tom moody

1. Kurt Vonnegut claimed somewhere "no suspense" as a rule of his writing. Music, too, should avoid false buildups and climaxes and manipulating emotions.

2. Surprise, however, is good. Pitch, timbre, or structure can and should unexpectedly change.

3. Eric Satie aspired to write what he called "furniture music," also eschewing suspense and emotional dynamics. A series of modular blocks that can be arranged and rearranged. This sounds dull, the recipe for most "modern" music. Yet people kept finding his music beautiful (whether to his chagrin or not). One must arrange the furniture so as to keep the eye sweeping around the room, completely engaged and "in the moment."

4. MIDI sequencers, affordable home production studios, sample banks, software synths are "boons," to use a term of artist Kevin Bewersdorf's. Things capitalism hands us allowing the making of complex, multilayered, multi-timbral music. Club music tropes (stabs, dropouts, vamping, loops, dubby echoes) provide ear candy (what designer Edward Tufte calls "confections") to keep the furniture engaging and should be used.

5. The goal: music neither obviously art (rehashing Steve Reich, Alvin Lucier et al for the million billionth time) nor obviously crowd-pleasing electronic club music, but something in the awkward middle. Failed as art (never sanctioned by established grant-givers); failed as club music (never picked up by a label looking to sell product). Self-produced but not necessarily amateur or vanity projects--like a studio full of paintings too unsettling for curators, collectors, or art directors.

6. This music exists by the ton (or mega-hours). The home computer revolution. A serious study should be made of it and it should be compiled. "Does it fail deliberately or unintentionally into the significant middle?" should be a central focus for the compiler.

inspiring 1981 cassette cover from the Mutant Sounds blog, which also has the music available for d/l (spare, rather analog electronics--equally inspiring from what I've heard so far--the song "Automation" is a grabber).

Upcoming at apexart, still fighting the straw man of Michael Fried 40 years on:

Perverted by Theater
curated by Franklin Evans and Paul David Young
October 22 - December 6, 2008
Opening reception:
Wednesday, October 22, 6-8 pm

With works by Laylah Ali, Mel Bochner, Luis Camnitzer, Kabir Carter, Ele d'Artagnan, William Daniels, David Dupuis, Igor Eskinja, Jackie Gendel, Trajal Harrell, Elana Herzog, David Humphrey, Ross Knight, Virgil Marti, Ryan McGinley, Martin McMurray, Jim Nutt, Ann Pibal, Shahzia Sikander, Jack Smith, Mickalene Thomas, and Alexi Worth

In his 1967 essay 'Art and Objecthood,' art critic Michael Fried's central thesis was 'theater's profound hostility to the arts': 'theater and theatricality are at war today, not simply with modernist painting (or modernist painting and sculpture) but with art as such.' Art was being 'corrupted or perverted by theater.' Though Fried's criticism has become a part of art history, the fear of and antagonism toward 'theater' persist in today's curatorial orthodoxy.
Polymorphously perverse and cognizant of the critique of Fried by postmodern theory and contemporary art discourse, Perverted by Theater inverts Fried's hypothesis, purposely selecting art for its theatricality and installing it in an environment molded by theater, invoking the temporal dimension, the subject/object relation, the audience, the presence of the actor, the event of attending the theater, character, plot structure, the use of text in performance, and mimesis in order to reexamine the triangulation of visual art, performance, and theater.

A few thoughts on the exhibition brochure, pdf, html (as opposed to the exhibition proper, which opens next week): a quick glance at the artist list shows not Robert Wilson or David Mamet or The Wooster Group but the usual gallery suspects. The brochure correctly notes that many of these artists are doing not theater but "theater"; therefore it is possibly correct to say

Fear of and antagonism toward "theater" persist in today’s curatorial orthodoxy.

Otherwise this show looks to epitomize curatorial orthodoxy. The examples given of the bad, Fried-like orthodoxy are

...the Performa biennials and the recent exhibitions "The World as a Stage" at the Tate Modern and "A Theatre without Theatre" at the Berardo Collection in Lisbon. Despite the obligatory rhetoric of "transgression" in almost any artist’s statement and gallery press release, theater qua theater remains forbidden in high art culture.

