Before we arrived in Australia there
was a long drought, followed by brush fires that raged all over the continent.
Tasmania was hit hard. Hundreds of people lost their homes, and a massive
amount of forests and farmland were turned into weird surreal landscapes of
black dead trees surmounting hills of ash. Here is what’s left of a home maybe
70km from Hobart:
The hills beyond are all burnt trees. I
think the fires swept through so fast that the tress were not consumed, not
turned to dust—but their bark and all the brush is gone. Here’s a bit of woods
bordering the road where the power lines (the light green bit) have fallen and
the power lines themselves dangle over the trees!
Sometimes a house reduced to cinders
would be next to one that seemed relatively untouched; sometimes one side of
the road was covered in ashes and the other side was green. The fires took
weird destructive paths, sometimes jumping over hills and even across some
bodies of water.
So, a week before we arrived in
Tasmania, when we were already in Australia, I got an email from Jherek
Bischoff—bass player, composer and arranger—who was touring with Amanda Palmer,
but was now is supporting her husband, Neil Gaiman. He was already in touch
with the festival folks and it seems there was an initiative to do a hastily
organized benefit for the fire victims the day after our show. It happened that
I was planning to stay on for a couple of days anyway, to check out the day
hikes not too far from Hobart, so I agreed to participate. Annie joined as
well, singing harmony. We were the opening act—joined by a string quartet, the
drummer from Midnight Oil, and Neil. I had some string charts emailed from my
office in NY and Jherek hastily composed an arrangement for “And She Was”. It
wasn’t super well rehearsed, but it felt great and seemed to go over well. The
bigger rock acts followed later in the evening—some big names from the Aussie
rock pantheon chipped in.
Scenery
The following day I did manage to get
in a couple of hikes. Down to the nearby Tasman Peninsula I drove, past the
fire damage. There’s a national park there and spectacular scenery. This arch is right off the road near Eaglehawk
Neck:
Further on I took a dirt road to some
less visited hikes.
On this one I was the only person on
the 1½ hour hike to a lookout near Waterfall Bay. I thought to myself, “No
twisted ankle or injury—as no one is likely to come by here and there’s no cell
service.” Here’s a chimney viewed from the cliff walk:
After fish and chips at a café in
Nubeena, I headed for another hike at the very base of the peninsula—Cape Raoul.
Quite a long hike this one—4 hours, and I didn’t make it to the end. I got as
far as the flat area in the distance, and then realized I’d have a long uphill
slog on the way back, so I didn’t proceed to the point. Spectacular.
Nearby, forking off this trail to the
cape, was another 2-hour trail that leads to one of the most famous surf breaks
in Australia—Ship Stern Bluff. There it is, at the point.
How surfers found it is a wonder—maybe they
saw it from a boat or from these cliffs and hiked down with their boards. God
forbid anything happened to them on a day with big waves, as there’s no way in
or out except hiking. Look at the size of these waves! You’ve got to be
kidding!
Lots of road kill visible on the roads
down here—sadly some small kangaroos and other critters. A bounty for the Tasmanian
devils, who like their meat dead and have jaws strong enough to crunch through
bone.
A couple of years ago I was told about this wild museum in
Tasmania called MONA, The Museum of Old
and New Art, by English record producer Nick
Launay (he just did the Yeah
Yeah Yeah’s new CD). It’s the vision of David
Walsh, who made his money coding odds-based programs—for betting on (and
usually winning) horse races, amongst other pursuits. He’s banned from quite a
few casinos.
He decided to collect art of many sorts with his newfound
wealth, and a few years ago opened this museum just a few miles upriver from
Hobart. From the land, the building seems a modest, two-story structure with
a slightly incongruous tennis court in front… and a silver reflective entry
portal.
We arrived by ferry, though, and the view from the water allows
one to see that the building is actually a massive structure dug out into the
hillside.
The inside has few windows and has been described as being
like the lair of a super villain in a Bond movie or the ultimate Batcave. That
does give some idea—it’s a pretty cool bunker that is part quarry, part temple.
There are no wall labels. None. One is provided with an iPod
touch on entry that, via a kind of
Mona GPS, can tell where you are. You then tap on a thumbnail of a piece if you
want to know more about the art in front of you. “Know more” is divided into
various subcategories. Ideas is a
sentence or two about the work beyond who made it. Artwank, is, as you might expect, some scholarly essay on the piece
or the artist—the symbol for this category is a cock and balls. The Gonzo button usually led to a more
personal reaction to the piece from Walsh or Elizabeth Mead, who helped in
collecting a lot of the stuff. It might be a poem, an amusing anecdote or
something that seems almost completely off topic—like trouble with a boyfriend.
Lastly there is Media, which often
consists of a casual audio interview with the artist, but sometimes could be
something else entirely. One media file connected to an assisted suicide
machine consisted of Walsh talking about how a similar machine was used by his
brother, who had terminal cancer. It was blunt, straightforward and very moving.
As you can see, there are also love and hate buttons. I
pressed “love” quite a few times. I NEVER pressed hate once. These tallies of
like and dislike elicit more information—how many other people liked too, for
example. There is an amusing rumor that if a work becomes too popular Walsh
will remove it. If you offer up your email address, the thing will track your
visit via GPS and then send you a link to a website showing you what you saw.
Here’s mine:
You can also find out from this site what you missed—I think
I saw most of it.
The collection itself is pretty eclectic, something I found
admirable and inspiring. In keeping with the name of the museum there were
Egyptian mummies next to contemporary art, work by indigenous artists next to a
Brancusi. It wasn’t random, there was a sensibility behind the mixing and
matching, and it seemed to appeal to all sorts of visitors. This was a museum
that folks who are suspicious of contemporary art could and do love.
That said, much of the contemporary work
did benefit from the little iPod explanations—there was often some narrative or
story that illuminated the work beyond just its visual appeal. The Santiago
Sierra piece listed above, for example, showed the skin color of the folks who
work at a museum in Caracas. These were then arranged dark to light, a kind of
gray scale of skin. The light to darker skin tones corresponded, not
surprisingly, with class, position and income. This you wouldn’t have known
unless you read a bit of the ancillary material. That said, these “conceptual”
works mostly weren’t insular works that only referred to the art world, as some
works of this type do.
The current show, which is in addition to the regular
collection, is called “Theater of the World” and occupies a whole floor. It was
organized by an outside curator, and he more or less colored within the lines—mixing
things in Wunderkammer
rooms, in which work from a variety of sources were grouped together, sometimes
by material or theme. Here is one such work—a chest of drawers with bones on
the outside, an indigenous ritual piece from Papua New Guinea also made of
bone, a Marina Abramovic video (installed like a somewhat disturbing digital
family album on the chest of drawers), and a painting at least 100 years old.
An eclectic mix, but with a guiding principal.
Some actual old cabinets were filled like real Wunderkammer, as well. They’d typically include ritual objects, geological specimens, bones,
contemporary Chinese porcelain pieces, and maybe an Egyptian funerary urn.
A group of us spent about 3 hours there, and we could have
taken longer, but we had a sound check to get to.
Did it work? Does this popular museum serve as an example
that others might follow, or is it one man’s eccentric indulgence?
It’s not completely unprecedented. I remember a show at the Pompidou
called “Magicians of the Earth” that mixed and juxtaposed work by indigenous
artists with contemporary works that seemed similar in their evocations of
ritual and spirituality. In that show you had Richard Serra steel slabs
alongside non-representational tribal work. Or maybe a feathered mask from the
Amazon would be juxtaposed with a Rebecca Horn piece. In that show all the
pieces were, despite their disparate origins, contemporary—they were all made
recently. It was a show that
claimed to be “against exclusion”. The show at Pompidou was the work of Jean-Hubert Martin, who, not
surprisingly, did this one at MONA as well.
It was controversial, as I remember. Some felt the work by
indigenous artists was being romanticized or taken so far outside of its
original context as to risk obliterating the piece’s true meaning.
One could say the same for most of the art in museums—art
that is more than 200 years old anyway. More recent art was made to be
displayed museum-style, but a Renaissance painting ripped from an Italian
church altarpiece is just as out of context as the indigenous art at MONA, as
are Grecian urns and the Roman statues (without their once garish colors) in so
many big-city museums. While the notion that many of these pieces lose some
meaning out of their original context might hold true, it’s also true that
works shorn of context are what museums (except contemporary ones) are all
about. I, myself, love the juxtapositions—as one could easily claim that a lot
of contemporary art is essentially our own ritual objects, when they’re not
self-referential or simply status baubles for the uber rich. (Full disclosure—I
did music for some films that were done for the “Magicians of the Earth” show.)
Did the lack of wall labels hurt? I don’t think so. Although
some works only made sense when you knew more about them, the lack of labels is
an attempt to urge us to engage with the piece, if only for a moment, without
the words leading the way. That said I did spend a fair amount of time checking
the iPod—listening to the artists talking about their own work, and to Walsh
and others giving their very personal, non-academic commentary. These audio
commentaries were often a little irreverent. One of our group said they heard
one in which a phone rang in the background, then the artist being interviewed
was told by some unnamed person, “You’ve got a call”, and the interview
abruptly ended. In a way, this whole museum is an installation—a massive piece,
an experience unto itself. Almost anything installed here becomes part of the
MONA experience. It’s certainly not as faux-neutral as a place like MOMA or the
Tate. Art in those places becomes part of those experiences as well—it just
happens to be the white-room-experience we accept as given. The lighting here
is moody and the architecture is present—not at all white-cube-invisible (as if
white cubes are invisible).
It was MONA that sponsored our visit to Hobart—they have been sponsoring
a music and performance festival that runs for about a week there every January.
It’s curated by Brian Ritchie, from the Milwaukee band Violent Femmes. He’s
doing a great job. A couple of days before us were Dirty Projectors, as well as
a woman who played drums while being submerged in the river (she wore scuba
gear and kept playing).
