So you know, most of my music will be coming out via Asthmatic Kitty Records -- you can (and should!) keep your eyes on their site for new release and tour info. I'll be keeping this site in an attempt to keep my thoughts organized, but I likely won't be posting free demos here very often. And there's lots of interesting things happening at the asthmatic kitty website. ... so. .. add a bookmark, don't erase this one, but do add that one: www.asthmatickitty.com
June 30, 2009 - BMB EP Now Available on iTunes
The first of three ep appendixes to Heavy Ghost has been released on iTunes today. It features new versions of a few songs, remixes of BMB, two covers and an instrumental b-side, seven tracks in all. You can read more about it HERE. Or go to iTunes and search for DM Stith.
Castanets have a new album coming out in September for which I was asked to contribute a choral arrangement for the song My Heart -- this song was recently featured at Pitchfork.com. They seem to've liked it. This album of theirs is really incredible. It inspired a late night 10 mile bike ride around Bloomington a few weeks ago, a ride that ended in a soaking rain in a strip mall parking lot less than a mile from my house.
I just returned from a couple weeks in Oregon learning how to rest. If you're interested, I'll tell you all about it sometime. And, great news, I'll be heading back to London in a couple weeks to play Somerset House on the 16th, opening for Bat for Lashes. They have a lovely new album out and I'm really happy to get to meet front-woman Natasha Khan! After that we're playing Hoxton Bar & Kitchen in London on the 20th of July.
Ok. Back to mixing. I just received parts from our marching band recording session this morning and have been really anxious to listen through everything, powder it up, put everyone at their places in the room.
June 14, 2009 - the part about Archimboldi
Nobody told me resting would be so exhausting. I'm home from tour and feel kinda gross -- nobody around to get me out of the house, and with all these little recording projects I'm working on, I sometimes go days without seeing another person. And my roommate has disappeared. (update: my roommate just went home for the weekend).
Really I'm just bored. And I miss the daily focus of touring life -- having a show at the end of every day to work towards, to know that I'm always moving forwards, and with people. I miss my band.
Anyway, I am keeping busy. I'm working on Shara's remixes, art for an Asthmatic Kitty artist, some covers, and something with a marching band. Busy enough for rest time, and still finding the time to stare at dust bunnies, stare at a fold in my sweater, a hair on my arm, convince myself I don't need to get out of bed until well after 11am, make a fourth cup of coffee, watch episodes of star trek (the original series - not nearly as hokey as I remembered), walk two miles for a sandwich, watching videos of Jim Gillette of Nitro try to make pretty. I could go on. But I won't. Here's a tree I saw the other night:
May 27, 2009 - homeagain
The third leg of our tour was as dazzling as the first two -- two nights in Paris after a lovely show in Brussels, then the UK with shows in London, Liverpool, Reading and Brighton (where we sussed out a fantastic meal at The Globe), and then on to Galway and Dublin for our last two shows, maybe the best two shows for us. So lucky to end on such a high note when for the final week of the tour I was afraid that I would need to cancel a show due to a severe cold I caught somewhere in Belgium. This cold is still working its way out of my system. The closest thing I found to a temporary cure for this cold was the whiskey given to me during my performance in Galway, Ireland. I was one song into our set and I felt like giving up -- my voice wasn't going to hold out. I told the audience what was going on here and 5 or 6 of them, simultaneously, yelled whiskey. Someone then brought up a glass for me which I gargled, swallowed, nearly spat back out, but by the end of the night was enjoying like it were lemonade on a hot florida day in June. I felt better almost instantly.
The tour was astonishingly, at least for me, affirming, comfortable even, and makes me anxious to do it again soon. Now I'm home in Bloomington sleeping whenever I feel the urge, wandering around town looking for a new apartment, pushing around song ideas, and trying to feel some sense of connection with this place. I wonder if maybe some day I'll be living somewhere in Europe? In any case, I'm more inclined now to feel like I really am trying to earn a vacation by recording new material.
So, new material. I'm reentering the writing phase and bringing sort of hazy conclusions about my process with me from the heavy ghost writing period. I have these charts from when I was first trying to think through converting the recorded songs into something performable -- thinking about making T-shirts? Here is an example:
May 17, 2009 - Leg #2
I finally had a chance to upload this here video -- The string players and I were rehearsing outside on a terrace in Milan and during a vocal moment, we saw this woman riding her bike around and around in a nearby parking lot. We don't know if she was inspired by our loopy singing or what inspired her ride, but we're happy to have it on film. Yesterday was another free day, this time in Paris. I spent the first half of the day sweating blood over a huge batch of press stuff trying to arrange itself at the last minute and being foiled by miscommunication and wrong numbers. When I finally gave up on some of these loose connections, the day turned itself into something altogether more important. I slept and checked email, took a walk in the rain, took a long shower, spent some time with Dixon and Ben, had pizza with Maria, and watched some tv with tour man Ingo (The Ingonator, as he likes to be called, hardly applies to this gentle German. I can sense, though, that he's capable of an intensity he hasn't needed to muster so far on this trip. He wields a tiny laptop because, he says, he's found they're more accurate when thrown long distances than standard 12 or 15 inch laptops. And it's black, he says, so that he can remain stealth, like a panther.)
Look who's European now:
Best tour-mates ever. My band wears colors so I don't have to:
Tonight, we play Brugge!
May 12, 2009 - 1st leg of 1st tour: a briefing
I'm writing from our hotel in Amsterdam -- a little room overlooking canals and rows of bikes, one of which was just knocked over by a gust of wind. Last night we played our sixth show of the tour, which was the last before our first day of rest, today, the seventh day. This has been so much more fun than I ever imagined. The audiences have been so incredibly responsive, laughing at my between-set banter, clapping way too long between songs, demanding encores... All of this is unexpected. And my players are so terrifically supportive too. Marla Hansen, our violist and opening act, has initiated pre-performance yoga in the dressing room, legs in the air, deep breathing, calming us down. And Maria, our restlessly cheerful Cellist/Matriarch, has turned our merch table into something as refreshing and inviting as a homecoming, a family reunion, night after night. Drummer Ben is finding fans here in Holland -- this venue was just perfect for amplifying the details of his fingernail and eyelash percussion technique -- every scrape, tic and toc igniting and circling the dome of the cathedral. And Dixon, our bassist and newest euro-tour addition keeps us laughing all day, every day. We're a happy family.
Audiences in Nijmegen, Amsterdam, Milan, Farrara and Rome have been amazing. And the folks doing sound are just blowing us away. Thanks everyone! Next stop: Paris.
French film maker, Armel Hostiou, took this fragment of a pop song and turned it into a deep, venomous, cavernous trip, like Lynch on downers, or Bergman on speed. It's understated in the right ways, I think, and a nice accompaniament to the EP mentioned below. It's a little like how I feel getting ready to board this plane to Germany, to play these songs for bunches of new faces. I get to visit Belgium this time around, which will be a first along with Ireland and the English countryside. Also, new to me are Nijmegen and Farrara and I haven't been to Rome in a decade! Last time I visited I was an art student seeing Europe for the first time. Me and my classmates told gypsy stories around our hostel bunks like ghost stories at night. I had my first wine on that trip -- almost couldn't finish my glass!
I'm working on a new song to play on tour. It's one of these I've had the chords and the chorus for months -- it's sitting there gestating. I try to be patient. The same thing happened with Braid of Voices, Just Once and Fire of Birds -- I had these big knots of songs but had to wait for them to sort of loosen up on their own. I'm calling this new one 'Brainiac' for now. Hoping for Kilar strings and bigger choir sounds. I am the line you can't quite see.
April 27, 2009 - BMB EP
In July we're releasing the first of a few eps sort of unraveling Heavy Ghost with remixes, alternate versions, covers and some new material. We started thinking about this sort of thing after we were approached by a few folks wanting to remix the songs. And then I started sort of compiling remixes and half-finished songs of my own into little groups, and, well you know, what starts as a mess of incongruous sounds become a new little body, a system, and then you name it and then record label people want to sell it. I'm thrilled!
This is a good morning. My older sister came to visit for the weekend -- we took long walks and ate and ate and ate and I got to introduce her to a bunch of my friends, to my co-op, to bloomington and the mid-west, drunk teenagers, french food, and my new Hofner guitar. Little 500 weekend meant that the town was abnormally rowdy and terrifically/tragically drunk off its 5 inch pumps. Beer cans in the yard! Plant a beer tree!
April 19, 2009 - Record Shop Day
Had a lovely show last night at Empty Bottle in Chicago -- the sound there was good and the audience was mostly attentive and full. When I started playing there weren't more than 20 people at the stage, but when I opened my eyes at the end of the first song the audience had at least tripled! Totally reenergizing show. Thanks people.
We had to leave Chicago in a hurry since we needed to make it back to Bloomington before morning. We stopped at a truck stop on the way and had breakfast, were warned by our waitress that the buffet is a bad idea since "truck drivers use the restroom, don't wash their hands and then dig into the buffet... let's just say I'll never eat it..." - Kimberly, Waitress. Fair warning. Made it home around 5am and went to sleep, but I was awake at 8 with a room full of sunshine and I found this old clip of Sufjan and me recording vocals last summer for "Around The Lion Legs":
That was a fun day.
Today is recordstore day. I'm gonna go buy a few records and smile big at the shop owners.
April 13, 2009 - NPR
Wow! I'm super excited to announce I'm currently being played on NPR. You can hear for yourself here: http://www.npr.org/
In other news, Cryptacize, inventors of some of the most infectious melodies I've ever encountered, and proud co-asthmatics, are about to release their second full-length record, "Mythomania." I've had it for a couple months and am really really proud of them and anxious for the rest of the world to get to hear this piece of work. And now you can. Thank you Muxtape:
I'm nearing the end of my second semester and a little sad that I don't get to spend more time on the projects I'm working through. This one, which involves a fetus shaped mall director and glow-in-the-dark t-shirts is really something. I'll share some of it when I'm done. Also, trying to let myself write new songs. They're sort of piling up at the gate. Good to know they're still anxious to be heard.
April 08, 2009 - we speed up
So last month I tracked down and watched all 10 Star Trek movies (and yes, a handful of the episodes, though I found the movies much easier to digest). This month I think I'm going to start digging into the 007 movies. "M" I think is the one really holding these films together. I first discovered Dame Judi Dench in the brit-com "As Time Goes By" which showed on PBS during my lunch break while I was working in Houghton, NY. I lived with my parents during some of that time and I remember watching that show with my mom in our daily 45 minute ritual. Something about relaxed, unironic, humor of the two (Dench and Geoffrey Palmer) was really soothing to me at the time. Natural's not the word I'm looking for, maybe cozy. I'd always make some fancy sandwich, a coffee, take my shoes off and we'd sit silent for 30 minutes in the liviing room, Gershwin, my parents' Schitzu/Toy Poodle mix gnawing some adorable thing at our feet and we'd be old people on the couch watching old Judi and Geoffrey.
This week I'm finally finding a rhythm with my school work again. Just in time too as the semester is winding down and I need to crank out one more really strong design project. And we (we at Asthmatic Kitty) we just finalized a new little thing. More on that soon.
This has been a strange week. After returning from SXSW I launched into my school work full-force, trying to catch up on things, trying to get back into this other set of responsibilities. I willed enough enthusiasm into existence for 4 days, and then I hit a wall. All weekend I was grumpy, exhausted, lonely, played video games on my laptop for hours while listening to lots of podcasts, took long midnight walks culminating with subway veggie-delight subs, and fiddled around recording new versions of old songs. This summer I intend to learn how to relax, how to put expectation away for a while. This week I'm still a little grumpy and I'm again having to exert some resolution to get things done like my taxes, getting my car to the shop and tuning up my bicycle, cleaning the house, planting some plants. I called my friend Shara last night and talked for an hour about what I was starting to think of as postpartum depression -- starting to recognize that the thing I made now has a life of its own.
Over the last few weeks I've been flying around talking about my album, about being a young musician, about being friends with Shara and Sufjan and the Asthmatic Kitty family. It's been super fun -- now seems a good time to share this stuff with you. One of the best things I've done this year was visit the WNYC studios and have a conversation with David Garland for Spinning on Air. That conversation and a short set of live songs were recorded and are now avilable to stream or download at the WNYC website. Click the photo above (photo by David Garland himself!) to go to that site.
March 16, 2009 -Heavy Ghost Double Vinyl Now Available!
Yes! it's available on the asthmatic kitty website for just $15. That's very little considering it comes with the curtain speech 5 song ep and big heavy artwork.
Tomorrow I'm off to SXSW. Maybe I'll see some of you there? Schedule of shows is HERE.
March 14, 2009 - I'll make you so proud of me
I'm discovering all sorts of new old music from the Cryptacize gang over at their blog: cryptacize.blogspot.com -- they've been posting the most wonderful mixes there. I've been on a 50s love song kick lately. And Star Trek movies. I just watched The Wrath of Khan and was near tears at the end when Kirk hugs his son. This isn't sophisticated story telling really but I keep coming back to these movies. And iced espresso shaken with soy milk. I don't know why. It's strange cravings of the pregnant, maybe. I did this sort of thing last year when I was beginning to dig into writing and recording HG. Maybe new bodies of song will be showing up soon? I hope I hope.
March 10, 2009 - HEAVY GHOST NOW AVAILABLE!!!
I made something a year ago that I care very much about and now it's available for friends and strangers alike, all over the place, for playing in their cars on long road trips, or for after dinner, or while waiting for something to happen in hospitals and subway rides, on planes, on unmade beds, on vacation, during finals week, at work, at the gym, when they're happy, when they're horribly upset, when they're lonely, when they're anxious, when there's a sudden sense of peace, when things change... I don't expect this recording to mean the same to others as it does me, but I'm elated at the chance to share!
In sharing with my elation, Rafter Roberts, almost unbearably talented mixer/inspirator of the album, remixed the track Thanksgiving Moon off the record and it's available for download at ImposeMagazine.com right now!
Also, the iTunes version of the record comes with a terrificly rejeuvinating remix of Pity Dance which clocks in at over 11 minutes long! It's sort of a meditation on the tumble of the guitar line and it's completely transfixing.
Thanks again to everybody who helped with this record. There are too many to name here, and you all got spotlit in the liner notes, but thanks thanks thanks. Take that thanks and think on it.
March 08, 2009 - Sick
Home sick -- I should be in Chicago right now grabbing some dinner before my show, but I'm home with a cold, goopy eyes and a sore throat. To keep my mind active I've been watching this video and reading a book on Werner Jeker, master poster and exhibition designer (And I'm amazed by how little information there is about him on the internet.)
ALERT! REMINDER: My first album, Heavy Ghost, comes out on Tuesday! (this Tuesday -- the 10th, or the 9th in Europe.) Go buy it from your favorite record store, or, if you're nowhere near a record store, head over to AsthmaticKitty.com and click on Add To Cart.
March 07, 2009 - Hairily
Bless my heart! I had a sorta sleepless night last night and ended up spending a whole hour watching this man's music videos. Maybe it's my strict diet of honey and lemon, but I think this man is completely captivating! Read more about Mr. Gorley at EncyclopediaDramatica...
Shows this weekend, here in Bloomington and in Chicago. I've never spent more than a day in Chicago. Can you imagine?
This video as done by hand (BY HAND) and director Charles Huettner has recently posted proof of this on his blog in a thorough piece by piece detail of the video's components. Read it on Music To Video.
It's going to be a beautiful weekend. I intend to walk around outdoors with no jacket on.
March 05, 2009 - quiet critique
In a coffee shop this morning I watched two elderly men laughing hysterically over something, I dont know what. I had my headphones on -- listening to Neko Case's brilliant new album (totally amazing! Prison Girls?! Red Tide?!). Something about older bodies. I don't know. They're more like mine, I guess. I'm not muscly, clothes sag on me. I have a couple of scapula bones sticking out at sharp angles on my back -- in highschool I used to knick these on car doors pretty regularly. They're not so prominent now, or I've learned to watch my shoulders or something. Anyway, these two men were laughing so hard and there was a baby sitting at the table between me and the old men -- the baby turned and looked at me, her one eyebrow went up and she pursed her lips. She stayed like that for a whole minute until the men resumed a more private conversation, her face in quiet critique. If the moment weren't so surreal, or maybe if I hadn't been the only one witnessing this perfect composition, I might've gone hysterical too. Instead, I stared her back, nodding my head a little, taking it in. Little cynical zen baby girl and me. Baby and old men are gone now.
I don't own a car. I don't make enough money that it's feasible, and I just don't need one all that often. And I like walking, but little things like paying rent or buying a loaf of bread turn into serious endeavors. I was in NYC on the day rent was due, and then I had a couple full days of classes and fevers so this morning was the first I've been able to make the 45 minute walk to the renter's office (is there a name for that?). This office is on the other side of a mall, so I made the mall part of my walk at 9:15 this morning. I was the youngest mall-walker by about 30 years, I think. There's an interesting little space on the back side of the mall -- a corner on the outside of Macy's, I think, which is fully covered with ivy, ground to roof, not an inch of the concrete shows through.
March 03, 2009 - Spilled my dinner
on my bed.
I'm washing everything now.
No, I hadn't eaten the dinner yet. It was in a bowl and it spilled on my pillow and on my sheets. And on my trousers and shirt. My world waits for dry bed sheets.
March 02, 2009 - Steam and Stream!
I spent the better part of today trying to sleep off a fever I brought back with me from NYC. Can't seem to sleep though. In sifting through old photos, I found this one of one of my midnight writing sessions at a church in Brooklyn. I don't own a piano o I'm always on the lookout for a semi-public one I can practice and write on. At this session, I recorded a sketch of what would be "Braid of Voices." I practiced in the dark not for aesthetic reasons but because the light switches were locked. No heat either. And I did this sort of thing at night because during the day there was a day care that met in the garden just outside that window. I once heard a child scream non-stop for 90 seconds. no joke.
In other news, Heavy Ghost is streaming in its entirety over at AsthmaticKitty.com! I recommend steamed potatoes as an accompaniment. Steam them, then fry them a little, then shake some soy sauce over them. I had mine sliced an eighth of an inch thin and they were delish. Fever's still here but I'm full of yum. And a little brocolli. Excellent.
Oh! And I done played a show on Friday! Brooklyn Vegan took some really lovely photos: SEE THEM HERE.
February 28, 2009 - MGC/GMS
Sometime during my senior year at college, in Rochester, NY, I found a copy of a National Geographic that featured a story on Sable Island, a 33 mile long curve of sand shifting in the currents southeast of mainland Nova Scotia. The article featured photos of a stubble ridged sandy landscape, a nearly two-dimensional swath of scenery defining the crease between two major Atlantic currents: this island is in a constant state of flux, being torn down and consumed by hurricanes and northeasters, and then, slowly, having its ridges and beaches rebuilt by the wind and water currents. This is a violently beautiful place. For the same reasons that the island keeps changing shape, its been named "Graveyard of the North Atlantic" as these storms have caused upwards of 350 shipwrecks. The article shows photos of ships half buried in the sand around the edge of the island.
February 25, 2009 - to NY!
Tomorrow morning I leave for NYC for a brief bit of show and tell -- I'm playing the Cake Shop at 9:15 on Friday night and hopefully visiting with friends on Saturday. I've been looking forward to this for a long time! Traveling and performing with me will be my friend Mike Dixon. He's trouble. He makes me do things: click.
This sun this morning. It's bright and I'm thinking about the rush of hope that shows up every year when the weather starts to go warm and soft. I always have a song writing spurt around that time. It was in that sudden crack of spring weather that I started writing and recording songs for the first time. I was living in Brooklyn, had only moved there a few months previous, and had finally found a job at a coffee shop in Manhattan. I'd been unemployed for months, floating around Philadelphia, upstate NY and the city looking for income. When I moved to NYC, it was with this feeling like I was casting myself out into some bottomless pit. I'd never lived in a city before and I was so scared. My father drove me the 8 hours from our home in Houghton to my first apartment in Sunset Park, Brooklyn -- I remember sweating in the car like I've never done before, leaving wet palm shapes on the dash. We entered Brooklyn and somehow didn't take the BQE from Brooklyn Bridge to Sunset Park -- we drove straight down 8th Street, through all the neighborhoods (my memory of it is more like some dense milieu of Calcutta, Hong Kong and Nigeria -- bodies pressed against our car as we drove, cattle in the streets! But for me at the time it was unbelievable -- so many people, so close together, small houses, no green spaces. I couldn't believe I was going to live in these conditions. I'd been so padded.)
My friend Timmy was waiting for me at the apartment, a single room in the back half of a basement. The room was big enough for two, but barely. The floor was bathroom tile white and sloped in the center to a drain which compounded my sense that the walls were moving closer and closer together. I felt like I was at the bottom of things. Everything eventually siphons through that drain. It was a dark time. Crying on the phone, lonely walks through a heavy cold neighborhood, through streets that stunk of fish and car exhaust and waste. New York is no place for the directionless.
