cooking, backpacking, filmmaking, drinking absurd amounts of coffee
I'd like to meet:
my friends for a good drink.
Music:
Gastr Del Sol, Yasunao Tone, The Mae Shi, Deerhoof, Squarepusher, Ex-Models, Kid 606, Melt Banana, Nervous Cop, Yamataka Eye, John Zorn, Silver Daggers, Q and not U, Olaf Rupp, Hella, Konk Pack, Blut Aus Nord, The Static, John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Kronos Quartet, Lauryn Hill, Fela Kuti, Antibalas, early Meat Puppets, Kletzmer music, George Crumb's "Black Angels," DJ Olive, Crimp Shrine, John Cage, Steve Reich, Amon Tobin, Iannis Xenakis, The Master Musicians of Jajouka, Cannibal Ox, Nels Cline, The Innocence Mission, Fugazi, Bjork, Sonic Youth, Ornette Coleman, Autechre, Red House Painters, Dead Can Dance, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Skeleton Crew, Ikue Mori, Jim O' Rourke, Xiu Xiu, Wolf Eyes, Bob Ostertag, Aphex Twin, Astor Piazola, AACM and the Revolutionary Ensemble, Bacchir Attar, Cecil Taylor, Aesop Rock, Anthony Braxton, Fred Frith, Shostokovich, Zeena Parkins, Art Blakey, Joanna Newsom...
Movies:
My two favorite films are Bergman's "Winter Light" and Tarkovsky's "Andrei Rublev," the films of Alejandro Jodorowsky (especially Santa Sangre, El Topo, and The Holy Mountain), the films of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami (especially Taste of Cherry, The Wind Will Carry Us, Through The Olive Trees, and Close-Up), Krzysztof Kieslowski's "The Decalogue" (all 10 hours of it), early Bunuel (Un Chien Andalou, L'Age D'or, The Exterminating Angel), Bunuel's Mexico period (especially Nazarin), The Steamroller and the Violin, the last few films of Kurasawa (Ran, Akira Kurasawa's Dreams, Rhapsody in August, Madadayo), City of God, The Scent of Green Papaya, The Vertical Ray of the Sun, just about any film made by Ingmar Bergman (especially Through a Glass Darkly, Autumn Sonata, The Serpent's Egg, Wild Strawberries, Hour of the Wolf, The Virgin Spring, Persona, and The Silence), Wings Of Desire, Werner Herzog films (especially Wheel of Time, The White Diamond, Burden of Dreams, My Best Fiend, Grizzly Man, Lessons In Darkness, etc.), Raise The Red Lantern, "Gambling, Gods and LSD," Rivers and Tides, the films of Nicolas Humbert and Werner Penzel radically changed the way I view both music and film (especially Step Across the Border, Middle of the Moment), the few films made by Gillo Pontecorvo (especially The Battle of Algiers and Burn), The Cruise, the films of Stan Brakhage, Maya Deren's experimental films of the 1940s (especially Meshes in the Afternoon), the films of David Lynch (especially Eraserhead, Lost Highway, and The Straight Story), Lost In Translation, Born Into Brothels, Brazil, 2001, Eyes Wide Shut, Pi, The Five Obstructions, Dancer In The Dark, The City of Lost Children, Waking Life, Delicatessen, The Fisher King, The Shawshank Redemption, Strangers On A Train...
Television:
don't watch it...
Books:
some favorite writers: Lorca, Borges, Rumi, Kazantzakis, Bielj, Rilke, Hesse, Eco, Dostoevsky, Vian, Ionesco, Chomsky, Arundhati Roy, Nabokov, Kierkegaard, Joyce, Merton, Yevgenny Zamayatin, Joris Karl-Huysmans, Burroughs, Miguel Angel Asturias, Cervantes, Murakami, Faulkner, O' Connor, Hemingway, Verissimo, Kafka, Neruda, Bulgakov, Frankl, Solzhenitsyn, Phillip K. Dick, Melville...Some favorite books: The Moon and Sixpence, Foam of the Daze, Invitation to a Beheading, Pale Fire, Lolita, Dandelion Wine, Kotik Lataev, Eduardo Galeano's Memory Of Fire trilogy, The Last Temptation of Christ, A Confederacy of Dunces, The Man Who Was Thursday, The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum, Tropic of Capricorn, The Smile At the Foot of the Ladder, One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Harry Potter, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainance, The Violent Bear It Away, The Glass Bead Game, If On A Winter's Night A Traveller, V., The Crying Of Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow, Descent Into Hell...
Heroes:
"We seem to love broken voices in general: vocal chords eroded by whisky and screaming, the junked out weakness of certain horn players, distortion which signifies surpassing the capabilities of a tube or a speaker - voices that distort, damage, but (at least in performance) don't actually die. The singer pushes through the note, the horn player eventually finds breath, the amplifier struggles on but doesn't explode and become silent.Was this always true? I don't know. Maybe it means something that representation of the struggle (once shown by the trembling effect called vibrato) to maintain the distance necessary to hold an instrument or sing a note in the face of overwhelming emotion is signified in our time by a direct attack on the equipment itself. True vibrato sounds old fashioned to us; think of Django Reinhardt's guitar sound, Caruso's voice, Guy Lombardo's saxophone. Somewhere along the line an inflation occured in the currency of romantic pain, and the price of our musical fix was more than notes could pay.Maybe we distrust our voices and that's why we're unfaithful to them. Beginning in the mid-to-late sixties, producers of guitar equipment began to recognize our need to be unfaithful by making equipment designed to produce distortion.If subtle distortion is make-up, the heavy, homogenous distortion of these guitarists (Eric Clapton, in a phrase demeaning to women everywhere, referred to his sound at the time as 'woman tone') amounts to a type of airbrushing. This is especially true when it is used in conjunction with the type of grandiose large room reverbs and echoes supplying every amplified squirt in a garage band with the imaginary ambiance of the Milan Central Train Station. It is the sonic equivalent of fascist architecture. The effect (and probably the intent ) is to eliminate the little clicks and imperfections that belie the god stature of the guitar hero and to give the impression that the guitar is a strong bellowing voice rather than a frame for frail pieces of metal whose vibrations soon die.All guitarists fight this death, this logarithmic decline into silence, and its implied presence in every note may be one of the reasons guitars (more than bowed or wind instruments, whose notes can be sustained at will) have long been linked to sadness and despair. The guitar is the essential instrument of the blues. Picasso chose it to accompany images of death during his 'blue period.' The best known piece of the first guitar hero virtuoso, John Dowland (16th century England), is titled 'John Dowland Is Always Sad.'Some guitarists fight it by squeezing the last bit out of a note with vibrato. Others use the mandolin technique of picking many notes very fast, hoping no one will notice...volume also works. The sound from the amp reinforces the vibrations of the strings, creating increasingly longer sustains up to the point of feedback. Still, to struggle with the decay and death of notes (in music, things decay before they die) is one thing. To try and actually win seems somehow wrong: a Faustian error. Hence the Marshall stack......mammoth sound systems in the hands of deaf or sadistic sound persons often make the room volume louder than the stage volume, but this only heightens the theatrical effect. In this illusion, the musician is both sacrificial victim and magical protector who filters the dangerous volume levels through his/her body (literally standing between amp and audience) to protect the audience. This ritual is not unlike the shamanistic practice of filtering strong poisons through their bodies so others can enjoy the less toxic residue by drinking their hallucinogenic piss."-Marc Ribot from "Earplugs"
