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TANKERTOWN weekly web comicxks
posted by elvis A GENTLEMENS' ROUNDEN-TABLET CLOPS: What would you do with your financial backing? ELVIS: Without being more specific, this question doesn’t really strike me as hypothetical! What we currently do with our meager financial backing is devote the most time we can to creating, rehearsing, publishing and performing the best music we can with the best gear we can. Now, if I had serious ‘bug out’ moneys, on the other hand – I would seriously bug out! Southern Alaska may not be too bad a place to start… MR. BRIANS: Art consultants are a tricky breed (men and women). The deceit they are capable of is amazing. I worked at a premier gallery in San Francisco and one of the consultants ripped me off. He offered me ten Jacksons to drive a $60,000 print by Arranz-Bravo to a penthouse and hang it, which I did no problemo. I asked for payment and he swore he put it in my mailbox, which he absolutely did not. Rather than press the issue, I deleted his entire Outlook personal folder and quit the job shortly after. The fine art retail world is an international network of haphazard appraisals, false information about supply and demand, and forgeries. The same gallery got busted for carrying fake Dalis. Luckily I was not responsible for authenticating that series, probably because I would have noticed. MAYOR MCFACE: An interesting query sir, but first: I insist on being called Mayor McFace for the duration of this conversation. Back to the topic at hand: Hell is an imagined landscape or emotion, and as far as I accept the concept of willful suggestion as the preliminary tool for internal creation - that I am the 'maker' and 'decider' of my own creative landscape - then it is my role to construct it. But as my concept of hell is one that has been shaped by the suggestion and teachings of others, as well as my own independent creative will, I would say that it is a shared construction. In my own hell there is a laughing dragon with skeleton finger eyeballs that flosses his bat teeth with a slow and never ending string peel of my physical and emotional being. There is incredibly bad comedy playing just loud enough to be audible, but not loud enough to make it funny. As far as financial hell is concerned I would say being without finance is hellish and that there are varying opportunities for financial stability based on a plethora of things such as social class, connections and school opportunities, whether or not you are a slave, etc. As in the imagined sense there is an extrinsic and an intrinsic creation to this hell. CHAUNCEY: Material reality is a realm external to one’s self, whereas imagined reality is generated internally by one’s own consciousness. The first situation is one wherein power is located externally, and the second situation ascribes responsibility to the actor. I believe the agent takes primacy over the other. posted by clops Elvis's Konspiracy Korner posted by elvis TANKERTOWN weekly web comicxks
posted by elvis RETURN OF THE CURSE OF THE BOOTLEGGER'S GHOST The irregular bootlegging of the king anti-blog 'anon' author behind the "Findings" page in HARPER'S now carries an extra-enthusiastic recommendation that you subscribe to their fine magazine, as they have now archived their entire fucking catalog online for subscribers. Still so cheap, now super-value size.
posted by elvis A GENTLEMENS' ROUNDEN-TABLET CLOPS: What is the unknown? CANSAFIS: Untenable Unattainable Undefineable Indescrible --- wait – that is not necessarily the truth now that I think on it. The unknown is knowable in that it exists as an idea, and likewise it is attainable as well. It’s mutable – a place existing mainly in thought that defines that which we do not know. But like the great “tree fart” question (if a tree farts in a forest does anyone smell it), it is interesting to ponder whether it can have a true existence outside of the idea itself. I feel the same way about ‘nothing’ and potentially ‘chaos’. The unknown is fluid and specific to its thinker. I found a three-pronged feather on my desk this morning – it is ‘unknown’ who left this for me. In my version of the unknown it was a sexy redheaded bird. But at the instant of this guess my ‘unknown’ has now become a ‘pondering’ (sucking up to a panda bear = ‘pandering’). You don’t and shall never know the unknown. And because I can get specific, “The Unknown” is now my superhero mantle for when I bust art fakers for being fake artists; my magic work is “Splazaam!” and if you’re faking it you better quit that shit motherfucker-motherfucker. “Splazaam!” Mr. Brians, “The Vague” is to become a new dance craze – how does one do it? MR. BRIANS: Just watch Elvis when he dances to Jefferson Airplane. I think it’s the only music he dances to! We should film and grab cool photos. Elvis, what’s the most underrated Jefferson Airplane / Starship song, and why? ELVIS: I will dance to anything like that given the sufficient psilocybin dose. My familiarity with Slick & co. thankfully runs shallow, so my uninformed opinion is that obviously all the good Airplane is correctly-rated. That leaves Starship and I will have to go with the oft-reviled “We Built This City (On Rock and Roll)”. If you simply listen to it and understand that it was recently voted the worst single ever (USA TODAY 4/18/2004) it is hard to draw another conclusion. Simple empiricism. Chauncey, how did simple empiricism treat you over the weekend? CHAUNCEY: Michelle and I share our tiny studio apartment in SF, and as I was scrubbing the kitchen floor, I realized through repeated experience that certain parts of the floor will never be clean. I think once one extrapolates empiricism past these sort of mundane household chores, though, the endpoint is inexorably an oleaginous ontology, which can ruin your whole weekend if you let it. posted by clops OGE KRAP
posted by cansafis TANKERTOWN weekly web comicxks
