a sort of homecoming

"So they lived in great joy and if ever they remembered their life in this world it was only as one remembers a dream" - C.S. Lewis











Where then is home? I feel California calling, and if its voice does reach me, I will return.

Watching Citizen Kane

I got together with a couple of friends during the football game so we could watch Citzen Kane. Matt was very excited to view Welles' masterwork.



















Here we are, three nerds watching one of the greatest films ever made while our no. 8 ranked football team plays a home game...they lost. We had more fun watching and discussing Citizen Kane then we would have if we watched the game. And there were some great insights shared.



Orson Welles 1
BYU Football 0












Other Orson Welles films I recommend.

The Chimes at Midnight (Campanadas a medioanoche)
Mr. Arkadin (A.K.A. Confidential Report)
The Trial (Le Procès)
Touch of Evil
F for Fake

Thesis

How do I describe then, the moment?
To capture in a frame this movement,
flux, ebb and flow.
Is it possible to write the ghost?
Memory, consciousness, le reventant,
becoming, always already haunted...
We are différance, we are ghost.

Silence, in memoriam

I'm coming to believe in the importance of silence in music. The power of silence after a phrase of music for example; the dramatic silence after the first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, or the space between the notes of a Miles Davis solo. There is something very specific about a rest in music. You take your foot off the pedal and pay attention. I'm wondering whether, as musicians, the most important thing we do is merely to provide a frame for silence. I'm wondering if silence itself is perhaps the mystery at the heart of music? And is silence the most perfect music of all?

Songwriting is the only form of meditation that I know. And it is only in silence that the gifts of melody and metaphor are offered. To people in the modern world, true silence is something we rarely experience. It is almost as if we conspire to avoid it. Three minutes of silence seems like a very long time. It forces us to pay attention to ideas and emotions that we rarely make any time for. There are some people who find this awkward, or even frightening.

Silence is disturbing. It is disturbing because it is the wavelength of the soul. If we leave no space in our music—and I'm as guilty as anyone else in this regard—then we rob the sound we make of a defining context. It is often music born from anxiety to create more anxiety. It's as if we're afraid of leaving space. Great music's as much about the space between the notes as it is about the notes themselves. A bar's rest is as important and significant as the bar of demi-, semi-quavers that precedes it. What I'm trying to say here is that if ever I'm asked if I'm religious I always reply, "Yes, I'm a devout musician." Music puts me in touch with something beyond the intellect, something otherworldly, something sacred.

How is it that some music can move us to tears? Why is some music indescribably beautiful? I never tire of hearing Samuel Barber's "Adagio for Strings" or Faures "Pavane" or Otis Redding's "Dock of the Bay." These pieces speak to me in the only religious language I understand. They induce in me a state of deep meditation, of wonder. They make me silent.

Sting, Berklee College of Music Commencement Address May 15, 1994

88 visits or writing to nobody

I logged on to Google analytics to see if anybody is looking at my blog and was surprised to see the map had turned very green. My visits had spiked from one or two a day to 88 on the 9th of October 2008. Turns out the name of the photographer who took the photos featured in my last post has a name similar to a certain Swiss soccer goalie, awesome. 88 visits, average length of visit, 0.00 seconds.

The cool thing is, some poor soul in Catarroja Spain actually stayed and read my blog for a minute and a half. I feel the love from Spain (¿Es posible extrañar un lugar que uno no conoce?). It's good to see that football is alive and well in most of the world. My goal is to get a visit from Russia so I can turn a HUGE part of the map green. And to the person who visited from Saco Maine and didn't stay, I've always dreamt of going to Maine, and perhaps I'd stay a while and watch the sea. (Longing for New England)

Blindness is Ghostly

In honor of Saramago's novel Blindness that is now being popularized in filmic form. All images courtesy Stefano de Luigi (http://www.stefanodeluigi.com/features-cecita.php?szLang=it)

The Lawrence Welk Show

When I was at music school I studied jazz improve with Lin Biviano. One day flipping through the channels I saw him on The Lawrence Welk Show, turns out his mom was a regular pianist on the show. That's all fine and good, but for those of you who, like me, think that The Lawrence Welk Show is a strange cultural phenomenon, enjoy this video.

outofstateplates

You know that guy you get stuck behind,
the one with the out of state plates?

He must be an old lady or someone trying
to save on gas.

When you finally pass with your angry acceleration
and glare to let me know that I've offended you,
don't be surprised that I'm in my late twenty's
wearing a baseball cap with a familiar logo
and smiling like an idiot.

I'm listening to jazz...man.













(Name this famous trumpet player and earn a gold star!)

Forgetfulness

For somewhere between five or seven months I've noticed that my memory is failing me, short term and long term. My wife as well as my friends have mentioned that I probably don't sleep enough. Sometimes I'll be reading and I can't even make sense of the words on the page, as if I couldn't remember the signified of the signifiers. Other times my inability to remember results in a strange kind of euphoria and I am able to feel more than perceive.

This not infrequent experience reminds me of something I read in and interview that Borges gave. He talked about not knowing German well enough to understand the poetry that he read in German. He did however understand enough of the language get the feeling of the poetry, which he thought was more important.

Together with my forgetfulness, I often wake up in places, at first unfamiliar, then context begins slowly to form in my mind and I understand. I read about a man who forgot the previous five years of his life through some freak happening in his brain. If that happened to me, I wouldn't know my beloved wife or my two daughters, or anything related to my field of study. I miss them, maybe I should get some sleep.