Getting a Foot in the Door

| | | | | | | |

If you enjoy intelligent cartoons and if your computer is Flash-capable, you’ll doubtless delight in this animation by Pascal Campion. It’s the tragicomic saga of one man’s quest to open a door.

Campion has made an extensive selection of his graphic work available here.

Lego My Escher. . .

| | | | | | | |

. . . says 3QuarksDaily.

“Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt”

| | | | | | | |

Earlier this afternoon, in true CSTF fashion, I quite literally StumbledUpon the now-old news that my very favorite writer in all the world, one Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., passed away last Wednesday night, April 11. He was eighty-four and one-half years old. He had fallen a few weeks before in his Manhattan home. The injuries to his brain were not reversible.

I StumbledUpon the garage. I cranked my ostensibly healthy, tremendously wasteful Jeep. With moisture filling my eyes and bluegrass tickling my ears, I solemnly gripped the wheel and backed into the street. As the result of absolutely no planning and in the company of even less understanding, I was on my way to buy something I hadn’t suffered in some years . . .a pack of Pall Mall cigarettes.

It’s where particular people congregate, you know.

Less than two hundred yards down the road, the Jeep died. There was no fanfare. The engine just stopped running. Something electrical, for sure. Something expensive. It was a pull-over-or-get-your-ass-flattened kind of moment, and without the amenity of power steering, to boot.

Into a vacant driveway I swerved. There she sits even now, awaiting the shiny red wrecker that will take her to the Jeep hospital she knows and loathes so well. She’s an old girl. We’ve been through this before, and we’ll have bad days again.

I walked the rest of the way to the store and then back home. The return journey was punctuated by Pall Malls and silent internal reiterations of these three words: So it goes.

Symbols can be so beautiful, sometimes.
–Breakfast of Champions (1973)

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.
When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments.
—Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

Let Me See Your Hand, It’ll Only Take a Minute

From Fresh Pics, a captivating exhibition of the amazing “hand art” of Italian painter Guido Daniele.

Guido Daniele was born in Soverato (CZ-Italy) and now lives and works in Milan. Since 1964 until 1968 he attended Brera school of arts (majoring in sculpturing) in 1972. In 1972 he started working as a hyper-realistic illustrator, in cooperation with major editing and advertising companies, using and testing different painting techniques…official home page: guidodaniele.com.

Many more pictures available at Fresh Pics.

The Brothers Wooten

Why would I travel a hundred miles to sit drinking beer for a few hours in a smoky Nashville bar, only to turn right back around and arrive home at 3 a.m. with an 8 o’clock class looming just over the eastern horizon?

Regi Wooten and the Wooten Brothers Band, that’s why.  This übermusical band-of-brothers has been entertaining audiences since childhood, racking up experience points with the likes of the great Curtis Mayfield before striking out on careers of their own.

Victor Wooten, the clan’s most famous son, is widely considered to be one of the foremost working bassists today or in any day, for that matter. With his incredible musical sensitivity and an eye-popping, failsafe technique, Vic can put on an astounding show with nothing more than his lonesome—and maybe a drummer. He credits his brother Regi and bassists Jaco Pastorius, Stanley Clarke, and Larry Graham as major influences, and his main gig in recent years has been with Béla Fleck and the Flecktones, a challenging and rewarding (but quite danceable) jazz-bluegrass-fusion ensemble whose music you mustn’t let pass you by whether in the flesh or on record.

Joseph Wooten (“Hands of Soul, Voice of Gold”) is an astute keyboardist and a winsome vocalist whose touring credits include, among others, the Steve Miller Band. This gentleman is a master of all musical idioms with a warm and easy stage presence that defies description.

Rudi Wooten is the family sax-man, routinely defying the laws of physics by playing two saxes simultaneously and certainly unafraid to challenge Kenny G’s questionable record for World’s Longest Note on any given night. If that doesn’t get you going, just try frowning through his vocals on the Mayfield classic “Freddie’s Dead.” Just try. 