Anyway, warm air came and the sun and friends, and sometime in April or May I found myself at my computer singing to a microphone that was set up across a room, putting sounds together in ProTools for the first time. I found out that I loved doing this, that I could layer vocals together and make the choir sounds I'd always listened for. I did this for 6 or 8 hours every day for the next 3 weeks, listening to what I'd made while riding the subway to work. It was life to me. Ugh. This is painfully sentimental. I guess it's the sun and this bit I read this morning: "...while a hundred civilizations have prospered (sometimes for centuries) without computers or windmills or even a wheel, none have survived even a few generations without art." (Bayles and Orland). Today anyway, music feels less like striving for acceptance and more like life. More life-full.
February 13, 2009 - Parade Day
I'm working on a bunch of design projects. Some parts of the work are really tedious and in the downtime I have figured out what sort of blogs I should be championing. Here's a list of those I keep coming back to:
1. BLDGBLOG - I'm not trained in architecture, but this frequently updated site is so full of good deep content, it's just so satisfying. The "Cable City And The Hanging Hotel" entry was one that really caught my attention. There's no quippy bites of info here.
2. 2 OR 3 THINGS I KNOW - wins the award for softest blog. Everything is communicated in a library whisper. It's all hushed monochromatic natural design.
4. 30 BUCKS A WEEK - I spend a lot more than $30 a week on food. I read this blog with curiosity. I'd like to try to eat this way at some point, maybe when I'm living with someone who is interested in the idea too.
5. 12K - Blog of the Sound-A-Day project. Herein are contained field recordings, one for each day, of places like a hockey rink, first rain on Pound Ridge, and the trains at Union Square.
February 11, 2009 - for Christian Schimke
Good friend, great designer, horrible keep-in-contacter, Christian Schimke, called me tonight to tell me to update my blog. Lame. Rather than appease him with something about my day (which I spent buying groceries and then transforming into a terrific kale feast) I send you to another blog. The happy workers over at AsthmaticKitty.com have encouraged me to contribute something to their regularly updated sidebar. Go here to read what I contributed:
I didn't pick up any souveniers on my rip through Europe last week (well, except for a couple copies of the Skymall catalog and a business card from an Indian restaurant in London -- it has this blue hologram on it. Irresistable.) Or so I thought. I've discovered I brought back with me a silent companion, with a tiny but ineluctable voice. It wasn't until this morning, a bluebird on my shoulder morning -- open all the windows morning -- big golden sun shapes on the living room wall morning... It wasn't until this here morning that I was able to formalize a vaporous desire. Last Tuesday I found myself in the imports aisle at the local fancy grocery store putting a tiny jar of Marmite in my basket. Marmite, for those of you who don't know, is an English delicacy: a brown spread that looks and smells something like shoe polish. It's a so-called "polarizing food" -- this is how it was introduced to me by the friend I stayed with in London -- it's a taste only half of any given population will be able to tolerate, and only half of that tolerant population will go for seconds, and half of that tolerant-second-grabbing population will not be able to stop spreading it all over everything they consume. I allign myself with the second-grabbers. When my jar runs out, I don't imagine I'll buy another jar (unless I come across the squeezable kind that I read about recently on THE MARMITE WEBSITE.)
So, this morning I realized that it's not the Marmite that I'm after. The morning after I arrived in London, Tom, my London friend, made me some fresh coffee and a batch of crumpets. The crumpets were merely the Marmite delivery devices, but I think it's the crumpets that I'm really after. I found an excellent write-up on the state of the crumpet industry on THE FOPPISH BAKER blog along with detailed instructions on how to make my own. Were I not so busy trying to get back on track with design and school things, I'd be planning my day around locating the ingredients, the cast-iron skillet, and the crumpet rings for this recipe.
Reminder: The first single from my album, for the song "Pity Dance", is available on iTunes right now. It comes backed with a cover I did for Randy Newman's "Suzanne." I'm really proud of both tracks and I want you to hear them! And I want to know what you think. Go add comments to the Pity Dance page on iTunes! It comes with pretty artwork I did myself. Oh, also, Suzanne features strings played by Prof. Michael Hart Dixon and was mixed by Rafter. I wouldn't be writing about this a second time (see below) if I wasn't proud about these two tracks. I really like them.
February 3, 2009 - Pity Dance!
Pity Dance, the first single from Heavy Ghost is released today. You can buy it HERE (CLICK) for $2. It features an extra tack: a cover of Randy Newman's Suzanne, which is a creepy blues number I injected some spirit into.
And finally, I recorded a 4 song live session at Daytrotter a little while back. You can download 4 tracks here: www.Daytrotter.com -- if you listen to only one, make it Braid of Voices.
I'm still trying to recover from my week in Europe. Things went really well, I met a huge amount of hugely awesome people and fell in love with 5 cities all over again.
January 23, 2009 - I am the line/Dark Was The Night
I'm hanging in limbo lately. Tomorrow I fly to Europe for a week to do some press things, but today I'm floating around town, directionless. Bag in the wind. A dryer on tumble. And other such horrible metaphors. This morning, the apartment I'm renting is being shown by the owners to new renters for next year, so I had to leave the house for a couple hours. After a near sleepless night, probably due to eating dinner at 11:30, I had to be up and out of the house by 9:45. I didn't have anywhere to be so I walked to a strip-mall bakery and had my morning coffee. I had to skip my shower this morning in order to get out of the house on time and so the tingle of sleep is still embedded in my skin. In the next 8 days, I'm going to move into and out of 6 countries. I don't really know how to prepare for this.
Now there's something wrong with the music feed here in the bakery and instead of pop songs, we're hearing chirps and squawks and the hum of an electric fireplace. The chairs in here look suddenly very flimsy.
There's a fantastic new compilation being released on February 17th: Dark Was The Night -- it's a Red Hot charity compilation currated by Bryce Dessner of Clogs and The National (who I've met a few times as he's friends with Shara and Sufjan, but with whom I don't think I've ever managed more than 3 or 4 words. I remember him for his handshake though: it's the gentlest I've ever held). This is a double-cd (triple-LP!) collection and features a more impressive line-up than I think I've ever seen in a benefit comp. I have a tangential relationship with this comp. I'm on it, but so far, I'm not listed. Over the summer, while I was vacationing at a friend's summer home on a lake in New Hampshire, Sufjan called me to see if I'd be able to add some expressive background vocals to a remix of a song he'd recorded for this compilation. (A remix by Buck 65 of Sufjan's song, featuring rapper Serengeti on vocals. And this song is a Castanets cover -- could this connection be any more tenuous?). I had my recording equipment with me (I had just returned from mixing my record in San Diego and was feeling ambitious, thought I'd record another album in NH, didn't, got almost nothing done) so I said I'd try. I was given access to another house on this cottage property, my friend's grandmother's summer home, and set up to record vocals in her living room.
This living room was quintessentially grandmother. Brown paisley carpetting installed during the Nixon era, statuettes of owls, deer, and Jesus, grey with dust, and the loudest clocks clicking, clacking. I had to unplug a few of them when I recorded. The couch was covered in plastic, so I sat in the middle of the floor, pulled shut some floor-to-ceiling burlap curtains, unplugged those clocks, and did my best Aretha. I think I spent about 3 hours in there, in that time capsule, mewing and cawing and tracing little vocal gestures over Serengeti's lyrics about perfect calamity in a salt and sweat summer romance, over Buck 65's blips and Sufjan's horns and piano.
This little house felt long-abandoned. All that was in the fridge was a couple jars of dill and butter pickles, mayo, lemon juice, ketchup, a single hotdog, and a whole shelf of fast-food-style soy and duck sauce packets. I finished recording with a little quartet gesture at the end of the song, packed away my equipment, plugged the clocks back in and set them to the correct time, openned the burlap curtains, and went for a swim in the lake. I think that was the night my friend and I got caught canoing in the middle of the lake by a lightning storm, legs of Tropical Storm Cristobal sprawled up over the north east.
Oh man. Don Quixote has just walked into the bakery.
And finally, I was commissioned by fantastic music bloggers, Motel De Moka, to compile a a playlist and accompanying commentary on music I've been interested in over the last few months. Go here to read and listen: www.moteldemoka.com
January 16/17, 2009 - a day off:
I visited my family for Christmas and found the upstairs bathroom completely disassembled. It was in the middle of being rebuilt. The wallpaper around the tub area had been mostly removed which revealed an interesting drawing -- some country kid's first go at graffiti. Nothing shocking, just a couple of people: a man with googly eyes and a huge smile, a woman who looks afraid or sad to be covered up by the wallpaper. Their hands were tracings of the hands of the previous owners and they nudge the aesthetic away from the playful towards archeological. There's something heavy about traced hands.
Yesterday was my day off: I slept until noon, read a book, listened to a record, made cookies, had a couple good long conversations on the phone, showered around 5pm and made a big salad for dinner. I never left the house.
January 14, 2009 - cd packaging:
It feels really good to have this album in my hands. You can't really see it, but the cover's all shiny. I'll take a better picture once my camera starts working again.
I tell you what, my friends have the strangest devices. I became obsessed with Torlando's anti-gravity boots after they fixed my aching back the other day. Tonight I went batman three times. Classes begin tomorrow.
January 9, 2009 - Tetanus, 5:30am
I had a lovely conversation with a nurse on Tuesday morning. I'd left my house at 8am and made my way, carefully, and slowly, over ice-covered Bloomington streets and parking lots to the IU Health Center for a tetanus booster shot. We looked at my records when I arrived -- I hadn't had any kind of shot in almost 20 years, except for one I had when I was 14, and I was overdue for one. No big deal. I was totally brave, made small talk with the nurse about the ice and some slip-on ice shoe attachments she recently bought. I was in and out in less than 30 minutes, a band-aid on my arm and a smile on my face. It's early Friday morning now and my arm is still sore from the shot, I've had headaches for 3 days and I've woken twice in the last 3 nights in fever shakes. I've got a bump on my forehead from what must've been a heavy blow, from what? I can't remember. Special thanks to tetanus shot. Extra special thanks to Michael Kaufmann who told me I could've avoided this had I done this and this and that.
I'm wide awake now -- it's 5:45am and I think this tetanus fever is back.
I've been in munch munch mode in the last few weeks. I found a great and simple recipe for Chocolate Has-A-Nut Cookies over at have cake, will travel <--click, which is a lovely blog I read often. The cookies tasted like this:
I've also been reading nomnomnomblog a bunch -- great quinoa ideas! And reading up on the talented mr. Jim Denevan, an artist who inscribes elegant geometric designs at an unbelievable scale on beaches on the west coast.
When Jim's not busy combing sand or setting up the next drawing, he tours the country on an awesome red bus puting on outdoor dining events he calls Outstanding In The Field:
People are amazing. I mean, the whole race of us. We're amazing. Good job everybody.
6:45am -- ok. my fever is gone. Back to sleep.
December 30, 2008: The Education of the Typographer
We feel it in our bones. The education of the typographer is one of feeling around the edges of something simultaneously ubiquitous and evasive. There are histories to memorize, styles to categorize, figures to idolize, but the technique itself, of seeing clearly, of feeling the type, the technique is something that can’t be merely mustered.
The process feeds the process. Typography is the study of seeing letter forms. The best typographers can tell you when something is right, when something is wrong, but not always why. They will feel their way through the work. It’s a dark pursuit. Spending time with a printing press, with the letters, leaning over the press bed, donning an apron, committing to a layout, changes the way you see type. You feel that it’s right. It’s like the difference between listening to a performance of Gorecki’s 3rd in mp3 format and hearing it live, in person, performed by a 120 piece orchestra.
I’m as much at fault for the proliferation of mindless type as any designer born after 1975. By the time I became interested in type, the world had the Adobe Suite, and my laptop came pre-loaded with hundreds of typefaces. I do all my freelance work on a laptop—I work at my micro-studio in my living room, my kitchen, on my bed. Typography is a matter of hitting a few keys, lassoing and scaling until they feel alright, sometimes scanning handwritten lettering. This summer I brought my work with me to San Diego for 3 weeks. In that time I started and finished several design projects for clients I work with on the East coast. I was as comfortable working from the queen-sized bed in my hotel room as I’ve ever been from my living room couch. By the work, my clients didn’t know I’d flown clear across the country.
I’ve since moved to Bloomington Indiana in pursuit of an MFA in graphic design. My world has suddenly become very small. I ride my bike to school, to my office, to one or two stores, and home. Rarely anywhere else. I ride in slow circles: each morning, away from my bed; each evening, back. Each day at school, I move from classroom A to classroom B; I eat the same bagel and bottle of juice for lunch between classes; I’m engaged in a rhythmic swirl through the day, tighter towards the middle of the day, more relaxed towards the end. In the last 5 years, I’ve moved at least twice per year, following a feeling about how I want to live. Living linearly away from the day before, towards the next day, headlong, cutting through the days like a prow, one place to another to another to another, and never back. Now, at school, I’m tethered.
To imagine a world in which the letter press and desktop publishing cooperate is to embrace a disparate dichotomy. The first is about understanding the process, the second about eliminating process.
The “at symbol” was certainly around in the years Hamilton was churning out the country’s wood type, used by merchants to denote “at each” in markets throughout the English-speaking world, but it’s a character that had little use by the sign-producing industry. ‘@’ was a character used to sell cheap and quickly-turned-over merchandise, merchandise likely advertised with hand-written signage. It’s fitting that this symbol, one that was likely only ever scribbled, is one that grew to common-usage with the advent of desktop publishing and electronic communication.
The ‘@’ represents the garishly over-simplified proliferation of commercial babble, at least as it has meant that any business can be done anywhere, by anyone. @ signifies imaginary location: information glittering in some server computer somewhere, or nowhere, or everywhere. @ represents the purely symbolic: A symbol of symbols. It’s a form that wraps around itself, a spiral, an open eye. With this project, I’ve attempted to capture it and subject it to physicality, and to the liturgy of ink, press, and paper. I present it as a memento in reverence to the living relic of Hamilton Wood Type—that maybe by giving it a body, we might eventually feel it in our bones.
[The images above are photos of a type-high letterpress @ symbol I built from mashed computer parts and epoxy resin. I built this thing in honor of the Hamilton Wood Type Museum, a museum celebrating the history of wood type in America, a niche market, for sure, but one that is important to many typographers. I built a pedestal for this piece, surrounded it with metal fittings used in setting type, and lit the character from underneath -- since the resin is clear, the piece appears to glow.]
December 23, 2008 - When your roads are too icy
Make a Christmas card! I am writing from the Indianapolis airport, awaiting a flight I was supposed to take yesterday back to Buffalo to spend Christmas with my family. Had I flown home yesterday, however, I would've missed out on a perfectly wonderful holiday experiment: making a squealing Xmas card with Torlando Hakes and Mike Dixon for Make: Magazine. Click HERE to see the results!
Also, I recorded my first Christmas song and you can hear it HERE (CLICK). It features Dixon on string bass, and me playing Torlando's grandfather's hand-made hammer dulcimer. I wrote it on Sunday, recorded all day Sunday and Monday. Is this good information to share? I'm not sure.
Happy Happy Family Christmas!
December 16, 2008 - Heavy Ghost
Heavy Ghost, my first full length record, proper, will be released March 10 on Asthmatic Kitty Records and I'm really excited about it! It's 12 songs and 44 minutes long and features contributions from lots of my friends: Shara on bgvs, Dustin Ragland, Sebastian Krueger, OSSO, Jose Delhart, the Houghton Brass Quintet, Marla Hansen on Viola, Sufjan on stapler, scissors, and a stationary fan. All of this is recorded in bedrooms, churches, kitchens and instrumental rehearsal halls around the East coast and mixed by Rafter in San Diego. I finished the art this fall, and I'm really proud of it. More info is available HERE. Track titles:
Heavy Ghost, by DM Stith
1. Isaac's Song
2. Pity Dance
3. Creekmouth
4. Pigs
5. Spirit Parade
6. BMB
7. Thanksgiving Moon
8. Fire of Birds
9. Morning Glory Cloud
10. GMS
11. Braid of Voices
12. Wig
Note: there are very early demo versions of a few of these tracks floating around, but really, they don't sound much like the versions on Heavy Ghost. Just so you know.
December 9, 2008 - :
How did I end up in Bloomington? A friend the other day called Bloomington "Kid Town" -- it sorta is. Smart, Friendly, Rich Kid Town. I've become really fixed on trying to understand how growing up in Buffalo shaped me aesthetically so differently from mid-westerners. I think mostly my search is an attempt to reconcile feeling like an outsider -- maybe I'm identifying myself too much with taste, piling up what I like to see and hear, hedging myself in with it as an insulating layer during these last 2 weeks of school -- but I feel more severe, more heavy headed, than ever here in Indiana, like I take things too seriously. And I end up writing confessionals on my website... East coast dread?
December 7, 2008 - Indy
The garbage around school is fantastic! I pretty regularly walk from the fine arts building through campus and into town -- the walk takes me over a cluster of foot bridges, under persimon and ginko trees and through a pair of gothic arches -- and every other time I go, I find some discarded thing worth picking up and cramming in my pocket. I keep these things pinned on my office wall. Mostly they're school notes -- I have a list of vocabulary words on a 4"x5" folded piece of computer paper, most likely used by its creator to help study for a linguistics exam, and I have some botanical anatomy scribbles on a napkin, drawn with a blue pen, with scribbles on the bottom edge likely used to revive the failing ball-point -- these things are easy to pick up inconspicuously. I find a lot of clothes too, but I leave them be. How does one lose a Saucony tennis shoe in the middle of campus? I haven't figured out why I pick these things up except that I don't like seeing trash floating around an otherwise pristine landscape. I drove through Indianapolis on my way to Bloomington in August and there I saw, twice, McDonalds trash tossed from the window of a moving car -- 2 seperate cars -- in the middle of an intersection.
On Tuesday, my EP, Curtain Speech, goes on sale at AsthmaticKitty.com and on iTunes (and emusic, I imagine?). It's only $3.50, comes in cool packaging that I designed, and could make a great, dare I say (?), stocking-stuffer.
November 14, 2008 - The New Tesla-ment
Balanced/Unbalanced: I was given a lesson yesterday on the sciences behind a balanced mic cable -- it was in the calm after a flurry of fears that either my record player had lost its capacity to play in stereo, or my really nice headphones were broken, or heavy ghost had somehow gone mono when pressed to vinyl. I figured out that my receiver was the cause of the problem, and more specifically, an extra cable stuck in its back. I knew about the cable, but until last night, I didn't know the cable. Personal brain trainer, Mike Dixon, explained, in dry ice science-guy terms, that a balanced mic cable contains 2 signals -- one signal carries the sound as electon waves, and the other carries a non-musical signal which counteracts interference when the cable gets crimped or the musical signal gets snagged. Kind of a boring explanation. Where's the ether? Where's the Tesla lightning?
I thought that was how music was made.
Oh, there's a new compilation out on asthmatic kitty called Habitat -- it's a two-disc set of electronic music on the theme of architecture, interior spaces, living space, and it's a really good listen. All proceeds go to Habitat for Humanity. GO HERE.
Heavy Ghost artwork is done! I'll share it soon. Here's a bit that's not being used, but I still like it:
October 29, 2008 - how close by
There's a new album up on AsthmaticKitty.com -- a remix ep of songs from A Thousand Shark's Teeth reimagined by Mr. Alfred Brown. I did the art. I'm working on an ep like this too -- don't know exactly when it will be out, but before the new year for sure.
The lines in the image above were created by scratching receipt paper (a roll of it sat in front of my house in Brooklyn for a few days before I decided, rather than throw it out, I'd hold onto it) with a metal tip I used to use for making linoleum cuts. The lines have a little more depth than a pencil line, and loads more than a pen. Artwork for the other remix eps (3 or 4) will be similar -- they'll be recognizable as a set.
Again, facing my longest day of the week on no sleep. I had a smidgen of coffee yesterday to help me over some creative humps and it, the caffeine and the thumping heart and the darting eyes, came back at 3:30am to haunt me. From 3:30 to 6 I lay awake counting the number of times the furnace kicked on, repositioning my 6 thick blankets.
I need a piano. I make regular trips to the music building in search of an available piano. I'm writing new songs and the best thing for me is a big piano and a sound-proofed room. The building with the practice rooms in it is a cylinder shape, with the rooms splaying on a central radial axis. I find myself walking around and around and around. I got lost yesterday doing this. So, I need a piano.
October 24, 2008 - my talented friends
Ladies and Gentlemen, the talented Mrs. Worden:
This is a video of a performance My Brightest Diamond did on a roof somewhere in sky high Manhattan. It's a great performance with great sound and video quality, and as ever, Shara is spirited and strong.
The string players (well, 3 out of 4 of them) are the players that fill out the middle section of Just Once, a track from my Curtain Speech EP. You can hear that track on my myspace page: www.myspace.com/dmstith or at AsthmaticKitty.com
More recording this week! It feels great to be working on songs again. We're preparing some great releases for February and March, and I'm heavy into the artwork for all this stuff. Can't wait to share!
October 19, 2008 - help?
Bike stolen! If you see this bike (serial # T037756) email me. dmstith (at) gmail [dot] com...
