Art Shanties 2010
Posted: February 1st, 2010 under Images, Minneapolis.
Comments: none
Minneapolis
My Verbs are Causative
Since long before I joined them, the members of have been part of something called the . The ICS and its Minneapolis chapter, the Bullet Lodge, are worth looking into if you’re at all interested in music, composition, the creative process, art, or life.
The philosophy of the ICS, in essence, is this: If you spend too long fussing over your art, you’ll never be satisfied with it; in fact, you stand a good chance of ruining it. This is especially true if you’re a perfectionist and/or tend to think too much, which, let’s face it, most artists are/do.
At a certain point late in the creative process, whether it’s revising a book, mixing an album, or editing a film, you reach a crucial point after which any further effort is only going to dilute and degrade the work (see: ).
The ICS’ philosophy in action is the Day Album: a collection of new songs you must finish in 24 hours or less. The ICS rules stipulate that you must write and record 20 songs in this period; the Bullet Lodge, thank god, uses six songs as a standard.
The other members of Run At The Dog have each completed dozens of day albums. Almost every Run At The Dog song was composed as a day album song. (The rest were created in a matter of hours, as part of another, different .)
Last month I finally made my first timid foray into the world of day albums. I finished six songs in 24 hours, using GarageBand, a lot of MIDI, some live drums, and my own less than confident singing voice. The quality, ambition, and variety of the results exceeded my expectations; I surprised myself in many different ways, not only as a musician but as a person; and after fifteen years in seven different bands I finally realized that I am, indeed, capable of writing pop songs. I will share one of the tracks from this day album with you here.
“Positive Ice Cream”
The rest of my day album is over .
Posted: September 23rd, 2009 under Minneapolis, Music.
Comments: 8
A Series of Empty Rooms
Barring some unpacking and some cleaning, I’m finally and completely moved into my new apartment.
I promised myself I wouldn’t oversentimentalize the process, and I think I’ve done a reasonably good job of that. I threw away, sold, or donated a lot of things I’d been holding onto long past their usefulness even as mementos, and I still think this move sets a new record for the least amount of garbage produced and cheap plastic purchased from Target to replace it.
But old habits die hard, and there’s nothing that turns the gears of sentimentality—or at least retrospect, wrapped in a skein of sentimentality and garnished with shavings of nostalgia marinated in Weltschmertz—better than looking at my newly empty old apartment after giving it the most thorough cleaning I’ve ever given anything (at least, thorough by my lazy bachelor standards; execrable by anyone else’s) and knowing that for three years it was my Home with a capital H. Nothing says transition—or ending—quite like a series of empty rooms.
As a kid, I loved the sitcom Growing Pains. The series finale, after several years of Learning Some Important Lessons and Having a Few Laughs Along the Way, hinged on one of many can’t-fail tropes for ending a series: the Seaver family was moving away, leaving the cozy three-walled house where Alan Thicke’s firm but fair patriarch practiced psychology in his home office and the family gathered on the lawn at the end of the theme song every week. When the Seavers relocated, they literally ceased to exist.
In my dim memory of the finale, Seaver daughter Carol, played by Tracy Gold, was the last one to leave the house. (I’m not sure why she got the last shot, and not Mike, or even better, ). She looked around the living room, ground zero for so many comic misunderstandings and Very Special Episode third-act denouments, and bid the place goodbye.
That’s kind of how I felt on Sunday night, which I realize makes me a grade-A sap. But that apartment was my homebase for three years, the longest I’ve stayed in one place since I went to college at 19. It was my first legitimately adult apartment—not a dorm room, not shared with a roommate, not a basement. It’s where I finished my thesis. It’s where I peaked as a .
So if all this makes me a sap, then bring on the theme song.
Posted: July 2nd, 2009 under General, Minneapolis.
Comments: 2
The Soft Bigotry of Willful Obliviousness
Well here’s a rant from out of nowhere.
Several times during my time in the Twin Cities, I’ve heard, or seen online, the following statement: “There are no black people here / in Minneapolis / in the Twin Cities.” This happened most recently just the other day, and since it’s one of my pet peeves I decided it was time for me to work myself up into a semi-informed lather and sound off about it.
