[as if in dreams] A newsletter from Joseph Zitt #013
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(That is, either this is the PDF edition or that is a link to it.)
11 December, 2020
This is the thirteenth issue of the newsletter.
If you can, drop me a note to let me know if you’ve reading these. I haven’t heard much back, and wonder if I’m talking to myself (beyond my usual muttering).
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Onward (from somewhere near Bashan without Og?)!
Contents
This Week’s Posts
Friday, December 4th, 2020
This sahlab is the best I’ve ever tasted. It’s dense and smooth, somewhere between foamy and creamy, topped with ground peanuts, spices, and other items that I can’t identify. For lunch, I have a sabich, like a falafel but with grilled eggplant and an egg instead of the chickpea balls. I eat it at a chess table in the square. When I’m done, I think of getting coffee. I see that the store with the mysterious sandwiches has sahlab. I get a large one. The worker asks me what I’d like in it. I say OK to everything. It’s easier than trying to figure out what he’s saying. I go back to the chess table with it. A grizzled man walks over to the next table and unpacks a guitar. He sits down, tunes, and plays a sensitive version of “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” He shouts above it, sounding like a less melodic Captain Beefheart, using random fragments he seems to recall from other rock songs. There are lines from “The Letter,” “I Saw Her Standing There,” and “Satisfaction,” tied together with a repeating “Mama Mama Mama” that might actually be from the song that the guitar is playing. He finishes the single song, packs up his guitar, and wanders off. Stores around me start to close for the Sabbath. I slowly finish the sahlab, then head back home.
Saturday, December 5th, 2020
I combine the piano and spoken tracks and listen to how they go together. I’m pleased. Both function as music. I have to slide the voice track ahead by half a second. The first piano chord is accented, while the first syllable isn’t. Once positioned and balanced, neither outweighs the other. Two minutes before the end, where I will insert a song, each comes to an appropriate pause. I put a layer of visuals on it. For most of it, pillars of English, formed from the text, slowly slide past, echoing the image of a Torah scroll. In the last two minutes, a paragraph that the voices repeat zooms in to focus on its unison last sentence. I didn’t intend, when creating the text, that it would repeat at the end. A bug in the program that generated it made it do so. I kept working on the program to fix the bug, but liked that version best. I didn’t save the buggy code. I no longer know exactly how I did it. I expect that the pillars of text will form a backdrop to whatever else happens in the visuals. I start to render out the film, but it will take too long to let me back everything up this evening. Other programs, running at the same time, stumble and glitch. I may be reaching the limits of my sturdy computer. I stop and render out only the audio. I listen back to what I’ve made as I continue with the weekend’s mundane tasks: making lunches, preparing laundry, sorting out tasks for tomorrow. I miss some of the sound due to the noise of the other things I’m doing. It’s OK. The music can roll on without me.
Sunday, December 6th, 2020
I spend the work day drifting, unmotivated. A couple of people ask me brief questions about English. Yes, the proper noun forms are “improvement” and “approval” and not vice versa. No, I don’t know why. I flip through an old manual and find that little of it can be salvaged. The structure is OK, but I’ll have to rewrite most of it from scratch. My mind is taken up with thoughts of the film project. I realize that I can’t shoot or generate what I need by myself. I had planned to do the entire project on my own, but I want to incorporate dance. I’m not interested in seeing my ungainly body wobbling around on screen. I think of what dancers could do that would fit with the project. I pull up an old idea for four dancers, moving to the soundscape independently, passing through one another like ghosts when their images meet. I sketch out a few lines of instructions in my head. This becomes more complex as I work on it. Toward the end of the day, it becomes radically simpler. Much as I did the sound with a single speaker and a single player, the visuals should include a single dancer, recorded four times. My brain is tired when I get home. I prepare something quick to eat, and sit down to watch an hour of television. I’ll work on the movement score afterwards.