I love this bike. Since I don't own a car, this is my sole method of transportation. Makes me real sad.
Update: I just remembered my bike had my headlamp attached to the handlebars for when I ride at night. I loved that headlamp. I wrote about it a few weeks ago. ...man...
October 17, 2008 - Move me, Nina
I found myself frozen in some tiny thought, something like a shadow of a word, tonight in my friends' back yard. I think I'm tired. I think it's been a long week. I was standing there in the swampy glow of the moon and living room lights pressing out from three houses in front of me. I'm still amazed at the alleys here. People park their cars behind their houses, share little dirt drives with their neighbors. Those private shared places are beautiful. So, I was visiting this friend and we were about to head next door to a party and I got stuck in this space between the houses. Not physically stuck—I was standing in an open yard—but I couldn't seem to think my way forward. I must've stood there for 5 minutes enjoying that space, tracing the shapes of the trees and the houses against the chalkboard sky, smiling to myself. I guess I would call that 'peace.' It certainly felt 'peaceful.' I listened to Nina Simone for the first time in months today. Maybe she had something to do with it. Or maybe I'm just really tired.
This is work by Tara Donovan. This image is made up of white plastic drinking straws. She has a wonderful installation piece made out of plastic cups.
October 12, 2008 - New Listening
I'm a restless listener. I've gotten so used to the glittering field of emerging music scenes and the musicians that spawn them, and of viewing them from afar, and of jumping from one idea to another the moment I think I 'get' what the musician is going for, I've been trying lately to slow my intake down a little. I think I see this overdrive consumption as a thing to be avoided. I'm not entirely sure why, but one of the reasons has to do with the way I was preparing to write my album. There was lots of fear. I was afraid that whatever would come out of me would be boring or lazy or something like that. I am so in love with so much music -- I didn't want to mimic it, but it was tough to always trust where my intuition was going.
Early on I remember feeling a little dizzy with the amount of good music there is out there. I didn't know where to start, what my sound would be. I remember waking up in the middle of the night and writing down little notes about how to get started on a song -- I found one of these notes recently and it suggested picking a song by one of my favorite artists, writing down the form of the song, writing down the lyrics, and seeing what of these raw materials I could use to develope my own song. It was an act of defiance against the thing in me that knows how to trust the right thing to come. It was laying on the gas in an overturned car, hoping something would catch and the car would be set aright. I don't remember ever actually trying any of these panic inspired ideas, but the impulse was strong. I had this big thing I wanted to make, and I didn't think I knew how to do it.
I was also becoming obsessed with certain musicians -- I wrote a while ago about Mary Margaret O'Hara who captured my crazed attention so completely I was almost sick with devotion to her music. I've finally purchased a vinyl copy of her first album and have been listening to it and a few other things on my record player. Vinyl changes the listening experience. I'm bound to the player, I can only listen on headphones, and I have to be there to flip the record half way through. I'm hearing more individual sounds, and I'm recognizing the miniature archs in the album sequencing. I've also been listening to the new Marnie Stern album and Belong's 'Colorloss Record.' Now that I'm on the otherside of my album, these subtly structured albums are really doing it for me.
Maybe it's fall too. Last year at this time I was living in Brooklyn and I was dealing with a grief tied to the season change (a grief Sufjan found utterly comical!). It may be different other years, but last year the leaves didn't change color in Brooklyn -- I should say they didn't flash gold and red like they do upstate -- the Brooklyn leaves turned gunmetal gray and fell on the sidewalk in one weekend. So, now, in Bloomington, the change is taking its time. Each weekend I find myself at least once wandering for a couple hours around campus, taking note of the slow change of things. In short, my findings: Bloomington + Autumn + Record Player = Happy Stith.
October 10, 2008 - Curtain Speech and Heavy Ghost!
Finally, some details on my upcoming releases have been posted on the Asthmatic Kitty website (Click HERE to read!). Over the last year, (since moving back to Brooklyn in the hopes of spending some serious time focusing on recording, and since being added to the Asthmatic Kitty roster around the holidays...) I focused on creating a body of songs in album format. What I ended up with were 17 tracks focused on the tension between isolation and community, creativity and duty, conversation and thought, and lots of other things. By June of this year I'd recorded versions of these songs I was happy with, but hadn't settled on a track listing for the album. I flew to San Diego where I spent a couple weeks with Rafter with his singing serpents refining and mixing and putting some sunlight between me and these pieces of music. It was pretty clear by the end of the first week that I had made an album and then some. The songs on Curtain Speech are the "and then some" and this ep (or, short album) is meant as a teaser to the more cohesive album, Heavy Ghost, which will be released a little later.
Anyway, I'm really proud. This year has been so much fun and these records serve as imprints of that for me. Hope you like them.
Update: Just Once, track 3 from Curtain Speech, is floating around the internet so I thought I'd list the non-stith players since there's a bunch of them:
Strings by OSSO, Lap Steel by Jose Delhart, Clarinets by Sebastian Krueger (of Inlets), Cymbals and Bass by Rafter, Saxophone by Chris Cory.
October 3, 2008 - bug in three parts
I have five minutes before I get on my bike and ride to class. I ride my bike everywhere. When I moved here (to Bloomington, IN) I decided that I liked living without a car and that I would invest in a better bicycle, which I did, and which I'm really glad I did. The first night after I bought it I clamped my headlamp on the handlebars and took a fast ride to the art building to do some research. I was rounding the first corner thinking "going fast is awesome!" when a big bug flew into my right eye. It was August house fly sized and I had to pull off the road and pulled the bug out of my eye in three parts. To that fly: I'm sorry I was going so fast and that you didn't see me coming. Now I wear sunglasses when I want to ride fast.
I'm working on album artwork. I'll share more on that soonish. We'll be anouncing some of my upcoming releases soon I think. I'll feel a little more comfortable talking about those things once they've been made public by the label. But artwork is playing an important role, at least from my perspective. More soon. I promise!
September 23 , 2008 - From The Top Of The World
Shara's new EP is out today on iTunes -- this is a 4 song exploration of her favorite french tunes and it's really charming and beautiful and well worth the itty bitty price tag. Youkali is a lilting and bawdy trapse through her more whimsical influences (think: a circus tent with Tom Waits the flame-spitter, Edith Piaf the tight-rope walker) and it shows off Shara's vocal agility as well as anything she's recorded. Hymn Á L'Amour is a warm march across the landscape she built in A Thousand Shark's Teeth, drenched in vibraphone and fluttering backwards piano and guitar trills. Adeur Mon Coeur is simple and elegant -- a palatte cleanser, understated and refreshing. In short, My Brightest Diamond have crafted a thoroughly satisfying 15 minute work of art. I can't remember the last time an EP kicked so much bottom.
Dill! Thanks to a lentil soup recipe procured by Val Perkins of Caneadea, NY, I've gone through three giant bunches of dill weed in the last month-and-a-half.
Val's Lentil Soup
Do it like this:
Get a big pot.
But some good oil in it and sautee some garlic and onion (1 onion).
Put 5 cups of clean water in the pot.
Cut up whatever veggies you want in your soup (carrots, potatoes, celery)
Put them in the pot.
Put 1 cup of green or brown lentils in the pot.
Add a lot of fresh dill, like 3/4 of a bunch or more.
Add some salt and pepper.
Add a can of diced tomatoes.
Boil for 40 minutes or until everything is soft.
Eat it with good wheat bread.
This has become a major staple here at the estate.
In other news, Hobby Lobby is not open on Sundays.
September 19, 2008 - Better
I've been really captivated by animation lately, and this video by Hauschka is my newest find. It's the first in a series of three videos by director 'Overture' illustrating songs from Hauschka's new album 'Ferndorf.' The layers of water-color-dappled paper suit the prepared piano sounds just so well! Ok. watch:
So, I did finally get to sleep, but it wasn't until after 4am. I ought to be good and tired for tonight, right?
September 18/19 , 2008 - Help me to sleep
My body clock system thing isn't working right. Maybe it's all the tea. This is the fourth night in a row now that I'm noticing the clock at 2:30am and more than an hours worth of minutes before this near blackest of black hours. Nothing good happens at 2:30am. At the beginning of this year, end of January 08, I got the flu. I got it bad. It kept me quarentined in my bedroom for over a week with a consistent fever and swollen sinuses so sore and so full of stuff that it hurt to see things. I remember a 2:30am moment when my fever broke (the first of many times) and I started praying out loud, thanking the world for my cozy bed, my distant family, my friends. I prayed big thanks for my dog and I remember then starting to bawl. Although I was praying to the mysterious Other, I wouldn't call it a formative religous experience. It was a human experience -- I knew it at the time. I was half crying, half-laughing at myself as I prayed; praying for forgiveness for laughing at my prayers, laughing as I sputtered out the prayers, crying at the whole big beautiful messy cycle of the situation.
2:39am. Now we're getting somewhere. So, likely the reason I'm awake has something to do with my diet (a major staple of which is tea and coffee) and probably something to do with the terrible heap of things I have to do in the next 100 days, the least of which it seems is the completion of duties bound to my graduate degree. I'm trying, of course, to do too much. There's room for grace here but I've hardly the patience to see it.
Let that myspace page load and play -- this is the page of a Ugandan music project called "Bitone," (or "talent") a program founded to nurture communal and spiritual health amoung the youth there. These recordings are just stunning.
My first roommate in Sunset Park and two of my best friends from college are making music together and it's terrific. Someone on staff at the Rochester City Newspaper has picked up on it and written a lovely article about one of their performances here: www.rochestercitynewspaper.com
I always find some unexpected comfort in their songs.
August 30, 2008 - Help Me To Sing:
I announced a couple weeks ago my involvement in a project exploring the history and tradition of Sacred Harp singing. Well, the first part of this project is a documentary produced by filmmakers Matt and Erica Hinton and the entire documentary is viewable on pitchfork.tv right now (but for one week only!). It's unsophisticated indelicate music, but it acheives a power and honesty rare in the Western music canon. Yes, it's traditional, but it illuminates our humanness through the formation of that tradition, and this documentary does an excellent job of explaining shape note singing's formal qualities as well without disposing of the guttural attractiveness of the music itself.
My involvement with the project is liminal -- I contributed a track to Help Me To Sing, the "Soundtrack inspired by the documentary" -- but my devotion to it is deep. I recommend the documentary, especially to you college music majors who think you've got a monopoly on right music opinion...
I've had a difficult year of starting and never finishing books I (or a friend) was certain would make some indelible impression on me. Maybe my taste has changed or maybe I was just too self-absorbed to give any real attention to the thoughts of others (I hope the former but expect something of the later), but then in New Hampshire I bought a flourescent orange copy of Joan Didion's "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" for a dollar at a library (it was wedged amid what must be a near complete collection of musty catholic-mystery novels and a slew of crock-pot cookbooks and world history textbooks). I hadn't read her before. I guess I was drawn to the orange cover? Anyway, I devoured that volume and in the storm of my ecstasy found myself in the parking lot of a Borders with the above heavy red tome in my hands. So, I've been reading Joan's collected non-fiction in the order it was written: "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," "The White Album," "Salvador," and now I'm on "Miami." It's all in the volume titled "We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order To Live" and nearly every page bears a revelation.
So that's my number 1 purchase of the last 2 years. Number 2 purchase was the headlamp (also pictured above!) which I now can't imagine living without! In Brooklyn I would spend whole evenings wandering my apartment with no light but that streaming from my forehead -- and everything, from washing dishes to natures call took on new poetic context. Reading at night... Canoing at night... Drawing in a poorly lit room... Loading a UHaul at 9:45pm... It's perfect for all these applications. Highly recommend you get yourself one.
August 21, 2008 - Ole Summer
A gentle septegenerian showed up at my door this morning with a wrench and a worried grin and an apology for the early morning intrusion -- I've just moved into my new place in Bloomington and we're scrambling to get the house all tuned up before the school year starts -- he had a Faulknerian drawl, each word drooping and dancing out and playing the strings of his face as they went. He brought with him a giant of a man, no wrench, and the two of them fumbled through the house fixing nothing but a spring on a door -- this the most minor concern and it took their concerted effort, all muscles on, to fix it.
Some photos from this summer:
The sky in Rochester during a trip with Dave H. was all churning and spilling over with clouds.
In Brooklyn, I had keys to a church with a piano in it -- the pastor said I could practice any time as long as the sanctuary wasn't in use by someone else. So, I usually practiced at night.
Here's that church again. I'm hoping to find a piano here in Bloomington -- maybe I should check the churches in the area?
I found this on my camera today -- I'm in the photo, so I didn't take it -- it's me and Dave P. at the lake in New Hampshire. When it wasn't tornado weather, the skies were these wonderful blues and pinks all evening. Well, not tornados but microbursts. Lighting seven seconds thunder.
August 17, 2008 - Vinyl!
Kelly Mordaunt is a one of the best friends I had in high school, and today she's on the cover of The Buffalo News -- she manages a record store on Main Street and was interviewed and photographed for an article about the recently revitalized vinyl market. Read it all here: www.buffalonews.com
August 15 , 2008 - Help me to sing
I had a dream last night about flying. I have these dreams maybe 3 times a year. In my flying dreams the flying is always hard work. Like I have to flex all my muscles at once in order to get going, and I always have this sense of no destination: I should have somewhere to go but I can't think of where.
I'll be featured on a compilation in October called "Help Me To Sing" -- it's an album of music from and inspired by "Awake My Soul," a documentary on The Sacred Harp. You can read more about it here: http://www.myspace.com/helpmetosing
My contribution is a traditional hymn from the Sacred Harp called "Christian's Farewell." I arranged and recorded the track in Rafter's studio in June and I'm very happy with it. The compilation also featured The Innocence Mission, Sam Amidon, Danielson and Liz Janes! This will be the first music released under my name, and an exciting release for me, but only the first of many things I'll be putting out this year. More on that soon!
August 7, 2008 - Oh heavy anchor
Oh, light feet! Summer's almost over and I've barely had a chance to be bored or lonely or lazy. Or update this site. Sorry to anybody who feels disconnected from my doings. Well. Here's what I got:
I woke up one morning on a lake in New Hampshire -- it was 4:30am and for whatever reason I couldn't find a reason to attempt sleep again. The room was still and everything a ghostly blue: I felt very small, very solid, like a wooden toy person in a wooden toy home. This is what it looked like outside on the lake:
That's an island in the middle there. Also in NH, I found the most wonderful pattern in the bottom of my coffee cup:
I didn't know how to work the coffee maker so I boiled the coffee, turkish style. Earlier this summer, I recorded strings -- Marla, seen here rocking the U.S., rocked a ditty pro-bono:
And before that, I worked with Shara on artwork for 'A Thousand Shark's Teeth,' which came out in June. Here's the booklet -- I did the drawings and the layout:
I'll be updating this more frequently I think in the future. In just a couple weeks I'll be moved to Indiana for grad school and I'll be forced into a more literate mindset. This is a good thing. Keeps my mind stretchy.
June 23, 2008 - San Diego
Rafter's Toys:
So much I want to share! But not yet.
June 09, 2008 - Procrast...:
I resent the idea that artists tend to be procrastinators, or somehow lazier than the rest of the world population. I resent it becuase the artists I know spin their wheels 2 or 3 times the speed of others, rarely slow down, and then only because they find that their system is being overworked. The system is on a different cycle than the 9-5 workday model. Maybe it's the dissonance where these two patterns overlap which has put them to tension. In any case, I'm reaching a thin point in my limit. It's been hot here for 3 or 4 days, I'm sleeping poorly and mostly because I'm the sole caretaker of the stith estate at the moment and our dog, Gershwin, requires a share of my bed as I have been necessarily neglecting his social needs while I work on recording projects. It's hot now -- Gershwin and I just took a walk to the post office to send a package to Shara (she's singing on my record!) and now we're both collapsed in the living room in front of a fan.
Oh! but recording is going well! In the last 2 weeks, the album has turned into something altogether more wonderful than I'd hoped! Still lots of work to do -- I'm really looking forward to seeing what Rafter's toys can add to it -- but were it mixed as is, I wouldn't be terribly sad. Ok. On to brass arrangements.
June 06, 2008 - Good Reads:
First an article by Sufjan about beloved labelmates, Cryptacize (though he refers to them as Cryptasize through the whole article -- oversight or part of the puzzle? FIXED!): CLICK HERE
Then an excerpt from 'Reckless Belief,' a novel by Lori Huth which interrupted the pleasantness of my June afternoon with a gash of a sublime despair: CLICK HERE
And finally, James Lileks goes to Disneyworld and writes about it. Never, until reading this, did I imagine I could survive in the ivory bubble -- somehow Mr. Lileks has maintained both his wit and a will to let fun be fun long enough to catalog his visit by means of a charming day by day blog. Really, it's worth reading!: CLICK HERE
The third is pertinent because tomorrow my folks and younger sister leave upstate NY for Orlando FL and a few days in the Kingdom. Who is the King of the Magic Kingdom?
(the art at the top of this entry is the back cover of the vinyl edition of the new My Brightest Diamond album -- if you click on the image, you'll go to a new page where you can preorder the album. It's an excellent album. You should buy it.)
June 04, 2008 - Old City
Back from Barcelona -- my visit was wondrful. On our first full day in the city, I took a walk around the immigrant neighborhoods to the East of our hotel. This, I think, was the old city: a medieval labyrinth of narrow streets and gates that openned in on orange tree gardens hemmed by gray stone cloisters, and small parks crammed with children playing soccer, old men playing cards and young men clattering ping-pong balls on ping-pong tables. I walked with Shara and James and Nate and Brian (of My Brightest Diamond) for something like an hour before meeting up with Cati of TouchMe Records, and members of Abrevadero.
Sky was beautiful there -- and the Mediterranean was all gold gush and proud. We watched surfers on day 2, ate Tortilla España, went to sound check and then all took naps. MBD played an incredible show!, Abrevadero turned a Portishead tune into a polka ditty, and the audience was all beer bottles in the air and drunk girls with back-packs and friends come-on-in-yeah-we-can-fit-a-few-more-in. All good things to have at a show. Thanks Barcelona! And then to the Madrid airport where we sighed and smiled and watched planes take off over some green scrape of a mountain range and talked about being "pro." Totally pro to talk about being pro in a European airport. Then back to JFK's noise and fumes. home?
I'm preparing pianos and recording horns today. Gershwin is sleeping by the window. It's humid. The air is gray and sticky. I feel like a walking rice crispy treat.
Oh, and Randy's got an album cover:
May 12, 2008 - Harps and Angels
A remarkable morning! Once every other week or so I skitter over to Nonesuch.com hoping to find a new collection of music by Gorecki, Byrne or Veloso. Nonesuch has long been the beef and prunes of my grown-up music afficionado self, music for appreciating with a stogie in an all-leather reading room. Even if the music is wild and fresh and demands a more relaxed appreciation, the presence of folks like Adams and Gorecki mute the whole of the output of the label for me. The label name alone colors my listen. Could I convince you this is a good thing?
Well, dream of all dreams (!), the upcoming release page had been updated and, dreams of wildest dreams (!!), Randy Newman has finally suspended his own disbelief long enough to wring out 10 songs he doesn't mind too terribly scribbling his name under -- "Harps and Angels," which I hope is as sickly cynical as Sail Away and God's Song, won't be a rainbow drenched escape from his legacy.
[above photo by steve johnson, taken in the woods next to his house. you can't see him here, but I'm bending down to rub the coarse fur on Peanutbutter's nose -- Peanutbutter is a very large sheep who the johnsons love and who loves the johnsons. The head piece was planted on me by steve's daughter Eliza. yes, it's a pair of pantaloons. yes, I look like a viking.]
April 29, 2008 - Freen
I've been watching Reggio's Quatsi Trilogy -- Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi anyway -- while working on design things. The images and the music are hitting me slant, the pulses and the slurs and Glass's grand strokes all nearly as subliminal as the commercial culture they force into exposure: watching it like this flops the roles of art and subject into stark negative. Or so it seems. Having grown up with images like these marching across PBS and the Discovery Chanel, I'm a little sad that I didn't get to feel the lurch of realization that these films meant to so many people. I wish I'd seen these before discovering David Byrne's "Feelings" or reading Shusaku Endo's "Deep River" -- I'm collecting my culture all out of order. What a shock to find that so much that fell into my line of site had been standing there, towering, just out of view for so long. Anyway... I like these films. At least as thoughtful muzak.
I had a conversation with my friend the other day -- our first real long talk since I moved back to Houghton and back to rurality -- I've been reading up on Internal Family Systems, a psycho-theraputic language which synthesizes systems thinking and the multiplicity of the mind: every human holds within her mind a system of parts -- parts are fully formed persons with emotions, talents, fears, knowledge, and influence over the human which rise up in the mind during trauma. The goal of the IFS model is to learn to lead these parts and teach them to work together. I learned about this method from a friend I met in Virginia when I visited to get some photos taken -- I think I've continued to think about the model because of its emphasis on compassion for the parts of our minds which normally, and naturally, we attempt to silence. I told my friend about this -- his reaction was full-formed and direct: he said "In my 70 years experience I've seen more evidence than I can so quickly deny pointing to humans as selfish entities first and foremost."