Word has gotten out, and
lots of folks flock from Melbourne (the nearest really big city) to catch stuff
that is outside of the regular touring circuit. So many people came to our show
that they opened the sidewalls of the venue (it was in a giant shed on a wharf)
so that people outside the hall could see and hear. None of them fell off into
the water as far as I could tell, though drinks were consumed. There was a big New Yorker article on Walsh and MONA a few weeks ago, so the museum as an attraction is only going to get bigger. Titling
the New Yorker piece “Tasmanian
Devil” rather than say, “The Future of The Museum” might lead one to not take
the whole thing seriously, but the article isn’t as sensational as it sounds. Overall
it gives the impression that MONA is something really special, deeply moving,
personal, and worth travelling to see—though Tasmania is a long, long way.
Had a day off in Sydney before heading to Tasmania, so I took
advantage of our being part of the Sydney Festival and got a ticket to Verdi’s Masked Ball
directed by La Fura dels Baus,
a longstanding Barcelona-based experimental theater group.
First of all, the opera house is NOT the building that is
usually pictured in the postcard views of Sydney—that is the symphony hall. The
opera house is the smaller, almost identical building that is often hidden
behind it. In the photo below, the opera house is on the left.
The production was set in some indeterminate Orwellian
dystopia. As the pit orchestra played the overture, a pretty spectacular film
of body parts with texts and mirrored masks was projected on a scrim. This flew up to
reveal the giant set which consisted of industrial columns that could move up
and down (where is the fly-space in this building?). When this part of the set
was down it resembled a concrete freeway underpass—a weird urban dead zone out
of a J. G. Ballard novel. A false ceiling of fluorescent panels flew in; it
looked like office lighting. Like the columns, the fluorescent ceiling could
also be raised and lowered—sometimes with “watcher” characters on board,
looking over railings above the lights.
All the actors wore business suits that were visibly
numbered, as well as weird headpiece appliances that covered their ears and
made them all look like bald clones. I liked it.
This being a Verdi opera, there were plenty of catchy tunes.
(Maybe the piece had been compressed a little? The running time was only 2 ½
hours.) The hits came about every 10 minutes. I left singing a particularly
ironic one in my head, which is what is supposed to happen. (This particular
tune was ironic because the tune itself is jaunty, but it’s sung by some
conspirators who are up to no good—it’s a foreshadowing of bad things to come.)
Of course I’m watching all this thinking, “Budget!”. It’s no
accident that “experimental” or “downtown” composers and theater directors
angle to get gigs in the opera world—where else could one have the budget to
indulge in a vision like this!
What does the dystopian vibe have to do with Verdi’s opera
and its narrative? Not a whole lot, though the opera is certainly set in a
royal court full of intrigues and political (and sexual) rivalries—not much has
changed. And one could argue that the “masks” could be viewed, metaphorically,
as the face one puts on to one’s peers and to meet the public.
Does Verdi need updating? Probably not, though the spectacular staging
was part of what one was paying to see. Did it give the piece a new
contemporary resonance and meaning? I dunno about that either. One ultimately
wishes for new works with the tunefulness of Verdi, or equivalent musical
impact, that fit a staging as revolutionary as this one.
The temperature today was 44˚C—which is 114˚ F. It’s scary.
A group of us went by ferry to Manly
for a bike ride and a hike to the cliffs. We didn’t go all the way to the
headlands, though—it was too hot.
Bari sax player Jon Natchez did some digging on why the area is called Manly and found out the beach was named by Capt. Arthur Phillip for the indigenous people living there. Phillip wrote that "their confidence and manly behavior made me give the name of Manly Cove to this place." (Source)
After getting completely sweaty, we had an incredible meal
of oysters and what they call bugs at the Fish Café, adjacent to a small fish
market.
Bugs are from Moreton Bay, up north where it’s more
tropical. They’re like something out of H.P. Lovecraft. A
creature that has survived from another slightly weirder era, possibly derived
from an extraterrestrial spore—definitely somewhat prehistoric.
They are very tasty. They are served sliced right down the
middle—the meat fills the back half, which like a lobster or shrimp, curls
under. However, the front half and underside more resembles a crab.
Then we went for a brief swim. We had just come out of the
water when the lifeguard made two announcements. One advised to be careful of
the rip currents. He said, “You may be a good swimmer in a pool, but that
doesn’t mean you know how to swim in surf.” The second announcement advised
that the change in wind was bringing in some Bluebottles (stinging jellyfish)
and he went on: “Unless you have a high threshold for pain we suggest you get
out of the water immediately.” Not everyone did, but we sure weren’t going back
in.
Here is where I should have my next publicity picture done:
I’ll have to make do with this self-portrait taken in one of
the Anish Kapoor sculptures on exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art that
are here as part of the Festival.
Yesterday a group of us were
invited by Pete Lawler of the band Weddings Parties
Anything to visit the Percy
Grainger museum here in Melbourne. A group of us grabbed local bike share
bikes ($2.70 for 24 hours!) and mandatory helmets ($5 at the local 7-Eleven,
with a $3 rebate if you return your helmet!) and headed towards the university.
We were met by Monica Syrette and Brian Allison, curators at the museum, who
explained a little about the museum and Grainger before we began our viewing.
Grainger was a turn of the last
century composer, most known for some band arrangements that almost every
school band learns.
He was also a lot of other
things—among them a famous concert pianist who played worldwide. Band students
aren't told about all the varied aspects of his life, however he stipulated
that it should all be laid bare when his life's work was presented in this
biographical museum. His idea was that every aspect of a creative person’s life
has some bearing on their work. So this museum has rooms about his dad, who
built bridges and civic buildings around Australia (when he was sober), and his
mother, whose dresses are on display. It’s an admirable idea—to include more
context in the presentation of an artist’s work—though how much of his
attachment to his mum and her tragic suicide shows up in his composing is
questionable.
In his later years, Grainger
developed an aversion to English words with Latin roots—so the word “museum”
was, in this system, to be replaced with the term “Hoard House”. He hoped this
was what all museums would henceforth be called. I agree. The Guggenheim Hoard
House, the Hoard House of Modern Art—let’s be honest about what these places
are.
He lived in England for a while
and is remembered there as a folk song collector, and some of his compositions
show this influence. One of his famous tunes was called “Lincolnshire Posy”. In
the U.S. he is remembered as a concert pianist and composer. and in Australia
he is virtually unknown (this could be disputed, as most in Australia are at
least familiar with his arrangement of the folk tune “Country Gardens”). We
have, it seems, many biographies.
He had many diverse interests and
felt that artists were always in danger of being pigeonholed for one thing—I
have to agree. Here is a quote from him:
“The artist is not (as so many so called ‘inartistic’ people seem to
like to believe) a being supernaturally gifted with skill for some branch of
art. To sing, make music, paint, draw, carve and dance is natural to all
humanity, and it is only a lopsided civilisation, mad on ‘specialisation’, that
scares the ‘tame cats’ of humanity into abandoning their natural right to an
allround manysided life.” Source
Here’s another quote—a sort of
early idea regarding emergent art forms:
“I don’t especially
value ‘originality’ in art, as I consider the communal development of folksongs
is no whit inferior to the original achievement of a great outstanding
‘original’ genius. It is the universal that pulls me in all matters and I am
more thrilled by these points that all people have in common than in the
special achievements and specialness of individuals.” Source
He was the definition of an
iconoclast. At one point he and his wife had the idea to design clothing made
of towels.
This was not just some idle wacky
whim. Grainger had a thorough justification for these outfits:
“My mother was devoted to Lafcadio Hearn’s stories of Japan and she
worshipped many aspects of Japanese civilization—for instance its cleanliness.
And she and I often discussed the filthiness of European clothes: men’s coats
in which the sweat of years is allowed to gather, our shoes that bring the dirt
of the streets into our homes. And around 1910 (after we had both been fired by
the beauty of Maori and South Sea island clothes and fabrics seen in museums in
New Zealand and Australia) my mother mooted the idea of clothes made
of Turkish towels – cool in summer, warm in the winter, and washable at
all times.” Source
He actually wore these outfits
while teaching and writing, and he was assisted in making them by both his
mother and his wife.
“Between
1910 and 1914 I wore these clothes while giving many of my lessons in London
and continually during my composing holidays in Denmark. In 1932 or 1933 my wife and I took up again this
idea of clothing made of towelling and when in Australia in 1934 and 1935
we were amazed by the beauty of
the bath towels on sale in Australia—some imported from England, Chekoslovakia
and America, but most of them (and among them the most beautiful ones)
manufactured in Australia.” Source
And here he proposes a proto-Bauhaus
idea—the beauty and practicality of machine-made objects:
“Here was
a chance to show what could be done with the beauty born of machinery—a beauty
as rich and subtle, in its own way, as anything made by hand or loom. The
problem was to use the towels with as little cutting and sewing as possible,
and in this skill my wife shone.” Source
Now, you might be thinking, “Hold
on, this guy is crazy!” You might also be thinking, “This guy is straight?” One
could say he simply had the courage to indulge in his own very forward and
original ideas. The kinky sex part will come later.
In later years he got fed up with
performing, claiming—like Glenn Gould would many years later—that the music he
conceived was not translating accurately into scores or performance. The music
he was writing was getting quite complicated, and was often scored for unusual
instruments. Here’s a piece for an imaginary ballet:
His idea was to “free” music.
Some of his compositions at this time were free of a central tonality and were
in this sense way ahead of their time. These avenues of inquiry eventually led
to the invention of a host of oddball electronic instruments—including one that
plays via rolls of cardboard, which he called the Kangaroo Pouch machine. Here
it is in the Graingers’ house in White Plains, NY:
The cardboard rolls scrolled from
one side to the other, and the sheets were cut much like a range of hills and
valleys. Small rollers ran along the crests of these “hills”, which caused the
attached arms of various levers to go up and down and effect a change in the
pitch of 4 oscillators. The resulting music was a bit like a series of sirens,
all going up and down at different times. Not as unpleasant as it might sound.
