I don't know that you'd like Sufjan Stevens; and it wouldn't help if you told me what kind of music you like. I'm not familiar enough with the off-off-Broadway of the music world to know how to describe him to those who are, and to the rest of you, he will be as inexplicable and description-defying as he is to me.
At the very least, though, I recommend checking out his CD next time you're in the record store. Not buying it; just reading the back. Seven Swans won't get you anywhere, but if you can find a copy of Illinois or Michigan, just read the song titles. That should give you a clue for whether you should even begin to think about buying one of the CDs. Also, they're really fun and they make me grin.
But I have these two things to say about Sufjan, inexplicable though he may be: First, when I put a CD of his into my car player, I don't usually take it out again for about a week. Second, he has written a song which I hate to listen to, but which I can't turn off if it begins to play.
And that's what I have to say about that.
Thursday, August 31, 2006
Saturday, August 26, 2006
Black and white: more newfound loves
It's taken me exactly this long to be able to declare confidently that Ben Folds is my favorite currently-recording musician. Back in school, when one's musical loves were the essence of self-definition, I was troubled by my inability to find an artist that adequately captured the voice of my inmost self. It sounds silly, writing that now, but that's the kind of project we embarked upon in school, and I can't say we're fully over it now. We evolve from "what's your favorite color?" to "who's your favorite musician?" but the object is still the same: tell me who you are, by reference to some commonly-known entity. I haven't decided yet whether "what do you do?" is the same question in the adult world, or whether most adults have just given up the need for self-definition. And if they have, whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. But that's not the blog I wanted to write today anyway.
Ben Folds. Ben Folds was a troubling artist to love because he does not often write introspectively. And how can you say "this person's songs express who I am" when this person's songs don't even express who he is? Not directly anyway; not like Adam Duritz's, for example. Ben Folds writes stories and scenes and characters. Even when he's singing in the first person, it's clear that some of the time, at least, it's an adopted voice, and not a statement about himself. In that respect, he's much more like a novelist: his writing doesn't let you see inside his head, it lets you see outside, through his eyes.
Well, it should have been obvious to me, but as I said, it's taken me this long to realize that it's that very thing that makes him my perfect "favorite musician." I know the dangers of overindulging in introspective expression. First of all, it's something of a contradiction in terms, and impossible to do with complete honesty: second, you will, if you go on too long, inevitably become boring. We who are chronically self-conscious need to develop the ability of talking more about what we see than what we feel... and Ben Folds seems to have done this.
But we all know that that's just an excuse. A very necessary one, but an excuse nonetheless. You have to have reasons for liking your favorite musician, or there's nowhere for the conversation to go. But we all know the real reason I love Ben Folds: the piano.
Why I have to be in love with such an inconvenient instrument as the piano is beyond me. Most of the time I'm piano-less, and there's not much I can do about it, and I don't really play that well anyway. But you can sit at that bench and start rocking those keys and I don't care what you're singing about: you've just won my heart. When I started learning to play, I thought it was a very generic, unromantic instrument. Then I began to love it, but I thought it was only because it was the instrument I knew how to play. Now I know that it's more than that.
And this is one of those inarticulate things that I fear my powers will be insufficient to capture. I love the piano's versatility, and its self-sufficiency. I know of no other instrument that so easily converses with itself in melody, harmony, and rhythm. It can convey nearly any mood that other instruments can... though I have never heard a piano sound despairing. But it can laugh better than any of them. I love the spread of fingers playing it, and the way the tendons in the hand move running up and down the keys (they almost mirror the hammers inside.) But these are only reasons, and the truth of my love runs much deeper than that.
At any rate, I love the piano; and Ben Folds loves the piano; and I love Ben Folds. And when the three of us get together, via my CD player, there is joy.
My other new love is the game Go. It's frequently described as the Eastern equivalent of chess: a complex strategic game with an ancient heritage and analogies to warfare. It involves the placement of black and white stones on a board, in such a way as to establish territory and surround and capture your opponent. I could explain the rules to you in five minutes... but it's taken me several weeks to grasp the strategy enough to play a game with some understanding of my own moves.
It's an elegant game, extreme simplicity yielding vast complexity. I like that about it, and I like that it involves playing with patterns and shapes. I watched a game between two players today, and most of the time I could only vaguely read the meanings behind each move, but I could begin to see how the board might look to me after I've been playing for a while, with patterns and possibilities readable at a glance.