posted by elvis LOCAL SCENE 10/19/0007 The gratitude of a fine anesthesiologist found me with two primo tickets to the above affair when visiting New York recently. I thought I was half-prepared, but was truly unprepared. I have been a musician for nearly 20 years, but this is the first time I have attended a professional orchestral performance. I can only say that this sound can never be captured by a microphone, and when I wasn't trying to stop crying like a baby the following things struck me: The sound of a critical mass of unamplified acoustic instruments is quite simply the best sound in the world. We should all continue to move forward with amplified musics, but let us not forget where it all began: finely made acoustic instruments playing in harmony in a number and room sufficient to make your time & worldly concerns utterly evaporate. This is not only a different sound than a killer rock band destroying on stage, it is an objectively superior one. This is a fine thing. Hierarchies get a bad rap - get over it or go back to grad school! Of course, the composition helps, too. I found the emotional content of the opening piano concerto overwhelming in large part due to the call & response nature of Beethoven's relatively simple but pristine melodies. The solo piano would be repeatedly answered by the full ensemble and knock my socks off every time. This Lewis guy is a monster and was clearly afforded the distinction, as while everyone else on stage had the coattails & black dresses, he had a sloppy black shirt with no collar and the right attitude. I didn't hear a bad note from him and he was tempting fate for the entire concerto. The median age of the audience was astounding. You may laugh but I was shocked that I didn't see a single other person obviously under 35, and many folks who must have to fight with an oxygen tank and nurse to get out of their upper east side apartment to the cab! This can't be wholly attributed to the price of the tickets in a market like Manhattan. There is clearly a dire generation gap growing in the audience for this music and the effects will be interesting to observe. Maybe it will just always be old people supporting the old masters, including our generation when we get old. Or maybe it will disappear for a while, or forever. Regardless, the performers were much younger, as is generally the rule. When a rock band makes a living playing covers of other musicians' music, they are generally looked down upon by other musicians. This is still the case, but the taboo is slowly lifting as it is (correctly) viewed as just another of the rapidly diminishing options for a professional musician to make a living doing anything remotely related to the music they sincerely desire to create & perform. I wonder if it works like this in orchestral circles: are many of these musicians just 'slumming' it playing Beethoven or Verdi, and nursing their true projects along on the ever-unprofitable side? If you are the type to complain about the lack of physical engagement at the typical hip low-level rock show, then you should check out one of these. I am not one to tear up the dance floor but I am compelled to move when confronted with a live performance that moves me. As far as I could see from my box seat (most of the floor and many other boxes), not a single person was as much as nodding their head. I couldn't help bobbing & weaving - they were tearing it up! Right now, pick a serious Beethoven symphony in your head (or just approximate one), and imagine yourself hearing it performed live, to perfection, in a hall that sounds gorgeous, and imagine sitting perfectly still for the duration. Weird. Serious drugs would be required to explain this response among most of the population. The actual visual aesthetic design of the Avery Fisher Hall was appalling. I was told it was very recently re-designed from the ground up, to ensure better acoustics for all seats. That is fine and it sounded fantastic from my seat in the front box, stage left, but even as a non-specialist I could easily discern the design from the acoustic choices, and the design choices amounted to a distracting and cheaply 'woody' affair that could be improved upon by any ambitious 12-year-old. That is my advice for this fallen post-cultural society: declare a moratorium on all current & future architectural projects, and hand over the design reigns to a promising middle school student with an aesthetic interest. Then the specialists (acoustic, engineering, or otherwise) can supervise the kid's choices to make sure nothing goes horribly wrong, and otherwise abide by their decisions. Imagine if they built the suburbs, or downtown San Francisco, like that instead! Stage presence is a subtle and almost infinitely negotiable thing. This becomes obvious when you consider the myriad successful approaches you have witnessed in the past. Two performers can take the exact same approach, and one will fail and one succeed, due to the other variables at play. In the case of an orchestra, the overwhelming & even terroristic synchronicity of the movements of the string players goes a long way toward obliterating the dread boundary of stasis that should never come between an audience and its engagement with the matter at hand. When you add the omnipotent fist of the conductor and the omniscient 'brain' of the body as a sum of its individuals - you will likely never understand the piece better than its performers do - it is amazing how effectively such an objectively timid affair can dominate a room. Also, the way the lone timpani player rests & rests forever before unleashing and resting again is fucking awesome. Timbre trumps all. Weasel Walter taught me this, actually, via the Flying Luttenbachers. But seeing a live performance of one of the orchestral masters drives it home once again for this primarily electric guitarist. Beethoven, Mozart, and particularly Bach can have some devastatingly evil magicks at play, but the contemporary listener will require time & effort to contextualize them within our current timbre paradigms. Orchestral strings sound 'pretty' to our ears regardless of what they are saying to us. Modern orchestral composers can still jar contemporary ears, but does it not pale in comparison to true contemporary slayers? Put it against the time vector and it makes a lot of sense. Bach was composing in the early 18th century, Boulez, Stockhausen, and Xenakis in the mid 20th. It may verge upon cliche - but it is an excellent one: the audience rioted when Stravinsky debuted the "Rite" in 1913. They were neurologically traumatized, according to some contemporary nerds. Put this in line next to what you understand about Edison, the phonograph, electricity, and the evolution of rock and roll and do the maths. An electric guitar is a dangerous thing and if you think that is inaccurate you should find another pool to pee in. Or better yet, conjure up your local orchestra hall on the internets and start listening. posted by elvis PRESIDENTIAL FAECES IN FOECUS
DON'T RUN posted by cansafis
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