A T-shirt with my drawing on it is available through Asthmatic Kitty records: Herefor a measly $12!GET OVER THERE AND BUY!
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Timothy Dick's album, On A Grassblade, is out now. Click the cover tobuy, click hereto visit Timothy on MySpace where you should tell him you love him and his music.
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Tear it Down by My Brightest Diamond features my art throughout the packaging as well as my remix of Gone Away. Click the cover to buy, or buy on iTunes.
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demos (2004-08) [note: these are copywritten versions of work-in-progress.
Listen if you'd like, share all you want]
(right click and save-as)
I resent the idea that artists tend to be procrastinators, or somehow lazier than the rest of the world population. I resent it becuase the artists I know spin their wheels 2 or 3 times the speed of others, rarely slow down, and then only because they find that their system is being overworked. The system is on a different cycle than the 9-5 workday model. Maybe it's the dissonance where these two patterns overlap which has put them to tension. In any case, I'm reaching a thin point in my limit. It's been hot here for 3 or 4 days, I'm sleeping poorly and mostly because I'm the sole caretaker of the stith estate at the moment and our dog, Gershwin, requires a share of my bed as I have been necessarily neglecting his social needs while I work on recording projects. It's hot now -- Gershwin and I just took a walk to the post office to send a package to Shara (she's singing on my record!) and now we're both collapsed in the living room in front of a fan.
Oh! but recording is going well! In the last 2 weeks, the album has turned into something altogether more wonderful than I'd hoped! Still lots of work to do -- I'm really looking forward to seeing what Rafter's toys can add to it -- but were it mixed as is, I wouldn't be terribly sad. Ok. On to brass arrangements.
June 06, 2008 - Good Reads:
First an article by Sufjan about beloved labelmates, Cryptacize (though he refers to them as Cryptasize through the whole article -- oversight or part of the puzzle? FIXED!): CLICK HERE
Then an excerpt from 'Reckless Belief,' a novel by Lori Huth which interrupted the pleasantness of my June afternoon with a gash of a sublime despair: CLICK HERE
And finally, James Lileks goes to Disneyworld and writes about it. Never, until reading this, did I imagine I could survive in the ivory bubble -- somehow Mr. Lileks has maintained both his wit and a will to let fun be fun long enough to catalog his visit by means of a charming day by day blog. Really, it's worth reading!: CLICK HERE
The third is pertinent because tomorrow my folks and younger sister leave upstate NY for Orlando FL and a few days in the Kingdom. Who is the King of the Magic Kingdom?
(the art at the top of this entry is the back cover of the vinyl edition of the new My Brightest Diamond album -- if you click on the image, you'll go to a new page where you can preorder the album. It's an excellent album. You should buy it.)
June 04, 2008 - Old City
Back from Barcelona -- my visit was wondrful. On our first full day in the city, I took a walk around the immigrant neighborhoods to the East of our hotel. This, I think, was the old city: a medieval labyrinth of narrow streets and gates that openned in on orange tree gardens hemmed by gray stone cloisters, and small parks crammed with children playing soccer, old men playing cards and young men clattering ping-pong balls on ping-pong tables. I walked with Shara and James and Nate and Brian (of My Brightest Diamond) for something like an hour before meeting up with Cati of TouchMe Records, and members of Abrevadero.
Sky was beautiful there -- and the Mediterranean was all gold gush and proud. We watched surfers on day 2, ate Tortilla España, went to sound check and then all took naps. MBD played an incredible show!, Abrevadero turned a Portishead tune into a polka ditty, and the audience was all beer bottles in the air and drunk girls with back-packs and friends come-on-in-yeah-we-can-fit-a-few-more-in. All good things to have at a show. Thanks Barcelona! And then to the Madrid airport where we sighed and smiled and watched planes take off over some green scrape of a mountain range and talked about being "pro." Totally pro to talk about being pro in a European airport. Then back to JFK's noise and fumes. home?
I'm preparing pianos and recording horns today. Gershwin is sleeping by the window. It's humid. The air is gray and sticky. I feel like a walking rice crispy treat.
Oh, and Randy's got an album cover:
May 12, 2008 - Harps and Angels
A remarkable morning! Once every other week or so I skitter over to Nonesuch.com hoping to find a new collection of music by Gorecki, Byrne or Veloso. Nonesuch has long been the beef and prunes of my grown-up music afficionado self, music for appreciating with a stogie in an all-leather reading room. Even if the music is wild and fresh and demands a more relaxed appreciation, the presence of folks like Adams and Gorecki mute the whole of the output of the label for me. The label name alone colors my listen. Could I convince you this is a good thing?
Well, dream of all dreams (!), the upcoming release page had been updated and, dreams of wildest dreams (!!), Randy Newman has finally suspended his own disbelief long enough to wring out 10 songs he doesn't mind too terribly scribbling his name under -- "Harps and Angels," which I hope is as sickly cynical as Sail Away and God's Song, won't be a rainbow drenched escape from his legacy.
[above photo by steve johnson, taken in the woods next to his house. you can't see him here, but I'm bending down to rub the coarse fur on Peanutbutter's nose -- Peanutbutter is a very large sheep who the johnsons love and who loves the johnsons. The head piece was planted on me by steve's daughter Eliza. yes, it's a pair of pantaloons. yes, I look like a viking.]
April 29, 2008 - Freen
I've been watching Reggio's Quatsi Trilogy -- Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi anyway -- while working on design things. The images and the music are hitting me slant, the pulses and the slurs and Glass's grand strokes all nearly as subliminal as the commercial culture they force into exposure: watching it like this flops the roles of art and subject into stark negative. Or so it seems. Having grown up with images like these marching across PBS and the Discovery Chanel, I'm a little sad that I didn't get to feel the lurch of realization that these films meant to so many people. I wish I'd seen these before discovering David Byrne's "Feelings" or reading Shusaku Endo's "Deep River" -- I'm collecting my culture all out of order. What a shock to find that so much that fell into my line of site had been standing there, towering, just out of view for so long. Anyway... I like these films. At least as thoughtful muzak.
I had a conversation with my friend the other day -- our first real long talk since I moved back to Houghton and back to rurality -- I've been reading up on Internal Family Systems, a psycho-theraputic language which synthesizes systems thinking and the multiplicity of the mind: every human holds within her mind a system of parts -- parts are fully formed persons with emotions, talents, fears, knowledge, and influence over the human which rise up in the mind during trauma. The goal of the IFS model is to learn to lead these parts and teach them to work together. I learned about this method from a friend I met in Virginia when I visited to get some photos taken -- I think I've continued to think about the model because of its emphasis on compassion for the parts of our minds which normally, and naturally, we attempt to silence. I told my friend about this -- his reaction was full-formed and direct: he said "In my 70 years experience I've seen more evidence than I can so quickly deny pointing to humans as selfish entities first and foremost."
I couldn't think much to say in response to this -- I certainly couldn't line up my 27 years against his near 70, but I couldn't deny my own experience. We watched Farting Preacher to clear the air.
I have lots of recording to do...
April 24, 2008 - I changed my first baby poopy diaper
poop done got all up everywhere. I babysat for a friend today.
I know I like to show off me some Shara, but c'mon. C'MOWN!:
I've been watching the smallest china paper globes unwrap into buds on the trees in the yard, waking to thicker and thicker clouds of bird sound morning by morning -- I can't believe the world does this every year! I told a friend in Brooklyn last summer that it was hard for me to imagine missing upstate new york's autumn pageantry by keeping myself in the city. He thought me crazy, over-romantic, and maybe I was and am now, a little home-sick or something. Somehow the city feels all sorts of things, but rarely did it feel homish for me the way hills and trees and ponds seem to.
I went swimming the other day in the pond on my friend's property. The water of the pond is fed and refreshed by a natural spring not 200 feet from it -- I have this memory of one night pulling on my rain boots with this friend: the spring's pump had been clogged by sticks moved in the heavy rain and we were the only bodies around to fix it, so we pulled on rubber things to keep the rain out and crouched through the rainy hiss into the dark. I remember with clarity a shock at how rich the sound of the rain was: a hiss on the trees at the perimeter of the forest, the pat-pat on my rain coat and hat, a thud and slap of water hitting the lawn, and every space between me and the ring of woods around the pond gave off a different timbre in the dark. All we had to see by was my friend's flashlight: he walked ahead and I followed his boots. I remember feelings of vulnerability and safety pulling at each other: The rain and the dark made my visible world tiny but my audible world huge.
I never got a chance to record the radiator in my Brooklyn apartment. It made this hummmhoooooooommmmhehummmm as it heated up. I imagined a choir of them opening my album. ... poop.
