To honor the final year of my thirties as well as the recent publication of my constraint-based Faulkner-inspired memoir, AS I STAND LIVING, which chronicles the year I became a father, I’m going to begin a new series here at Entropy where I document my various sources of media input each week: art, literature, music, movies, television, and so on. New updates will appear every Monday until I turn forty (March 19, 2018).
First thing Monday morning, AM 710 ESPN Los Angeles: Keyshawn, Jorge, and LZ argue the merits of acquiring Paul George if you’re the Lakers. I start fantasizing about a Lakers starting lineup consisting of Lonzo Ball at point, Paul George at the two, Brandon Ingram at three, Julius Randle at the four, and Ivica Zubac at center. Playoffs for certain.
Ornette Coleman’s The Empty Foxhole (Blue Note, 1966), which features his ten year old son Denardo playing drums, and Charlie Haden on bass. This album on repeat in the family car.
Bibi Bourelly’s “Ego” on repeat. “And I won’t ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever give a fuck. Won’t ever, ever, ever give a fuck. You won’t bring me down.” Here’s where Rihanna gets certain of her sounds.
Koto Vortex I: Works By Hiroshi Yoshimura. According to Lastfm, “Koto Vortex are four women (Yoko Nishi, Miki Maruta, Etsuko Takezawa, Michiyo Yagi) who play 13 and 17 string koto together.” Hiroshi Yoshimura was a pioneer in Japanese ambient / environmental music in the 70s.
Season five premiere of HEY QWEEN! With Jonny McGovern featured my all-time favorite drag queen, Alaska Thunderfuck. That hair! Yes, I said, Yes!
Don Cherry’s Art Deco (A&M, 1989). Cherry on trumpet, James Clay on tenor sax, Charlie Haden on bass, and Billy Higgins on drums.
Lakers lose to Wizards by eleven.
“The sentence is merely a limit, the point beyond which grammatical analysis cannot be further extended,” writes Ron Silliman in his essay “The New Sentence” from the book of the same name.
Mariam Wallentin with some phenomenal voice work a la Diamanda Galás or Yamatsuka Eye in a live performance with Mats Gustafsson’s Nu Ensemble at the Music Unlimited festival in Austria, 11/11/2016.
“Performers are encouraged to look for “affinities” and “composite sound states” based on the collective dynamics of the ensemble,” writes Anthony Braxton in his Introduction to Catalog of Works.
Panicsville “Stabbed in the Face” (2003) video by Usama Alshaibi, music by Andy Ortmann:
Season 9 episode 1 of Untucked, the companion show to RuPaul’s Drag Race, featured Lady Gaga going backstage to give the queens workshop notes on their performances and looks. Need to borrow more from Drag Race for my CW workshops.
“In this universe — and perhaps many others — life forms, matter and energy are constantly interacting to promote flow or movement from one moment to the next. This is improvisation.” from Pauline Oliveros’s “Harmonic Anatomy: Women in Improvisation.”
Listened to the first quarter of the Lakers vs. Timberwolves earlier this evening. Ingram’s not playing. The rest of the team refuses to play defense. Since our goal is to lose as many games as possible in order to gain the greatest chance of landing a top-three pick in the draft (otherwise we lose our pick and it goes to Philadelphia because of a trade deal going back to the Steve Nash deal), we did a great job! If the Lakers want to tank, they are archiving their desired outcome. I sort of wish they’d play hard until the very end and then let the other team win. The way they’re playing now is no defense from the tip-off. Next season can’t happen soon enough.
OMG! Timothy Marrinan and Richard Dewey’s new documentary, BURDEN, about the artist Chris Burden (i.e. the dude who did the video of his friend shooting him in the arm with a .22 caliber rifle, the dude who put nails through his own palms, the dude who did the tight rows of lamp poles at the entrance to LACMA) premiers May 5th in theaters and on Amazon:
Week Two of Dancing with the Stars. Watching it only because Nick from The Bachelor is a contestant. The whole episode I think about how much more awesome it would be if I understood anything about dancing. I mean, I don’t know the rules of the foxtrot so how am I supposed to watch two people dance a foxtrot and know if they suck or if they’re killing it? If I produced that show, I’d do some kind of package explaining the dances you’re about to watch, or a little popup in the corner of the screen explaining each of the dances. I think I’d appreciate the show more.
