mmm...treats from the deep!

Here's a snippet of an article from Stop Smiling:


Sunday, December 09, 2007

BUILDING SOMETHING OUT OF NOTHING:
ISAAC BROCK OF MODEST MOUSE
(EXCERPT)

The complete Stop Smiling Interview with Isaac Brock, which was conducted throughout summer 2007 in Chicago and at Brock’s home in Portland, appears as one of three cover stories in the second annual 20 Interviews issue. (For more on this issue, click here). An excerpt of the conversation follows below

Interview by JC Gabel

Stop Smiling: You grew up in Issaquah, just outside Seattle. You moved around quite a bit, and then settled in Portland, but at one point you were living in a logging town in central Oregon.

Isaac Brock: Once I got into Portland I had no idea what the fuck I was doing in that logging town, except for drinking and getting fat. I didn't go back, I just moved out. It seemed to me at the time that if I wanted to get things done — I was too easily distracted — and I was in the middle of nowhere, so I’d have nothing but time to focus and work on stuff. But because I was isolated, I drank out of boredom and I got less done. I didn’t ever actually intend on moving to Portland. It wasn’t a thought I had. It just kind of happened and here I am. Occasionally, people ask me to talk about the music scene here, like, “Why do you think people move here?” — that whole thing. There’s a lot of rock and rollers who live here, but I have no idea. I don’t hang out. I stay at home most of the time.

SS: Can you see yourself living anywhere else permanently — other than the Pacific Northwest?

IB: I have a hard time imagining that — maybe the Northeast, around Maine. It’s beautiful. It’s cold enough to not make me paranoid about the world ending, and it’s near seafood — treats from the deep.


(read the rest of the article at the link at the top...)

why don't you just put up the damn parking lot already

I forget the movie, but whatever it is, Edward Norton's character has a line where he complains that he hates pecan pie because everybody makes it too @%^$#@& sweet. This is how I feel about these cereal bars I bought the last time I was at the grocery store. Well, ok, let's just put it all out there--this is how I feel about lots of foods; too sweet.

But these cereal bars have me particularly grumpy because they tricked me! Schnuck's (think the midwest equivalent of Hannaford's) has this "Full Circle" brand they carry. It's more or less their mass-produced hippie food brand. (It's the only kind of rice milk I've been able to find at that store yet, and it pretty much sucks. When you're a (even just quasi-) vegetarian, you can tell when you're eating something that was made by meat-eaters for non-meat-eaters. Rice milk is not easy to make well, and this stuff tasted like they didn't really try all that hard. But I digress...) Now, don't get me wrong...I am all for mass-food producers hopping on the hippie bandwagon. I myself am not a super-rabid supporter of organic foods (and got myself into plenty of shit in Vermont for my lukewarm support of organics...), although I do really like the effect that movement is having on the food industry at large.

So, I like that mass-producers are seeing that they must produce healthy/all-natural options if they want to stay competitive. However, the success of such ventures seems to vary widely by instance. Quaker Oatmeal has this tasty multi-grain, low-sugar oatmeal they've begun carrying...and it's way good. (And they don't cram it full of Splenda to make up for the lack of sugar...they just really understand that there are people out there who don't feel like eating a bunch of really sweet stuff.) Smucker's makes an all-natural peanut butter that is sort of ok...I've had better, but I'd still buy it over our usual American excuses for peanut butter any day. (My personal fav has for years been Maranatha; smooth or crunchy. That stuff is food for the gods.) Anyway, I pegged this Full Circle as a hippie lip-service brand the second I saw it...but decided to give it a go anyway. I really like having cereal or granola type bars around the apartment...good for breakfast on the run, good for snacking. They make some decently priced cereal bars, so after my usual scan of the ingredients list, decided to give them a spin.

Well let me tell you. Do not get these puppies. Too much sugar. You can make something as organic-y or natural as you want, but when you drown it in sugar, you've totally missed the point. Looks like I should have checked out this site first. (I think a B+ is far too generous considering the sugar offense.) I think reading the sugar content will need to go on my usual food product check-over list...right up with there with soy, preservatives, and partially/fully hydrogentated stuff. Damn you and your sneaky ways, Full Circle. I think I need to go shopping in the hippie land of Urbana more often...I've recently been told legends of oat milk being sold over there...

best. alarm. ever.

