Wax Banks

Dog on election night.

food food food food food food food food food food food food water water water water water water i could go hump that couch DENIED circle circle lie down someone scratch me someone scratch me someone scratch me mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm i could go hump that pant leg DENIED why do they call it 'pant' anyhow? circle circle lie down someone scratch me mmmmmmmmmmm food food food food i could go hump that piece of kitchen equipment OW lick self lick self lick self this could turn out to be a key turning point not only for race relations but for class consciousness in america circle circle lie down someone scratch me someone scratch me mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm i could go hump that television set DENIED i wonder why they don't show 'lassie' anymore water water water water water water water water maybe if i'm sneaky about it i could go hump that television set DENIED well tv's bad for you anyway

Lizza on Emanuel.

Emanuel's apparently a bit of an obnoxious cunt - sidebar: not the first overcompensating little nerd to decide he needs to live that way - and even lazy head-in-the-sand types like me remember how important he apparently was to the Dem's charmingly craven capitulation to Bush et al. on nearly every issue of any importance these last few years. Lizza, who wrote a very mixed profile of Obama last year (with an equally noxious editorial stance not even cursorily veiled), has a hagiography of Emanuel in the latest New Yorker.

Greenwald hands them both their balls.

Beau.

Digital devolution.

Suddenly I remember that the people who created the tools that make today's digi-pop lifestyle possible do not, in fact, have anything in common with the people now trading on those tools to get semifamous. I rediscover my capacity for pity; for how miserable must this young tribe of social-media-bloggers, hipster-foodie-photographers, indie-folktronica-hypers, organization-fetishists, corporate-shills-in-fashion-sneakers, graphic-designer-wannabes, and other assorted largely coastal organisms be, ten years out from their useless liberal arts degrees with nothing to do but talk to one another about how Ira Glass is really awesome and the new living room chair was totally worth the $400 because it's, like, really a work of art?

The generation that used its engineering skills to escape Mom's basement is not the generation that uses its graphic design skills to get into slightly smaller lofts with lots more natural light. That the latter fetishizes the former is a joke - but not on the former.

Proverbs for paranoids, ACLU/NYTimes/Bush-was-pretty-awful edition.

Charlie Savage's article on Obama's antiterror/law-enforcement/military-justice policies is worth reading. But I feel obligated to point out that this, from the bottom of the article...

The administration’s recent policy moves have attracted praise from outspoken defenders of the Bush administration. Last Friday, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page argued that “it seems that the Bush administration’s antiterror architecture is gaining new legitimacy” as Mr. Obama’s team embraces aspects of Mr. Bush’s counterterrorism approach.

...is completely irrelevant. The WSJ editorial page touts these Obama-administration signals and policies not because they're good or bad but precisely because they 'legitimate' the war criminals of the Bush administration. This is yet another example, with the polarity reversed, of token repetition of political views in the name of 'balance.' This lame guilt-by-association doesn't amplify the claims of the article's main body, which (incidentally) range from worrying to laughable. If the Bushies are happy about something and Obama is happy about something, that does not mean Obama is a Bushie. Was that so complicated?

The article is super-scary if you think 'resembling Bush' is the worst thing Obama can possibly do. And of course, many Well-Meaning NYTimes Readers do think so, partly because they've staked their political identity and 'seriousness,' for the moment, on the myth of the righteous leader, partly because they've spent the last eight years judging political actions on those very terms. But - like you, I suspect, like almost every American - I know little about the policies and cases (vaguely) referred to in this implication-heavy op-ed dressed as reportage. (Near as I can tell there's one fresh interview source in the piece, and two quick supporting quotes; all the other material comes from the public record, confirmation hearings and the like. In other words: the story is the creepiness of the language as much as or moreso than any wrongdoing. It's a blog post in print.)

God damn it, people. Did we learn nothing from The Wire Season Five? When you see a fella who won a Pulitzer for his coverage of a politically-charged subject talking about how 'quietly' and 'secretly' the exact same story Seems, Interestingly Enough, To Still Be Awfully Relevant, the truth is likely a mix of two things: (1) yes, there's something to talk about, (2) Pulitzer Prizes are good for business. (Savage's bosses are still the same guys - Globe and NYTimes being sister papers.)

