Steve Reich: Music for 18 Musicians

A concert from the beginning of the decade to mark the end of it--  Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians (written between 1974 and 1976) performed by Eighth Blackbird and Third Coast Percussion in a free concert at Chicago's Millennium Park, August 22, 2011:  

Just another summer night at the park in the Second City.

If 61 minutes of Reich isn't quite enough for you (as it wasn't for Chicago), here is the other piece performed that night, Double Sextet which Eighth Blackbird commissioned from Steve Reich for the occasion:

Extra credit:

Lithium & Capitalism

Bolivia has been among the poorest countries in South America for generations.  In 2006, Juan Evo Morales Ayma, an Aymara by heritage, became the first indigenous President of Bolivia.  A socialist, he was elected to 4 terms-- 2 more than the constitution of Bolivia allows, but his socialist policies were successful and popular with his constituency.  Bolivia happens to sit on the largest reserves of Lithium in the world, a piece of minor trivia that has become of critical importance with the advent of electric cars.  Morales had promoted the development of lithium as a source of wealth for Bolivians-- potentially as a material to be used primarily by Bolivian companies in the manufacture of batteries for export-- and had recently canceled a high profile deal with a German company that was intending to mine and export the metal as a raw material at a lower cost, of greater benefit to non-Bolivian capitalists.

Morales resigned and fled the country to Mexico on November 11 of this year under extreme pressure from the military.  Morales' family was threatened and wound up fleeing to Argentina before his house was ransacked and burned. Within hours of his departure, Sen. Jeanine Añez, a somewhat obscure politician from a small right wing party representing the interests of wealthy Bolivians of European stock and their foreign allies declared herself president.  These details are not coincidental. 

I urge everyone to watch this very instructive interview of Morales conducted by the Intercept's Glenn Greenwald in Mexico City.  Its 50 minutes contain a great many truths about our contemporary situation-- particularly the reach and current interests of the United States and its ruling class-- that call for urgent reflection (with an eye to subsequent action).

Dear Reader

Merry Bezosmas everybody!  Welcome to unspeakable (as heck).  I know you have questions.  I will answer them.

Q: Why "unspeakable (as heck)"?

A: Because "unspeakable" was taken.

Q: Why "(as heck)"?

A: Because I was raised to not swear in titles.  Although I would still one day love to write my great American anti-corporate novel: The Fucking Genius.

Q: Why "()"?

A:  What is this, the third degree?

Q: Why doesn't everyone know about unspeakable (as heck)?

A: Some are not as well read as yourself.  Until they are, I keep the place a bit of a secret, which seems to favor the prolificacy of my writing.  I don't know how eager I'd be to continue putting pieces of myself out there if I thought other eyes might be on it, reading it, judging.  I sometimes contemplate the dissonance between the drive to publish pieces at a regular monthly rate that is greater than 0 versus the preference to not be read and it occurs to me that harmony could be restored by not publishing anything at all.  You might think I'd at least publicize to family, friends and acquaintances, but for one reason or another I never have.  I've only told 2 people in my life that I have a blog that I post to (once because it came up in casual conversation and the other time just to plant a seed of knowledge about it in the mind of someone other than myself) but they did not ask where they could find it and I did not volunteer the information. The failure to remember to apprise people of the existence of the place has turned into a determination to keep it under wraps for now.  Originally, I kept it secret as an experiment in how public a non-publicized blog actually is.  I used to wonder about the likelihood of anyone asking me if a blog they came across by chance was mine before I told them I was blogging.  After several years of accumulating page views, I can now safely say that at the rate it is actually stumbled upon based on blogger statistics, it might become a household name by 2582.  On the other hand, life being a series of uncertain events, there may yet be a peculiar day in my lifetime when someone by sheer luck comes across a post of mine, recognizes me by details I impart in it and reaches out for confirmation.

Q:  I found you as the result of a google search. How do you manage to get high enough ranking to be noticed?

A: I wish I knew. In terms of rankings I always aim for my posts to be Number 1 but as readers will attest, it’s a pretty sure thing that they’ll be Number 2.

Q: How much do you get paid to do this?

A: I get out of it what I put into it.  No money changes hands.

Q: You have several original posts each month, month after month going back a number of years on your site.  Are you aware that Google admin has been known to completely remove blogger sites without warning-- that your work could vanish in an instant at the will and whim of an admin? 

A: It is an unfortunate fact, easy to forget,  that my content once published is no longer mine but the property of Google, an obscenely large and vastly powerful operation that is in the sole business of growing itself without limit, whose interest in the fruits of my free labor in the creation of content of substantial quality and personal value to me, is -- to say fickle is to be generous.  No one who is not an owner in our type of society, works, creates, lives except at the will of the owners.  I think this is wrong but this is the situation we find ourselves in in 2019 when we post on Blogger.  I have found moments approaching fulfillment creating my blog, for reasons that are as mysterious to me as they must be to you (and would be to Google as well if the question were pondered by their algorithms).  Creating my blog is both the bane of my existence, and my existence.  It is a big contentious world out there and I know it is partially populated with people who reflexively respond to questionings of conventional thinking and morality or to satirical, impassioned, fringe, experimental or alternative points of view with offense who will now and then complain to Google about them in a desire to destroy them, and that the Google admins responding to complaints do not get paid to treat the creative expression of blogspot content creators with care but rather, solely to promote the interests (in limitless growth) of Google, which jibe with their bloggers' interests only coincidentally if ever.  Where they are judged to clash or if they are not judged to be worth bothering to judge, Google wins.  Those are the terms.  There is an appeals process that I understand sometimes works in the blogger's favor.  It is entirely possible that in acquiring Blogspot in 2003, Google aspired to live up to a responsibility to preserve the online record of the creativity of those humans who provide content for it.  It's possible that a spirit of profound responsibility to protect and preserve the space of public expression that a blog hosting service perhaps truly ought to be yet thrives within the bosoms of Google and the Blogspot admins who maintain the site.  But I'm not so naïve as to think it will be that way tomorrow.  I've lived far too long to expect to be treated with care if I one day find my writings at unspeakable (as heck) in a "disappeared" situation, but for me and for my fellow creators of content for Google, I deeply hope for care from Admins (or Cosmic Void help us, from the algorithm that is surely being written to replace them) if I need it from them.  In the meantime, I back it up.

