"To Bridge or Wedge the Fault-gap..."

My second blog-installment for the site "The Interdisciplinary Student" is now up. In this entry, I discuss the crux and confusion of the current/ future place of the humanities in the academic world, and how the term "interdisciplinary" can either become an important component to finding/ building our futures, or a meaningless fiscal/ institutional catch-phrase that merely makes the problems bigger.

Check it out, here.

Ealain Ar Son Ealaine (anachronistic credos to reconstruct the creative "now")

(For a variety of confusing, conflicted, and convoluted reasons that I'll spare you from here, several of my recent research endeavors have been bringing this poem that I wrote a couple of years ago to my mind a lot lately. I thought that I had posted it somewhere shortly after it was written, but a cursory search of google says that I'm mistaken. This piece was one of a pair (drastically different from each other) that I wrote for anonymous submission to an academic poetry journal that I was working for at the time. In keeping with my initial guess, this one was rejected in favor of the other, which was said to be more realistic, grounded, and relatable... which provided further proof of the point that I was trying to make with this one in an appropriately ironic way... which I was obviously greatly amused by.)


The breeze blows in
The experimental surreal
The swirl of my pipe-smoke
The mingling, crumbling,
Crushing of crumpled, living
Leaves, to sway and swing in
Non-notes, artificial harmonics,
To add texture to the silence.

None of this is more real or
Pertinent than the
Dream that I had last
Night... something about
Espionage, switched ID's
In the restaurant where I
Work, in big-backed
Red-vinyl booths with
Pernod bottles on the
Shelves, "Anisette," a smaller,
Softer version, a more
"Truthful" femininity,
Something far more "real,"
If "reality" and "truth"
Could be given more
False "faith." But from that
Draught they've drank enough.

When your footing fails,
And your senses are seen to be
No more than merely what
You sense, "Construction" and
"Conceptualism" render
"Content" entirely inconsequent.

Activity falls to the
Dagger of intellect;
All disciplines would quake and
Cower if they realized that
The ones that prove their
Umbrella could make their
"Important" findings obsolete.

Empirical studies suggest,
Based on what we understand,
The best of the research-
Methods that I have no
More than anyone else,
Or less, the plinking,
Plopping, fizzing, bubbling,
Test-tubes of all the
Chemical concoctions we can
Understand (which are none),
Besides what happens in
Our own heads, concludes,
That this is all that matters.

A false construction
In a dead language,
Of a nineteenth-century
Slogan, fitted around a
"Real life" growling version
Of a giant plaster lion
At the front of an emerald
Building in a city
Built for the construction
Of fabricated grime
Demonstrates this well.

When the activist "realities"
That Gautier and Poe spoke
Out against are demonstrated
By our daily lives to
Not exist, their credos adopt
More fervent strength and meaning.

Anachronistically, of course.
I am well aware of my
Ironies and contradictions,
And these themselves will prove my point.

Welcome to the Intellectual Apocalypse; "Pseudo-Modernism" and Dr. Alan Kirby's Assertions That We're All Irrelevant Now.

In a comment to my last entry, C. Charles ("xian") Dyer left a link to this fascinating article. Thank you, Mr. Dyer.

It's by Dr. Alan Kirby, from a 2006 issue of Philosophy Now magazine. Dr. Kirby asserted that post-modernism is dead, and that the way that contemporary pop-culture, technology, commerce, and social-dynamics operate have made any thought that goes beyond observational/ critical realism outdated and irrelevant.

I'm well aware that this article is 3 years outdated. But, it's new to me... and now that I'm familiar with Kirby's idea of "pseudo-modernism," three-years-out seems like a pretty good juncture to take a look and assess his predictions, especially since many of his claims are intrinsic upon the idea of how rapidly-changing, ephemeral and transient our culture has become.

For more on this debate on "what comes after post-modernity," I've actually found that (surprisingly) the Wikipedia entry for "post-postmodernism" actually provides a helpful overview (Dr. Kirby's article and nomenclature is mentioned here as well.) I've personally been partial to the ideas of "reconstructionism" for some time, but I tend to view this as an extension and development of postmodern thought, rather than a replacement of or rebuttal to it.

