The permanent marks
scatter their utterance
like crickets or bats,
subject to skip and
flights of sound
rounding a corner.

Here is a draft of my bit for the panel Jenny Edbuaer Rice, John Biewen, and I will be putting on in New Orleans. The panel is on sound in composition, so it's a bit ironic that the audio quality of this is somewhat dicey, but you do what you can.

Musical Pieces: Readymade Audio Projects and Creativity from Daniel Anderson on Vimeo.

16:08 minutes (14.77 MB)

This is a repost of a playlist composition I want to share with some classes. I'm posting here an audio mix of the playlist and the textual mix below. Prompted by the phrase "was dead three days," the story is about missing time.

---

Three Days Dead

"One Tree Hill" U2 (lyrics)
The story begins today, steeped in references to our shared memories. The black center of The Heart of Darkness and the songs of folk found in Jara’s music trick us into thinking these are only our struggles. But the tale leans back, archetypal, toward the symbolic scene.

---

"Babylon" David Gray (lyrics)
Three days bind the story. Its deeper movement starts with anticipation.
An eager descent softened by hope:

Friday night I'm going nowhere / All the lights are changing green to red

A blessed mistake.

Only wish that you were here

You know I'm seeing it so clear
I've been afraid

To tell you how I really feel

Admit to some of those bad mistakes I've made

The long passage back.

Turning back for home

You know I'm feeling so alone

I can't believe

Climbing on the stair

I turn around to see you smiling there

In front of me

---

"Sympathy For The Devil" The Rolling Stones (lyrics; Salon piece)
This big picture plays out in close up, the curtains rich burgundy, velvet and deep as blood. Not fabric, but membrane screen image flickering as grey light comes up from the back of a stage. The lit grey screen contracts into a tight circle and swings off stage to the woman, wracked. The light swings back, center stage. The dead.

So if you meet me
Have some courtesy
Have some sympathy, and some taste
(woo woo)
Use all your well-learned politesse
Or I'll lay your soul to waste, um yeah
(woo woo, woo woo)

The dead shimmer as the man extends his arms and gathers them, shapelike, collecting them like clouds dissipating in summer sun. He breathes deep. Looks off stage. The light dilates, brightens, and swings with his gaze, highlighting the woman. Her face is framed at the bottom by fingers, steepled over lips. Eyes closed with thought. Brow set, wrinkled. He looks to the light. Turns.

---

"In The Garden" Van Morrison (lyrics)

The streets are always wet with rain
After a summer shower when I saw you standin'
In the garden in the garden wet with rain

You wiped the teardrops from your eye in sorrow
As we watched the petals fall down to the ground
And as I sat beside you I felt the
Great sadness that day in the garden

His fingers curl over the back of her hand. Nerves race up his side and fire up his face. He radiates. She breathes, opens her eyes. He’s fixed. She too.

And as it touched your cheeks so lightly
Born again you were and blushed and we touched each other lightly
And we felt the presence of the Christ

And I turned to you and I said
No Guru, no method, no teacher
Just you and I and nature
And the father in the garden

---

The man awakens. He stretches, expectant. Remembering the garden. Sunday. Ascendance. The morning light warms the side of his face. Questions. The circle of light surrounding him on the empty stage expands and all around him the dead. He squints toward the sky. The morning sun makes no sense. Three days and still he sits among bankers, butchers, mothers, fathers, sisters, sons, the lost souls of the darkened world. Sunday’s past and something’s wrong: “They call it stormy Monday but Tuesday’s just as bad.”

"Stormy Monday" Eva Cassidy (lyrics)

---

"Black" Pearl Jam (lyrics)
The sadness smacks personal and profound. Lured by pain and beauty to betray the world, he feels now the loss and fingers at his own soul like a sore, remembering. That joining. That giving, that, allowed just an instant, instantly changed forever.

And now my bitter hands shake beneath the clouds
of what was everything?
Oh, the pictures have all been washed in black--
tattooed everything.

---

"Pacing
the Cage" Bruce Cockburn (lyrics)
Reflection comes much later and brings with it nothing more than the slow turn of the proverbial screw. The unjust judge and the pearl of great price. He wanders the timescapes of the past, stepping into this very present. The rusted ships, scuttled on distant shores and waiting to turn to scrap. The lights of cities, biting and empty in their brilliance. The thrum of the engine soundtracked beneath the song of the lark. He wonders aloud, how is it that you’re just now “finding yourself in a place that you've willingly waltzed into. Suddenly, you realize it's not such a good place to be, and it's hard to find your way out, hard to know where the next step is supposed to go.”