You can hear a recording here.
Following Grainger’s wish that
nothing in his life be left out in the Hoard House we come to the biggest
surprise—the "Lust Branch". He left a trunk that he stipulated wasn't
to be opened until 10 years after his death, so the University held a big
ceremony for the trunk opening. What kind of wonders and unpublished musical
scores might be inside?
When they opened it up it was
filled with, amongst other things, bloody shirts, a large collection of whips,
diagrams showing various ways to be whipped, and photos of his naked backside
covered in bloody whip welts.
...they quickly put it all back
in the box. But by deeming that the lust collection be included in the Hoard House
it was clear that he wasn’t ashamed of his both sadistic and masochistic
leanings.
“I am a sadist & a
flagellant—my highest sexual delight is to whip a beloved woman’s body… To a
lesser degree I enjoy being whipped myself (& before marriage used to whip
myself every few weeks)…” Source
He knew the contents of the box would cause an uproar, but he wasn’t
trying to hide it and didn’t seem to think it was sinful or anything like that.
His wife even aided him in his painful desires or was the willing victim in
some cases one might assume—so it was a family arrangement. Here he wrote to
his future bride, "I shall thoroly thoroly (sic)
understand if you cannot in any way see yr way to follow up this hot wish of
mine." (Source) But she did manage his
hot wish, and they got married in a ceremony that capped a concert at the
Hollywood Bowl!
Grainger had what we would
now define as a dark side. Ever since he was a boy he was enamored of Norse
myths and tales, and he felt that these were obviously the product of an
extremely creative people. Not to take anything away from the Scandanavians,
but Grainger had a theory that Northern people were more creative than
Southern. By Southern he meant the Mediterranean people. He felt that Italian
composers and operas were overrated—this included the Semitic people and
composers whose symphonies were popular.
Grainger went so far as to take a
series of pictures of the eyes of composers and musicians he came in contact
with to show that the blue-eyed ones were superior. Oddly, this odd theory or
prejudice didn’t diminish his respect and admiration for other groups outside
of those he disdained—he was a big Duke Ellington fan in later years, for
example. He brought the Ellington big band down to his classes at NYU to
expound on the ingenious and novel approaches the Duke had taken to
arrangements. This was well before jazz was taken seriously in academia.
To further these ends Grainger went so far as to develop “Blue-Eyed
English”—a version of the English language purged of all Latinisms. Of course,
so much of our language has Latin roots that what he ended up with was
something truly bizarre. I’ll wrap this post up with this glossary
“translation” of many common words into Blue-Eyed English:
I was recently asked to do a conversation/talk with Janette Sadik-Kahn, our commissioner of transportation, at the AIA New York Center for Architecture Center (American Institute of Architects). Since I imagined there might be some architects or designers in the audience, I took some time to share some of my notes and photographs from my summer Latin American bikes and cities tour. I also took this opportunity to finally organize some of the notes I had taken and post them. So here it is, many months late.
Flashback to July 23, 2011—Oscar Diaz is my host here in Bogota. He worked closely with Enrique Peñalosa, the former mayor of the city (from 1998-2001 and currently running this year with the Green Party), on various projects to improve Bogota’s system of parks, bike paths, road construction, and mass transit system. He suggested we take a field trip so he could show some of the projects they had initiated. A few of us piled in a van in the morning and headed towards the outskirts of town, to the Kennedy District. In this district there are several small neighborhoods like El Tintal, Bellavista, and El Recreo. Bellavista is a small community that was formerly illegal. It was a place of dirt streets, no sewage, no water, or electricity. There was no property ownership or the various rights that go along with that. Much of that has changed, for the better, since that administration implemented a number of interrelated schemes.
There are lots of these illegal communities around Bogota and other cities here. Invasiones ilegales or piratas (illegal or pirate invasions) are what these communities are called when they begin forming—as they’re completely illegal. They’re called favelas in Brazil, townships in South Africa. They don’t hook up to city water, sewage, or electricity (not legally anyway), but there are still entrepreneurs who will develop real estate in these settlements, if you can call it that.
This is the way they used to look (Oscar took this in 1997):
One might call this old view of this community an example of crowd-sourced architecture—as there are no regulations or governmental guides. The patterns—streets and basic infrastructure—that comes into being could be considered to be emergent. But without sewage or water it’s pretty sad. Maybe that crowd principal can’t really be applied in all areas? Or maybe it needs a framework and set of principals and then it can form and grow around those?
This is the way it looks now (I took this July 2011):
We biked along these bike/ped paths that have been built here. We passed many improvised bike repair stations that have sprung up—a guy with a set of flat fix gear and other tools sets himself up as a pop-up business. Little shops have appeared on the ground floors of many of the buildings since the paths have been built. Needless to say in the intervening years this area got electricity and sewage, streetlights and schools.
Unfortunately, because of the current administration, the neighborhood has gone back to being a tough and dangerous area though it didn’t look it—I was advised to slip my big camera into my bag rather than letting it hang on my neck. Whenever I went off a little on my own, someone from the group would appear close to me, watching out. But now, at least there are possibilities for the residents—the local schools, the library and other centers provide educational services, and the TransMilenio buses that now reach here can connect these folks to employment in town—all of which didn't exist until the bus system (BRT) was created under Peñalosa’s administration.
The bike and pedestrian passages that former Mayor Peñalosa and Oscar instigated go through these communities and provide a network—they give the communities a street-type focus. Also, the “roads” serve as a link to other communities and to the TransMilenio—the rapid bus network that goes to, among other places, the center of the city.
The TransMilenio system, was begun some years ago as a cheaper and less socially and ecologically damaging alternative to the 600 million dollar highway scheme that was ready to go. The buses run really fast and, because you buy the tickets before getting on, there is no time wasted doing ticket business after you board the buses—which pull up to specially built stations along the existing highways as well as inside the city. They pull up, exchange passengers, and then zoom off. Only a masochist would decide to drive his or her own car to work... but there are plenty of those.
In the Americas terminal the station has indoor bike parking, as the inhabitants of that zone get around mainly by bike or by walking.
Would this kind of bus system work in some place like Atlanta, Georgia, where people spend hours and hours stuck in their cars getting from one side of the sprawl to the other?
It was pointed out that the improvements in Kennedy (schools and the bike/ped paths), and those in other barrios, were funded by the savings that accrued after the decision to build the TransMilenio system—a much more cost-effective solution than building the massive highway that had previously been proposed. There are 84km of exclusive corridors in the TransMilenio system. 1.7 million people are transported every day. 7 million people live in Bogota.
Many of the inhabitants of these squatter towns had never been outside of those places. These bike/ped "roads" coupled with the bus system allowed them to get out, get jobs in town, go to school, university etc. The storefront businesses that sprung up along the paths changed the communities in other ways, not only by creating jobs—people began to be more motivated, feel better about their situation, and about the future chances for their kids. My point to the architects was that here were fairly cheap and simple improvements that (coupled with some other changes described below) radically transformed people’s lives.
In order for these "townships" to receive basic city services—sewage, city water, electricity, schools, etc.—the settlements had to be legalized. Usually, previous city administrations would legalize about 12 of them a year but under Peñalosa and Oscar, they legalized 600. To kick the process off, the city would buy some of the vacant land and sell it to developers, as well as putting in some infrastructure such as the bike paths, pedestrian walkways, and public parks—all the stuff the “developers” in those zones would not ordinarily put in but made the areas attractive and more livable. The developers, seeing that clients were drawn to those amenities, began to advertise their future developments as having those features. Here is a developers’ billboard—their advertising features apartments with public spaces and green zones:
The public education in these areas was terrible. According to Oscar, that was partly due to the unions, who were mainly interested in holding onto their positions and increasing their benefits. The city took an initiative and began to build schools and then open them up to bids for private management at the same cost allocated per kid in a public school. In other words, if a kid were allocated $500 a year for a normal public school education, that was what the bidders would receive—but often under private management they could accomplish a lot more for the same amount of money.
It was a way of getting around the unions, and it was very successful. Some of the management of these schools was by Catholic schools that do not really aim to make a profit on their schools the way others might—breaking even is considered OK by the religious schools. The grade results and SAT scores are now equal those in the established private schools.
Critics say this system is privatizing education—a dangerous precedent, but Oscar counters that the parents don't have to pay tuition as they would in a real private school. It has brought a vast improvement in the quality of education to these poor neighborhoods. My friend Sally wrote me: “The education stuff sounds dangerously close to arguments made here for charter schools and the evils of the teachers' unions; I would say [to you] to be careful and be specific, but then again I am wary of such semi-private endeavors in education and you may not be...” I too am wary of the privatizing of education—it could turn into something driven by profits, like prisons are in the US. Can you imagine if a basic service like water were privatized—as is being discussed in some places? Scary. However, Oscar claims in this situation it worked because the education remains public for the children and the city pays the same per student. What changes is the administration, teachers and program—all managed by the private schools and universities that won the public bid.
Next we toured Biblioteca El Tintal—which is a library, auditorium, meeting rooms and cafeteria complex that was built on the site of former garbage dump. In the past, the trucks would go up the ramp and dump their loads, and the resulting heap was eventually carried off to the distant landfill. It was an unsightly dump, and certainly didn’t make the area attractive. These new library complexes—and quite a few were built based on this model—are usually located near a bus transit hub and surrounded by green. They were built by respected local architects and were the sort of eye-catching buildings any city would be happy to have downtown, but here, they were being built in the poorest neighborhoods. Needless to say, besides being a social, educational and cultural center, these places became sources of pride.
