RIP Henry

This article on www.stuff.co.nz relates the death of Benson: “Britain’s favourite carp.” Why this is news in New Zealand is beyond me, other than that nation’s penchant for a daily animal story. But I am glad that it is news, after all, if the death of an actor or singer or media type deserves world wide reporting, then surely a celebrity fish does too. This carp was so loved by locals as to have been freed 60 times when caught at the end of an ‘ook.

Once the nation has shed it’s tears for Henry I suppose that the search will be on to locate the carp who presumably came in second place in the favourite carp polls. Hopefully the news gets to the fish before the angler does. Imagine killing a fish only to find out later that you had put an end to Britain’s new favourite. For shame!

How To Draw Backwards

MLAC: Ideas for your cultural rebirth:  I want a cat (favoured things) attacking a kid (unfavoured things).

Headphone Microphone Man: Have it leap out of the cupboard.

MLAC: Yeah!  Kid’s trying to get at the sugar bread but kitties’ already got there.

Talented Artist: I don’t know about this.

MLAC: Just draw the picture will you?

TA: I can’t draw from the imagination.  I need an image to work from.

MLAC: Fine!  I’ll give you an image.  Pulls out notebook and starts scribbling.

TA: What’s a frog doing in there?

MLAC: What the hell are you talking about, that’s obviously a cat.

TA: Cats don’t have rounded legs!

MLAC: They do when they are leaping from cupboards, kung fu style.  Draws a pair of triangles atop cat’s head. There.  Cat!  When you do it properly you can make the kid look like the brat off those U2 albums.

TA: No way!

MLAC: Look, if you put a cultural touch-stone in there, you will have a better chance of selling it.  Either to fans of U2 or Cat lovers, or Kid haters.  Or some hybrid of the three.

TA: But I hate U2.

MLAC: Musical taste doesn’t come into it.  In any case, you are scratching U2′s kid with a wild animal, so what’s your beef?

HMM: You need to draw it upside down.

MLAC: What’s that you say?

HMM: It’s all about drawing from the right side of the brain.  It will look better if you copy the image directly, not try to draw what you think it should look like.  So if it is upside down, you are just copying the lines.  It will be more accurate.  Betty Edwards guarantees it!

MLAC: What absolute twaddle.

HMM: No, it works.

MLAC: Lets just see about that.  Takes out phone and snaps HMM.

HMM: What’s this all about then?

MLAC: Well I don’t exactly have a flying cat that I can turn upside down to copy, do I?  And as far as I can tell, my imagination is the right way up, so you will have to do.

Fall Star: But you cant draw to save your self!

MLAC: Quiet in the cheap seats.  Turns the phone upside down and starts to draw.

HMM: You are allowed to lift the pencil, you know.

MLAC: If it’s good enough for Paul Klee then its good enough for me.

FS: Yeah but he could draw.

HMM: You are wilfully sabotaging this!

MLAC: Of course I’m not; it’s a flawed exercise in the first place.

Fall Star guffaws into his pint.

Right, you stunted excuse for an evolutionary joke, let’s see you do better.  Thrusts the notebook at Fall Star.

FS: Perhaps it’s supposed to be drawn upside down and with the left hand?

MLAC: I don’t think so.  What the hell have you done to his lip? He looks like a goddamned zombie.

Fall Star shades under the “nose”

MLAC: Now he looks like a concentration camp survivor.

Fall Star continues his “shading” on the cheeks.

And NOW he looks like he’s been savaged by a crazed animal.

FS: Perhaps he’s Bono’s kid in old age.

HMM: I hope the old man shuffles off soon, I could do with the money.  Another round?

Vanishing Worlds by Rod Gray & Shining Happy People by Kerry Buckland- Upstairs at the Napier.

There are dissatisfied rumblings eminating from several patrons. The wine, you see, it is not free. “This is supposed to be an opening, and we have to pay for the wine!” Sober at an opening? There’s a horrible thought. Like going to a Pink Floyd show without pot. I am fine, I already have my pint of Guinness bought from the bar downstairs. But there are a few noses out of joint up here. “We are struggling artists, where are we supposed to go for free booze if not to gallery openings?” one girl asks. Times are tough and I guess some of the gathered throng will just have to get by without the grog tonight.