---

"All
Along The Watchtower" Bob Dylan (lyrics)
Swiveling days compile their despondencies and urgent little victories. An adoption in Armenia. Plundering in Mertz. A library in Egypt. A Caldera vaporizes a village. A man has a dream. Resigned, he turns toward each event, draping shawls over corpse and cold soul alike. Lowering and lifting to the timeless rhythm of the rise and fall. More, he finally cries. I now need nothing more.

Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl,
Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl.

---

"Across The Universe" The Beatles (lyrics)
The sound of horse’s hooves rises from the edge of the stage in clops like gentle rain. The ebbing and flowing circle of light that baths the man swells to full brightness and the two riders join the scene—the woman and the father, smiling. Musical feet fill the gaps as the horses stop, and with each beat figures step on the stage. Teachers. Farmers. Runners. Writers. Young and old, they step forward like members of a choir and mouth the sounds that change the world.

Jai guru deva om
Nothing's gonna change my world,
Nothing's gonna change my world.
Nothing's gonna change my world.
Nothing's gonna change my world.

---

"With or Without You" (live) U2 (lyrics)
As the crowd gathers on stage, another sound swells from behind. A whistle. Clap. Clap. Whistle. Clap. Looking out he sees more souls pouring in from doorways and climbing down from the rafters. The days, he understands, have nothing to do with the scattered sequences of noon and night. The days instead have played out over these millennia in each ragged cough and lover’s cry. Three days dead, he understands he’s not alone and he “give[s himself] away”

My hands are tied
My body bruised, she's got me with
Nothing to win and
Nothing left to lose

And you give yourself away
And you give yourself away
And you give
And you give
And you give yourself away

She takes his hand. The sound turns smoky and swirls over the scene. It surrounds the man and the woman and slowly lifts them, as if on filaments of thought, invisible and rising skyward.

We'll shine like stars in the silver light
We'll shine like stars in the Christmas night
One heart. One home. One love.

Came across this while sweeping the Web for mediawiki tips.

I'm not usually one for putting together film reviews, so I'll leave most of the poo-pooing and discussion of camera angles, and lighting to someone else. But I did want to share some thinking about Perfume, which we watched last night. To me the best way to understand the film is to think about it in terms of mixing. The biggest problem, I think, is that it's difficult to get the mix right between magic and realism. For instance, the notion that one could derive a substance based on beauty into a distillation so powerful it would transform the vilest anger into overwhelming love is fantastic. A bit innocent, unrealistic sure, but that's the point.

The problem comes with the realism added to the mix. There is plenty of grit poured into the film--rotting fish, dank alleys, and dirty bodies are everywhere. Still, this is fine and in some ways makes the texture more compelling. But when the process through which the magical elixir is made is revealed, the result is mostly gruesome details of serial killings and processing of bodies . The realism swamps the magic and the resulting mix makes the ending ultimately unsatisfying. The magical mixing needs less presence, more mystery.

This brings me to another kind of mixing that the film also illuminates. The kind of synaesthaesia that comes from trying to represent one mode or sense through another. In this case, the film tries to portray smell through the visual. It's an ambitious goal and it keeps the film engaging. Of course, film has the advantage of also being able to layer sound into the mix. A close up of the nose, a close up of a girl's skin, the sound of inhalation, and voilà, a sense of smell. What really struck me about the film, though, was the way in which the effect can be pulled off with less than the full application of all of these elements. This came home when the scenes switched to Grasse in rural France.

 

Several years ago I checked out a book by Dennis Stock from our art library. The book, Provence Memories, could easily be the inspiration for many of the synaesthaetic rural scenes from Perfume. As I looked over the images then, I experienced the same sense of something beyond the visual. Really the images offered a transformation into the scene. I could almost feel the sunshine and inhale the scent of lavender on the breeze. (The high res images in the book are more powerful than those linked here on the Web.)

So, there's much to be had from synthesizing the senses through media. But in many ways that power comes from a blending that is subtle. The realism of Stock's images translates into visual magic that yields impressions beyond the simple scene captured in the photograph. The trick, then, and the reason to consider the film and keep on working with media, is learning to mix.

Cheryl asked me about a phrase from an e-mail message in which I mentioned thinking about the writing course as shop class. I’ve been considering the writing classroom as a studio for a while, an approach that has great promise if only for the counter-force it applies to the analytical inertia of most language arts pedagogy. It’s hard to fall back on consumption and analysis when making stuff becomes the main activity of the class—a point particularly helpful when working with media. Over time, I’ve modified my thinking about this studio model to put back some analysis, ending up with a core of activity/making (maybe 70 or 75%) woven through with threads of analysis and critique.

