Gacela del amor desesperado

 I was listening to Marta Gómez, a pop version of this Lorca poem. The music is upbeat and happy, unlike the poem itself. I laughed out loud at the discrepancy. If you didn't know Spanish, you would think she was singing a happy lyric.  

A theory of kitsch popped into my head, nothing too original but an extension of my earlier ideas. I've been thinking about this since the 1990s, at least.  The word kitsch is in the title of my first Lorca book.  

We take a work of art associated with high culture. Kitsch is not mass culture itself, but a degradation of high culture. 

The next step is a fossilization into an easily recognizable and reproducible stereotype. 

Now the stage is set for popularization. 

Not all popularizations are kitschy. We know when they are because they somehow forget to engage with the work itself. The problem is not even raised. It's as though any melody could be used for any poem. WTF!  

 

Minimalism

Apple music is offering me a minimalist play list. Let's listen. I don't know much about this kind of music. I have an open mind. I am open to finding something I like as much as Reich's Drumming. I also think I am bound not to find it all very satisfying.  

 I don't get bored with Triadic Memories, by Feldman, but Pärt's Spiegel im Spiegel is hard to listen to to the end, and it is only 8 minutes long, as long as single section of Feldman's work. Maybe because the Estonian is only using major triads and Feldman uses major and minor sevenths.

Glass.  String Quartet 4, movement I. Of course looking for something interesting is not really the point? At least I am interested in this, if only in my reactions. It has some of that scrub a scrub quality of some baroque music. He's interested in one or two intervals. It should have a more meditative effect but it doesn't. 

Movement 2: It's got a plaintive quality. It uses similar techniques to Movement 1, but it provokes more engagement, with an enigmatic character. This would be the adagio?  For a movie scene I would use for a guy sitting alone in an apartment in the evening in a melancholy mood, as I am doing now. I like that the movements are connected. 

Movement 3: It starts off with some resonant chords, then we here the scrub a scrubba motif. Apparently I made up this term because a search on google only give me my own blog. I'm sure though that I heard it from someone else first. I don't hate this string quartet, but I would have faint praise for it. Some of it is pretty-sounding, but not in an interesting way, with exception of movement 2. 

Hamburg by Richard Bundy. It has the same interval as the Glass piece, just the major 2nd. I've already discovered a minimalist cliché. The piece has a "new age" feel, though some saw-like sonorities would keep it out of the spa.  

More Glass.  "Tissue #7." It has an appealing romanticism to it. I can imagine a woman of 45 sipping red wine at sunset on a verandah. She is worried about something that isn't an immediate threat. 

More Pärt, arranged for solo guitar again. "Für Alina." It is a pretty piece. 

Detritus by Sarah Neufeld.  Hypnotic, repetitive rhythms, with repeated intervals. It's pleasant without being overly calming. 

1st conclusion. It goes after prettiness, not complexity (duh). It was an original style in world in which everyone wanted to reach for a complex music that people don't like very much. Minimalism can be disliked for other reasons. It does not emphasize melody, everyone's favorite musical dimension. Ir can fade into the background and its repetiveness can irritating, provoking either nervousness or a too easily achieved new age coma effect. Some of it is considerably less engaging than a Keith Jarrett free improv.  Arthur Kaassens's New York Counterpart is on right now, probably one of the more interesting pieces.  

  

Babies

 On the side of Beth's house, built on top of a wreath, a house finch nest with tiny baby birds. 

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Swallows are abundant, even in downtown Lawrence. Hawks are also commonly seen this time of year. 

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It looked like it was going to rain so I cut my walk on the wetlands short. I stopped to get birdseed, and it was raining by then. By the time I drove home, the rain was torrential. I had to wait in my car five minutes before going inside, and I still got wet just in those 30 seconds from car to front door.  

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A bird with yellow markings I didn't see long enough to identify. Some kind of warbler? Also, a reddish sparrow (or something). I got a good long look at them, as there were several on the path and nearby bushes, but they didn't look like anything on my bird app. There was some kind of cormorant (or something) in a tree. It looked somewhat like a crow, but with a much longer neck. Not being able to identify birds, or making erroneous identifications, is an inevitable part of the process.  I can embrace my ignorance because it simply is information about how much I know, or don't. 

Dalí!

Hair and Makeup

 Movies that win academy awards for hair and make up, costumes, or production design, will have those things in great, attention seeking quantity. Yet I feel that in the best movies these aspects are invisible and only have a subliminal effect. I don't like super "costumey" period piece films. 

Hands in the key of C flat minor.

Thomas clued me in to Oliver Senior's instructional book on drawing hands several years ago. It is called How to draw hands, and the first sentence and paragraph is "This is an instruction book." I purchased a used copy and have had it around for a while. I recently did a drawing course on line with a delightful teacher, the Spanish illustrator Puño, who recommended drawing your own hand on successive days, so I am doing that now.  I'm on day four. 

When I look at the drawings, I see that they give me information. Most of the information is about how bad I am at drawing. I say this non-facetiously: I know what my hand looks like, and I know what a good drawing of a hand looks like, so I get very concrete, objective, and detailed feedback about where I've gone wrong. Once in a while, some small detail will be not horrible. I also know how much time and effort I've put into a particular day's work. At some point I will want to use and eraser and try to correct things and arrive at some less rough approximation.  

The thing about the hand is that we are familiar with it, we have a model close by (my right hand, since I draw with my left), we can draw it in real life size, or even trace in on paper, and yet it is difficult to draw all the same. That is, the difficulty is not due to a lack of familiarity, but to the fact that in some sense we are not seeing it as it really is.  

Since I don't expect myself to be able to do this well at an early stage, there is no negative emotion around the information. I could even give myself some jocular grades, like D plus plus or F triple minus or C flat minor. 

Scarcity model of time

My therapist said there was a scarcity model and an abundance model. I couldn't find a lot about it that wasn't sort of Oprahesque. Obviously if a resource is, objectively, scarce, then the scarcity model will be in effect no matter what our desire to think differently about it. 

We think of time as a resource. (Time is money.) We use it, waste it, use it efficiently or not. It is exchanged for money in various ways (labor). A feeling of scarcity is not inconsistent with the misuse of time (procrastination?). 

What would an alternative to the scarcity model look like? No clocks or timers, in the first place. You can get up any reasonable time without an alarm, go to sleep when tired. Work would get done without thought to exact quantities. There would be more flow-like states of concentration. 

How would I achieve this for myself? I probably wouldn't, but it would be nice to imagine. First, reduce internet and facebook. Keep the blogging, but not check to see if there are comments until I write the next post. I already have my life organized so there is little or no commuting, house work is small because I have an apartment, and do yard work for someone else only once a week if that. I have no "tenure clock" any more and can do what I want when not teaching or grading. 

If it is difficult for me, then it will be even more difficult for someone not in my privileged position. I cannot advise, but I wish I had rejected the scarcity model earlier, since it doesn't fit my objective conditions of life.