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| December 2004 »
Lockheed is the nation's largest military contractor.
Lockheed writes more code than Microsoft.
Their CEO says they stand "at the intersection of policy and technology."
To others that means you can't tell where the government ends and Lockheed starts. One watchdog says about government checks and balances on big contractors "The fox isn't guarding the henhouse, he lives there."
If WalMart were a nation it would be ranked 19th biggest economically. It is the biggest company in the United States.
There is a tremendous noise of fire trucks, the twin babies are alert, looking around... I think one of them says the word "firetruck", which all kids love to say, don't they?
Five trucks converge on the house across the street from my sister. The neighbors were deep frying a turkey in the backyard and something went wrong, the grease caught fire and flames shot up to the second floor with a roar like a jet engine. Boiling hot grease went flying everywhere. The turkey, I was told, exploded. A propane tank that held the fuel to heat the grease was a danger. A fireman asked the owner if he had a garden hose (but there was a hydrant on the corner!) He aimed it at the grease, which more or less went nuts, splattering everywhere, but the flames were out.
Earlier my dad and I had a chat about politics. I mentioned to him that I thought the U.S. was more or less dependent on foreign oil, or at least they’d need to maintain the present level of oil and gas consumption in order to sustain the present lifestyle, travel and transportation. I said something like "if OPEC decided to withhold all oil the U.S. would be on it's knees in a year."
Dad likes to be somewhat argumentative, so he took the position that the U.S. could function more or less intact using its own resources. Well, depends on what you mean by function. He said the highways would become redundant, empty, and rail transport would become the principal means of transport. The interstate highways would be converted to rail paths, he predicted. The primary oil resources would be diverted to agriculture and allocated to food production, and the suburbanites would, I guess, be hung out to dry. Gas would be 20 dollars a gallon, at least.
I said I thought those predictions seemed realistic, but that I thought Americans would fight tooth and nail to hold on to their extravagant lifestyle — they won't go down without a fight. I also said that they would hardly hold the global hegemony they now do in his future scenario. He maintained they could still funnel sufficient funds to the military to be a significant power, but I doubt this.
Did make it to the Hirshhorn. There's a wonderful exhibition of Ana Mendieta's work from the 70s and 80s, when she died due to a suspicious fall from a SoHo window. Ned, the director, came down from wherever his office is and we were joined by Olga, who curated this show. They both walked through with my dad and me, my dad keeping his distance, for some reason.
In the very first room there were images of A.M. covered in feathers and another with blood dripping down a shaved head. Both images familiar to me from Santeria and Candomblé initiation ceremonies. A.M. is Cuban, so this seems natural, although she left when she was quite young.
Olga seemed to think she took an interest in her Cubana roots despite being raised in Iowa(!).
Ned chatted with my dad a bit and later commented to me that his dad is about the same age but mine seems more sprightly and energetic, which was sweet of him to say, I guess.
As I write this I'm on a train to Washington DC with my daughter to visit my sister and parents. The weather is beautiful today, the Jersey Meadowlands, the landfills, the overpasses and the marshes look lovely. The light is crisp and clear. As we left Manhattan the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade was all over my neighborhood. Streets were closed, floats waited on the side streets (there was a giant "Trojan" donkey a block from my house) and we watched as a giant inflated Jeeves passed across the space between the blocks.
I have been invited to do a kind of installation at the Hirshhorn Museum in DC so I will probably take time to scope out the available space while I'm in town — sneaking in a little bit of work on the holiday weekend down here.
I get to get a hair trim on my way to my office/studio at Freestyle Barber on 7th Ave. I've been there before. It's fast, cheap and normal. The staff are all Russians, a couple of men and some blonde women with big hair. I get a man this time, and he asks what I want. "Not much off the top and short back and sides, tapered, no line," I say. He snips away and I wonder if he understood me — he and the others are all jabbering away to each other in Russian and paying no mind to the few of us in the chairs. He's a little rough, yanking my ears. I'm worried about my ears. Maybe it's a Russian macho thing to treat the customers sort of roughly — pandering to customers is not a habit that was ingrained in the Soviet system. Or maybe it’s meant to be a sign that these barbers are real men, not "hairdressers". I keep watch and he does what seems like a terrific job, exactly what I wanted, except maybe for the blow dry comb job at the end that makes me look like Bill Clinton when I was hoping for Jim Jarmusch or Herbert Von Karajan. I'm optimistic, though, one has to be, and hair is, for those of us who have it, such an object of vanity. After a shampoo and loosening it'll be alright.
