Andrew Hickey and Lana Del Rey

Tags

A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, Andrew Hickey, Lana Del Rey, music

Will never meet.

And that’s a shame. And, of course, in real life they may meet, but what I mean by this is that the outstanding history of rock music, A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, that Hickey has been painstakingly putting together since 2018 will never extend to cover Del Rey and musicians of her generation. As it stands, Hickey plans restrict himself to 20th century songs, and honestly in many ways that makes a lot of sense. It is perfectly possible to argue that rock ‘n’ roll and the forms that make up what is loosely classified as rock music ceased developing after 2000. It’s not an argument that convinces me on any level, although I will concede that electric guitar driven music in no longer in the ascendant – and this is often considered some sort of gold standard for rock.

But the reality is that rock has expanded beyond what you might call the guitar based rock and roll unit, and this is not a new expansion at all. Beginning in the 1960s but ballooning afterwards, rock has embraced and coopted all kinds of music and the form that underlies most of today’s popular music, electronic dance music or EDM, was almost wholly established as long ago as the 1970s by Giorgio Moroder and Kraftwerk and was thoroughly integrated into what was still classified as rock by the 1980s. And it never went away.

Which leads me to Lana Del Rey, a protean musician who incorporates the entire history of rock into her art and who is crying out for the kind of in-depth analysis that Hickey has so captivatingly extended to, say, The Grateful Dead. An analysis that we will never, as it stands, ever hear.

Hopefully, inspired by Hickey’s achievement, someone else will come along to give 21st century rock and pop that kind of deep analysis. Although to match Hickey they are going to have to be very special indeed. I wait for the next installment of Hickey’s survey, appearing every couple of weeks or so. As of the moment, The Band, is up next. But part of me aches for Hickey to feel free to break out of his chronological limitation and bounce all the way up to Venice Bitch.

Beer

Or the absurdity of the Bud Light flap

I like beer. Always have. Liked it since I was a teenager and drink a lot less these days but with just as much – and maybe more – enjoyment. I grew up in England, so my tastes were formed by bitter-type beers and I’ve never had a strong liking for the lighter lager-style beers that make up the bulk of the mass consumption types in the U.S. But I will drink them from time to time and some can be considered very delicious. I would not extend that appreciation to the AB family of beers. Nor to Miller. Nor Coors. When I first moved to the U.S. decades ago there was very little brewing activity outside of the major producers and even imported beers were limited to a small number of big brewers outside the United States. So I drank Bud largely because it was available and not because I really liked it. Bud, that it. I never liked Bud Light at all, it lacked body compared even to Budweiser let alone any other beer. But all of this is a matter of personal taste. To associate beer consumption with a political viewpoint never crossed my mind. But here we are, with boycotts of Bud Light because it has been construed to be the sort of beer that trans folk like simply because a trans person likes it and that association is a big threat. Threat to what I might ask? Some weird sense of sexual rightousness? As if that has anything to do with a beer. But what it does speak to, rather depressingly, is that Bud Light (along with many other major label beers) is marketed as a lifestyle choice and not simply on its merits as a beer. The danger of such positioning of course, as we’ve seen, is that the product itself becomes secondary. Its associations become the ascendant quality.

These days I don’t have to drink Budweiser or any other major label beer. The rise of craft beers of real quality and with flavours to delight has occurred throughout the country and wherever you are you can find some local brewery to savour. And I do.

Two More Years

Tags

age, music, social media, time

Another two years since I last wrote. At this rate I may get another 10 to 20 posts up before I peg out. Maybe that’s how it is meant to be. Nonetheless, I’m here again, pondering why. I think know, or at the least the initial motivator. Leaving Twitter because I really do not like Elon Musk very much, or at least the Elon Musk he chooses to portray in public. I moved to Mastadon, opening a number of accounts on different servers until settling (mostly) here: @musickmast@masto.ai

This led to a general reevaluation of my social presence. At this point slender to the point of vanishing. It was easy leaving Twitter because I very rarely used it. The only site that gets much attention at all is Facebook and that’s only about once a month on average. So, two years between posts here maybe isn’t that unusual after all.

