taliesin's log (voices of women)

mardi 6 juin 2006

Sounds good: space, time and music blogs
A makeover for me, my wardrobe and my Mac

Things have generally needed dressing up. It's making for an expensive month, overhauling both my computer and my wardrobe! I had a nasty nausea attack on realising there was no question of putting off a refit for me any longer, since it meant further spending, but the sickness wore off on remembering that my financial woes are a worry of the past if I remain wise. I can be remarkably slow on the uptake when it comes to my own good news. Worse, I've usually left such long intervals between outings to buy clothes that I forgot how when I pluck up the courage to do it, even such shopping can even be fun.
That observation is perhaps for my personal edification since people say noting things down helps you remember them. But here's fact one from my experience: the average survival time of modern clothes before the holes are beyond mending is five and a half years. Fact two: either the intolerable holes appear in everything simultaneously or you see them yourself all at once. The latter might seem marginally more plausible, but there have been regular such intervals.

I've always put buying clothes among things to delay and endure in sprees, but I no longer want to keep it on a list of commended long-term cyclical activities. I can precisely date the last time I went on a shopping bout that set assistants asking polite questions like "Are you getting a new wardrobe?"
It was in the final days of the French franc. After December 2000, I left France to work in South Africa for a few months and on my return, we had euros. This made calculating price increases tricky during my last such expedition, but they haven't risen exponentially in the way that changes in computing have made audioblogs possible and widely popular in less time than I wear out a set of clothes.
Just after my latest adventure, a woman in the newsagent's shop was buying big envelopes and complaining about the customs hassle in posting stuff to the United States inside them. François, the owner, said: "Pas d'anti-américanisme primaire!"
"I'm suffering anti-American side-effects," I chipped in, because I was still miffed at having had to open a new payment card account to be able to benefit from sales prices. Everyone knows the French economy is in a dire state, yet we constantly have plastic cards foisted on us, just like people tell me it's now hard to get by without them in America.

Sizing up a sound box
While I've always been so silly about buying clothes that I can note personal wear-and-tear statistics and guess they're probably much the same for all of us, what gets me down is my dislike of being pushed into consumption. I became aware of that pressure in the hype surrounding my choice of a new Mac and what it can do for me musically.
The biggest partition on the more energetic eMac is called "sound box". This is hardly original, but that's going to be its main job, and part of it includes handling what's on people's audioblogs with greater ease than its predecessor. Just as musicians make up new social rules as they go by mostly having their own websites and being very generous with their work, a lot of audioblogs are a healthy counter-reaction to market forces.

Ghyslaine's card It's hard to stay sane in a very sick society without music and a few of the analogies musicians and listeners like me are drawing from it for life when we hear what's going on around us. I've already posted a pick of "podcasts" and when I get to what's in a handful of audioblogs, that's another occasion to remind uncertain visitors what podcasts are, since they're still quite new.
Quite why Kami Knake, meanwhile, drawls her opening remarks at Bands Under The Radar only to "L.A", where she happens to live, escapes me. Perhaps she doesn't she expect anybody in France to be interested in some of the music she plays, along with nasal ramblings that seem to give her a complex about talking too much?

The power in a podcast
I've asked Kami to turn off the default "play" option on her website, leaving a jokey observation about what it would have taken technically and financially in the 1970s to put two of her at once into the listener's sound box the way she does. Probably I'm not alone in visiting her site to check her music playlists at the same time as I listen.
But I would have have to listen for nine days and nights non-stop to exhaust what's in my podcast selection on the computer, which is tiny compared everything out there. My preferred programmes already take up almost 12 gigabytes of space on an external hard drive.
The recent exponential growth of data storage space bears no relation to prices. It astonishes me and has made possible things we could only fantasise about fewer than six permanent changes of my clothes ago. I'm working on an eMac that has a partition of about 144 GB and one of around four, which is there for some small tasks (with the old "classic" operating system on it). In French, by the way, that word partition isn't just a noun and a verb about dividing rooms or a computer's hard disk into separate bits; it's also the historical term everyone kept for a score, or sheet with musical notation on it.