Monday, December 7th, 2020
I don’t feel like going straight home after work. I head to the city square. I think of getting a mushroom burger, but can’t get myself to spend that much for dinner, especially to go. I stop into the pizza place again. I don’t recognize the worker who greets me, but he speaks to me in English right away. I get a slice of what’s on display and a soda. While I wait, I realize that, even though he seems to have an Israeli accent, he is speaking with everyone in English. Either he is practicing the language, or he doesn’t speak Hebrew well and comes from somewhere else with an accent that sounds the same to me. I sit down at a chess table with the slice. I figure I’ll get some writing done on the dance scenario. I had written some notes down at work. I take them out and fumble around in my pockets looking for a pen. I don’t find it. I must have left it at work. So much for writing. I finish the slice fairly quickly. It’s good, as usual, simple cheese with a thin, crisp crust. When I’m done, I realize that I hadn’t opened the soda. I put it in the bag with the groceries that I got in mid-afternoon. The shop with the sahlab appears open. I want another one. I go into it. The teenager smoking outside tells me that they’re closed for the night. Oh, well. I head home. I’m not tired. I should be able to get more writing done tonight.
Tuesday, December 8th, 2020
I do get the mushroom burger tonight. I may not be able to get another one for a while. A curfew may start tomorrow night. Or it may not. If it does, the word is that it will start at 5 PM. Or maybe 6. Possibly 7. The Coronavirus Cabinet has announced it. Members of the Supreme Court have said that it may be illegal. A contradictory law passed earlier this year. I take the bus from work down to the city square to get the burger. When I buzz for the next stop, a shabby-looking man across the aisle mumbles something at me that I don’t hear. I stop the podcast I’m listening to and take my earbuds off. He says it again. I tell him I don’t understand. He switches to English. “I need to go up the street to get Chanukah presents for my children. Will you come with me?” I’ve heard this line before. He’ll want money. I tell him that I have to head straight home. “Please, it will take a short time.” Sorry, I can’t. “It will only take ten minutes.” No. “Then can you help me with some money?” There it is. Sorry, no. I get off the bus and head to the burger joint more quickly than I otherwise might. I pass a lot of people sitting at the chess tables and in the clusters of chairs in the square. They all seem to be enjoying a last warm evening before the curfew starts. Or doesn’t.
Wednesday, December 9th, 2020
One of my favorite gelato joints, “Doctor Lick”, is now “Aryeh’s Ice Cream.” As I walk toward it, I see the new sign. The curfew didn’t happen. I’m downtown. The place where I had gotten the great sahlab is closed for the evening. This other shop is across the intersection from the city square, on the edge of a smaller plaza next to the Great Synagogue. It’s still open. I haven’t had dinner yet, but I’m in the mood for sahlab. I’ve gotten it here before. The worker is dishing sherbet out from a large tub into a container that fits in the counter display. There aren’t any other customers right now. He asks me what I want, then says to wait a moment. It takes him a couple of minutes to finish transferring the sherbet. He picks up a metal instrument and guides it along the top of the sherbet to give it a fancier surface, He puts the container where it goes, then scoops out a sample with a small spoon and hands it to me. It’s apricot. It’s good. He pours some of the sahlab mix into a paper cup and steams it with a cappuccino steamer. Coming around front, he puts crushed peanuts, coconut, and spices on top and sticks a spoon into it. I pay. It’s fifteen shekels, slightly less expensive than the other place. I pay with a twenty shekel note and put the five shekel piece he hands back as change into the watch pocket in my jeans. I’ll use it to get a donut tomorrow. I take the sahlab to a bench in the square and sit down. Few other people are around. A man reads a newspaper at the other end of the set of benches. A woman paces between me and the gelato shop, speaking on her phone in what may be Russian. At the far side of the square, three young women sit on the ground, against a wall. From where I am, I can’t see what they’re doing. This sahlab is good, but not as good as at the other place. Once I get past the top layer, the body of it is liquid, like eggnog, not foamy. I don’t have to use a spoon. I can drink it. The flavor is a little less rich. Still, it’s a good second choice. I drink it slowly, watching and listening to what’s around me. When I’m done, I drop the empty cup in the trash can a few feet away, put my mask back on, and continue on home.
