Crescendo, Tension, Pleasure...(that's what she said?)

 So I am going to start this post off by saying I owe it completely to one thing...hip hop music.  That being said, we will arrive at the reason later on.  So I've been struggling for some time with balance in the crazy world of avant-garde innovative hipster post-punk nihilistic apocalyptic impressionistic free-jazz noise existentialistic crescendo oriented DIY postmodern.....indieness? I don't really know what any of that meant but I kind of touched on it in my art post. Art for art's sake.....you're an artist if you dress like, act like, listen to the music of, eat at the restaurants of....well whomever culture calls artists at the time.  It's all part of my constant struggle to be self-aware, continually re-inventing myself, not necessarily my values or the core of who I am, but simply realizing that I may be a very different person in a year...or tomorrow, and that what I adhere to today I may not tomorrow. If I met me a year ago I'd probably laugh at myself. If I met me five years ago I would most certainly laugh at myself.  Where was I?....Oh yeah self examination...anywho all of this is to say that in thinking of things like the kind of paintings I like, the kind of books I read, the movies I enjoy, the music I listen to, I like to look at their parts, why I like them, why they make me feel a certain way......(alright quick side note, it just hit me that my posts take so long to develop/actually get to the point, because I like to try and express the ways in which my mind works.  This is not an easy task because my mind operates in peculiar ways and so I suppose expressing my train of thought and the ways in which one of my ideas connect to and seed the next, seems, well, chaotic to say the least. Thank you for bearing with me in this moment of........self examination)....Well looking at the popular trend of instrumental ambient crescendo post rock that is oh so popular in independent music today (and which I myself enjoy and play) what is it we like so much about these bands?  I believe the key to the feelings music like this give us can be wrapped up in one word, tension.  Now stick with me here, because here goes my mind.....most high levels of human physical pleasure come from the absence and anticipation of a basic desire/need.  Take for example when you have not eaten in quite some time.  Think back to one of those incredibly long days that leave you dead. You overslept and did not have time to grab breakfast before work, but that cup of coffee seems to be doing a fine job of killing your hunger.  Well soon enough that creeping feeling of hunger finds you, but of course you don't get a lunch break. Well after your shift your sister, wife, mother, brother, roommate, whomever it is in your life needs you to do that thing for them that is time consuming and urgent so you go straight from work to do that because, well, you're just that kind of guy/gal.  Anyway you get the picture, your day gets filled up and you haven't had a chance to eat. This pain in your stomach makes that moment when you finally make yourself a turkey sammy and chow down, oh so much better. It could even be a sub-par sandwich but it tastes like a feast of the gods because you are famished.  Why is that?  Well let us think back earlier to your maelstrom of a day.  The whole time that pain in your stomach grows, you feel your blood sugar level dropping, you get short tempered and light headed. That entire time you are anticipating that mediocre sandwich. As you become more and more irritable there is a growing tension. The more you think to that Utopian future in which you and the turkey sammy are together at last, the more the tension grows.  That growing tension actually has some pleasure in itself, because of the anticipated plateau of satisfaction.  Nevertheless that tension is what brings absolute ecstasy when heaven between two slices of wonderbread is in your hands. Now let us relate this to music.  Those post-punk ambient rock songs with those guitar riffs that use way too many pedals to get that ambient spacey sound make us feel so awesome, because of their structure.  Those songs are built with ups and down, climbs and drops which eventually lead to a climax of epic indie rock goodness.  It is not however the plateau of the song we love most.  It is of course, that moment right before the zenith of the ballad that we long for most.  Those few seconds when the tension meets the satisfaction is what makes us feel like we want to climb a mountain.  Hey remember that one time when I said this post was inspired by hip hop? Yeah that was cool....well Joe McElroy and myself were listening to my new obsession, P.O.S He introduced me to this amazing rapper that evening and we were talking about how indie music should incorporate more rap the way P.O.S incorporates rock into his hip hop. Well one of his songs we listened to is called The Brave and The Snake. I realized this song does the same thing, especially at the beginning of track, that an Explosions in the Sky song does. It builds tension.  It does this in a very different way however.  Instead of ups and downs of building guitar lines and cymbal crashes, it uses the absence of sound to build tension.  The beginning of this song is fairly simple and steady, but gives you an ominous feeling.  The entire time this instrumental intro to the track is going on there is an overbearing feeling that something is about to happen, that a bomb is going to go off. Twice during the intro several of the samples and instruments drop to a low hum, this absence of sound, similar to the absence of food in your stomach on that long day we talked about, builds the tension.  Of course these drops are only a tease to keep you hanging on for that moment that....BAM! P.O.S breaks the silence with an explosion of intellectual, fast paced lyrical genius.  I suppose all of this is just an incredibly long winded way of saying, it's cool to look at things in a different light.....sorry it took so long.
Here's that song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kx1OCJ2gbEA
Cheers!