Oh, I got into grad school! I'll be moving to Bloomington, Indiana in August to work on my MFA! long time coming. Album is coming along. I'm anxious to share it, but I'm afraid it won't be sharable for a while. I keep underestimating the work and overestimating my capacity to complete it.
April 15, 2008 - I have a big announcement
Big announcement: coming next week. ...
In the mean time, write a song for yourself. Write it about the parts that make you up -- imagine the voices that influence you have bodies and taste and memories, and favorite songs: write the songs they sing.
love, David
March 25, 2008 - two thousand people cling to bottles, to powdered babies, to leather bibles...
I spent Easter with some good friends in Philadelphia -- 6:30am, Sunday, on top a small hill outside the city with a crowd of shivering young people, trying less to unravel the cryptic morning of Christ's resurection, more to play with that strange ball of prophetic mystery in order not to freeze bone solid on that bare southeast Pennsylvanian scrub. Our toes were geodes in our boots by the time we drove out of there.
I haven't been posting songs here in a while -- it's because I'm working on a full length and don't want to share song by song. I'd rather you heard these songs for the first time in the form of a long play record. Recording is going well! Maybe I'll be able to share more about it soon. I have plenty of new music, new songs and things. for example: wig:
Also, I'm moving back up to Houghton in order to finish some of these recordings: ready to be overtaken and overtaking by the starlings' litany of fabulous cursive air weavings. I got pooped on by a pigeon today. I was staring up at a bunch of them roosting on a Greecian ledge thinking oh the beauty around here is sometimes hiding isn't it, and then poop, white poop on my right arm. Anybody knows how to get white poop out of blue fabric?
did you once know did you once know did you once know? did you once know did you once know did you once know? I was the wary scarlet and the rot plain, oh holy mountain lady turned off turned off turned off.
March 18, 2008 - "That's just the trade entering his body."
There'll be a neat announcement on April 15th or somewhere near there. Neat for me.
........
A little while ago I visited some great friends of mine who live in Broadway, a small town in Virginia, in the Shenandoah River Valley, on a branch of that river, who have a lovely home tortured and loved by two young girls, Maggie and Eliza, who taught me in a week that I know near nothing about what it is like to live in a young girl's body. They were wonderful to witness -- and so powerful. Steve and Anna Maria, the girl's parent's, shared everything with me in that week. It was hard to leave.
My week in Broadway was a dream. I miss the countryside and the dining room table and the meals together. There was a really strong, really palpable rhythm of life in the Johnson house. It's sometimes hard to find the rhythm and so sometimes dancing is awkward -- keep second guessing the beat and stopping to look around to see what other people are doing, and then being afraid to start up again we drift over to the refreshment table and stare at the others.. but the Johnson house was strong rhythm'd, strongly currented, lifefull and bawdy. Maybe it's the presence of the two little girls -- I've often thought having children would be good for me: me, who is often afraid of the peculiarities of being rather than curious and brave in their excavation: me, who is often afraid of the grape jelly on the piano, afraid of the pile of cheerios on the love seat, the unkempt, the decaying, the aging: all that which the girls embrace and induce with all their might every minute of every day. I need more of that. I need someone to take me to the edge sometimes like that. someone to smear peanut butter on my nose, or leave ketchup on my seat to sit in. messy is good sometimes: at least more times than I normally give it room for.
March 8, 2008 - February
No updates for a whole month!? geez. I got swamped in with a flu (a temperature above 100 for a whole 11 days in a row!) and then was working hard on foundation identity and letterhead and then on artwork for Shara's new album, A Thousand Shark's Teeth, which is done now and should be a proper plastic and paper package in the next few weeks: a significant contribution to the lake of art that is the ever-manifested seep of groundwater of independently concieved musics: art world: culture world: new york city: something significant, something special. Shara's really made something beautiful. Hope the art isn't too harsh, too laughable, an insult to the depth of her vision. Here's a reject I'm particularly fond of:
No promises. I'm busy but trying to write.
Last night I saw Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes at the Met. This has been a long time coming, and totally worth doning my 3-piece suit. Sufjan said I looked like money. Shara made a gasp when she saw me in her kitchen. Maybe I should dress up more often?
January 31, 2008 - Mary Margaret O'Hara
She breaks my heart. I bought a CD ten years ago, a Vic Chesnutt tribute album with a performance of the song "Florida" by Mary Margaret O'Hara and it's been buzzing flapping around my brain ever since. She's a performer like no other with an unbelievable amount of control over her voice enough to contort and conjure a hundred ineffiblenesses in a minute. She's just a complete master of her instrument, and very few people know about her. She released an album "Miss America" in 1988 and hasn't put out a proper album ever since (there was a Christmas EP and a soundrack with some significant work on it and a slew of great one-off compilation tracks, but no more albums). Her music is hard to track down, but I managed enough songs last night to keep me awake way past my bedtime listening and listening.
Likely she's not everyones cup of tea, but I'm in love.
So, lately it's lots of Mary Margaret and Faulkner's The Sound And The Fury. It's what I needed in order that art begins to make sense to me again.
Thanks everyone for your dream interpretations! Besides being all sorts of entertaining, I think I learned a few things both about how my brain works and about who is actually reading this thing. Good things all!
January 25, 2008 - I like cabbage just fine
I didn't expect as many interpretations of my dream as I've recieved! Below is the third thorough interpretation of THE RED BEAKER this week. It comes from my friend, and co-Houghton-ex-patriot, Julia O'Brien. You can read the original dream and 2 other interpretations below.
"My gut tells me that the black-haired guy is you. The side of yourself that is daring, adventurous, and playful. A very true you. The artist you.
Houghton cafeteria= safety, home. Open window with breeze coming in= possibility. You with the cabbage= instigating a journey/adventure.
The fact that you are not wearing a shirt means that you feel vulnerable/naked as you set out on a journey with everything you need on your back. That you instigate this journey with the throwing of a cabbage means that it starts from a natural and organic place in you, with a sense of humor and optimism. (unless you don't like cabbage, but I would guess that you do. If you hate cabbage, it means something else entirely.)
Cars usually represent your life and the need for control. You get into your parents' car, but it has been altered. (Again, I think you have positive feelings about your parents, so let's go with that.) You want your life to be similar to your parents', but you feel the need to break away from them. You are breaking away from them to make your own life, but it's very difficult and slow going. It is awkward. The fun adventurous part of yourself has to buckle down and work.
I don't know about that third person who is with you, but most likely it is another part of you. Or Jesus.
Ok- here's where it gets more difficult. When you describe this policewoman, you clearly had feelings of animosity towards her. She represents establishments and institutions that you see as outdated and obsolete, and yet they still have an arbitrary authority over you and are preventing you from moving forward. You give her your license (your identity) "...with your black-haired friend awaiting pedaling instructions" and then leave your artist self in the car to follow her when she walks away.
Real life: Most likely there is something that is making your artist-self wait and you feel like it is arbitrary and cruel. Yet you feel obligated to this authority and see no choice but to follow it. It is interesting that the authority figure is a woman. An unattractive woman who is attempting to make herself appealing, but is failing. I don't know enough about you and women to know what that means, but examine it.
I'd like to know more about how you felt in the medical facility, but the overall feeling I get is one of fear/anxiety. It is an institution. In the first room, you see a dead body (mortality), the second, a terrible car crash (loss of control, fear of losing friends and people close to you), in the third, this authority figure reappears, and she is exposed further to be even older, crazier, and possibly drugged.
This guide is a person you asked for help and yet she doesn't seem to know any more than you do. She is a stranger, foreigner, representing the other people in your life right now who are in the same situation as you. Whatever you have seen is a secret. The secret is that the establishment is a place filled with death, loss of opportunity, and is run by unqualified authority.
Did you wake up right after the guide spoke to you? How did you feel immediately after you woke up? Your feeling after you wake up is telling. I realize that you may have to interpret my interpretation, but hopefully I've given you some clues that will help you assimilate what's going on in your waking life and in your subconscious.
My advice: Get back in the car as fast as you can and drive to Mexico with the black-haired guy and mystery guest. It will take some effort, and there may be some loss along the way, but it will be worth it."
January 22, 2008 - "Accuracy"
Another interpretation of my RED BEAKER dream. You can read the original dream a couple entries below. This here is an interpretation by the fantastic Laura Morton:
"wow david, that was indeed quite a dream.
i love the visuals!!!
sounds like you really want to be a movie star...
it was you who wished you had on the aviator glasses...
can we say, 'catch me if you can?'...
you're fearing what it will feel like to be 28...and you have thought about finally trying on, for fun, that hot pink lipstick that you stole from Andrea when you were like 14. go on, give it a whirl. you'd be surprised just how difficult it is to apply lipstick with 'accuracy'.
in any case...you wish you would have received an orange party hat at your 27th birthday party, but no one got the hint...so, you're hoping for not only the party hat, but also a new fishing boat for your 28th.
the black haired friend is me. i just recently died my hair.
just kidding...it's cramer, of course!
you were so annoyed that you had to get up and let him in to the apt, that you, subconsciously, felt bad for getting annoyed with him, and in your dream, you 'made-up' and allowed him to be your cool, control-pedal, friend.
really, i think the pedals have to do with all that recording jazz you do.
oh, what joy.
fuchsia fluids and lousy lipstick.
loved your dream!!!"