I couldn't think much to say in response to this -- I certainly couldn't line up my 27 years against his near 70, but I couldn't deny my own experience. We watched Farting Preacher to clear the air.
I have lots of recording to do...
April 24, 2008 - I changed my first baby poopy diaper
poop done got all up everywhere. I babysat for a friend today.
I know I like to show off me some Shara, but c'mon. C'MOWN!:
I've been watching the smallest china paper globes unwrap into buds on the trees in the yard, waking to thicker and thicker clouds of bird sound morning by morning -- I can't believe the world does this every year! I told a friend in Brooklyn last summer that it was hard for me to imagine missing upstate new york's autumn pageantry by keeping myself in the city. He thought me crazy, over-romantic, and maybe I was and am now, a little home-sick or something. Somehow the city feels all sorts of things, but rarely did it feel homish for me the way hills and trees and ponds seem to.
I went swimming the other day in the pond on my friend's property. The water of the pond is fed and refreshed by a natural spring not 200 feet from it -- I have this memory of one night pulling on my rain boots with this friend: the spring's pump had been clogged by sticks moved in the heavy rain and we were the only bodies around to fix it, so we pulled on rubber things to keep the rain out and crouched through the rainy hiss into the dark. I remember with clarity a shock at how rich the sound of the rain was: a hiss on the trees at the perimeter of the forest, the pat-pat on my rain coat and hat, a thud and slap of water hitting the lawn, and every space between me and the ring of woods around the pond gave off a different timbre in the dark. All we had to see by was my friend's flashlight: he walked ahead and I followed his boots. I remember feelings of vulnerability and safety pulling at each other: The rain and the dark made my visible world tiny but my audible world huge.
I never got a chance to record the radiator in my Brooklyn apartment. It made this hummmhoooooooommmmhehummmm as it heated up. I imagined a choir of them opening my album. ... poop.
Oh, I got into grad school! I'll be moving to Bloomington, Indiana in August to work on my MFA! long time coming. Album is coming along. I'm anxious to share it, but I'm afraid it won't be sharable for a while. I keep underestimating the work and overestimating my capacity to complete it.
April 15, 2008 - I have a big announcement
Big announcement: coming next week. ...
In the mean time, write a song for yourself. Write it about the parts that make you up -- imagine the voices that influence you have bodies and taste and memories, and favorite songs: write the songs they sing.
love, David
March 25, 2008 - two thousand people cling to bottles, to powdered babies, to leather bibles...
I spent Easter with some good friends in Philadelphia -- 6:30am, Sunday, on top a small hill outside the city with a crowd of shivering young people, trying less to unravel the cryptic morning of Christ's resurection, more to play with that strange ball of prophetic mystery in order not to freeze bone solid on that bare southeast Pennsylvanian scrub. Our toes were geodes in our boots by the time we drove out of there.
I haven't been posting songs here in a while -- it's because I'm working on a full length and don't want to share song by song. I'd rather you heard these songs for the first time in the form of a long play record. Recording is going well! Maybe I'll be able to share more about it soon. I have plenty of new music, new songs and things. for example: wig:
Also, I'm moving back up to Houghton in order to finish some of these recordings: ready to be overtaken and overtaking by the starlings' litany of fabulous cursive air weavings. I got pooped on by a pigeon today. I was staring up at a bunch of them roosting on a Greecian ledge thinking oh the beauty around here is sometimes hiding isn't it, and then poop, white poop on my right arm. Anybody knows how to get white poop out of blue fabric?
did you once know did you once know did you once know? did you once know did you once know did you once know? I was the wary scarlet and the rot plain, oh holy mountain lady turned off turned off turned off.
March 18, 2008 - "That's just the trade entering his body."
There'll be a neat announcement on April 15th or somewhere near there. Neat for me.
........
A little while ago I visited some great friends of mine who live in Broadway, a small town in Virginia, in the Shenandoah River Valley, on a branch of that river, who have a lovely home tortured and loved by two young girls, Maggie and Eliza, who taught me in a week that I know near nothing about what it is like to live in a young girl's body. They were wonderful to witness -- and so powerful. Steve and Anna Maria, the girl's parent's, shared everything with me in that week. It was hard to leave.
My week in Broadway was a dream. I miss the countryside and the dining room table and the meals together. There was a really strong, really palpable rhythm of life in the Johnson house. It's sometimes hard to find the rhythm and so sometimes dancing is awkward -- keep second guessing the beat and stopping to look around to see what other people are doing, and then being afraid to start up again we drift over to the refreshment table and stare at the others.. but the Johnson house was strong rhythm'd, strongly currented, lifefull and bawdy. Maybe it's the presence of the two little girls -- I've often thought having children would be good for me: me, who is often afraid of the peculiarities of being rather than curious and brave in their excavation: me, who is often afraid of the grape jelly on the piano, afraid of the pile of cheerios on the love seat, the unkempt, the decaying, the aging: all that which the girls embrace and induce with all their might every minute of every day. I need more of that. I need someone to take me to the edge sometimes like that. someone to smear peanut butter on my nose, or leave ketchup on my seat to sit in. messy is good sometimes: at least more times than I normally give it room for.
March 8, 2008 - February
No updates for a whole month!? geez. I got swamped in with a flu (a temperature above 100 for a whole 11 days in a row!) and then was working hard on foundation identity and letterhead and then on artwork for Shara's new album, A Thousand Shark's Teeth, which is done now and should be a proper plastic and paper package in the next few weeks: a significant contribution to the lake of art that is the ever-manifested seep of groundwater of independently concieved musics: art world: culture world: new york city: something significant, something special. Shara's really made something beautiful. Hope the art isn't too harsh, too laughable, an insult to the depth of her vision. Here's a reject I'm particularly fond of:
No promises. I'm busy but trying to write.
Last night I saw Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes at the Met. This has been a long time coming, and totally worth doning my 3-piece suit. Sufjan said I looked like money. Shara made a gasp when she saw me in her kitchen. Maybe I should dress up more often?
January 31, 2008 - Mary Margaret O'Hara
She breaks my heart. I bought a CD ten years ago, a Vic Chesnutt tribute album with a performance of the song "Florida" by Mary Margaret O'Hara and it's been buzzing flapping around my brain ever since. She's a performer like no other with an unbelievable amount of control over her voice enough to contort and conjure a hundred ineffiblenesses in a minute. She's just a complete master of her instrument, and very few people know about her. She released an album "Miss America" in 1988 and hasn't put out a proper album ever since (there was a Christmas EP and a soundrack with some significant work on it and a slew of great one-off compilation tracks, but no more albums). Her music is hard to track down, but I managed enough songs last night to keep me awake way past my bedtime listening and listening.
Likely she's not everyones cup of tea, but I'm in love.
So, lately it's lots of Mary Margaret and Faulkner's The Sound And The Fury. It's what I needed in order that art begins to make sense to me again.
Thanks everyone for your dream interpretations! Besides being all sorts of entertaining, I think I learned a few things both about how my brain works and about who is actually reading this thing. Good things all!
January 25, 2008 - I like cabbage just fine
I didn't expect as many interpretations of my dream as I've recieved! Below is the third thorough interpretation of THE RED BEAKER this week. It comes from my friend, and co-Houghton-ex-patriot, Julia O'Brien. You can read the original dream and 2 other interpretations below.
"My gut tells me that the black-haired guy is you. The side of yourself that is daring, adventurous, and playful. A very true you. The artist you.
Houghton cafeteria= safety, home. Open window with breeze coming in= possibility. You with the cabbage= instigating a journey/adventure.
The fact that you are not wearing a shirt means that you feel vulnerable/naked as you set out on a journey with everything you need on your back. That you instigate this journey with the throwing of a cabbage means that it starts from a natural and organic place in you, with a sense of humor and optimism. (unless you don't like cabbage, but I would guess that you do. If you hate cabbage, it means something else entirely.)
Cars usually represent your life and the need for control. You get into your parents' car, but it has been altered. (Again, I think you have positive feelings about your parents, so let's go with that.) You want your life to be similar to your parents', but you feel the need to break away from them. You are breaking away from them to make your own life, but it's very difficult and slow going. It is awkward. The fun adventurous part of yourself has to buckle down and work.
I don't know about that third person who is with you, but most likely it is another part of you. Or Jesus.
Ok- here's where it gets more difficult. When you describe this policewoman, you clearly had feelings of animosity towards her. She represents establishments and institutions that you see as outdated and obsolete, and yet they still have an arbitrary authority over you and are preventing you from moving forward. You give her your license (your identity) "...with your black-haired friend awaiting pedaling instructions" and then leave your artist self in the car to follow her when she walks away.
Real life: Most likely there is something that is making your artist-self wait and you feel like it is arbitrary and cruel. Yet you feel obligated to this authority and see no choice but to follow it. It is interesting that the authority figure is a woman. An unattractive woman who is attempting to make herself appealing, but is failing. I don't know enough about you and women to know what that means, but examine it.
I'd like to know more about how you felt in the medical facility, but the overall feeling I get is one of fear/anxiety. It is an institution. In the first room, you see a dead body (mortality), the second, a terrible car crash (loss of control, fear of losing friends and people close to you), in the third, this authority figure reappears, and she is exposed further to be even older, crazier, and possibly drugged.
This guide is a person you asked for help and yet she doesn't seem to know any more than you do. She is a stranger, foreigner, representing the other people in your life right now who are in the same situation as you. Whatever you have seen is a secret. The secret is that the establishment is a place filled with death, loss of opportunity, and is run by unqualified authority.
Did you wake up right after the guide spoke to you? How did you feel immediately after you woke up? Your feeling after you wake up is telling. I realize that you may have to interpret my interpretation, but hopefully I've given you some clues that will help you assimilate what's going on in your waking life and in your subconscious.
My advice: Get back in the car as fast as you can and drive to Mexico with the black-haired guy and mystery guest. It will take some effort, and there may be some loss along the way, but it will be worth it."
January 22, 2008 - "Accuracy"
Another interpretation of my RED BEAKER dream. You can read the original dream a couple entries below. This here is an interpretation by the fantastic Laura Morton:
"wow david, that was indeed quite a dream.
i love the visuals!!!
sounds like you really want to be a movie star...
it was you who wished you had on the aviator glasses...
can we say, 'catch me if you can?'...
you're fearing what it will feel like to be 28...and you have thought about finally trying on, for fun, that hot pink lipstick that you stole from Andrea when you were like 14. go on, give it a whirl. you'd be surprised just how difficult it is to apply lipstick with 'accuracy'.
in any case...you wish you would have received an orange party hat at your 27th birthday party, but no one got the hint...so, you're hoping for not only the party hat, but also a new fishing boat for your 28th.
the black haired friend is me. i just recently died my hair.
just kidding...it's cramer, of course!
you were so annoyed that you had to get up and let him in to the apt, that you, subconsciously, felt bad for getting annoyed with him, and in your dream, you 'made-up' and allowed him to be your cool, control-pedal, friend.
really, i think the pedals have to do with all that recording jazz you do.
oh, what joy.
fuchsia fluids and lousy lipstick.
loved your dream!!!"
January 21, 2008 - Here Come The Planes
Michael and Julia O'Brien, some good friends of mine, gave me a ride back to Brooklyn after being in Houghton for Thanksgiving back in November. Michael has really good taste in music and is always playing me great stuff from before I started listening to music. This one song in particular really got to me -- a song by Laurie Anderson from her album "Big Science" which came out when I was 2 years old. Laurie's been named a sort of prophet, and based on the haunting accuracy of this song, it's no wonder. I get shivers:
A dream interpretation by Fred Brown, (read original dream posted in the last blog entry below titled "THE RED BEAKER"):
"ok, so you left a familiar place to go to some place that you'd never been that was very different than where you came from. it seems like everything is just slightly different than you are used to (the cafeteria is the one at houghton, kind of. the car is your parents', kind of. and isn't really driven quite the same way as a normal car. the hospital is like a bizzaro type of hospital), but maybe that's just the nature of dreams. it seems like your brain was juxtapposing two situations.
maybe it's about your moving to brooklyn. trading houghton's free food, cool breezes, and familiar friends for the harshness of the city where everything is weird and maybe somewhat scary. the houghton person is helping you while the nonhoughton people are giving you a hard time. think about this: two situations involving cars. one in which your friend was helping you, the other in which a person in trouble was being somewhat ignored by a whole group of others. they're opposites. it's like you think, "maybe no one will help me here like my houghton friend helped me." the police officer is more concerned with a road cone than with you. except there is one person, i guess, who is trying to help you because you have found at least one friend in brooklyn."
January 17, 2008 - THE RED BEAKER
Dreams: I dreamt in the hour of extra sleep this morning (roommate Andy came home at 7:30 and I had to get up to let him in, and since I didn’t sleep really well last night, I made myself go back to sleep. I don’t want to be working on bad sleep) of eating in what felt a little like the cafeteria of Houghton, though it was on the first floor and there was a refreshing breeze coming in through a bay of open doors in the overflow room I was sitting in. In the dream I have this cabbage and I step out of the overflow room into the main room and lob it at some black-haired guy’s head a few tables away. I hear for a few minutes people’s theories about where the cabbage came from while I gather my things and prepare to leave the dining hall. I’m not wearing a shirt, not sure why, but I have more than just a backpack to carry, like I’m carrying my clothes as well. I leave the dining hall and am maybe 50 feet out into the air and I am tackled playfully by the black-haired guy I cabbaged moments before. So he’s my friend and we kid about the joke cabbage as we head somewhere. We come into a parking lot, and there’s a third person with us now, don’t remember who, and we board my parent’s car which is like a dark conversion van with the top sawn off and no seats. Sort of like a boat. Since there are no seats, pressing the pedals down is very awkward – you can’t reach them if you stand straight up, but if you want to lean, you end up killing your back. So, the black-haired guy works the pedals while I steer and prompt him to speed up, slow down, or stop. We’re in another parking lot then, looking for a space and we get stopped by a policewoman on foot. She is short, has long, obviously dyed, blonde hair, and is formless – large on top, even her head is large – and practically no butt – she’s wearing tight pants. She’s obviously trying hard to fight her age and is painfully oblivious to her losing battle. She's hiding what she can of her face with gigantic aviator sunglasses. Not aging gracefully. She asks for my license, oh, but before I’ve retrieved it, she wanders away to fix a toppled down orange cone or something and then comes back to press the issue of the license. I dig it out and ask over and over what the problem is. I even say something like “I hesitate to give you any more information until you explain to me exactly what and how I’ve violated whatever it is you’re protecting.” I’m cheeky. All this time I'm standing in my boat car thing, with my friend the black-haired guy at my feet awaiting pedal instructions. The police woman sort of wanders into the nearby building without giving me an answer and so I follow her in. She's got my license now. I guess the car is just parked on the main aisle of the parking lot. When I get inside, I realize this building is a medical facility – big public sitting area in the foyer, though it’s dimly lit and there appear to be very few chairs. It’s silent in there and I think, uncomfortably so. The walls are rounded and beige. There’s a receptions desk and a woman working a computer behind it – when I ask to see the police woman who’s taken my license, she seems confused. I walk past the counter and seek her out on my own without resistance. I find what must be some sort of coroner’s room, with a body on a table. A woman discovers me and asks if she can help me. I explain my situation again – she looks as baffled as the receptionist, but leads me through a few other rooms. One room seems to have a car wreck in it, and a person trapped inside the car, and a small group of people surrounding the car talking to the person inside. It’s as if the jaws of life were unable to remove the body after a crash and so the whole of the car was brought to the hospital for treatment. It’s at seeing this that I tell the woman there must be some mistake. I’m indignant, even grasping her elbow at some point while she leads me down another hallway. We pass a large window looking in on a laboratory – the policewoman is there working a microscope and then downing a beaker of red liquid. I recognize her because she’s still wearing her sunglasses. In the artificial light she looks much older – the pink of her lipstick was applied with terrible inaccuracy, and the dark roots of her hair show a whole two inches. At this my guide stops us from proceeding – we scurry around some corner to keep us hidden from the police woman. My guide looks grim. She’s got her hands up over her mouth and he eyes are wide and when she speaks it’s with a Mexican accent. She says “you didn’t see any of that.”
Please send your interpretations to me at dmstith(at)gmail(dot)com. I'll post any good ones I receive!
January 12, 2008 - where my friends at
I've been using this new browser called Flock, which integrates really well with Flickr, YouTube and Twitter, and I think everyone should try it. It's a mozilla based browser, like FireFox, but it seems to work even faster on my MacBook Pro than FireFox did. And Twitter is totally awesome. It's been helping me to keep up with the friends that don't live in my close proximity. Anyway, go get them.
I've been eating mostly raw lately, raw vegan that is, and this site, GoneRaw, has been really helpful for finding great recipes. My roommate just had a Treet breakfast -- we had a laugh -- Andy has formulated a diet not via nutritional content, but via the cultural content of the food. So, Treet, Miller Light (specifically the can with the football laces on the side, Andy says, for those times he needs to chuck a can down the hallway... for the grip), and General Tsao's Chicken.
The director (the multi-talented Timmy Gallogly!) posted this about this video:
If this song moves you like it moves me, write me a letter, and tell me what the song makes you think of @
Timmy Gallogly
5461 Creek Rd.
Oneida, NY 13421
and I receive the letter sometime before January 31st, I will mail you Timothy's album free of charge. We'll pay the shipping/whatever too.
So, get on it people! Tell him how moved you are. And then go read more from Timothy and Timmy and a great Best-of-2007 list over at The Torture Garden.
December 30 - my black feet
Some of my favorite photos this year came from a camera held by Steve Johnson, a professor at Eastern Mennonite University and a former colleague of mine at Houghton College.
He lives in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and records the spontaeous beauty of his life as a father, husband, teacher and vallery-dweller. I've known Steve for a few years so maybe I'm biased. I miss the shock of beauty on the hills just after the sun sets. I miss the blue hour and stumbling into the stare of a deer on the road. I miss meandering walks in the woods and the sky through trees and creek water cooling the air with a hiss that sounds like wind in a neighbor's tree... anyway, some photos:
I'm learning to treat myself better. Brooklyn life is a toughy. I may need a change sometime in the near future.More hills, less money, more clean air, less noise, more friends, less careers, more time for making music...
#40 in the demos section is a new one I forgot I'd made.
December 23 - Sweeping water
I just spent the last hour sweeping flood water in my parents' basement. Our pump isn't working right and we're afraid the motor will burn out if we leave it on too long, so I wait for the water to rise a little and then I turn on the motor of the pump and sweep the water that's on the floor toward the pump. It's arcane, this method, but it's all I can do right now. The weather has changed pretty quickly from cold and snowy to warm and wet. All that was frozen is now soggy.
I feel pretty numb -- I have for the last few months. I don't really know why, except maybe I'm tired from all the change over the last few years. It's hard to feel settled anywhere when it takes me more time to recover from moving. So, right now, I'm spending my time reading through "The Artist's Way," a book on "unblocking the creative self" and "The Golden Compass:" an ample means of escape from the wet newspapers, patches of black ice, hissing neon and the crass managerie of inflatable plastic kitsch that is my neighbor's front stoop: Brooklyn, in all her nakedness. My friend is visiting Haiti for the holiday, spending his time with orphans who are starved for attention and care nearly as much as they are for food and medical care. This friend recently sent me an email describing Haiti as an entire coutry resembling the BQE underpass at the end of my block in Brooklyn where all the trash goes to sit in puddles. Then I think of "The Bog of Eternal Stench" from the movie Labyrinth (starring David Bowie), and I think, no, Brooklyn's uglier than that right now.
Now I must go sweep some more water.
My apartment is starting to feel like my own place. Here's a picture:
December 13 - Mockterna and good things
November 29 - Mexican Hot Chocolate
Sorry I've been so long silent -- I went away to Houghton for Thanksgiving -- oh I have to tell you about Friday night! Day after T-day, my friend and I went up to visit our friends, The Barringers, at their gigantic old farmhouse in LeRoy where nearly their entire extended family had gathered for the holiday. I didn't know this until I arrived: the family has very strong Irish roots, and they like to dance and sing. I'd be sitting in the living room playing a board game or talking with one of the cousins and from the kitchen I'd hear a mournful alto lilting into song with a ring of listeners encircling her, or a guitar would drift in from another room and the group would stagger, unled, into a favorite old song. Coming from a family that almost never sings together informally, the Barringers were the family from "You Can't Take It With You;" a family so brave as to be calcified in their honesty, and subsequently, a sometimes comic, sometimes ludicris, absurdity. So, I spent 6 hours on Friday night promenading one Irish lass or another, always walking a narrow aisle between humiliation and ecstacy. I gotta dance more!
In other news, I played my first song in Brooklyn on Monday night. Dayna Kurtz (the sultry, the gold-throated and magnificent, Dayna Kurtz!) invited me to play a song near the beginning of her set at Barbes on 9th St. and 6th, so I did, and with the help of Shara and Dayna on background ooo's and Dayna's pianist/accordianist, Peter, on piano investigating the twinkles, I think we pulled off a lovely performance of Thanksgiving Moon! I will do more performances in the future -- this one felt pretty good considering it was my first time with the hot lights turned on me.