Roy “FutureMan” Wooten is a deft and spicy percussionist from far in the future, graciously taking time from his intergalactic schedule to stop by 21st Century Earth to enlighten us with his unique presence. He plays a mean set, but you’re most likely to catch him with his Synth-Axe Drumitar, a MIDI-driven guitar-like instrument through which he can amply lay down any and every groove imaginable. It’s a cliché but it’s the truth: you gotta see it to believe it.

The oldest wolf in the pack is guitarist-extraordinaire Regi ‘Arpeggio’ Wooten. He’s known as ‘The Teacha’ because, when the Wooten lads were young tykes milling restlessly around their home in Hawaii, it is rumored to have been Regi who started it all. Beginning on a brokedown ukelele and progressing to an electric guitar, Regi taught himself and then his brothers all about The Funk. A multi-instrumentalist and a musical genius, Regi opened the door through which would emerge a family of musical prodigies that is, in no uncertain terms, an international treasure. Regi’s signature style of guitar playing includes laying down accompaniments of smooth, silky, sophisticated chords; tunefully tapping out melodies and harmonies on the fretboard of his instrument as if it were a piano keyboard; rhythmically thumping complex patterns of pops and pings and bops and bings; and, on occasion, turning the volume up to 11.9 for a nuclear-powered wailing solo replete with classic Chuck Berry-esque licks and his own brand of hair-raising outer space noises. Enjoy the show, but don’t let him fool you—Regi is a musician of the highest caliber with knowledge and skills far deeper than hinted by some of the fantastically fun gimmicks that keep audiences on the edge of their seats.

The Wootens credit their musicianship, their diligence, and their infectious smiles to their parents, who always encouraged them to do their best and to be resourceful under any circumstances. If they can stop dancing for long enough, those good folks must be proud now.

Their busy independent schedules mean that it’s a tricky matter to catch all of the Wootens together on the same stage—but Regi and his band are at 3rd and Lindsley in Nashville, Tennessee practically every Wednesday night by 10 p.m. or so and the music doesn’t stop until the wee hours of the morning.  If you’re not able to catch them live, you’d be well-advised to check out their discographies (Live in America, one of Vic’s live compilations featuring several of the brothers, is a must-listen.) One of the best things about the Wooten Brothers’ shows is that you never know what’s going to happen—and there’s no telling who might stop by to pick a tune or two. I always leave the venue with two thumbs high in the air (and wishin’ for a third.)

For a taste of Wooten, check out the video below.  This is from a NYC performance featuring Regi and Vic (excellent percussionist unknown) and features a Wooten trademark—the “thump-off”—but I’ll let them explain that. Running time is about 11 minutes.

Texas Flood

Stevie Ray Vaughan (1954–1990) was an American blues guitarist, the driving force behind the 1980s revival of electric blues music and one of the most famous white bluesmen and electric guitarists in history. He brought American “roots” music back into the popular realm at a time when synthesizers and highly doctored vocals were topping the charts, drawing on influences such as Albert King, Buddy Guy, and Jimi Hendrix and inspiring a future generation of electric blues/rock artists like Derek Trucks and Jonny Lang. His work drew crowds to gritty live performances in the era dominated by superficially appealing, commercial-minded music videos.

Vaughan was born and raised in Dallas, Texas, but dropped out of school to pursue a career in blues music in Austin. His elder brother Jimmie Vaughan is a celebrated blues musician in his own right. Stevie played several club gigs weekly throughout the late 1970s, attracting the attention of David Bowie and Jackson Browne in the early 1980s and subsequently recording what would become the album Texas Flood at Browne’s L.A. studio. Vaughan and his backup band, Double Trouble, toured the US and the world throughout the 1980s. By 1986 Vaughan’s hard drinking and cocaine habit were severely detracting from his well-being and from his musicianship, but he later underwent treatment for these addictions and emerged as a hardcore teetotaler with decidedly Christian leanings. After an historic performance at Alpine Valley, Wisconsin in 1990, which featured an encore jam with several of Vaughan’s heroes including Buddy Guy and Eric Clapton, Vaughan was killed in a helicopter crash. Already something of a living legend, the Texas bluesman’s tragic and untimely death robbed America of one of its greatest musical treasures but also cemented his reputation as an icon at the height of his musical powers.