January 21, 2008 - Here Come The Planes
Michael and Julia O'Brien, some good friends of mine, gave me a ride back to Brooklyn after being in Houghton for Thanksgiving back in November. Michael has really good taste in music and is always playing me great stuff from before I started listening to music. This one song in particular really got to me -- a song by Laurie Anderson from her album "Big Science" which came out when I was 2 years old. Laurie's been named a sort of prophet, and based on the haunting accuracy of this song, it's no wonder. I get shivers:
A dream interpretation by Fred Brown, (read original dream posted in the last blog entry below titled "THE RED BEAKER"):
"ok, so you left a familiar place to go to some place that you'd never been that was very different than where you came from. it seems like everything is just slightly different than you are used to (the cafeteria is the one at houghton, kind of. the car is your parents', kind of. and isn't really driven quite the same way as a normal car. the hospital is like a bizzaro type of hospital), but maybe that's just the nature of dreams. it seems like your brain was juxtapposing two situations.
maybe it's about your moving to brooklyn. trading houghton's free food, cool breezes, and familiar friends for the harshness of the city where everything is weird and maybe somewhat scary. the houghton person is helping you while the nonhoughton people are giving you a hard time. think about this: two situations involving cars. one in which your friend was helping you, the other in which a person in trouble was being somewhat ignored by a whole group of others. they're opposites. it's like you think, "maybe no one will help me here like my houghton friend helped me." the police officer is more concerned with a road cone than with you. except there is one person, i guess, who is trying to help you because you have found at least one friend in brooklyn."
January 17, 2008 - THE RED BEAKER
Dreams: I dreamt in the hour of extra sleep this morning (roommate Andy came home at 7:30 and I had to get up to let him in, and since I didn’t sleep really well last night, I made myself go back to sleep. I don’t want to be working on bad sleep) of eating in what felt a little like the cafeteria of Houghton, though it was on the first floor and there was a refreshing breeze coming in through a bay of open doors in the overflow room I was sitting in. In the dream I have this cabbage and I step out of the overflow room into the main room and lob it at some black-haired guy’s head a few tables away. I hear for a few minutes people’s theories about where the cabbage came from while I gather my things and prepare to leave the dining hall. I’m not wearing a shirt, not sure why, but I have more than just a backpack to carry, like I’m carrying my clothes as well. I leave the dining hall and am maybe 50 feet out into the air and I am tackled playfully by the black-haired guy I cabbaged moments before. So he’s my friend and we kid about the joke cabbage as we head somewhere. We come into a parking lot, and there’s a third person with us now, don’t remember who, and we board my parent’s car which is like a dark conversion van with the top sawn off and no seats. Sort of like a boat. Since there are no seats, pressing the pedals down is very awkward – you can’t reach them if you stand straight up, but if you want to lean, you end up killing your back. So, the black-haired guy works the pedals while I steer and prompt him to speed up, slow down, or stop. We’re in another parking lot then, looking for a space and we get stopped by a policewoman on foot. She is short, has long, obviously dyed, blonde hair, and is formless – large on top, even her head is large – and practically no butt – she’s wearing tight pants. She’s obviously trying hard to fight her age and is painfully oblivious to her losing battle. She's hiding what she can of her face with gigantic aviator sunglasses. Not aging gracefully. She asks for my license, oh, but before I’ve retrieved it, she wanders away to fix a toppled down orange cone or something and then comes back to press the issue of the license. I dig it out and ask over and over what the problem is. I even say something like “I hesitate to give you any more information until you explain to me exactly what and how I’ve violated whatever it is you’re protecting.” I’m cheeky. All this time I'm standing in my boat car thing, with my friend the black-haired guy at my feet awaiting pedal instructions. The police woman sort of wanders into the nearby building without giving me an answer and so I follow her in. She's got my license now. I guess the car is just parked on the main aisle of the parking lot. When I get inside, I realize this building is a medical facility – big public sitting area in the foyer, though it’s dimly lit and there appear to be very few chairs. It’s silent in there and I think, uncomfortably so. The walls are rounded and beige. There’s a receptions desk and a woman working a computer behind it – when I ask to see the police woman who’s taken my license, she seems confused. I walk past the counter and seek her out on my own without resistance. I find what must be some sort of coroner’s room, with a body on a table. A woman discovers me and asks if she can help me. I explain my situation again – she looks as baffled as the receptionist, but leads me through a few other rooms. One room seems to have a car wreck in it, and a person trapped inside the car, and a small group of people surrounding the car talking to the person inside. It’s as if the jaws of life were unable to remove the body after a crash and so the whole of the car was brought to the hospital for treatment. It’s at seeing this that I tell the woman there must be some mistake. I’m indignant, even grasping her elbow at some point while she leads me down another hallway. We pass a large window looking in on a laboratory – the policewoman is there working a microscope and then downing a beaker of red liquid. I recognize her because she’s still wearing her sunglasses. In the artificial light she looks much older – the pink of her lipstick was applied with terrible inaccuracy, and the dark roots of her hair show a whole two inches. At this my guide stops us from proceeding – we scurry around some corner to keep us hidden from the police woman. My guide looks grim. She’s got her hands up over her mouth and he eyes are wide and when she speaks it’s with a Mexican accent. She says “you didn’t see any of that.”
Please send your interpretations to me at dmstith(at)gmail(dot)com. I'll post any good ones I receive!
January 12, 2008 - where my friends at
I've been using this new browser called Flock, which integrates really well with Flickr, YouTube and Twitter, and I think everyone should try it. It's a mozilla based browser, like FireFox, but it seems to work even faster on my MacBook Pro than FireFox did. And Twitter is totally awesome. It's been helping me to keep up with the friends that don't live in my close proximity. Anyway, go get them.
I've been eating mostly raw lately, raw vegan that is, and this site, GoneRaw, has been really helpful for finding great recipes. My roommate just had a Treet breakfast -- we had a laugh -- Andy has formulated a diet not via nutritional content, but via the cultural content of the food. So, Treet, Miller Light (specifically the can with the football laces on the side, Andy says, for those times he needs to chuck a can down the hallway... for the grip), and General Tsao's Chicken.
The director (the multi-talented Timmy Gallogly!) posted this about this video:
If this song moves you like it moves me, write me a letter, and tell me what the song makes you think of @
Timmy Gallogly
5461 Creek Rd.
Oneida, NY 13421
and I receive the letter sometime before January 31st, I will mail you Timothy's album free of charge. We'll pay the shipping/whatever too.
So, get on it people! Tell him how moved you are. And then go read more from Timothy and Timmy and a great Best-of-2007 list over at The Torture Garden.
December 30 - my black feet
Some of my favorite photos this year came from a camera held by Steve Johnson, a professor at Eastern Mennonite University and a former colleague of mine at Houghton College.
He lives in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and records the spontaeous beauty of his life as a father, husband, teacher and vallery-dweller. I've known Steve for a few years so maybe I'm biased. I miss the shock of beauty on the hills just after the sun sets. I miss the blue hour and stumbling into the stare of a deer on the road. I miss meandering walks in the woods and the sky through trees and creek water cooling the air with a hiss that sounds like wind in a neighbor's tree... anyway, some photos:
I'm learning to treat myself better. Brooklyn life is a toughy. I may need a change sometime in the near future.More hills, less money, more clean air, less noise, more friends, less careers, more time for making music...
#40 in the demos section is a new one I forgot I'd made.
December 23 - Sweeping water
I just spent the last hour sweeping flood water in my parents' basement. Our pump isn't working right and we're afraid the motor will burn out if we leave it on too long, so I wait for the water to rise a little and then I turn on the motor of the pump and sweep the water that's on the floor toward the pump. It's arcane, this method, but it's all I can do right now. The weather has changed pretty quickly from cold and snowy to warm and wet. All that was frozen is now soggy.
I feel pretty numb -- I have for the last few months. I don't really know why, except maybe I'm tired from all the change over the last few years. It's hard to feel settled anywhere when it takes me more time to recover from moving. So, right now, I'm spending my time reading through "The Artist's Way," a book on "unblocking the creative self" and "The Golden Compass:" an ample means of escape from the wet newspapers, patches of black ice, hissing neon and the crass managerie of inflatable plastic kitsch that is my neighbor's front stoop: Brooklyn, in all her nakedness. My friend is visiting Haiti for the holiday, spending his time with orphans who are starved for attention and care nearly as much as they are for food and medical care. This friend recently sent me an email describing Haiti as an entire coutry resembling the BQE underpass at the end of my block in Brooklyn where all the trash goes to sit in puddles. Then I think of "The Bog of Eternal Stench" from the movie Labyrinth (starring David Bowie), and I think, no, Brooklyn's uglier than that right now.
