The art of letters

I'm a technological enthusiast. While not as quite as much a gadget-freak as my friend, Chris (who quickly obtains the latest phone/tablet/computer or other such enhancement to something he frequently already owns), I'm fond of moving forward, as it were. One of the ways we've all moved forward is in forms of communication, such as the one I'm using here. The US Postal Service, once the envy of the world, is now crumbling under this change. Who needs to write letters when one can email or text or blog or Skype or Vine or Tweet or whatever other method will emerge in the coming years? (Yes, olfactory communication (aka Smell-o-vision) is still on the minds of some people...)

I'm well into a novel at the moment by one of my favorite writers, Neal Stephenson. He actually published it a few years ago and I've had it sitting in my "to read" pile until last week. It's a very complex tale about communication, language, knowledge, and the roots of ideas and how they're transmitted. At one point, the lead character inquires if there will be some way to send a letter while they're traveling. His companion asks if he's writing "to a girl" and he admits that he is. When he stammers about what he should say, since their travel is taking him away from the woman in question, he's told that he shouldn't bother with the detail of what he's doing and where he's going. Instead, he should just tell her what he feels for her. Even in the fairly advanced setting of the novel, these people are in a situation where he's actually going to have to write a letter with a pen and a pad of paper. But that is, of course, the best way to pursue the advice that he's been given.

Modern communications can be dismissed easily. It takes seconds to text and, if one receives it, a response takes seconds, as well. Communication is constant and therefore ephemeral. While it's certainly more convenient and can carry its own level of intensity because it's everpresent and easily conducted, I think it tends to lose the gravitas that a handwritten letter once held because the latter could easily take hours to write and then days or weeks or even months to reach its destination. The effort in comparison to the modern 2-minute Gmail experience is different by multiple orders of magnitude. When one sat down to convey a message of importance, to let someone separated by miles or oceans know one's most heartfelt thoughts, it had to be conveyed with a certain level of ferocity and elaboration. Ideas had to be spelled out at length, both as a way to convey the feeling and to demonstrate its intensity. No emoticons or icons or hashtags could be used to elaborate upon (or cover up) the emotions involved. Only words.

Did she know that a certain scent reminded you of her and that moment put a twist into your gut until it passed? If not, you'd have to spell it out (quite literally) and she would only know weeks from now, when that moment was distant (until it happened again.) Did she know that you watched the sunset because it brought forth a memory of the sun shining through her hair as she looked back at you with an affection that you didn't know existed in the world to that point? You'd have to tell her and hope that perhaps she remembered the same moment. That world wasn't captured in rapid-fire moments of thumb-typed affirmations that soon get lost in the flurry of other signals, real and imagined. It had to be crafted over time and longed for with an energy that could either keep one moving through the days or make them agony until that separation was ended.

I'm not trying to say that the proliferation of communication and its ease have made relationships less passionate or that modern forms can't be used to convey those same ideas. But there's a difference. My friend, Leca, mentioned a text to me a few months ago that she'd gotten from her (now) husband, Kevin. It mentioned that she had looked especially beautiful that morning as she'd left for work. A mutual friend of ours had an immediate reaction: "Awwww. He's trying to get some." Maybe that's true or maybe he was being absolutely genuine with this thoughts. But if one had to set pen to paper and wait even just days for a response, would it be interpreted so casually or would it carry the weight of those supposedly more "genuine" impressions?

Of course, every time I try to think about writing something like that, my words veer into the archaic and Shakespearean, which makes it sound even less "genuine" than a simple text. The other advantage of this change in communication habits and styles is that my handwriting is god-awful, so I'm not sure anyone that I wrote to with a pen would be able to read it, outdated language or no. But I wonder if those ideas and gestures aren't being muted by the constant stream of contact we currently swim in and if it behooves us to take more time with matters that used to require strength simply to write down.

Back to the music and other stories

For as expansive as my tastes are, there are a fair amount of musical styles, mostly modern ones, that I simply can't relate to. There is no resonance, to use the musical term. What follows is a recent single from Slash's band, Velvet Revolver:

Now, I was never a big Slash fan. Guns 'n Roses was not really my cup of tea, although I appreciate the driving beat on Welcome to the Jungle and I certainly appreciate Slash's talent on guitar, for which he's become pretty widely recognized. But neither his playing nor the band's ("Velvet Revolver" immediately makes me think of both the Velvet Underground and the Beatles' Revolver; subliminal intent or just me being old?) on the above "Set Me Free" evokes anything from me at all. Nothing leaps from the music to make it memorable. It's simply a constant drone in one direction or another. Of course, having Scott Weiland as your lead singer doesn't help in that respect. Since he stopped aping Eddie Vedder in the early 90s, he seems to have reverted to the level of "growl" as a vocalist. Since most of the band is already producing what is essentially an elevated growl, that doesn't help. There is no contrapunte, as it were.

Now, that could simply be my disaffection for the musical style. I have never been a heavy metal/hard rock person; vastly preferring the speed and anarchism of punk when it came to guitar-dominated music. But, in hearing this, I can think immediately of a similar song from my deep, dark past that has the same kind of beat and elevated string work that is appealing:

Having not heard much of anything from Van Halen since 5150, I've long thought that Fair Warning was their best album because of its simple approach (none of the synth stuff that soon dominated their music) and very bluesy theme. "Unchained" lacks the speed of most punk and, in fact, has the same droning approach as "Set Me Free" but there's enough blues foundation and style to it that it doesn't sound like it was produced on an assembly line. Imagine a stamping machine. Every time it strikes the line, there's another casting of a Scott Weiland-fronted 3.5 minute single.

On something of a tangent, my most memorable moment of Weiland's career was a date on which he actually didn't appear. In the mid-90s, KISS began their "Return to the Makeup" tour in the old Tiger Stadium in Detroit. Sponge and Stone Temple Pilots (Weiland's band) were supposed to open for them, but Weiland's addiction to heroin caused STP to cancel. In the end, a smaller local band that I don't remember (probably because we didn't see them, having spent an hour or two outside the stadium drinking...) and Sponge did the openers. We made it inside for the last couple numbers of Sponge's performance and our seats were on the playing field, some 60 rows back from the stage, which was set up in front of the right field seats. I was there with my business partner, Jeff Donaldson, his brother, and a few of his friends. Jeff had come up with the tickets through his job at Chrysler and had had to talk me into going. As noted before, most heavy metal acts are a non-starter for me. I remember being fascinated with Gene Simmons as a kid because he was all demonic- and sorcery-like and I'm a geek like that, but I had long since left it behind.

Jeff's brother had to use the facilities, so we wandered over to the row of porta-johns by home plate. Looking to my left, down the line of the stage, I noticed that there was no security. People were just milling about. I pointed this out to Jeff who was, like me, always willing to take advantage of an opportunity. The three of us kind of sidled over and sat down in some seats right near the corner of the stage as darkness began to fall. As soon as the lights came up for KISS' entrance, we hopped up and plunged into the crowd. There we were: front row. And to this day, despite my nonchalant attitude about the music, that remains one of the best shows I've ever seen. I walked away drenched with sweat on a humid July evening, a good proportion of which was probably not my own. (If that's at all repellant to you, may I suggest never engaging in martial arts? You can't be afraid of human contact...)

The music itself didn't move me. Sure, I responded to the old hits that I'd heard incidentally on the radio a thousand times (Detroit Rock City, etc.) But what really got me was the showmanship. The band had been doing this for 25 years and, clearly, knew their stuff. I didn't run out and buy a backlog of KISS material, but I could now appreciate it in ways that I couldn't before. Is that part of what resonates with Velvet Revolver fans?

Approaching this from a different angle, here's a band that I first heard live, down at the Falcon Club in Hamtramck:

That's Gangster Fun, a ska outfit that played in the 80s and 90s. I'm a fan of ska, in general, although I don't get as excited about classics of the genre, like UB40, but instead swing back a little closer to the punk end (surprise!) with bands like Streetlight Manifesto:

Nevertheless, what sold me on Gangster Fun was their electric stage presence, especially their front man and vocalist, John Bunkley. The above recording is from one of their albums and it isn't exactly inspirational. While it still had their trademark bouncy beat and John's sly smile behind the lyrics, I wouldn't be surprised if few of you, my faithful 3 or 4 readers, weren't impressed by it. But if you saw them do it live, it would be a whole different story.

I've had this experience at other times with performers like Chris Whitley:

whom I saw open at a Tom Petty concert (Why was I at a Petty concert? I got talked into it, of course. Admittedly, his earlier material from the late 70s is often quite good.) I was impressed enough with his performance to pick up an album, but never went past that because his material at the time just didn't sell me off the stage, unlike Gangster Fun. Would I be more interested in Velvet Revolver after seeing them perform, seeing their intensity, their connection with their audience, their devotion to their own art? I don't know.

In many ways, I've often found that the ability to do it on stage is more appealing to me than anything that can be put on an album. Sadly, in Gangster Fun's case, John left the band in the early 90s. I saw them perform shortly thereafter and they simply didn't have... it. I still enjoyed the music and they produced some good material in following years, but a little bit of the magic was gone and when I hear their music now, I think back fondly to following them to every club in the metro area but am also slightly chagrined at the loss of what was, for me, a great thing. That may be one of the key things that separates me from a lot of more recent music that is so heavily produced that many of the people producing it can't do so in a live setting without computer backup or lip-synching. Would Velvet Revolver's "Set Me Free" be better in concert or worse? Or will it always simply be a question of my general distaste for that style of rock?

Is there a limit to how many things can resonate with any individual? I'd like to think not, but it's not something I can answer anytime soon.

Cue the shivers

I don't play any instruments. I kind of doubt I have the talent for it but I've never made a concerted effort so I can't verify it one way or the other. My parents felt it was necessary to put my sister through the unwanted travails of piano lessons but never subjected me to it/gave me the opportunity. I suppose they thought that excelling in school was sufficient to get me through life, devoid of other talents, or some such thing. The more likely reason is that they just didn't care and I, in turn, didn't either.

But music became really important to me in my early teen years, in part because it was one of the ways that I could more easily associate with the older people in my classes in the process of skipping two grades. If we could all relate via music that we liked (and that our parents likely didn't), then we could all be part of a group, as opposed to Them and Me. But mostly because something in it simply, uh, sung to me. I could see and appreciate the energy and effort that went into it and that it consequently produced. I've met few people that can get through life without music at some time, but I found a need for it pretty much all the time.

I jumped into the music world with both feet, as I am wont to do with most things, and had music playing around me as often as possible. Worked with it, studied with it, slept with it. I began to learn things about the musicians that I was hearing and started noticing tendencies and styles and genres and techniques. I especially began to notice moments that simply worked for me; that I could pick out and remember even apart from the surrounding sound and almost cringe at the force or delicacy or precision with which it was played. Just as an example, here's Bitch from the Rolling Stones' Sticky Fingers:

Keith Richards' counterpoint chord from the very beginning of the song is played in tight fashion, so the driving beat by Mick Taylor concentrates the energy and Keith releases it with those little twangs. It's at 2:10 where he starts one of the great solos in all of rock and 2:50 where he takes it to the next level. Both of those moments still make the hair on my arms stand on end. There was someone totally immersed in his craft and speaking volumes with one or two notes.

I became deeply enthused with the punk scene. It's what was "now" for when I was coming of age and the politics of the movement in general spoke to me. One of my favorites was Bad Brains because of the primal energy they retained in everything they did (even when they were just doing reggae.) In fact, for the famous "what one album would you have on a desert island?" question, Bad Brains may be it (or Mozart's clarinet, oboe, and bassoon concertos.) This is the track that pushed me over the top with Bad Brains:

Just the growl of Dr. Know's guitar at 38 seconds in makes my chest fill with energy because the band is about to explode with it, as well, and I can feel that. That's communication on a very basic but still very elevated level. They're letting you know that they're about to take you on a ride and you'll enjoy every minute of it, while H. R. yells at you about the loss of your basic liberties and how you're ignoring it.

Mozart's work is rife with little (big) messages of all kinds. For all that he's regaled for the technical precision of his work, Mozart was first and foremost a storyteller and often communicated through his work even when it wasn't accompanied by a libretto. The second movement of the Sinfonia Concertante that I spoke of a couple weeks ago is a perfect example of that, with the plaintive wails of the violin and the viola. But another favorite piece with what seems to me to be a constant driving message is the Rondo of the Haffner Serenade (no. 7, K. 250):

The lead violin (which was largely Mozart showing off, as serenades were traditionally supposed to be background music) propels the entire piece and keeps the listener rolling from one stanza to the next and at 4:20 briefly carries the tone to an even higher level that always keeps me hanging in anticipation (even though I've probably heard the piece a couple hundred times.)

I'm not much for country. I like a little bit of Johnny Cash and my stepmother was a big Jimmy Buffet fan when I was a kid so I have some of that imprinted on my brain (and I know he's not strictly "country" by most estimations) but it generally takes some blues mixed in to really find favor with me, be they Memphis or Irish. Steve Earle does the trick:

That's a piece sung with so much soul it could almost raise James Brown from the dead. You can hear him barking to the band when they come together between the verses because he's so immersed in delivering this story that it just bursts from him.

You may notice a dearth of whatever the current musical rage is (Lady Gaga, Glee, et al.) Despite the fact that I enjoy many types of music and just in the above have traveled from the 18th century to the 00s of the 21st (and the fact that I'm fond of many acts still performing in the last decade, such as Cake and The Crystal Method), I have zero interest in studio-processed crap that relies on the presence of programs like AutoTune to make it function. It has no soul. If you want to make music, make it. If you want to let the computer do it, let it. And get off my lawn.

By the way, while I was writing this, in addition to the tracks above that generate some kind of deep reaction from me, I was also listening to Mastodon's Blood and Thunder, Mos Def's Know That, The Orb's Toxygene, John Lee Hooker's Boom Boom, the flamenco theme from 3:10 to Yuma, Jimi Hendrix's Machine Gun, The Pogues' Sally Maclenanne, and Ice Cube's Wicked, among others. They all engender that same response from me: they're saying something and I know they are because some part of my body tells me that they are on a level that delves deeper than whatever lyrics may be present. If we could find a way to encapsulate that into words, the world might be a very different place.