A mere decade ago, it would have taken more than three of the first beautifully designed iMacs that wooed me into a love-hate relationship with Apple just to hold those digitalised "radio shows" in my podcast library. I dare not imagine how many dozen home computers and external drives I'd have needed for the whole music library.
Back in 1976, huge professional databases were needed to store the amount of music I can keep on my desk. Yet though I remember this and the excitement of working in places with such libraries, it still didn't occur to me that one new eMac would give me so many extra gigabytes on top of what I already had to be able to tell Steve, a fellow at work who asked if I'm going to have enough space: "Yes, and I've got plenty to back up data for my daughter and for friends."

'Tout va vite. Trop vite.'
While this capacity exponentially to pack more and more into less room is, to my mind, one of the most welcome aspects of developing computer technology, I'm hard put to imagine how music files can now get smaller without insufferable quality loss until someone invents a way of doing it. When that happens, how many of us will be able to afford it?
The music CD was a huge industrial investment, with a massive market organisation to sell it. People will long love their compact disks and vinyl like most of us cherish our old books. Still, the power of computers and the personal data space readily available to millions -- and thus already cause for competition among media moguls -- is more than a means of storing music alongside which the older ones will co-exist.
What is becoming increasingly popular in uneasy times is the new way of pooling resources, alongside new incentives to musical creation that overdo the ease of it. A Log chapter in which I sought, via music, to capture the Zeitgeist of this turn of the century may have long, but it's borne out by these phenomena too.
As a former musician, I welcome the apparent ability of this particular Mac to ease me back into making music again. I missed an activity that a few years ago seemed definitively halted by repetitive stress injury, but what needs stressing is the way that minor handicap for life came of trying to do too much at once.

"Aujourd'hui tout va vite. Trop vite*," read, before a word fell off, the collage postcard shown, which was made by my first love, Ghyslaine, in 1980. She was so right, I am no speed freak. In recent years, that timeworn, reglued card has got a place it deserves opposite another gift on my shelf of "soul-food books". The other object is also a collage, with a small mirror in the middle.
I don't know whether this was the intention and the mirror is of minimal practical use, but set amid a brightly coloured patchwork of little bits of sticky paper, it reminds me when I look at it simply to try to be myself in a patchwork world, keeping a harmonious place without too much room for introspection! Hefty music books have meanwhile all drifted into the bedroom-cum-study. Yet I still want to slow down more.

This Mac is my first to come with the Garage Band programme that has given birth to a host of sites on the Net. The rediscovered teenager in me who used to make up big compositions in his head would have been overjoyed at the idea of fitting a symphony orchestra into a cardboard box the size of a thick book.
But here's the freaky side of facility: "Just break open a Jam Pack," the blurb says, "and you’ll find all the talent you need -- hundreds of professional backup musicians and sound engineers at your disposal 24/7."
Many Apple publicity gimmicks include "Just do this" and "Just do that", usually meaning, "Just give us a bit more of your money, and you'll be able to work miracles," but with this constant emphasis on ease.

Nevertheless, the real idea in making music accessible to everyone outweighs what might be a prejudice against facility I've felt and often struggled against since the 1960s. If the Zeitgeist is truly about people searching for the deepest roots they can find, when times haven't been so tough for almost a century (in ways I described at length on May 19), then I shan't mind if Garage Band and more sophisticated programmes take me plenty of time to explore.
I've also contacted Grove Music Online about a trial subscription. The learned Grove Dictionary (Wikipedia) doesn't come cheap in online form. It costs £50 (about 73 euros or 93 dollars a quarter). France adds almost a fifth of the price in the country's value added tax on cultural artefacts. That's a lot of VAT; everyone, including me, gripes about nearly 20 percent extra on anything from a computer to a blank recordable CD.
We really shouldn't moan, though, if the funds thus raised are genuinely used to help pay creative people and new means of spreading their craft around from which anyone can benefit. So I want to give Grove Music Online a three-month trial as a deeper learning tool and resource, partly for me to revise my homework and better understand the women on the Log and partly for the lending library I now work with at the Factory.

Old music by new means
I feel better as a communicative and humanistic animal in decent clothes, there's no doubt of that, but most other recent outlay has been an investment in my creativity and reaping the harvest of those who want to share with us.
All the same, some of the best things still come for free. When made by people who hold our attention, podcasts are a genial use of the exponential growth in space and above all in freedom, both personal and economic.
Nearly all podcasts, which are like radio broadcasts you can keep on your portable music player, do come for free and you can use them for time-travel. If at the computer, I like listening to what's new in podcasts, as I do with the sample CDs that come with magazines while I'm focussed mainly on my own craft, because the musical side of my consciousness yells "Stop and listen properly" if something really good comes along.
While I'm always saying that comparisons are odious, a striking amount of what I hear in podcasts presenting new music reminds me invariably of what musicians were already doing in the 1960s and 1970s, but they then needed resources few could afford without some sort of patronage.

