When washing dishes my feet are idle but my mind is wandering. This morning I wandered into thoughts of sponge production costs and change management.
I’ve been buying a certain national brand of sponge for years now (I cook a lot–therefore I wash a lot of dishes). But there’s something different about the last batch of sponges I bought. This difference I noticed immediately on my first use of the new sponge some days ago. As my fingers assimilated the new texture, I felt small flutterings of disappointment, fear, panic. Something has changed! The sponge is different!
Which leads me to a certain realization:
Familiarity is comforting. Monotony may be dull, numbing, but also comforting. Settle into a comfortable routine. Pull on a familiar pair of jeans. Etc.
So, unexpectedly change something on someone, and you’re ripping away their security blanket–suddenly and frighteningly your victim cold, exposed, surprised. You’re going to get a negative reaction. 100% of the time.
And yet, when properly managed, change can create just the opposite sensations: a positive anxiety born of anticipation, eagerness.
Imagine how my own reaction to the mundane matter at hand had only the sponge’s cellophane packaging announced a “new and improved texture! Now softer and more supple for better bubbles and cleaner dishes!” I might instead have found pleasure, delight in the new sponge, noticed its softer, more supple texture, rather than its less substantial feel in the hand.
The life lesson from a sponge? Never let change you’re creating catch someone unawares. A surprise change invokes fight or flight. An anticipated change creates earnest expectation.
The clean narrative of music’s progression from 60’s pop to 70’s rock to 80’s metal to 90’s alternative shatters violently at the turn of the century. Musical shrapnel shoots violently across the vast empty space of the universe. Genres proliferate at a dizzying rate, at the rate at which the universe expands. As a listener, lost and adrift in space, these shards pass through one’s body like cosmic rays of energy from a sunburst. Occasionally, one such shard strikes a nerve.
If there is a music for the 21st century, it should be something like The Knife. It should be impersonal, industrial, haunting, melodious, at once manufactured and yet subversive of manufacturing and industry. Its instruments should be the touchscreen, the drumpad, the synthesizer, the digital sound processor.
It should accord its listener, lost in space, with a sense of harmony in vast emptiness, a sense of belonging in the midst of nothingness, a sense of place where coordinates and location are impossible, a sensation of movement even though every distance is infinite. It should be our salvation, our uplifting, our transcendence, our god in an age where god is not.
I’m late to the party. “Silent Shout,” the last album by The Knife, was released in 2006. It swept the Swedish Grammy’s, picked up Pitchfork’s Album of the Year, and then apparently drifted into space. Perhaps appropriately so: The Knife makes music fit to be played into the empty vacuum of space, amplified, and amplified, and amplified into vast nothingness. A writer for the LA Times suggested (and I paraphrase) their music should be played from an altar in a obsidian church, preferably while levitating.
The Knife released a concert video, “The Audio Visual Experience,” in which the performers, visuals, and music become one, become more than the sum of parts. So seamlessly do they fade into and from each other that it becomes impossible to tell where the performers end and the music begins, to tell solid flesh from massless projection.
It’s a palimpsest of visual images, physical performers projected back upon themselves, the swirling shapes and colors engulfing the performers, even as they lose themselves into their music. The refracting projections play fast and loose with space and time.
I can’t stop watching.
Of the performers you seldom see more than white gloves and masked faces. At times, the image of a performer is projected back upon the performer, but imperfectly and enlarged. Solid flesh melds with projected image and is obliterated, as though the tangible performer is vaporized by the projection of self upon self.
A green light appears on stage left, illuminating a puppet mannequin and an oversized music box. The mannequin’s stick-like wooden arm unevenly cranks the music box (or does the music box drive the arm of the mannequin?), which projects bursting light upon the performers. The mannequin’s head, you realize, is merely a projection, becoming first exaggerated lips, then a passing star field in space. Suddenly the performers are themselves drifting in this same star field, which turns to snowflakes, which envelops the stage and performers as their music settles into silence.
And so on.
For The Knife, it’s as though their music has no beginning, no end. It feeds back into itself. This sense of infinity is suggested by the way the music builds upon itself, by the way the voices are layered, by the looping of visual images.
Unfortunately for the viewer, while space and time are infinite, The Audio Visual Experience is not. When music fades and credits appear, one wonders where an hour just went, reaches instinctively for the re-play button, and realizes feeling comforted and at home, even while drifting in space and time.
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The Knife releases a new album on April 8th titled “Shaking the Habitual”. A tour has been scheduled. The tour does not, as of yet, include the United States.
2012 was a good year, full of activity. This spring I canyoneered or climbed or adventured almost every weekend until moving from Phoenix in May. Then, I travelled to Sweden, and throughout the Rocky Mountains until September. In September, I moved to Golden, CO with Kendra and Sagar, where Sagar and I started a business.