Since my next entry will feature my own response, reaction, and reflection on Dr. Kirby's article, I figured that I should probably post the link before-hand so that anyone who wants to know what I'm talking about can get a jump-start on reading it.

Overall, it's a really interesting read... I understand and agree with many of Dr. Kirby's observations, but I have some definite questions and reservations about the conclusions that he draws from them. (As I scribble all over the copy that I printed out, I'm also starting to get the impression that his own line of reasoning invalidates and contradicts some of the points that he's making [not to mention the fact that anyone's reading it]... but don't we all sometimes.)

What do you think?

Art and Ideas in an Economic Recession.

Everyone I know seems to be scrimping a bit financially right now. This is probably redundant; something that goes without saying... and it's probably also a fairly obvious assertion that among those affected are "artists," a group who are often labelled and stereotyped as "starving" to begin with.

These artists, however, seem to me to be in a better place to use the economic hard-times as a growth-period: Rather than dollars-signs, the commerce of our trade and the coin-scale of our success is composed of ideas and creativity. These things are not intrinsically tied to economic fortunes. In fact, I think there are gains to be made by being forced to limit our resources, to need to separate our intellectual capital from our fiscal.

This is a great time to change our cultural thought-processes, to finally make the moves away from consumerism that we've been toying with the hypotheticals of for so long. This economic downturn could function as a golden-period of innovation in arts and ideas, particularly if we strive to view our limited expendable incomes not as a factor that constrains our creative outputs, but instead as a factor that provides much-needed opportunities to reassess the way that we think about and engage in creative tasks.

This is a good time to really enact the old credo that's deep in and important to most of our artistic subconsciouses by now; that we learn the rules so that we know how to best break them. This is an ideal time to utilize all the rules that we've learned in order to break those same rules more thoroughly, and in more creative ways, than ever before.

Think: Do I need this tool? How can I do this differently? What less-orthodox medium can I use to make my point more poignantly? What means can I use to get my message out that could attract more attention than the tried-and-true by way of their unusual and un-tested methods?

In the past, the "starving artist" mantra/ cliche usually involved scrimping on food to buy art-supplies. What I'm saying is rather, for the overall benefit of your artwork, and the potential to say something truly progressive and innovative with it, try not to buy conventional art-supplies. Figure out alternatives.

Is it for any reason, besides past rules that you learned as a foundation for your skill set that, if you're a painter, for instance, you need to purchase canvasses to paint on? What else could be used to fulfill the same purpose, but more creatively, and perhaps to the better demonstration of the concept of the piece (not to mention more economically)? I promise, there are plenty of things, and I definitely feel that more artists being coerced to think this way will produce far more interesting art.

As another example, it would greatly benefit most musical acts to re concentrate their attention on creating more genuinely interesting sounds by stopping dishing out unrealistic sums of money to record in pro- or semi-pro studios to make "radio-ready" demos when they're still quite a few rungs on the industry ladder down from radio-play. Adhering to current "professional quality standards" does not always equate to a more listenable (or even more marketable) product. More creative-sounding recordings and noise-making that not only cost less money, but come about because they cost less money??? How can you go wrong? How are we ever going to hear anything new or original again when even the lowest-caliber local bands in any given city pay to record in the same sort of studios which are stocked with same sort of gear as everything on the radio? Conventional machines (which cost money) make conventional sounds (which sound like money, rather than ideas or creativity).

Utilize this tight time-period. Make it your opportunity. Change the way that we think. This is a great opportunity to remove dollar-signs from the creative-exchange, to make the idea-market decidedly and intentionally our own.

“This very deep, dark fault;” The “Gap” Between Constructed Artistic Identities in Murakami’s “Dance Dance Dance.”

Demonstrations of theories about identity construction abound in contemporary (particularly “post-modern” and post-”post-modern”) Literature. I stumbled on one recently that spells things out in an interesting way, so I figured that I would share.

At a pivotal moment, in the midst of a tense piece of dialogue in Haruki Murakami’s 1988 novel “Dance Dance Dance,” Gotanda, an actor, explains to the unnamed narrator, “I get this gap between me Gotanda and me the actor and stand back and actually observe myself doing shit. I’m on one side of this very deep, dark fault, and then unconsciously, on the other side, I have this urge to destroy something.” This is a problematic phenomenon for the troubled character, who expresses that it “never happens when other people are around, though. Only when I’m alone.”