Thursday, December 10th, 2020
We gather in the office hallway to light the first candle. There isn’t quite enough room for us to space properly. We do the best we can. Some of us wear masks. Some don’t. After some negotiation, the youngest worker, the bosses’ son, does the actual lighting and prayers. We respond appropriately. Our staff sings rather well. Someone has ordered donuts, jelly-filled with powdered sugar. They’re still warm. They’re delicious. I take the bus downtown after work. I think of getting another donut but don’t. I’m limiting myself to one a day. I get a coffee and sit down in the city square. It’s relatively quiet. The three young women that I saw sitting against a wall yesterday come by again. Two of them are carrying skateboards. A mother cat and two kittens come through a hole in a fence and sit outside the toy store. One kitten jumps on the mother repeatedly. She doesn’t react. The other kitten sits and watches them. A large black cat comes over and sits about a meter from them. The mother walks over, swats the black cat in the face, then sits down next to it. The kittens join them. A soldier with a yarmulke and backpack walks by and crouches in front of them. He wants them to play with him. They aren’t interested. He walks away. I head home after a while. When I get in, I put my bag down, take off my mask, and reach for the menorah and candles. They’re right where I left them last year. This time, I put a large piece of aluminum foil under the menorah. I had trouble getting the wax off the table last year. The matches are in the drawer. I haven’t used them since then. They’re still good. I say the blessings, light the candles, and put dinner together. The holiday begins.
On writing as if in dreams
I’m realizing that I might have to include reminders of what some things in the posts are. When I mentioned sahlab this week, some readers didn’t know what it was (as I didn’t before I got here). I knew that I had mentioned it before – but it turns out that that was almost three years ago and I didn’t say what it was. Fortunately, one friend posted a definition when I first mentioned it this week, and another posted a recipe.
Maybe I need to have a “Previously on as if in dreams” prologue. Or, more appropriately, I have to keep these things in mind.
I have to remember the mantra that I used to hear a lot among tech writers: The hardest thing we have to do is imagine how the world looks to someone who doesn’t know something that we do.
Things of Possible Interest
One thing I’m watching
My film project is turning out to have a lot of dance involved. Since I can’t go to the Dance Center for inspiration, I’m turning to videos online.
One of my favorites has always been Merce Cunningham’s Beach Birds for Camera. It has stuck in my mind for years, particularly since the costumes were so memorable. Its score, John Cage’s “Four3”, is a direct influence, along with the work of Harold Budd, on what I’m composing now, especially the piano part for my film.
I was surprised and pleased to find a complete performance of his Roaratorio online. I had seen an early performance of it at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1986. I knew my memory of the performance had to be way off: I remembered a naturalistic set of a bar, and people doing line dances. Looking at the full performance and the early snippet, I see what I misremembered. Upper stage right, there is an array of bar stools. In the full performance, dancers being them in and off the stage. And much of the dance looks like Cunningham shredded film of traditional Irish dance (which makes sense along with the audio) and glued the chads back together. Its score, again by John Cage, is the closest influence on the vocal part of my film.
I’m excited to find, as I write this, that a relatively new film about Merce Cunningham is now available to own or stream. It was first shown in 3D last year, though I don’t have a way to watch 3D. But the bits that I’ve seen look great. I have several other films by and about him, but I’m particularly looking forward to watching this.
One thing I’m hearing
One of my favorite composers, Harold Budd, passed away a few days ago from complications of COVID-19, which had only been diagnosed a few days before. Word of it ricocheted around the Net, as announcements were posted (and some were taken down pending confirmation) by his friends before official word got out.
After a start as a jazz drummer (including playing in the army with Albert Ayler), he became a standard avant-garde composer, writing works for electronics or conventional instruments that became increasingly abstract and vague. He stopped after hitting a point of absurdity. As he said in an interview with Mark Prendergast, “I can remember writing something called ‘The Candy Apple Revision’ in 1970. I had a little piece of red paper about 4” x 5” and I wrote on it in ink ‘Candy Apple Revision, D-flat Major, Harold Budd May 1970’.”