Malu and I went to see The Incredibles, the new Pixar film about disgruntled retired superheroes. I laughed and cried, as I do at lots of animated movies. I wonder if I get more emotionally involved in animated characters than in films using real actors? Other than Spielberg movies that deliberately work the sentimental buttons it's much easier to identify with drawings than with real people.
Maybe this isn't strange. Maybe the fact that they're drawings makes them more ambiguous, more universal, and easier to identify with. Well, it's true with lots of other things — things that use metaphor, allegory and poetic ambiguity are generally more powerful emotionally than straight narrative.
Went to a theater piece at BAM and met up with Marianne Weems and her friends Diller and Scofidio for dinner afterwards. Talked with Marianne about my disco Imelda idea, which she approves of, and about her own developing piece about surveillance.
I'd liked Diller and Scofidio's show at the Whitney but they said when I asked were they busy touring it that it couldn't travel to other museums — the cost of the installation and the fact that the Whitney, as originator, was charging any potential institution a huge fee for the rights to the show. Which one can understand pragmatically, but it seems there might have been room for just a little negotiation and compromise in the name of disseminating the arts.
I was kind of shocked as we talked over dinner at the sheer number of their projects that came up in conversation (an arts district in Brooklyn, for example) that have never gotten past the drawing board. Differing points of view between institutions and developers seems to be a recurring theme.
They are doing The High Line, which is good news — the former elevated rail line running through Chelsea up to 34th Street that will become an weird skinny park.
Here is the marching band from Lehigh University. There aren't very many of them:
 Went to a WIRED Magazine event at the Rose Planetarium, part of the Natural History Museum. I stood by the Willamette Meteorite and Neil deGrasse Tyson, the Frederick P. Rose Director, explained to us that this meteorite is so heavy that the building was built around it.
It's pretty much solid iron (with a little nickel content also.) Neil said we on Earth don't normally encounter solid iron — it's usually something we find extruded into girders or rebar, so other than some Richard Serra pieces the true weight of the metal is unfamiliar to us. This stone, a little larger than a large couch, weighs as much as a large semi. The floor of the building would not support it, so much weight concentrated at one point, so a column below it goes down to the Manhattan bedrock.
Later he takes us to his office where a smaller meteorite is passed around for us to heft — he says dramatically, "that's the oldest object you'll ever touch" — this meteorite is older than any rock on the Earth itself. Wow.
Later I go to the last of the many openings that have been held this week at the new reopened MoMA. The ubiquitous newspaper and magazine articles have prepared me for the increased size and the almost invisible architecture. Floor after floor of white rooms that don't draw attention to themselves or to their fixtures. It's closer to the kind of rooms in the larger Chelsea or L.A. galleries, but like a whole bunch of them stacked up.
The larger rooms, bigger than those in the old MoMA, make the modernist icons — the Picassos, the Pollocks, the Van Goghs, Matisses and Rauschenbergs — all seem the more precious and special than ever. They're surrounded by vast expanses of while space now — they float. Now Picasso's painting of a blue boy is not just one of his paintings but, having some much space framing it, it becomes "THE Blue Boy". The paintings now have capital letters and quotations — "THAT Pollock", "THE Starry Night". They're all icons now. If the old MoMA was originally a modest chapel now it's truly a kind of invisible cathedral — invisible because the building itself almost disappears — the art is in perfect white voids, the modernist ideal.
From James F's piece in The Guardian:
According to John Updike in The New Yorker, the architect of the newly expanded building, Yoshio Taniguchi, said to the museum's trustees: "Raise a lot of money for me, I'll give you good architecture. Raise even more money, I'll make the architecture disappear."
The trick was to convince the trustees that what they actually wanted was the opposite of what they thought they wanted. They thought they wanted to see something for their money. What they actually wanted was to see their money disappear in a puff of smoke.
Someone said the previous night's opening was "for the artists", which seemed odd, as most of them are dead. I don't know why the MoMA persists in trying to be relevant and contemporary, they've got P.S.1 for that. The MoMA is the repository of the modernist vision, that utopian plan for the 20th century, and maybe that's enough. A poetic monument to a failed Utopia. It seems to be what they do instinctively, perfectly, without trying, though they give lip service to being more.
