Last Thursday on Alberta

Last Thursday has been picking up popularity since this summer when there were so many pedestrians walking the streets that they petitioned to make trimet buses take a different route and keep cars from driving down the street. This open-art-gallery event is more like a block party, with street performers, barbequed corn on the cob, and fire-juggling acrobatic dancers. If you’re looking for a quiet casual evening, you’re better off moseying around the pearl district on first Thursday, because last Thursday crams all the action into one happening street where the crowds are unavoidable and the vibe is celebration.

potential song lyrics of mine

If you are a luxury
And I’ve got no money
Is this just a fairytale
To think that we could be Royalty?
And if I had your body
Held fast underneath me
Are we making love then?
Or am I just a poor thief?

Time-Based Art Festival Ends with a Splash

Sitting on the cement ledge of world-renowned Lawrence Halprin’s Keller Fountain, looking across and down as the dancers dressed in white and blue slowly invade the platform planks and submerge their bodies in the fluid stage below, whets the appetite for the two-hour-long adventure to come. Dancers cannonball underwater 30 feet above the miked string-quartet avidly bouncing their bows and flittering there fingers to Morton Subtonik’s “A Fluttering of Wings” creating an icy eerie texture on this hot sunny day. The mixture of live sound-recorded pieces repeated over the ambient noise-rhythms of “Five Legged Stool” and “A Sky of Cloudless Sulpher,” Anna Halprin’s choreography matches this strange music with guided interpreted dance. At the end of the piece, a gold bell rings at the top of the applause and the crowd stands up and follows-the brightly dressed TBA volunteers to the next segment of the performance.

The beauty of this event is its placement in the city. Outside of business buildings, in Pettygrove Park, where people usually keep to themselves or gather in small groups during lunch hour, the collective audience of two-or-three-hundred floods the cement center and takes a seat off of the park benches. Older folks hand over their canes and plop down on their small area of cement squeezed next to mothers with infants and people with digital cameras. The performers surround the central audience raised up on grassy knolls for a humorous game of musical Telephone. Each raised hill houses two dancers and an instrumentalist. The violinist standing on a chair in the middle of the crowd guides the French horn player, flautist, cellist, and others transforming Pauline Oliveros’s “Tree/Peace,” meant for a piano trio, into an interpretive responsive octet and dance crew.

The Lovejoy Fountain, complete with a grand piano placed in the base of the fountain proved that even the musicians were going to get their feet wet that day. Terry Riley’s “In C” begins with the metronome-like octaves of C played on the piano as xylophones, bassoons, trumpets, and keyboards and an array of percussive instruments sound from all different angles of the outer edges of the audience. Dancers take to the fountain placing wet handprints on the dry cement wall, and climbing above the ledge flipping cups upside-down over partially opened hands letting the water drip out like sand through a glass timer. One dancer repeatedly throws a cup full of water over the ledge of the fountain and lets the water disperse magically into droplets as it falls 25 feet into the pool of water below. Terry Riley’s piece gets slowly replaced by percussionists, including Lewis & Clark’s own Brett Pascal (slightly disguised in a sunhat), banging on metal buckets with chains, entering the fountain, and clanking the inside strings of the piano reaping playful havoc. Just as Terry Riley’s piece changes each time it is played depending on how long each of the instrumentalists plays one musical rhythmic and simple melodic idea, the open-to-the-public closing event of the Time-Based Art Festival acted as a guide to an experience that an artist takes with his or her art, and the audience takes with the performance.

The audience ends the ceremony by joining hands in a circle with women dressing and undressing in the middle of the circle. As you leave and unlink hands with the stranger next to you, one of the event staff looks you strangely in the eye placing a pin on your hand that reads “PLAY” and sternly says, “Please, go play.” Retracing steps through the city parks and fountains gave those spaces all new meanings, and invited the people of Portland to play together in our communal spaces.

Clearing the work out of the play

I've spent three years, six semesters, playing this game of the student, trying to get my mind around massive subjects, pulling up a magnifying glass to nitty gritty details, and spending god knows how many hours in the library waiting for paper ideas to materialize into coherent sentences. and i'm finally starting to feel a change that was articulated so simply in todays lecture. "In order to become successful you have to have discipline, not the kind of discipline where you work all the time, but where you work hard for a good hour and then play for 2 hours."