Now I must go sweep some more water.
My apartment is starting to feel like my own place. Here's a picture:
December 13 - Mockterna and good things
November 29 - Mexican Hot Chocolate
Sorry I've been so long silent -- I went away to Houghton for Thanksgiving -- oh I have to tell you about Friday night! Day after T-day, my friend and I went up to visit our friends, The Barringers, at their gigantic old farmhouse in LeRoy where nearly their entire extended family had gathered for the holiday. I didn't know this until I arrived: the family has very strong Irish roots, and they like to dance and sing. I'd be sitting in the living room playing a board game or talking with one of the cousins and from the kitchen I'd hear a mournful alto lilting into song with a ring of listeners encircling her, or a guitar would drift in from another room and the group would stagger, unled, into a favorite old song. Coming from a family that almost never sings together informally, the Barringers were the family from "You Can't Take It With You;" a family so brave as to be calcified in their honesty, and subsequently, a sometimes comic, sometimes ludicris, absurdity. So, I spent 6 hours on Friday night promenading one Irish lass or another, always walking a narrow aisle between humiliation and ecstacy. I gotta dance more!
In other news, I played my first song in Brooklyn on Monday night. Dayna Kurtz (the sultry, the gold-throated and magnificent, Dayna Kurtz!) invited me to play a song near the beginning of her set at Barbes on 9th St. and 6th, so I did, and with the help of Shara and Dayna on background ooo's and Dayna's pianist/accordianist, Peter, on piano investigating the twinkles, I think we pulled off a lovely performance of Thanksgiving Moon! I will do more performances in the future -- this one felt pretty good considering it was my first time with the hot lights turned on me.
Sorry to whoever has been checking this site regularly and has found it unchanged over the last couple of weeks -- I had a dreamweaver problem and have been too busy to address it completely, and so I couldn't post. Did I mention that I've been busy? I've been very busy. I'm working on an album now which I hope to have finished and ready for consumption by early Spring or late Winter. Heart Hair Just Once Starlings A Fire of Birds Bending Low A Silent Bee.
October 31 - Halloween
On my way home from work today I stopped at Eclipse (grrreat Mexican restaurant on 4th ave in Sunset Park) for some take out wonders and while I was sitting at the bar, a mob (A MOBBBB!!!) of children in halloween costumes, and their moms, came in! The owner was in the back getting my stuff and so I had to dish out the candy that she'd left on the bar. Seriously, like 25 kids. Seriously. Anyway, I saw the most remarkable thing: I tried to make eye contact with every kid as I gave them candy, but then the 2nd to last girl, a girl probably 12 years old dressed as a zombie or a vampire or something bloody and blackish, kinda sided up to me and held out her bag. Instead of a "Trick or TreeeeetT!!" I got a mumbled half conversation -- she was talking on her cell phone. And it wasn't like an emergency parental conversation -- she was talking about what her "friend" said to her other "friend." Can you say ghetto?
Ghetto.
Tomorrow night is Sufjan's premier of the BQE, and I'm real excited about it. Oh, and check out mybrightestdiamond.com -- Shara's been hard at work on "Shark's Teeth!" I can tell you it's sounding incredible.
October 29 - Missing Caliope
My friend Shara recently wrote about our friend Timothy Dick. Here's an excerpt:
"...I'd be upstairs in my apartment working on my record and Timothy would be downstairs underneath my feet in his kitchen recording too, and I'd hear a harmonica or pedal steel coming up through the floor and I'd stop working to listen. The sounds would be muted and felt old, like I was listening to memories. "
I recently wrote a press release for Timothy's first album which you can read by clicking the image below.If you haven't bought his album yet, go here: http://cdbaby.com/cd/timothydick
October 23 - a lapse of lucidity
From a recent email conversation: "For me, Christianity is something I don't understand. It's something that I hope I never think I really understand. Love's ineffability is what keeps me believing in Love. Faith's ineffability is what keeps me faithful, what keeps me trying to express faith. Since art for me is about mystery, and since Christ's love for me is the most baffling mystery, pinning the two together feels more awkward than I can express. It feels unnecessary. It seems like tying two lovers together in the hopes that they'll produce a child."
October 11 - E for Effort
You will be glad you watched this:
October 10 - On Pummelling Moses
Bible Fight simulates hand-to-hand combat between some of the Bible's most popular characters. Play as Jesus, Mother Mary, Noah, Eve, Moses or Satan in landscapes straight from the flannel-graph board. For blood and glory. or for fun. I think the game is more fun to tell people about than to actually play (and this may be true of most of the content on adultswim – cartoons more interesting in summary than in repletion) but still I've gone back to Bible Fight to cool off every now and then. So, it's got some replay value.
I could imagine me and my friends in Sunday school sneaking into Mrs. Turtledove's bag of story-telling props and applying our balmy young imaginations toward such an end as this game. We would've probably added our own beloved characters: maybe Mickey Mouse, Jackie Chan, Mark Twain, Tiny Tim, Barbie, Buddha, Pocahontas, Hitler, Betty Boop or the Morton Salt girl. Or maybe we'd have attempted to keep chaste our imaginations while in church and held the “seculars” out of it... or maybe the bible characters would've just always won. In any case, this concept would've enticed our fertile minds relentlessly until some moral chord snapped and the dogs of our imaginations got loose.
I remember I loved games like Street Fighter, TMNT Tournament Fighter, and Tekken when I was in middle school. We got to fight – for all the pent up aggression of the trumpet-playing band nerd, we got to fight. While the muscles in our legs and shoulders atrophied, we were Spartan, training to dominate: kool-aid fed princes of dexterity. I remember, at one point, I had played my gameboy so much I started having sharp pain in my wrists and palms – my first Carpal tunnel. I bore the pain with honor. The swan song in the litany of my youth. I digress...
While the game is attractive on a lot of levels (see the Disney style landscapes complete with quirky details like the fish flopping on the dry ground in front of Moses' Red Sea, or the unicorn in Eden's bushes) and has a lush soundtrack (did they commission John Williams?), the characters and their unbelievably silly special moves steal the show. Eve throws apples and can summon Adam to execute an uppercut (notice the fig leaves, how they flop around and quiver – and doesn't Adam look like a bug-eyed Tarzan?), Moses can summon a rain of frogs or whip a couple stone tablets at his opponents, swarthy Noah can direct a charge of animals, summon a pillar of water or unleash a dove from his chest, and Jesus calls fish and bread out of the sky or brandishes his cross like a folding chair in a WCW match. The characters are endearing in their absurdity.
I stumbled upon this game late one night after an evening of furious job hunting. It came to me as an epiphany in blood and pixels. A tiny metal cross and brass knuckles. brilliant. After a few hours of work, Bible Fight serves as an ideal mind erasing tool – 10 minutes whipping Moses with a snake or calling a rain of frogs from the sky has amazing refocusing effects – and then I'm back at the task again, scratching plates, scoring lines, punching keys, ripping apart and rebuilding sentences: I fight with a resurgent energy transposed from muscle to mind. But only 10 minutes is allowed at the game lest my brain become purple and soupy from battle. But it's enough. 10 minutes is enough. Where this game doesn't come close to the complexity of those special-move-and-combo-packed monster games with entire perfect-bound strategy guides devoted to their possibility, it's fun. And it's full of the syrupy cynicism adultswim has been mustering since Space Ghost and Brak first appeared on late night TV.
I'll spare you the other characters I've come up with since discovering this game, and I'll spare you their hilarious special moves. And I'll spare you my petty frustrations with the game – the imbalances, the quirks and glitches. It's full of problems, but I play Bible Fight to forget about problems. Or at least to forget about the problems that can't be solved with two buttons and a direction pad.
I'm in a coffee shop with headphones on and this book in which I'm supposed to be working on lyrics to a song. A girl is tearing open a package of peanut butter crackers. Her nails painted bright red, hair straight hiding her face like a teepee. She strutted in minutes ago in spiked heels, tight jeans, a sweatshirt, plain purple, and a big cell phone wobbling at her hip. It's a big phone. Like the walkee talkees we had as kids, the fischer-price ones. Just as I began to put her faults together, I was slowed by my morals. Panda Bear sang Comfy in Nautica and my judgements slowed. The song ended and I heard, during the pause, she spoke to her friend next to her -- a homely pink-hoodied girl with her knees together picking at food from a bag, careful not to nick her nails -- she said "and then saderday I'll be in vaygass, so I'll need to bring extra monay...
then the flood.
rummaging around in the attic of me, bumping my head on the ceiling when I hear flapping and something small trying to get out.
