on dit bravo

William T. Vollmann wins 2005 National Book Award for Europe Central

New York, NY/11/17/2005
William T. Vollmann was presented with the 2005 National Book Award for fiction on November 16 at an awards dinner in New York City.

'First Saint of the Fucked-With CD'

i don't know why i keep refraining myself from sampling Tone's non-tones directly i always end up copying his music through biased paths anyway


i don't know why the word "fuck" always comes to mind when i or others mention his music

i just got hold of this 2003 assemblage for NYC label Asphodel and it's just as great as all the other records i already have and worship

worship him

do

torso soundhole

i had this nightmare this afternoon while taking a nap on my couch

i was composing elegant music, everybody kept congratulating me for making elegant music, at last

oh how i hate sunday afternoons

cubase

"Well, often I did unpremeditated things in those days, as I have said. Once, from the top of the Spanish Steps in Rome, for no reason except that I had come upon a Volkswagen van full of them, I left hundreds and hundreds of tennis balls bounce one after the other to the bottom, every which way possible.
Watching how they struck tiny irregularities or worn spots in the stone, and changed direction, or guessing how far across the piazza down below each one of them would go"

(David Markson, Wittgenstein's Mistress)

next morning is once again the morning i empty our Human Refuse bags and the trash bags and the bag from the bottom of the sleek metal hole

oh vous savez moi le foot

's all a matter of hoodies

my machines

tout crash

sur "electric" la 6 il y a une cloche et la batterie fait presque oumpah oumpah

des handclaps sur "ねるいmachin"

takeshi n'a jamais aussi mal chanté

connais bien ce riff là déjà

et puis il y a du celluloide autour de la pochette découpée en petits carrés, sais pas pourquoi, elle aurait dû être... dorée d'or doré

pourtant, oh là là, love it all the way.

i'm still, always a SUCKER for boris, a heavy one, that is

nb

vous avez vu ce qui se passe, là je m'enveloppe de 家畜人ヤプー je n'ai jamais lu rien d'aussi cruel et j'ai un peu peur je préfère faire danser les filles

quand elles posent leurs trucs fluos, par terre

headline is: schizophrenia held useful for evolution

coltrane, guapo, ayler, sleep, oneida, vibracathedral orchestra, white out

not gold, uranium

where is the gold? where has the gold gone?

got a letter from your sister

yes, it is








(my favorite song has to be the demo version of true confessions, though, because you can hear the bassline more distinctly)

danger, stranger

i like slightly embarassing artists


i saw architecture in helsinki play live yesterday evening, ten or eleven people constantly prancing here and about the stage, shouting in unison, gyrating and rotating in front of the mics, most of them not your regular overlooked musicians with the regular fringy haircut, either too chubby or trembling on their feet and emanating a lovely odor of uncertainty and freedom, and i just loved them for this (and their great, great songs, but that' s another story, and i'm weighing up you have all the wonderful in case we die in your record collection, and if you don't, now you know you should), or, did i? i mean, they do look like a high school big band playing at the end of the year's party, they do cover wilson pickett and the zit remedy (i don't want to embarass you, reader, but it indeed comes from this canadian tv show), and they really are embarassing at moments. there's some weird sense of affection, tenderness invoked, and it's really weird to feel that way at a rock concert. is it part of the show or have our artcore indie minds mutated in such a way that we love to see people that exactly look like our best friends prancing onstage like they are having fun at a party?