A couple of years later, Budd made a sharp turn. He realized that, in that atmosphere, the most radical thing that he could do was to create music that was simply pretty. His breakthrough piece was Madrigals of the Rose Angel, a flowing tonal work for keyboard, harp, percussion, and wordless vocals. Composer Gavin Bryars heard it and passed a tape to Brian Eno, who called Budd in California and brought him to England. The album that he produced of Budd’s music, The Pavilion of Dreams, was one of ten releases on Eno’s Obscure Records label, a group that, as others have said, was parhaps the single greatest influence on composers of our generation.
Budd continued in the same vein for the rest of his career, focusing on gentle piano work and its expansion into other instrumentation and processes. At 84, he was nowhere near done yet. Word has it that he was at work on a cycle of twelve string quartets.
Check out the obituary from NPR’s Simon Reynolds in the first link in this note. It tells a lot more about Budd and links to a playlist of his music. It’s worth a listen.
One thing I’m reading
In doing the research for the current phase of the film project, I started looking for other examples of experimental dance on film. I could only think of a few, including work by Merce Cunningham with Elliot Caplan and by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker with Peter Greenaway. I vaguely remered that there was material at UbuWeb. There is – a lot of it.
It turns out that there’s a huge and well-studied field known as “Screendance.” I quickly found the International Journal of Screendance, published by Ohio State. It’s a massive project, eleven volumes so far, with more that a thousand pages of writing and images.
I’ve been reading articles from it for the past several days. It has a lot about Maya Deren, of course, and articles on everything from the beginnings of film to the present. Some of it is quite academic, but a lot is accessible. Links fron it have pointed me to further videos of screendance, as well as books and conferences on the topic. My ideas of what’s possible are evolving as I go along.
One more thing
I haven’t listened to Taylor Swift’s new album yet. No, not folklore. That’s relatively old news. There’s another new one, evermore, which she announced yesterday and released at midnight in some time zone or other. I grabbed it the moment that I woke up. (You can stream it at the link.)
Swift might be the best media manipulator out there. She can keep large projects quiet for a long time, then unleash them when we don’t expect them. She’s not the first to do this. Beyoncé mastered the stealth release before her. But Swift keeps the process rolling, well after the album drops.
For folklore, for example, she planted some mysteries in the album, with a pseudonymous co-writer and cryptic lyrics. Her fans are known for looking for easter eggs in everything Swift does, and she accomodates them. She also lets more material gradually come out after people think that the album is done. For folklore, there was an extra track, “the lakes” (she’s taken to using lowercase titles for everything) first released in Japan, which she then said was always intended as the true ending of the album. Then there was the surprise live video of the entire album, complete with behind-the-scenes talking liner notes to each song, in which she, for example, revealed who the mystery co-writer was (her boyfriend, as most people who wondered about it had guessed). And she has published different playlists of how to put the songs together, creating slightly different albums out of the same material each time.
And now there’s a whole other album, recorded in the same sessions, effectively the Amnesiac to folklore‘s Kid A. It’s said to carry on in the same vein, which could be good. I loved folklore, so I’m looking forward to this.
I hope to listen to – or perhaps watch it – tonight. In addition to a beautiful conventional video that she directed for evermore‘s opening track, “willow” (which follows up on images from folklore‘s “cardigan” and “invisible string”), she has released lyric videos for each song. I have cued up the YouTube playlist of all of them. (I also want to watch the new episode of Star Trek: Discovery and the Merce Cunningham documentary tonight, so I had better finish up this newsletter and fire up the TV.)
If the new administration wants to get information out where people will pay attention, perhaps they should recruit Taylor Swift to help out. We’re fortunate that she uses her powers for good. When it comes to distributing supposed secrets to the faithful, even Qanon can’t complete.
Colophon
(Unchanged from last week, except for this line!)
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