I was working late to some dreamy electronic sounds given the overall title 'File under Insomnia', in the most recent hour-long podcast from Rotterdam's "TC" at Spacemusic. TC says, by the way, that his next, 60th podcast is going to a "best of" before he takes a break from one of the most enterprising shows around. Given his broad beat, I'm expecting quite a trip down memory lane and wonder if TC knows it.
It was odd to hear two tracks from a guy called Recue, or Riku Annala (home) and his 'Between Stations' EP, and realise that what's readily available via the musician's site and on today's "ambient" shelves is much the same kind of sound as was broadcast 30 years ago late at night on the BBC's Radio 3. When I worked there, what was previously called the Third Programme, along with what was considered "Light" (now Radio 2) and the Home Service (Radio 4), were still all we had unless you were a radio ham or young and adventurous. The BBC's popular Radio 1 was the baby of the family and snatched its presenters from pirate radio stations I've mentioned before.

Most people thought that Radio 3 very highbrow, a far cry from what it is today. If you had my luck to work there that was rubbish. Some people were very scholarly as well as bright and a few had the worst kinds of closed minds about music, but most were good fun. If anybody of us knew how much the popular styles of 2006 would echo what was then being broadcast as 'Music in Our Time', I wasn't among them.
We rarely bothered to speculate on the future of music and few who did imagined that the technology would make it possible, let alone popular, for people to produce and disseminate the kinds of noise people loved to hate with their personal computers. Still, the occasional hangovers from our almost nightly drinking bouts could be hell!
People were too involved in the complexity of what they were doing to have an ear to the 21st century. Guests who made music very much like Recue and the others on Spacemusic 59 needed big modern studios or had to be grant students at places like France's highly rated Research Institute in Acoustics and Music. IRCAM's Multimedia Library (English-language entrance) must in 2006 be among the biggest resources of musical info packed into digital space in the world. Those who were into IRCAM in its early days crossed the Channel from England when there was no three-hour train ride but the salt spray was a good remedy for the evenings in the BBC Club.

Ghyslaine gave me her collage including that bit, "Everything goes fast. Too fast," in a year when the pace of things was comparatively still sluggish! Nobody called electronic music "dub" and "ambient" usually meant "surround sound", certainly not easy listening.
I imagine Recue already knows that his audiences in 1980 would have numbered in the hundreds if he was very lucky. Nearly all of them would have been fellow musicians or probably seen by most people, like I was, as eccentric intellectuals.

Yet today Recue and hundreds of thousands like him have a whole planet at their fingertips. If my daughter hadn't seen the sea, maps and aircraft, I don't know what she'd think separates France and England, so she has to go into a tunnel for a good quarter of an hour. And today the Kid and me and you and everyone is, if the law so declares, a pirate. As Apple avoids saying, "Just make me a copy, please."
If you were silly enough to believe Apple's advertisements, we can all be musicians too, provided we "just" did whatever they suggest. The trouble is that if you lack the craft and skills, you can't just do anything of the slightest interest to anyone but yourself: that is inevitably the downside in whatever people try to convince you is new and wonderful.

My kind of culture
My new computer and what it allows me to do prolonged a pause for reflection, aware also that it's been music and a desire for harmony with others and above all in myself that sent me out to buy new clothes. I had no strong external stimulus like a trip to Africa, which was the case the last two times, but maybe that patchwork mirror gave me the same view of my holes as expressed by those who said they mattered.
Hence, too, the changes in the blogroll. There was a section called "my kind of culture". That has gone. Music itself does quite enough with space, time, memory and energy to be my kind of culture. The links worth keeping have moved elsewhere in the list, while the new part will go on doing what it does already, sharing the musical culture of others in all its diversity ... and making more room for the men.
My subject matter obviously doesn't mean leaving my fellow man out of decisions like selecting the kind of audioblogs in which I hear the Zeitgeist at work, especially since if you were to believe some of what you read, it's still men who make most of the big moves when it comes to shaping the defining spirit of our times. That's another rather sad and silly perspective, but Lilith is doing her best to even the balance.