The last one was during the early days of Covid. Curiously, I’m sicker today from some non-Covid respiratory infection than I ever got from Covid. In truth, I don’t know if I ever got Covid at all. I followed the recommended vaccination schedules and never felt sick despite being around people later confirmed to have the illness. I followed the news and marveled at the capacity for treatment to become so divorced from reality as to become a political statement.

Little surprises me anymore. I guess that’s one advantage of growing old. What have I been doing? Listening to music. It seems like some sort of received wisdom that the music, particularly pop and rock, that is most meaningful is that that you heard in your early life, primarily teens and twenties. Judging by the tastes of those I know, this seems to a pretty consistent truth. For me, this means music from the late 1960s into the early 80s. And if I’m truthful I have to admit that most of the albums and singles I know really well, from being able to name every song and b-side, the members of the band, the recording date, the label and producer and more do come from this period. But that cuts out a huge amount of later music, and one of my ambitions since I retired has been to plug those gaps.

Some of this is simply to defy the never stopping generational tendency to say that the music you love (of your youth mostly) was the best there was and most (with a few largely recognised exceptions like The Beatles) that became before or after was or is rubbish. The awful taint of youthful nostalgia suffuses even ordinary music with a golden glow and paints even the most startlingly fine new music with a sense of irrelevance.

So how do you overcome this? In my case, I find that approaching music much as I did when I was young helps recreate something of the sense of adventure while expanding the context. This means avoiding streaming services like Spotify that offer a seemingly endless choice and with that the difficulty in focusing. Instead I continue to buy the physical artifact. When I was young this was a vinyl record, today (because I really do not like pops and crackles) I’m more than content with a CD. Curiously, it’s currently almost harder to find a CD of a new recording than a vinyl record thanks to the reuptake of that older medium. I don’t mind this as I fully appreciate the sense of solid artifactual presence that you get from a LP – I never got rid of my own vinyl collection for this reason. But, regardless, even if rip my CD into my computer based sound system for listening, I find owning the actual artifact of recording fully part of the process of appreciating the music.

Right now, the artifact of involvement is a used CD copy of Suede’s “‘dog man star”. I did not bypass BritPop wholly during its heyday, I picked up some Oasis and Blur records, but, despite its clear and sometimes almost too overt references to the music of my youth, I didn’t embrace it as I might have. Now I’m revisiting those older purchases as well as plugging some of the gaps, of which ‘dog man star’ is prime example. A fabulously constructed record, it amazes me that I never listened to it until yesterday.

But now I have, and something of that tingle of excitement that I recall from ancient purchases of records such as “For Your Pleasure” or “Aladdin Sane” is rekindled. Ironically, “dog man star” is now old enough to have been reissued and remastered and entered into the canon of critically acclaimed rock classics. For some, this is the pivotal music of their youth and those some are now getting a lot older. I suspect that they too, just like me, are finding it harder to relate to contemporary recordings in the same way.

And, as Nick Lowe sang, so it goes.

Plague Journal

Tags

journal, privacy, retirement, summer

I haven’t written anything here for two years.

This suggests that I’ve gone inactive or simply disappeared, but all that has really happened is that I’ve moved my writing onto paper with a fountain pen instead of a keyboard.

The great joy of that way of writing is that no one is ever likely to see it. And that’s the real reason why I’ve not been here. After several years of writing where people (albeit a very limited number of people) have seen my writing, to be able to write freely has been very liberating. For to write for an audience is never to write freely.

So, three plus years of notebook journaling and over the past six months something of a plague journal too. When Covid-19 is finally under some sort of real control, I’ll go back to those writings. Maybe some will seem suited to putting up again on a public forum. Or maybe not.

Meanwhile, my life of retirement spins on in a serene way, largely removed from the very real troubles that afflict many other people. I can feel very fortunate about this and I do.