Q:  Who edits your posts?

A:  I know, right?

Q: Why did the post I read 2 years ago change without any indication?  Do you have no journalistic integrity?

A:  Sometimes, I'm wrong or grammatically incorrect, or prone to perpetrate a mixed metaphor, a solecism or a malapropism or two.  Sometimes when I discover an error, I correct myself after looking at it long enough.  This is not the New York Times or Wikipedia. I don't think people should come here looking for truth, but I'd like them to find it.

Q: Who do you support in the upcoming election?

A:  Labour all the way.

Choice Notes

I am on a personal mission to make Jeff Bezos a pauper by withholding my patronage from his businesses.  It won't happen overnight but I'm in it for the long haul.  My wife shares my opinion of the man who may be not be the only asshole billionaire but is certainly at the extremities-- but she can compartmentalize her feelings about him from the act of ordering batteries for a car fob from Amazon when you can't find them anywhere nearby or going to say Whole Foods when the usual place doesn't have currants.  It's a mixed marriage but love knows no bounds.  

For her, I was at the local WF on the currant mission recently.  We had split up.  I was hunting for the currants while she was going to grab another item she couldn't get at the usual store.  Suddenly, I became aware of something heavenly happening on the sound system.  It was a chorus of voices-- I couldn't tell if they were women or children -- singing a refrain of "Oh"'s that soared up the scale only to be followed by a line coming back down in an immediately captivating melody.  After hearing the refrain a few more times, it dawned on me that my need to know the name of the song was urgent.  This being Whole Foods, and the unfamiliar music having a confidence and a vaguely (to my ears) classical vibe about it, I assumed it was an entertainment for wealthy folks that I was surreptitiously overhearing by being in the store.  I retrieved my iPhone* and set my SoundHound app on the job, and after a momentary grinding it came back with Choice Notes by Alex Winston.  Nothing about this new information dissuaded me from my initial impression that this was rich people's music.  Alex Winston?  Never heard of him.  I had visions of some continental European guy in a studio in Paris directing a chorus of French school children in a musical confection for the aristocracy.  My glee at having the information felt a little bit dirty.  When I got home, I snuck an opportunity to look into the matter and was relieved to be somewhat disabused about my prejudices right off the bat, first of all about Alex Winston himself.  She's American:

The setting of the video is Detroit (Winston is from the suburbs) and specifically an area reclaimed by The Heidelberg Project of Detroit artist and activist Tyree Guyton and his band of young artists from the city. I've lived in those environs of Detroit, and I know what a Michigan autumn does to you.

Aside from its great charm, two things struck me about the video.  First, its age.  How did such a thing exist for so long without once entering my consciousness?  Second, and even more striking is the high volume of comments posted by fans whose experience echoed mine: they heard the song in one or another national chain store-- many of them as employees-- went through a period of urgent wonder about it only to either, like me, eventually pull out their music identifying app to track it down or to rediscover it by accident online-- one of my favorite rare pleasures in the world. Another contingent of commenters were Europeans who heard the song on advertisements.  Did it exist only for corporate commercial contexts?   

It's no mystery how once aware of it, corporate musicologists would be all over it.  There's no denying the strong hooks it gets into you by virtue of its alluring sound and structure.  Also, as an independently produced piece of music it's competitively priced. But where were the rest of us?

I don't have an answer for this.  I also don't really have a point in writing about it other than to take an opportunity to ponder why some music grabs us, how it affects us, and whether there is more to that interaction than delivery of pleasure.  In the case of this particular song and me, I detect traces of deep seated nostalgia that the song evokes in me.  Musically, I respond to the harmonies and pleasant dissonances, the easy way it straddles moods and modes between minor melancholy and major exuberance,  the wall of voices,  the texture created by the interplay of the timbres of each instrument.  Lyrics are not usually the first thing I notice about a song, and there was no exception here, but on multiple listenings, the matching of phrases to music strikes me as above average. There might be something to my initial impression of the song as a kind of delicacy that was slumming a bit by availing itself to my ears.  I stand at the threshold of a song I'm learning to hear, and from this vantage, I somehow see other roads I might have gone down.  If the song itself is old when I first hear it, something about the lost time gives the acquaintance an extra poignance.  After ten years as a stranger, this song finally grabbed me by the shoulder and made me pay attention.

Plus it's got a good beat.
~~~~~~
* Once Bezos is destroyed, Apple is next.