the thing with architecture in helsinki's weird attitude is that their music itself is not particularly sweet; it is fast, shattered, dense, witty, demanding at time, interspersing bursts of weirdness inside cheerful tunes. yet all the danger's gone when they play live, and you end up wondering if your own cheer wasn't just communicated by that cheerful fatty whirling around like a stumbling star who acted like it was her first time on a stage. the gap between the music and the people playing it is really huge. there is absolutely none of the intense sense of awe, admiration, grandeur involved when you're witnessing a concert or listening to music by great self-controlled artists, Smog, Stephin Merritt, Lou Reed, Bob Dylan, you name them.
reading edith frost's enormous blog, i feel a similar tension, a similar schizophrenia at work. frost is a rather embarassing person (she describes herself as "rollerskating enthusiast" and she's a webdesigner, for god's sake), she like to take pictures of herself with her friends. yet her records, her songs, are extremely precious to me. i've been listening to her music constantly for five years. she's definitely one of my favorite songwriter and performer of all time. and her new album, "it's a game", on first listen and for the first time, really looks like how she likes to show herself on this damn blog (i wrote a lengthy review in the new issue of chronicart, in case you're interested), i.e., fragile, insecure, imposing, loathsome at times. is it a big let-down? the thing is, it's not, at all. i love all the songs. more than that: i cherish every single one of them, with some curious sense of embarassment and affection added. frost desecrates herself all along, playing the part of the fooled lover with the acid liver, and displaying all the flaws of her voice with no prudishness. she is embarassing. she is amazing. she's all too amazing because she is embarassing. where is the danger in that, you should ask. what is that kind of art, that involves our selves in such a way that it asks for our softness and leniency, our attachment, and in the end, our friendship, asking us to shout along instead of our admiration?

if only i had the nerves

Msrs

Tomonori Hayashibe

&

D. F. Wallace



standing in line

unrelenting commitment to what might be best described as synaptic verisimilitude

neural-based

re-create the jagged contours of "real life" via Möbius-strip shapes elastic enough to accommodate vertiginous digressions and multiple points of view but that, in reality, whatever that means, bears little resemblance to realism as traditionally depicted

the fundamental and mighty authority of skill

both feeling unrestrained urges to show off, constantly

sans les mains

they are, theoretically, my two favorite contemporary artists.

am i making too much of them?

i shall get back to that later (i should be, constantly).

currently enjoying far more trivial pleasure with paul mccartney & wings in a wildlife scenery

and am lengthily falling in love with smash but i'm so relentlessly and shamefully jealous i hate to admit it

dance in full-body muffle, a new sound is upon the world

I told you that already, reading Notable American Women by this

aerialist
slash
maven
of a writer (here appearing in disguise)
it seems the guy's been drilling holes in my mind. here's an example from page 83:

"1935
Boston widow Claire Dougherty is arrested on her doorstep October 3 by detective Sherman Greer as she tries to swallow a coded message. In prison, she refuses to speak and appears to suffer at hearing any kind of sound, a condition termed Listener's Disease, in which even sounds produced by her own body appear to cause her agony. She must wear a soundproof suit and a life helmet. State doctors report that there is nothing unusual in Dougherty's hearing, but they agree to relieve her with a quiet cell in the prison and a full-body muffle, later termed a Claire Mitten and worn by young girls who are sickened or distraught at the sound of their own voices. Before she dies, in November, she writes in a letter to her daughter that"...a new sound is upon the world. We have erred greatly and will be killed for it. Look to the soil, for the sound to me was beneath it. Walk slow or do not walk. Hide. Duck. Listen." Detective Greer, the arresting officer, will die a year later, complaining of a "sharp noise" in the water near his home. His cause of death is listed as exhaustion. The two deaths will launch several studie of disease caused by sound, and Greer's wife will later appear in the streets of Boston wearing an executioner's hood. Her body, upon examination, will reveal heavily damaged ears".

This may seem somewhat trivial, but I value it incalculably inspirational. This extract indeed almost sounds as an explanatory plot about what I'm trying to achieve in my so-called art, and Marcus seems to be writing about noise only for language's sake, and in a somewhat hazardous manner. Believe it or not, but I'd love my music to talk about, recycle, evoke sound that spreads and kills - and pop music is fraying and killing people by millions already through vibrations and data, and mostly the ones who are not listening to it but who suffer from its residua, its pernicious resonances and words.
I really don't want to w.a.s.t.e your time but the horns

are clarioning already.