Lucky Dragons give their brilliant 2016 release Ooga Booga Bongo Music the tags “experimental future human life Los Angeles.” Here’s the album description:
“syllables repeated quickly backandforth between left and right channels, filtered and gradually mixing in and out, sounds appear as different words or sentences to some people, or as rhythms and melodies to others.
based on an auditory illusion described by diana deutsch, in which our attention wanders and allows for a shift between what we hear and what we imagine, like a sonic rorschach test–not as a puzzle to solve, but as information in raw form that we meet halfway as language or as music.”
“Established in 2016, Fonograf Editions is a vinyl record-only poetry press. It is based out of Portland, Oregon and is an arm of Octopus Books. It aims to press and publish 2-3 spoken word poetry LPs every year.”
Four volumes of Hans Pokora’s legendary rare records price guide, Record Collector Dreams, appear on the internet archive in full color.
First issue of YES FEMMES. It’s got text and video and collage. Lots of terrific stuff, including this mind blowing piece by knockout writer Megan/M. Henry Milks called “ASMR SCRIPT FOR A HAPPIER YOU.” Those whisper videos!
“Friends of Dorothy, do not retreat, do not despair. We don’t need a pair of ruby slippers. We don’t need to return to Kansas, to a life in the black & white past. We don’t need to return to Oz, to a life in Technicolor fantasy. No, all we need are a brain, a heart, and more courage for the road ahead,” writes my colleague Martin Pousson in his recent essay at The Rumpus. I heard Martin read from his new book, Black Sheep Boy (Rare Bird Books, 2016), at Skylight last fall, and I’m still thinking about certain images from that reading. It’s a beautiful novel-in-stories set in the bayou starring the “Son of a mixed-race Holy Ghost mother and a Cajun French phantom father.”
This issue of Sound American, because I’m researching Anthony Braxton right now. According to Braxton’s website, this issue is “designed to serve as a primer and guide providing history, context, and performance practice hints for Braxton compositions. It also includes audio samples of Language Music performed by musicians in the community.”
Death’s Leprosy provides relentless drums wielded like blunt objects in tight syncopation, both guitars crisp as chips, the bass sometimes gets lost for me though, but the whole thing seems meticulously orchestrated and performed. Totality of vision level eleven, for sure. Lead singer Chuck Schuldiner’s voice seriously scares me. Musical equivalent of a horror movie. My wife likes to tease me because I always say I’m going to watch a horror movie but then I chicken out. I get scared easily. Listening to this album, I’m feeling dread. I’m feeling anxiety. I’m feeling afraid. I look down periodically at the picture of the band on the inside of the gatefold and it helps ameliorate my concerns because the band looks like goofy eighties rockers rather than evil demons.
Sing, an animated movie written and directed by Garth Jennings, put out last December by Illumination Entertainment (known for the Despicable Me and Minion movies), tells a cute story about a group of anthropomorphic animals who compete in a singing competition. My folks got it and sent it to Jasper, so we screened it on movie night. Casting didn’t work for me, but the story worked well without much meanness or violence. We laughed a bunch.
Jenny Hval – “Female Vampire” (2016) directed by Jenny Berger Myhre
Young Thug’s recent mixtape, No, My Name is Jeffery. Tracks 1 and 3 on repeat.
New Migos album Culture.
New Kendrick Lamar track “Humble.”
Recent Jacquees & DeJ Loaf mixtape, “Fuck A Friend Zone.”
Dying Fetus, Reign Supreme (Relapse, 2012). Technical death metal supremely intriguing.
Summoning – Minas Morgul (Napalm Records, 1995). Atmospheric black metal — also sort of Final Fantasy sounds mashed in there.
RuPaul’s Drag Race se09ep02 and accompanying Untucked. The pacing seems off this season, so far. Not surprised at who got eliminated. There’s a really telling moment at the end of the Untucked episode where we hear the voice-overs from Jaymes and Kimora where Kimora goes, “No way I’m going home” and then Jaymes says,”There’s a chance I might go home.” Not for nothing, as I always say, 9 times out of 10 confidence wins in life. Look who staid and look who sashayed away.
The Gaslamp Killer – Instrumentalepathy (2016) Electronic beat collages and soundscapes and noises and found sounds.
Didn’t catch any of the Lakers vs. Clippers game today. We lost, of course.
Got in the car right at the moment after NC beat Oregon by one point to advance to the NCAA finals against Gonzaga. I only cared about the NCAA tournament this year because of Lonzo Ball on UCLA, but after they lost to Kentucky I stopped watching or paying attention. Lakers are currently going out of their way to lose games to ensure a shot at drafting Lonzo in the draft.
Somewhere I heard Kaoru Abe described as sorta like Albert Ayler but more desperate:
