Here you are.

• “crooning the tunes, naming the names”

  … Here it
  Seems to grow lighter with each passing century.
  No matter how you twist it, life stays frozen in the headlights.
  Funny, none of us heard the roar.

  from John Ashbery’s “Wakefulness”.

  Before this becomes last year’s news: Ashbery is the poet laureate of MTV. Go watch snippets of Ashbery’s “snapped-off perceptions,” graphically made-up for the kids. Is this just a sad waste of effort, somehow? Or can poets be pop icons, once again?

  See also:

  •“Invisible Listeners” in the New York Times.

  [Ashbery] imagines no perfect unions, in life or art. Instead he stresses the otherness of others and ourselves. But the acknowledgment of otherness is itself a form of intimacy. In Ashbery we learn how to be alone together.

  • “Understanding Metaphor“, an essay on Ashbery I wrote back in 2004.

  Posted on Dec 25.07 to business, language, poetry   

• “Sound is Touch” and Beijing Opera

  I’ve been trying to define what holds this blog together. I care about fabric, clothing and the processes that bring them to me. I love music. Music is like fabric, and vice versa. I guess that’s it, then.

  I added something to that effect to my “about” page, and almost immediately, my coworker Brittany starts playing a segment from WNYC’s Radio Lab called “Sound is Touch”, from a show called “Musical Language”…

  The show explores the relationship between language and music. Intonation and music. Chinese tonality and pitch-perfection. Music and the mind. Soooooo well done.

  This is the stuff I’m here for.

  [singlepic=90,200,,,right]The part on Stravinsky reminded me of my first reaction to Beijing Opera. Since I first encountered it a few years ago, Beijing Opera has been hard for me to appreciate at any level, let alone watch for 3 hours. It still sounds either harsh or cartoonish to me, or cloying. As far as I can tell, this is by no means uncommon.

  Now for the experimental portion of this blog: Today’s postsong is a selection of Beijing Opera—an aria from Xia Jia Bang called, appropriately, “Mental Battle”. Listen to it after you listen to the sections of the above Radio Lab piece on Chinese tonality, and then the section on Stravinsky. What am I missing about this music (besides not understanding classical Chinese)? Why can’t I parse it yet, musically? Do I just need to give it some time to sink in?

  For anyone who’s learning Chinese, teaching Chinese, blogging about China, doing business in China, studying in China, or going to the Olympics in China, you may eventually find yourself staring at a colorful Tom and Jerry scene, with masked characters howling, and someone you need to impress is asking you what you think. You should be honest, but maybe you can train your ear a little so you honestly don’t hate it.

  There may be a few parts I’m starting to like.

  Posted on Dec 05.07 to china, experimental, language, music   

• “Rust is futuristic moss”

  Two things, maybe three:

  1) Words by Michael Crowe.
  2) Images from the mossy, rusty, flooded-basement of the past at Square America, curated by Nicolas Osborne. Zero nostalgia.
  3) Sounds of moss, rust, and the musty rasterized past/future by Porn Sword Tobacco (yes, more).

  Now for a multimedia experiment while I take a break from studying. Crowe’s words become titles to selections from Osborne’s collection. Ready go:

  “The School Robot.
  They change for P.E. quickly, excitedly.
  I’m more deliberate as I get ready.
  I’m careful not to reveal the
  three thousand wires
  that run down my back.”
  

  “We played chess for 48 hours straight.
  I thought it was her move.”
  

  (more…)

  Posted on Dec 04.07 to art, compassion, language, music, texture   

• Demograph

  The debate is over: my blog is easier to read than Graham’s blog.
  

  

  96% of people (25 and older) where I live and where I grew up are educated enough to hypothetically read my site, if they wanted to.

  Posted on Nov 30.07 to language   

• Silbo Gomero

  This is the sound of Silbo Gomero, or “Gomeran Whistle.” According to agulo.net, “speakers” of this whistled language understand it basically as a Spanish conversation that goes:

  ¡Servando¡, ¿qué?, mira, dile a julio que vaya y que traiga las chácaras. Ya voy ¡ julio! ¿qué? Que dice lilí que avises a los muchachos y que traigan las chácaras para la fiesta bueno, bueno, bueno

  which means:

  something about “bring the Chácaras”

  I first learned about Silbo in the fantastic Proceedings of the Athanius Kircher Society: “Silbo, the whistling language of Gomero Island has a vocabulary of over 4,000 words.” Thanks to Praat, we can see the subtle intonations that encode meaning:
  [singlepic=27,300,,web20,]
  See and hear more: (more…)

  Posted on Oct 29.07 to language   

• On Metaphoring

  “Understanding Metaphor: John Ashbery and Wu Kuang-ming” by Nathan Rosquist.  Written for a graduate course in Semantics at University of Colorado, 2004.

  Posted on Jun 25.04 to language, poetry, portfolio, school