I know it might seem absurd that anyone would actually say there are no black people (or Hispanics, or Asians) in a metropolitan area like the Twin Cities. But I am not expending 800 words on a straw man argument. I assure you that I really have heard people say this—bright, progressive, conscientious people—about not just blacks but the other groups I mentioned.
I’m not sure what the people who utter this statement are trying to say. Well, that’s not entirely true—I think what they’re trying to say is that this part of the country is so provincial, so culturally and ethnically homogeneous, that persons of color and other minorities are all but invisible.
There is some truth to this—the Twin Cities are, like much of the United States, still predominantly white. Maybe the people who make this irksome declaration are bothered by what they perceive as a lack of diversity in the Twin Cities. But this dismissive claim does nothing to further diversity, and it is not only inaccurate, but insidiously harmful and patronizing.
Because guess what? There are black people in the Twin Cities. Quite a few, actually. And they’re not just confined to North Minneapolis or Cedar-Riverside, though yes, you will find quite a few African-Americans and Somali immigrants living there. After all, Minneapolis saw a 127% increase in foreign-born residents between 1990 and 2000, and is home to the one of the largest U.S. Somali populations, and St. Paul has the largest U.S. Hmong population—though I have heard, appended with a straight face to the “There are no black people here” formulation, the corollary, “and Somalis don’t count.”
Posted: June 16th, 2009 under Minneapolis.
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Farväl Mikael
- “That challenge haunts all animators. We grow up thinking that our bike is cold when it’s left out in the rain, or that a leaf on a high branch is afraid of heights. ” –
- “I chose, with not too much deliberation, a nice new desk at which I will accomplish many accomplishments for at least the next three years.” – Me
I’m not an animator, but I still get sentimental about inanimate objects. At the end of this month, in order to be closer to my job(s) and friends, I’m going to move to a new apartment. My last few moves were marked by ill-preparedness and last-minute all-nighters spent haphazardly throwing things into boxes. I’m trying to be a little more organized about it—I consider this my first “adult” move—but I still can’t help but feel overwhelmed by all the shit I have to do before July. Not to mention the emotional strain of vacating a place I’ve inhabited for three years—the longest I’ve lived anywhere since my parents’ house in high school.
So I’m trying to get started early. Today my project was to disassemble the aforementioned behemoth of a desk. It’s served me well in two apartments and through the entirety of my MFA program. I wrote a lot at that desk. But because , and because I probably didn’t care for it as well as I should have, it’s basically falling apart, its bolts missing and its famous IKEA particleboard disintegrating. I don’t think it can survive another move and I don’t relish the idea of carrying it up three flights of stairs.
Posted: June 7th, 2009 under Iowa City, Minneapolis.
Comments: 3
Songs 2009: Halloween Alaska
Oh hi. I was just sitting around, you know, listening to some great music.
Maybe it’s the weather—thunderstormy, on the cusp of June. Maybe it’s because it’s a Sunday night, or because some fuckwad killed an abortion doctor this morning in the lobby of his own church. Maybe it’s because I just watched a sad movie, or because this is the time of year when we are all going through transitions, even if we don’t know it. But this song hits me right square where it hurts.
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I try not to use the M word anymore when discussing music, but this is good old-fashioned melancholy pop. is a Minneapolis band but they recorded their new album with Tchad Blake at Real World Studios. So I think it’s safe to say they’ve Arrived, if they hadn’t already, and they deserve every bit of it. These guys are geniuses with the vocal melodies and especially bridges—and a knife-twist of a lyric like “Don’t talk to your ex / There, I said it.” And while most bands would milk every last drop out of melodies as brilliant as the ones in “The Ends” (I know I would), they fade it out before you can really get a good grip on it.
I’m focusing on “The Ends” because it sounds a little bit like the 80s, and that’s always going to get my attention. And the Current’s been playing it a lot lately. But I could have picked just about any song from Champagne Downtown and it would match this one for sheer beauty and hooks. And then the bridge sounds like Steely Dan. So there you go.
I feel like lately my music listening habits have been stagnating a little, or that I’ve hit a dry spell interrupted only by halfhearted listens to P4K’s Best New Musics. I’ve been waiting to discover my First True Summer Album. It’s a new month, and it feels pretty much like summer, and I just belatedly acquired Champagne Downtown, and I love it, so it might as well be the one.