Through Gotanda’s dialogue admissions in these passages, Murakami establishes a paradigm, and at the same time a paradox, of the ways in which artists (and artistically-minded individuals) construct their identities. By doing so, he also sheds light on the construction of his own novel, as it becomes suddenly apparent that the narrator, who, on a surface level the work seems to be telling the story of, is NOT being portrayed as having a dynamically constructed and artistically-minded identity in the same way that Gotanda and most other characters in the novel do, thus shifting the narrator’s position within his own narrative from subject to something more akin to a Greek Chorus, a mere facilitator of the tale actually being told.

Gotanda’s “gap” is something expressed as a virtual constant for artistic individuals. The artist builds two distinctly separate identities, one for “self as artist,” and another for “self as private individual.” The “gap” is the void left by the discrepancies and differences between the two constructions, which, as one is distinctly intended for public consumption, while the other functions in terms of private self-perception, is why Gotanda points out that the gap is only present, is only something that he notices, “when I’m alone.”

The identity/ construction -free narrator (who is symbolically identified as such by the very act of remaining nonchalantly unnamed throughout the novel) is able to fulfill his “facilitator” role within the work of allowing stories about the gap to be told unencumbered by the necessary problems created by the nature of the constructs themselves (a description of identity, without the sort of foil provided by the narrator, would necessarily be presented within the context of either one construction or other, the intended “public” or “private” personae of the artist relating the self-involved anecdote). As Gotanda tells the narrator in this conversation about murder over beers, “whenever I’m with you, I feel so relaxed. I never feel the gap. You don’t know how precious that is.” Precious indeed, to an even greater extent to Murakami himself than to Gotanda, as the way in which the narrator’s character is constructed provides the precious necessary neutral backdrop on which to make the author’s larger points about personal and artistic identity. The ironies, complexities, and contradictions with which this is done are far too detailed to expound upon completely in a medium such as this. He is a character skillfully constructed for a difficult purpose; he is, in a broad sense, an “artist,” which allows him to empathize to certain degrees with Gotanda and others and come and go effortlessly or accidentally within their lives and social circles, yet, due to the nature of his “art” (which he views as existing in the realm of “commerce rather than “creation” and refers to frequently as “shoveling cultural snow”) he is devoid of the need to think of himself in such a way that requires a construction of an artistic identity. He lacks “the gap,” therefore, because he has built the constructions on neither side of it, and is therefore able to present Gotanda with a surface on which to lay his own bare, and demonstrate a theory on the way that the construction of identities operates for artists.

We are what we create ourselves to be. Just mind the gap.



(Image courtesy of Alloy Images; I am indebted to Sara Jane D'Agostino of that organization for exposing me to Murakami's writing.)

Critical Snippets, Music, Movements... Goulash.

Movements" and "stances" are themselves fabricated constructions, tools within larger identity-construction mechanisms.

This isn't a new idea, but it's usually used to discredit the validity or power of a movement or critical stance. It seems to me, however, that this awareness can function as the SOURCE from where the movement or stance can derive it's power. It validates its own existence AS a mere fabrication by the very act of elevating itself as such.

Contributers are any artists and critic willing to participate conceptually in the act of such an elevation and reconstructive effort.

(This was my reply to someone who inspires me, when asked to expound on a partially toungue-in-cheek and cockily-provocative statement about arming potential contributors with stances for the next major critical movement. Reading it today, I figured it might be worth taking out of context a bit and passing on. Chew on it a bit, spit it back to me.)

In other news, I've been completely addicted to Playlist.com lately. This service is nothing terribly new, I know, but I figured I'd share some of the spoils of my recent musical meanderings. As I'm sure you've gathered by now, my mind tends to wander a bit, so very little on this playlist has anything in common with the rest besides that I enjoy it all. There are new songs, old songs, forgotten songs, obscure songs, favorite songs, songs I'm still not sure about and only kind of like, you name it. Enjoy.

My top "wtf"/"guilty-pleasure" picks on the playlist would presently be Hot Hot Heat covering Amy Winehouse (yes, you read that right) and "Parentheses" by The Blow.