Granted, in certain departments — photography, design, film — the work is slanted more towards the present, but the bulk of the building is, well, a museum, not a kunsthalle.
I don't know anyone here at this opening, which is odd at a N.Y. arty event. They're all wearing black, as they should be. I thought I'd be more festive than the black uniform so I'm wearing a western shirt and a baby blue jacket that Jim White sent me from a Pensacola thrift store.
Two men in baggy T-shirts and baseball caps are about 25 feet from me on a neighboring rooftop adjusting a microwave antennae they are installing this morning. They're awfully close. It's awfully close. They can’t see me through the translucent blinds. They stand right on the edge of the roof, bolting and screwing this thing into place. Six stories up. All my audio gear is this room near the window — will the microwaves create interference the way cell phones do near a microphone? The other day the street was dug up at night. One of those machines with the big circular blades that cuts asphalt appeared in the evening and all night they worked — the sound of grating and machines screaming never stopped (I put a pillow over my head.) In the morning there was a trench about four feet deep with perfectly straight sides that ran halfway down the block. The next day they laid some PVC pipe in it and by evening were beginning to fill it up. Now there is a black tarmac scar that runs down the middle of the street to about halfway down the block. Most N.Y. blocks have similar, though slightly older, scars... I ride my bike over them almost every day, avoiding the bits that have collapsed and the other bits that have folded and warped into little moguls. Last night I went to Staten Island with Louie Vega, the DJ and also part of the dance music enterprise Masters At Work. He's reworking and remixing the tune I did with the Thievery Corporation, "The Heart’s A Lonely Hunter". He's making it more club-friendly and a bit longer too. Currently he DJs at a club called Cielo on Wednesday nights, so he often tests out his mixes in progress to see how the dancers react. He says the mix in progress has been getting a good response. Unlike many dance producers he works a lot with real musicians — on this track the original guitar and keyboard parts the Thieveries recorded and looped have been replaced by a funky picking guitar — somewhere between Fela and Talking Heads — and an electric piano (and?) an organ that throws little riffs and counterpoints around the guitar and vocal lines. There's a guitar lick at the end that is a direct lift from "Born Under Punches", the Talking Heads song. Normally I would never repeat or quote myself in such an obvious way, but as this is someone else's vision it might be O.K. — and part of what he’s doing throughout this mix is referencing other music — afrobeat, seventies soul, Latin House, Talking Heads — it's all alluded to. Louie has added at least a minute of instrumental jamming to the ending after the regular song stops, and he wants me to add some vocal ad libs here... and, he says, a hook, which might be a tall order to come up with on demand, we’ll see. He tells me this as we drive over the Verezanno bridge in his Mercedes and he plays his mixes in progress over the car's sound system. (Not having a car myself this is a treat.) We've met before — he worked a lot with Los Amigos Invisibles and there was once talk of us collaborating, but this is the first time we've worked together. In the studio he really has a composer's sense of how to rearrange parts, sections — how to make a section build and then release. I warm up by singing the verses then when I get to the new ending I improvise a slower more languid melody. After a couple of bars I lock on to it, reusing some of the chorus lyrics. We both agree this is going somewhere, so we flesh this idea out and I realize that just like in "Born Under Punches" this slower melody can maybe have the faster chorus vocal simultaneously going over it. We try it and it works — though one has to be "introduced" to the slow melody first, before the layering happens, or it’s all too confusing. We thicken up some grunts I did and I lay a track of spoken responses and answers to the singing vocals that Louie likes, some of them are funny — like me in a low voice giving a come-on to visit my spaceship. I still haven't quite figured out what this song is about — there are references to going off the grid and putting sheets over the windows — a world of surveillance and fear — but there is a simultaneously a kind of wacky joyous hopeful search for love and human connection. (Hence the title.) Maybe, almost unbeknownst to me, it's a kind of reflection on the world we're all in right now. We work fast. I can follow Louie's thinking process as he quickly cuts and pastes bits of the new vocal. He comments that some artist who come in spend ages getting the mood, preparing, wavering in self-doubt, hesitant — but this was almost instantaneous, easy. I go home optimistic, what if it’s good?! Wouldn't that be great?!
Continuing from an earlier theme of imbedded advertising — that one was about the new TV shows being made by advertising agencies — now in a new twist Amazon offers a "film" for free and when you watch the film almost ALL of the products seen in the film are itemized below with thumbnail pictures and with one click you can buy them — the skirt, the wireless headset, the shoes, the phones, the had cream. So, the whole movie is one long imbedded commercial.
