DJing on the hedonic treadmill

Tuesday, July 12, 2022

Lately I have been thinking a lot about the “hedonic treadmill,” the idea that being the resilient and adaptable creatures that we are, we can get used to almost anything.

To simplify: We chase after the things that we think will make us happy, and once we get those things, we realize we’re not that much happier than we were before, but we see other things that we think will make us happy this time, so we chase after them, etc., etc. (See also: Arbitrary stupid goals.)

One way to deal with this is to just jump off the treadmill and be grateful for what you have.

Another solution might be found in this wisdom from composer Tom Holkenborg I found in Blood, Sweat, and Chrome, the book about making Mad Max: Fury Road.

On the problem of how to “continuously build on that anticipation of what comes next,” Holkenborg brings up a lesson he learned from being an electronic musician doing live shows:

Every time the DJ drops a new track, it feels louder than anything else that you’ve heard before, which is actually not the case! What happens is you drop a new track, and then over the course of three to five minutes, you make it ever so slightly quieter. And then the new track comes in and it’s back at the level where the original one started, and then everything feels so loud.

This seems to me a valuable tip for art and life.

Holkenborg also talks about how much his hobby, cooking, influences his work. He thinks about his soundtracks like building a 10-course meal: putting a taste in one course that begs for another in the next. (Like DJing with food. I suspect Questlove would have much to say about this.)

Juxtapositions from a sequence of experiences are overlooked as a source of creativity.

We tend to think a lot about what we do, but we rarely think about the order in which we do it.

I have found this especially true in one’s self-education: the order in which you come into contact with things is almost as important as the things themselves. (See: Melville not reading Shakespeare until he was 30.)

Adjust the volume, shuffle the sequence…

Songs as shelters in time

Friday, January 7, 2022

“I could wrap myself in the warm cocoon of a song and go anywhere. I was invincible.”
— Johnny Cash

It was the late singer/songwriter David Berman’s birthday this week. I have been listening to his last record, Purple Mountains, over and over. It seems to me a plague album the way Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is a 9/11 album: both feel like prophesies, when really, like many works of science fiction, they were the products of sensitive souls describing our pre-existing conditions.

Friends in NYC and the northeast were posting photos of snow on Instagram while I was listening to “Snow is Falling on Manhattan”:

Songs build little rooms in time
And housed within the song’s design
Is the ghost the host has left behind
To greet and sweep the guest inside
Stoke the fire and sing his lines

“Songs build little rooms in time” reminded me of John Berger’s “Some Notes about Song,” collected in his last collection, Confabulations. (You can also hear Berger read the essay in this BBC radio feature.)

A song, when being sung and played, acquires a body. And it does this by taking over and briefly possessing existent bodies….

A song, as distinct from the bodies it takes over, is unfixed in time and place. A song narrates a past experience. When it is being sung it fills the present. Stories do the same. But songs have another dimension which is uniquely theirs. A song while filling the present hopes to reach a listening ear in some future somewhere. It leans forward, further and further. Without the persistence of this hope, songs, I believe, would not exist. Songs lean forward.

The tempo, the beat, the loops, the repetitions of a song construct a shelter from the flow of linear time: a shelter in which future, present and past can console, provoke, ironize and inspire one another.

Berger thought of songs as being forms of possession: they are hauntings, in a way. “In every song there is a distance,” he writes, and also an absence. “Absence is what inspired them and it’s what they address.”

Flamenco performers often talk about el duende. Duende is a quality, a resonance which makes a performance unforgettable. It occurs when a performer is possessed, inhabited, by a force or a set of compulsions coming from outside her or his own self. Duende is a ghost from the past. And it’s unforgettable because it visits the present in order to address the future.

(Here I’m reminded of a line from Longfellow: “And at last we hardly distinguish / Between the ghosts and the guests”)

Elsewhere in the essay, Berger wrote, “Much of what happens to us in life is nameless because our vocabulary is too poor.”

Berman had the vocabulary. He wrote us these songs. He built us these temporary shelters to step inside.

Heraclitus on the harmony of tensions

Thursday, November 11, 2021

In Heraclitus’s Fragments, he notes that tension is the very thing that makes life sing.

Take a guitar string, for example. If you wind it too tight, it will snap. Too slack, and it will buzz and make no note at all.

So it is with life: it’s not, in Victor Frankl’s words, about finding “a tensionless state,” but about finding the right tension.

(See also: Iain McGilchrist on “the coincidence of opposites.”)

Punk is not a style, punk is a spirit

Wednesday, November 3, 2021

“It is not so much a matter of technique as of spirit.”
—John Holt, How Children Learn

This index card the cartoonist Gary Panter posted to his Instagram reminded me of something the bassist Mike Watt said:

Maybe you gotta understand what punk meant to us. With the Minutemen, punk was not a style of music. It was the state of your mind. We thought the style of music was up to each band. For us punk meant if you find yourself not fitting in a certain kind of world, you try to create your own.

Many think of punk as a style or a category or a thing, but it’s much more interesting if you think of it as a process, a way of doing things, a disposition, a spirit. (This is probably true of all movements.)

If you think of punk as a spirit, not a style, you can learn a lot more from it, you’re more open to other influences, and you’re more free, which is what it’s about.

Further reading: Our Band Could Be Your Life.

A sketchbook page from when I was writing *Show Your Work!*

Prince and Pessoa’s heteronyms

Monday, September 6, 2021

Reading Duane Tudahl’s books about Prince’s recording sessions, it’s mind-blowing to realize just how much music Prince was making all the time, sometimes recording two to three songs in one day.

Prince had so much music in him that it was impossible for the record company’s machinery to absorb it into the release schedule, so he wrote and recorded music to give to other acts. For these acts, he channeled different parts of his personality, and he adopted many alter egos and pseudonyms, such as: Camille, the sped-up voice you hear on tracks like “If I Was Your Girlfriend”; Jamie Starr, credited with the production of Vanity 6 and The Time; Alexander Nevermind; Christopher; Joey Coco; and more.

In a weird reading convergence, I’m also reading Richard Zenith’s biography of the writer Fernando Pessoa, Pessoa: A Biography. The first section of the book is a “Dramatis Personae,” listing the dozens of fictional authors that Pessoa invented, the most famous of which were Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Álvaro de Campos. Pessoa gave them all “biographies, individualized psychologies, religious and political points of view, and distinctive literary styles.”

Too radically different from him to be considered simple pseudonyms, as if only their names had changed, Pessoa called them “heteronyms,” and in a “Bibliographical Summary” of his works published in 1928 he explained the conceptual distinction: “Pseudonymous works are by the author in his own person, except in the name he signs; heteronymous works are by the author outside his own person. They proceed from a full-fledged individual created by him, like the lines spoken by a character in a drama he might write.”

Applying these definitions, one wonders which of the names in a list of Prince’s dramatis personae are pseudonyms and which are heteronyms, and whether Prince himself knew. (He told Oprah in 1996, “Recent analysis has proved that there’s probably two people inside of me. There’s a Gemini. And we haven’t determined what sex that other person is yet.”)