things bill sallak likes

More Deresiewicz on higher ed

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 22:05:54 -0500

More Deresiewicz on higher ed

Great think-piece by Bill Deresiewicz on higher education

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 07:58:53 -0500

Great think-piece by Bill Deresiewicz on higher education

From the WLS Archives: Stuart Saunders Smith’s Angels, at...

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 20:53:27 -0500

From the WLS Archives: Stuart Saunders Smith’s Angels, at the Nief-Norf Festival, June 2011.

John Cage Interview (excerpt)

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 20:23:16 -0500

John Cage Interview (excerpt):

Music for Dancers folks: this is a video containing one of the quotes I dropped in class on Monday.

Coffeeshop Commandments

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 20:17:53 -0500

If you know me, then you know that my personal standards for coffeeshops are high. (Phoenix, AZ’s Cartel Coffee Lab ruined me; everything they make is delicious.) I make no apologies; if you’re going to sell me coffee for more money than it costs for me to make it at home, you had better either make it better than I do at home, or make things that I can’t make at home (i.e., professional espresso, etc.). The following is not an all-inclusive wishlist, but it does represent the price of entry to my wallet on a regular basis:

1) Beans for espresso should be ground to order. An airpot of brewed coffee sitting around is alright (although grind-and-pour-over to order is SO much better), but any decent espresso shot or espresso-based drink isn’t gonna fly unless the beans have been ground within, oh, the last minute or so. You won’t get decent crema any other way.

2) Milk (or half-and-half, or soymilk) should be properly steamed. This does not mean that you stick the wand in a small metal pitcher of milk and fire steam into it until it gets hot. It takes technique, but the reward is absolutely worth it—instead of hot milk with a top layer of stiff, meringue-like foam that will never ever get friendly with espresso crema (Starbucks, I’m looking at you), properly steamed milk will have legions of tiny, supple foam bubbles all throughout it. For whatever reason, properly steamed milk tastes sweeter and richer, and does amazing things when poured into espresso in the right proportion, depending on the drink you ordered (i.e., a real macchiato vs. a real cappuccino vs. cafe latte). Latte art (those cute little leaf or apple designs that some baristas can pour into your espresso drink) is not mere vanity; it is impossible to pour latte art with badly steamed milk, so the art is essentially the barista’s guarantee that they know what they’re doing.

2a) Two Bad Signs regarding your local shop’s milk-steaming chops: a) if they ask how much foam you want on your drink (remember, properly steamed milk does not have a separate foam component); b) no latte art, or worse—stiff, unyielding foam on top of a cup.

3) If I’m going to stay, a proper cup or mug and saucer should be an option. You’ve got real plates for your $3 muffins, so I know you’re already washing dishes back there somewhere. Step up with some ceramic cups. (Not to mention that it’s impossible to present a proper macchiato or cappuccino in a to-go vessel.)

4) Good coffeeshops adhere to standard coffee nomenclature. (STARBUCKS, I’M LOOKING AT YOU.) “Skinny” means to make it with skim milk, not to sub in all your sugar-free syrups for normal ones. A real macchiato is concentrated espresso-and-milk bliss, and caramel is nowhere expletive near it. There is no such thing as a real cappuccino in a 20-ounce size. And so on.

4a) Rule #1 of Good Coffeeshop Citizenship: DO NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, use Starbucks lingo in a non-Starbucks joint. (You know, “Frappuccino,” or “Grande,” or “Caramel Macchiato.” It hurts just to type it.) Kittens die when people do that s***.

There are, of course, other things needed to create a full-on coffeeshop crush. (Got tables-and-chairs and easy chairs and couches? Reliable Wi-Fi? Enough power outlets? Complimentary self-service water? Do those $3 muffins taste better than generic foodservice product? Is your music quiet enough to keep conversation easy? etc.) These guidelines are first-round coffeeshop criteria.

From the WLS Archives: Failure is Now Cheaper

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 18:30:48 -0500

The more I listen to creative people discuss their work, one common thread that emerges is that you have to do lots and lots of work before the quality of the work begins to approach the quality of your taste, i.e., a lot of the stuff you do at the beginning will not be so good, and you’ll know it’s not so good, and you have two options: you can stop working (as many people do), or you can push through and keep working, pushing each piece of work closer and closer to excellence, closing the quality/taste gap more and more. In some very good YouTube videos, Ira Glass discusses this at length.