Sorry to whoever has been checking this site regularly and has found it unchanged over the last couple of weeks -- I had a dreamweaver problem and have been too busy to address it completely, and so I couldn't post. Did I mention that I've been busy? I've been very busy. I'm working on an album now which I hope to have finished and ready for consumption by early Spring or late Winter. Heart Hair Just Once Starlings A Fire of Birds Bending Low A Silent Bee.
October 31 - Halloween
On my way home from work today I stopped at Eclipse (grrreat Mexican restaurant on 4th ave in Sunset Park) for some take out wonders and while I was sitting at the bar, a mob (A MOBBBB!!!) of children in halloween costumes, and their moms, came in! The owner was in the back getting my stuff and so I had to dish out the candy that she'd left on the bar. Seriously, like 25 kids. Seriously. Anyway, I saw the most remarkable thing: I tried to make eye contact with every kid as I gave them candy, but then the 2nd to last girl, a girl probably 12 years old dressed as a zombie or a vampire or something bloody and blackish, kinda sided up to me and held out her bag. Instead of a "Trick or TreeeeetT!!" I got a mumbled half conversation -- she was talking on her cell phone. And it wasn't like an emergency parental conversation -- she was talking about what her "friend" said to her other "friend." Can you say ghetto?
Ghetto.
Tomorrow night is Sufjan's premier of the BQE, and I'm real excited about it. Oh, and check out mybrightestdiamond.com -- Shara's been hard at work on "Shark's Teeth!" I can tell you it's sounding incredible.
October 29 - Missing Caliope
My friend Shara recently wrote about our friend Timothy Dick. Here's an excerpt:
"...I'd be upstairs in my apartment working on my record and Timothy would be downstairs underneath my feet in his kitchen recording too, and I'd hear a harmonica or pedal steel coming up through the floor and I'd stop working to listen. The sounds would be muted and felt old, like I was listening to memories. "
I recently wrote a press release for Timothy's first album which you can read by clicking the image below.If you haven't bought his album yet, go here: http://cdbaby.com/cd/timothydick
October 23 - a lapse of lucidity
From a recent email conversation: "For me, Christianity is something I don't understand. It's something that I hope I never think I really understand. Love's ineffability is what keeps me believing in Love. Faith's ineffability is what keeps me faithful, what keeps me trying to express faith. Since art for me is about mystery, and since Christ's love for me is the most baffling mystery, pinning the two together feels more awkward than I can express. It feels unnecessary. It seems like tying two lovers together in the hopes that they'll produce a child."
October 11 - E for Effort
You will be glad you watched this:
October 10 - On Pummelling Moses
Bible Fight simulates hand-to-hand combat between some of the Bible's most popular characters. Play as Jesus, Mother Mary, Noah, Eve, Moses or Satan in landscapes straight from the flannel-graph board. For blood and glory. or for fun. I think the game is more fun to tell people about than to actually play (and this may be true of most of the content on adultswim – cartoons more interesting in summary than in repletion) but still I've gone back to Bible Fight to cool off every now and then. So, it's got some replay value.
I could imagine me and my friends in Sunday school sneaking into Mrs. Turtledove's bag of story-telling props and applying our balmy young imaginations toward such an end as this game. We would've probably added our own beloved characters: maybe Mickey Mouse, Jackie Chan, Mark Twain, Tiny Tim, Barbie, Buddha, Pocahontas, Hitler, Betty Boop or the Morton Salt girl. Or maybe we'd have attempted to keep chaste our imaginations while in church and held the “seculars” out of it... or maybe the bible characters would've just always won. In any case, this concept would've enticed our fertile minds relentlessly until some moral chord snapped and the dogs of our imaginations got loose.
I remember I loved games like Street Fighter, TMNT Tournament Fighter, and Tekken when I was in middle school. We got to fight – for all the pent up aggression of the trumpet-playing band nerd, we got to fight. While the muscles in our legs and shoulders atrophied, we were Spartan, training to dominate: kool-aid fed princes of dexterity. I remember, at one point, I had played my gameboy so much I started having sharp pain in my wrists and palms – my first Carpal tunnel. I bore the pain with honor. The swan song in the litany of my youth. I digress...
While the game is attractive on a lot of levels (see the Disney style landscapes complete with quirky details like the fish flopping on the dry ground in front of Moses' Red Sea, or the unicorn in Eden's bushes) and has a lush soundtrack (did they commission John Williams?), the characters and their unbelievably silly special moves steal the show. Eve throws apples and can summon Adam to execute an uppercut (notice the fig leaves, how they flop around and quiver – and doesn't Adam look like a bug-eyed Tarzan?), Moses can summon a rain of frogs or whip a couple stone tablets at his opponents, swarthy Noah can direct a charge of animals, summon a pillar of water or unleash a dove from his chest, and Jesus calls fish and bread out of the sky or brandishes his cross like a folding chair in a WCW match. The characters are endearing in their absurdity.
I stumbled upon this game late one night after an evening of furious job hunting. It came to me as an epiphany in blood and pixels. A tiny metal cross and brass knuckles. brilliant. After a few hours of work, Bible Fight serves as an ideal mind erasing tool – 10 minutes whipping Moses with a snake or calling a rain of frogs from the sky has amazing refocusing effects – and then I'm back at the task again, scratching plates, scoring lines, punching keys, ripping apart and rebuilding sentences: I fight with a resurgent energy transposed from muscle to mind. But only 10 minutes is allowed at the game lest my brain become purple and soupy from battle. But it's enough. 10 minutes is enough. Where this game doesn't come close to the complexity of those special-move-and-combo-packed monster games with entire perfect-bound strategy guides devoted to their possibility, it's fun. And it's full of the syrupy cynicism adultswim has been mustering since Space Ghost and Brak first appeared on late night TV.
I'll spare you the other characters I've come up with since discovering this game, and I'll spare you their hilarious special moves. And I'll spare you my petty frustrations with the game – the imbalances, the quirks and glitches. It's full of problems, but I play Bible Fight to forget about problems. Or at least to forget about the problems that can't be solved with two buttons and a direction pad.
I'm in a coffee shop with headphones on and this book in which I'm supposed to be working on lyrics to a song. A girl is tearing open a package of peanut butter crackers. Her nails painted bright red, hair straight hiding her face like a teepee. She strutted in minutes ago in spiked heels, tight jeans, a sweatshirt, plain purple, and a big cell phone wobbling at her hip. It's a big phone. Like the walkee talkees we had as kids, the fischer-price ones. Just as I began to put her faults together, I was slowed by my morals. Panda Bear sang Comfy in Nautica and my judgements slowed. The song ended and I heard, during the pause, she spoke to her friend next to her -- a homely pink-hoodied girl with her knees together picking at food from a bag, careful not to nick her nails -- she said "and then saderday I'll be in vaygass, so I'll need to bring extra monay...
then the flood.
rummaging around in the attic of me, bumping my head on the ceiling when I hear flapping and something small trying to get out.
September 17 - Harp Singing
Today I sang with the Harp Singers!
I know I know I know these mp3s can't begin to illustrate the force of this experience, (the walls of the room so close, hugging the song book and hearing the song unfold syllable by syllable, arms hacking out rhythm) but I gotta share this somehow. In this post I'll feature the work on one composer: Raymond C. Hamrick -- a watchmaker from Macon, Georgia.
Saturday I attended a viewing of Awake My Soul, a film about the continuing history of some of the earliest music in American history.
I'd like very much to write more, but after a day of singing louder than I think I've ever sung, and after wandering around Brooklyn with Matt Hinton two straight nights in a row, I'm pooped. I've had just enough energy left in me to read a few more chapters of Roberto Bolano's Amulet (which I need to finish so as to return it to the library on time) -- it's haunting me more than I thought I could be haunted.
A quote:
"From time to time I feel as though my books and figurines were with me still. But how could they be? Are they somehow floating around me or over my head? Have the figurines and books that I lost over the years dissolved into the air of Mexico City? Have they become part of the ash that blows through the city from north to south and from east to west? Perhaps. The dark night of the soul advances through the streets of Mexico City sweeping all before it. And now it is rare to hear singing, where once everything was song. The dust cloud reduces everything to dust. First the poets, then love, then, when it seems to be sated and about to disperse, the cloud returns to hang high over your city or your mind, with a mysterious air that means it has no intention of moving."
September 12 - you'll be in the air
Yesterday was the 11th of September, my first spent in NYC since 2001. I was contacted by Michael Kaufmann of Asthmatic Kitty about a cover that i was supposed to be working on -- as with so many things, this was a project with an undetermined deadline, and so I put it off to the last minute -- he contacted me yestreday to tell me he needed the song the next day (today). So I set to it. AK is celebrating the long history of indie record label K Records up in Olympia Washington, I don't know how many years exactly, but it's the label that Elliott Smith and Beck got their starts on. As was my duty, I chose a song from the K Records catalog and rerecorded it for the AK website.
I chose 'You'll be in the Air' by The Microphones from the LP 'Glow pt.2' -- this is a record that came out while I was in college and set new ideas in me about low-budget recording. I chose the song because it was particularly melismatic compared to most of the other songs on the album, and has a clear melody and a structure that's at least somewhat recreatable.
Anyway, I didn't much consider the content before I started singing it -- in the song, Phil, the lead singer/writer, seems to be saying goodbye to someone that is leaving or has just left on a plane -- by the second verse, he's removed the plane from the picture and his love is flying through the air with slowed breaths through rock-filled winds and ash-filled skies... the content as you can imagine was startling to me. It wasn't until 3.5 hours into the recording session that I realised what I was singing. Outside the rain was coming down steadily -- there were moments that my room fell dim and the grey light from my computer screen reached out to all the walls. A couple times, when the lights would low like this, I removed my headphones and could hear outside the rain crunching on awnings below my window, hear it whipping through the trees. I think this is the best attempt at a day of remembrance that I'll ever make.
September 5 - midlake fountain
I've been sorta fascinated by architecture lately. Lots of reasons for it, I'm sure: it represents a collective effort which, in my present position, seems heavenly; the conception of a building utilizes a handful of measures including aesthetic, philosophical, mathematical, sociological, psychological and historical frameworks in a balance rarely used in other mediums; I have a couple of friends who are more than dabbling in architecture: Jonathan is the middleman at a work site on one of the fingerlakes in charge of interpreting architectural drawings into work flow on a $10 million home, Luke is designing homes for his friends, keeping a journal of drawings that he shows me when he visits. I've been thinking a lot, too, about community.
A week ago, after the bike ride through Brooklyn on which I met the smell of the ocean and a sense of undeniable peace, I had a conversation with a friend about Christianity, the church, and biblical interpretation. I'm not usually keen on talking about the tenants of my faith -- they're dangerous to me. At least my memory of the power of an argument over such things.. These conversations divided cliques in high school, ended friendships. I'm older, but the memory of the projected taughtness of our strands of belief
makes me sad. We could've been so much more loving.. Anyway, after an hour or so of conversation, my friend asked me, and in a way that seemed to imply that my personal theology was so far out of the normative circle as to be beyond his imagination's capacity, in a sort of exhasperated sigh and looking at me straight with curiosity and concern.. I started to speak and then stopped and measured my words. I was afraid of what might come out -- my doubt, my shame, or worse, something to cover one or the other up. I found myself then speaking about community, about the orthodox belief of God in three persons, three beings with different tasks, different angles that work together; That perspective is possible within a functioning community, and without that perspective, we can't help but give, what ought to given to one another, to ourselves.
I furthered the conversation with my friend Dave last night on the phone. We talked about William Carlos Williams and romantic notions of beauty, and the everyday.. and now I'm thinking about prayer chapels in the woods. While living in Houghton, I dreamed regularly about making it a more livable place. The two improvements that I regularly returned to were economically feasible, fulfilled a well-recognized need, and encouraged creative and physical well-being in the community. The first was to organize a farmer's market to bring people into the community, establish new economic ties, support local farmers, encourage healthier diets among the people of Houghton, and encourage recognition of the physical needs of an academic community which has, in the past, been divided by an inflamed divergence of philosophies. The second idea was to build one or two prayer chapels in the woods that surround Houghton. I'm going to have Luke draw me up some plans that I can deliver to Houghton's President, Shirley Mullen. Maybe Jonathan will help order materials..
September 1 - pinwheel of peace and strength
Saturday morning: Shostakovich piano preludes and lysoling the garbage cans: a fresh fig, washing dishes and a soy mocha. Lovely. My hands feel stretched from the soap and disinfectant. I have the blinds down in my office and the morning light is just barely on them, gold and blue. Three nights ago I rode my bike with a friend to a Taize service at my church in Park Slope. The service consisted of candles and silence, scripture reading, the singing of gently repetative songs as meditation, and 10 minutes of silent prayer. The night was built for this sort of service -- I mean to say that the weather was perfect, cool enough not to sweat from bike riding, with a slight breeze that brought sea air all the way up to the slope, and the sky was some deep ocean blue with bits of purple, and yellow where the purple split open. The whole evening was just so peaceful. It's a different sort of peace in the city than it would've been out in Houghton -- this is most inriguing to me as it's been a theme of thought so frequently revisited over the last five years and only now are my hypothosis being tested. Let me see if I can get at the difference in the sort of peace I experienced riding my bike through the quiet city streets toward my church in Brooklyn from the peace I experienced walking through the woods at twilight or sitting on the dock at Perkins pond watching the swallows fly, or driving home in the evening from Rochester or Buffalo...
Trees exude a quiet presence, but still it is a strong one. A friend once categorized Timothy Dick's music as being as silently strong as an oak -- this for someone's music which I could also say requires patience, invokes stillness, and simultaneously overturns peace with strength and strength with peace. His music is an edy of change but it's somehow very solid, very still. So that's nature to me -- trees anyway. Trees and the dark hollows underneath them, the waterways that cut through them: it's guilt and grace in equal measures. And at least for me, a man with severly limited grasp of the
workings of the natural world, this is life incomprehensibly strong, fixed, proud. In it's silence, or maybe I should say, in my silence, in my patient observance of the place, my peace matches the peace and pride of the landscape: I am both terrified and proud. Nature to me is an unknottable mystery -- some ineffible Truth. Recognition of that Truth is the key to my peacefulness in the country, the key to richness and contentment and it's, I think, what I've experienced during the dark blue part of the evening watching birds or listening to wind or some such thing. It's a recognition of life and it gives me, at least for a time, a sense of my smallness, of my scale, of the size of the world, the overwhelming density of life and a sense that it's also ephemeral, instantaneous, fragile and small. In Houghton you can look up and see stars -- not just four or five, but a nightly soaking of fresh light; a deep swash of dense glitterings dizzyingly numerous.
The peace I experienced in Brooklyn the other night was similar. There are trees here -- especially in the neighborhood my church is in, its streets are fully green, and brick is everywhere -- this is a part of the city that remains soft somehow. But the peace here, at least for me, rarely escapes the boundaries of my fear of the place. Peace comes despite my fear, but still it's a peace that grows from something very small, like a memory, whereas the peace of the country comes at me from all sides and sometimes overwhelms. The peace on Wednesday came when I smelled the ocean, at least that's what I'm remembering now, and that smell took me out of the place, out from Brooklyn and the peopled world. So here, too, I found my sense of scale, but it was powered by longing rather than the depth of fulfillment -- the sense of space that memory of the ocean gave me brought on the peace. And maybe riding my bike too, maybe that brought on a sense of freedom and space even deep in this web of streets. I've said before that there's something ridiculous about art in the country, like there's no need for it, like decorating a mountain or building a fountain in a lake. But here in the city, art serves a very definite purpose -- there's a real need for art: for organized beauty. In both settings art is a communal act -- however I'm thinking now that my experiences of art in the country have evidenced the singularity of the specific community. My most moving art experiences have served to illuminate something uniquely beautiful about the people around me. My art experiences in the city so far have served to give me peace about myself --served to identify something ineffible concerning my human experience. This isnt to say that these experiences have only served as tools of isolation, but that the peace came out of a new trust in my own experience whereas the peace or truth that came out of my art experiences in Houghton have served to confirm a commonality in our group experience.
There must be a better way to say all of this. I'll do some researching to see if I can find some PhDs who've already written about this. If you know of somewhere I should be looking first, please feel free to write me (dmstith@gmail.c om).
We had a couple of clutterdancers in Brooklyn last week touch down just a couple of streets from my apartment. I wasn't there to see the winds -- I had just left for New Hampshire and missed the rare weather completely.
I was on nature's side when the tornadoes touched Sunset Park -- I was thinking about storm clouds and star maps and mashed huckleberries on toast, talking with a quiet voice about the sweet smell of the lake water, watching light shake on the walls of the cottage just before dinner time. I wish somehow I could discover that Brooklyn has a neighborhood so intoxicatingly soft.
While at the Lake I read Robero Bolano's book Last Evenings On Earth, released by New Directions -- a collection of short stories so haunting and foreign I couldn't put it down. The stories take place in Chile, Mexico and Spain. They're disconcerting in their understatement: secret and horrible lonliness and pangs of despair so exquisite, so plain, I couldn't take my eyes off the book. Reminds me of Hesse and Camus.
I got stuck in NH longer than expected due to the storms in Brooklyn -- my flights routed through LaGuardia were delayed and canceled twice and in the end I decided to wait a few days and then drive out, cancel the flights altogether and accept that my vacation was going to plan itself. On my last visit to the Portland ME airport I almost made it onto a plane. I got through security, checked my bags and headed toward my gate where I planed to spend a few hours reading and drinking coffee. The gates I passed were sparsely populated, more people in line at the Starbucks than waiting in the plastic seat clusters at each gate. I remember smiling and thinking this is a nice place to read. The flights to LaGuardia all flew out of 3 gates at the end of the terminal. This is where I was headed and where I was greeted by something resembling Somalia more than Northern New England -- children sprawled on the floor surrounded by handfuls of fitfully scattered crayons, bellies exposed as if by tantrum and sleep, vending machine food wrappers tumbling out from under seats stuffed with unpacked carry-on luggage, and the bodies of parents racked over armrests (looking less comfortable than Christ in Michelangelos pieta) sleep starved eyes bulging over red bellied cheeks. I walked straight to the check-in desk and the attendant laughed at me when I squinted at a stray beam of sun that hit my face when my elbowws reached the counter. She laughed, she said, because everybody gets hit by that sunshine and she loves to see the looks on their faces when their eyes defend themselves against the beam. I was still hopeful at this point in my travels and laughed with her. It was then that I asked if my flight would be on time. She laughed again, harder this time, almost involuntarily, like a sudden cough.
So I didn't fly out that day. I stayed on in NH and had a great time. And now I'm in the Adirondacks looking at more water and more trees. When I get back to B-land I have loads of artwork to do, and lots of recording. More on that later.
July 28 - blankosaurus rex
What can I say? According to my internet sources, it's supposed to be raining in Brooklyn, but all the rain's caught up in an irrepressible humidity clinging to doorframes and foreheads. Garages and little children.
If you're looking for a good book of poetry, when you've finished the Deathly Hallows, order Jagged With Love by Susanna Childress:
"You hear these things: guitars, crickets, coughing, half of August/in a day."
I have a week off to finish some recordings. I don't think these songs will come immediately to this here table -- I'm going to save things up for a proper album release.
July 16 - On a Grassblade
Timothy's new album, "On A Grassblade" is out now and it's a powerful piece of work. Click the image to go to cdbaby.com where the album is on sale for $12.50.
July 13 - Friday Glory is the Fire at the Center of Pain. -Jean Janzen
A conversation with a woman I share this office with: a Russian Jew that's waiting for her new color tv to arrive -- she's having it delivered to the office and she'll take it home with her on the subway tonight. On Monday she wrangled me with a minute by minute sometimes-hard-to-understand-through-her-thick-Russian-accented reenactment of her slow escape from the NYC subway during the blackout of 2005. She's saying how awful it was trudging through the dark tunnels over the rail lines, holding on to the person in front of her, but then when she was out on the street, how peaceful. How nice to finally get out of the city. And then when she got home to Queens she sat on her roof and watched the blackened NY skyline and counted planes lining up to land.
From what dizzying heights it seems I've fallen into the mash of Brooklyn and the world of men. The buildings here are tall and strong and each hewn by some slave-scoured agent of the free world so ravenous in his duty so as to push the earth to its limit. I'm amazed. I'm amazed and astonished at the capacity for human achievement. And, too, this bewildered branch of stride they call Manhattan and it's energy of THRUST and FORCE!! fantastic.
I rode my bicycle over the Brooklyn Bridge after sunset last night -- weaving towards the NY skyline the thirst of man becomes as unveiled a beauty as any -- and the dark of night suppressed by the spray of artificial light, I'm amazed by the hate man has for nature. What is this fear? How does this place draw together so efficiently the corners of man's desire: this Beauty, this Hate? We are delving too deep.