This isn't to say the article has no value. It's intriguing stuff and I plan to read more on the subject, as Savage has reminded me to stay vigilant (for self-esteem's sake if nothing else, right?). But I'm offended, as ever, by the willful naivete, the Shocked! Just Shocked! posturing, of NYT readers who are jumping up and down about the phrase 'state secrets' when the shit has been quite openly discussed on national bloody television over the last month.

Obama will be a vastly better president than Bush and I believe he'll follow through on his campaign promises as best he can. Where he fails, I expect he'll explain, and I hope that our press corps rouses from its decades-long slumber long enough to press him. As Greenwald et al. point out, there is reason for concern, but there is not yet cause for alarm. We can learn a new discursive mode, even in the good ol' post-9/11 world blah blah blah.

Here's how you'll know 'fourth-generation media' have arrived, idiots:

When a new technological storytelling medium has 'arrived,' or the 'game has changed,' a female audience will give a fucking shit.

Well, Warren Ellis is a breathless earnest-conspiracy wannabe-tech-punk type and he's pitiably prone to overstating shit like this, so what. But plotless fan-made FX reels made on borrowed Hollywood equipment using preexisting models from multimillion-dollar digital productions aren't interesting - historically, aesthetically, technologically.

The Guild is aesthetically kind of meh but it's a vastly bigger deal than this silliness in every imaginable way.

From 'altered' to alternate consciousness: notes, a recognition, the Weave.

From the improv-and-the-brain essay I mentioned a few days ago:

When we move from talking about 'altered consciousness,' with its implicit therapeutic goal of returning to 'normal,' or even 'expanded consciousness' with its naive emphasis on thinking one's way to correctness (it's a political/religious term, alas), and come around to acknowledging the possibility of alternate consciousnesses - different frameworks for understanding the world and (literally) different mechanisms for processing relationships between things - we break away from the zero-sum parochialism and protectionism of religious/spiritual dogma. 'Learning' might be defined, if perhaps a little glibly, as 'non-zero-sum thinking.' Walter Murch tells the startling story of his two weeks listening to nothing but Gregorian Chant at work, at the end of which he was driven out of his skull by a blast of incoherent, unparseable noise - which turned out to be Bach's Passion of St Matthew. One is tempted to think Murch constrained his consciousness through this experiment, but it's more evenhanded to say he simply reprogrammed his listening apparatus as a survival mechanism, acclimated himself to the environment in which he was working - adapted to the flow of aural information around him. He relearned soon enough how to comprehend Baroque music and modern music alike, and - here's the crucial point - the experience of radical circumscription altered his sense of the place and possibility of sound. (Among other things, Murch is responsible for the astonishing soundscapes in George Lucas's THX-1138.)

The point of which is just this: just as immersion in water causes certain survival mechanisms to kick in, and immersion in a foreign-speaking culture revitalizes our language-acquisition apparatus (witness the profanity on Deadwood, or spend two months in Spain), musical immersion makes available to us certain forms of consciousness - and long-form improvisatory music is an ideal tool for producing these alternate states. Its open-endedness lifts certain expectations of closure and precision/unity (just as Modernist literary abstraction/formalism prepared readers for the deferral or denial of satisfaction). Its seemingly arbitrary complication can open us up to a kind of simultaneous experience of melody and harmony, as for instance when John Coltrane would play a simple five note melody with each pair of notes separated by a complex cascading arpeggio, which functioned as colour and texture rather than traditional melodic content - see his Interstellar Space for the purest examples of this kind of musical storytelling. The different tempos and rhythms of in-the-moment personal expression in jazz and other improvised musics free the audience from the bang-bang-bang rhythm of traditional music, allowing listeners to comprehend the music at their own speed according to their own free-floating focus - which is in turn more likely to correspond directly to the human-scale shifts in attention and intention of improvised performance than to the preordained formal shifts of through-composed music. Improvisatory forms allow the musicians to testify to their experiences as musicians more directly than do written forms, which first and foremost testify to their writers' experiences as writers - all live musical performance liberates the music to a degree, but jazz and its sister forms privilege something like faith-based expression, in (this always needs saying) forms and fashions reflective of a particular black American experience.