Lines are shaky things in the vanishing world. All of the architectural forms are wonky, hand drawn, imperfect renditions of perfect structures that the ravages of time has rendered imperfect. The proportions are correct, but it looks as though gravity and decay have done a number on them. Many have reached a vegetative state, and after a while the buildings begin to resemble vegetables. Pumpkin structures and turnip devices. Not that anything seems edible in this post societal landscape. The few humans who populate these pictures are survivors. Scavengers, not thrivers. A race bemused and confounded by the relics of their forebears. Whose ancestors are as alien to them as the ancient Egyptians are to us.

Most of the works are monochrome, with some sepia and the rare shot of muted colour. The most successful images are of re-found spaces, the sort of places that have just been discovered after many years of neglect. A wonky rocket hangs in space looks cobbled together from other bits of space junk; repaired from the debris of other lost craft. Two figures huddle in the rear of the space capsule, crouching round an unlit fire, trapped on their journey. A huge column sits in a dusty loft. Is it a furnace; is it a device to control the atmosphere, a dalek, an un-detonated bomb?

While I think that the shock of recognition and their alien nature give many of the pieces a lasting resonance, Kate thinks that this effect dulls quite quickly. She likes them at first, but then starts to get bored. She is a seasoned pro though. An art teacher and gallery fiend of many years and many cities. I should probably defer to the voice of experience, but then, I knows what I likes.

Next door, a room of silhouettes of human figures cut from mirrored glass. Each piece is about 10cm high and they are displayed at eye level. There is also one gamboling pooch. It comes as no surprise that the only sold mirror is the one of the dog with the ball in his mouth. All the others are people in varying states of relaxation or exertion. That’s fine, its an interesting idea, but who wants to reflect in the silhouette of a stranger? Perhaps a celebrity silhouette, a pop star maybe? Michael Jackson seems to be pretty popular at the moment… In any case, people with dogs or cats (or rats, budgies, fish or children) tend to buy shapes that recall their pets sooner than people with uncles, wives, nanas or bosses. “Look honey, I got you this mirror, it looks just like you!”

The Slow Gestation vs. Shock & Awe

Finale of the Luminous festival in Sydney

This is an extended version of my response to the Ghost’s post on theage.com this morning. The Ghost wrote about lengthy gigs. How long is too long? This started there and kind of devolved into a short meditation on exciting performances.

We went to a Mark Kozelek gig at the East Brunswick Club last year that may or may not have lasted an hour. It felt like a week. There was so much reverb on his voice that he sounded like he was singing at the end of a concrete pipe. Each gently plucked and sung song blended into each other. It was sonic minimalism dressed up as folk music. I hear tell that this is the way Kozelek likes his sound. There are rumours in this town that he has come to blows with sound engineers who refuse to subject an audience to Kozelek’s preferred presentation technique. I am not sure if these rumors are true, but while an hour of echo is a fine thing, if you are coming along expecting to hear songs then the reverberated man may come as a rude shock, and it is the sound guy who gets the blame for “bad sound.” Too much of the same thing is a bad news gig.

More recently we saw 3 concerts in a row by Brian Eno at the Sydney Opera House. Each show was an hour and a half with a 45 minute break between. The musicians stayed on stage for the whole time, but when they were not playing they sat in “the lounge”: a set of couches and tea making area that took up about a third of the stage. So they were on stage for about six hours. It was a mostly improvised thing with some ideas worked out before hand. There were repeated motifs, wild abandon and spine chillingly eerie silences punctuated with cacophonous blasts of industrial noise. Four and a half hours went in a flash.

We were seated though…

But being seated is not always the key to withstanding a long musical experience though. We have all been to music festivals where we are on our feet all day, dancing, staring, just standing there letting the vibration of the bass and drums shake the body while the guitars sear through the mind in an electric storm. But these are festivals, where variety is in abundance.

Perhaps variety is the key to felling a sense of enjoyment rather than endurance. A short sharp shock of 3-minute-blinders sure is energising. For the longer set the performer needs to mix it up. Play with different tempos, dynamics, moods and modes. We go to gigs to be surprised, to be entertained with unexpected punctuations of music.