Ninety-Five

The bridges twist and shiver
Before they snap like straw
Whose ends have been pushed too close
to one another

and I whisper in your ear
"This is how the world ends"

Alert the Sky
The Ground has opened
and has begun to swallow jet planes
and steam mills
and all those things we stood upon

as we shouted
"This is how the world turns"

Our boat is gutted and torn
The sea which at one time
carried this machine upon its back
now stretches fingers into its belly
as the clouds applaud and shout 
This vessel holds us close
as it submits to the earth's desire

and I whisper to you
through the cracks between each finger
"This is how the world ends"

You take my hand
and say
"The world will not end in fire
or water
or earth
but in the space between your heart and chest
that place where kindness lives and dies
lives or dies..."

"What is the sound of redemption?"
I shout
"What stretches forth when it is struck
What resonates through the staircase
of a cracked and rotting lighthouse
Who cannot but lead a sinking ship to shore...."

I opened my hands
from clenched fists
And they were covered in dust.

The Greatest Waste of Time

Lately I've been giving a lot of thought to art.  This "art themed" cloud looming over my head was most likely birthed by my Origins of Modernism class I am currently taking, and loooooving.  Anywho my professor was talking about.......(enter name of 1930's french Marxist who by the 1950's recanted most of his leftist beliefs and whose name completely escapes me) and how in the mid 20th century he deemed modernism as being about one and only one thing: flatness.  He said that what set modernist art apart from every other period of art and kept it from simply being some trendy fad that a bunch of french commies jumped on, was the modernist's recognition that painting was all about two dimensions.  He claimed that all those really smart dead guys who did a bunch of cool stuff in Italy that would later be called The Renaissance, actually had the whole painting thing completely wrong.  Painting, in its essence, is all about recognizing first and foremost that it is, in actuality, simply the placing of paint on a flat surface.  You absolutely should not be trying to make things that have two dimensions look as though they have three...because they do not.  Modernist painting recognized that all they were given was two dimensions, and they worked with that, and did a darn good job if you ask me.  Aaaaanywho, things like this make me think about my own experience with art and what it means.  Let me go ahead and say I am the harshest critic of myself.  I have done maybe two complete works with paint that I am actually happy with.....ever.  That being said I often wonder if I am truly putting myself into what I am doing.  I find myself thinking that my art is simply an expression of my brain's interpretation of visual stimulants I've taken in that are deemed acceptable by a cultural sector known as the art world. I've had a lot of ideas floating around in my head as of late, but simply have not had the time to invest in them. My wish is simply that some day I will look at my art objectively and be able to pick it out of crowd of finger paintings and trash glued to canvas and say that, at the very least, I expressed part of my experience, while still allowing the art to live and breath and grow somewhat on its own (and to hopefully not write run-on sentences anymore). And no that part about the art living wasn't me trying to sound "avant-garde" or "hip" or like thick rimmed glasses, beards, and PBR were the greatest things to ever happen to me.....I genuinely meant and believe it. Nighty Night.

P.S. I loved watching Bryce go bonkers tonight :)     

Well here goes nothing....literally

     Alright well I suppose I have finally gone through with making my own blog.  Perhaps this came about out of some false sense that what I have to say about the things that go on inside my head and in my everyday life are actually intriguing enough for others to take time out of their day to observe.  Perhaps this came about due to some narcissistic feeling of importance born out of a random pretense floating in the back of my mind that tells me people sit around for hours grieving over the fact that they do not know exactly what is happening in my head at any given moment.  It could be the result of my understanding the voyeuristic nature that seems to be born inside of every human being on the face of this planet and forces them to have a clinical obsession with the lives of others (perhaps as a subconscious effort to convince themselves that minds outside of their own do in fact exist).  Any way you look at it maybe this will be more than a simple distraction from everyday monotony, hopefully you (assuming of course YOU are actually reading this. I would not be surprised in the least if this blog ends with me carrying on hour long conversations with myself at 3 a.m. including of course the occasion yelling at the computer screen things like "Yeah that's how I feel! *sips coffee* of course you're siding with her! you're both republicans!!!" *flips off laptop*) will find some amusement in my humor/cynicism/emotionally-abusive-relationship-with-coffee.  Hopefully I will learn a thing or two about myself by ordering my thoughts into grammatically correct sentences placed one after the other in paragraph form. At the very least I hope this will delay the deterioration of my sanity. Anywho enjoy......or at least laugh at me and then convince me that I'm laughing too.