June 13 -
May 15 - my clutter dance
Two weeks until my move to Brooklyn -- I'm tired. I'm sore from the impossible nearness of change. Living in an achademic community in which half of my friends are settling into summer relaxation mode and the other half are gearing up to squelch their memory of the year through a barrage of travel plans -- For these people, this is the transistional moment they've been looking forward to for so long, and here I am trying to incite some empathy, some encouragement, at the very moment they feel they finally have time for themselves. So, trying to float by. Trying to hide fear of change. Trying to remember what it is I'm looking forward to, why I should be excited about this move...I tell myself to remember. I try to remember.
Also, planning a trip to England for a week. I've never been and I'm realy excited about it! I have a face that Americans say "looks SO British" -- gamey I suppose. So, a chance to test my britoflage. Gonna look at monoliths and heathrows... maybe sleep in the lake district for a while... definately have more than my share of Yorkshire pudding!
Oh, my friend Shara was interviewed by Face Culture --
watch it HERE. There are some new things scattered in the demos section to your right-->
May 8 - fluttery
A Good Breakfast:
Oatmeal with flax seed and bananas, dry double-cappuccino
and a handfull of blueberries. Good.
The solid colored storefronts of Washington Park were reminiscent of the algae water mark of the locks on the Erie canal – I remember seeing them on a canoing trip in college: riding the water level down as the locks eased out their water and the color of the walls changed from dry gray to a mucous green – I remember even the spurts of water from zebra muscles. Like Washington Park had been under water for a year or more. The concert hall's auditorium was on the 2nd floor of a building with steep steps – I couldn't help but think it had survived this imaginary flood by anticipating it. But then to admit that the flood plain is so reliable makes me wonder how art has existed among the people at all. I suppose it is the people – art is the people at their most earnest. I described the Havel's performance to somebody as High Art played to a high audience... I wonder if the illustration above applies to my perception of the performance that evening. (* any great hills in Cincinnati?--the spell checker pointed me toward “incinerate”, and “incinerators.” -- possible title). So we have this flood of humanity, we have the marks on the walls to prove it, we have the memorial hall raised up over the park and a couple little experiences that firm the danger or the scars of the city. We have the experience of the Havels, the embrace, the conversation with the beer kid next to me and his shortened and very well-spoken version of the race riots. We have the Indiana countryside which I think will go in the the 2nd installment. I've got to figure out this SnowFish thing – so I need to mention the long ride home and the way I had to hunch over the wheel and feel for the bumper strip in the road to know where I was – the feeling of deep oblivion and then this startling vision of a fish swimming through the falling snow at me – it startled me enough to keep me awake for half an hour. I'd like to tie together this fish and the “flood” of the race riots, and the waterline on the buildings – use water imagery and no direct conversation. Color my images pale and blue if possible – almost being crushed by two snow plows in Cleveland.
April 23 - happy warning I smell sugar, I smell smoke, the moon's a metal colander over the road (sifting us and the light apart), and the shadow of the weepers on the pond commiserate, protect, their wildness and their mirror.
phew! it's been a few weeks of thinking how I need to get something done about my website, and then at last: TIME! so, here we go. I'll try to update this more frequently than I have been. Since my move to Brooklyn is coming up, I'll be puting together my portfolio and uploading a lot of work, and I DO have new music to share sometime. Though, I'd like to have a few more things completed before I throw them out here. Legs are wobbly still -- might do them good to have a few more laps around the living room.So, how are you all?
And where did Spring go? I thought it was around here somewhere...
Feb 17 - More Chicken Love!!
So, a couple of weeks ago I posted a review of Rafter's 'Music for Total Chickens' -- I sent it to Rafter in the spirit of the album, recognizing that everyone needs a little encouragement now and then. Then, on Monday, the folks at Asthmatic Kitty asked if they could post the review on their website as part of their 'Half-Week of Rafter Love,' (a darling fledgling with a keen sense for the commercial calendar). "What an honor!" I thought. And indeed! An honor! (see it HERE)
On Monday of this week, asthmatic master Michael Kaufmann asked if I'd be interested in contibuting a Rafter remix to the Half-Week, and so my schedule for the next three days was prescribed: 7-8am, accessory percussion recording, 8-5pm, normal work day, 7-10pm, recording strings, horns, piano, voice, and at last I knocked together some tripod of a track.
It was great fun, and the remix is ready for downloading!
Head over HERE Look on the left side of the page for my remix, and on the right side for the original Rafter composition (available in stream only).
One more week of full-time day job and then my vocation and avocation will trade clothes. Say a prayer if you think of it.
Feb 6 - It's Working. It's Working.
I've been meaning for a while now to write a review every now and then of albums that strike me as honest and note-worthy. Maybe eventually I'll add a section of this site for such a thing. We'll see. (I'm thinking big website plans lately: recently bought dmstith.com, though nothing's there just yet -- this in preparation of my move to nyc and my focus on music for a while. Got to get myself in the culture.) Nerves are charged: I can use all the encouragement I can get.
Rafter - Music For Total Chickens
For all the hype about this album, the video contest, the chicken outfit, the buyers guide over at Asthmatic Kitty, I expected to be hearing more from the press upon the release of this fine album. Maybe it's a symptom of the indie media's cynicism, maybe the content isn't cool enough -- it's been overlooked.
I was mostly intrigued by what seemed intense production techniques -- the scattered drum fills and chirps and growls of 'Encouragement' -- Rafter lulls over the ramparts, a calm voice over a comically stormy sea of scraggles and squawks. It's music that kicks and soothes -- it's all hard edges, and those made cavernous by strings and choir. The production is awkward and manic. It's over-the-top and bawdy! And every song suffers the sting of Rafter's eccentricity.
But then every song untwists itself in the most beautiful ways.
Take for example 'Tragedy' -- begins with an off-rhythm high hat and guitar squawk with beach boy ooo's flying by the tent poles: after the first minute it sounds like Rafter will launch into garage band senseless passion -- the drums cut out, a guitar rears up on hind legs: you can imagine Rafter's red head bracing to bang. And then the most wonderful thing: a guitar flum-flums, a melody bubbles up and a song is formed with the most wonderful lyrics: "It's natural to get destroyed," and you've forgotten that you almost skipped to the next track.
Another example: on 'Unassailable' -- Rafter turns some machine all the way to eleven, some speakers blow, some paint is peeled and all through the first minute-fourty you're wondering what could be made from this mess. And then a trumpet comes in -- the scale is made perfect, the mess has context. This track never totally lands: it's always a little too shiny in an over-bright sky, but if you squint just right, you can see the figure of our hero crafting something fine. Something careful.
There's evidence that this has been heavily crafted as an album rather than a collection of songs -- Rafter has a great sense of scale and audience. We're encouraged into patience with the respite of 'interlude' and 'Boy' which tumbles and trips into a mantic coda of strings and Liz Janes speaking low -- these are the landscapes and blue skies we've been waiting for! Now if Rafter pulled this trick on every track, or even a few of them, we'd wink and walk away. But, as I said before, he's careful. He knows his audience.
On the second listen the anticipation is almost unbearable -- and this is the life of 'Chickens' -- these are songs beautifully crafted, glazed, polished, smashed to the concrete and rebuilt -- the destruction is the process; the cracks are in the story. This is an album whose scale is persistently renewed: we grow to expect clamor and crash to bloom and slow into something wonderful. This is an album about giving the seemingly haphazard a chance to explain itself. And this album is rewarding in ways I didn't expect.
What I want to know is Why this album was made -- I don't imagine I'll be writing an album of inspirational songs any time soon. It seems beside the point. If good work is to be about process, it seems that songs written to give a push to the stalled ought to show more pushing: more unstalledness. What we get is an album which beautifies and validates the words used by folks attempting to avoid and disuade process. And yet there's evidence throughout the album that Rafter understands this: and is playing with process as much as anyone.
So why the strange disconnect? Is it possible that a man in a chicken suit is in love with the process, and so much so it need not be conjured in his art?
What I find appealing in Rafter is that he's playing with grand posture in his outrageous skin -- this is not a clown feigning sadness or joy. There's something about Rafter that denies self-parody. He's attempting to uncover something of the core of experience by examining the poles -- to the North, the honest and human, the validation of experience and need. To the South, chickens and guitars wailing and all things flippant. But he seems to be caught up in something larger -- the scale is the key. Rafter's going to weave the two extremes together in an attempt to capture everything in between. There's something beautiful about this method. Rafter is simultaneously the scheming villain defending the nebula of his ego and our hero caterwauling through the sky.
If you have time, go listen to some samples here:
http://www.asthmatickitty.com/news.php?newsID=114
Feb 5 - Sharing
A video has appeared on the tube for the remix I did for Shara.
Jan 20 - Fire
On the 87 the other week, we saw a fire -- and from inside the car, in the line of cars, seeing the shine of it on us as we passed, it seemed the most wild thing: a breach in the natural world. Something undefendable. Something clean.
I couldn't see but the back of his head when he said it, but Ted said "it's so beautiful" as we passed. I imagined the glare pressed on our eyes: our eyes stretched wide and shiny. I stared at the road to keep us on it (I was driving) and the reflection was everywhere. The road -- the wet road, the wet cars -- was engulfed in the presence of the flame. Ted said he saw a man standing up near the fire watching -- and he was "tiny as a matchstick" next to it.
Maybe we're bound to our humanness by the nuclear brilliance of the world. Maybe we're bound to beauty and truth by fear, by danger and a base wisdom hidden under language. By humanness I mean our collectivity, and collectivity that admits mystery and powerlessness. Nature is collective but in a way refined: the symbiotic mechanisms are indestructable. Nature's is a clean system in that it's a self-ruinous, self-sustaining system. Maybe humans are too. How would we ever know? Beauty in ephemerality?
In other news:
my ersatz buxom mother wrote a bit of braggadocio: here
And this appeared on the Asthmatic Kitty site:
"That mysterious and haunting male voice from “Magic Rabbit” appears again, but this time in the Scott Walker-esque remix of “Gone Away”. Who is that masked, multi-talented man? Also known for his subconsious drawings on “Bring Me The Workhorse”, David Stith emerges subtley. The clamor and noise seem to hush in the quiet suspension of his gorgeous and icey remix. The backstory begins in the summer of 2004 which found Shara recording demos in a Brooklyn basement converted into museum, The Museum of Disembodied Folk Art. In the next room lived David Stith who would creep out during cookie and milk breaks and he and Shara would discuss music, art, life and the Starbucks coffee uniform. David moved away momentarily but Shara kept snooping around his diggs, borrowing microphones, triangle beaters and getting him to sing, draw and remix on projects for her! Cheers to more collabs between friends!" Read more about "Tear it Down," the remix album here
Dec 29 - Goals: I, David Stith, promise to board North Wind's back, tie her hair around my waist, and trust: this requires the dismantling of my pride, my protection, my painted self: preparing to dissolve the real. So, here are things I have worked on in the last 3 years, and what they need in order to be finished.
• Ichabod & Apple - 15 songs, 12 of which I'm mostly happy with, though the recording is poor (these were my first recording experiments) and the lyrics could benefit from revision. After listening to the first 3 tracks this morning, I think it would be good to try and rerecord them (at least the vocals) and write up some simple string arrangements to add texture.
• Water/Music- um...probably not going to do anything with it. It's mostly too self-involved. Not clear-headed. Soupy. Maybe see how some of the soup sounds when dried out. Try performing them sans production.
• Messages Soundtrack- Will be working this spring to write/record the orchestral arrangements of each of 24 tracks. Feel pretty good, still, about the basic themes. Need to experiment with more textures and instruments.
• People project - T&E, Joy, Saint Clark, Into the Lawn, F of P, Huth's Theme, GMS/Morning Glory Cloud, An Ambiguous Siren, Hair Balloon, Chimney Baptismal, The Blue Light- tracks I'll keep exploring. Intend to write pieces for Timothy, Shara, Timmy, Luke... Some of these tracks are long: 10 - 15 minutes and will be recorded with a load of instruments. Will write a song based on the 2nd movement of Suite for Marice (my grandpa). And a piece for 3 aunts -- a verse for Bonnie, Sue, Kathy.
• New album- Thanksgiving Moon is a launching point -- chamber songs. Exploring my upper range. Lots of piano, blues guitar and voice.
• Colab with Fred Brown- electronic compositions. Need to find a lyrical basis for the pieces: short poems about birds? Sable Island? Fogelin Hill? The Anchor?
• Colab with Shara - 2 albums: perhaps one ep and one full length. Chamber dance music -- acoustic dance music. Instrumentation = blender, sink, coins -- not sampled, but played. Tom Waits tea party. Other colab will be art songs -- maybe some old Brazillian folk songs blended with rewritten Ives and Gorecki and Gershwin. maybe. Shara can handle it, but can I?
• Peace Songs - commissioned by Charity Case to write a couple songs in response to the politics of the last 5 years. Thanksgiving Moon, High Hay and Peace Workshop came out of the sessions. Intend to submit TM in current form for comp, add strings and more resolution for album.
• My Brightest Diamond Remix - in the bag. Already sent to press. Will be a promo for the remix album. Album releases on March 6 (I think?): ought to have something ready by then.
I just realized how like a new years resolution list this looks. I wasn't even thinking about the new year! shoo. get to work lad.
Dec 12 - Raise Your Arms For Victory!! Satisfy your need for an early winter warbling: Thanksgiving Moon.mp3 <-clicky
Dec 1 - Thanksgiving Moon Sorry for the lack of updates lately -- lots of projects in the fire, and one must wear lots of fire-proof gear when working near the fire, and the gear takes hours to put on and hours to take off, and while the gear is on, typing is nearly impossible (big gloves, big fingers). so, then, what's goin on??
Well, for one, I got over my distain for myspace long enough to put up a music page ( here: http://www.myspace.com/dmstith ). This didn't take too long to do, though it was stressful in all the ways you can imagine. I'll still be updating this page as much as I can (as much as I can with these gloves on).
There's a story by me up at the asthmatic kitty site now -- go have a read! -- and with it a GIGANTIC photo of me with egg dripping from my face. (CORRECTION: I guess the giant portrait was making it difficult for some users to read the story below: reports of covered text poured in from parts of the North Eastern United States, Tanzania, Bulgaria, and most of South America. The portrait has since been reduced to a thumb nail.)
So, what have I been working on? Several projects for My Brightest Diamond: layout and lots of drawings for a single and another release slated for this spring, a remix of Gone Away, a t-shirt, and plans to record together again in preparation for Shara's next major release as well as for my own projects. Also, I spent the Thanksgiving holiday recording a few tracks for a compilation to be released on Charity Case. I'll have mp3s of all of the tracks up in the next 1.5 weeks.
Did any of you catch the beautiful sickle moon on thanksgiving? The sky was clear here in Houghton. The world felt very still.
Nov 2 - Trees in Buffalo I took a drive through my old neighborhood in Buffalo yesterday. The sky was blue but a cracked sort of blue -- shards of trees stuck up in the air everywhere in garish spires. After the big snow storm that left Buffalo without power for a week, 80% of the trees in Buffalo have been ruined. The trees made that place beautiful. It's sad to see them go. Really it's horrifying. I wish I had pictures to share.
I'm hard at work on some new projects for My Brightest Diamond involving more drawings and new music. I will be working heavily on my first official release as well as recording the score to a film starting in February. Here are a few more piano demos for the score:
Oh! And a T-shirt with my drawing on it is available from Asthmatic Kitty records: LINK for a measly twelve bucks! GET OVER THERE AND BUY!
Oct 29 - Good Morning Sunday! Walking around the house in my pajamas -- it's a windy Sunday morning and the house is full of blips and hums from Nobukazu Takemura and me zipping from one idea to another. Over my head I can hear my sneakers banging around in the washing machine -- I'm washing cat pee out of them (a momento left from a dinner party at the Lipscomb's last night: so am I marked? I scrubbed my right heal for 15 minutes last night but still that tart and musty smell is there); over the tumble is a heavy wind that kept me up last night. The sky is full of silver rimmed clouds that, in their persistent motion, reveal the speed of the earth, the thinness of the veil between calamity and peace. The last of the leaves are being ripped from the stem.
Found this bit I wrote on the back of a piece of staff paper last spring:
"I have a memory -- something formed when I was young like my taste for bitter things (olives, plain yogurt, black coffee) formed to sweeten the sour nature of my mother's formation -- I sought stories of her childhood; perhaps I sought to suite a taste developed by a sweet story told early on, and over and over -- and always lacking the sort of detail that aids the story in developing straight forward. The story was simply that my mother's house burned down when she was younger. In my fantasy I grew a grand house with blue twilight walls, dainty curtains, books everywhere, and a small room where my mom, a young child, slept. I imagined the sweet and fair-faced blond and blue of a five year old Joyce, her stuffed animals, her toys, her bowl of apple sauce and fig newtons -- iced tea and wooden games. I imagined the bowl of blue sky and froth of green trees ( the greenest, most shining, green) held by strong and curvy brown trunks (glistening, like melted chocolate) yellow bees, the sound of clothes hissing in the wind (a warm wind) and hills that appeared when one looked for them. I imagined this on thanksgiving or Christmas vacations which we took to our grandmother's house in central NY. The story was that my mother's house had burned down and her family had originally lived across the street from the house I visited. Because my Grammie's house was a modified trailer, and had been added onto only on the back side, and because the bedrooms were on the front of the house and off limits to guests, I grew up with the impression that the bit of land across the street was something secret -- something one shouldn't stare at. I'd only see that property when coming or going from Grammie's house -- being inside with windows that only faced back, I imagined that land, that missing house, with intense longing. I poured all my imaginative power into reconstructing the house of my mother's childhood. My aunt lived with my Grammie in that little trailer house -- with perfume soaked afghans, and particle board doors: the sheers over tiny rooms with beds so near to all four walls, I imagined the rooms must've been built around the beds, or dropped in through an open ceiling by crane. I remember the bathroom pocked with tarnishing mirrors and hairpins. A can of Aquanet. The tub had brown spots from age, from hard water and from one or the other standing on the same spot every morning. My dad played games with us: cards or bridges, or we watched TV in the add-on living room. The back yard could be seen through a plastic covered window in this living room -- its grass was brown and stretched on to the horizon -- it seemed to my imagination that the house sat on the edge of some inhabitable waste-yard and just over the horizon was oblivion. The neighbors had big black angry dogs that barked through the chain-link fence when we approached the house; they were always either barking or chewing some piece of shingle that had fallen from the house. That house was a crumbling piece of coal. There was solace in Grammie's living room at least -- like an observation deck to the mystery flatness of that place. I'd sit in the arm chair with the wooden swan's heads for arm rests and imagine, sitting there in the musk and the paneled walls, the sad of it, that the landscape had been deflated and scorched by fire. No hills, no trees, no friendly people -- just road and this little house on the brink of something bleak, and the invisible mess of earth across the street where paradise had been."
Oct 4 - heavy pelted I went running a couple days ago. I chose to run indoors, on the treadmill, where I can set my speed and time myself. I'm not a better runner when I'm less bored, still I'll complain that boredom keeps me from running more than I do. About 15 minutes in I'm watching the numbers flip thinking in mundane cycles. I've started to sweat, I'm ready to leave. Today I ran home in the rain. I looked forward to the mad dash all day -- every time I looked out the window of my office I thought about the weight of the drops. Maybe not every time... I was surprised how dark could be at 9am, it was 4am dark. Dark enough to fool the crickets into chirping long after sunrise.
Work has been crazy these last few weeks. I'm trying to make time for projects outside of work: a remix for Shara: I'm really very excited about this one! She's given me "Gone Away" from "Bring Me The Workhorse" -- I've completely disassembled it into a series of lyrical moans on loss and longing -- I remember hearing about the writing of Exit Music (For A Film) by Thom Yorke: he was asked to write this song to be played at the end of Romeo & Juliet and his solution was to write them a new ending, to give them the lucidity to abandon their scheme and make for the hills. Anyway -- I'm doing something like this with Gone Away. I'm trying to bring the person back. The lyrical line, where before it acted as an anchor to the drama of the song, holding the listener close to the carpet, starring into the vacuum, into the billowing curtains of loss -- where the line held things down, I've flipped the dimension: Shara's voice floats over top a Major wave of cumulous clouds and heavenly choir: she's resurected in the pink and gold of a Titian painting. I'm working on the horn arrangements now. Trying to find anchor enough to write this all down in notation.
I'm also working on some musics with Mr. Fred Brown -- I trusted him with some of the piano sketches I recorded for Dave huth's film and he returned them with new layers of instrumentation. In return, I'm going to try and do the same for him. I'll be adding vocals and the like to a series of short electronic pieces. I hope not to sink these little majesties into song form -- they deserve the full treatment. I hope to have something to share from this by the end of the year.
Also working on more layout for Ms. Worden. Can't say what just yet. I'm so happy to be working for Asthmatic Kitty. nice folks. can't say it enough!
Aug 29 - sparked From a journal, a summer ago in NH:
"I had a feeling as I sat down on the warf that my hands would be soaked by touching this book -- that picking up my moleskin would feel like washing the dishes -- starting something I can only finish. My hands are dry -- my feet host the cosmos in variants of light -- they're magnified and marbleized under the surface of the lake. The same effect has come on the whole of me since I've been here at the lake..."
