Fungible Convictions

Robin D. G. Kelley’s new book Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original is just plain awesome.

The first jazz album I ever bought—I would have been sixteen or so—was Thelonious Himself, a late-career solo album Monk recorded after a more than a decade of low-wage gigs, stolen compositions, and magazine writers’ lazy caricatures.

Kelley, to whom I just wrote a blathering email because I’m so in awe of his work here, writes a new, accurate narrative, using his prodigious skills as musicologist and music describer, as well as his Herculean scholarshipping to fully cover Monk’s life. (The appendix features 3,027 endnotes.)

I’ll quote one paragraph from the book because it’s the one that got me out of bed to email Kelley and write this post. I quote it because, as a non-musicologist, it’s the single best description of Monk’s musical style I’ve ever read (and granted, this is just page 141; there’s 310 pages, plus acknowledgments, to go; it could get even better):

All the songs on the date [a Blue Note recording session in 1948], particularly Monk’s musical dialogues with [vibraphonist] Milton Jackson, exemplify Monk’s characteristic parallel voices, collective improvisations, and layering of melodic lines and countermelodies. In these and other recordings, he invents countermelodies, incorporates arpeggios (outlining chords in single notes, often emphasizing the most dissonant tonalities), and plays many different “runs” down the piano—particularly runs built on whole-tone scales. Monk, in other words, conceived of the piano as an orchestral instrument. He thought in multiple lines—two, three, even four—an played independent rhythmic lines with his left and right hands. It was a key to Monk as a composer, improviser, and arranger—three components of making music that he treated as inseparable. For Monk, the composition was not just the melody but the entire performance. He had little interest in “blowing sessions.” Even when musicians were improvising together, he expected a level of orchestration that would sustain the essential elements of the piece.

For a couple years I kept coming back to Planxty’s version of the Celtic harp tune “Sí Bheag, Sí Mhór” as a song of some comfort. But it wasn’t until recently that I sat down with my guitar to figure out how to play it. Now, granted, my “playing” is just chords, so I can play along, but it showed me a internet blind spot, namely that “Sí Bheag, Sí Mhór” was only available as tablature, not as straight-up chords.

So here at last, internet, is “Sí Bheag, Sí Mhór” as chords, based on the version from Planxty Live – 2004. Guitar picks up at 1:09.

A. x2
D Bm G A D, G A, D Bm, G D A D G A D2-ish

B. x2
D Bm G A D, A D Bm G A(?) D G A G A D2-ish

Parts A and B repeat two more times in full, in order. Corrections are more than welcome, just leave them in the comments below.

Radiohead and director James Frost generated some buzz last year when they released a video for the song “House of Cards” that used no lights or cameras. How’d they do it? Current.com helped produce a short documentary of the “filming,” which, in its experimentation with new and old technology, reminds me of how work is done at the MIT Media Lab…give it a look:

And here’s the “House of Cards” video, all finished:

I was using TuneUp to clean up my Monk tracks in iTunes, it suggested some Youtube videos. Oof…

Around 2:50 in this one, of him in Oslo in April of ‘66, he does his famous random stand-up, followed immediately by a solo showing his percussive technique. He was long criticized for his lack of proper technique, but I don’t know how else a pianist could achieve the right syncopation without it:

All of “Straight, No Chaser” by Clint Eastwood is online:

And there’s a podcast with footage of Orin Keepnews, who helped produce Monk’s concert at New York Town Hall in 1959:

This was a research article written by Scott DeVeaux and published in the Journal of the American Musicological Society. I came across it in The Thelonious Monk Reader, and the topic is fascinating: a musicians union—the AFM—asked its members not to record music until they got a better cut of revenue from recording companies (“By making recordings which could be used in place of live performances on radio and in clubs, [. . .] union members were putting themselves out of work.”) The significance, typically described, was that we listeners today lost out on three years of seminal jazz, including recordings that could have been made by Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, and a handful of big band leaders who were starting to experiment with bebop.