These days, I cycle to Forest Park in St. Louis, find a quiet table outside the Visitors Center (easy to find when the cafe is closed), sip some homemade coffee and write in some lovely colored ink in my journal. While the sun moves across the sky and the flowers bloom all around me.

I spent an entire lifetime getting to this point. It was worth it.

Fun Regained

Tags

cameras, fun, lenses, public involvement, retirement, technique

Earlier this year, my first public photography exhibition at Washington University wrapped up and home came all my prints. There are in the basement now, propped up against walls. I may yet put them out in the house.

For that show, and the work that went into it, felt like the final culmination of a particular phase of my photographic endeavours. One I might call my public phase. That’s a loose definition that involved exhibitions, entering competitions, attending photography club meetings and critiques, and going on photography group outings.

I’m not going to say these things won’t happen again, but I feel no desire to get involved right now. For none of them hold any particular pleasures and, at this stage, convey a sense of obligation that I find to be more inhibiting than stimulating.

Retirement has taught me two things. The value of time and the value of freedom from obligation. These are qualities that are under-appreciated in a society that often appears to value productivity more highly than the development of personal insight and perspective. The world of work is all about doing things, making money and doing things with the money. Remove yourself from that world and a very different set of priorities establishes itself.

It’s hard to really quantify the change, but it has shifted my creative focus. Rather than photographing, I’m now writing. Very little here, but for myself and with pen and paper. Copious amounts too. Notebook after notebook has been filled over the past months.

I haven’t completely abandoned the camera. I still carry one with me most of the time, but the photographs I take are more casual and less planned. I no longer think of the result in terms of what I might bring to a critique or enter into a competition. This has been remarkably liberating. Without that sense of, again that word, obligation, I find myself enjoying the moment more and caring far less about just how I might render it for others through a photograph.

The results please me – but would they please anyone else? At this point, that question doesn’t really enter the matter at all. Quite a change from how I used to regard my work.

As I said, a very liberating change.

One surprising – and very welcome to my bank account – result has been an almost complete loss of interest in new camera equipment. I have more than enough cameras and lenses to get all the photographs I want right now. Why add to that? Just to chase up a new toy? For that’s really all that it’s about. It’s something of a relief to step off the upgrade ladder, one that is so involving when you care about the latest marginal improvement to some or other technology.

Photography is becoming fun again. Fun as it used to be in the early days when I really paid no mind to what camera I was using or how good or bad my technique was. I haven’t lost all I’ve learned in the meantime. Those qualities just don’t dominate anymore, as they seemed to do not so long ago.

Best of both worlds. Long may it continue.

Tarot for the mind

Tags

conscious, faith, mind, mysticism, subconscious, Tarot, thought

I’ve been interested – and I have to say it’s been on and off – in the Tarot for a few years now. I began with a Rider-Waite-Smith deck, the de facto standard, and it continues to be my usual deck (I’ve since picked up the lovely Thoth Tarot, Aquarian Tarot and Deviant Moon Tarot among others).

I find the cards and their symbolism fascinating, but, having delved through much literature and come across a wide variety of interpretations of the origins, involvement of other mystic or mystically associated systems, meaning, predictive power and effectiveness of the Tarot, I have come to my own conclusions.

Firstly, the Tarot has no magical, mystical or predictive power whatsoever. It’s simply a series of drawn symbols on a set of cards. Anyone who claims more is entering the realm of faith, and that seems to be fine for a lot of people, but not for me.

Nonetheless, and ironically, because it needs no superstitious or supernatural association, the Tarot is very powerful and useful tool of exploration.  The subject of its investigation is the mind, and in particular the mind of the subconscious.

Tarot symbolism allows you to bypass rational thought and access deeper and less understood emotional undercurrents. In essence, it gets past the gatekeeper of clarity and what we call sense, and integrates what we rarely, if ever, (except perhaps under deep psychoanalysis or hypnosis) embrace or even acknowledge.