It seems strange and presumptuous of me to attempt a comparison between go and chess, since I have such a limited understanding of both games... but what are private blogs for but to wax eloquent on subjects we're underqualified in? It seems to me, then, that they're on a roughly equal plane of complexity, but it comes from very different sources. Chess requires more raw analytical power: processing moves and their consequences far in advance. Go uses this as well, but it's less critical to good play. There are so many different styles and strategies that can be used toward victory, that it requires more of creativity and flexibility than chess does; at least, that's how it appears to my novice eyes.
In chess the pieces are distinct from each other, and combine into fairly rigid power structures; in go every piece is identical, and the meaning and role of each piece depends on the shape of the stones around it. This means that a given stone or group of stones may play several different roles in the course of a game, and you have to keep alert to the fluidity of possibilities.
Yeah... so I'm hooked.
Ben Folds. Ben Folds was a troubling artist to love because he does not often write introspectively. And how can you say "this person's songs express who I am" when this person's songs don't even express who he is? Not directly anyway; not like Adam Duritz's, for example. Ben Folds writes stories and scenes and characters. Even when he's singing in the first person, it's clear that some of the time, at least, it's an adopted voice, and not a statement about himself. In that respect, he's much more like a novelist: his writing doesn't let you see inside his head, it lets you see outside, through his eyes.
Well, it should have been obvious to me, but as I said, it's taken me this long to realize that it's that very thing that makes him my perfect "favorite musician." I know the dangers of overindulging in introspective expression. First of all, it's something of a contradiction in terms, and impossible to do with complete honesty: second, you will, if you go on too long, inevitably become boring. We who are chronically self-conscious need to develop the ability of talking more about what we see than what we feel... and Ben Folds seems to have done this.
But we all know that that's just an excuse. A very necessary one, but an excuse nonetheless. You have to have reasons for liking your favorite musician, or there's nowhere for the conversation to go. But we all know the real reason I love Ben Folds: the piano.
Why I have to be in love with such an inconvenient instrument as the piano is beyond me. Most of the time I'm piano-less, and there's not much I can do about it, and I don't really play that well anyway. But you can sit at that bench and start rocking those keys and I don't care what you're singing about: you've just won my heart. When I started learning to play, I thought it was a very generic, unromantic instrument. Then I began to love it, but I thought it was only because it was the instrument I knew how to play. Now I know that it's more than that.
And this is one of those inarticulate things that I fear my powers will be insufficient to capture. I love the piano's versatility, and its self-sufficiency. I know of no other instrument that so easily converses with itself in melody, harmony, and rhythm. It can convey nearly any mood that other instruments can... though I have never heard a piano sound despairing. But it can laugh better than any of them. I love the spread of fingers playing it, and the way the tendons in the hand move running up and down the keys (they almost mirror the hammers inside.) But these are only reasons, and the truth of my love runs much deeper than that.
At any rate, I love the piano; and Ben Folds loves the piano; and I love Ben Folds. And when the three of us get together, via my CD player, there is joy.
My other new love is the game Go. It's frequently described as the Eastern equivalent of chess: a complex strategic game with an ancient heritage and analogies to warfare. It involves the placement of black and white stones on a board, in such a way as to establish territory and surround and capture your opponent. I could explain the rules to you in five minutes... but it's taken me several weeks to grasp the strategy enough to play a game with some understanding of my own moves.
It's an elegant game, extreme simplicity yielding vast complexity. I like that about it, and I like that it involves playing with patterns and shapes. I watched a game between two players today, and most of the time I could only vaguely read the meanings behind each move, but I could begin to see how the board might look to me after I've been playing for a while, with patterns and possibilities readable at a glance.
It seems strange and presumptuous of me to attempt a comparison between go and chess, since I have such a limited understanding of both games... but what are private blogs for but to wax eloquent on subjects we're underqualified in? It seems to me, then, that they're on a roughly equal plane of complexity, but it comes from very different sources. Chess requires more raw analytical power: processing moves and their consequences far in advance. Go uses this as well, but it's less critical to good play. There are so many different styles and strategies that can be used toward victory, that it requires more of creativity and flexibility than chess does; at least, that's how it appears to my novice eyes.
In chess the pieces are distinct from each other, and combine into fairly rigid power structures; in go every piece is identical, and the meaning and role of each piece depends on the shape of the stones around it. This means that a given stone or group of stones may play several different roles in the course of a game, and you have to keep alert to the fluidity of possibilities.
Yeah... so I'm hooked.
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