Next in line, structureless-wise, might be Gilbert Simondon, but his two books are painfully hard to dig out.

anyone can go pink

big news

title: "the monolith"

subtitle: i was only a bit of math for him to do

date of release:tba

these pages have no numbers

well, here i am in my new flat, you should come and visit, and i've spent so much time marvelling at ben marcus' notable american women, robert coover's "heart suit" cardgame story in issue n°16 of mcsweeney's or asva's futurists against the ocean and installing and scribbling little words in my notebook (some song about a unicorn without a horn) and simply enjoying the fact that a decent living space enables me to leave records spinning for more than one song or two because my stereo system is not ten centimeters from my forehead and i haven't even taken the time to copy out all the draft ideas i wanted to here. i've received a couple of insulting mails, also, for no reason. dismissing them in oblivion takes quite some time, as is curtain hanging. next in line was a discussion about gender power being involved in chorus repetition, as the ones ruining street legal, you know, the scheme of the lead singer announcing big ideas which are being obediently repeated by lavish expressionless ideas, what happens in the mind of an artist actually craving for this kind of scheme? contemporary r'n'b goes the same way, turning all these dull asian-afroamerican half-breds into vibrato machines to accompany big male smart mouths in a weird super hetero sexist waltz of egos. thank g*d we have missy to actually rap (rapping is indeed a very much empowered and gendered activity in US hip-hop - not to sound vainly glorious and dismissive about the realm of the past but where are the foxy brown and lil'kim and l'trimm that made the rap game such a varied and exciting one?) and produce and lead her art business. the other day at a friend's house we were listening to kate bush and there was this big chorale of male voices submissively echoing the diva's weirdness and it troubled me the other way round. i've always loved indie rock because it discarded the issue by making actual duets something more than a selling concept, carpenters or barbra streisand vs. gibbs bros-like. i guess electronic pop music took it all a step or two backwards, systematically pushing the discreet girlfriend at the microphone, with the smart might music-creator controlling it all behind the computer. eventually, you have to credit a constantly expanding musical figure such as sufjan stevens' for completely blurring the gender origins of his choirs. i just love the fact that you can never tell if this or that range in his elegiac chorales is sung by a girl or a boy. they're all mixed. they're all holding the same stick, at the same time. they hold hands. they don't fight for power. same idea goes for gruntling goddess runhild gammelsæter, who used to sing in the shortlived thorr's hammer (you can also hear on sunn o)))'s white one) - she's the only extreme metal singer i can think of who doesn't bring romantic appeal to big guys' manly mayhem but who actually growls as well as she sings in clear voice, in a really disturbing way, and with all the rigid schemes i have in mind when it comes to musical genres and genre distribution, i've thought for a long time that these howls and grunts were courtesy of one of the guys of the band. now i need to figure out why i love these lavish voices in japanese indie pop that all sound the same so much, especially when they're super lavish like coated with plastic (you can mention any singer in any band on usagi-chang, softly! or contemode, they do all sound the same, tending to get even less expressive when they accompany a guy's voice, as in aprils or macdonald duck eclair, or even when the music goes really noisy, as is the case on eel's latest little prince album), and why i can't stand most of mainstream j-pop's idols because most of them happen to have distinctive, expressive big voices (riingo s. is the exception). does it come from some kind repressed appeal to tamed, submissive characters, especially in the context of a super patriarchal society such as the japanese one? in the meantime of an answer, i'd just like to end this silly business by saying that i really love when brother and sister sing together and properly collaborate (another battle of power at stake, in this case), as rufus and martha wainwright seem to enjoy doing, more and more, these days (and i'm pretty sure that this doesn't have anything to do with the fact that rufus is gay, yes i am). Now, back to tables and chairs and curtains and electric supply.

i see big crests big breasts

because i've moved in this new flat i haven't been able to publish whatever i've been having in mind in the last two weeks or such and my website is down and i can't do anything about it for now because my internet connexion is not working yet but this is all in the works i promise soon you'll be reading if you will about america and hymns, about tenniscoats again, about the use of women whispers and girl choirs and mysoginy and how a listening experience can be totally altered by space and chausse-pieds (english word anyone?), about denis johnson and what is noir