To continue with the scatter-brained goulash of today's post, I like to occasionally send a shout out for cool things going on around town that deserve attention. Last week I headed down to the Underground M.A.P. Project, a gallery space on Lowell Street in Manchester, for the first time to check out an open-mic that they were hosting. The vibe of the event proved to be refreshingly more similar to a round-table workshopping session than a performance-setting. The gallery has a comfortable and creative set-up in a brick basement across the street from the Red Arrow, and the visual work on display included some peices that I was impressed by. The group gathered was talented and supportive. They seem to have a good thing going on down there, to the extent that I plan to head down again this evening.

This is Boston, Not L.A...Still.

As green versus yellow fire spit across the nation this month, renewing long-forgotten divergent styles of shit-talk, the pertinent dialogue for a moment turned to “cultural rivalries.”

Glancing through an assortment of articles and snippets on the subject in the Boston Globe one slow morning at work, I was reminded of how strange of a chasm still sometimes sits between pop-culture and the counter- or sub-, the mainstream media and the underground-/ arts-media… and how well the idea of this sort of “cultural rivalry” can sometimes demonstrate this. What seems pertinent and obvious within one lifeblood can often fall irrelevant on deaf and confused ears within the context of another.

The articles in the Globe (and, as I’ve noticed since, most other mainstream sources that covered the “broader” implications of the basketball playoffs) seemed to want to insist (with a suggestion that, to the readership, it would be a given, an obvious assumption, something only briefly worth mentioning as an afterthought for those of us living most extremely under a cultural rock) that the rivalry between Boston and Los Angeles, culturally, as cities, was forgotten since the days of Bird and Magic, and completely dominated by sports over all other elements, paling in comparison to the Boston versus New York rivalry, which is driven (obviously) by the same sort of sports-first cultural tunnel-vision. Duh.

There are those of us, however, within the varied readership of these mainstream publications who most definitely do not live under cultural rocks, yet were still a bit surprised by these supposedly “obvious” assumptions.

For those of us who grew up and live daily within various facets of an art-driven “counter-culture” ( I use that term hesitantly, but am unable to come up with a succinct replacement that better conveys the idea), the pertinent rivalry has always been Boston vs. L.A.

The “forgotten rivalry,” huh? I assure the staffers at the Globe, to musicians and artists in the Boston area, the bad blood with the city of angels has never completely left our minds, while the feud with New York has always seemed more like a fairly good-natured (albeit violent) sparring about sports among “friends.” Hell, with the distance separation being as small as it is, holding legitimate grudges between Boston and New York would be incredibly creatively and culturally limiting for artists and musicians. We trade shows and gallery-appearances on a weekly basis; our cultures and tastes are similar enough any sort of “real” rivalry would be self-defeating. Whether the team-flag-waving fanatic is willing to understand or not, for the sub-culture there is a daily, pragmatic need for us to leave the Red Sox vs. Yankees grudges in the pubs and on the fields.

If the mentions of rivalry in the media-coverage was limited to sports-fanaticisms, I would concede the cultural over-looks as aspects of a suburban-mainstream American culture outside of my realm of most-adequate experience. Unfortunately, license has been taken to translate “sports” and “culture” into interchangeable terms, and translate the entirety of one into the limited scope of the other. “Cultures” were contrasted, in ways that had nothing besides context to do with sports.

The arts scenes in both New England and Southern California have been acutely aware of a “cultural” chasm separating them for quite a long time. Having worked as a musician extensively in both parts of the country, I can assure you that this separation is far more fundamentally life-style-based than any assumptions that a mere sports rivalry can caricature during a play-off period pitting one commentator’s accent against the next, or compiled lists of celebrities residing in one locale over another (which reminds me that I should point out for those in my readership that are bound to quip that I’m not even “from” Boston [the city proper] or a citizen of the commonwealth of Massachusetts that EVERY of the articles to which I’m referring that boasts of Beantown’s celebrity roster lists Adam Sandler, who has largely touted his allegiance to the neighborhood that he’s from mere blocks away from where I grew up and currently reside [once again] in the Queen City of the Granite State… not to mention Aerosmith, who’s members hail from a rather rural area even further north in New Hampshire [and I would prefer not to even mention the rednecks from Godsmack, as I consider them a bit of a disgrace to the state]…)

Flipping stations on a car-ride during the playoffs, I caught an afternoon DJ on WBCN spinning The Freeze’s “This is Boston, Not LA” as a rallying-cry for Celtics fans prior to the evening’s game. Great song, great compilation… and I promise, it spoke to so much more than basketball, and still does, to New England punk fans. When I got home, I cued up The Showcase Showdown’s classic Boston anti-Cali-anthem “213.”