Here is an aerial view—the library complex has now been there for a while, and as a result the shanties that used to sprawl out in the area have been replaced by apartment blocks and row houses—all still linked by bike paths and pedestrian walkways:
(Image Source: Oscar Diaz)
Peñalosa fought to keep the former garbage truck ramp as a reminder of what it once was. When it was built there was not much around here—the illegal communities were springing up all around in a kind of squatter anarchy. The parents in those days would plop their kids in front of the TV. Now, the kids are going to schools and can use computers at this center—and teach their parents how to use computers as well.
Here’s an inside view:
Here is one of the other libraries in another outlying area:
This concept of the library as community hub, and as a transformative catalyst in a community was also picked up by the former Mayor of Medellín, Sergio Fajardo. His realized version was even more spectacular looking, though the effect was similar.
He brought in Giancarlo Mazzantito as an architect to build Biblioteca España on the edge of a hill, as part of a funky barrio, Santo Domingo, that had been dangerous and was considered a sort of dead-end for its citizens. The newly created plaza soon became a place for folks to meet, mingle and shop in the kiosks that sprung up—a focal point the barrio didn't previously have. The library became both a local and international architectural landmark, and is an example of both how architecture can transform a community, as well as being an example of serious architecture being introduced into a poor neighborhood, as opposed to where it usually is—in city centers where the well-to-do are entertained.
Fajardo did something similar to the BRT bus system connection as well—he linked this formerly isolated community to the main city by public transportation. Though in this case, it wasn’t possible to tag a bus line onto existing roads because the way up that hill is too twisty. So, instead, they made a gondola that takes folks to and from town.
Fajardo managed to transform Medellin from a place of squalor and despair into a liveable open city. He resorted to architects and urbanists, many of them Colombian (Rogelio Salmona, Giancarlo Mazzanti who designed the Parque Biblioteca Espana, Alejandro Echeverri who was responsible for the spatial development strategy, Sergio Gomez for the Botanial Garden), to realise “our most beautiful buildings in our poorest areas.”
His strategy was to begin in the most deprived areas, gain the trust of the poorest with the lowest chances of succeeding in life. Santo Domingo Savio which houses some 170,000 people was the starting point of the regeneration of Medellin from where it has spread elsewhere. Places for learning, schools, a library were deliberately designed as landmarks to signal a brighter future. Parks (of Wishes, of Bare Feet), internet facilities, an art gallery and a day care centre form part of the public realm open to all, together with new connections to the city at large. Converting dilapidated spaces into places where people can meet without fear and the very young population can play triggered improvements to the precarious abodes.
Openness and, most importantly, beauty was brought to these areas, for which the inhabitants started to feel civic pride.
The locals participated actively in these transformations. Youngsters and the unemployed were given the opportunity to learn building trades. Not only were they able to improve their own abodes, but their skills provided them with jobs and a new lifestyle.
Oscar and I had lunch with Alexandra Rojas, former Deputy Secretary of Finance, who is involved in a program of national accident prevention. She was also involved in a big campaign (Fondo de Prevención Vial—FPV) to reduce road, pedestrian, bike and car accidents. She said that the prevailing attitude is that accidents are destiny—that they come upon us at random and unexpectedly—black swan events that we can’t predict. There is a feeling that you, therefore, can’t do anything about them. Their program, fronted by a very well known TV presenter, was called Epidemic of Excuses. Interesting that when they tested they found that this presenter had a credibility rating of 80%—so she was perfect for getting this difficult message across.
Rojas says all studies show the opposite to the prevailing perception of accidents as random or fate—it showed that traffic accidents, and especially those involving pedestrians, are indeed mostly avoidable, and therefore preventable. However, to prevent them, there would need to be some compromises for drivers such as driving slower (which may mean more traffic jams, though), along with additional crossing stations, more lights, etc. The number of lives that would be saved is not random—it’s completely predictable. Janette Sadik-Khan is figuring out how to do a similar program here in NY to get drivers to slow down. In Colombia, as in the US, it’s an uphill battle. In Colombia, 80% of the population does not have cars, but, as in the US, most of the infrastructure budget goes to accommodate the other 20% who do own cars. As Peñalosa and others have pointed out, these fiscal policies are counter democratic—they privilege a minority, a wealthy minority, of course, over the bulk of citizens. It would be as if sections of public parks were lopped off to create helipads for wealthy businessmen, or as if hire cars were allowed to stop and park wherever they wish. As in many parts of the U.S., lots of roads in Colombia have no place for pedestrians—there is no sidewalk. If you don’t have a car, tough luck. When the largest part of a nations funds go to accommodate a small, wealthy portion of citizens (the drivers, in the case of Columbia), democracy and the rights of the citizens are being subverted in the most profound way—at the level of the pocketbook.
Back in the U.S.A.
In a similar effort to those that Peñalosa, Salas, and Fajardo have done, an organization named Studio H has been active in North Carolina. I read a piece the other day that Alice Rawsthorn wrote for the NY Times in which the organizers were quoted as saying that, similar to Fajardo’s scheme, they focused on young folks becoming involved in the building effort. Many of these folks were around 17 years old and had never made anything in their lives—never held a hammer or sawed wood. So this was a big step that not all of them wanted to take, but for those who did their sense of self was radically changed.
Bernardo and I arrived Sunday night and were met by Scott Muller, who works for the Clinton Foundation here. They’re involved in projects that combat global warming. Part of that effort involves advocating for more efficient and sustainable transportation (that’s where I come in) and for use alternative energy sources (geothermal and methane from landfills are 2 possibilities there).
We checked into the hotel in Miraflores, the upscale district overlooking the beach and then we headed out to a local restaurant on some folding Dahon bikes we were leant. Chilean wine and local ceviche—one almost can’t go wrong food-wise in Lima.
One major strand of Scott’s lunch conversation was that Lima is in a real pickle. A former president allowed the importation of a lot of cheap used cars and combis to be used as taxis and buses to combat unemployment -also a kind of populist vote-garnering move—they now have one of the largest per capita taxi fleets in the world! All of these vehicles ran on diesel—really low-grade diesel. The emissions from these vehicles with their super low-grade fuel are 100 times higher than anywhere else. That combined with a few other factors—the extent of the sprawl here, the lack of transportation alternatives (like bikes), and more BRT bus lanes or rail—has resulted in a huge amount of particulate pollution. The pollution rose up, blew east and landed on the glaciers in the Peruvian Andes. One glacier in particular melted super fast as a result—it is now nearly gone due to rapid melting, and that particular glacier was the principal source of Lima's water supply. It took 200,000 years for the glacier to form— a generation to lose. They're now looking at plans to recycle wastewater for irrigation. I'll drink to that.
These places are being forced to take climate change and energy and water issues really seriously, if they don't they are totally fucked—if they aren’t already.
Peru also semi-privatized their water—under Fujimori or his successor, I'm not sure. This didn't raise any flags among the public here, until a Chilean consortium tried to buy the privatized part. Only then did the Lima folks suddenly realize their lives would be at the mercy of a gaggle of Chilean investors whose primary interest would be to see a profit on their investment. 1.5 million residents of Lima don’t have access to piped water.
In reference to the incredibly rapid melting glaciers in this area of the Andes, I was sent a paper detailing the issue. It's from some heavy-duty glaciologist, Lonnie Thompson, in Ohio. Having this stuff made concrete in a place like this makes your skin go all funny.
That, and some other similarly tragic stories, and one can see that places like this—rapidly expanding or already expanded urban regions in countries without deep pockets—are going to get hit by these environmental changes really hard and fast. It's going to happen way sooner than most of us think, and it's going to be more tragic than we can imagine. Lima is home to 8.5 million people. Can you imagine if a city that size that you know—Tokyo, NYC, Mexico City—were suddenly faced with having no water? The Peruvians have therefore been forced to initiate a lot of fairly innovative programs—more on that later. Many of the places on this tour don’t have the financial resources that the U.S., for example, used to have (the U.S., as we know, doesn’t have those resources either, not any more). In New York, we used to build massive and very expensive highway systems, tunnels, underground trains and Tunnel No. 3 to bring water from upstate. Europe and China are spending, or have spent, the cash to upgrade their rail and other systems, but I suspect the U.S. doesn’t yet have the political will to do that. War spending has taken precedence.
Anyway, many of these countries, not having funds to draw on, are forced to find cheaper alternatives, and to be somewhat more innovative and imaginative. Here is their relatively new BRT system-the Metropolitano, the high-speed bus line that goes from Miraflores and other districts into the center city—very quickly. We took it once—it’s fast and it runs on time. As in other cities, it eats up two lanes of an existing highway and the median strip, but runs as fast and efficiently as a train or subway—and is many, many times cheaper to install. The Metropolitano runs on 100% domestic source CNG (natural gas).
OK, one more bit from Scott’s lunchtime download—due to this same rampant use of low-grade diesel, the asthma and lung disease rate here is astronomical. As pointed out by the Mayor, three kids die daily from air pollution or some horrible figure like that. The fog + pollution combo is atrocious, and the new president, Ollanta Humala, is the first one to stand up to the various lobbies and say, “Look, this is happening—we need to respond to it and not just accept it as the price of rapid expansion.”
The car that Scott used to pick us up from the airport runs on compressed gas. They're trying to get a methane extraction system working here, as the piles of garbage on the outskirts of town generate tons of it. At a later dinner we met Matt Evans, a garbage expert from HDR Engineering in Minnesota. He stuck a tube into the landfill and lit it with a lighter and it burned. Needless to say, that same methane is currently leaking into the atmosphere, so tapping it is a great option. Not every landfill is a good candidate for methane extraction—some are too dry (no fermentation/breakdown) and some too wet (in danger of suddenly slipping and shifting), but the climate here seems to be suitable. It doesn’t pour rain very much in Lima, but the sky is light gray and overcast for many months of the year (a look that is referred to as “donkey’s belly”), and there is sufficient dampness to keep the breakdown of waste going.