September 17 - Harp Singing
Today I sang with the Harp Singers!
I know I know I know these mp3s can't begin to illustrate the force of this experience, (the walls of the room so close, hugging the song book and hearing the song unfold syllable by syllable, arms hacking out rhythm) but I gotta share this somehow. In this post I'll feature the work on one composer: Raymond C. Hamrick -- a watchmaker from Macon, Georgia.
Saturday I attended a viewing of Awake My Soul, a film about the continuing history of some of the earliest music in American history.
I'd like very much to write more, but after a day of singing louder than I think I've ever sung, and after wandering around Brooklyn with Matt Hinton two straight nights in a row, I'm pooped. I've had just enough energy left in me to read a few more chapters of Roberto Bolano's Amulet (which I need to finish so as to return it to the library on time) -- it's haunting me more than I thought I could be haunted.
A quote:
"From time to time I feel as though my books and figurines were with me still. But how could they be? Are they somehow floating around me or over my head? Have the figurines and books that I lost over the years dissolved into the air of Mexico City? Have they become part of the ash that blows through the city from north to south and from east to west? Perhaps. The dark night of the soul advances through the streets of Mexico City sweeping all before it. And now it is rare to hear singing, where once everything was song. The dust cloud reduces everything to dust. First the poets, then love, then, when it seems to be sated and about to disperse, the cloud returns to hang high over your city or your mind, with a mysterious air that means it has no intention of moving."
September 12 - you'll be in the air
Yesterday was the 11th of September, my first spent in NYC since 2001. I was contacted by Michael Kaufmann of Asthmatic Kitty about a cover that i was supposed to be working on -- as with so many things, this was a project with an undetermined deadline, and so I put it off to the last minute -- he contacted me yestreday to tell me he needed the song the next day (today). So I set to it. AK is celebrating the long history of indie record label K Records up in Olympia Washington, I don't know how many years exactly, but it's the label that Elliott Smith and Beck got their starts on. As was my duty, I chose a song from the K Records catalog and rerecorded it for the AK website.
I chose 'You'll be in the Air' by The Microphones from the LP 'Glow pt.2' -- this is a record that came out while I was in college and set new ideas in me about low-budget recording. I chose the song because it was particularly melismatic compared to most of the other songs on the album, and has a clear melody and a structure that's at least somewhat recreatable.
Anyway, I didn't much consider the content before I started singing it -- in the song, Phil, the lead singer/writer, seems to be saying goodbye to someone that is leaving or has just left on a plane -- by the second verse, he's removed the plane from the picture and his love is flying through the air with slowed breaths through rock-filled winds and ash-filled skies... the content as you can imagine was startling to me. It wasn't until 3.5 hours into the recording session that I realised what I was singing. Outside the rain was coming down steadily -- there were moments that my room fell dim and the grey light from my computer screen reached out to all the walls. A couple times, when the lights would low like this, I removed my headphones and could hear outside the rain crunching on awnings below my window, hear it whipping through the trees. I think this is the best attempt at a day of remembrance that I'll ever make.
September 5 - midlake fountain
I've been sorta fascinated by architecture lately. Lots of reasons for it, I'm sure: it represents a collective effort which, in my present position, seems heavenly; the conception of a building utilizes a handful of measures including aesthetic, philosophical, mathematical, sociological, psychological and historical frameworks in a balance rarely used in other mediums; I have a couple of friends who are more than dabbling in architecture: Jonathan is the middleman at a work site on one of the fingerlakes in charge of interpreting architectural drawings into work flow on a $10 million home, Luke is designing homes for his friends, keeping a journal of drawings that he shows me when he visits. I've been thinking a lot, too, about community.
A week ago, after the bike ride through Brooklyn on which I met the smell of the ocean and a sense of undeniable peace, I had a conversation with a friend about Christianity, the church, and biblical interpretation. I'm not usually keen on talking about the tenants of my faith -- they're dangerous to me. At least my memory of the power of an argument over such things.. These conversations divided cliques in high school, ended friendships. I'm older, but the memory of the projected taughtness of our strands of belief
makes me sad. We could've been so much more loving.. Anyway, after an hour or so of conversation, my friend asked me, and in a way that seemed to imply that my personal theology was so far out of the normative circle as to be beyond his imagination's capacity, in a sort of exhasperated sigh and looking at me straight with curiosity and concern.. I started to speak and then stopped and measured my words. I was afraid of what might come out -- my doubt, my shame, or worse, something to cover one or the other up. I found myself then speaking about community, about the orthodox belief of God in three persons, three beings with different tasks, different angles that work together; That perspective is possible within a functioning community, and without that perspective, we can't help but give, what ought to given to one another, to ourselves.
I furthered the conversation with my friend Dave last night on the phone. We talked about William Carlos Williams and romantic notions of beauty, and the everyday.. and now I'm thinking about prayer chapels in the woods. While living in Houghton, I dreamed regularly about making it a more livable place. The two improvements that I regularly returned to were economically feasible, fulfilled a well-recognized need, and encouraged creative and physical well-being in the community. The first was to organize a farmer's market to bring people into the community, establish new economic ties, support local farmers, encourage healthier diets among the people of Houghton, and encourage recognition of the physical needs of an academic community which has, in the past, been divided by an inflamed divergence of philosophies. The second idea was to build one or two prayer chapels in the woods that surround Houghton. I'm going to have Luke draw me up some plans that I can deliver to Houghton's President, Shirley Mullen. Maybe Jonathan will help order materials..
September 1 - pinwheel of peace and strength
Saturday morning: Shostakovich piano preludes and lysoling the garbage cans: a fresh fig, washing dishes and a soy mocha. Lovely. My hands feel stretched from the soap and disinfectant. I have the blinds down in my office and the morning light is just barely on them, gold and blue. Three nights ago I rode my bike with a friend to a Taize service at my church in Park Slope. The service consisted of candles and silence, scripture reading, the singing of gently repetative songs as meditation, and 10 minutes of silent prayer. The night was built for this sort of service -- I mean to say that the weather was perfect, cool enough not to sweat from bike riding, with a slight breeze that brought sea air all the way up to the slope, and the sky was some deep ocean blue with bits of purple, and yellow where the purple split open. The whole evening was just so peaceful. It's a different sort of peace in the city than it would've been out in Houghton -- this is most inriguing to me as it's been a theme of thought so frequently revisited over the last five years and only now are my hypothosis being tested. Let me see if I can get at the difference in the sort of peace I experienced riding my bike through the quiet city streets toward my church in Brooklyn from the peace I experienced walking through the woods at twilight or sitting on the dock at Perkins pond watching the swallows fly, or driving home in the evening from Rochester or Buffalo...
Trees exude a quiet presence, but still it is a strong one. A friend once categorized Timothy Dick's music as being as silently strong as an oak -- this for someone's music which I could also say requires patience, invokes stillness, and simultaneously overturns peace with strength and strength with peace. His music is an edy of change but it's somehow very solid, very still. So that's nature to me -- trees anyway. Trees and the dark hollows underneath them, the waterways that cut through them: it's guilt and grace in equal measures. And at least for me, a man with severly limited grasp of the
workings of the natural world, this is life incomprehensibly strong, fixed, proud. In it's silence, or maybe I should say, in my silence, in my patient observance of the place, my peace matches the peace and pride of the landscape: I am both terrified and proud. Nature to me is an unknottable mystery -- some ineffible Truth. Recognition of that Truth is the key to my peacefulness in the country, the key to richness and contentment and it's, I think, what I've experienced during the dark blue part of the evening watching birds or listening to wind or some such thing. It's a recognition of life and it gives me, at least for a time, a sense of my smallness, of my scale, of the size of the world, the overwhelming density of life and a sense that it's also ephemeral, instantaneous, fragile and small. In Houghton you can look up and see stars -- not just four or five, but a nightly soaking of fresh light; a deep swash of dense glitterings dizzyingly numerous.