I promise, for artists and musicians, this rivalry has nothing to do with basketball. I am disappointed that “credible” and well-staffed publications such as the Boston Globe and the LA Times, who operate in cities whose “dominant” cultures are more dominated (possibly ironically) by the “sub”-cultures than most others in America, seem to be completely and naively oblivious to this.

To Every Medium Its Place...

To anyone who has been awaiting my entries with bated breathe (*cough* dead-metaphor alert *cough*), I apologize for the gap between this entry and the last. To everyone else (alright, then, probably just "everyone"), carry on, and thanks for stopping by. My distractions have been multiplying rather vigorously recently, leaving me little time for frequent blogging.

As this is still most definitely the case, I will present this entry as, rather than a critical essay as many in the past have been most like, a small collection of notes and thoughts that could prove thought-provoking or useful, to me, you, or some combination of us.

First, a quote.

"It's difficult to talk about these songs indepth. That's why they're songs."

This statement was made by Eric Clapton, in his recently published "Clapton; The Autobiography." I have to admit, I'm not really a Clapton fan at all, so I haven't actually read the book. Ironically, it comes to me by way of another artist that I'm not exactly a fan of, Stephen King. He printed the quote in his review of the guitarist's book, "Slowhand; Clapton remembers his life and his music" in the October 28, 2007 edition of the New York Times Book Review.

It's a pretty simple idea, and really boils down to the same concept as the old "writing about music is like dancing about architecture" cliche, but for some reason it struck me as a more direct and poignant way of expressing the concept. (If I remember right, that quote was referenced within the same review as well. No, I don't have it in front of me at present.) Part of me always wanted to argue about the older quote; the stubborn quixotic part of me that was thinking "Sure, I guess you hypothetically could "dance" about "architecture"... define "dance" and define "architecture"... hell, define "about," for that matter. Clapton's version leaves little ambiguous space for the over-analytical among us to pull these sorts of punches (oh look, another dead metaphor.).

This is no new idea, I'm well aware, but merely one of those sound-bites that struck me as an aptly expressed summation of something that was in need of a more forcible finger upon it. Reading it was one of those "That's it" moments for me, helping to grasp why so many of us are tangling ourselves in our quests for artistic expression by way of so many different simultaneous mediums, and critically fascinated by the interplay, interreliance, and interdependence amongst them. Each medium expresses a different aspect of the thought or concept, and each is self-sufficient in the same ways and for the same reasons that it is dependent on expressions from other angles. When I'm at a loss for the tone of particular scene of a work of fiction, for instance, often only changing my creative mask to "poet" or "songwriter" can appropriately capture what I'm looking for. From there, the resulting mediums must either be combined (in often expirimental ways that wouldn't have been readily thought of by any other means or for any other reasons) or utilized as ladder-rungs to understand the appropriate creative voice that the initial piece requires to be composed in.

Not a bad snippet, overal, especially courtesy of two artists that I don't particularly care for.


In a bit of housekeeping news, I am considering adding a side-bar to the site with links to the blogs of others that I read or find noteworthy or relevant to the topics at hand. If you run a blog or post to a collective site and are interested in pointing me in the direction of your content or swapping links, please be in touch. After a weekend in the Boston area that turned out to be timed with the final couple games of the World Series sweep, a site pertaining to that sort of thing seems knee-jerk appropriate to me right now. See the right column, right below my bio.


On the note of my recent trip home... rest in peace, Memere. You'll be missed.

Lorraine L. Provencher, December 25, 1929 to October 26, 2007

Wrapping up my drawn-out show review (Today is the Day, et al.)

OK, so I intended to finish this the next day, but I guess that didn't happen... It's been a wierd week; my apologies.