(Personal moment #1: my father is a very bright and honest man with a quiver of aphorisms which he takes up when a teachable moment arrives. A favorite was:

A man’s reach must exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?

Saddish news #1: the gap will always be there— all of us are working to shrink it as best we can.)

So, to get where you want to go, you’re going to have to generate a certain amount of material that’s not up to your own snuff. (Saddish news #2: for a while, most of what you generate will fall into this category. If you immediately begin pleasing yourself greatly, you’ll want to investigate the possibility that a) you are gifted on the level of a Daniel Tammet or Willie Mosconi, or b) your means of self-evaluation are not sufficiently incisive.)

(Personal moment #2: my father spent (and continues to spend) most of his working time in finance. The fact that I knew what EBITDA* stood for when I was 12 may have some impact on the following analysis of the situation.)

You should minimize the cost of this failure, because you’re about to buy a lot of it. You’re spending your time and energy, which are finite resources, to get this failure. Get it as cheap as you can.

Happy news: here are two helpful things that will radically lower the cost of your failure, and they’re both within reach.

Aid to Cheap Failure #1: The Internet. The cheapest collaboration/publication/research tool ever invented by human beings. Say you wrote an article. Want to publish it?

1a) Reproduce that article on paper many times over (hello Kinko’s), mail it to as many appropriate magazines/journals/periodicals you can think of, wait around for a while, and receive tons of rejections. (high financial/personal costs) x (failure/success ratio) = pretty darn high.

1b) Register on tumblr or a similar service, start typing, tell all your friends and colleagues, and see what happens. (very low financial/personal costs) x (failure/success ratio [same as before]) = much much lower. I’m still buying about as much failure, and it’s still not much fun, but I can afford to keep buying it long enough for it to start paying off in terms of better-quality work. (I picked this option, as you can tell.)

The transaction cost works the same from the research side— you can hope that the article you’re looking for appears somewhere in a $6 magazine or $45 journal, or you can hope it’s at your local library, or wait for inter-library loan— or you can search for the topics that interest you online. Neither is perfect, but one is way cheaper.

Cory Doctorow talks about this at length in a lecture he gave at Cambridge. The whole thing is worth a read, but YouTube has a pertinent excerpt up:

Aid to Cheap Failure #2: Higher education (of whatever flavor: community college, junior college, university, grad school, etc.)

I don’t know about you, but if I’m going to spend most of my beginning creative time failing, I’d really like to do it somewhere where I’m not also relying on my creative work to pay the rent. Not that higher education is necessarily inexpensive, but it provides you with an environment where you don’t *need* to nail it the first time. It also provides you with a small army of people (aka faculty) who will give you information that will save you from having to learn some things by trial and error. TRIAL AND ERROR IS AN EFFECTIVE BUT PAINFUL AND EXPENSIVE WAY TO LEARN.

College can’t come close to teaching you everything you need to know. But it does allow you to work out the kinks/fall on your face/make your mistakes so that when failure becomes expensive, you’ll need to buy only small amounts of it to get your success. I wonder if this could be expanded into…

A THEORY ON THE MACROECONOMICS OF CREATIVITY

In the beginning phases of the learning process, large amounts of my time/energy/intelligence/resources are used to purchase large amounts of failure as cheaply as possible. My failure is then used to purchase creative success. Like any monetary system, large supplies of currency (here, failure) create inflationary pressures, i.e., rising prices. Hence, lots of failure in the equation means that the price of success per unit of failure is quite high, and I need to acquire and spend large amounts of failure to get a decent amount of success.

