Monday, March 25, 2013

"...You can clap now" - Vic Chesnutt performing "Everything I say"


Some concerts can be life changing experiences. The venue is right, the artist and the audience straight away create a bond, the music flows and you feel you are about to witness something magical, something unique. It doesn't happen so often, to get all the parameters right, but when it does you feel it. From the first seconds.   

I am not going to say a lot about the late Vic Chesnutt. Paralysed at the age of 18 he discovered that he could still play some simple guitar in the wheelchair to accompany his beautifully written songs. He released 17 albums during his short career and even though he was not so well known to the wider public, he influenced musicians from around the world who mention him as their prime source of creative inspiration. Michael Stipe of R.E.M. produced his first two albums but Vic Chesnutt was never meant for mainstream success.  
        
Filmed for the music series "the neighbors dog", this concert took place in the living room of a Canadian house. There is no stage, no extravagant light show and no distance separating the audience from Vic and his musician friends who included members from Godspeed You Black Emperor and Thee Silver Mt. Zion. There is nowhere to hide in a setting like this. It's raw. Bryan Carroll (from All Music Guide) described Vic Chesnutt's music as a "skewed, refracted version of Americana that is haunting, funny, poignant, and occasionally mystical, usually all at once". The song "Everything I say" as performed in this crisp and beautifully filmed extract is a perfect confirmation of that statement. Chesnutt cracks a joke at the beginning and then starts playing as if there was no tomorrow. An electrifying performance where everything is balancing on the turn of each note. From a silent strum of the guitar to the distorted "wall of sound" attack, there is such a release of musical energy that the feeling you get is one of almost mystical exhilaration. 

In classical music concerts, a knowledgeable audience will wait for the final note to become inaudible and then still refrain from clapping and cheering as the last feeble vibrations of the musical wave are absorbed in silence. The same reverence can be witnessed in the audience's reaction at the end of this song. There is a long pause and Vic releases the tension with a simple "you can clap now". 

This show would be one of Vic Chesnutt's last performances caught on film.

Thursday, March 21, 2013

"End" - A poem by Jorie Graham


As soon as I bought Jorie Graham's new poetry collection entitled "PLACE", I leafed through the book looking for a quick entry point. A poem that would stand out from the rest, a quick gratification reference, a turning of a phrase that would drag me in, chain my eye to the page.

From one poem to the other I drifted, looking for familiarity in presentation, looking for hooks in the titles, the phrasing, the opening lines. I soon realised that I would have to dig deeper to unearth the treasure chest. I found myself skipping pages, unable to penetrate the strange form, syntax and ideas contained in the poems. No less than five or six times did I put the book down and returned, only to be denied access once again. Then, one fine morning, the "sound and vision" of the poem "End" progressively revealed itself  and there I was balancing the shifting emphasis from fragment to fragment and back. It all came together and the last words of the poem, I feel, really leave an indelible mark on the reader. What can that be other than the sign of great poetry in the making?  

In a very interesting interview by Thomas Gardner for the magazine "the Paris review", Jorie Graham is asked if she feels she is asking too much from the reader... This is what she says:

"...I do worry considerably about a reader’s patience—how much mental or emotional space they have in their life in this crushingly full world to give to the reading of a poem. Many of today’s readers prefer fast poems with stated conclusions, partly because they can fit them into their day. Who can blame them? They have precious little time. They want the Cliff Notes to the overwhelmingly huge novel. Of course, it is poetry’s job to try to provide the very opposite—to recomplicate the oversimplified thing. This doesn’t require going on at length—lord knows some of the more complex acts of human awareness occur in Basho. At any rate, it’s not hard to see where the shortened attention span has gotten us, the desire for speed, for the quick rush or take or fix . . .

INTERVIEWER

Some of that is the impact of technology.