Scott was an Olympic kayak guy, and later on he used to lead kayak tours in northern Greenland (!) for enthusiastic adventurers. Apparently there are Nazi weather stations up there that are completely intact.
The next day we agreed to go surfing—or have lessons, more accurately. The beach is right next to Miraflores. It’s below a crumbly cliff that runs along the coast—exactly as in Santa Monica.
There is a nice park and bike path that runs along the top of the cliffs, which is not of much use as a mode of transportation, but it is safe and scenic. We rode along it for a few miles to a lunch spot after surfing. There’s the beginning of a similar park n’ path down below, along the beach, but much of that awaits development. As with Santa Monica, much of that area was given over to a narrow highway that runs along the water.
It gets choked with traffic a few times a day, so occasionally there are murmurs about the road being widened. This, of course, would not solve anything, as it would cost a fortune and usurp public land from the beachfront. The few existing developed areas are hugely popular—people hang out, bring picnics and up above there’s a lovers park, too. In a country like this one where a minority own cars, usurping public spaces for cars is in effect privileging a minority of the population over all the others. It’s stealing from the lower larger portion to allocate the smaller wealthier group of car owners.
As we drove along a road coming in from the airport, Scott pointed out the streetlights, saying there’s a huge opportunity to switch out the sodium for LED lights. Then, further on, spying a clump of LED traffic lights, highlighted that they use 90% less energy than incandescent, and won’t burn out for +10 yrs. Here’s a quote from the C40 (a group of large cities committed to addressing climate change) website:
If all 220 million street lights around the world were retrofitted to more energy efficient technologies, we could reduce their energy consumption by 50 percent; cut carbon emissions by more than 40 million metric tons each year; and save approximately $8 billion dollars annually in energy costs.
The surfing was fun! It’s winter down here, so I’m happy to report that the wet suits worked. The “beach” is stony, so getting to the water was painful without booties. Surfing uses a whole different set of muscles and breathing than jogging, so after about 1/2 hour I was totally winded. This time, I managed to get one leg all the way up and the other part way—caught a couple of long rides, so I did a little better than my first attempt in Oz when a group of us went surfing on the last tour.
On the way back to our hotel (we biked to the beach), it was pointed out how far the water receded after the Santiago earthquake—about 1/2 kilometer, I think—and it stayed out for about 20 minutes. The expected tsunami never arrived (there are tsunami evacuation routes posted here). The crazy locals rushed out, scampering over the rocks to gather the fish that had been left flopping on the seabed.
Later, we got onto the ingredients in Inca Cola (which is foul, bright yellow, and tastes like bubblegum), and then ayahuasca and other hallucinogens found here. I was told that that one, at least, is bound to the culture—the preparation is elaborate and requires combining two substances derived from roots and vines—so it unlikely it was travel or be easily exported (though it will probably be synthesized). The name means “spirit vine” or “vine of the souls.” (I like that second translation better—it’s way creepier.) Speaking of synthesized, there was talk of other drugs that are sold as incense (K-2, it is called) in the U.S. and it’s catching on with teenagers in the meth belt. You can buy it legally. There’s also another substance being imbibed in the U.S. sold as “bath salts,” though the users and sellers know it’s not for getting yourself clean.
Bernardo and I rode off along the malecon on Tuesday morning, as I was scheduled to do a TV interview overlooking the water. The new mayor, Susana Villaran, dropped out of doing the intro at our presentation—which is a shame, as she's great and has initiated a lot of good projects, but my guess is she had to make an appearance at some football-related event, as the whole country was waving flags with Peru in the Copa America semi-finals. Even if they don't win, they'll be thrilled they made it this far. The “big” Latin American teams have all been knocked out—Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela— and Peru, Paraguay and Uruguay are left standing. It’s rumored that the superstar players on the other teams have forgotten it’s a team sport.
We rode back along the malecon to an early lunch at restaurant named Sonia—a little family owned place (Sonia is sitting a table near the entrance).
It’s in Chorillos—a less upscale neighborhood than Miraflores (which is nice, but Miraflores does feature mysterious casinos that we all think are mainly for money laundering) or more bohemian Barranco.
A street in Barranco, almost a Peruvian Greenwich village:
The place is all about seafood, of course. It seems the big chef in town—Gaston, who has several restaurants in Lima, two in Bogota and one in San Francisco (hint)—also has a cooking show here, in which he visits small family-run restaurants all over the country, highlighting unique dishes that each one features. Naturally, these places immediately become hugely popular. We had an early lunch so hardly anyone was there at first, though some North Americans arrived, so this place must be in the guidebooks or food blogs or something. Nothing spectacular, but really nice and totally unpretentious—they let us bring our bikes into the restaurant, and I don't mean into a back room—into the restaurant proper.
The meal was (as was typical with most meals in Lima), some assorted ceviches and then some cooked fish and shellfish.
Here is how the coffee is served.
You get a cup of hot water, and of course you immediately think "Uh-oh, here comes Nescafe," but, then comes this from the Peruvian science lab—super duper strong brewed coffee. You just pour a little in your hot water, and you've got a cup as strong or weak as you want it to be. It tasted great. Milk was not offered.
Sonia was not as good as the place the singer Susana Baca and her husband, Ricardo Perriera, took us to on Tuesday night. It’s called Rafael. It was described as "fusion," though what that meant no one could say, but you could sense Japanese influences (Fujimori, right?) with the local fish, ceviches and seasonings. Really amazing food, one of the best meals I’ve ever had. Apparently Rafael is a protégé of the well known chef mentioned above—Gaston, who put Peruvian cuisine on the world map not too long ago. Roberto, a local graphic designer who is also involved with all this transport stuff, said his kid, and many of the others his age, have two ambitions—to be a skater or a chef. Those are the only cool options here.
After dinner we stopped by Susana and Ricardo’s house and had a discussion that began with mention of the current generation of youthful protesters in Chile—kids whose parents were either too timid or too beaten down to rise up publicly. It’s a special moment. Ricardo asked me, “What happened in the U.S.?” He was referring to post 9/11, the Afghan and Iraq invasions and now the financial meltdown.
Wow, I thought—was that the last time I saw them? Susana was in New York, at a studio in what is now the meatpacking district recording a record, when the planes hit. I lived nearby, and after sorting out some family matters, I biked over (there were no cabs downtown) to see if they were all right. Did they want to go home and recommence recording at a later date? No, was the answer. “We’ve lived with Shining Path for decades. This is not enough to stop us.” They finished a beautiful record that week. I rode home and saw people sitting in a sidewalk café—oblivious to the cloud of asbestos and human remains that I could see drifting their way across a lovely blue sky.
I told Ricardo that since then there is a lot of wonderful work being done musically, though much of it isn’t massively popular. There is a lot of art being made too, though much of that world has to be taken with a grain of salt, as there is a lot of money and posturing there. I said that a generation of talented and creative graduates got seduced by the quick power and riches of the financial sector. A smart kid could make a fortune overnight and not have to really make or create anything. It was a waste of a generations’ talent, I told him. But there is still great stuff being made, sung, written, danced and created.
A few days after leaving Peru, I got an email from Scott notifying me that Susana was just named minister of culture for Peru.
There have been a lot of huge demonstrations in Santiago recently. Most of them are focused on education—the government wants to begin charging for public secondary school and universities. Public education, higher education in particular, is often very cheap in much of Latin America. As a result, there are at least a few generations of very well educated folks. One piece of graffiti I saw on the street said, in rough translation, “If we had the copper, we wouldn’t have to pay.” I had to ask what this meant. Minerals in Chile are big business—part of the reason President Salvador Allende was toppled by the U.S. decades ago was because he nationalized the mines. And don’t forget the trapped Chilean miners from a few months ago. Anyway, the copper mines have been at least partially privatized after the Coldelco Law was passed in 1992, so the profits from them don’t go to the government. Much of those profits don’t even stay in Chile—they go to multinationals, as in many other parts of the world. Hence the wording of the graffiti, which ties together the privatization of the mines with the lack of a budget for education.
The demonstrators are incredibly creative here. They don’t just shout, make speeches and wave banners. One group organized thousands of people to dress as zombies and learn the choreography to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video. The zombie image links to the education system, since they view it as dying and rotten. Here's a zombie/thriller demonstration link:
Local TV reported that there were three thousand students dancing. In the news clip below one can see a few of the ubiquitous Santiago dogs, lolling about as the zombies dance around them. The city seems to be filled with feral dogs. In India and elsewhere such dogs are usually small and fairly emaciated, but here they’re large Mastiff and German Shepherd blends. It’s a frightening sight if one is used to aggressive and crazy street dogs—crazy with hunger or abuse. However, these seem gentle—most simply lie around, peacefully. One tailed us for a bit. I saw a man in a black cape, a gaucho hat and ponytail reach down and pet one—something I’d never risk doing with a street dog, but maybe these have learned to be docile, and the locals treat them accordingly.
The other things the demonstrators do are what is called a ‘besaton’— a kissing marathon. Here’s a photo set. And they do a jogging thing, where they run circles around the palace.
Sally and I went out in the evening to a local fish restaurant. There is fairly abundant seafood in the Pacific coast of Chile, and the seafood menu is like a wine list. The fish are listed according to whether they are deepwater, shallow water, river fish or caught around a group of nearby islands.
The next morning we decided to go find out what a local breakfast is. Seems we picked the wrong time—Saturday morning. We made it all the way into the old city center and nothing was open, except a funky diner on Plaza des Armas. So that’s where we went. The waiter asked us which we wanted—brewed coffee or Nescafé. As we headed back to the hotel, and I to my tech check, a few places were beginning to put out chairs on the sidewalks for a brunch or lunch crowd.
The event was held in a spanking new cultural center called Centro Gabriela Mistral or GAM for short.