Later on (say, after graduating), I’m still pouring in large amounts of t/e/i/r, but I’m getting less failure for my efforts. This is because failure is more expensive and I can afford less of it— if I fail now, instead of just being frustrated, I get frustrated AND lose money from low ticket sales AND renting the hall AND paying the musicians, say. But, because the supply of failure currency has tightened up, the price of success per unit failure has gone way down. Same t/e/i/r input with less failure and more success. This is good because a) I’m learning and improving, and b) who wants a lot of failure hanging around? I’m going to buy it all up ASAP so I can sell it all off as soon as I can. (Incidentally, this is also why starting new careers or new large projects in adulthood can be as scary as it is— you’re going back to purchasing large amounts of failure in your new venture at a point in life when failure is very expensive. Lots of adults make it cheaper by…you guessed it…going back to school.)

Throw yourself in the deep end. Go out and fail. Interrogate the failure. Go out and fail again. Get a hug when you need one. Go out and fail again. Keep doing work. Enjoy the success. Go out and fail. Stay warm.

And thanks, Dad.

*EBITDA = Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization

Awesome interview with Laurie Anderson

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 16:24:52 -0500

Awesome interview with Laurie Anderson:

As I gear up for the coming semester, it’s nice to read about art and artists and see what other strategies people have come up with for working.

Salman Rushdie on Christopher Hitchens in Vanity Fair

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 10:44:23 -0500

Salman Rushdie on Christopher Hitchens in Vanity Fair

"There is merit, and blessing, and reward for those who undertake necessary work; attenuated to the..."

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 23:45:37 -0500

“There is merit, and blessing, and reward for those who undertake necessary work; attenuated to the degree that their work is undertaken in anticipation of merit, and blessing, and reward.”

- Guitar Craft aphorism

From the WLS Archives: On Aphorisms

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 23:02:00 -0500

This is an old blog post from NoiseGarden, but Guitar Craft aphorisms are always there, and always useful!

UPDATE: Ack! Had to fix the link; the aphorisms page moved, because it looks like Fripp is no longer actively maintaining Guitar Craft. (The old link went to a page that said: “Guitar Craft no longer exists.”) The new link is to The Orchestra of Crafty Guitarists, who are carrying on (with Robert’s blessing, I imagine).

“One thing I find very helpful is having a resource where I can quickly go and get a small but pertinent piece of advice about art and creativity. While the advice is generally not as good as the advice I’d receive from a live human, this resource would be available 24/7, whereas people sometimes need to sleep.

My favorite is the aphorisms page at Guitar Craft. Guitar Craft was started in the mid-1980s by King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp, and what started as a course in guitar technique broadened to become applicable in almost any way you choose to use it. The aphorisms touch on truth with speed and precision, and they’ve been very helpful to me. If you want another one, you can just refresh the page.

It’s worth checking them out. (The one that came up just now was, “Sometimes no answer is an answer, especially when the answer is no.” Not always sunshine and smiling bunnies, but useful.)”

From the WLS Archives: Stage setup for Akros Percussion...

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 17:31:13 -0500

From the WLS Archives: Stage setup for Akros Percussion Collective’s second concert at the Blurred Edges Festival, Hamburg, Germany, May 2011

"Instead of asking ‘Is it right?’ we are tempted to ask ‘Will it pay?’ and..."

Sun, 04 Dec 2011 21:07:53 -0500

““Instead of asking ‘Is it right?’ we are tempted to ask ‘Will it pay?’ and ‘Will it win?’ As a result the public conscience is becoming seared and the public service debauched.””

- William Jennings Bryan, “The Value of an Ideal,” 1901 (via Alex Ross)

On the importance of technique

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 18:29:14 -0500

On the importance of technique:

You want to see technique? You want to see mastery? You want to have a glimpse of what is possible after you’ve gone through the hard work of internalizing a task? Watch Jacques Pepin bone out a chicken. Technique. Mastery.

Post-PASIC Panel Pfollow-up #4

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 18:32:05 -0500

A quick one before Thanksgiving: Chris Shultis just wrote me back to remind me about his discussion of Antonin Artaud’s The Theatre and its Double. I haven’t read it myself, but I’m gonna.

(Aside: since we’re on the subject of theatre manifestoes, I might insert a brief plug for Jerzy Grotowski’s Towards a Poor Theatre and David Mamet’s True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor. Strictly my picks, but excellent reads nonetheless.)

Happy Turkey Day!

From the WLS Archives: Child of Tree and Music for Four at John...

