Reading about gamelan on Wikipedia:
In Bali, the Gamelan instruments are all kept together in the balai banjar, a community meeting hall which has a large open space with a roof over top of it with several open sides. The instruments are all kept here together because they believe that all of the instruments belong to the community as a whole and no one person has ownership over an instrument. Not only is this where the instruments are stored, but this is also the practice space for the sekaha (Gamelan orchestra). The open walls allow for the music to flow out into the community where the rest of the people can enjoy it.
The sekaha is led by a single instructor whose job it is in the community to lead this group and to come up with new songs. When they are working on a new song, the instructor will lead the group in practice and help the group form the new piece of music as they are practicing. When the instructor creates a new song, he leaves enough open for interpretation that the group can improvise and as a group they will be writing the music as they are practicing it.
The Balinese Gamelan groups are constantly changing their music by taking older pieces they know and mixing them together as well as trying new variations on their music. Their music is always constantly changing because they believe that music should grow and change; the only exception to this is with their most sacred songs which they will not change. A single new piece of music can take several months before it is completed.
I heard from a guy who went to Java to study gamelan that the musicians he studied with said that you don't play the music; you join the music.
My login name to Moveable Type is "nedlog," and I can't believe that name has stuck to me, or that I stuck it to myself. I came up with it when I needed a handle for blogging on randomWalks. Why didn't I use my real name, Mike, the way Sudama used his, Sudama? I guess I felt that next to "Sudama" "Mike" would sound rather bland. Nedlog came from the brand name of a kind of juice that was for sale at the dining hall at Hampshire College when I visited Sudama there, when we were both freshmen in college.
I had a pleasurable day of waking up, meditating, diddling around on the laptop for far too long and with far too little to show for myself, lifting weights at the gym, going to Target to buy a floor lamp I'm not sure I like, going Christmas shopping for Catherine (she left for Arizona before Xmas and gets back New Year's Day, and was kind enough not to appear to care that I didn't have most of her presents for her when she left), eating a Chipotle burrito (there's a new one open near my house, alleluia, but I'd rather live closer to El Charrito Caminante), then watching Fishing with John.
Have you seen this show? I think I read about it in Spin years ago, when I first read Spin and before I stopped for many years, and somehow it stuck in my memory all that time. So I got it from Netflix. The premise is that John Lurie, an actor, artist and musician that I first saw in Jim Jarmusch films, goes fishing in various locales in the company of Jarmusch, Willem Dafoe, Tom Waits, Matt Dillon and Dennis Hopper. Lurie has said that it was inspired by the more straightforward fishing shows you see on sports networks, but it has little in common with those.
I was anticipating something unusual, but I wasn't expecting the combination of cinematography that seems to feast on serendipity with the dialed-back, low-key surrealism of the scripting. For example, the show's narrator has the gravitas and grainy voice of a genuine nature-show voiceover guy, but is given to saying things such as "I'd love a bite of your sandwich" or "I think this is John's best show." At times, footage of birds on the wing or crocodiles slithering into rivers, rendered in dramatic slow-motion, inexplicably runs in reverse as well. In the episode with Dillon, Lurie and his compadre consult a reticent village sage for advice about a fish dance, which they then perform on the banks of a river with loony abandon (also rendered in slo-mo, incidentally).
Each episode is less than half an hour, a tasty nugget of cryptic absurdity. Eat all six! Now I'm a tasty nugget as well. Anyway, I saved the Dennis Hopper episodes for tomorrow.
The plan tomorrow: arise early enough to throw on my Saturday best and get to the Falls Church Farmers' Market to buy some Hondo Coffee. In Catherine's absence, I've reverted to drinking green tea in the mornings, but as I sipped bi luo chun today I thought, this is good, but it's not stacking up to a cup of rich black coffee. Coffee. There's nothing like it on earth. It is not just a drink but an experience, don't you agree? If this is not true, then why do we meet over coffee, read the paper with coffee, eat ice cream or cake with coffee, listen to folk music or poetry slams with coffee? We do so many important things with coffee nearby. Thus, it is a collective watering hole for our culture, but splintered into an infinite number of smaller holes whose surfaces wobble and shimmer in our mugs and cups made of paper and Styrofoam.
I must have freshly roasted coffee. From oily, shiny beans. And a French press. It shall be so. G'night.
Dammit, I love the Bad Plus, and I'll yell it from the barricades. Check out this NYT article with this quote from Ethan Iverson.
''When we all started playing together,'' Mr. King said, ''Ethan had never heard of Nirvana. Reid and I thought this was kind of incredible for a guy his age. This is what inspired us to play covers of rock songs. We'd wonder: 'Wow! What filters this stuff inside Iverson's head? What's he hearing?' We figured he'd give the music a fresh approach.''
So, what did he hear in Kurt Cobain and Nirvana? Mr. Iverson, sitting in his Brooklyn apartment with Mr. Anderson, who lives two blocks away, reflected for a moment.
''With everything I'm playing,'' he replied, ''I take, on some level, a dispassionate look at the raw materials -- the melodies and the harmonies. I basically rip off Stravinsky's way of dealing with harmony as much as I can.''
''Heavily implied in most of Mr. Cobain's music,'' he continued, ''are raw, open fifths. I take these fifths and stack them in every which way. These become the basis of my voicings and the language in my solos. Believe me, Stravinsky would have known how to shape Mr. Cobain's fifths.''
Also from the Times, this article about how a blog post from trumpeter Dave Douglas spurred a blog post by Iverson, which in turn led to "an open-source, alternative canon-building sweep" covering post-'60s jazz. Sometimes I really do forget just how powerful and cool the Internet is.