GRAHAM

Yes, don’t you think? For example, when you have a split tv screen giving you main news (images), secondary news in text (often war facts), weather, stock reports, and even an “update” in the corner, on sports, how is a person—let alone one in a democracy and therefore responsible for clear-headed choice—supposed to feel any of the information she’s gathering? One is reduced to simply scanning the information for its factual content. The emotive content, unless reported to one or rhetorically painted onto it, is gone from the experience. It seems almost in the way. And yet it’s in the overtones of the facts, in the emotive overtones, that much of the real information lies. None of this can be separated out from contemporary poetics. The “multitasking” asked of us by the CNN screen is precisely geared to dissociating our sensibilities. It forces us to “not feel” in the very act of “collecting information.” But what value does information unstained by emotive content have, except a fundamental genius for manipulating dissociated human souls? Why, you can frighten them to the point of inhumanity. You can get them to close their eyes and let you commit murder in their name..."

  End


(November 21, 2010)

End of autumn. Deep fog. There are chains in it, and sounds of

                                                   hinges. No that was

                                                   birds. A bird and a

                                                   gate. There are

swingings of the gate that sound like stringed

                                                   instruments from

                                                   some other

                                                   culture. Also a

hammering which is held

                                                   in the fog

                                                   and held. Or it is continuing to

                                                   hammer. I hear the blows.

Each is distant so it seems it should not repeat. It repeats. What is being hammered

                                                   in. Fog all over the

                                                   field. The sounds of

                                                   boots

on soil in groups those

                                                   thuds but then it is

                                                   cattle I

                                                   think. The sound of the hinge the swinging chain it won’t

go away. But it is just the farmer at work. He must be putting out

                                                   feed. Fog. Play at

                                                   freedom now it says, look, all is
                            
                                                   blank. Come to the

                                                   front, it is

                                                   your stage it

                                                   says, the sound of the clinking of links of

chain, I think it is someone making the chain – that is the hammering – the thuds – making

their own chain. But no, it is the gate and the herd is let in again, then

                                                   out. I can hear

the mouths eating, dozens maybe hundreds, and the breathing in and out as they

                                                   chew. And the

                                                   chain, for now I am alive I think into the hammering

thudding clinking swinging of metal hinge – of hinge – and also think maybe this is

winter now – first day of. Fog and a not knowing of. Of what. What is inner

                                                   experience I think being

                                                   shut out. I look. A gate swings again and a rustling

                                                   nearby. All is

nearby and invisible. The clinking a chinking of someone making nails. The sounds of a crowd

meaning to be silent, all their breathing. Having been told not to move and to be

                                                   silent. Then having been told to

                                                   move and be

                                                   silent. The crowd is in there. All the breaths they are trying

                                                   to hold in, make

inaudible. And scraping as of metal on metal, and dragging as of a heavy thing. But it is a field

out there. My neighbour has his herd on it. When I walk away from the

                                                   window it’s a violin I

                                                   hear over the

                                                   chewing out of tune torn string but once it made

                                                   music it might still make

                                                   music if I become a new way of

                                                   listening, in which

                                                   above all,

                                                   nothing, I know nothing, now there are moans

out there such as a man accused and tossed away by his fellow beings, an aloneless, and

                                                   listen, it is blank but in it is an

appeal, a ruined one, reduced, listen: in

                                                   there this

                                                   animal

                                                   dying slowly

                                                   in eternity its

                                                   trap.

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

The Alchemy of Light by dandyPunk - A Projection mapping live project



Imagine the possibilities for artistic expression if one could harness the light, project it, make a mould out of it, cut it up, split it, use it to wrap up objects, and intervene in the shadow play. The artist that goes by the name "a dandyPunk" has done just that. In a short video clip which includes some of the highlights of a live project mapping performance, dandyPunk creates a modern work of art mixing different media and techniques to great effect. Being an acrobat and having participated with the Cirque du Soleil troupe gives dandyPunk the edge especially in the way he handles the timing of the performance. But in the end it's all about imagination and creativity and these he seems to have in abundance.      


Take a walk on the wild side by visiting the site of an imagineer in exile...
The site of dandyPunk