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 23:36:40 -0500

From the WLS Archives: Child of Tree and Music for Four at John Cage Celebration w/entelechron trio, Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, March 2011.

RIP Paul Motian

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 11:45:06 -0500

Paul Motian passed away today. Three memories that stick out:

1) As a Modern-Drummer-reading high school student, I vividly recall the first time I saw one of his transcribed solos in the magazine. I knew very little about him (or jazz, or anything, it felt like) but just from seeing the page I could tell that this guy was reading some other rulebook about how to play drums. Sometimes his playing reminded me of a full, open trap case falling down a flight of stairs, except sounding really really good too.

2) There’s a live cut of the Evans/LaFaro/Motian trio playing Miles Davis’ ”Solar” on a reissue CD that I have (I’ll check my shelves when I get home tonight) where the tune becomes the thinnest thread of connection between the players, and they’re all seemingly doing their own thing, and it swings like mad, and works brilliantly despite the fact that it sounds like it’s about to fall apart pretty much all the time. (You know the Steven Wright joke: You know that feeling where you’re leaning back in a chair, and then you lean too far, and then just at the last minute you catch yourself? I feel like that all the time.)

3) “Osmosis Part III” from I Have the Room Above Her, with Bill Frisell and Joe Lovano. Beautiful, breathing spaciousness.

Post-PASIC Panel Pfollow-up #3

Sun, 20 Nov 2011 18:25:00 -0500

This is the second in a series of posts describing/linking to things that either were mentioned, or were about to be mentioned but for lack of time, at the PASIC New Music/Research Panel “On the Nature of Percussion Masterworks” that I moderated at PASIC 2011.

At the top of the hour, each of the four panelists (Allen Otte, Morris Palter, Chris Shultis, and Stuart Smith) gave some brief opening remarks. Stuart Smith went so far as to compose his opening remarks into a piece for spoken voice. The composition is reprinted below. (It will appear in Stuart’s forthcoming collection Composing Thoughts.) As in Stuart’s other spoken-text works, keep two things in mind: 1) scansion (the manner in which the text is divided into lines) is very important, and should be closely observed, and 2) the small dot represents a period of silence of about one or two seconds. Enjoy!

We are in a condition of communication

When both parties already know

What is being said a priori, a priori, a priori.

How else would one so easily understand?

Communication is one way, always.

•

When we are in a condition of dialogue,

When each party has information

(unknown to the other)

the hegemony of communication is retarded.

•

When all is understood, after dialogue,

then repetition is just so much communication.

•

Familiar musical ideas

become communication instantly—

they are familiar.

•

Dialogue happens in the presence

of musician and audience

when new connections, between sounds,

are needed.

•

Familiar music does not need an audience.

It’s had its audition.

New music needs an audience

to make it. After time, it too becomes

a communication,

which, then,

is no longer necessary.

•

It is the job of the musician

to slow down the process of music

from becoming communication

for as long as possible.

•

It is the political responsibility

of the musician to engage in dialogue.

•

In the end,

communication is violence, an assault,

dominance,

one over the other.

•

Dialogue cannot be violent.

•

Again:

communication leads to

violations, violences.

Continuing dialogue

will not.

•

If everyone spoke their own language,

then we would have a babel of peace.

•

No one would understand

until it was understood.

•

True musical creation

is in a state of becoming.

It is in the making of language.

•

Dialogue is a music of co-existence—

each a soloist,

each not playing their part in society.

•

In dialogue

we, each one, become a singularity—

a universe, not whole

but so incomplete and lost

that we need to invent ourselves,

one to another.

•

We need music without cheers.

We need music that keeps us guessing.

"I find that when someone’s taking time to do something right in the present, they’re a..."

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 13:52:04 -0500

““I find that when someone’s taking time to do something right in the present, they’re a perfectionist with no ability to prioritize, whereas when someone took the time to do something right in the past, they’re a master artisan of great foresight.””

- Randall Munroe, creator of the xkcd webcomic, which is excellent

From the WLS Archives: log xylophones from grain of...

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 13:28:00 -0500

From the WLS Archives: log xylophones from grain of sand sessions, summer 2009

great article about chess and ows. owchess?

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 13:22:27 -0500

great article about chess and ows. owchess?