Again, the artist list for "Perverted by Theatre" shows few who could be said to be doing theater qua theater--it is mostly the recombinant practice that has been the art world's staple since the '70s. What's theatrical is the perennial ritual burning of Michael Fried, a favorite mummer show that never seems to grow tiresome in the art world. The novelty of a critic who resisted the fusion of all the arts continues to throw off sparks. For four decades! Amazing.

As opposed to watching it. From the comments there:

I'm not watching this debate.
By the time the third debate rolls around, I despise the Republican candidate too much to watch.

Oh you're missing a great deal of fun
to see the creep feign outrage and put his hurt feelings before the hurting americans for all to see and despise and reject.

The creep.

TV makes you feel like a helpless simp--hate it. Reading, baby. Don't care how "televisual" the candidates are--it's a false reality.

Thanks to Lektrogirl for the shout.

And a couple of nice posts from Chris Ashley: 1 (read the comments on the Cedar Tavern vs last June's Rhizome chatboard debacle) and 2.

It is not, as the bigots on the right love to say, because of increased lending to "minorities." It stems from (1) Too much unregulated securitization of mortgage loans, and (2) Too many of such loans made in bad faith by unregulated mortgage brokers. Barry Ritholtz of The Big Picture blog explains:

Nothing in any of these Bush speeches [quoted by Ritholz at the link] that pushed for more lending to minorities and increased lower income home ownership caused the problem. Neither did any similar Clinton speeches. Nor did related the legislation related to the Bush speeches, nor did the CRA, nor Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. Indeed, none of these actions required the sort of reckless lending that we saw from 2002-2007.

Understand this simple fact: In an ultra-low rate environment, where prices are appreciating rapidly, and mortgages are being securitized, ALL THAT MATTERS IS THAT THE BORROWER NOT DEFAULT IN 90 days (or 6 Months). The goal was to make a loan that did not default in that period of time, it cannot be put back to the originator.

As a mortgage salesman, you only lose your a fee if a borrower defaults within 3 or 6 months. What do you do to maximize your returns? The best way to do that -- to put people in houses that would not default in 90 days -- was the 2/28 ARM mortgages. Cheap teaser rates for 24 months, then the big reset. By then, it was no longer your problem.

Can you grasp what a monumental change this was? Instead of making sure that borrowers could pay back ALL OF THE 30 YEAR FIXED MORTGAGE, you only had to find people who could afford the teaser rate for a a few months. THIS WAS AN ENORMOUS AND UNPRECEDENTED SHIFT IN LENDING.

This is the key to the housing boom and bust, and ultimately underlies the entire credit freeze. And, it would not have been possible without the Greenspan ultra-low rates, which made the teaser portion (the "2" of the 2/28) of these mortgages so attractive.

Discussing the future of banks in the ongoing financial panic as they navigate the reality of federal assistance, the Associated Press offers this quote:

"This is Darwinism finance, literally the survival of the fittest for the banks," said Chris Johnson, chief investment strategist at Johnson Research Group. "This is Wall Street's version of the Amazing Race where these companies are going to jump through hoops and rings of fire to rebuild their businesses as quickly as possible."

A brief refresher on how Charles Darwin's "survival of the fittest" works in the evolution context: "Teams of two people who have some form of a preexisting personal relationship race around the world in competition with other teams," the British naturalist wrote in The Origin of the Species, elaborating further:

Contestants strive to arrive first at "pit stops" at the end of each leg of the race to win prizes and avoid coming in last, which carries the possibility of elimination or a significant disadvantage in the following leg. Contestants travel to and within multiple countries in a variety of transportation modes, including planes, taxis, rental cars, trains, buses and boats. The clues in each leg point the teams to the next destination or direct them to perform a task, either together or by a single member. These challenges are related in some manner to the country or culture where they are located. Teams are progressively eliminated until three teams are left; at that point, the team that arrives first in the final leg is awarded a large cash grand prize, usually one million U.S. dollars.

It's amazing that we have so many species on Earth today given what they had to go through.