From Leaning Bricks to Flying Buttresses

I will start with this statement: Technical complexity or even technical facility are not necessarily the measuring sticks for artistic quality. Simple art can be beautiful; a technically limited artist can do a good thing.

Cathedral builder. 

Usually, though, great art is both complex and technically sound.

Now that I have said that, I have to voice my frustration as a guy who has spent his life in pursuit of musical excellence: being a musician in a world of non-musicians can be incredibly frustrating. The reason for this is that the average person understands so little about music; music is a mystery to most in a way that visual art, literature, theater and even dance are not. The average person understands the core of what is happening with these arts. Music is more ethereal.

A good comparison, in terms of my incredulity about the music that impresses the non-musician, would be this:

It's like being an architect who knows how to design cathedrals who sees a group gathered around a man. The  crowd is agape with appreciation; they titter about how great the man's architectural sense is; how innovative his work is; how great his accomplishment is. When the architect gets close enough, he looks at the man's work and sees that the fellow has taken two bricks and leaned one against the other. The architect knows this is nothing, but the crowd does not; they are amazed and mystified.

Of course, this would never happen, because people understand enough about architecture -- they, after all, live in buildings -- to see that leaning one brick on another is no big deal. People do not, however, generally understand enough about music to make this distinction. (If you can't tell me the notes in a C Major chord, you can't even lean two bricks together.)

Brick leaner. 

This is not to say that I haven't enjoyed the aesthetic of a brick leaning upon a brick. I often like music that is simple. Again, complexity is not the only measure of artistic worth. But it is frustrating to think so much about craft and to learn so much over a lifetime just to see work with less dedication and/or craft get equal or greater recognition than more adept work.

I know many feel that no one has the right to say what is great and what is bad when it comes to art. We all just like what we like. Okay. I can't stop anyone from liking something, no matter how aenemic I might think it is. The problem is, though, that I know if people understood even a little about music they would probably quickly change their opinions.

Imagine you finished running a marathon and everyone ignored you in favor of a perfectly healthy guy who walked across the room to toss his soda cup into the trash. I've  already gone through hundreds of pairs of running shoes, so...

The Arteeste (A Parable)

As he sat in his modest home, the artist lifted a chipped coffee cup to his lips, sipped, and looked out the window as the late morning sun brought steam out of the road.

The audience, the night before, had been a good one. They had cheered. They had danced. He had had his hand clasped, enthusiastically. Various people had expressed their wish that they, themselves, had "stuck with" this instrument or that one. It always struck him as a kind of passive/aggressive thing when they praised his playing and then stated their own wishes to have continued on a musical journey, but, praise is praise, he supposed.

He was a writer, as well, this artist. And he could draw fair bit. All of his life, people had called him "talented." They had worn his acquaintance like a bit of a cultural badge. This, by no means, secured him invitations to the best parties, however.

A scholarly mutt of my acquaintance.

Girls liked it too, his artistic...ness. He wasn't the kind to crank out love poems or songs for his own carnal gain, but they (these young ladies) were often intrigued by his obsession with creativity; by his fanciful nature; by his unaffected artiness; that is, until they found someone easier to get a handle on. Someone more grounded.  Someone with more potential. Someone with a nice car. (Except one.)

The Critique

We all know life is weird. We all tend to figure that out on our own, after a while. There are only so many weirdnesses that can occur before we realize that it's not just a random series of events, but an indication that  somewhere up in the offices of heaven, there must be an Administrator of Weirdness, who sits at a computer and checks to see if each of us has gotten his daily dose of weirdness. If not, maybe his hits us with a crazy dream at night, just to make up for it. But there will be weirdness -- make no mistake.

The other night, when my band had finished playing, I was in the process of breaking down my drum kit (a process that always makes me wonder why I didn't choose the piccolo) and I heard a conversation off to my right. Two youngish guys were sitting there, ignoring the bartender's yelps about it being time to leave, and one guy was saying, "... classic rock, some modern rock and dance stuff. Yeah, they were actually pretty good."

Buddy Rich, who grew up to
be more not-crap than just about
every drummer, ever. . 

He was obviously talking about our band. And it just made me laugh a little about the absurdity of human endeavor.

"They were actually pretty good."

So that's it. Some random guy in a bar has spoken his opinion: we were actually (this was a surprise, apparently -- maybe because when we took the stage we looked like we would be horrible) pretty good. Not great; not excellent; not really good -- just pretty good. One man's observation.

The Hobbit and the Fruit Bowl

Peter Jackson, director of The Lord of the Rings movies, is not one to let the grass grow under his technological feet. (Hair on top, I'm not sure about.) We already know this, based on the extraordinarily impressive effects in his trilogy. But now, it seems, he has screened parts of the upcoming movie The Hobbit at 48 frames-per-second, twice the speed of the traditional 24 frames-per-second and the reactions were mixed. It seems some people thought the movie just looked too real.

Isn't that interesting? What is even more interesting is that we seem to be sort of alluding to an old debate about art. Is this the new objection to "representational art"? Is Jackson giving us echoes of the perfectly and photographically-rendered bowl of fruit? (As you probably know, many fine artists think photographic-looking art is not art -- that the art comes out of the interpretation of the image. For one example, you might think of the impressionists.) We'll have to see.

Graffiti Girl

Yesterday, as I was driving home from work and enjoying the cool, sun-scented wind through the opened windows of my car, I saw a girl in the distance. She was standing at the base of a billboard. She was busy, but I couldn't tell what with.

As I got closer, I saw that she was a young woman, clad in pretty, young-womanly clothes -- summer clothes. Her feet were bare and her copper-red hair was long, copious and partially pulled back with a lime-green ribbon. She looked like the nicest girl in her class -- maybe an honors student; maybe the valedictorian.

Still, We Write

Lee J. Cobb, the first Willy Loman

The other night, I caught the last hour of a movie masterpiece on TV: Sidney Lumet's 12 Angry Men. It is an inspiring film to watch, in and of itself, full of that 1950's mixture of sinewy intellect and bongo-driven, twelve-tonal avante-gardeness. It is a film that simultaneously, as much of the art of that period did, praises and condemns the register of human action and tendency.

But the old stream-of-consciousness kicked in when I again saw Lee J. Cobb, the disgruntled father who wants a young man to hang as a result of his own feelings against his own rebellious son. Seeing Cobb made me think of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, in which he played the first Willy Loman.

Dynamics in Art and in Life

Hi, all. It has been one heck of a week, so, for the first time, I am posting an article I wrote for the online journal When Falls the Coliseum. It is "thicker" than my usual posts on here, but the spirit is the same, with an idea I come back to a lot: art as teacher for life. Hope you like it!

I had been looking forward to seeing David Russell in concert for a long time. In my opinion, he is the finest living classical guitarist. He was to perform at the First Unitarian Church in Philadelphia. It's a pretty big room. It seats about five-hundred and there were people standing in the back, too. People suck up sound, you know. I leaned over to a fellow guitarist and said, "Do you see any microphones?" He furrowed his brow and shook his head. We were worried. We were halfway back in the crowd. This was terrible. Then, David Russell trotted out pleasantly to lively applause and took his seat. He checked his tuning, but the turning of the buttons had the secondary effect of serving as a volume dial for his audience: the crowd slowly went as silent as a snowy pine-forest.