Most often seen with a Fender Stratocaster in hand, Vaughan played with an intense emotionality and a searing-hot tone which were facilitated by his use of ultra-heavy strings stretched high above the fretboard. Playing in this way requires much more physical exertion than is the norm for electric guitarists, but also lends itself to a languid expressiveness not entirely achievable with a normal guitar setup. He used few effects in the signal chain between his guitar and his amplifiers, most notably the wah-wah pedal for tonal variation and an Ibanez TubeScreamer for extra overdrive. As a stage gimmick Vaughan liked to play blazing solos behind his back, and audiences were never quite sure if a given treatment of a tune would be a standard rendition or a vehicle for meteoric improvisation.

Stevie Ray Vaughan lived the blues, proving that this great American medium of expression knows no other color. As an artist he is an inspiration to many thousands of young musicians around the world, and he is widely respected for his victory over the personal demons that haunted him offstage for so many years.

The performance of “Texas Flood” below is from 1983’s Live at the El Mocambo in Toronto, Canada. (RT 9:45)

Sculpting in Time: Andrej Tarkovskij

When film is not a document, it is dream. That is why Tarkovskij is the greatest of them all. He moves with such naturalness in the room of dreams. He doesn’t explain. What should he explain, anyhow? … All my life I have hammered on the doors of the rooms in which he moves so naturally. —Ingmar Bergman, 1987

Andrej Arsenijevich Tarkovskij (also spelled Andrei Tarkovsky, Cyrillic Андре́й Тарко́вский), 1932-1986, was a Russian filmmaker, producer, actor, and writer. He was arguably the most influential and almost certainly the most visionary of all Russian filmmakers. Two of his best-known films are Solaris (1972), a sci-fi psychodrama after the novel by Stanisław Lem which is viewed in some quarters as Tarkovskij’s answer to 2001: A Space Odyssey; and his swan song, The Sacrifice (1986), a Tarkovskij-written and Swedish-produced hommage to Ingmar Bergman which explores the journey of a somewhat neurotic Swedish family into the initial shock of a (possibly imaginary) nuclear holocaust.

He was the son of the poet Arsenij Tarkovskij, receiving a classical education in Moscow and later attending the All-Russian State Institute of Cinematography where his chief teacher was Mixail Romm. There he produced several student films, including 1960’s The Steamroller and the Violin.

In his maturity, Tarkovskij developed a theory of film which he referred to as ‘sculpting in time.’ He thought of the medium of film as a way of carving unnecessary facts and details out of a length of time to reveal a finished artwork in much the same way as a sculptor creates his artwork from a block of mineral. He believed that film offered a unique creative opportunity which is particularly faithful to the human experience of the passage of time, even moreso than music or dance. Tarkovskij created not by the addition of elements, but by subtraction, in a manner of speaking.

Tarkovskij paid a great deal of attention to fine detail, participating actively in aspects of production not normally attended by the director. He believed that one should not relegate that which one, as an artist, can do himself; however, he also encouraged his actors, cinematographers, and production crews to contribute creatively to his films. As a result of this philosophy each of his films has its own character traits while preserving Tarkovskij’s creative signature on multiple levels of play.