The peace I experienced in Brooklyn the other night was similar. There are trees here -- especially in the neighborhood my church is in, its streets are fully green, and brick is everywhere -- this is a part of the city that remains soft somehow. But the peace here, at least for me, rarely escapes the boundaries of my fear of the place. Peace comes despite my fear, but still it's a peace that grows from something very small, like a memory, whereas the peace of the country comes at me from all sides and sometimes overwhelms. The peace on Wednesday came when I smelled the ocean, at least that's what I'm remembering now, and that smell took me out of the place, out from Brooklyn and the peopled world. So here, too, I found my sense of scale, but it was powered by longing rather than the depth of fulfillment -- the sense of space that memory of the ocean gave me brought on the peace. And maybe riding my bike too, maybe that brought on a sense of freedom and space even deep in this web of streets. I've said before that there's something ridiculous about art in the country, like there's no need for it, like decorating a mountain or building a fountain in a lake. But here in the city, art serves a very definite purpose -- there's a real need for art: for organized beauty. In both settings art is a communal act -- however I'm thinking now that my experiences of art in the country have evidenced the singularity of the specific community. My most moving art experiences have served to illuminate something uniquely beautiful about the people around me. My art experiences in the city so far have served to give me peace about myself --served to identify something ineffible concerning my human experience. This isnt to say that these experiences have only served as tools of isolation, but that the peace came out of a new trust in my own experience whereas the peace or truth that came out of my art experiences in Houghton have served to confirm a commonality in our group experience.
There must be a better way to say all of this. I'll do some researching to see if I can find some PhDs who've already written about this. If you know of somewhere I should be looking first, please feel free to write me (dmstith@gmail.c om).
We had a couple of clutterdancers in Brooklyn last week touch down just a couple of streets from my apartment. I wasn't there to see the winds -- I had just left for New Hampshire and missed the rare weather completely.
I was on nature's side when the tornadoes touched Sunset Park -- I was thinking about storm clouds and star maps and mashed huckleberries on toast, talking with a quiet voice about the sweet smell of the lake water, watching light shake on the walls of the cottage just before dinner time. I wish somehow I could discover that Brooklyn has a neighborhood so intoxicatingly soft.
While at the Lake I read Robero Bolano's book Last Evenings On Earth, released by New Directions -- a collection of short stories so haunting and foreign I couldn't put it down. The stories take place in Chile, Mexico and Spain. They're disconcerting in their understatement: secret and horrible lonliness and pangs of despair so exquisite, so plain, I couldn't take my eyes off the book. Reminds me of Hesse and Camus.
I got stuck in NH longer than expected due to the storms in Brooklyn -- my flights routed through LaGuardia were delayed and canceled twice and in the end I decided to wait a few days and then drive out, cancel the flights altogether and accept that my vacation was going to plan itself. On my last visit to the Portland ME airport I almost made it onto a plane. I got through security, checked my bags and headed toward my gate where I planed to spend a few hours reading and drinking coffee. The gates I passed were sparsely populated, more people in line at the Starbucks than waiting in the plastic seat clusters at each gate. I remember smiling and thinking this is a nice place to read. The flights to LaGuardia all flew out of 3 gates at the end of the terminal. This is where I was headed and where I was greeted by something resembling Somalia more than Northern New England -- children sprawled on the floor surrounded by handfuls of fitfully scattered crayons, bellies exposed as if by tantrum and sleep, vending machine food wrappers tumbling out from under seats stuffed with unpacked carry-on luggage, and the bodies of parents racked over armrests (looking less comfortable than Christ in Michelangelos pieta) sleep starved eyes bulging over red bellied cheeks. I walked straight to the check-in desk and the attendant laughed at me when I squinted at a stray beam of sun that hit my face when my elbowws reached the counter. She laughed, she said, because everybody gets hit by that sunshine and she loves to see the looks on their faces when their eyes defend themselves against the beam. I was still hopeful at this point in my travels and laughed with her. It was then that I asked if my flight would be on time. She laughed again, harder this time, almost involuntarily, like a sudden cough.
So I didn't fly out that day. I stayed on in NH and had a great time. And now I'm in the Adirondacks looking at more water and more trees. When I get back to B-land I have loads of artwork to do, and lots of recording. More on that later.
July 28 - blankosaurus rex
What can I say? According to my internet sources, it's supposed to be raining in Brooklyn, but all the rain's caught up in an irrepressible humidity clinging to doorframes and foreheads. Garages and little children.
If you're looking for a good book of poetry, when you've finished the Deathly Hallows, order Jagged With Love by Susanna Childress:
"You hear these things: guitars, crickets, coughing, half of August/in a day."
I have a week off to finish some recordings. I don't think these songs will come immediately to this here table -- I'm going to save things up for a proper album release.
July 16 - On a Grassblade
Timothy's new album, "On A Grassblade" is out now and it's a powerful piece of work. Click the image to go to cdbaby.com where the album is on sale for $12.50.
July 13 - Friday Glory is the Fire at the Center of Pain. -Jean Janzen
A conversation with a woman I share this office with: a Russian Jew that's waiting for her new color tv to arrive -- she's having it delivered to the office and she'll take it home with her on the subway tonight. On Monday she wrangled me with a minute by minute sometimes-hard-to-understand-through-her-thick-Russian-accented reenactment of her slow escape from the NYC subway during the blackout of 2005. She's saying how awful it was trudging through the dark tunnels over the rail lines, holding on to the person in front of her, but then when she was out on the street, how peaceful. How nice to finally get out of the city. And then when she got home to Queens she sat on her roof and watched the blackened NY skyline and counted planes lining up to land.
From what dizzying heights it seems I've fallen into the mash of Brooklyn and the world of men. The buildings here are tall and strong and each hewn by some slave-scoured agent of the free world so ravenous in his duty so as to push the earth to its limit. I'm amazed. I'm amazed and astonished at the capacity for human achievement. And, too, this bewildered branch of stride they call Manhattan and it's energy of THRUST and FORCE!! fantastic.
I rode my bicycle over the Brooklyn Bridge after sunset last night -- weaving towards the NY skyline the thirst of man becomes as unveiled a beauty as any -- and the dark of night suppressed by the spray of artificial light, I'm amazed by the hate man has for nature. What is this fear? How does this place draw together so efficiently the corners of man's desire: this Beauty, this Hate? We are delving too deep.
June 13 -
May 15 - my clutter dance
Two weeks until my move to Brooklyn -- I'm tired. I'm sore from the impossible nearness of change. Living in an achademic community in which half of my friends are settling into summer relaxation mode and the other half are gearing up to squelch their memory of the year through a barrage of travel plans -- For these people, this is the transistional moment they've been looking forward to for so long, and here I am trying to incite some empathy, some encouragement, at the very moment they feel they finally have time for themselves. So, trying to float by. Trying to hide fear of change. Trying to remember what it is I'm looking forward to, why I should be excited about this move...I tell myself to remember. I try to remember.
Also, planning a trip to England for a week. I've never been and I'm realy excited about it! I have a face that Americans say "looks SO British" -- gamey I suppose. So, a chance to test my britoflage. Gonna look at monoliths and heathrows... maybe sleep in the lake district for a while... definately have more than my share of Yorkshire pudding!
Oh, my friend Shara was interviewed by Face Culture --
watch it HERE. There are some new things scattered in the demos section to your right-->
May 8 - fluttery
A Good Breakfast:
Oatmeal with flax seed and bananas, dry double-cappuccino
and a handfull of blueberries. Good.
The solid colored storefronts of Washington Park were reminiscent of the algae water mark of the locks on the Erie canal – I remember seeing them on a canoing trip in college: riding the water level down as the locks eased out their water and the color of the walls changed from dry gray to a mucous green – I remember even the spurts of water from zebra muscles. Like Washington Park had been under water for a year or more. The concert hall's auditorium was on the 2nd floor of a building with steep steps – I couldn't help but think it had survived this imaginary flood by anticipating it. But then to admit that the flood plain is so reliable makes me wonder how art has existed among the people at all. I suppose it is the people – art is the people at their most earnest. I described the Havel's performance to somebody as High Art played to a high audience... I wonder if the illustration above applies to my perception of the performance that evening. (* any great hills in Cincinnati?--the spell checker pointed me toward “incinerate”, and “incinerators.” -- possible title). So we have this flood of humanity, we have the marks on the walls to prove it, we have the memorial hall raised up over the park and a couple little experiences that firm the danger or the scars of the city. We have the experience of the Havels, the embrace, the conversation with the beer kid next to me and his shortened and very well-spoken version of the race riots. We have the Indiana countryside which I think will go in the the 2nd installment. I've got to figure out this SnowFish thing – so I need to mention the long ride home and the way I had to hunch over the wheel and feel for the bumper strip in the road to know where I was – the feeling of deep oblivion and then this startling vision of a fish swimming through the falling snow at me – it startled me enough to keep me awake for half an hour. I'd like to tie together this fish and the “flood” of the race riots, and the waterline on the buildings – use water imagery and no direct conversation. Color my images pale and blue if possible – almost being crushed by two snow plows in Cleveland.