Yesterday I did just that at the closing performance of the time-based art festival here in downtown Portland. I'll be posting pictures of this joyful experience (ending with the perfect memoriabilia pin with the word "PLAY" on it now strapped to my bag) when I organize that experience into a sort of review. For now I'm just marveling at how much better life is when you do separate the work from the play.

Before heading to Nora's class today, I got the urge I haven't had in at least two weeks to just sing and play my guitar. It helped having no one home and 10 solid minutes before I needed to speed away on my bicycle to get to class, of course longer would have been good but it was enough to make me want to return home after class for session number two, mirah tabs in hand, new song ideas of my own ready to be recorded on garageband, for the later more serious work/play of finishing and rewriting songs. I'm still working on clearing away the fog that work casts over my clear sunny dreams, and on days like today I'm allowing those dreams to peak their heads out of the covers; I'm giving them the time they need to wake up and sing in the morning. I'm still too afraid to post what those dreams might be, and the "covenant" to myself we were asked to write up in class the other day. I have a feeling, like I always do, that my dreams involve the community of the arts (music in particular) and my place within it. For now I'll make sure to only do work when I'm doing work, and leave the rest of my time to explore whatever's inside my curious soul, and unabashedly go outside and PLAY.

Sister, Sister

Think of your favorite hip-hop song, take out the profanities, and replace that thrusting bass line with smooth electronic ambient rhythms, and you're making your way closer into the world of Cocorosie. Sisters Bianca Lellani Casady, nicknamed Coco, and Sierra Rose Casady, nicknamed Rosie, recreate a childlike innocence clashed with harsh adult subtleties using bits and pieces from hip-hop, folk, classical/opera, electronica, and reggae in their most recent album The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn. The wind-up music box in “Bloody Twins,” the kazoo in “Werewolf,” and the bike bell in “Animals” are a few examples of the creative sound effects that litter each track. There is a simplicity to Bianca’s raspy rhyming spoken/sung words reminiscent of rap that is lifted up by her sister Sierra’s opera-inspired vocal lines drifting out into another realm of angelic sweetness.

These at times magnificently sounding songs each have an element of darkness mixed in. Divorce and separation shaped the sisters’ childhood and it was not until their 20’s that they even became close. Sierra lost touch with Bianca when she was sent to boarding school as a teenager, and she later moved to Paris to study opera. Bianca studied linguistics and sociology, wrote music and pursued art on her own until her artistic soul sent her wandering, and she serendipitously landed at her sisters apartment. The music they wrote together and recorded in Sierra’s bathroom spread through friends and in March 2004 the freshly formed Cocorosie released their successful La Maison de Mon Reve through the Indie label Touch and Go Records, and toured with Ratatat, Bright Eyes, and Devendra Banhart. The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn goes further out on a limb than Cocorosie’s first album in order to further explore what they seem most interested in—mixing together ideas that don’t usually go together, harsh cruelty with happy-go-lucky melody, children’s toys played with harps.

The song “Bloody Twins” slowly creaks along to the chiming of a music box with lyrics about being kissed and turned into roses. “Japan” begins where “Bloody Twins” left off with a wind-up-music-box feeling being cranked faster and then slower, and soon shifts into a reggae sing-along with a surprising pile of heavy lyrics. Cocorosie introduces severe irony in the third verse about Jamaica, which includes the lines "they'll take you home and then they'll rape you” and adds joyfully “but you like it so say thank you." Again they mix their childlike sound with some intense references to war in the fourth verse, "Everybody wants to go to I-raq / but once they go they don't come back / bringing peanut butter jelly, and other snacks / we might have our freedom but we still go down." Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are the trademarks of elementary school lunch boxes, but this image only serves to infantilize the soldiers, making war seem like an exciting field trip from home.

The name of the CD is a bit troubling and ironic also—The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn. "The adventures of Ghosthorse" is a little creepy for the ghost reference, but could sound like a viable children's book title, until we get the side-kick to Ghosthorse which is "Stillborn," a dead infant. These women aren't afraid to use some non-PC language and images, and they can't be tossed out with other artists who seem to be experimental for the sake of being experimental. They've got a message here that’s coming out of their messy room of toy instruments and silly-serious lyrics. And they naturally place the unlikely mixture of opera and hip-hop into the same disorderly, but complete family.