Things that happened in 2012 (in no particular order):
Grand Canyon trip with Kendra, in which it snowed and we saw no-one else
Travelled to Sweden
Ran two half marathons
Climbed Devil’s Tower
Climbed Gannet Peak and Grand Teton (removing both from the list of peaks who have rejected me)
Saw my Dad run the Boston Marathon
Saw Chris Thile perform in Carnegie Hall (with Kendra)
Quit my job
Moved to Colorado
Paddled Class IV water
Placed in the top ten at Pond Mile 5
Learned to ski bumps (well, kinda!)
Learned to bake (still working on this one!)
Climbed in Indian Creek
Welcomed Kanye, my chinchilla, to my life
Travelled El Camino del Diablo with Kendra and Curtis
Climbed both the tallest and highest sand dunes in North America
Became a Wilderness First Responder, and Swiftwater Rescue Technician
Started a new business
What a year full of activity, full of adventure! I’ve been less productive than I hoped, but finishes happier than I had dared to hope.
Every once in a great while, you go to a show, and come away with a sense of positive eubilation. Sometimes it’s the perfect blend of intoxication and music —lost into a meaningful and moving haze. Others, it’s the circumstances–what happened before, or after. And still others, that ebullition can only be attributed to the musicianship and energy of the performers.
Of these, Punch Brothers this evening in Boulder was overwhelmingly the last. Stone sober, and with a wonderful companion but certainly no surrounding circumstances of note, I’m still aglow with the sense of having a seen a SHOW tonight.
What kind of show? Punch Brothers bills as a bluegrass band. But, in truth, tonight’s performance was more that of seeing Yo Yo Ma perform a concerto than a raucous bluegrass band. Consider the set design: five stands with microphones (four across and one behind), set atop two large area rugs (oriental in style–possibly the venue’s), one banjo, and black curtains behind. No stage monitors, no amps, no racks of guitars–in fact, nothing more than the microphones to distract from the musicians.
When you see a symphony (at Carnegie Hall, say), you wear formal wear, and the musicians wear formal wear. When you see Punch Brothers, you wear a down jacket (this being December in Colorado, after all), and Punch Brothers wear coordinated, and exceptionally well-tailored suits. The crowd is respectful–the band pays it back in kind.
They walk on stage and play music for two hours straight. They’re present, and articulate–clearly in possession of their faculties.
And, as you watch, you become keenly aware that you’re witnessing greatness. These five (three in particular, though I won’t say who) are not merely great at their instruments. More than that–Thile in particular is wildly talented at his instrument. He’s not merely playing it as others have–he’s pushing the boundaries of the instrument, of its sounds, of its style–not just the limits of technical precision and speed, but of what defines the instrument, and how it’s played.
And, more about Chris Thile. He’s a consummate performer. He establishes instant rapport with the crowd–and exudes pure joy in playing his mandolin. At times he conjures David Byrne, as he dances and plays on stage. Each song, it seems, has its own unique motion and moves. He croons into the microphone, pantomimes the actions of the song, gives voices to the characters in his songs.
I’m grasping at straws to describe the scene, and my current elation. Suffice to say, if you have the opportunity, go.
There’s much to like–and much to say–about Punch Brothers. Their new EP (“Ahoy!”) is a delight. But to see them live–ah! Such rapture!
(I’m too exhausted to proofread this tonight–and supposed to leave to ski in seven hours. Forgive me my typos and poorly arranged thoughts!)
If there’s a dog on my mind, it would have to be Izzy. She’s a six-year-old, blind Weimaraner, who is currently (and constantly) trying to climb into my lap. Kendra and I (okay, mostly Kendra) are providing a foster home for the local Weimaraner rescue. We’ve had Izzy for five or six weeks, now.
There’s a story (probably apocryphal) of MSU ag students who once led a cow all the way up the stairs to the top of the bell tower atop Montana Hall. It was a great prank, until realizing that there was insufficient room for the cow to turn around at the top of the stairs, and, worse, that the cow would-not, could-not walk down backwards. (In the version of this story popular with MSU Orientation Leaders, the cow was rescued by crane!)
So it is with blind dogs. We took her to the Creek (that is, Indian Creek–a popular climbing area about an hour south of Moab. Pictures here.). She had little trouble navigating the the approach hike up the broken and steep Chinle formation–but coming back down was treacherous for all involved.
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The outlook for this winter is becoming increasingly distressing. According to OpenSnow (run by a local skier-meteorologist cum entrepreneur), only 2 – 4 seasons in the last 30 years have had so little snow to date–and of these, half were warm winters with less than average snowfall, and the other half were average winters. Not a good start to the season.
Alas. At the very least, the temperatures have been cold enough for snow-making. Keystone just opened up a few more runs. It’ll likely be a zoo tomorrow–but, hey, it’s skiing!