Looking over the novel manuscript I wrote last fall, I see repeated references to something I only recently began to put a name to: improvisatory consciousness (which is the subject of the essay from which the foregoing is excerpted). The manuscript also contains an offhand mention of something called The Weave - a word stolen from the Forgotten Realms campaign supplement to D&D, referring to the source of all magic in that world. The concept has changed shape a little. (That's what they're for.) Today I worked up some new material for the novel's second draft.

Ever take multivariable calculus? Div grad curl and all that? In second-term calc classes you learn about vector fields, mathematical constructions in which at each point a certain motive force or intention expresses itself. The way to know a vector field in practice is to pass through it, along a given vector until buffeted by all the other forces in your vicinity - picture a satellite in a slingshot orbit around a planet, affected at each turn by some sum of gravitational pulls. The (approximate) point sources of gravitational force sum to a vector field; at each point you're pushed/pulled in one or another direction, and that force, plus whatever momentum you brought with you, sends you skidding through space. Your path is a function of the field and some initial conditions (position, velocity, etc.).

The point being: you know the field by the curve you trace. You feel that sum of forces in motion, gliding - as a tanguero treats a given step not as an object with substance and span (e.g. 'I wish to sidestep so I initiate the step by bearing down on what will be my trailing foot, then press it outward to propel me sideways, stepping, and in collecting my trailing foot I complete the sidestep') but as a kind of improvisatory logical progression: 'I've gathered my feet here, sway a bit sideways, which affords me the chance to respond to the impulse to sidestep.' The action (the sidestep) comes as an expression of the improvisatory impulse, a now-unmediated experience of flow rather than a block of being. The edges of the step dissolve; everything is consequence (literally 'following with,' right?).

Time's arrow can only point, but the Weave undulates and pools, fluid, looping, force and time in knots. Another dimension asserting itself. There is no map of the Weave, only the experience of submission, of travel...

'Following with' is why the roles of 'leader' and 'follower' in tango are not so simple as their names might lead you to believe. Each point specifies a unique vector, each point connects to another. Zen for beginners I guess. Rhythms don't consist of beats and silence; their meaning is motion.

('The world moves on a woman's hips / The world moves and it swivels and bops')

'What's water?'

It was a good day's work and I look forward to picking it up tomorrow. Best of luck and good evening, Reader(s).

How the Mind Works, abridged edition.

Actual headline: 'GOP Sen. Graham Opens Door To Bank Nationalization'

What my wife saw: 'Senator Graham Opens Door for Notorious B.I.G.'

['What does it actually say? ... Oh, so I was pretty close.']

Ecstatic.

I want to talk more about it because it's been needlessly - and tastelessly - shat on by critics, but the short version is: Mamma Mia! isn't just a 'celebration of middle-aged female sexuality' and it isn't nearly as brain-dead as it's been docked credit for. The obvious: yes it's a mass-produced jukebox musical. Live with it. Barring one downright smutty song ('Does Your Mother Know,' joyous) and one bizarrely erotic/ambivalent one ('Mamma Mia,' Streep solo on the roof going crazy, less inexplicable than it first appears), the thing seems to be less about celebrating sexuality in a 'turning up the volume equals empowerment' way than about learning to live with what other people want, in or out of bed - so many big sugary major-key songs talking about such a minor-key subject! Impressive, in a way. Not since Casa de los Babys have I seen a flick about Women of A Certain Age congregating in an atmosphere of similar realization, plus the ladies of Mamma Mia have got a few years on the cast of John Sayles's film.

The structure is ridiculous and the Abba songs are Abba songs, but there's more going on in Mamma Mia! than critics insisted on insisting. Which is a compliment to the journeymen filmmakers and a yet another disappointed wag of the finger to our useless self-involved corps of movie critics. If you couldn't tell.

[Oh, bother. A sharp review here, barring some unnecessary swooning. Boston represent!]

My wife is way way better at Ninja Ropes than I am!!

She's almost certainly way way better than you bitches too.

We did not get along / I thought Wax Banks wrote down one too many blogs

Best yet.

National holidays.

My 30th is tomorrow. Lincoln had his time - give the new kid a goddamn chance!

From a long essay about music.