My challenge now is to combine my scribbled notes with my wracked memory of a show that's now a couple weeks past, and combine those with the vague recollections of the points that I was intending to use that show to demonstrate. Perhaps this challenge (and my rather abstract intended ways of confronting it) will prove large chunks of my point. I think that it will, or will at least help. Some of my intended points may even be made better, if less directly or cogently. This is a study of bias itself rather than of the subject, and the limitations of this post, and the necesary piecemeal/ goulash nature of its presentation, are the bias. This is much like post-modern critical anthropology. The anthropology of a rock show. All writing is fundamentally primarily about the writing task itself, and the biases of its author rather than about the subject undertaken.

With that in mind, I return to the show itself. After Christine, Defcon 4 from Boston took the stage. Musically, these guys were strikingly dissimilar to the rest of the bill. A hardcore band that leans harder toward thrashy punk than metal, their set felt a bit like a circus act for intermission at the opera. Not that this is a bad thing, necesarily. The crowd seemed to revel in a brief change in the mood of the room. And I practically grew up on Boston hardcore, so their set struck me as a refreshing chunk of nostalgia, even though I wasn't previously familiar with anything besides the name of the group prior to this show. Say what you will, the Boston area has (and will probably always have) a pretty distinct sound in violent music, and Defcon definitely has a bit of something in them that would give me a good guess where they were from at the most casual cold listen. Their set was alot of fun, in a similar way to how it can occasionally be fun to dig through boxes of old cassette-tapes with hand-made labels and reflect on the chaos of the shows that I picked them up at.


Today is the Day themselves delivered what their reputation promises. From the moment that they began playing, they assaulted the crowd with nearly transcendentally precise walls of rhythmic sound. From my place in the bobbing crowd in front of the stage, their music struck me as having a distinctly trance-like quality that I found thoroughly enjoyable. The sensation that their music created for me was similar to being lifted into it and then sorrounded or wrapped by it, taken completely into the different sort of space that the music comes from (whatever that may be). From inside of the grip of the music, it seems that the point of it, the purpose for the construction of this space, the composition of the music that is the tool to propell the listener there, is completely atmospheric and textural. The culmination of this feeling came, rather predictably, with a heavy and rythmic rendition of the song "Temple of the Morning Star" (a song that appears on their myspace page in an acoustic form) which features a well-crafted pulsingly repititious chant that sucked the crowd, joining in and mobbing toward the stage, further into the embracing effect created by the sound. "I can't be... what you want me to be... I am... dead..." By the last time through, I couldn't see a person who wasn't positively screaming. If the show is intended as a sort of ritual (which at times it felt like) and the embracing sensation of the rhythms is in some way thereputic and building toward some sort of goal, this refrain serves as a most definite point of release. And it felt damn good.


Of course, this could have been merely an idea that I had been spinning on my own that evening (or something that part of me bady wanted), and the sensations that TITD created for me played into it rather (coincidentally) well. Jotted in my notebook from prior in the evening (I believe just after Black Hell finished playing) is this-

The purpose of "scene" has nothing to do with other people. It has to do with the constructin of individual identities, something to allign yourself with, the ability to space-out and step into the pseudo-surrealistic realm of an option for "reality" that the band is creating for you.

Music communities, it seems, aren't fundamentally about community at all. The aspect of community created as part of the activity of musical enjoyment is merely a tool with which individual identities are sculpted. Therefore, the most artistically valid moments in the act of musical appreciation are intrincically and harshly individual moments. At this show I remembered that it is still possible to say something artistically valid within a guitar-bass-drums cliche box-structure or with the utilization of otherwise unnecesary social frivolities like music scenes or the cheap enjoyment of conventional entertainment. Even if what's being said by the art is merely the brief expression of a single feeling, atmosphere, or texture that an individual wants as a facet of their self-constructed identity. As I left the show, I felt decidedly disconnected, dazed, and strangely somewhat content. If music can still be relevant art, I think that this feeling alone may be a valid and important point to make, and I commend Today is the Day for making it for me that evening.

A show review, or a review of shows in general? (Preface)

This is not a music-blog. There are far too many sites floating around the internet dedicated solely to concert and record reviews, thus I feel that my addition to that dogpile would be superfluous.

However, this blog IS dedicated to multi-medium art-criticism, and as a musician and a reluctant (and extremely critical) music "fan," music IS one of the multiple mediums that this blog occasionally covers.