Tarot changes the mind.

Literally.

That is its value and its great power.

Although I have read the Tarot for others, I regard that as an imperfect use of the art. Rather, I believe you should teach yourself the symbolism and its meaning and use the cards as an exploration of your own mind. Some authors I have read dismiss or belittle this approach, claiming that only someone else can effectively do a Tarot read for you. This is nonsense, but it helps support an industry of Tarot readers and why not? People need to make a living and many people get a lot out of a visit to a Tarot reader.

But not me. The Tarot is of great use, particularly when I feel a degree of emotional turmoil and I cannot parse exactly what is behind it. It acts as a conduit between conscious and unconscious thought and allows both understanding and integration.

That’s a heck of lot in itself. I find it sad that it is hyped as being far more than that, but it’s quite understandable. At heart, everyone wants to believe in miracles.

 

Starter

Tags

pens, starters, status, utility, value, writing

When I took up writing by hand again a year or so ago, I began with a ball point pen.

Black.

It was fine.

But I remembered how I used to write with a fountain pen when I was a boy and felt an urge to go back to that instrument.

So I did.

With a Pilot Metropolitan. A cheap metal pen selling for around $15. Well regarded by the sages on the internet. As a starter pen.

A starter pen.

Isn’t that something? You buy a pen for what you think is a perfectly reasonable price (and a lot more than you’d pay for a ball point), it works fabulously as a writing instrument and yet it is a starter?

This is absurd. It’s absurd as starter houses. Even starter marriages. (Yes, I went through one of those.) Still living in my starter house though.

The reason it’s classified as a starter pen is that it is supposed to lead you into buying ever more expensive pens. And the prices start ballooning pretty quickly. $100. $800. $2,400. Why if you want to buy the Pilot 100th Anniversary set of seven Namiki pens, you’ll fork out $48,000. Pilot does throw in seven bottles of ink and a Japanese folk art display set up for the price, but, still, that’s almost $7000 per pen.

I guess I would call those finisher pens. They would definitely finish off my savings account.

My point? Why do we succumb so easily (and it must be pretty easy or else pens at these prices would not be manufactured and sold) to an object whose stated value so vastly exceeds its utility?

I can think of only one real reason. Perceived status and some need to show off that you are rich. Of course, this applies to cars. Lots of other stuff too. Even cameras, my particular poison. So far I have resisted going down the Leica path.

I think it’s totally absurd. Rather than sink $100 plus into a pricier pen than the Pilot Metropolitan, I bought a few more of the same type and filled them with different inks so I can write in a series of lovely colours. That’s made me very happy.

Utility. That’s what I like.

Status, you can keep it.

 

 

A Change

Tags

art, computer, expression, handwriting, ink, journal, meaning, pen, word processor, words, writing

I’m writing more now that I have ever done before, and practically none of it is appearing here.

Or anywhere else on the web.

I am, to quote the fabulous Jam single of the same name, Going Underground.

The reasons for this are varied.

I picked a pen about two years ago and realised I barely knew how to use it anymore. It seemed like an almost wholly unfamiliar instrument. So, I said to myself, why not try it out again.

So I did.

And as I wrote out those letters in an uncertain hand, looking to all intents and purposes like the first illegible scratchings of a beginner child, I began to realise a deeper truth. By relinquishing control of my writing to the perfectly formed letters of the computer font, the unceasing surveillance of the the spell and grammar checker, and the forced format of the word processing program, I was losing at least half the expressive potential of my writing.

Hand writing isn’t just the words. It’s now you shape those words. It’s the nib you use, conventional, italic, flex. It’s ink. Free or slow flowing. Permanent or splashed by the rain. Colour. Shade.

In other words, it’s art. Your own little paintings.

Maybe you think you can mimic all this through creative control of a word processor.