DeVeaux’s article is a bit of a let-down, in a sense, because he’s “reconsidering” that traditional dramatic view of the recording ban. It turns out the ban wasn’t as long as people think it was, bootlegs of club shows were made, and, in any case, formal recordings don’t capture what was really happening at Minton’s Playhouse and Monroe’s Uptown or the later downtown jazz clubs.

So the article is a great piece of historical research, and it ruins any chance to be up in arms about something people used to be up in arms about!

Lots of people though are still up in arms about something related. Record labels today are in the place musicians unions were then, trying to the control the supply of music or renegotiate the terms of its distribution.

The article, written in 1988, touches on these issues—a decade before Napster at that. It references a Supreme Court decision that the “control of performing artists over their own recordings” ended “at the time of sale”. And there’s this gem, hinting at my feeling that the recording industry isn’t worth saving:

And what of the idea that recording companies would, under normal circumstances, have documented this music [bebop]? In much of the writing on jazz there is the unspoken assumption that “documentation” is a virtually automatic process—the inevitable result of there being music worth recording. In reality, of course, the major recording companies were run by businessmen, who logically gave precedence to the tried and true over innovations by relative unknowns.

So there’s no guarantee this jazz would have been recorded. (Moreover, DeVeaux makes a should-be-obvious point: who was going to buy jazz records in 1942-1944 when the majority of American men were at war and the very materials needed to manufacture records were rationed, to the point that records were being melted down and re-pressed?) When the ban was lifted, it was new independent companies that came to the fore and recorded bebop while the big companies still churned out big-band records.

The same thing happens today, just at an accelerated pace. While big companies do everything they can to restrict access to recordings—they do want it out there but only on their terms—small companies and independent artists take advantage of changing technology to make a name for themselves. New artists have an almost zero chance of getting wealthy off their work and only a slightly better shot at making a short career out of it by touring. But if you look at the market forces, the supply of good music completely outstrips the ability of people to listen to it all. We have a century of recorded music to listen to!

Take a lesson from Monk, who, while he played at Minton’s, went home every night to live at his parents’ apartment. Musicians and their labels don’t have a right to compensation simply for playing music. The 20th century was a golden age, when supply, demand, and heavy-handedness intersected just right. But now great musicians can be discovered and shared at almost no cost and thus with little chance for making a living off it. As with Monk, it has to be a passion. You have to love music and playing it. And if you find a place to play and friends to play with, that’s what makes it worth it.

Though I can’t speak for the students taking advantage of the Independent Activities Period at MIT, it’s been a quiet week for everyone in the Comparative Media Studies department.

When things are slow, I turn to two profoundly dorky pastimes: picking out books from the library during lunch and working through programming or design tutorials.

These week I did both, and in one case they overlapped.

My all-time favorite musician is jazz pianist Thelonious Monk, so I stopped by the MIT music library (conveniently down the stairs from my office) and picked up the Thelonious Monk Reader, a well-curated collection of writings by critics, fans, and contemporaries. The book helped me track down some early photos I’d never seen of him:

So for the first tutorial, I used that photo in Photoshop to try some pop art stuff (warning that I’m not good with colors):

Then I practiced some of those same skills—namely, using the pen tool A LOT–some more. I took the Facebook profile picture of my wife’s friend Annemarie, who’s a huge Yankees fan, such a big fan that she work a Yankees jersey at a wedding reception, and put her in left field of Fenway Park with a Red Sox hat on (the hat was originally a Buffalo Bills hat):

It was fun to play with the texture of the Sox logo for that one, though you can see I had trouble with the cloning tool while trying to clean up the gray part of her hat—so now it looks like she was beat up and has a lump on the side of her forehead.

When I try tutorials, though the skills are good for work, I usually try to do something explicitly that can help my office too. So I attempted a “slow shutter effect” tutorial that used my office’s acronym. This came out good but showed why I need to bring my drawing tablet into the office because using the pen tool for lettering looks pretty rough:

Lastly there’s the glowing light painting effect, achieved by using the pen tool to outline a figure and then using a blurred stroke to make that outline glow. For this one I outlined the image of my wife in a moose hat. You heard me. Then I made it glow and placed it in a darkened photo of a river in Juneau. I also added some smoke:

And that about covers my slow day!