I'm working on a long essay about collective improvisation, modes of listening and thought, musical forms, and the improvisatory/catholic culture around (in particular) Phish. From that:

I experience a mild form of synaesthesia whereby I see melodies and chord progressions as blocks of colour moving through space, defining a kind of spatiotemporal domain or a density gradient. I literally see the staff sometimes and notes parading across it - not notes so much as ranges. Clouds even. OK, I have a tough time describing it. It's linked to my ability to transcribe and rearrange music intuitively (i.e. I can usually hear a tune and write down its chord progression the first time out, improvise accompaniment right off, and then give you the chords in all twelve keys without much labour). I know that music 'makes sense' in part because the accompanying visuals depict a kind of lock-and-key mechanism, or sine waves coming into phase, or confluent shapes close-packing like crystal molecules. I mention this not to brag - near as I can tell it's an innate characteristic as meaningful as my height - but to suggest that this might be a good learned framework for listening to improvised music in general. The musicians' work, in jazz and other improv, is to provide the soloist or lead player with a rich framework, a conceptual baseline from which to move out then return. Hearing the music as a field, a conversation, the transmission of thought (electricity), lets you get past the big hurdle for many new listeners to improv, which is it takes forfuckingever and doesn't make a lot of sense. The language of jazz is its own world, sure, but more importantly, improvisational practices demand a mode of listening, specifically of acceptance, quite different from e.g. the procedural language of classical music. And good collective improv asks one extra thing, which is that you live without satisfaction for some length of time as the players work up the structures that in written musical forms would be givens - premises.

Musical improvisation at its best embodies an evolutionary model of punctuated equilibrium: good ideas get rewarded quickly, but even off-the-cuff notions play out, have ripple effects, make room for ecstatic outgrowth as well as slow conceptual interpenetration. (They learn to live both joyously and with one another.) Ideas are not precious; the goal of the organism isn't survival, it's propagation - the survival of the gene. (The 'meme' if you're a hipster.) Darwin, Freud, and Marx all had versions of the same extraordinary idea, basically that complex systems can evolve something that resembles intentionality even in the absence of a Prime Mover, a first object. God doesn't have to be real for the world to look like it, in other words. When improv gets going, there might be an overarching structure to the proceedings, but it doesn't have to be there right out, nor is it something the players come to, a destination. It's an emergent property, connecting both forward and backward in time; it's a characteristic of any honest creative activity. 'Artistic' coherence is mainly a characteristic of work done in good faith - work that gets out of its own way. Which if you're a novelist doesn't mean your characters are real beings living inside of you and dictating the shape of their story and you should write according to whatever whim strikes you, oh God please don't no no no - only that the categories of your imagination have an integrity that most expressive vocabularies are inadequate to translate, so the way to let ourselves to great work without needing to spend a hundred years in solitary contemplation and practice is to find a form that lets us listen first and then speak meaningfully. To escape the tyranny of our own voice by pressing it into service. I'm not agitating for the restoration of the military draft or anything; this is an essay about (sort of) rock music, and nothing is less rock'n'roll than the goddamn military draft.

I'm excited by the work. (20,000 words in three working days, of which the majority is salvageable, however flawed. Lovely feeling.) Adrian, I'd like to send it to you but the thing needs the red pen like I need sleep.

I forget that I know anything, and forget how to listen. Much of the writing lately has been about learning how to listen. Rejection letters, exhortations, musical analyses: invitations all.

Notes.

Spent the afternoon writing at the Harvard Coop. Listened to an album by Elbow, was quite taken with a song about something-or-other. Wrote notes.

'tower crane driver' by elbow
can feel verses as (transposed) C-F-F-Ab, up chromatically
to C - with shading between C+ and C as chord settles in, Ab
and Ab-dim
second measure shades between Fmin and F

but the actual array is: Ab-C-F-F (settle into F)

outro: Am-E-C, Am-F-E, C-Am-Ab (and back into primary progression)

absolutely beautiful

feel of 'subterranean homesick alien' and 'eternal sunshine' theme, but

given over to scale and scope

'send up a prayer in my name'

gorgeous!

write to adam

write to ecwarm

"The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or

 whatever almost made me die." --DFW

"There is, in writing, a certain blend of sincerity and manipulation,

of trying always to gauge what the particular effect of something is

gonna be," he said. "It's a very precious asset that really needs to

be turned off sometimes. My guess is that writers probably make fun,

skilled, satisfactory, and seemingly considerate partners for other

people. But that the experience for them is often rather lonely." --DFW

"I go through a loop in which I notice all the ways I am self-centered

and careerist and not true to standards and values that transcend my

own petty interests, and feel like I'm not one of the good ones. But

then I countenance the fact that at least here I am worrying about it,

noticing all the ways I fall short of integrity, and I imagine that maybe

people without any integrity at all don't notice or worry about it; so

then I feel better about myself. It's all very confusing. I think I'm

very honest and candid, but I'm also proud of how honest and candid I

am — so where does that put me?" --DFW

How to Be Alone.