I read this Twitter message and felt bad that I didn't even know what happened on Wall Street this week. I'm woefully underinformed on the current economic situation, and feel irresponsible for it.
On the other hand, someone once asked Thich Nhat Hanh about media consumption, and he advised that people spend only about five minutes a day checking on the world's happenings. I find that sort of amazing, considering how much most people I know spend immersed in media. Though I must admit that I don't actually KNOW how much time my friends spend immersed in media. I should ask about this.
Let's just take a moment to acknowledge how wonderful Thich Nhat Hanh is. Right on.
Surely part of the reason that I enjoyed music so much more this year is that I met my roommate, Bob, this year. Well, technically he moved in last year, but it was in December, and we know each other better now. Anyway, Bob is younger than me (he's 24, I believe) and knows about a LOT of music that I've never heard of. It's great. We'll be sitting around and he'll say, "Oh man, this is what you really need to hear right now." And he'll put on something mind-blowing. Also, his own music is pretty damn awesome, and you should listen to it (I especially like "Thoughts Are Leaves").
I can think him for introducing me to Cold Sun, Girl Talk, Pere Ubu, the Free Design, Caribou and much more. And he also played me some key Animal Collective and Jens Lekman cuts before I heard them anywhere else, adding much joy to my life.
I'm mounting a plan: I want to be a DJ on WPFW. Larry Applebaum (who, incidentally, discovered the previously unissued recording of Monk and Trane at Carnegie Hall in 1957, which is some incredible music that you should hear right now) was kind enough to give me some advice the other night about how to get into the station -- I called him while he was in the studio, amazingly remembering the phone number which I had last called months ago to score a few free tickets to Twins Jazz.
Then I called the program director and said, hey, let me on the air. Then I e-mailed him to ask for an application form. Next I'd supposedly take a training class, then, if the p.d. is down with it, I could subhost.
I would love to host a music show on FM radio. I did it at WFDD back in the day, but those shows were probably hard to listen to. I was young and idealistic--"everyone should like the music I like!"--and also not the best at delivering voice tracks. (Weird, Coltrane just came up at random on my iPod.) I think I could do a good job now. The thing is, I sometimes doubt myself because I think I might not know enough about any one genre of music to program an entire show every week. On the other hand, a few hours a week seems like a lot of time, but I know from experience that it goes by fast. My ideas about songs to play could get me by for a while.
So call WPFW and say, "Allow Mike Janssen to be on the air!" And then, I will invite you to come on my show and play one of your favorite songs, and I will interview you about it, and ask you why you like it so much. And thus we will have an interesting conversation, and I will stop writing like Junie B. Jones now.
Tonight I scored some nice used CDs at Orpheus Music in Arlington, prior to attending my Scrabble game night. A Willie Bobo comp, a Vijay Iyer disc, Steve Lacy playing Monk, a two-disc set of John Zorn's Masada live in Jerusalem in '94, and a disc of gamelan. Dudes, gamelan is the next pop music. I swear it, you're gonna turn on your radio tomorrow and hear some crazy-ass gamelan shit spewing out as the DJ says "This is the new one from Gamelan Batel!!!!!! Tune in later for our remix of the Ramayana Monkey Chant, as seen in Baraka, the summer blockbuster of 2004!"
I'm embarrassed that this is such a serious fantasy. I'm such a snob.
Currently rocking to: McCoy Tyner's solo in "Afro Blue" on Coltrane's One Down, One Up, a scary good album. As Miles Davis would say, or would he, McCoy Tyner was a motherfucker.
The clerk at Orpheus told me that they never play albums at the store, just CDs, because the turntable is covered with 150 CDs that they'd have to move. I found this quite ironic. I'd like to produce a narratorless piece for WAMU about that. Dude, I should pitch it to Metro Connection. Dude, I'm going to. Anyway, I just found that terribly ironic. And the part-time clerk was a talker, and Zappa geek, which I used to be in a half-hearted kind of way.
"Guest Host: NULL." Do you think Gary Null guest-hosted all those shows? I fricking love Gary Null. Something about his voice is like 280-grain sandpaper.
Couraje.
I'm going to start a band: Tag Cloud. It will be a laptop band. It will be awesome. This goal may be aided by the fact that my mom bought me one of these today — technically for Christmas, but I get to noodle with it sooner on the condition that I write a holiday song. Hmm. Better get working on that.
Speaking of things with X in them, Xgau's best of 2007, via Brooklyn Vegan. I have a general sense that this has been a good year for music, though I rarely think about the music I'm listening to in a chronological frame. Perhaps I just enjoyed music a lot this year. I really did — today I was digging Taffetas, for example. I still have not picked up the new M.I.A. Ach!
Tyler Cowen digs on Meaza, which reopened not long ago just down the street from where I live. And I agree that it is quite good, and boasts nice ambiance to boot.
Monday night Catherine and I were planning to celebrate our first anniversary (if you don't account for the month or so we spent broken up) by returning to Etete on 9th St. NW, where we met for our first date last December. But we were sidetracked by a new Mexican restaurant a few doors down, El Sol, outside of which I ended up parking the car. Overall I wouldn't recommend it. The pupusas were dry and bland; the margaritas' color (green) and taste (fake) suggested a mix at work; and the entrees were unimpressive, especially when my vegetable burro arrived with steak. Yuck. Stick with the Ethiopian restaurants on the block, especially Etete and Abiti.