As an art critic who is versed and educated primarily in literary scholarship, the scope and format of the majority of mainstream, journalistic music reviews are of very little interest to me. My attempt with the "reviews" that I post on this site, therefore, is more akin to what I consider to be viable and noteworthy literary criticism. The goal of this, in my eyes, is not to merely explain and cast judgement on the work being examined, but to use the individual work as an example to demonstrate broader, more "important" topics about art and culture in general.

Therefore, I have several "reviews" slated for this blog of shows that I have recently attended/ will attend and records that have recently been released. This has mostly come about because, as I wrote among scribbled notes about the performers and the crowd while sitting at the bar between acts at a recent show that I attended, "I seem completely unable to leave my work at home lately" (as anyone who's recently spotted me sitting at various pubs around Phoenix on busy nights with stacks of books and notebooks in front of me can attest to). So, I may as well make critical use of the ideas that strike me, and scribbles that I go home with, when I go out at night, right?

My first entry (or set of entries) of this nature, for which I'm currently sifting through a hap-hazard set of notes, will address questions of the purpose of entertainment and entertainment "scenes" (and, yes, the identity-constructions that come about by way of them) as they pertain to two recent shows that I attended (the first couple that I had been to in quite a while); Today is the Day, et al, at the Stray Cat, and The Red Elvises at The Rythm Room.

And, the next time that you're out in Phoenix and see the wierdo sitting amidst the crowd at Rosie Mcafrees or the Dubliner studying for the GRE's or editing a thick packet of dry typescript with illegible scribbles all over the margins, stop by and say hi.

An Introduction to Miss Chloe Claustrophobia.

One of my primary intentions with this blog involves the construction of a centralized location from which to synthesize and blur the lines between art-genres as they weave in and out of each other as the multiple mediums that I work with engage in the same projects from multiple simultaneous angles in attempts to more thoroughly adress the same concepts.

Whew, that was a mouthful. Basically, this blog is a place for me to put it all together, to place in the appropriate context {the piece of music} that needs {the fiction sketch} that needs {the visual image} that was rendered in response to {the critial review} in order to fully make sense or create the sensation or idea that it is intended to. (obviously all {brackets} in the foregoing statement are examples interchangeable with countless other variables. I think you get the point.)

This catch-all idea is also intended to afford me the oportunity to address other topics that enthrall me, using my own work as examples, such as the lack of binary and objective certainty in matters of creativity, such as ambiguities as to the "source" or "credibility" of artistic creation (see my prior post about windchimes), and similar ambiguities about artistic "end-results," questions of which stage in the artistic process constitutes the "artistic product." It is this last question that I wish to adress by introducing my readers to a multi-faceted project that I'm engaged in. That project is, loosely, the construction of the artistic identity of an otherwise non-entity that I call "Miss Chloe Claustrophobia."

Miss Claustrophobia, as a project, is currently still in the nascent stages. I am by no means currently exibiting a completed work, as the "completed work" of the project will involve many elements and may never completely exist, although many of the elements leading up to the hypothetical "completion" of the project will be exibited in "completed" forms. Many "completed" pieces of work will therefore be exhibited as components and raw-materials for a larger work-in-progress. In theory.

This project is not a puzzle. If you watch the updates on the project that I leave in this blog waiting for some sort of thorough-going "answer" as the project gets closer to "completion," you will be sorely disappointed. I don't believe in binary "answers" to artisitc questions, or "statements" made by art that can be "cracked" so definitively that they hit you like the punchline to a bad joke. Much of the concept itself has to do with the necesity for conceptual subtlety and the lack of finite answers to questions of statement, purpose, and intent.

Miss Claustrophobia began as a dream. A very vague dream that I remember almost nothing of, at that. But a dream that left me with a very definite impression of a better understanding of latent human (and personal) phobias, obsessions, and insecurities upon waking. The day after waking from this dream, I wrote a song with my Doom-Rock band The Green Sea called "The Plea of Miss Claustrophobia" that captured the concepts of the dream as they seemed in my mind at the time, in an appropriately vague, elusive, and frantic manner.

This is the song that therefore began the project-


This is a video of The Green Sea performing that song while writing it the day after the dream that inspired it-
Snake pitt

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I will continue this explanation, with some of the images and ideas that followed, as well as future plans for the project, most likely tomorow.

Until then, stay out of the snake pit.