I remember that feeling now more keenly than I think I felt it then. The world was a shimmering body heavy and glorious in front of me, gold shoots cartwheeling from the sphere, and I am lit up by it. I'm a reflective surface, a light conduit, wading in the majesty of something other and at the same time that the largeness of the world overwhelms and exhausts me, somehow my meager intentions glow a little too. I'm sparked I guess. The gold shoots ferris-wheel out of me a little. So, what to call this: is it empathy? impressionablility? naivety?
Aug 28 - What The Lawn Produced I had a funny dream last week -- (just now, as I sat down to add some text to this site I wondered what I'd write about: something funny, I thought to myself: something light. Let the people know I can think light. I'm not always such a hard charger. Anyway, I sat down as I normally do, without any idea what I'll wriite about, and I was reminded of this odd dream. I've had an overabundance of nonsensical dreams this month. What is a creative person to do with this stuff?) -- and my funny dream contained these things:
• A human leash (like the kind used to keep children in your periphory) with a built-in walking cane, blinking lights and a sign that says " I'm Deaf" on one side, "I'm Blind" on the other.
• A Country club, the front lawn of which is filled with camping trailers -- the lawn is meticulously manicured -- rich people (people in expensive clothing, with pretty nails, nice shoes: people that walk with their chins in the air) walk from the trailers, their hair a crown of bed mess, up the lawn to the main entrance of the country club. These people are wrapped in pride, though they look as though they've just rolled out of bed, their legs not quite ready for an elegant stroll -- looks something like a drunken masquarade: their bedhead could be bird feathers, their silk night gowns, robes.
• A
club owner and his assistant work at restoring light to their concert hall. 2 men in the electrical room in the catwalk of a great auditorium, shining flashlights -- I see the reflection of their lights on the ceiling of the auditorium. The flicker of light reminds me of an aquarium. Light in feather strokes moves on the walls. I hear whispering and agitation, the flashlights bolt; a sigh, a whistle, and the lights slow.
• A game of Balderdash in a classroom. I'm losing miserably. My older sister Andrea sits in front of me in the classroom. It's a small highschool classroom and some of the students are sitting on their desks. I remember playing a game with a ball in middle school -- everyone sits on their desks and keeps their mouths closed -- the game is called "mumball." An ingenious rule: no talking. No talking means not even when the person next to you nearly falls off their desk, not even when the teacher gets beamed in the face with the nerf ball, not even when the principal stares through the glass in the door. Mum means mum. (incidentally, 'mum,' the word, is one of those strange and familiar coloquialisms that I grew up near though never comfortable with. Like the 'PJ's,' or weewee -- these were words that rubbed me wrong because my parents never used them, but were used by my friends' parents all the time, at least in the scrap of vocabulary that was reserved for their young children).
A couple more tracks. Note: these are just early sketches for the film. I intend to use these to feed orchestral pieces for the soundtrack.
Aug 23 - The Workhorse 3 new tracks in the demos section on the right (under the Ichabod & Apple section), all of which came out of my work on a score for Dave's (of 90secondsofdave) next full length film. Monday was a day full of music: composed and recorded from 9am to 5:30pm, came home to a dinner table conversation about sailing terms, about wind speeds and jigs, starboard and larboard and sleeping in a hammock to avoid being green in the morning. I contributed no words to the conversation. I was still locked away in music land. That druggish state of absurd oblivity: the place where dreams happen and one loses their capacity to make judgement. Anyway, I was stuck there, in that place, for the entire evening. Went to bed early and was still tired the next day. My composition chops are weak. It's good to work them out.
Shara's album (Bring Me The Workhorse) came out yesterday, was given as 8.1 at Pitchfork and will be celebrated tomorrow night at the Speigletent in Manhattan. Wish so badly that I could go. Too far to drive.
Most of my words are going into emails these days. Heres a clip from a recent one to Mari (my Mari):
...I was alone in that room face down on a blue pleather harness, thinking that my eyeballs aren't made for chairs like this (mine stick out more than most), listening to a Celtic flute swim under a waterfall, under a rainbow, under a sky full of birds, pink in the sunset. My electric current machine chimed and the chiropractor returned and asked if my muscles were cooked yet. I measured the weight of my existence in that moment: oh, that I could be cooked, distracted by the peace-machine, face down in a plastic harness, and all the while the rain comes down outside smacking the ground like tiny bodies thrown from a high place: smacksmacksmacksmack smack smacksmacks macksmacksmack smacksmack smacksmacksmacksmack...: the world is full of influences, and the one influence I ought to be seeking, that of God, is the most difficult to read, in its violence, its unbearable peace. The wills of the world are bearable. The will of God is quick and quiet when it ought to be loud and slow, rigid when it ought to bend. The road was a river for the car to plow through on the way home. I stopped at Jubilee as I went through Fillmore -- we'd run out of toilet paper -- the rain let up just long enough for me to get inside. Toilet paper. $3.50. Have a good night! Thanks! Stay dry! Haha! Good luck! And then a woman whose jeans had been soaked to midnight blue, whose head held a seaweed mop of hair and an awkward smile and bright eyes that held mine long enough to say "damn. It's wet." and I put on my biggest smile, and worked my eyebrows so that she knew that I understood and was proud of her bravery and that she wasn't alone in the wetness of the world, that I had witnessed her trauma. I couldn't see my car 20 feet in front of me as I ran through the parking lot -- and I banged into it, I flopped and squeezed and shook my umbrella as I floundered into the door.
Jul 13 - Mexicali and Yuma attend the ocean's lonliness with strip-mall coddling.
It's been raining for 4 days now -- today looks like sun, some blue sky and all the world is green. And I think a lot of people around here are glad for it, but I want the rain back. I'm in a deep spot, and the water, when it comes in gully-washers, lifts me out a little bit. Reminds me I'm bouyant. The link above goes to a page from a sketch book I'm keeping. I fight my writers block with lists and excersizes. When I don't know what to draw, I scribble. More color and maps:
This weekend I'll face my fear of judgement. In some ways anyway... I'm visiting Shara and James and Timmy and Kat and her baby.
Jun 14 - grass hammerhill
Jun 05 - riding my bicycle a minor update: Shara's artwork is done. I'm flitting around Houghton and Fillmore and Caneadea housesitting for a couple friends -- tending to animals and grandparents. I did this last year. Summer means living nomadic again, riding my bike all over tarnation, sweating it all out and swimming in ponds. This is not a bad way to live.
I AM recording -- last week I recorded a new version of joy based on some revisions I made for playing it live. I'm working now on moving into the next section of the piece: the part where the winds kick up and the window fans blow in and farms on hills are rubbed dusty and smooth.
So...more soon. I hope.
Mar 01 - Coach and six-a little horses I wish I could write and listen to music simultaneously. I remember a project I was working on in the fifth grade -- Wolf Spiders were the topic. I had 2 or 3 picture books from the library and I was widdling down the finer points for my scientific evaluation of the creature: eight hairy legs, lots of eyes, scary, don't want to find one in my bed: I don't think much was expected of the paper, just some sentences, some thoughts put together. I had just bought a new Petra tape (that's right, the christian ROCK band) and didn't want to take my headphones off. I begged my parents to let me try writing the paper with the headphones on, with the music rocking my soul, with Ronnie on keyboards spraying Jesus into me 'til I puffed up and exploded love all over, spraying me like aquanet, shiny like chrome. They said fine. The paper rocked. Hard. And so my parents, smiled and tilted their heads until the crown of each proud brow touched and a new pride for little Davey was born. I wasn't proud. I was too busy Rocking Out.
So it worked for me 17 years ago. But now it's not enough to see the words on the screen. I need to hear my brain telling my fingers what to write. I need to intercept each message and sign off on it. In conjunction with head and hands, we at David Stith are working to bring you a better product -- something more intentional, something beautiful and honest. Something right. It's living here in Houghton that has made me more sensitive to it. Anyway, as much as I'd love to merge music and art and writing into one form and not feel torn by lack of time or an indecisive spirit, putting the 3 together compromise each in a way that I don't understand. I'm hoping to understand it well enough to work with it someday, but for now, each is lacking and each needs work.
This month was very full. I haven't written in a while due to being out of town, resting and pulling late nights at the office while in town. I spent a week in New Hampshire visiting an old friend and the school she works at (The Meeting School, in Rindge NH) and then going on to Lovell Lake for canoeing and reading, swimming and eating. The ice had left the lake only a week before I went in -- I didn't stay in the water long for fear of permanent pruning or worse... I needed to be brave. It was good for me. Then: home for two days and off to Calvin's Festival of Faith & Writing featuring talks given by Marilynne Robinson (Pulitzer Fiction winner for Gilead), Walt Wangerin Jr., Salman Rushdie and Andrew Hudgins. Lots of wandering around the strip malls of suburban Grand Rapids, Michigan, boxed lunches, sleepy afternoons on Calvin's lawns. In the middle of these two trips I sent Shara's artwork to print. The packaging for My Brightest Diamond's "Bring Me The Workhorse" album features photos by Sarah Small and drawings by me. Here are a couple of examples (click for larger images):
I never thought I'd find much of a purpose for these drawings. I did a series of them in college based on travel and migration. I never fell out of love for them, but to try to explain them over and over to people became tiresome and made sharing them a heartbraking task.
For whatever reason, Shara loves them. Sarah Small and Michael Kaufmann (at Asthmatic Kitty) made me feel really good about them.
I hope to have more time to work on the next series of images before we go to print -- these were rushed out the week before they were sent to print.
I'm listening to music now. Listening to Alfred Deller, a countertenor whose voice Jack Leax introduced me to on the 9 1/2 hour trip back to Houghton from Grand Rapids. A countertenor, for those who aren't familiar with the term, is a man that sings in falsetto -- sort of a castratti with knobits in tact. It takes years and years of training for a man to develope a sufficient range of this voice before it is worth hearing -- Alfred Deller is mostly self-trained and a master of this voice. I've always had a bent towards my falsetto voice -- during the dark years of my puberty, it was the only sure thing for me. My low voice might crumble and burp, and there was no telling what my vibratto might sound like, but my falsetto wavered of its own accord. I didn't share this voice with people except in jest, afraid that my masculinity might be questioned, so maybe it would have felt just as great to sing alone in my full voice. I didn't do much of that until I started recording. Now I'm interested in seeing what my high voice can do.
Apr 01 - More Artwork for Shara I'm still grinding down my concepts for Shara's artwork. Below is an example of something that came out of my experimentation today.
This is mostly fun -- though it takes time and I'm finding that a lot of images that I thought would work well aren't working at all. Takes a delicate eye I guess. It's growing in me. I'll be picking Shara up from the airport tomorrow morning -- she's performing Monday night.
Mar 28 - Interviews and Composers I had dinner last night with Lowell Liebermann (click) -- besides having a name wil 3 L's in a row, he's friendly, over-boisterous, happy to tell a story, content to listen to one. He reminds me of so many classical musicians -- introvert, untroubled, cool until another musician is involved, and then quickly respondory and clumsy with wit, spraying names of concertos, violinists, record labels, mouthpiece manufacturers, and the whole messy polyphony of the music industry on each other. I find this sort of musician frustrating. Tiring even. Maybe it's watching the sordid competitive spiel in their communication -- something disfunctional in the closeness and the fight of their talk. This of course is the way of deep rooted frats -- musicians, Christians, athletes, chefs -- so often holding to the comfort of plainspeech of their field because there is so much at stake -- patting the ground like crows, sharing food, dealing with the concrete and reasonable landmarks rather than collaborating or engaging in anything dangerous. I'm reifying I know -- musicians don't exist, Christians don't exist, only people that think and believe, make decisions, act. Right?
The night was interesting. This was a dinner party my folks were throwing in Lowell's honor -- he's a guest of the college right now, working with the Wind Ensemble on a piece he was commissioned to write -- the music faculty were invited. I had just finished preparing the salad plates with my mom when a man arrived. Niether of us knew the man -- his car had been lodged in a ditch up our road a bit and needed to use our phone. So for the next 10 minutes prior to guests arriving I was helping an older woman climb out of her car, showing her husband how to use the cell phone, giving the woman a ride to church where she was already late for a meeting, offering the man iced tea and bread. I told my mom she was at fault for causing the accident. That in the speed of her worry she'd created some sort of negative vortex and disrupted the sphere of order. This happens doesn't it? Strange things happen at weddings, at graduation parties, when you're readying the house for someone, someone else altogether shows up. Build it and they will come. Draw a bath for yourself, expect some time to yourself, and you will be called on to fix the world instead. Nice reminder anyway. I thank God for the evening. I think I would've been more likely to ask an innapropriate question had I not helped that woman out of her car or sat with her in my car.
The above is a sample of some of the work I'm doing for Shara currently. Scribbling horses and telephone wires, and looking through the photography of Gustav Le Gray (click) for inspiration. There are ghost fields and faerie trees in Fontainebleau, and in Napolean III's ships. There really is something otherworldly in these old light experiments -- maybe it's in the way emulsion was painted onto sheets of paper, or wax was made into a negative. Silver salts and light and a wooden contraption like a horse with wobbly legs and metal hinges holding it together. I can't imagine it without smiling! We're all the magicians we're afraid of -- constantly pushing around chemicals, contraptions, speaking strange languages, incantations. We see ourselves and we're afraid. I imagine finding a man like Gustav Le Gray in the woods somewhere with his camera poised would change me for a day -- such an odd presence. Scary to find that there are subliminal happenings in all that we interact with. We half-expect it in the wild world -- we hunt for it when we go for walks, hikes, when we stop and listen, stop and stare. We want to be scared so that the day-to-day can be safe.
An interview Adam Sukhia conducted with me a month ago showed up in Houghton's student newspaper this week. He's very complimentary and makes me feel valued. Makes me want to finish something. I'm surprised that no one has commented on my thoughts about the "Feel Muscle" -- I said some things about worship that might make some people uncomfortable or at least defensive. But this is a safe community for all sorts of conversation right?
Mar 22 - Quick note Due to scheduling conflicts with the strings and other inconveniences, I'm postponing my portion of the show until next fall. In the mean time I'm working on arrangements to release Ichabod & Apple. I'll be shopping for a label this spring and aiming for a small release in time for my concert.
More on my feelings behind the whole of this later.
Shara is still on the bill to perform and while she's up here in Houghton, we will finalize artwork for "Bring Me The Workhorse," her new album which will be released on Asthmatic Kitty in August. I'll post bits of artwork here as it's finished (or just ready to be seen).
**I heard last night from Shara that Timothy's mom is doing much better. In my last post I mentioned that she had slipped into a coma as a result, in some way or another, to the cancer she's been living with for some years. Thanks for your prayers. __________________________________________
Mar 06- wailing I spent Saturday morning on the couch in my living room trying to eak out new lyrics for "For Thomas and Ezra." I'll explain the purpose of the song and then my thought process through the morning of the 4th as well as the lyrics that I have settled on.
Thomas Dick and Ezra Telavera were born within a week of each other to parents that mean a lot to me: Alex and Lisa Telavera pastored the church I attended, leased a room to me, taught me how to live in Brooklyn; Timothy and Kathy took my place in the Telavera house when I moved back upstate. Timothy and Alex are two of my best friends, two of the best artists I know. They're great fathers. Kathy and Lisa are kind and gentle, warm hosts, loving. They're great mothers. So when these babies arrived, there was something in me that felt very connected to them, like I knew them already. I suppose I was merely expecting them, and that any feelings I had when I first met, or have now would not stand up as anything unearthly, anything new. There's a sort of magic built in to everyday life, everyday relationships.
I like these babies. I care for them. I'm anxious to see them grow and learn and wish to be an influence on them in some way.
Months ago I recorded this song -- just sang it straight out and it was done in 30 minutes. No lyrics were involved -- I didn't know what I was singing about. The babies were born and I listened to the song again. The emotions I had while I listened were more complex than I had expected -- I thought about the freshness of starting over, starting at all, and I thought about the weight of being born. I felt joy and fear in the same 2 minutes and I thought of Thomas and Ezra. So the song's intent became very real to me: to sing to Thomas and Ezra a welcome song.
I went through so many revisions. I tried singing about prayer, about being saints together; I sang warnings and lamentations; I sang apologies and regrets... I was entirely unhappy with these lyrics. I was missing the point.
On my last visit to Brooklyn I got to spend time with the babies -- they did a lot of crying (wailing really). My instinct wasn't to shut them up but to wail with them. Read into this what you will...
This entry is begining to sound like....I don't know what...something silly. Thinking on all of this now, I wasn't having any sort of revelation really. When I sat down on saturday all of these memories came to me, gathered up like in a flip book ready to be summed up. I decided the purpose was to make no conclusions on life -- to validate our wailing, to give perspective, to sing something...
"Do you hear?
Great terrible tolling laughs
like thunder and winter
summer and fear
oh, brine-eyed keeper, prayer, lover
we will wail with you
in terrible wonderful welcome song
heaven comes with bells
banging,
wailiing:
'hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on'"
I wonder what people will read in these lyrics. I just heard today that Timothy's mom has slipped into a coma. She's been full of cancer for several years now. I pray this isn't goodbye to her. So Timothy has raced back to Canada to be with his family. Kathy is teaching all week, Shara is taking care of Thomas while Timothy is gone.
Rehersals begin tomorrow for my April concert. I hope to have a poster to post here soon.
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Mar 01 - Snow-cellos and writing with the things of life I stumbled on this post about Messiaen's Quartet For The End of Time -- contains one of my favorite pieces of music in movement #5. Read more on this piece here: C L I C K.
Music as Utility
I remember the little room in the basement of Roberts' library where the CD's, LP's and tapes are stored along with the static and disintegrated foam of so many headphones, CD players and mingled sound cables. This was my retreat from the art building where I lived the last 2 years of my undergraduate. I'd wander down, often in the bright of the morning from harsh, flat sunlight and eyes swollen with sleep to this dark damp shelter of a place. I had a favorite seat and pair of headphones. I wandered down rather than slinking off into sleep somewhere after a long night with a paintbrush or scissors. The resonance of this library was restful, convalescent and low; I found myself in some place deeper than sleep, dancing in the humming chorus of Puccini's Butterfly, sloshing oars with Peter Grimes, flattening under Berlioz's varnished comic sky.
A filthy hospital room -- something like what my bedroom would've felt like if I managed to spend enough time in there to leave my residue, [Why I reserve my residue, I've never understood] the walls there, where they weren't sagging with collection, were scarified with scribbled numbers and letters, muddied with the evidence of a connection between listener and performer -- oh, our human work! The vulgarity of feeling! The sanctity of vulgarity! The sanctity of feeling, of work, of striving for relevance, of pleading with the unnamable to be useful, to feel useful...
A scribble would read "232-52 CD2 7 4:50-7:25" -- a catalogue number, a cd number, track number and the time at which the epiphany started, it's duration and when the listener came back to the room. I imagine the care each scribble took. Yeah we're looking to be moved, and maybe sometimes it's all for the chance to evidence that we're capable of connecting, of proving the existence of the power and beating our chests in our worthiness, but there's room for selfless sharing and pure amazement at the moment. Even in this tiny room (perhaps because of the confinement of it) with our eyes closed, when we're reminded of the infinite, we feel small again. So we write small, between the cracks and the sagging shelves, on the booth walls, on the shelves themselves -- we populate the tiny room with the bigness of ourselves, with the ineffible. The room redeemed by a small trail of numbers. For me, there was more life in that room, more connection, more communication than in the whole of the campus.
Is this communication, this community, fantasy? Did I do myself irreperable damage by making my daily connection with the dead? Or was this my prayer life? I prefer to think the later, but I haven't found the truth of it that isn't saccharine and slick. I can't prove the holiness of some art. I can only hope. I wonder, is this the hope that Messiaen was working through in his concentration camp, in the snow, under the prodding of his captors? And I find it beautiful and simple and with no need of defense. What he made was necessary and perfect.
Thomas & Ezra
The piece is a greeting, a welcome into the world. The only words I've written that I'm happy with are "hello" and "hi." I think the problem is that in my humblest state, I'm silent. I'd say nothing worth saying. I'd want to warn them of the unexpected depth and speed of life, that they're already moving much faster than they realize. I'd want to comfort them without letting them know how much pain is involved, to show that there's some joy here too, and that I'm told it's worth it to stay through the whole of it. I'd want to give them some advice, some tactics for remembering how lucky they are to have a family that loves them, a God that knows them, but it all comes out trite when I put it to paper. So tonight I intend to sing and see what happens. Maybe I'll take a walk in the woods, embrace the obvious.
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Feb 23 - A quick hello. I'm anxious to put up some new stuff, but I know I ought to take my time. I'm entitled to time. I'll take it.
Here's what I'm working on: A new song about sleeping in hay, arranging Thomas and Ezra for choir and organ and writing lyrics about clouds and birds and words my mom has said to me, learning ukelele and bells, collaborating on a poster for the upcoming concert with Jillian Sokso -- Houghton Art Professor and print maker -- (it's going to be great!)..that's about it.