It has a story behind it—a political story, naturally. On this site was once a cafeteria that also served as a small cultural meeting place. When Allende took office, he made that cultural element official, and it was outfitted to be more accommodating as a cultural center for all classes of people. After he was overthrown by General Pinochet and the Americans, it was remade as a headquarters for Pinochet. Then, after a return to democracy, it burned down. Now, it has been returned to its previous incarnation, but much improved. A well known architect, Christian Fernandez, designed this new incarnation that houses multiple theaters, cinemas, rehearsal rooms, art exhibits (a show of photos of Neruda and his circle was up) and, of course, a cafeteria. The ministry of defense towers above and behind the cultural center—a not so subtle reminder.
The event was early, as it occurred on a Saturday. I got some laughs (good), and I have begun to incorporate more images of local initiatives that have transformed various Latin American cities. The incredible library that former mayor Sergio Fajardo had built in a poor barrio of Medellín, the super graphics that Hass & Hahn, the Dutch artists, did in some favelas in Rio (both of these were featured in the New Museum’s Festival of Ideas for the New City earlier this year). I plan to add more as I visit other cities along the tour—the rapid bus system in Quito, the libraries in Bogota (the inspiration for Fajardo’s initiatives) and other projects that generally improve the quality of life in various districts.
Patricio Fernández, a writer who is one of the founders of the magazine The Clinic spoke last, and both Bernardo and I found him very eloquent. The Clinic is a satirical magazine that began publication when Pinochet was captured—at a clinic in London, hence the title. It’s a cross between The Onion and Private Eye maybe—more on The Clinic later.
After the event, we took the metro (very clean and quiet) to a bike shop run by Claudio Olivares, one of the panel participants, to pick up loaners and find a place to have lunch. In the metro we saw a diorama of the first encounter between the Spanish and the indigenous Chileans.
Their last minutes of innocence:
A few minutes after picking up the bikes, we were off. I couldn't help thinking—are there bike lanes? How hard is it to ride here? I didn’t remember any lanes networking though the town proper from previous visits, though there are some that border the park alongside the river. There is a BRT (bus rapid transit system) here, which Loreto Araya, the organizer here, complained about—though it seems to be busy and there are lots of busses. We stopped for lunch in the Recoleta neighborhood—an area of low buildings that used to be a red light district, but is now filled with cool restaurants and sidewalk cafes. My lunch was a giant seafood stew, and Sally’s, a massive chicken strew. Delicious, but could have done with just one order and shared. A highway threatened this neighborhood not too long ago, but there was resistance from the residents and others. In the end, the big highway that runs through town is now buried and runs in tunnels alongside the river. Grassy lawns cover much of the top of it—FDR drive, take note.
After lunch, Sally and I took off on our own, roaming aimlessly though other parts of this neighborhood and past lots of Bavarian looking houses, but with tin roofs.
Then we wandered into another mostly residential neighborhood—Conchalí—that features other architectural styles that I can’t identify. How would one describe this style? Hobbit deco cottage?
Mental Maps No, not loony maps, or maps of how our brains function, but maps we construct in our heads as we become familiar with a place.
The Bavarian homes above might seem slightly incongruous looking here, and slightly puzzling, unless you know the immigration history. The Law of Selective Immigration of 1845 encouraged middle class Germans (and some Austrians and Swiss) to settle and colonize the ‘undeveloped’ southern parts of the country. They blended in after all those years, and many of the leading artists, musicians, business people and tennis players were of German descent. The British settled a little earlier, around Valparaíso, and one of the big avenues here is called O’Higgins. They got involved in saltpeter (used for gunpowder) and the Atacama mines.
Some of the Austrians who settled in Chile were fleeing Prussian persecution. Later, waves of German Jews were fleeing the Nazis, and only a year ago Paul Shaefer (not the Letterman guy) passed away. A former Nazi accused multiple times of child abuse, Shaefer founded a religious utopian community (Colonia Dignidad) with the blessing of Jorge Alessandri who was then president of Chile (1961). Shafer had abused two children at another religious ‘charity’ organization he founded in Germany. He disappeared from Colonia Diginidad after twenty-six kids accused him of abuse. He died in prison.
On a wall were plastered a grid of collages, like the ones that might be seen in a young person’s bedroom. But there they were, proudly displayed, someone’s private loves and obsessions, made totally public.
It was nice to have a chance to ride on the side streets and through the neighborhoods, as my past experiences of this city were almost exclusively of office buildings and generic, almost North American, looking edifices. The only structures I saw then that retained some character were downtown. I’m seeing more this time—even though it’s another quick visit. As was the case in Sao Paulo, I’m unconsciously forming a mental map of this place that is very different than what existed in my head previously—an expanded and more complete version than it was previously. The bikes help with that. Walking or cycling gives one a sense of the physical, visual and other relationships between the neighborhoods—how the river runs through the city and where the landmarks are. It’s amazing how fast that mapping process happens—how quickly one develops a sense of where neighborhoods and landmarks are, and how they connect to one another. After just two days I could almost get around Santiago without a physical map and just rely on the one that has appeared in my head.
Sally flew back to NY on Sunday morning and that night there was a dinner for the event participants and others at The Clinic. Not the magazine offices, (though that may be here too), but at a lounge, bar, and now a restaurant that has spun off from the magazine and is like nothing I’ve ever seen anywhere else in the world. It’s a really interesting mix of an obviously hip or fashionable club (no one dressed like what we might imagine as overly fashion oriented, though they did seem to all be wearing black), combined with the intellectual and political satire that the magazine is known for.
The walls are painted black, with blow ups of wittily captioned old B&W photos on the walls (a giant one of Allende), as well as humorous statements and collections of quotes from politicians and others painted in white type—a Joseph Kosuth installation turned into a bar, but funnier. Where else would one find this mixture?
Outside there was a blackboard with a 'quote of the day' scrawled across it.
When I left around 11pm, to walk back to the hotel, there was a line outside waiting to get in to the lounge on the ground floor. If it isn’t clear yet, it should be—politics is very much alive here. The trauma of the years of dictatorship, combined with the now relatively successful economy and high levels of education make for a potent mix. It’s manifested in the humor and politics of The Clinic and the Thriller dance as a creative form of protest. There’s an optimism and hope here that won’t be squashed—it keeps resurfacing over and over.
Speaking of creative protests, Chile isn’t alone there—the protesters in Belarus, one of the last truly repressive Eastern bloc dictatorships, have resorted to standing still (!), spontaneous clapping, strolling or arranging for their cell phone alarms to go off simultaneously. The government there has adopted new measures to enable them to throw folks in jail for protesting in this way.
Monday Morning I ate breakfast in the hotel and then went off for a quick ride around before my flight to Lima. Sally’s friend, Daniel, emailed her a list of spots in Santiago that he checked out when he came down for Lollapalooza here earlier this year. Maybe The Clinic hadn’t opened yet—as it was significantly absent from the list.
There’s a great farmers market alongside the river and the park adjacent to it. Look at the size of those stalks of celery!!
I rode on, through a relatively upscale neighborhood, with houses that could have been lifted from any North American suburb.
On to another zone of high-rise offices, with more of them on the way, and the Andes in the distance—a rare view, given the usual amount of pollution here.
The mountains are close to Santiago. There was a tremor the morning we arrived, somewhere near Valparaiso, on the coast. It registered around .6, so no one here paid any attention. Part of the protests concerns a proposal for a hydroelectric damn in a pristine area. Chileans are proud of their amazing countryside—the Andes, the Atacama Desert, the beaches. So, a giant damn with high-tension wires strung across the pristine landscape is a hot and very symbolic issue. It fucks with people’s image of what their country is, what it represents—even if they only see those pristine areas rarely and sporadically. In the U.S. it might be likened to building a damn in the Grand Canyon that caused the canyon to disappear, or building a lucrative casino around Old Faithful.
I biked back to the center of town, to Bellas Artes—the Beaux-arts style museum here (the contemporary museum is behind it). Free entrance. Some rooms of contemporary Latin artists and others filled with colonial portraits. Hardly anyone here (so I can take pictures!). A silent temple for contemplation. Here are some of those immigrants mentioned earlier:
From the breakfast room in my Shibuya hotel one can see Fuji-san! It’s a remarkably clear morning and it looks like the endless city stretches until the foothills of Fuji begin (it doesn’t quite). It’s a weird sight—a vision of a planet that is all city, except for the occasional volcano.
I went to Tokyo to be present for the installation of a small art show (one piece likely needed technical tweaking). The space is in Harajuku, and it’s called Vacant. The parents of the gallerist are old friends of mine, and the dad had a chain of clothing stores that sold U.S. thrift store items. Similarly direct, it was called Department Store. He’s sold the business now.
When I was in town for my performances over a year ago I saw some photos he had by Ikebana (flower arranging) artist Yukio Nakagawa. I’d seen a few of his own photo documentations of his work in an ICP show that Noriko Fuku curated a while back, but now I was seeing a lot more—and was blown away.
I’ve seen some wacky Ikebana work before, but Nakagawa’s stuff is way extreme. Some of it isn’t even recognizable as flowers; though in the titles one finds that indeed is often the material used—but mashed, pulverized, sexualized.
These images are from some time ago. Nakagawa-san is still alive, though he lives in a nursing home now. Apparently he trained in a proper Ikebana school, but was sort of kicked out—gee, I wonder why. To us in the West this might not seem a big deal, but in Japan, where flower arranging is a big business—and being certified is like a law degree or a medical degree—certification all but guarantees you a living for life. So being "disbarred," as it were, was a serious business—it forced Nakagawa into a subsistence existence. My friend Seiji and his son Yusuke have been negotiating with the Nakagawa family to do prints for a show in early 2011.
Nakagawa was pals with Kazuo Ohno, the father of Bhuto dance, and a wild figure all on his own. Of course these two revolutionaries would cross paths. Though what, if anything, they did together, I don’t know.