April 23 - happy warning I smell sugar, I smell smoke, the moon's a metal colander over the road (sifting us and the light apart), and the shadow of the weepers on the pond commiserate, protect, their wildness and their mirror.
phew! it's been a few weeks of thinking how I need to get something done about my website, and then at last: TIME! so, here we go. I'll try to update this more frequently than I have been. Since my move to Brooklyn is coming up, I'll be puting together my portfolio and uploading a lot of work, and I DO have new music to share sometime. Though, I'd like to have a few more things completed before I throw them out here. Legs are wobbly still -- might do them good to have a few more laps around the living room.So, how are you all?
And where did Spring go? I thought it was around here somewhere...
Feb 17 - More Chicken Love!!
So, a couple of weeks ago I posted a review of Rafter's 'Music for Total Chickens' -- I sent it to Rafter in the spirit of the album, recognizing that everyone needs a little encouragement now and then. Then, on Monday, the folks at Asthmatic Kitty asked if they could post the review on their website as part of their 'Half-Week of Rafter Love,' (a darling fledgling with a keen sense for the commercial calendar). "What an honor!" I thought. And indeed! An honor! (see it HERE)
On Monday of this week, asthmatic master Michael Kaufmann asked if I'd be interested in contibuting a Rafter remix to the Half-Week, and so my schedule for the next three days was prescribed: 7-8am, accessory percussion recording, 8-5pm, normal work day, 7-10pm, recording strings, horns, piano, voice, and at last I knocked together some tripod of a track.
It was great fun, and the remix is ready for downloading!
Head over HERE Look on the left side of the page for my remix, and on the right side for the original Rafter composition (available in stream only).
One more week of full-time day job and then my vocation and avocation will trade clothes. Say a prayer if you think of it.
Feb 6 - It's Working. It's Working.
I've been meaning for a while now to write a review every now and then of albums that strike me as honest and note-worthy. Maybe eventually I'll add a section of this site for such a thing. We'll see. (I'm thinking big website plans lately: recently bought dmstith.com, though nothing's there just yet -- this in preparation of my move to nyc and my focus on music for a while. Got to get myself in the culture.) Nerves are charged: I can use all the encouragement I can get.
Rafter - Music For Total Chickens
For all the hype about this album, the video contest, the chicken outfit, the buyers guide over at Asthmatic Kitty, I expected to be hearing more from the press upon the release of this fine album. Maybe it's a symptom of the indie media's cynicism, maybe the content isn't cool enough -- it's been overlooked.
I was mostly intrigued by what seemed intense production techniques -- the scattered drum fills and chirps and growls of 'Encouragement' -- Rafter lulls over the ramparts, a calm voice over a comically stormy sea of scraggles and squawks. It's music that kicks and soothes -- it's all hard edges, and those made cavernous by strings and choir. The production is awkward and manic. It's over-the-top and bawdy! And every song suffers the sting of Rafter's eccentricity.
But then every song untwists itself in the most beautiful ways.
Take for example 'Tragedy' -- begins with an off-rhythm high hat and guitar squawk with beach boy ooo's flying by the tent poles: after the first minute it sounds like Rafter will launch into garage band senseless passion -- the drums cut out, a guitar rears up on hind legs: you can imagine Rafter's red head bracing to bang. And then the most wonderful thing: a guitar flum-flums, a melody bubbles up and a song is formed with the most wonderful lyrics: "It's natural to get destroyed," and you've forgotten that you almost skipped to the next track.
Another example: on 'Unassailable' -- Rafter turns some machine all the way to eleven, some speakers blow, some paint is peeled and all through the first minute-fourty you're wondering what could be made from this mess. And then a trumpet comes in -- the scale is made perfect, the mess has context. This track never totally lands: it's always a little too shiny in an over-bright sky, but if you squint just right, you can see the figure of our hero crafting something fine. Something careful.
There's evidence that this has been heavily crafted as an album rather than a collection of songs -- Rafter has a great sense of scale and audience. We're encouraged into patience with the respite of 'interlude' and 'Boy' which tumbles and trips into a mantic coda of strings and Liz Janes speaking low -- these are the landscapes and blue skies we've been waiting for! Now if Rafter pulled this trick on every track, or even a few of them, we'd wink and walk away. But, as I said before, he's careful. He knows his audience.
On the second listen the anticipation is almost unbearable -- and this is the life of 'Chickens' -- these are songs beautifully crafted, glazed, polished, smashed to the concrete and rebuilt -- the destruction is the process; the cracks are in the story. This is an album whose scale is persistently renewed: we grow to expect clamor and crash to bloom and slow into something wonderful. This is an album about giving the seemingly haphazard a chance to explain itself. And this album is rewarding in ways I didn't expect.
What I want to know is Why this album was made -- I don't imagine I'll be writing an album of inspirational songs any time soon. It seems beside the point. If good work is to be about process, it seems that songs written to give a push to the stalled ought to show more pushing: more unstalledness. What we get is an album which beautifies and validates the words used by folks attempting to avoid and disuade process. And yet there's evidence throughout the album that Rafter understands this: and is playing with process as much as anyone.
So why the strange disconnect? Is it possible that a man in a chicken suit is in love with the process, and so much so it need not be conjured in his art?
What I find appealing in Rafter is that he's playing with grand posture in his outrageous skin -- this is not a clown feigning sadness or joy. There's something about Rafter that denies self-parody. He's attempting to uncover something of the core of experience by examining the poles -- to the North, the honest and human, the validation of experience and need. To the South, chickens and guitars wailing and all things flippant. But he seems to be caught up in something larger -- the scale is the key. Rafter's going to weave the two extremes together in an attempt to capture everything in between. There's something beautiful about this method. Rafter is simultaneously the scheming villain defending the nebula of his ego and our hero caterwauling through the sky.
If you have time, go listen to some samples here:
http://www.asthmatickitty.com/news.php?newsID=114
Feb 5 - Sharing
A video has appeared on the tube for the remix I did for Shara.
Jan 20 - Fire
On the 87 the other week, we saw a fire -- and from inside the car, in the line of cars, seeing the shine of it on us as we passed, it seemed the most wild thing: a breach in the natural world. Something undefendable. Something clean.
I couldn't see but the back of his head when he said it, but Ted said "it's so beautiful" as we passed. I imagined the glare pressed on our eyes: our eyes stretched wide and shiny. I stared at the road to keep us on it (I was driving) and the reflection was everywhere. The road -- the wet road, the wet cars -- was engulfed in the presence of the flame. Ted said he saw a man standing up near the fire watching -- and he was "tiny as a matchstick" next to it.
Maybe we're bound to our humanness by the nuclear brilliance of the world. Maybe we're bound to beauty and truth by fear, by danger and a base wisdom hidden under language. By humanness I mean our collectivity, and collectivity that admits mystery and powerlessness. Nature is collective but in a way refined: the symbiotic mechanisms are indestructable. Nature's is a clean system in that it's a self-ruinous, self-sustaining system. Maybe humans are too. How would we ever know? Beauty in ephemerality?
In other news:
my ersatz buxom mother wrote a bit of braggadocio: here
And this appeared on the Asthmatic Kitty site:
"That mysterious and haunting male voice from “Magic Rabbit” appears again, but this time in the Scott Walker-esque remix of “Gone Away”. Who is that masked, multi-talented man? Also known for his subconsious drawings on “Bring Me The Workhorse”, David Stith emerges subtley. The clamor and noise seem to hush in the quiet suspension of his gorgeous and icey remix. The backstory begins in the summer of 2004 which found Shara recording demos in a Brooklyn basement converted into museum, The Museum of Disembodied Folk Art. In the next room lived David Stith who would creep out during cookie and milk breaks and he and Shara would discuss music, art, life and the Starbucks coffee uniform. David moved away momentarily but Shara kept snooping around his diggs, borrowing microphones, triangle beaters and getting him to sing, draw and remix on projects for her! Cheers to more collabs between friends!" Read more about "Tear it Down," the remix album here
Dec 29 - Goals: I, David Stith, promise to board North Wind's back, tie her hair around my waist, and trust: this requires the dismantling of my pride, my protection, my painted self: preparing to dissolve the real. So, here are things I have worked on in the last 3 years, and what they need in order to be finished.
• Ichabod & Apple - 15 songs, 12 of which I'm mostly happy with, though the recording is poor (these were my first recording experiments) and the lyrics could benefit from revision. After listening to the first 3 tracks this morning, I think it would be good to try and rerecord them (at least the vocals) and write up some simple string arrangements to add texture.
• Water/Music- um...probably not going to do anything with it. It's mostly too self-involved. Not clear-headed. Soupy. Maybe see how some of the soup sounds when dried out. Try performing them sans production.
• Messages Soundtrack- Will be working this spring to write/record the orchestral arrangements of each of 24 tracks. Feel pretty good, still, about the basic themes. Need to experiment with more textures and instruments.