I've done a lot of reading in the past month. Here are the books I'd recommend:
• Silence - by Shusaku Endo
• The Adventures of Augie March - by Saul Bellow
• Gilead - by Marilynne Robinson
• Time's Arrow - by Martin Amis
• Let Us Now Praise Famous Men - James Agee
• Brendan - by Frederick Buechner
Things I'm listening to:
• Throttle Furniture - by Clark (formerly Chris Clark)
• What's The Remedy? - by Half-Handed Cloud
• Four Last Songs - Richard Strauss (1968 recording)
• Sail Away - Randy Newman
Also, go check out the new site that Charity Case has put up. There's more going on there than I expected: CLICK. Oh, and my friends Alex, Timothy, Kathy, Jose and Shara all appear on the new Asthmatic Kitty compilation enititled "Mews TOO: An Asthmatic Kitty Compilation." 4 out of 5 of those friends appear on track 2 under the name "Bogs Visionary Orchestra." The tune is all things falling apart and reassembling on their own for some automated hysteria, trombones and slides guitars, singing saw and detuned piano.
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Feb 16- Come closer and I'll tell you. A friday night at the beginning of the month I took the subway from 36th Street Brooklyn to 59th Street Manhattan. Unloaded from the train, let go of the handrail, the back-bending, the expression compression of 45 minutes in the flourescent light; walked with Timothy to the Bloomingdale school of music to see Shara perform. Timothy and I were there twenty minutes early, found seats in front of Shara's husband James who was setting up a video camera as we sat. We made low conversation.
The venue was a long hall (with a thin ceiling that let in some trampling from above throughout the performance) seats set like a tour boat: 8 chairs wide with a narrow aisle down the middle that people teetered down in search of a seat. I sat at the starboard, James to the stern. The air approaching a boil as people flanked into their rows, 2 by 2.
My sweater made parody of its unfortunate name and I stood to remove it. (This wasn't a spontaneous move -- I considered my options for several minutes before deciding a smelly guest, though slightly dressed, is a less welcome guest than he who leaves the adjacent air undisturbed). This sweater is of a strange make -- tight at the arm pits and of a thin material that threatens to give every time I dress or remove it -- the act of removing it can by no means be made a slight maneuver. In deciding to take off the sweater I was commiting to a public act. My little performance went with an assortment of embarassing hitches.
Let me explain:
Underneath the sweater I was wearing that night a most unfortunate T-shirt. Not unfortunate in the sense that it was dirty or uncouth, brash, gawdy, obscenely tight, loose like a bed-shirt, crass or distracting, at least as can be determined in most social circles. It was a bright green T-shirt, a color that accented my red and brown striped sweater with a calm and cool respect. I suppose I'm dancing around my point here. I'll be direct in saying it was one hip "Come On Feel The Illinoise" T-shirt -- a shirt made in conjunction with Sufjan Stevens' album Illinois. This shirt has been a happy inclusion of my common wardrobe and it is both comfortable, conversational and a lovely green.
I'll get to the point.
I was struggling to remove the feral thing. The sweater's left armpit was pinning my left wrist next to my left ear, my right arm was stuck up straight in the air, bound by the straight jacket of this sweater; my hand and forearm had lost all capacity for planned movement -- they flopped around like a soft sausage, waving above my head as I concentrated on the thin fabric of those armpits (I really ought to reinforce them!). My green t-shirt inched it's way up my torso -- the little belly I've been trying to get rid of poking out, belly button making a curious oooh as I danced in the tiny hall. My thin line of belly hair measuring the panic of my state like the heat rising in a thermometer.
My moves were unpracticed, mechanical, neither a jig nor a waltz. My awkward canter distilled the conversation around me, a jagged shadow gathering more and more concert-goer's attention. The logo on my t-shirt made it's proud parade from under my ascending sweater. The light, the air, the spirit of the room descended on me and then on the well-dressed figure of Mr. Sufjan Stevens as he made his slow way into the hall.
The silent snap back into my seat was perhaps the most elegant moment of the evening -- let it stand even next to Shara's impeccable singing! -- my muscles for once worked in homogeneity. This vessel of mine bent on utility: I hid my shame, pinned it with the burning of my gaze to the floor. Sufjan sat 2 seats away, made no eye contact with me except, it seemed, when 30 minutes into the recital, he stood and removed his sweater. I mopped my brow (for it was sweltering in the little theatre), smiled an exhausted smile and pretended the veins in my neck weren't pounding, the hair on my neck screaming, the white letters of "Illinoise!" engraving themselves with acid reduction on the salts of my chest. He sighed in comfort as he folded his sweater and adjusted his bright orange t-shirt.
In my next entry I'll explain more of my loose relationship to Mr. Stevens and my thoughts at dinner that night. In subsequent entries I'll let you in on conversations I overheard on the Subway, on what I think about moving back to Brooklyn, on Bunnies and Baby jumpers, on $400,000 real estate, on grad school, on Peter Grimes, on Strauss' Four Last Songs, on writing choir arrangements, on 40th birthday celebrations, on family and on the state of music today. And the ecstasy of removing that sweater in the winter air, outside with the smokers on the Upper West side of NYC in February having just witnessed one of the most beautiful performances of my young musical life. Shara, if you read this, good going kid. High five.
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Jan 26 - I had a little epiphany this week. Tuesday night in the car on a dark road in the snow.
I had a conversation with my mom on the way to choir about my fear of performing — that I was never afraid of it until middle school, at least part of the way through. I sang a solo and a duet in front of the entire student body without a complaint in 5th grade and used to perform in front of church all the time—acting, singing with my folks, singing little solos. “You were the little boy with the angelic voice” my mom said. The ladies swooned and dabbed their eyes with handkerchiefs when I tucked in my shirt and stood up in front to sing. I’d puff out my little chest and sing my song.
I guess the epiphany came then — I was suddenly unafraid of singing in front of a group again. Maybe not unafraid, but less afraid. I’ve done it before and I still have my ego.
I talk about my fear all the time now, and I wonder if that is doing anything more than feeding my fear... My mom said I never said no to performing until seventh or eight grade, (that’s when lil davie started getting pushed around at school). I think I can put aside my fear of the bully now.
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Jan 3(06)- I'll be playing a show with Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond (and member of Sufjan's touring pep band - bringer of spirit fingers, spirit cheers, high spirits and indie crowd managment) and hopefully Timothy and Kathy Dick, and perhaps Timmy Galogly. It's good to have friends that want to help. I'm currently planning out arrangements for my choir -- The Mouth of the Creek -- so that I can attempt to recreate my album sound on stage. Concert date is April 3rd (a Monday) and it will be at the campus center, Houghton College in upstate NY. 8 o'clock I think.
This week I am resting. D.P. has left town to visit his sister and I've been put in charge of the Perkins estate. This means stoking the furnace three times daily, investigating strange howls and stillnesses, eating dinner with Carolyn and Clark (D.P.'s grandparents), feeding the three cats, dog and goldfish, living in wonderfully refreshing routine -- I find living in someone else's house to be a joy bearing freedom. I love other people's routine, I love taking it on for a time and leaving my self, my habits and worries in the kitchen of my old house, somewhere on the floor between the dishwasher and the refridgerator. I've never been able to stick to a routine for myself. I find too much to run after, too much excitement in the new to stick to regimine for more than a month. I'm restless when I'm alone.
I ate dinner with Dave's grandparents last night. As part of my duty, and the little challenge of it. The first 30 minutes we struggled to find comfortable conversation. They ask very little of me. They know little about our similarities. Conversation took off when I asked about the church they founded in Hingham Mass. They have so much pride, so much history in that little town of Hingham. I imagine the town as being full of the sort of driven, clean, clear-eyed fresh people that the Perkins are. I imagine everyone washed in the ocean, washed in clean air and history. Carolyn drove the conversation -- I was drawn into her eyes as she told about the cleaving of a church and the struggles she and her mother-in-law endured. I've always admired the depth of her eyes -- the grey green light of them -- but last night, in our conversation, the depth of them was overwhelming. As she rolled into her story, her face became strong and invigorated. She seemed renewed somehow. Memory is strong.
For an hour and a half after we finished our food, she went on to tell me about the banker, the millionaire, the grump that lived across the street from the church, the corner where she helped to plant geraniums, the Queen Mary and her visit to the harbor, the pews and the overflow of the church, parking, the Dutch, the first meeting in her living room. Someday I will have a history worth telling. I can't wait to be old.
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Dec 29 - Oh fickle intention. I've been writing a lot, keeping a journal, though little (well, none) has ended up here on this site.
Found this poem the other day, digging through the folder in the back of my Moleskine. Adam S and I were sitting at the "fitness incentive" on LongIsland somewhere, waiting for our women to clean up and join us. Soon after, we went to the beach where I picked up smoothed stones and looked out at the ocean. Felt like I couldn't see as far as I used to be able to. Like it was just a big slosh of water -- no more mystery and wonder.
I met Thomas and Ezra while I was down in the Brooklyn area. Played their song for them, Alex and Lisa, and Timothy and Kathy. Kept my head down the whole time. I never know what to do with my eyes when I'm playing a piece for someone that I wrote. Anyway, the poem:
what do those swallows say
their cursive ways
the wind-held letters left
from wake to wake
and then off and away
are they frieghtened by the words they make?
I must have written that on Dave's porch over the summer, while he was away and I was watching his place. Or maybe squeaked it out in his loft. It's conflicting to think about when good work (or any work) has come out -- I remember the feelings the work induces and mix them up with the need to feel them. So I remember this poem and I remember days on the dock in the summer air, watching the blue gold of the sky, playing in the water with my feet, watching fish rise into view. I remember missing Dave and watching the birds, waving to Rich and Val as they worked in the garden or walked into the woods. I remember being afraid of that which I was making. I forget, however, that I was just as remotely connected to those moments as I am now -- they had melted down to the abstract -- that I was working to see the feelings realized. If I was merely recounting memory in my art -- If I wasn't creating a minor mythology each time I recall something -- I suppose I'd be a better writer. I'd be more honest at least. I can be honest by writing -- by just writing down something. Making a mark is honest until made otherwise -- innocent until proven guilty.
I read a bit yesterday about the Book of Kells -- they've made something like 1,400 copies of it -- a limited release -- where each sells for $15,000. Irish monks worked on this book for years and years. I imagine the work environment as a peaceful one, but I know nothing about the process, about the chemicals and the tools used to make this. Were men burned and poisoned in the making of this book? Was it the fear, the love, the inspiration of God that drove them to believe they could finish it? I have a board game at home -- a mystery murder game that takes place in an abbey. A brother has been killed and all that live there are suspect. Men of the cloth killing? Seems crazy to me. Like a monastery and a prison may bring out similar vices. Maybe not. I read about Urso Branco prison as well -- about the hostage situation there in Brazil. ugh. Would a book of Kells project fix this situation? If people felt valued, even in prison, would the sense of responsibility keep the peace?
Keeping up my work on music helps me. I find that I've left it for a while, when I come back to it all the old clothes fit. There's a music peace that I feel when I'm writing. It's a madenning peace. Feels unfairly ephemeral. I hate to feel it start sometimes because I know it will be gone very soon after and I'll be longing again for simplicity and truth. It comes on of it's own accord. Like a ghost entering a room. or a storm. or wind. I've always loved storms -- told my grandmother the other day that I love driving in fog -- leaning over the steering wheel, driving half speed and being numbed by the clouds rolling by my windshield. Storms in the valley where I live are the best -- the echo of thunder on the hills makes it easier to imagine the body of the storm. To see the big shoulders, the dark face, the bright hair of the storm lumbering over the land. I'm not often scared by storms. I don't fear for my life. I suppose I've never been so down to earth that I thought I had anything to fear beyond pain. So I don't fear death, but I somehow am inhibited by the fear of making a mark sometimes. Of being judged by my piers -- of being mediocre or average. These fears are real. Perhaps the storm giant has the same fears -- I don't imagine it is afraid of dissipating (this must be a sorry truth by now), but perhaps it fears being forgotten. It makes it's marks with a resignation. I feel sorry for each thunderclap -- that, oh, that was beautiful but it's over. I wrote a poem during my freshman year at Roberts titled "The Beauty of Ephemerality" -- won me poem of the year for the school lit mag! It opens and closes in a washing machine. I remember writing it at a Denny's late one night with Laura and Christian at the table with me. We were playing a writing game (I think I was the only one into it at the time). We read each other our poems after we wrote them -- this one came out in one go -- I don't think either of them submitted what they had written to the magazine. I loved our time at Denny's -- eating english muffins and drinking black coffee, drawing each other for figure drawing class, or studying western civ together. I don't remember feeling as dependent on anybody as I do now. Maybe I've faced my love and feel like clinging to be free from it -- so afraid of the responsibility of supporting my songs. They're hard to raise sometimes. I'll have to reread that poem sometime. It's been a while since I've seen it.
I'm working on songs currently -- longer pieces about specific people. Don't know when I'll feel like sharing them. I'm being protective -- they might mean something to me.
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Dec 2 - I am remembering a visit I made with Luke Cody (whose drawings and paintings are featured in the pictures section). We spent the day between explorations of the city in his hatch-back, half-hearted strolls through the local mall, coffeshop and bookstore hopping and lounging in his half-renovated house in Dayton Ohio. We hadn't seen each other in a while and I felt changed. I felt like I had forgotten something very important about being quiet and patient and just being. Luke lives in this. I've always pushed him to get work done, to find the heart of his work, his painting, and squeeze until he figures out when it beats, how to control it.
Luke hadn't been painting much as he found writing less demanding and more satisfying in the evenings after a long day teaching art at school. We stayed up late in our beds -- mine in the living room, he in the kitchen on a mattress on the floor, a bed frame set up around him leaning against the walls. From where I lay, he looked like a soldier hunched over a ration of cold something in a tattered post-apocalyptic shelter. I'm sure I added the drama myself. He read some of his short-stories to me and I listened on my back dizzy with jet-lag and the drone of his stories.
A train called as it rumbled by across the street. It rumbled to a roar -- Luke continued to read over the cavalcade of noise. He was reading about a kite, about a kite maker that hears Jesus in the wind when he flies his kite. The kite is made of paper and gets too wet to fly in the end. I don't remember where it was in the story that the train showed up -- I remember Luke didn't change his tone as he read. he didn't raise his voice, but I could still hear each word clearly as if he were as far away as my wrist, and I was reading his lips.
I sent Luke a book of poetry for his birthday last month. The collection was by Naomi Shihab Nye. There's a poem in it I read about a boy cleaning his room, organizing his childhood, filing it away in shoeboxes and acting grown-up. A train calls in the last stanza and the young man asks "Why does it cry? doesn't it want to go?" It's silly of me to force my sentiment on him. I fear I'm manifesting a new Luke because I don't see him as much as I should. He's not a sad man, or a man without direction. He's not a hermit or a saint. He is filled with silence and patience. This is something that I wish I had. I wouldn't be writing all of this, making all of this if I had that silence in me. I wouldn't have sat taking pictures of Luke reading that night if I hadn't been concerned that I can't trust my memory. I post this anyway.
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Nov 30 - The Mouth of the Creek (the community choir that I sing with) sang during Houghton's chapel service today. We performed two numbers. My knees knocked during the first of the two, voice cracked a little during the second. Performing is such a strange thing. I looked forward to it with abated anticipation - I'm stunned when it's over, that I'm still standing and the music isn't there anymore. I've heard people speak of it as being in a dreamstate. Is this some sort of defense mechanism? Do musicians shut themselves off from the world this way? I watch people like Sufjan and Shara approach performance from different angles -- Shara puts on her character and struts into the light -- Sufjan never leaves himself; he's as amazed by the crowd as they are by him.
I remember seeing him perform two years ago at OtherMusic in NYC in support of Seven Swans. He clapped for himself after each song, made almost no eye contact with anyone in the crowd. He squeeked through the crowd with each song. Now he's into telling stories. He's faced the audience and is starting to feel in control. Shara on the other hand makes little attempt to control the audience. She tempts them, but makes no demands.
I talked to Dave Perkins on the phone last night for a little while. I told him I am the sort of person that constructs "self" over and over in order to fit into my immediate social surroundings. I treat my abilities (art and music and intellect) as blueprints for my self-manifestation, but am free to interpret these things differently depending on the pull of the social situation. Others may use a moral set to guide their interaction in these situations. Even with good solid friends like Dave or Shara, my family, Mary Claire, who I am is volatile. I feel entirely vulnerable. I'm wondering how this will play out when I begin performing more regularly.
Nov 21 - My sister Meghan was struck by lightning a couple of weeks ago. I received the news from my mother -- I was at my office thinking about magazine covers when she called to tell me Meghan was on her way to the hospital. Meghan is 7 years younger than me, has always had a slippery luck, an awkward charm about her. I don't mean that people find her irresistable in person - she has made enemies before. Meghan is full of energy and charisma - she loves to perform in front of large difficult crowds. When she enters a room, her Meghan-ness billows out around her like a cape that people trip on and marvel at simultaneously. I imagine Dolly Parton has a similar effect on people. Or Big Bird. She's always been charged with something the rest of us Stiths are drained of. We're shy people with smiles on our faces - one could spend hours with us in a room and not know we're there.
So now it's official -- Meghan's charged.
I was told by a friend that one's lightning-strike likelihood increases 10 fold after the first strike. She's now a conduit for the charge of the heavens. For the wrath of God. Also, she's very popular at her school now. She's hounded by students that think she's stared the whip-crack figure of death in the face. They sit with her at meals, brush up against her in the halls and in church, listen a little more intently to her speech patterns for any sign of the mysterious shock. I don't know whether she holds it as a near-death experience. The rest of her college does. For a little while anyway she's a relic of the old world - of stories one tells at campfires and under bed sheets - and I hope this goes to her head.
She's coming home for Thanksgiving and I'm really looking forward to it. I'll let you know how she is after I've sat next to her for a while, watched her eat, listened to her voice again.
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Nov 2 - Wish work didn't keep me so busy. I've added 4 new tracks to my little web arsenal. The first is an important little ditty I did over the summer. A good friend of mine went away for a while and asked me to watch his house in his absence. I set up shop, brought in my recording equipment and began writing songs based on the environment there. I wrote songs about the cat, the trees, the grandparents that live nearby, the pond and the birds that dip and dive over it. "Fondly of Perkins" is the intro track for this programatic suite - the first of the bunch to be ready for any sort of consumption. I hope to find the time to finish these pieces and give them a proper release, but for now, all you get is the one.
I've also put up 3 demos. You'll recognize 2 as I put up later versions of them in the New Music (04-05) section. The demos were written and recorded in the same afternoon - one of those days that the ion fields are aligned just right, or something. "Joy" and "Into the Lawn" came out together - I wrote joy as I went, in just a couple of minutes, waited 30 seconds or so, and then played straight through "Into the Lawn." Same thing happened in the Ichabod & Apple sessions: "Kites in the Harbor" floated out without a hitch, quickly followed by "Over Me." In all 4 cases, the tracks have been reworked heavily if not rerecorded, but the demos have a lovely character that no amount of dabbling can muster.
"For Thomas & Ezra" is written for the newborn boys of four of my best friends in Brooklyn. This is an early demo version sans lyrics.
Starting to think that sending music out to record labels is a good idea. What artist doesn't want a patron?
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July 7 - some nice words in the bio section - have a read.
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June 22 - all links are working!
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June 20 - The stith did an interview with charitycase magazine, answered questions they called 'rudimentary'. There are some more little experiments up under the new music section to click and download.
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Ichabod & Apple was written and recorded in a span of about 3 weeks. Mr. Stith wrote and recorded a song a day until he ran out of time by taking on a job with full benefits and a paycheck. This to itterate the benevolence of the recording—no thoughts of release dates, accessibility, clarity, reproducibility. No. The fifteen songs here were recorded to please David and his close friends for those 3 weeks. It's a strange thing the way music steaps in a person. In this case, it came out quick quick—like love or blood. I for one am glad he is sharing. It was not always so easy to share.
There are themes to be extricated from the work here. Ichabod and Apple... Who are these? Archetypes? the split ego of Mr. Stith? Is he Ichabod, or Apple—can this be derived from the lyrics? And these winds are strange.
A T-shirt with my drawing on it is available through Asthmatic Kitty records: Here for a measly $12! GET OVER THERE AND BUY!
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Sometime during my senior year at college, in Rochester, NY, I found a copy of a National Geographic that featured a story on Sable Island, a 33 mile long curve of sand shifting in the currents southeast of mainland Nova Scotia. The article featured photos of a stubble ridged sandy landscape, a nearly two-dimensional swath of scenery defining the crease between two major Atlantic currents: this island is in a constant state of flux, being torn down and consumed by hurricanes and northeasters, and then, slowly, having its ridges and beaches rebuilt by the wind and water currents. This is a violently beautiful place. For the same reasons that the island keeps changing shape, its been named "Graveyard of the North Atlantic" as these storms have caused upwards of 350 shipwrecks. The article shows photos of ships half buried in the sand around the edge of the island. 
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