My own show was some old and some new stuff, and most of them without text, as that’s a bit of a barrier here. There were two relatively new pieces—one of which is a piece with almost 100 guitar pedals that the public is invited to walk over.
Here’s a kid taking an audio stroll at the opening.
As he steps on each pedal it either turns on or off, depending on its current state, and the sound of a guitar loop (the guitar is off camera in this picture) is affected in some way. Echo, flanging, distortion, pitch shifting, delays, auto filters—the combinations are pretty limitless and sometimes sound quite nice!
This piece was originally done for a benefit The Kitchen (an arts space in NY) was having a year or so ago at which they were “honoring” the artist Christian Marclay, who does a lot of sound and audio works. So this piece was inspired by his work, in a way. However, the fire marshal at that event said the piece had to be removed, as I’d installed it in a hallway between two spaces—which I did as a further encouragement for folks to walk on it. Though I made a narrow safe passage around the side for the timid and for ladies in heels, the fire marshal was, I think, miffed that he’d never been consulted, so he showed us who was boss. By the time the partygoers arrived the piece was gone.
The oldest pieces in this show were some prints of some pictures I’d taken of a video monitor that were possibilities for the Bush Of Ghosts record cover. We ended up using similar pictures with little figures, that Eno took at the same time. In those days (1980, I think) one could mess with the color controls on a TV or video monitor, and with the addition of some video feedback get some pretty trippy vortex visuals. Turning the color settings way off and fucking with the contrast and other tiny knobs was very hands on, and not so different than messing with guitar pedals. One can’t do this with digital flat screen TVs—you’d have to access and manipulate a whole array of menus simultaneously, which isn’t really possible.
There were also some large banners of the inside of masks—Halloween masks of political figures (in this case Bush I and II hung on either side of Saddam Hussein). There is a whole series of these.
Note that the gallery space isn’t a white cube like the ones in Chelsea and elsewhere. It’s wood-paneled and half the floor is covered in wacky floral linoleum (made in Japan), so it has a little bit the feeling of a giant rec room or suburban basement.
There were some old and new lenticulars, which are sometimes known as winky dinks. In one older group Danielle Spencer and I altered some photos I’d taken of corporate tombstones so that from one view they’d have the name of the company, and from a couple of feet to the side they’d say something like “honesty” or “trust”—what these corporations would like to elicit from us, but certainly don’t these days.
Lastly, there was another group of lenticulars that each consisted of three photos of roundish objects on black backgrounds, but as one moved, the objects overlapped and almost morphed into one another. It becomes hard to see where one object begins and another ends.
Here’s a sample—as an animated gif. It’s not the same, but you get the idea.
We all went out for dinner a few times, and twice had a seasonal dish that Seiji said was made of the organ that fish eggs come from (but NOT the eggs themselves). He said its name is translated as “white baby.”
Needless to say, on my day off I went for a bike ride. There aren’t many bike lanes in Tokyo, but more and more people are riding anyway. There are lots and lots of bikes locked up here and there, and the bank where I used a cash machine had indoor bike parking! Not many banks in the U.S. cater to cyclists like that.
As some of the main thoroughfares are busy a lot of cyclists ride on the sidewalks, which is pretty insane from our point of view—though I didn’t see anyone get hurt or yelled at. But a few times as I was walking I had to jump out of the way as a housewife with a basket of groceries slalomed through the throngs of pedestrians.
I stopped at the Mori Museum—a contemporary art space on the top floor of one of Tokyo’s rare skyscrapers. This one in the middle of a development called Roppongi Hills that includes condos, offices, cinemas, shops, restaurants and a rooftop viewing area with a heliport. The main show was a retrospective of Odani Motohiko, a contemporary sculptor. He represented Japan at the Venice Biennial in 2003.
Then I biked to 21 21 Design Sight, a new design museum designed by Tadao Ando. The concrete building is half submerged in a park—which was a pleasant surprise, as a small urban public park is sort of a rare thing in itself in Japan. Though it’s a design museum and their upcoming show includes Sottsass and other furniture designers, their shows generally encompass an impressively wide range of material.
The show I saw was called Reality Lab, and it was curated by fashion designer Issey Miyake—who was also an instigator in the creation of this museum 3 years ago. Whether he curated all the parts, I’m not sure, but I think they were, which made it all the more surprising.
One section was an exhibit of meteorites—both actual and in large photo blowups, that allowed one to see their interior structure and makeup. In the same room were interspersed a collection of globes—some of Earth, but most of moons and other planets, colored to reveal their geologic structure or other features.
Further on there were large photos by Hiroshi Iwasaki of various items than had been frozen using a new technique called CAS (Cells Alive System) that minimizes tissue damage during freezing, which allows for specimen storage and food preservation than keeps nutrients, freshness and flavor intact. Like the meteorites and globes, this was almost more science exhibit than art of design, but the overlap was exciting.
There were more varied groupings of more science related items here and there, but the largest room featured a collaboration between Miyake and some scientists and students that eventually, no surprise, ended up as innovative designs for clothing.
Next to a wall covered with mathematical formulas (used in the process) were the beginnings of the designs—which were experiments in paper folding. Like Ikebana, origami has broken free of its roots and is now a hands-on way of investigating serious studies of morphology and topology. Believe it or not, the shapes below were made by folding flat pieces of paper!
In some display cases were samples of these paper foldings that one could touch and examine. I pulled a few apart gingerly to see how they were made, and even the Japanese kids around me were amazed, we all went ooh and ahh. I then had a little bit of a hard time getting the pieces to resume their folded shapes—luckily the paper has some memory, so it guided me.
Miyake then had the students do similar foldings with fabrics, which were sewn along just one side, creating a tube, and unfolded to make dresses that retained much of their foldings. He had metallic pigment (almost like silver leaf) roughly added to the top surface when the items were folded, so you saw what was exposed when the garment was in its folded configuration. Here is the garment emerging from its flat form in reverse order.
At her suggestion, we did a song we’d been writing together, one of about 8 or so. Our collaboration was partly inspired by the Dirty Projectors/Björk thing at Housing Works many months ago that we both attended. We agreed to do something similar there, though there is no timetable. Annie (her real name) has been on tour, on and off, for quite a while, so the collaboration proceeds in fits and starts. It was a good idea of hers to get this one song at least up to speed, as it gave us a deadline and allows us to see where problems and musical issues might lie.
Annie also came up with the concept of using a brass ensemble as the core band for these things, which gives us a unifying musical direction and coincidentally will also work nicely in someplace like Housing Works, where the “less in the PA the better” rule applies — the acoustic volume of brass instruments means that if we are careful the balance in that room could be natural, and mainly the voices will require amplification. It’s a case of music being written for a specific situation for sure.
Another one of our pieces looks like it’ll see the light of day this summer via Bang on a Can’s Asphalt Orchestra, which is kind of a new-music marching band. They’re larger than what we’re envisioning for most pieces, so they’ll help reconfigure and orchestrate what we’ve begun for their special needs and situation — outdoors, a large specific ensemble, in motion. They’ll perform around Lincoln Center in August. More news at 11.
I’ve done a slew of collaborations over the years — more and more as time goes by, and they are always slightly different from one another, though there are more similarities than differences. One could say that some of the songs co-written with other members of Talking Heads were also collaborations, so the give and take nature of collaborative writing skills got developed early.
The Here Lies Love project — due out in early April — was largely a collaboration with Fatboy Slim, and one of the most extensive I’ve done in while. Not all the 22 songs on that project were collaboratively written, but more than half were.
How do these things work?
My last record — the Byrne/Eno Everything That Happens Will Happen Today — was, as far as the process goes, typical in some ways. Brian had a slew of tracks on the shelf, tracks that seemed to want to become songs (as opposed to ambient tracks or film scores), but he was unhappy with his own attempts at completing them. So, from his point of view, he has nothing much to lose by passing them to me to “complete” — they were just gathering dust anyway (although one did get passed to Coldplay), and unless I did something horrendous (which we agreed he could veto), it was a win-win situation.
I was sent stereo mixes of his musical ideas, which I sometimes left alone and worked over as is, but just as often I slightly restructured them to bring them closer to a song form. However, I never even thought about requesting musical changes in the tracks — key changes, changes in groove or instrumentation. The unwritten game rules in these remote collaborations seem to be to leave the other person’s stuff alone as much as you can. Work with what you’re given; don’t try to imagine it as something other than what it is.
This always presents some musical challenges, of course, but the benefits generally outweigh them. The fact that half the musical decision-making has already been done bypasses a lot of waffling and worrying. I didn’t have to think about what to do and what direction to take musically — the train had already left the station and my job was to see where it wanted to go. This restriction on one’s freedom — that some creative decisions have already been made — turns out to be a great blessing. Complete creative freedom is as much a curse as a boon. Freedom within strict confines seems to be ideal.
I work in a home studio, which I’ve carved out of a larger room.
Tidy, eh? Embarrassing, actually.
There is no professional sound baffling, but the floors of this industrial building are concrete — and I put industrial carpet down on the floor, and one wall is a kind of sound absorbent sheetrock. Unless a truck backfires or an ambulance goes by it is OK for vocals and guitars. There’s no room for drums or anything like that… but for writing it is fine. There’s a good tube mic for singing, a radio studio mic for the little old guitar amp (woops, you can’t see it), and a nice pre amp and compressor. That’s pretty much all you need to find out where things want to go.
Serial numbers and security codes for software are pinned to the wall, along with a Tammy Wynette poster. The computer is under the desk. It’s a mess, it’s not much, but it’s enough for writing and, amazingly, some of the vocals I’ve done here end up being keepers. Guitar parts too — and of course, midi stuff, if it survives the evolution of a tune. The vocal I did on the hit version of the song “Lazy” — the collaboration with DJs X-Press 2 — was recorded using a decent mic into a G3 laptop! So clearly pro gear is nice but not super essential. The track those guys sent me sounded completely different texturally than how it ended up — they stripped it down and made it more “housey” after I sent in my vocal.
