So Percussion Interview

Last spring I had the privilege of interviewing So Percussion, an avant-garde quartet that works almost exclusively with percussion instruments. They're playing the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave festival coming up in October in NYC, where they will be performing their new original piece, Imaginary Cities. After the jump, the final product from my interview.

Check it!

Recent Essay

For my Writing the Personal Essay class, our first assignment was to write a quick essay on a mundane or routine act. Here is the result:

To Drive

I have lived in New York for three years, and never once have I lamented leaving my car behind, that dark-gray Saturn Ion that I shared so aggravatingly with my mother up until I left for school. I don’t miss finding parking, near accidents, or waiting in traffic. I don’t miss those winter days when the car would warm up just as you arrive wherever you were going, or summer days when the humidity outside feels exactly the same as the thickness in the car and you have to submerge in its swampiness until the steering wheel stops burning your hands. I don’t miss having to find someone to stay sober at such-and-such’s party, or being the one to do so, so that everyone else can be reckless and free.

But I do miss the music. Nowadays, I have my industrial looking Bose headphones with their intimate and powerful sound quality, and my IPod that fits almost everything I own in its neat little portable package. Yet with those come the protective bubble of personal experience, whereas nothing beats the slightly scratchy speakers and CD player in the car of my youth. You could blast music to fill not only every inch of air space in your car but out to the streets around you, an accelerating boom box lacking the confrontational vibe of it’s 80s counterpart (it’s much easier after all, to speed away than run from anyone opposed to your taste).

As a teenager, I used music to act out my angst, playing bad hardcore music at 6 am while my mother drove me to school and playing the Beatles by way of apology once I had calmed down. Learning how to drive meant a certain kind of adult freedom, and the music I listened to fed right into that. Listening to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, an art-punk group still around today, made me feel bad and dangerous at the age of sixteen, a force to be reckoned with. My friends and I would blast dance music and try to gain attention for our careless joy at every stoplight, a precursor to the Joy Division induced cigarette-out-every-window nonchalance we affected later on.

When the first rush died down and driving became routine, I began to really take note of what little peace driving could give me. It was how I got to know an album, leaving it in my car for months at a time, on repeat. The summer was for ska music, with its lively and joyous horn section, and winter was for the droning sounds of Nico and the Velvet Underground, keeping me company while I treacherously attempted to drive over snow. Driving allows for a sort of meditative trance, being an automatic and simple task that lets your mind wander. While listening to music in the city I’m always transfixed by those around me, by the distractions of lights, buildings, constant action. What I miss isn’t the music- it’s the perfect way to experience the music, to let it act as therapist, setting, friend, and personality all in one go. It’s the ability to be left with nothing but what you hear.

Good Things, All Around

(from http://faux-beau.com/journal/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/where-the-wild-things-are.jpg)

Everyone I know (and plenty of people I don't) can't wait for Where the Wild Things Are, the Spike Jonze/Dave Eggers rendition of Maurice Sendak's classic tale. It was said over a year ago that the film was having problems since it was too weird and scary for children. Of course, that made me want to see it more, and it sounds like not too much has been altered for its release. A great article on Jonze and the process of bringing the ten-sentence book to screen was published in the New York Times last weekend.

Also, you can watch the trailer here


Everything about this film (soundtrack, cast, set and costume design, etc) looks perfect and beautiful, though with all the hype who knows...



Also, go see Inglourious Basterds. I wanted to go into the film without expectations so I won't ruin it for anyone by writing about it. Just see it. For the sake of your own cultural references for the next....forever, go see it.

Sunrise/Sunset: Dalai Lama XIV

(from http://media.ifccenter.com/images/films/sunrise-sunset_592x299.jpg)


When imagining the Dalai Lama, my conceptions were limited to a solitary man, a figure made political less for his own actions than for those of his followers, who preach that which he meditates upon. Yet in Sunrise/Sunset: Dalai Lama XIV, a film by Vitali Manski I saw recently as part of IFC’s Docuweeks, His Holiness appeared as a kind of celebrity-figurehead for the “Eastern Way,” condensing his meditation periods into a several month, hibernation-like exercise and teaching via television and loudspeaker.
The movie was billed as an in-depth day-in-the-life view of the Dalai Lama, but by the end of it I felt no closer to him than if I had watched an old-fashioned presidential interview. Sure, I saw some personal moments while he ran on the treadmill and watched TV (only to happen upon footage of himself on a talk show…coincidence? I’m undecided…). But I had no further insight on someone who is supposedly the world’s most insightful man. His day was spent both holding a class and a press conference in which others eagerly jotted down his opinions, but they unfortunately sounded like any sort of droll sermon reiterating the dictums of living a good life.
I can’t say why I’m so surprised. Why should the Dalai Lama be so different from any other prominent religious leader, like the Pope? It was something about Buddhism that I thought might be different, the less politicized of the religions maybe, the least organized and most organic. But in a similar vein, the book The Art of Happiness, in which author Howard C. Cutler, M.D. spends many months interviewing His Holiness on his perspective of happiness, comes to the same formulaic conclusions about the importance of meditation, breath, forgiveness, and state of mind.
Both the book and this documentary did provoke interesting, if not forced reactions from their narrators. In The Art of Happiness much of the text condenses Cutler’s train of thought on happiness, while the Manski of Sunrise/Sunset spent the second half of the film attempting to tie the teachings of the Dalai Lama to the parts of the world he visited. It is this section of the film which seems wholly separate and quite desperate to connect to its earlier half, focusing mainly on overpopulation. By the end, it is this subject which seems to catch the documentarians fancy much more, and it becomes obvious that this is the film he truly wanted to make. Perhaps Manski thought it would sell if the Dalai Lama were involved? It seems, unfortunately, to be his true purpose.