So why switch metaphors now? What might be found in the shop class that would make it worth reconceptualizing my teaching? For one, shop classes use a lot of tools. My take on the debates about tool metaphors resonates with what might be found in Stuart Selber or Andrew Feenberg. Tool metaphors and fixation are dangerous—they tend to blind us to the human or ideological motives invested in those tools. And yet, tools can also function to implement human intentions. Not neutral, certainly, but not off limits for use and in fact helpful, even necessary. So, I’m OK with making tools and tool use a key part of teaching.

In fact, I’m more than OK with making tools a key focus of composition classes. I’m a regular subscriber to the belief that the focus of the writing class should be students’ writing. But I’m not sure that the best way to focus on that writing is always to foreground it. Sometimes, I think the writing gets in the way of the thinking and of the connecting that matter as much as the compositional moves. Here’s where a tool comes in handy. Learning to use a digital audio recorder creates a space to push aside for a moment the high pressure concerns of producing and evaluating writing. Through the use of the recorder, composition emerges, but it’s mediated by practical/fixable concerns. Tools. Tools of misdirection.

The tool stands in for so many other things. I’m thinking of the first stanza of Ron Wallace’s “Hardware”

My father always knew the secret
name of everything--
stove bolt and wing nut,
set screw and rasp, ratchet
wrench, band saw, and ball
peen hammer. He was my
tour guide and translator
through that foreign country
with its short-tempered natives
in their crew cuts and tattoos,
who suffered my incompetence
with gruffness and disgust.
Pay attention, he would say,
and you'll learn a thing or two.

I won’t reproduce it, but the second stanza is the kicker where, after the death of the father, the speaker of the poem is left holding “watchamacallits” and “thingamabobs.” Knowing about the “set screw and rasp” opens up a secret language that binds the users of these tools. These bonds eventually become the focus of the poem. So it is with technologies in the writing classroom. The tours and translations go better with tools.

There’s a lot more I need to think about regarding the shop space, but I guess I’ll wrap up with one more rumination on the use of tools. It could be argued that working with words on a page is little different than plugging in input jacks and setting the gain on a mixing board. Both are technologies, variations of tools created to make sounds or words. True. So what gives the mixing board more promise in my mind as a helpful thing to monkey with in the writing classroom? It’s got to be the mediation. Text on the page is so naturalized that it no longer mediates in the way that a microphone might—the microphone (at least for those sopped with the prosaic twelve or thirteen years of public education) has more potential to act as a translator—channeling some Latour [track 2] to mix with the Wallace [track 1] here.

I don’t doubt there’s a bit of a tangle developing in my thoughts between the tool and the medium. But still, I’m going to say that working with the less familiar tool is more powerful not just because it leads to new media—in this corner, representing printed text we have the word processor; in the other corner representing sounds we have the mixing board. Which is more likely to serve as a mediator, linking teachers, learners, ideas? To be intellectually honest, I suppose I’m not sure. Which one am I going to grab as I enter the classroom tomorrow? No contest.

3:20 minutes (2.3 MB)

I think I prefer to read this one silently, though I believe in poetry being performed aloud.

Play the two audio samples, and then see if you can line them up with the two soundscapes in the image. Bonus points for making a second connection with teaching practices.

Sound Sample 1: Sound Sample 2:

Since I've been thinking much of sounds, both verbal and musical lately, this commercial from Volkswagen struck home. First, the words are written by Dylan Thomas and taken from the film Under Milk Wood. I've yet to see the film, but I've put it in the que. The language is measured and evocative of the sounds and scenes of night.

Second, I really like the way the soundtrack with the soft melodic keyboard evokes the atmosphere described through the language: "You can hear the dew falling / and the hushed town breathing."

Then there is the voice--in this case, Richard Burton. The timbre (low-pitched and slighly husky, but clear) and the tempo create a kind of soothing blanket, warm and regular.

Finally, there are the visuals. The dark scenes piled one over the other prepare a kind of inky foundation. Over this foundation is layered the soothing sounds rising toward the conclusion, and then layered in at the end is the brighter image with the car. Visually, we get the same message delivered by Burton: "Only your eyes are unclosed / to see the black-enfolded town / fast and slow asleep."

Click to play
15:06 minutes (6.22 MB)

My paper for the Computers and Writing Conference this weekend. It will be the first time I've actually written up a formal paper to deliver at the conference in thirteen years.