Also, how embarrassing is this: I wrote song lyrics. Reader(s), if I share with you my shame does it turn into, um, encouragement? Or something? I was gonna paste all the lyrics below but you'll have to make do with the final verse, laughable, Christ -

love changes everything i know they used to say but
everything i love has changed to wind and blown away and the
blue that took its very definition from the sea is now a
charming shade of grey the same as winter and the stone and the
cattle car that brought them and the highway strip below and the
skin and the voices and the memory of the memory of the
poets who pretended we were capable of love or love was
capable of change or change [hold] was gonna spare you or -
- oh, lord
- spare me

The last line is an interpolation in the voice of the Critic, baby. Check out baby Wax Banks waving a little pomo around like it's a dongle.

Knob at night.

Every few months I forget and then rediscover the Ricky Gervais podcasts. Having now heard many hours of the remarkable Karl Pilkington I'm less amazed than I used to be at his foolishness, and over a dozen episodes Gervais's keening air-raid-siren laugh does begin to grate. But Gervais and Merchant are a great comedy team, and Karl is...well if you've never heard the man and can parse heavily-accented Manc twattery, you're in for a unique treat. It's nearly a decade they've been doing the radio show, and I've never known Gervais or Pilkington to break Karl's Neanderthal-at-the-mixing-board character or undercut the abusive, disappointed-schoolmaster dynamic of the series. The metanarrative of the show is even more impressive than Pilkington's stonefaced improvisations and Gervais's increasingly-unhinged responses - the tale of Pilkington's rise from anonymity to minor media celebrity, with Gervais sincerely(?!) touting him as the funniest man in Britain, is currently the longest-running media performance in Gervais and Merchant's ongoing comedy career.

Pilkington is a virtuoso. Do listen to the show. They're doing new material now in a more focused format, and you can find the old shows online if you're crafty. The best of them are priceless.

How, apparently, to save America.

Go read this bit of history from the weird, wily Brad Hicks, and tell me why it's not as exciting as it seems. Short version: the WPA paid for itself many times over and we need a new one; instead we'll get a PWA that accomplished nothing.

I got my first literary agent rejection today!

It was a nice one - if it was a form letter, it's the best I've ever read.

And finished a long essay that needs to move.

Good day.

Everybody's getting paid behind this steroid stuff - so why talk?

Alex Rodriguez is like everyone else in the Major League - a corporate employee masquerading as something else, whose business happens to be baseball. The list of steroid-abuser names came out when it had to, not a day before, and of course the MLB honchos knew about it. Home run records and superstar names are how they make money. The Boston Red Sox have no connection to Boston except in the imaginations of the audience members; the teams have no integrity but what the audience desperately, gratefully imputes to them so as to avoid acknowledgment of the emptiness of pro sports spectatorship.

Steroids have long been part of the Major League's business plan. McGwire, Sosa, and the pursuit of Maris's home run record - you think it's a goddamn coincidence that this happened when baseball's media fortunes were at a low point (post-strike)?

Naivete is one of the privileges of childhood, and childhood is what pro sports sell. Screaming, crying, single-sex congregation, playing dress-up, simple games with arbitrarily complicated rules, weird architecture, sanctioned violence, monomaniacal idolatry (of monomaniacs): popular pro sports in the U.S. are Romper Room with a paycheck.

The idea that these sports are anything but TV entertainment filmed in front of a studio audience, partially scripted and all, should vanish from our national mythology. Saddens me to say so.

Dear fourteen literary agents...

...I hope you enjoy the complete bullshit you'll hopefully receive in the mail by Friday. It was written with ENORMOUS PILES OF MONEY in mind.

I blew my daily on that dire wolf!

Aah, Curse of the Dark Dream, how I missed you in the ensuing trip through the Hall of Eyes. But that was several levels ago, Reader(s). And now I am a new man halfling.