He was infamous for using very long takes and lengthy single shots; The Sacrifice, for instance, contains only 115 shots in total, including an opening shot which lasts for just under ten minutes. His films contain stark, beautiful imagery with carefully crafted contrasts in color and texture. Tarkovskij often insisted on active participation in set design and cinematographic matters. He relied heavily upon playful signature devices such as abruptly terminating dream sequences, spilling milk, Christian imagery, and characters leaving and reappearing in the foreground in single shots. A number of his pictures prominently feature the music of J.S. Bach and the ambient sounds of nature.

Stalker (1979) is a particularly interesting film which some consider a prophecy or foreshadow of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Tarkovskij’s other major sci-fi picture after Solaris, this picture tells the story of three men who search through the remains of a post-apocalyptic world in an attempt to locate a room which grants wishes. The production of Stalker was plagued with problems. Most of the outdoor shooting took place in a heavily polluted area of Estonia, and a number of the participants in the production, including the director himself, died of cancer in subsequent years. The relationship between Tarkovskij and his cinematographer suffered a fallout early in production and much of the film had to be reshot despite firm opposition from the Soviet film boards.

Although his spirituality often put him at odds with Soviet authorities, and although he eventually left the Soviet Union for good, Andrej Tarkovskij was nonetheless a beacon of originality and genius as a product of the Soviet arts education system. His films provide a great measure of poetry, finesse, and introspective vision in a world where cinematic production seems to be increasingly dominated by frenetic symptoms of ‘attention deficit disorder.’ Tarkovskij’s art is essential material for both the serious student and the serious enthusiast of cinema, and his works leave impressions which are not soon shaken—through his unique ingenuity and passionate dedication, this titan of the moving picture continues to sculpt the minds of his audiences in a very real sense.

Do Not Wash!

At first I thought it might be a joke, but the joke was on me, as it turns out: Scott Wade really is an artist who really works with dust on a windshield canvas. It’s called dirty car art, and his work in the medium includes portraits of Albert Einstein and Brazilian football star Ronaldinho; there are finely detailed landscapes and animal life, as well.

Other than the obvious benefit to the planet, I can’t think of a better reason to keep ’em parked.

More Chopin

Here is Chopin’s Etude in E major, Op. 10, No. 3; my performance still needs a bit of work, particularly in the more technically challenging middle section, but I have a horrible phobia of being video-recorded so this might be the best performance the camera gets out of me. Sorry about the mistakes and about the unfortunate sound quality. Increasing your treble and decreasing your bass might help a bit on that second count.

Of this piece, a technical study in bringing out a melody over a busy accompaniment that tends to muddy it—as well as an exercise in broken diminished chords—Chopin is reported to have said: “Never again shall I find such a melody.” Five-measures-long phrases are adventurous even for a daring dandy such as Chopin, but the asymmetry is barely perceptible. This piece is often given the nickname “tristesse,” meaning ‘sadness,’ because it has the character of a melancholy remembrance of better times gone by, the longing escalating into an angry panic in the middle of the piece and then returning to something approaching satisfaction in the final phrases. We might never know of what Chopin was thinking when he wrote this little jewel, but the emotional progression is made quite tangible thanks to his pen.

NaNoWriMojo

As November draws to a close, they are legion whom languish lovingly in the final throes of the great scramble for 50k words. Because winning isn’t everything in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo)—it’s the only thing.

I am not among them thissssss time, but perhaps you are, and if so (or even if not) you should check out this helpful little William S. Burroughs-inspired website. With more literary gadgets and gizmos than James Joyce’s toolchest, you can cyberpimp your novel, short story, and other sundry ramblings with that special flair only a computer randomizer could provide.

Don’t talk to me about cyberpunk. Deconstruction—aye, there’s the rub! Cut ’em up and move ’em out! Sentences, that is. Just sentences. With only eight days left to the finish line, there’s simply no more time to murder your darlings by the paragraph.

This is the the creative writer’s wet dream as much as ’tis the blackest, harshest nightmare of the longsuffering copyeditor. Enjoy! Forever. And ever. And ever.

Slowly paint the burning biscuits just across the starlit pond.