Favorite images

The wedding gets top billing of course. Lindsay and I still have to go through all our photos to choose prints, but this is still my A+ #1 favorite, the Nuptial Terrorist Fist Jab:

A close second was a photo from my final chemo session back in January:

The most emotional image of the year came from election night. Not Palin in front of slaughtered turkeys, not Jeremiah Wright at the lectern, not even Obama’s speeches—the image of a weeping Jesse Jackson will be my visual definition of the 2008 election:

Immediately after the election, there was a flood of photographs uploaded to the “Message for Obama” pool. This was tops:

Favorite songs (maybe only one or two actually written and released in 2008):

• “Book of Love” by the Magnetic Fields. Lindsay’s and my first dance.
• “The Well Below the Valley” and “Sí Bheag Sí Mhór” by Planxty. Both still haunting.
• “Wonder Worm” by Captain Sky. “Unidentified craaaaawling object!”
• “Young Folks” by Peter Bjorn and John. Tops from my drives to and from Tufts while listening to WERS.
• “Where Is My Love” by Lucinda Williams. One of the top five songwriters working today.
• “Cayman Islands” by Kings of Convenience. Must have felt amazing for them hearing the recorded version the first time. Just a lovely song.
• Anything by the Rev. J. M. Gates from the Anthology of American Folk Music
• “Terraplane Blues” by Robert Johnson. Oldest favorite.
• “Freddie’s Dead” by Curtis Mayfield. A superb song from Superfly, largely lost to history except that it was covered by, of all groups, the Derek Trucks Band.
• “II B.S.” by Charles Mingus. A favorite song every year until I die.

Favorite books:

1. Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
2. The Best American Comics 2008
3. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
4. Reading Comics by Douglas Wolk
5. Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely
6. How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative by Allen Raymond
7. Sacco and Vanzetti: The Men, the Murders, and the Judgment of Mankind by Bruce Watson

Favorite poems:

• “Exxon” by Robert Wrigley
• “Here the Birds’ Journal Ends” by Mahmoud Darwish
• The O’s by Baron Wormser

Favorite moments, aside from my own wedding and the election:

• Commiserating with my wife on the side of the G.W. Parkway as we both got sick after my cousin’s wedding and needed my dad to pull over seven separate times. (Moral: stay away from homemade Romanian liquor.)
• Last year was all about my illness, and though this year featured the end of chemo, it was far more awesome to a) meet my chemo-twin Erica and to spend a long afternoon with her and her husband at the Gulu-Gulu Cafe in Lynn, to b) meet up with paraneoplastic-twin Scott on the Cape, and to c) have dinner with Marc Wein, who’s a sweetheart and presented on my case at a conference.
• Babies! Our friend Katie is ready to burst—the baby “dropped” last week—another friend had their first last month, Nancy (see post below) just announced her pregnancy, and our friends Nada and Alex welcomed the world’s prettiest catcher’s mitt back in January (I kid! She’s beautiful, especially now that she does parlor tricks):

  

Favorite new computer programs (absolutely new or just new to me):

• Twitter/Ping.fm/Brightkite: Twitter and its companions spread faster than lolcats, theinternetisseriousbusiness, and the aforementioned Palin turkey video combined.
• Vidalia and Tor: high-gear, well-maintained, indispensable tools for online privacy.
• FontExplorerX: saves a ton of time when I’m trying to find good typefaces to use, though I overwhelmed it when I installed about 15,000 of them.
• Evernote: replaced Delicious this year, because Evernote also saves entire webpages for offline viewing—not to mention saving images with my built-in iSight camera.

Favorite websites:

• General interest: BoingBoing, as always
• Prurient interest: The Daily Puppy and Cute Overload
• Politics: Talking Points Memo
• Tech: Schneier on Security
• Friends’: The Newtster Prepares Supper and Things
• Work: Center for Future Civic Media
• Design: I Love Typography
• Tutorials: PSDTUTS

Favorite quotes (all of them come from my cousin-in-law Colin, who’s currently recovering from serious surgery on his gut):

• Absolutely belted in a silent cathedral before his epistle reading at my wedding: “GOOD MORNING.”
• Yesterday in his hospital bed, to his mother. “The pain button isn’t working. You’re still here.”
• And to give his mother the last word. “His new girlfriend is nice. They’re always nice. And then they leave.”