Posted: May 31st, 2009 under Minneapolis, Music.
Comments: 4
Seven Observations About This Morning’s Bike Ride
1. I am glad I ignored today’s forecast for rain.
2. If I ever see a U of M undergraduate who is on a bike, wearing a helmet, and not riding on the sidewalk, I will give that person $1. I am fairly confident I will never have to part with that dollar.
3. There is no way to say “on your left” on the shared bike/walking trail without sounding like a dick. And yet, buzzing the person without a warning would be far more dickish.
4. Dear 3-year-old girl on the trail waving at me as I rode by: you made my day. Dear 3-year-old girl’s mother: I am sorry I was setting a bad example by riding no-hands at the time. I hardly ever do that, I swear.
5. Now is officially the best time of year to listen to by Jason Falkner. Or to have it in your head while you ride to work.
6. Looking across the Mississippi at the dense mass of finally-green trees lining the river, I thought, “Well, at least we still have that.”
7. I am fortunate to have jobs that allow me to show up wearing jeans and drenched in sweat. May I never work for The Man again.
(Awesome “Self-Portrait of a Bike Commuter” by the awesome Minneapolis studio .)
Posted: May 7th, 2009 under Minneapolis.
Comments: 9
There was a time before we were born
The month in high school after I bought , the Talking Heads’ new 2-disc great hits collection, was possibly the first and only time in my teenage life when I enjoyed getting up in the morning.
It was May 1993, the weather was finally nice, and my first-period class was B&W photography. There were only four of us in that class and Ms. Yellick-Manley loved us, or so we thought, because we were smartasses and she let us get away with a lot. Phil was in that class with me, and so between that and the fact that we loved taking photos, and were given a lot of room to experiment while shooting and in the darkroom, it was pretty much a glorified, artistically invigorated study hall.
My morning routine that month consisted of waking up and listening to the following songs from SitV: “My Love -> Building on Fire”, “Don’t Worry About the Government”, “Warning Sign”, “I Zimbra”, “Once In A Lifetime”, “Burning Down The House”, and, finally, “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)”. If I recall correctly, they were all on the first disc (this was back when we still had discs), and they were a good way to trace the most joyous, buoyant route through the first half of a mostly joyous, buoyant musical career. “Naive Melody”, especially, was the best way to send myself off into the often difficult, occasionally revelatory existence that was 10th grade in a small town in Iowa.
While riding my bike to work along the Mississippi River this morning, “This Must Be the Place” appeared on my iPhone’s shuffle. I keep my phone in my pocket with its tiny speakers emitting my favorite songs, however faintly, so I don’t get something terrible stuck in my head during the long ride. (QV last night, when I inexplicably got “What Would You Say?” by the Fucking Dave Matthews Band lodged in my head during my ride through downtown.)
Anyway, “Naive Melody” made me glad to be awake on a Monday morning, riding my bike, even if I couldn’t hear it all that well, and even if (especially if?) I was no longer 16 years old.
Posted: May 4th, 2009 under General, Grinnell, Minneapolis, Music.
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Killing Rolando
Over the past few months I’ve had the privilege of watching my friend work on a video installation that last month, and was honored when he asked me to compose music for it.
The resulting piece, , is an installation that incorporates elements of documentary footage, autobiography, archival materials, and landscape photography, though it’s immediately apparent that the finished whole amounts to far more than those constituent parts. I was pretty thrilled that I was able to contribute even a scintilla of my own fitful stabs at amateur composition.
The piece is best digested in a large three-dimensional space, so the elegant website Nathan designed for it doesn’t quite do justice. But it’s still pretty fucking cool. You can hear my music by viewing the video in the top right-hand corner of , but definitely watch all the videos and read all the text.
Posted: April 26th, 2009 under Film, Images, Minneapolis, Music, Video.
Comments: 1
Tonight we’re gonna party like it’s 1997
Sleepytime Gorilla Museum at the Triple Rock
Posted: April 14th, 2009 under Images, Minneapolis, Music.
Comments: 3