_______

*"Today, everything goes fast. Too fast."
The other line on what's left of Ghyslaine's card reads "Hope rises. Let's respect its fragility." The cartoon is by Wilhelm Schlote.

7:18:46 PM your views? []

jeudi 1 juin 2006

In a mood for the inner shaman
The weather has turned chilly, rips appeared in my remaining presentable pairs of trousers, and my Mac crashed so thoroughly and then refused to start up and show any life until the third day of fixing -- more than just a battery replacement -- that I know the computer is on borrowed time.
In sum, I prefer to rejoice in a rare piece of good news, when a far-off friend mailed me to say something I'd done for her was right on the mark but "officially insane", and also I'd like to explain that being "normal" is coming rather hard to me! I think this is an entry about two sides of one coin.
My mood for days has steadily been subdued and one of slight depression, with the rare dose of absurd humour. In my reading, I find most psychiatrists consider a mild depression the state of a human mind best attuned to what is commonly taken for reality: the world as we're able to share our views of it.

A week ago, I published a look back over a first full year when the Log has been devoted to the 'Voices of Women' by name (though this was really only an extension of what had already happened in practice), with an ear to the future. I removed that entry, for my plans seemed premature until I know what is going on in my heart.
Being a man who is held often to be good at listening to the hearts of his friends and enjoys trying to hear everything he can learn of the musicians who come up here, it struck me how rarely I've directly expressed my own mood unless it's been in the Orchard, regarding the big highs and lows of my strong bipolar cycles.
In talking with other people, I've also frequently adopted the style of a sensitive outsider who can empathise with them deeply, draw conclusions and make suggestions if they are troubled from what seems like a detached viewpoint.

Getting out of the emotional heat

Today it appears that, in a way, I have been an outsider!
Strange moods have affected me since I stopped taking a serotonin regulator my therapist contends became counter-productive at some stage in many years of treatment. I had to start adjusting to new medication for my brain chemistry, after in March entering the manic phase of a seven-month cycle just before plunging into the most crippling depression of my life.
I shan't repeat what I've posted about having to learn more and fast about manic-depressive illness and devising a strategy to beat it, on being warned that a third cycle even more extreme than my past two could kill me, possibly literally, but very likely figuratively by putting me away for a long time.

Yet the discovery of what I can only take for normal emotions has been very hard to endure and constantly disconcerts me, combined as often it has been with sporadic surges of mood-tinged memories up into my conscious mind at unexpected moments. These have concerned several periods in my chequered life.
For a couple of nights last week, I couldn't sleep for trying to process this new data and make sense of it, and I feel there's a foot planted now on the lid of a pressurised can that's going to blow off when I let it, which I simply must do next week with the help of a bomb disposal expert.

I have to be prudent in my choices of music, like when coming out of a "downer" in which I couldn't take any music at all. So given my constant tendency to explore what's new in my ever-growing library of mainly women musicians, I'm relieved that the "magic iPod finger" can usually be depended on to pick the right voice. However, my "year-ender" won't appear on the Log, because I know what other people I've been reading lately mean when they say their weblogs seem to become to-do lists.
It's best instead, as Kathryn Petro showed in a typically enjoyable entry on a visit to a wildlife reserve, simply to do or even just to be. She found: "My body felt it could breathe" (A Mindful Life). But I want my mind to be able to breathe easy again. This entails telling my therapist that accepting my strategy for recovery, giving me new medication and advice about that and then saying "Good luck and get on with it!" isn't quite enough.