Does that mean we want to be "in" a movie... we admire those characters and by association using products they use we will be more like them? That's a traditional way of thinking, it seems to me. I don't think white teenagers really believe they're down just because they wear clothes like Snoop Dog.
I suspect that we don't so much admire movie characters (some of them are despicable) as we want to escape the reality we think we are in, and any alternative, especially one endorsed by a big media outlet, will do.
Did a performance for a DIA benefit last night. I was asked to do so nicely by Bob Hurwitz, head of Nonesuch. I know what these black tie arts events can be like so I declined doing a musical performance — I'd feel demeaned as they slouched back, sipping the last of their wines, picking at their deserts and secretly chatting or networking with their tablemates. So I offered that I do a short version of my PowerPoint talk. They only wanted about 20 minutes of entertainment, which was perfect, the first 20 minutes of the talk was the funny part that is essentially a jokey history and description of the software. I was really nervous. I sat with Hurwitz a bit before I went on, I was dressed in a black suit and tie so as to both blend in with the art collectors, museum directors and corporate CEOs and to play the part of the "expert" during my talk. I was also worried because a man on my right, an author, had never heard of PowerPoint. Maybe the CEOs had underlings to do their PowerPoint and the artists in the room would never have had any contact with it, as I didn't until a few years ago. It went over really well. Got so many laughs sometimes I had to stop. Lauren Hutton, the former(?) model, heckled from a table near the front. I mostly ignored her — maybe she was drunk, or maybe excited about the subject. I mentioned that I wasn't going to subject the art curators to slides of my own work, though I slipped one or two in there. Mostly the images were of PowerPoint stuff I'd downloaded from the web — lots of nutty uses and abuses of PowerPoint. I wrapped up with the PowerPoint piece Mike Fincke the astronaut sent me from the International Space Station — PowerPoint sent from outer space seemed a nice closing — it's universal, see? Earlier, listening to some of the Bush Of Ghosts outtakes — I think there might be some cool stuff there worth including on the re-release, we'll see if Eno agrees. An Italian town has cops in a Lamborghini (top speed 190 MPH!). Here are the cops. An attractive woman (Laura Ciano) and what appears to be her clownish batman — Vincenzo Bizzarro (real name!)
Sounds like a TV pilot to me. I can imagine some macho Italian driver running red lights, speeding along, then suddenly pulled over by Vincenzo as Laura leans over and asks to see his ID.
Been reading Stasiland, a book by an Australian journalist stationed in former East Germany who investigates personal stories involving the notorious agency.
Her perceptions are wonderful — she spots the bizarre and oppressive not only in the detaining, spying on individuals and unexplained deaths, but in things like a weird sexless popular dance (the Lipsi) that the government attempted to insert into popular culture as a kind of immunization against Elvis' rock and roll gyrations.
There were massive "files" that consisted of jars of smells of suspected subversives. Jars filled with scraps of clothing, preferably underwear, that had been secretly procured. In some cases if clothing could not be found an agent would wipe the seat where a suspect had been seated and preserve the rag, labeling it by name of suspect and how long he or she had been seated on said chair.
It goes on... there's a beautiful Kafkaesque scene where a woman, denied employment for suspect activities is called in:
"Why don't you have a job?"
"YOU tell me."
"You’re a smart woman, surely you can find employment."
"No, I am unemployed."
"That can't be; there is no unemployment in the people’s republic…"
Went to see I (heart) Huckabees last night. A Brazilian woman seated a couple of seats over saw our show in São Paulo. She pulled out her camera and took my picture before the movie started.
Nonesuch does want to do another record with me. We are also in discussions with them about re-releasing the My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts record through them in North America.
David W. and I talk about music biz models fairly often, like a lot of us do, I imagine. The traditional model seems to not work anymore. We noticed that in the last year I made a lot more money on my little soundtrack through Thrill Jockey than I will ever see from Nonesuch. Granted, Nonesuch gave me an advance that allowed me to pay a producer and the cost of string players etc., and on the soundtrack that was paid for by the film... but this kind of alt model might be the future. Or one possible future.
I also think that acts will need to be self-sufficient live, and good performers. Lip-synchers will need to put on a good visual show or give up.
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