You can’t. You can’t because all your fingers do in tap the keys or move the mouse. Maybe with a graphics pad and pen you can get closer, but it’s still just a set of lit pixels on your screen. Ink and paper are real. They exist without the need to power up your computer. You can touch the paper, run your fingers over the text. Over those words formed by the motion and pressure of your hand on that pen.

I found that as I formed words, sentences and paragraphs with my pen, they interacted in quite different ways with my mind. They seemed real in a way that anything I type here does not. I remember what I write. What I put up here leaves my memory almost as fast as I type it.

So I gave up on the computer. Realized that all this was ephemeral, words without impact or meaning.

So now a series of filled journals is lining up on my bookcase shelf, growing about one per month. They may never be read again, by me or anyone, but they seem more real than anything here.

That’s the way it’s going to be.

 

Early Days with a Digital Camera

Tags

lake, landscape, photographic technique

I bought my first digital SLR camera in 2005. It was a Canon Rebel XT a.k.a the 350D, with a modest 8 megapixel sensor. Modest by today’s standards – at the time it seemed like a wondrous thing. That hooked me into digital photography, and it wasn’t long before I added a slightly better camera with similar specifications, the Canon 30D, to my collection. This photograph of a boreal lake in Ontario was taken with the 30D in the summer of 2007.

It’s one of no less than 181 almost identical photographs that I took of the scene. 181! Why did I take 181 photographs of a pretty but entirely average landscape view?

Partly it was because I could. That was a trap – still is, in many ways – of digital photography. No longer limited by film and its parsimonious allocation of frames, you can go hog wild with a digital camera. I did – and not just here. It wasn’t until I returned to film photography in 2014 that I seriously began to reconsider my photographic overload and to comprehend that tens or hundreds of photographs of the same scene added nothing to the artistry of the shot. In contrast, it often obscured it. You become pinned to a particular view and rather than wait for the best light or consider changing your position, you just click away, telling yourself that one of these shots will be a masterpiece. Even though they are all pretty much the same and when you come to view the collection on your computer, they take on a dreary homogeneity that dilutes even the best images.

In photography, less is more. If instead of the 30D, I had a large format field camera, I would have spent a lot more time seeking out the best viewing point for a strong composition and I would have waited for good light and if I didn’t get it, I wouldn’t take the photograph. In other words, a lot more considered thought would have gone into the image and the ‘spray and pray’ mentality that is so strongly encouraged by digital cameras would have been absent.

I don’t have a large format camera. But I do have 35mm and medium format film cameras and I use them frequently now. I take far, far fewer photographs. But more of them are worthwhile. The discipline gained using those film cameras has transferred to my digital photography as well. I am very much happier with the results.

 

 

On Being Publicly Exhibited

Tags

art, display, exhibition, perception, photography, public, show

I have a photography exhibition at Washington University.

Fifteen photographs, all chosen by me. No competition, no outside selection. All stuff I like.

They will be there for another two months.

I didn’t have to hustle for this show, nor put out any money beyond the prints themselves. It came my way based solely on appreciation of my work as displayed in earlier art shows. All I had to do was to make sure the work was available to hang and display.

I’ve never considered myself as an artist. Photography has been a simple pleasure, a method of recording my life, and a way to get me to get out the house and look at things anew. It’s a hobby. But now? Even if I’m not calling myself an artist, others are. I already feel that weird sense of being looked at differently. “He has a show, he must be good” – and similar sentiments. Perceptions altered, even if little else seems to have been.

None of this has changed my own view of my work. I take a lot of photographs. A few I really like. Even the ones that I like less are still meaningful. It’s all personal – wrapped around my own life. I’ve never given any real thought to making art for others. Perhaps that explains my persistent lack of sympathy for most popular photography; somehow much of that does seem tailored to appeal to others and, in doing so, loses any character or individuality.

This show may well be the pinnacle of my public photographic career. A career that is no career at all. If it is, I will be perfectly satisfied. One thing I will not do is change to fit any alteration of perception of me or my work.

I guess this means I’m some sort of accidental artist. If I am, well, that’s just fine.