It takes more than drugs to heal a mind

The new therapist hasn't gone guite this far. But I suspect, all the same, that while his approach has been better than others I first saw but won't name and we get on well, that we're both victims of a trend in "modern society" that Kay Redfield Jamison warned against on just page three of her trailblazing book, 'Touched With Fire' (an Amazon France link this time).
I prefer to be in mutually active relationships of exchange, rather than taking all the initiatives, but therapists do have a tendency to sit back and wait. After a few lines about the "fine madness" and simplistic notions of bipolar disorder in people of an artistic temperament, Kay wrote that:
"labelling as manic-depressive anyone who is unusually creative, accomplished, energetic, intense, moody, or eccentric both diminishes the notion of individuality within the arts and trivializes a very serious, often deadly illness. There are other reasons for such concerns. Excesses of psycho-analytic speculation, along with other abuses of psychobiography, have invited well-deserved ridicule. Due to the extraordinary advances in genetics, neuroscience, and psychopharmacology, much of modern psychiatric thought and practice has moved away from the earlier influences of psychoanalysis and towards a more biological perspective. Some fear that the marked swing from psychoanalysis to psychopharmacology is too much, too soon, and that there exists the risk of a similar entrenchment of ideas and perspectives."
This is what nearly happened to me.
I know so much about some mental disorders and getting help to inspect one's parts and put them together again that sometimes it's easy to feel that others have too much faith in my ability to come up with answers! At the same time, however, I know a part of me has a lot of the answers. It's also the bit that helps other people and there's no reason to believe it's any different for you.

I'm no longer interested in the practice of psychoanalysis (apart from a soft spot for Carl Jung -- Wikipedia -- and acceptance of principles of some importance) because experience has given me an aversion as strong to people who lock themselves into "schools of thought" as musicians usually hate being classified by critics and narrowly labelled on store shelves and in magazines.
I want helpful therapy. Strong empathy with the moods of others, usually in circumstances when they need to talk about these feelings and want help, hasn't given me enough tools to understand my own moods, since I've got nothing subjective with which to compare "normal". So next week, I plan to take an emotional "crash course", since I can live with the memories, on condition I can be confident what I feel never means I'm headed for an even worse cycle.

Throughout this whole episode, I've heard more sense out of honest and ordinary people than from those who wrote some of the lousy books I've skimmed and from psychiatrists with rigid minds. I've been able to talk openly with cooks in the canteen at the Factory who always spoil me, colleagues who have been understanding and interested in my views on healing with music and in society rather than some institution, friends who say simple and wise things, and my down-to-earth general practitioner.
I guess I've frequently been good at helping people live with emotional extremes and through periods they find hard going because those very extremes have been my habitual territory! In pressing me to become a teacher and use the music Log as my prime means of doing this, some have also called me a bit of a witch-doctor and a shaman. This I'm finally prepared also to accept, because two things have happened since March to reinforce my sense of what's in our souls.
I've said very little about the second "massive spiritual experience" that accompanied a total brain burnout. The doctor didn't put it on my medical record as such this time round when I asked him to refrain. I've been thinking, too, about a talk with a friend in Africa -- not the Lauren who thinks what I do is "officially insane"! -- regarding her loneliness and dislocation and how people best deal with madness and purportedly deranged people in so-called primitive societies.

What people in such traditional societies, close to nature, do not habitually do to those with disorders of the mind and the soul is put them away. In modern France, though, I encountered resistance from some health professionals and even one or two people chose to me to my determination to heal within society, which is absolute. Next week my therapist will again find himself helping out with a strategy I have taken to him: "This is the plan, will it work?"
If I can listen to it, you see, a part of me knows what to do.

The medicine-man inside us all

I believe this bit of me is my inner shaman, my personal medicine-man, and that it's the same part that found me Sheryl Crow and Natalie Imbruglia's 'Left of the Middle' to listen to last week, the album of a spirited woman in her early 20s. She is singing about a new start in the world.
Oh, I could readily identify with that desire! Natalie asks 'Leave Me Alone', rejects the second-hand opinions of others and trusts to her 'Intuition'! I had no idea she was going to title a song for it, but have used the word recently and split it into the bits that apply in what I need to do: "in-" for the inside where I went to find myself and get over the very mad month of March, and "-tuition" for the rest. Put together, that is our knowledge within.
Our knowledge within. This is the essence of my second spiritual insight. It brings me no closer to using the word "God" when I can simply talk about the "Big L", love, and all its power. It would be hard to find verbal language for what I discovered in "that place" in March, when I ceased to sense my own ego again, but I know it is shared ground.

The details of what I did for Lauren, as sometimes I can for people regardless of the fact they may be an ocean away and we've not been in touch for ages, are our business only, but I just knew something about her situation and mailed her to tell her so and what she might do. She wrote back:
"it is officially insane that you know how to say exactly the right thing at exactly the right time, nick. (...)
was re-reading yr long missive this ayem [...], my eyes straying only slightly but coming back to the points where you hit the nail so head on it's a wonder i don't suggest you get into spiritual carpentry (no that was not a jesus reference, just so's you know, i know you don't do that collective monotheism bandwagon thing)..."