Q. Why take ten minutes to convey a point that can be made in ten seconds?
A. Because you can convey your point more thoroughly and interestingly over a longer time.
Or can you?

A rat-a-tat lightning fast set is damn exciting but it is difficult to remember the specifics of the performance afterwards. Beuys might approve of this nothing-left-behind-but-a-sensation approach to music. After being attacked by a man with a jack hammer, you may remember his menacing approach with said implement, but then (suddenly) (a week later) you wake in a hospital bed, the jolt still coursing through your bones. Specific moments, such as your ribs cracking, the veins in your hand bursting as you fend off the offending instrument are erased by an overall feeling of shock.

Back to the Eno gig; given the opportunity to produce a musical finale to the Luminous festival he chose not to present something in the vein of his Steve Reichian minimalist ambience. Instead he mixed elements of free noise, jazz, pop, the aforementioned industrial rock reminiscent of his mid nineties work with Bowie, dry witty remarks and, yes, ambience: samples of running water, passages of two pianos playing a chord every ten seconds or so, letting it hang suspended like a crystal shard waiting to be shattered by the next chord.

There was space to breathe, to revel in the sound, to soak it all in. Which is probably why my recollection of the music performed at the Eno gig is more detailed than, say, the last time I saw the Mint Chicks. The Mint Chicks do rock star antics without any of the messianic posturing of Jim Morrison or his band of followers. Rather, a spastic outpouring of wild dumb energy, climbing up the walls of the pub like a rabid monkey, paying little heed to the audience, not showing off, just going nuts. Like you did in your room when you were fifteen. With the amount of static performancews to inert audiences it was memorably refreshing to witness such a carry-on. The music was fantastic, but while I don’t recall many specifics the performance left a lasting impression.

We have all seen plenty of instrument destruction antics since Pete smashed his first Rickenbacker; this sort of crazed outpouring of aggression is often the only memorable part of a gig. How many times have we said “I think I have seen this band before, they kind of remind me of such and such, but I’m not sure…”? No matter how original musicians like to believe they are, every band belongs to a scene. They are all working in a similar territory to some other bands. In order to rise above the bland fish who swim in every scenes wake they need to do something spectacular. If not musically then with a personality.

Steven Malkmus handed out spoonfuls of mashed potatoes at the door of a Pavement gig in Auckland about 10 years ago. The people who were there and the people who have heard about it remember that gig. That experience. I wasn’t there so I cant speak for the music itself. How about that instrumental gig where the band crescendoed to an almighty volume of precisely two minutes of quarter notes on high C at 120bpm followed by a piercing silence, which was filled by a soprano off stage who emerged from the wings singing a solo aria which was washed with waves of shimmering guitar… actually I haven’t seen that, but I reckon that everyone in the room would love it… if it had happened. I better get on with sorting something like that out, actually.

There sure is a lot of homogenous music out there at the moment. Always has been. Musicians like to play familiar sounds just as much as people like to hear it. There is a comfort in producing something instantly familiar. It is probably familiar though, because it has been done by a hundred other outfits a thousand times before. Not because it taps into some primal human experience. And that is the trick and the trap for the musician. How do you recognise whether the seam you are mining is in any way original, a new form, an interesting amalgamation, or at least saying something interesting. Or are you just indulging in your Radiohead fantasies?

It is fun to have a good old sing along to familiar tunes, but the best moments at live music events are when the performers blind side us with a sneaky melody, a sudden rush of accelerated rhythm or an unexpected theatrical foray. The other moments, the quiet, the chugging, the jangling the rocking moments serve as conduits between these peaks, and if there are enough peaks, then play on.

What do I know about Art?

Hell, I don’t even know what is good. Is it a subtle mix of light and dark, or is the contrast overstated? Do the colours convey the right emotion or should they be a little more muted? Is that line too sharp? Or is it not sharp enough. Is that even a line? Should it be?

We shall see. Over the next few weeks, the angry cousin will be visiting as many of the exhibitions on this calendar to try and get a sense of what the arty types are thinking and making in Melbourne this winter.