A short post just to say… “I’m not dead.” I’ve started about twenty fabulously expansive rants and I just run outta gas.

But it’s been too long. So…
1. We’re actually gettin’ near the end. I had all these grand pretensions of posting snippets of notation and audio and all these really cool images of Detroit in it’s hey day and man? I get exhausted even thinking about doing all that multi-media pre-marketing shit. But the music is even better than I thought. It took me a long time to really believe it… It was just so impossible when I started that I didn’t take it all that seriously in some respects.

2. I was warned not to care too much. Which I completely laughed off. What am I? Some kinda method actuh? But at some point, all melodrama aside, the nature of Detroit got to me. It is no exaggeration to say that I’ve made myself clinically depressed getting to know these people. I cannot wait to have this over. It’s all […]

Comedy really is hard.

I recently saw Le triplettes de Belleville again and was reminded of this fact. It’s one of the great achievements in animation—hell in all moviedom. It’s funny, sad, warm and uplifting and it made me realise that very little recent art popular outside of animation has those qualities.

But let’s face it: There has never been much truly great art that is a whole lotta fun.

Do I have to feel like crap in order to have a transcendent experience? (No sex, drugs and rock and roll jokes, please.)

But how many life-changing moments come out of funny business? As much as I go on about Shakespeare this and Shakespeare that, how many of the comedies would I feel bad about missing before shaking off this mortal coil? Zero. From the whiny Hamlets to the homicidal Richards Henrys to complete nutjobs like Lear and Titus, let’s face it: it’s the death that really sticks with a person. All the rest? They feel mostly like what they were meant […]

But ya know why there hasn’t been a ‘Great American Novel’, one with the sweep of Tolstoy’s Russia or Shakespeare’s England, or Dante’s Florence? Because it’s really hard to start with a metaphor and then find a story to build around it. And that delusion seems to me now to be (irony of ironies) quintessentially American… If you build it he will come. If we start with a cool idea, all we need to do is throw enough man-hours at it and POW! To the moon, Alice!

I have never seen a successful integration of rock n’ roll and classical music. The closest to the mark, in my opinion, was ELP’s ‘Pirates’. That’s ten minutes–about proper length for ‘prog’. It seems the longer one goes, the less successful the results.

I keep getting asked how the opera is going. Actually, I’m getting asked less and less because interested parties are sick of waiting. But Detroit proceeds apace. What strains credibility is the lack of audio samples. And that, Dear Reader, is the point of this post.

JUST ME AND THIS LI’L OL’ GUITAR

There is this myth and legend—which used to be true—that songwriters sat down in a room with their geetar and the producer and performer say, “Now that’s a song! Sign that boy up!” But that ended decades ago.

But I, in all my naivete, still feeling twenty years old, that we were back in the age of Hindemith and some old Germanic types with white flowing beards and a monocle, perhaps. I present Herr Professor with a large sheaf of score papers and he hears the score in his head, humming softly at certain particularly cantabile passages. Boy, what a moronic idea.

Today’s music societies are largely technically uneducated. I don’t mean that the way it sounded. Back in the day […]