No, I don't like bandwagons, nor do I have major woodwork or building plans. The only screwdrivers and sledgehammers with which I'm well acquainted are medication for the mind, the kind of which I approve and the drugs I've known and hated because they left me feeling artificially "better" but more cut off from others and myself. I've always said I don't regret the 14 years I had to forego any sex life, but that's no longer true. I just hope never to regret certain outcomes of the decision...
On seeing a musical connnection last year, I felt it was to state of the obvious about the common "languages" of the art and sexual activity, but now I know better and so appreciate encouragement I've been given to go on through that particular door into Lilith's domain.

"Non, je ne regrette rien" is the brave kind of thing a woman like Edith Piaf (Wikipedia) could sing. The Log is no place for the kind of abusive psychobiography I dislike as much as Kay does, but it could fairly be said that regret is a normal emotion and Piaf had a very disturbed life. It can be courageous to claim you don't regret what you can't change.
The famous song is about significant memories, with their strong emotional component. I have a new and subtle emotional palette to learn -- including grieving events and losses I haven't yet because I never could -- and strong recollections with which I need to come to terms. For the moment, I know that my life has been lived close to one or the other extremes of feeling relatively invulnerable or broken up yet again, which meant my finger found Jann Arden's 'Time of Mercy' tonight, with songs like 'Give Me Back My Heart', where she goes straight to the point! I admire people who have lived all their lives with the real vulnerability I currently feel. What I want from Azoulay is more in my "tool-kit"!

A tool-kit for personal tuition
This was a tool-kit I got from Kay Jamison and Azoulay's retired predecessor ... and from that inner shaman of mine. It belongs in the part of my being Lauren and everybody else who has learned anything from me has to thank for it. I need to be fairly alone with the shaman for a few days.
It isn't going back to work that has had such an effect on me; it's the trappings that have surrounded it on emerging from the deepest journey inside I've ever made and probably wish to make out into a city that often shouts "artificial" and, in some respects, "officially insane" at me. But I made that trip because I was mad myself for a while.

If, then, I am to use the Log to return to women musicians and teach by telling their stories and sharing their songs, I plan to do what all good teachers must in life, which is just to share with others the tools we've found, as equals. I can't deal with people otherwise now I know we all have our own inner shaman, every one of us, and I'm essentially no different from you.
Like Pinocchio, I've discovered that honesty pays, while closing your mind and your heart gets you nowhere. Each day can bring surprises, if I venture to talk quite deeply but without hiding anything from others about what's happened to me, since I find it tends also to draw some of them out of their shells, no longer afraid to speak of what upsets them.
I don't know how often I shall log again. In the period that starts with some medical exams on Friday, this over-stretched Mac of mine must sadly go and be replaced. It's hardly good timing now I'm more aware of the need for new clothes with fewer holes. Worse, the day I disintegrated again was my daughter's 17th birthday, so I must make up to the Kid for having turned down an invitation where I'd have felt like a ghost at the feast given the way I felt then.

However, the weather forecast gets better.
I've ordered a new eMac, which comes for the weekend. It may not be a brand-new model, but I like robust eMacs. It was a nice surprise to find out I can still trade in this one while there is any life in it against the price of a rather more powerful machine that can face the music. So when I'm not in emotional therapy and making sure of my inner shaman's compass bearings, I'll have to tame the Tiger too.
What with all these cats for which Apple names its operating system, it's scarcely surprising that my finger found its way from Imbruglia to Arden via Massive Attack and Liz Pappademas and her piano-driven Hurts to Purr (band and debut album).

For once, I'm going to be discreet about a woman I fancy, just saying I've known her for some time and her circumstances have also changed. We shall soon be having dinner and when I asked her how she had put up with me all these years, she said: "In small doses."
"Well, I hope," I said, "that in future, you might be able to endure slightly bigger doses if they come on a more manageable scale."
That won me a little smile and she asked me to wait until she'd sorted out some other stuff by the end of May. My experience has usually involved being madly in love, but now I know why people say "madly". Is going without feeling over-excited a normal emotion?

12:49:01 AM your views? []