Inventive Ancient Oddities

I can't tell if Meredith's Monk's ancient earthy vocal music in her 1980's CD Dolmen Music has gone extinct today or if it is a form of genius from another universe. The final track "Dolmen Music: Overture And Men's Conclave - Wa-Ohs - Rain - Pine Tree Lullaby" could be the musical backdrop to the origins of humankind all orderly gathered around stonehenge in the year 2,900 BC as the monoliths magically raise into their perfect positions in the ground. Her voice is a sort of tribal-cavewoman-meets-alien-space-creature surprise jumping out over her minimalist soothing piano snippets on repeat. But somehow she landed on earth showing us vocal technique far beyond a country yodel and trill. She makes Schoenberg's use of sprechstimme seem like baby talk in her grown-up ensemble of awkward vocal oddities. Monk communicates laughter, deep moaning and weeping using gibberish speech-song and sounds, all without saying more than a few English words on the third track of her five-track album. Whether you are interested in studying extreme vocal technique, or simply want to be entertained by what could qualify as a 20th century musical from mars, Dolmen Music is worth the wild journey it sparks.

Kronos Quartet : Short Stories

The Kronos Quartet album "Short Stories" is aptly named, take the twelve and a half minute song "Cat O' Nine Tails," continuously morphing from one extremely short story into the next without warning.

The first minute is relentless with change of style and genre, like a commercial with too many images packed in for you to take in at once, its audio-overload. Brief moments of tonality disperse madly into chaotic dissonance over and over, landing someplace entirely unexpected each time. This is a quartet with serious multiple personality disorder. just when you think you are getting to know the piece it morphs into something different. The photo on the cover of the cd with a birds-eye-view picture of a typewriter with flames coming out of it does a good job of representing the madness that goes on in these songs. you can picture the performers hammering away their skittish story on the typewriter which releases a fire fueled by a curiosity driven to madness. It is enough to spark your interest. It is easy to forget in moments of extreme dissonance and discontinuity that there is an incredible skill at work, and here there is.

If nothing else you could come to this saying you've never heard anything quite like it. They use all kinds of inventive techniques to play each of the four stringed instruments, making a cello sound like an angry dog, and the slapping and stretching of strings sound like bamboo being pushed and snapped in a creepy forest. The instruments take on a human or animal quality in what seems like a short horror story, arriving at times in moments of beautiful sadness. Half way through the song, diminished chords fade into silence and then get scooped up into a tacky version of a hoe-down dance from your middle school country-line-dance class, departing into something less familiar just in time to keep you from skipping to your next track on your shuffle setting of i-tunes. One can only imagine how this piece is notated for all of the strange sounds that manage to come out of these traditional instruments (presumably a cello, viola, and two violins). The creaking of a door sliding slowly pulled out of the cello into the casual strum of a violin, they throw you into snippets of familiar genres, and sweep you right back out of them with haunting sound effects and precise chaos. this music is refreshing and alive, and a bit frightening, you would have to be brave to play this one loud with your windows down in the summer time (and a bit neurotic feeling). But its worth listening to in a safe secluded place, for an experience all together unique and difficult to understand.

First day of class -- McCartney

Before today I was doing a bad job of describing what this class was to people. "It's called music and language... we are reading about billie holliday, it should be really cool." I am pleased to be writing about music, creatively and critically.

Today in class we listened to Paul McCartney's new album. The introduction sounded like tuning instruments with a rhythm behind it, it sounded chaotic. Then the music thinned out and there was a dialogue between the low strings and the drum and slowly built back up with more instrumentation and more layers. The instruments did not have a big range of notes used, it was not very melodic or lyrical, but instead, pressing and marching forward without changing. it sounded disjointed with jolting rhythms.

perhaps listening to the rest of the song would have allowed it time to become more melodically interesting, but i thought mccartney's limited understanding of music theory was really apparent in the lack of diversity in the string parts. It wasn't close to the caliber of composers we compared him to in class, stravinsky's rite of spring and beethovens ninth symphony, but it was an interesting atmospheric kind of music to listen to.