Have you heard Buckminster? Have you seen Buckminster? You really should. I saw them last night and took this terribly dark, horribly grainy, totally lame picture:
Recent posts
nip/tuck, red pens, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, etc
My MO for today is to finish up an application for the 6 Points Fellowship. Heard of it? It's a 2-year fellowship centered on Jewish issues (whatever that means) with a pretty sizable stipend. Maybe you should apply, too. I'm proposing creating a large-scale composition or suite of works, plus a complementary sound and/or video installation, using letters between Jewish students in New York and Palestinian students in, well, Palestine, as source material. My current problem is to boil the next three paragraphs into 250 words:
"too many dicks on chatroulette"
And if we're talking opening yourself up to trauma, Chatroulette. Seriously. I mean, you are talking to The Stranger, even to multiple The Strangers, connected to you by some kind of anonymous algorithm. Not you, not human, not anything, always with the hope (assumedly) of finding the ideal Other with the parallel dread of finding your worst nightmare. This screenshot pretty much sums it up:
brain dump: sound as trauma, cage and the wreckage of music, etc
In The Pervert's Guide to Cinema, Slavoj Zizek talks about the voice. "Voice," he says, "is not an organic part of the human body...it's coming from somewhere in between your body.
slippery slopes
As reported on Mother Jones and the New York Times, Iceland is considering legislation that will effectively make it a free speech haven. As in, Iceland will be to free speech/journalism what Delaware and Switzerland are to taxes/banks. Or whatever.
hack loop
Ok, somebody hacked Facebook. And Twitter, and MySpace, and a bunch of stuff. It's annoying, but not that annoying, and the amusing thing is that they hacked all these social networking sites into a feedback loop with each other: Facebook goes to MySpace, Twitter goes to Yahoo! Buzz, and so on. It's kind of hilarious, actually. But annoying...but hilarious.
please turn off all cellphones
Made a little edit of the manatee deck video I took at the Atlantic Center for the Arts and realized that I neglected to turn my stupid cellphone off...you can hear the dings and dongs of me receiving e-mails and text messages throughout the video. I also sneeze and bump into the camera at one point.
cold war
On advice of a friend, I recently started reading American Pastoral. It took me a while to get into it, and as soon as I was into it, I lost it. I found it - it's about 10 inches from me right now, in a very obvious place. While my book was lost, sitting in an obvious place but not the correct obvious place, I started reading Notes From the Underground. I like Notes From the Underground better. Much better. Does this have far-reaching implications?
CMA headbanger
Here's a little head-banger on the application guidelines for the Chamber Music America New Jazz grant:
In the written application, the ensemble will be asked to:
• list the ensemble’s public performances in the past 5 years with accompanying documentation
or print-outs from a web-site
Submitted by Anonymous on Wed, 02/17/2010 - 18:24.
or print-outs from a web-site showing the listing...I've done that. Something to prove the thing really happened.
do you think a copy of a mass
Submitted by jacob on Thu, 02/18/2010 - 12:28.
do you think a copy of a mass e-mail might function? i think in some cases that's the only "proof" i have...
jacob wick
jacobwick.info
jacob.wick@gmail.com
flyers would probably
Submitted by Anonymous on Wed, 02/10/2010 - 11:52.
flyers would probably suffice.
anderson cooper in a vacuum, part 2
More from Anderson Cooper's Twitter stream from Haiti today. I don't know why I love this stuff so much and I definitely have no clue what I'm going to do with it. I wrote - well, scribbled - a very, very rough piece for even though you're only 9 to play last weekend...we'll see. Anyway, without further adieu:
failures of confidence & a proposal i didn't make
This weekend I had a bit of an episode. I went to FEAST in order to present an idea I described in an earlier post, the Peer Learning Institute; I had submitted a proposal, one of 18, and had rehearsed, sort of, a little stump speech about intellectual emancipation being more than just a clunkier, more academic-sounding version of "free your mind;" and so on. What I failed to consider was that presenting an idea, a distinctly non-musical, non-improvised, non-compositional idea that certainly did not involve me hiding behind the trumpet in any way, form, or function, was something I had never done before.
mammoth rant
Great show last night at Douglass Street Music Collective: Mike Pride's From Bacteria to Boys, the Nate Wooley Quintet, even though you're only 9. It was very jazzy - "jazzy" - whatever. I mean, composed pieces that swing occasionally and involve chords that are in some way interpreted by soloists. Speaking broadly, I can't stand "modern" jazz, I really like most things recorded before 1975, I only play jazz with close friends, etc.
anderson cooper in a vacuum
Every once and a while, something pops up that really makes me appreciate Twitter. Today, one of those, from cable news phenom/occasional heartthrob Anderson Cooper:
@andersoncooper: From ac: it was a bit surreal
This can be taken two ways, either as hilariously vague and unhelpful or as maybe the one most relevent piece of journalism to come out of that country...
winning
Got it down to 213!
Letters is an attempt to engage with perhaps the preeminent Jewish issue of our time, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Both as a Jew and as gay man, I am very, very alarmed by the blind hatred infesting both sides of the debate. I am particularly sensitive to this sort of blind hatred – it is the seed of homophobia. Homophobia is a hatred blind to the humanity of gay people; homophobia cannot exist if the humanity of gay people is ever considered. It persists because a majority of Americans do not know, or do not know that they know, any gay people, and can therefore continue hating the idea of homosexuals while never having to reconcile it with the humanity of gay people. I am afraid that the wall between the West Bank and Jerusalem, coupled with a dire lack of unbiased media reporting and an overload of vitriol on both sides, creates the perfect atmosphere for blind hatred. Since neither side has to encounter the other on a daily basis, each can continue to hate the idea of Palestinians, the idea of Jews, without ever having to reconcile it with their humanity. The Letters project is an attempt, however small and however removed, to begin to re-engage Jews and Palestinians in each other’s humanity.
jacob wick
jacobwick.info
jacob.wick@gmail.com