Special thanks for helping make 2008 great go out to:

• My wife.
• My family and in-laws, but especially my dad for continuing to come to Boston to take me to doctor’s appointments, particularly the two sleep-deprived EEGs.
• Paddy, Jon, and Alan for a kick-ass bachelor-party weekend in Chicago.
• Sarah Wolozin, Henry Jenkins, William Urrichio, and Ellen Hume of MIT for hiring me for the best job I’ve ever had. And Geoffrey Long for aiding the transition into what had been his old job, and Generoso Fierro for being an incredible resource for understanding the inner-workings of MIT.
• [Snark]Tufts for not really understanding what I did so that I felt compelled to look for another job.[/Snark]
• And a very special thanks to Paul and Hope of the Half Shell restaurant, for feeding me so much food over the last five and a half years and for cracking me up a few months ago by showing me a picture of your new grandson and saying proudly “His name Demetrios! Is Greek name!”

And to all you readers, thanks for a great 2008. Keep in touch for 2009, and my best wishes to you and yours.

…had a very shiny nose. He was about thirteen at the time. Up until then, the nose had been of normal size, shape, and color. But his body had changed a lot in the last year—his nose most awkwardly of all. It was bright red. And if you ever saw him, you would even say it glows.

All of the other reindeer used to laugh and call him names. Lush. Cardinal-diver. Ground control, even. While it was accepted that Rudolph was, and might always be, too immature for their annual flight on the 24th, this red nose thing made him a total outcast. They never let poor Rudolph join in any reindeer games. Not Reindeer Polo, or Reindeer Pétanque. Not even skee-ball.

Then one foggy Christmas Eve, Santa came to say: “Rudolph with your nose so bright…” he cleared his throat for dramatic effect and stared down a particular jerk, Blitzen, “…won’t you guide my sleigh tonight?” This made no sense. Santa was known as a conservative, traditionalist, hard-ass. He’d essentially had the same eight reindeer (by name) for every flight since 1 A.D., trading in older reindeer for similar-looking younger ones every five years or 150,000 miles (like Menudo) and simply changing the nametag on their collars (like Menudo).

The issue this year was that it was 1939. Germany had invaded Poland the previous September, not leaving enough time to sort through the Naughty/Nice paperwork for all 80 million Germans. Santa had no practical choice but to move them all to the Naughty list, but, not wanting to deliver 80 million individual gifts of coal to their countrymen, both Donner and Blitzen went on strike.

Aaaaaand I have no idea how to finish this before dinner….

This is sweet. From page 5 of Charles Nesson’s counterclaim (PDF) against the Recording Industry Association of America:

Imagine a statute which, in the name of deterrence, provides for a $750 fine for each mile-per-hour that a driver exceeds the speed limit, with the fine escalating to $150,000 per mile over the limit if the driver knew he or she was speeding. Imagine that the fines are not publicized, and most drivers do not know they exist. Imagine that enforcement of the fines is put in the hands of a private, self-interested police force, that has no political accountability, that can pursue any defendant it chooses at its own whim, that can accept or reject payoffs in exchange for not prosecuting the tickets, and that pockets for itself all payoffs and fines. Imagine that a significant percentage of these fines were never contested, regardless of whether they had merit, because the individuals being fined have limited financial resources and little idea of whether they can prevail in front of an objective judicial body.

What’s really hard to imagine is the future of the RIAA. It’s been said thousands of times in this context: no industry can thrive by suing its own customers.

One of the best shows I ever saw was Boss Hog at the 9:30 Club in D.C. Must have been 1998 or so. They’re together again for a mini-tour of Europe and then one show at the Bowery in NYC.

Catch it if you can. There’s nothing quite so awesome as watching Jon Spencer have to back up his wife.