I am so getting myself this. No question about it...I've been waiting for this alarm clock all my life. (It's like the real-world equivalent of Google's now infamous mail goggles..."are you sure you want to turn your alarm off? let's make sure you're lucid enough to properly answer that question by posing you with a small puzzle...")

This way beats just putting the alarm clock on the other side of the room. I could strew these three pieces in various other rooms for that matter--all different. Maybe even hide one in a cereal box to remind me to eat breakfast.

Just trying to find the proper Google blog link for that previous paragraph has drawn me off into all sorts of other wonderfully rabbit-hole deep thoughts. One in particular struck a chord with a thought that has been gracing my mind repeatedly a bit lately; that of mastering an art form.

I've been daydreaming a lot lately about when I used to play piano seriously. I have this confused winter coat, that although remarkably lovely, cannot decide if it's blue or purple. (I think I probably bought this coat for that very reason. And it's effing warm, too.) The other day I realized it is very nearly the exact same color of the cover as a piano solo copy of "Rhapsody in Blue" I used to have in high school. The link's picture doesn't entirely do it justice, but you get the general idea. If one could ever truly be in love with a few bound pieces of paper (well, not few, the damn thing was almost 30 pages and I'd only ever perform about 12 or so of them...), then I was with this. Not only was the music it contained gorgeous and worthy of devotion, but the ambiguous shade of blue chosen for the cover was almost a challenge: "go ahead, try to label me or conquer me or stick me in a box; and when you fall short--as you most certainly will--you will understand my true beauty."

There are various phases I came to be familiar with when seriously practicing a difficult piece on a long-term time frame. (Phases that I have come to recognize in all sorts of other areas of life...but those are other ramblings for other days...) First, you pick a piece that you absolutely love. If you work on anything long enough, you're going to get sick and tired of it for certain, and you might as well postpone that event as long as possible. The first phase is rather rewarding...there's a bigger return for your time investment as you go from just very slowly being able to work your way through a few pages, then eventually the whole piece, to finally being good enough at it to recognize some semblance of a continuous melody or various voices.

Next, you begin to hit a plateau. Progress slows. You come to know the piece better and have a better idea of it as a whole. It becomes a familiar commute, complete with easy stretches, and bumpy difficult parts that force you to slow down. You begin to curse these bumpy difficult parts from denying you the satisfaction of doing justice to a piece of art you are emotionally invested in. Have you ever had a dream where you were trying to yell, but no sound came out of your mouth? That's what this feels like.

Next comes the intense part. You are dead-set on smoothing over the bumpy patches; there is fire in your veins from the frustration of not being able to freely express yourself through your craft. You play the piece through and make note of all the places that need work. And you set to work on them one by one. You will play the same eight measures over and over again for two hours if that's what it takes. And often, that's exactly what it takes.

Eventually, you reach the point where you can begin slowly stitching the piece back together from all of the microscopic bits you had focused on. The smoothness of some transitions may have temporarily been forgotten as you lost the artistic forest for the technical trees, and must be relearned. But the task of a full play-through is now getting easier and more fluent each time you sit down. You see a light at the end of the tunnel. And if you've gotten to the end of that tunnel before, you know you're bound for something amazing.

And then it happens. You're just sitting, playing the piece through one day, and perhaps in the middle of a passage that you have a particular liking for. And you lose yourself in the sound for a minute. You've just played it a little differently. You weren't paying attention to the notes or the staff or your deliberately mapped-out fingering; you were speaking. (That's the best I can explain it, and if you've never actually experienced this, then any explanation is doomed to fail anyhow.) The instrument and the writing became auxiliary vehicles for your expression for an ecstatic, fleeting moment. Eventually these beautiful moments start to bleed their way across your entire playing of the piece. And when you get to the point where you can play the entire thing on autopilot, leaving your waking mind to fully express itself in the artistry of your playing, that my friends, is the most wonderful manifestation of freedom I have ever felt.

So I've found this similar journey in lots of other places as well...learning a (spoken) language, learning a computer language, playing a sport, cooking, ...I could go on. Granted, I don't think I've ever mastered anything else quite to the level of where my piano skills once were, but I imagine if I were to have, the end result would feel quite similar. I do hope, one day, to master some sliver of mathematics/science to (at least, if not more than) this extent. And the reason I even got into this stuff in the first place was for the gleeful freedom of expression and further exploration allowed by the advancement of such theoretical technologies.

I think the true metric of an advanced society is the extent to which it uses its hard-earned intellectual advances for purely leisurely enjoyment.