• People project - T&E, Joy, Saint Clark, Into the Lawn, F of P, Huth's Theme, GMS/Morning Glory Cloud, An Ambiguous Siren, Hair Balloon, Chimney Baptismal, The Blue Light- tracks I'll keep exploring. Intend to write pieces for Timothy, Shara, Timmy, Luke... Some of these tracks are long: 10 - 15 minutes and will be recorded with a load of instruments. Will write a song based on the 2nd movement of Suite for Marice (my grandpa). And a piece for 3 aunts -- a verse for Bonnie, Sue, Kathy.
• New album- Thanksgiving Moon is a launching point -- chamber songs. Exploring my upper range. Lots of piano, blues guitar and voice.
• Colab with Fred Brown- electronic compositions. Need to find a lyrical basis for the pieces: short poems about birds? Sable Island? Fogelin Hill? The Anchor?
• Colab with Shara - 2 albums: perhaps one ep and one full length. Chamber dance music -- acoustic dance music. Instrumentation = blender, sink, coins -- not sampled, but played. Tom Waits tea party. Other colab will be art songs -- maybe some old Brazillian folk songs blended with rewritten Ives and Gorecki and Gershwin. maybe. Shara can handle it, but can I?
• Peace Songs - commissioned by Charity Case to write a couple songs in response to the politics of the last 5 years. Thanksgiving Moon, High Hay and Peace Workshop came out of the sessions. Intend to submit TM in current form for comp, add strings and more resolution for album.
• My Brightest Diamond Remix - in the bag. Already sent to press. Will be a promo for the remix album. Album releases on March 6 (I think?): ought to have something ready by then.
I just realized how like a new years resolution list this looks. I wasn't even thinking about the new year! shoo. get to work lad.
Dec 12 - Raise Your Arms For Victory!! Satisfy your need for an early winter warbling: Thanksgiving Moon.mp3 <-clicky
Dec 1 - Thanksgiving Moon Sorry for the lack of updates lately -- lots of projects in the fire, and one must wear lots of fire-proof gear when working near the fire, and the gear takes hours to put on and hours to take off, and while the gear is on, typing is nearly impossible (big gloves, big fingers). so, then, what's goin on??
Well, for one, I got over my distain for myspace long enough to put up a music page ( here: http://www.myspace.com/dmstith ). This didn't take too long to do, though it was stressful in all the ways you can imagine. I'll still be updating this page as much as I can (as much as I can with these gloves on).
There's a story by me up at the asthmatic kitty site now -- go have a read! -- and with it a GIGANTIC photo of me with egg dripping from my face. (CORRECTION: I guess the giant portrait was making it difficult for some users to read the story below: reports of covered text poured in from parts of the North Eastern United States, Tanzania, Bulgaria, and most of South America. The portrait has since been reduced to a thumb nail.)
So, what have I been working on? Several projects for My Brightest Diamond: layout and lots of drawings for a single and another release slated for this spring, a remix of Gone Away, a t-shirt, and plans to record together again in preparation for Shara's next major release as well as for my own projects. Also, I spent the Thanksgiving holiday recording a few tracks for a compilation to be released on Charity Case. I'll have mp3s of all of the tracks up in the next 1.5 weeks.
Did any of you catch the beautiful sickle moon on thanksgiving? The sky was clear here in Houghton. The world felt very still.
Nov 2 - Trees in Buffalo I took a drive through my old neighborhood in Buffalo yesterday. The sky was blue but a cracked sort of blue -- shards of trees stuck up in the air everywhere in garish spires. After the big snow storm that left Buffalo without power for a week, 80% of the trees in Buffalo have been ruined. The trees made that place beautiful. It's sad to see them go. Really it's horrifying. I wish I had pictures to share.
I'm hard at work on some new projects for My Brightest Diamond involving more drawings and new music. I will be working heavily on my first official release as well as recording the score to a film starting in February. Here are a few more piano demos for the score:
Oh! And a T-shirt with my drawing on it is available from Asthmatic Kitty records: LINK for a measly twelve bucks! GET OVER THERE AND BUY!
Oct 29 - Good Morning Sunday! Walking around the house in my pajamas -- it's a windy Sunday morning and the house is full of blips and hums from Nobukazu Takemura and me zipping from one idea to another. Over my head I can hear my sneakers banging around in the washing machine -- I'm washing cat pee out of them (a momento left from a dinner party at the Lipscomb's last night: so am I marked? I scrubbed my right heal for 15 minutes last night but still that tart and musty smell is there); over the tumble is a heavy wind that kept me up last night. The sky is full of silver rimmed clouds that, in their persistent motion, reveal the speed of the earth, the thinness of the veil between calamity and peace. The last of the leaves are being ripped from the stem.
Found this bit I wrote on the back of a piece of staff paper last spring:
"I have a memory -- something formed when I was young like my taste for bitter things (olives, plain yogurt, black coffee) formed to sweeten the sour nature of my mother's formation -- I sought stories of her childhood; perhaps I sought to suite a taste developed by a sweet story told early on, and over and over -- and always lacking the sort of detail that aids the story in developing straight forward. The story was simply that my mother's house burned down when she was younger. In my fantasy I grew a grand house with blue twilight walls, dainty curtains, books everywhere, and a small room where my mom, a young child, slept. I imagined the sweet and fair-faced blond and blue of a five year old Joyce, her stuffed animals, her toys, her bowl of apple sauce and fig newtons -- iced tea and wooden games. I imagined the bowl of blue sky and froth of green trees ( the greenest, most shining, green) held by strong and curvy brown trunks (glistening, like melted chocolate) yellow bees, the sound of clothes hissing in the wind (a warm wind) and hills that appeared when one looked for them. I imagined this on thanksgiving or Christmas vacations which we took to our grandmother's house in central NY. The story was that my mother's house had burned down and her family had originally lived across the street from the house I visited. Because my Grammie's house was a modified trailer, and had been added onto only on the back side, and because the bedrooms were on the front of the house and off limits to guests, I grew up with the impression that the bit of land across the street was something secret -- something one shouldn't stare at. I'd only see that property when coming or going from Grammie's house -- being inside with windows that only faced back, I imagined that land, that missing house, with intense longing. I poured all my imaginative power into reconstructing the house of my mother's childhood. My aunt lived with my Grammie in that little trailer house -- with perfume soaked afghans, and particle board doors: the sheers over tiny rooms with beds so near to all four walls, I imagined the rooms must've been built around the beds, or dropped in through an open ceiling by crane. I remember the bathroom pocked with tarnishing mirrors and hairpins. A can of Aquanet. The tub had brown spots from age, from hard water and from one or the other standing on the same spot every morning. My dad played games with us: cards or bridges, or we watched TV in the add-on living room. The back yard could be seen through a plastic covered window in this living room -- its grass was brown and stretched on to the horizon -- it seemed to my imagination that the house sat on the edge of some inhabitable waste-yard and just over the horizon was oblivion. The neighbors had big black angry dogs that barked through the chain-link fence when we approached the house; they were always either barking or chewing some piece of shingle that had fallen from the house. That house was a crumbling piece of coal. There was solace in Grammie's living room at least -- like an observation deck to the mystery flatness of that place. I'd sit in the arm chair with the wooden swan's heads for arm rests and imagine, sitting there in the musk and the paneled walls, the sad of it, that the landscape had been deflated and scorched by fire. No hills, no trees, no friendly people -- just road and this little house on the brink of something bleak, and the invisible mess of earth across the street where paradise had been."
Oct 4 - heavy pelted I went running a couple days ago. I chose to run indoors, on the treadmill, where I can set my speed and time myself. I'm not a better runner when I'm less bored, still I'll complain that boredom keeps me from running more than I do. About 15 minutes in I'm watching the numbers flip thinking in mundane cycles. I've started to sweat, I'm ready to leave. Today I ran home in the rain. I looked forward to the mad dash all day -- every time I looked out the window of my office I thought about the weight of the drops. Maybe not every time... I was surprised how dark could be at 9am, it was 4am dark. Dark enough to fool the crickets into chirping long after sunrise.
Work has been crazy these last few weeks. I'm trying to make time for projects outside of work: a remix for Shara: I'm really very excited about this one! She's given me "Gone Away" from "Bring Me The Workhorse" -- I've completely disassembled it into a series of lyrical moans on loss and longing -- I remember hearing about the writing of Exit Music (For A Film) by Thom Yorke: he was asked to write this song to be played at the end of Romeo & Juliet and his solution was to write them a new ending, to give them the lucidity to abandon their scheme and make for the hills. Anyway -- I'm doing something like this with Gone Away. I'm trying to bring the person back. The lyrical line, where before it acted as an anchor to the drama of the song, holding the listener close to the carpet, starring into the vacuum, into the billowing curtains
A T-shirt with my drawing on it is available through Asthmatic Kitty records: Here for a measly $12! GET OVER THERE AND BUY!