With Annie we’ve worked in a similar fashion to those collaborations, though from both directions. Sometimes (as in the song we did at the Allen Room) she’d give me some instrumental tracks she’d done in Garage Band using brass (and other) samples, and then I’d organize those using the music software Logic, and add some stuff of my own. In the case of this particular song I first added a “virtual” acoustic rhythm guitar and some percussion — which cemented the nice herky-jerky brass parts she had recorded. I sent these via email to her for approval. After that (she liked what I had done) I improvised a vocal melody on top — thus far without words. She liked that too.
She sent back some new brass chords and harmonies under one of my vocal verse sections — and that eventually turned into a middle 8 (sometimes called a bridge in the US). She also sent some melismatic vocal improvisations of her own that pushed the verses into being nicely asymmetric.
I did some further restructuring and began to write words — written to fit the metric and rise and fall of the vocal melody I’d improvised earlier. Many drafts later we had a song. While I was writing the words, I brought in Tony Finno, who had done arrangements for brass and strings for Here Lies Love and the Big Love score material I did a couple of years back, to do charts for her brass guys — who turned out to be horn guys more than brass guys, but they were flexible enough to cover the parts.
Although writing words to fit an existing vocal melody and meter is what anyone who writes in rhyme does naturally and intuitively — every rapper improvises to a meter, for example — I was encouraged to make the process more explicit when Talking Heads made Remain In Light. I found that, remarkably, solving the puzzle of making words and phrases fit existing structures often resulted, eventually and somewhat surprisingly, in words that did in fact have an emotional and sometimes even narrative thread. They may have begun as gibberish, but often, though not always, a “story,” in the broadest sense, emerges. Emergent storytelling, one might say.
With other St. Vincent collaborations that are in the works, I have sometimes started the brass parts on my end and then sent them to Annie; I’ve also sent her words, potential lyrics, that I had written. The latter is unusual, as I don’t usually write words in advance, but I wasn’t sure what form of collaboration she’d be comfortable with. So far none of those have achieved true song status. It’s all still evolving — where these will end up? We don’t know — and that’s a nice place to be in.
It seems she doesn’t like writing words — and she’s not alone there. Brian hates it as well. I find it to be the most labor-intensive part of songwriting, but when it works, and it doesn’t always, then the song can seem more like something whose constituent elements magically flowed out — something that emerged naturally, rather than something that was made in incremental pieces or layered up.
But at times words can be a dangerous addition to music — they can pin it down. Words imply that the music is about “that” (“that” being what the words say literally) and nothing else. They can, if not done well, destroy the pleasant ambiguity that is a lot of the reason we love music so much. That inherent ambiguity means that we can psychologically tailor music to our own needs, sensibilities and situations — but words limit that, or they can. There are plenty of beautiful tracks that I can’t listen to because they’ve been “ruined” by bad words — my own and others’. So I understand some folks’ trepidation, and my own sometime-failures.
Once I have a melody and vocal arrangement I, or both collaborators, like I’ll transcribe that gibberish as if it were real words. I’ll listen carefully to the meaningless vowels and consonants and try to understand what that guy emoting so indistinctly (that’s me) is actually saying. It’s like a forensic exercise. I’ll follow the sound of the nonsense syllables as closely as possible — if a melodic phrase of gibberish ends on a high ooh sound, then I’ll transcribe that as a word that ends in that syllable, or as close to it as I can imagine.
I do that because the sound, the difference between an ohh and an aah, and a B and a TH sound is, I assume, integral to the emotion being expressed. I want to stay true to it. Admittedly that emotion has no narrative or literal text thus far, but it’s there — I can hear it. I can feel it. My job is to find words that match it, that don’t destroy it.
Part of what makes words work in a song is how they sound to the ear and feel on the tongue. If they feel right, if the tongue (wooo!), and the mirror neurons of the listener (isn’t that part of why we love music and performance — mirror neurons?) are made to feel (neurologically) the delicious appropriateness of the words coming out, then that rightness sometimes trumps literal sense. We “sing” in our minds and muscles when we hear and see singing. In a sense, performance and listening to music is a participatory activity. So the writing of words — the putting them down on paper — is certainly part of songwriting, but the proof of the pudding is in the singing. If the sound is untrue, we can tell.
After the initial transcription of verbal sounds into nonsense sentences made of real words, a long, tedious process begins. I then begin to write out every phrase I can think of that matches that sonic/syllabic flow — no phrase is too mundane or stupid. I try not to pre-judge anything that occurs to me at this point — one never knows if something that sounded stupid at first will, in a new context, make the whole thing shine.
Sometimes sitting at a desk trying to do this doesn’t work. I never have writer’s block, but sometimes things do slow down. (And sometimes the shit backs up.) My conscious mind might be thinking too much — and at this point, one wants surprises and weirdness from the depths. Some techniques help in that regard — I’ll carry a small micro recorder and go jogging on the west side, recording every single phrase that matches the song’s meter as they occur to me. On the rare occasions when I’m driving a car, I can do the same thing — are there laws against driving and songwriting? Basically anything that occupies part of the conscious mind and distracts it works. The idea is to allow the chthonic material freedom to gurgle up.
I’ll accumulate many, many pages of this stuff, and then begin to sort through it. Sometimes just a verse, or even a phrase or two, will resonate — but that’s enough to “unlock” the thing, and from there on it’s more fill in the blank, conventional puzzle solving.
With Norm (Fatboy), I sometimes wrote songs over simple drum loops of my own, which Norm and Tom (Cagedbaby) Gandey then replaced with their own funkier and more characterful grooves. Other times Norm sent me basic groove loops — sometimes with some bass or instrument samples mixed in, sometimes not — and I sliced and diced those and wrote melodies and words over them. The songs in that project that I initiated myself tended to be more harmonically complex — to have more chord changes — than the groove-focused ones that Norm sent me. Together they made for a nice variety.
The lyrics on that project came about in a slightly different way for me. As I did research on the characters and their story, I took notes — emphasizing both curious and emblematic events, and things that the characters said. Often a direct quote from one of the characters put their feelings and point of view in such a perfect nutshell that much of my meandering lyric process was shortened. I often used the character’s own phrases: “Just say — here lies love” was one. “Please don’t — don’t let them look down on us” was another.
“I knew if I did not react they’d kill us, every one,” and, “I made a promise to my mother that for every tear she shed there’d be a victory” — these and many more were ever so slightly tweaked, and integrated. It was the easiest lyric writing task I’ve ever had.
I did another collaboration recently with Yuka Honda and Petra Hayden that I believe Petra will end up singing (though now I hear it’s a duet with me); a couple with Dirty Projectors for the Dark Was the Night charity record; and one with Dave Sitek of TV on the Radio is in progress. More are lined up on the runway. I’ve joined the roster of artists covering Peter Gabriel tunes in response to him covering our tunes. His record — orchestral versions of songs new and old — reminds me in some ways of the first Cat Power Covers record, in which it was sometimes halfway through a tune before you figured out what the song was. This is nowhere near that extreme, but he takes liberties with the songs — changing grooves and even melodies — in an effort to make them his. And in most cases he does. It’s a tough assignment covering songs that folks are familiar with, and sometimes a radical reassessment is the only way to make them new again.
I’ll have to do something similar to the song I cover — though exactly what remains to be seen. So many of his tunes are instantly texturally identifiable. In the era of recorded music, we have often come to think of one specific recording of a song as being “the song.” Is it? Legally, it’s not. Though it might seem unjust, I don’t think one can copyright sounds, a groove and a mix — though sometimes that’s what draws us into a recording. Anyway, I’ll have to somehow subvert that identification — as he did, but in some other musical way.
A writer at Pitchfork critically said I’d collaborate for a bag of Doritos. I do love it, and the results are sometimes surprising, sometimes creatively successful and sometimes even popular (“Lazy” was a huge hit everywhere except the US).
Beyond the reward of the bag of Doritos, why collaborate at all? One could conceivably make more money not sharing the profits — if there are any — so why collaborate if one doesn’t have to? If one can write alone, why reach out? (Some of the most financially successful songs I’ve ever written were not collaborations, for example.) And besides, isn’t it risky? Suppose you don’t get along? Suppose the other person decides to take the thing in some ugly direction?
Well, as I said earlier, one big reason is to restrict one’s own freedom in the writing process. There’s a joy and relief in being limited, restrained. For starters, to let someone else make half the decisions, or some big part of them, absolves one of the need to explore endless musical possibilities. The result is fewer agonizing decisions in the writing process, and sometimes, faster results.
Another reason to risk it is that others often have ideas outside and beyond what one would come up with oneself. To have one’s work responded to by another mind, or to have to stretch one’s own creative muscles to accommodate someone else’s muse, is a satisfying exercise. It gets us outside of our self-created boxes. When it works, the surprising result produces some kind of endorphin equivalent that is a kind of creative high. Collaborators sometimes rein in one’s more obnoxious tendencies too, which is yet another plus.
There are also some more market-oriented, pragmatic arguments for collaboration. If both collaborators are sort of well known, then there is a natural interest among the combined set of music fans. Part of the marketing has been done without having to do any corny PR. Even if the collaborators are not all that well known there is often some curiosity at what friction might result and what sparks might fly.
But one might also ask: Is writing ever NOT collaboration? Doesn’t one collaborate with oneself, in a sense? Don’t we access different aspects of ourselves, different characters and attitudes and then, when they’ve had their say, switch hats and take a more distanced and critical view — editing and structuring our other half’s outpourings? Isn’t the end product sort of the result of two sides collaborating? Surely I’m not the only one who does this?
