Afternoon Sketch with Paul O'Rear and Travis Metcalf: Jigsaw (7.7M mp3).
This is still a bit of a blank canvas w/ some semi-interesting textures. But the foreground is missing. The real challenge will be finding a four hour block to discover the lyrics and add vocals to this puzzling piece. But it's in the queue.
It was nice to have Travis and Paul over for a brief reunion concert for an important out of town visitor and a super-patient girlfriend. Then, into a spirited rehearsal after almost two months since our last show. Some groups actually do this the other way around: rehearsal then show. We are different. But we are back in action, and there is some nice newness brewing. And we have three house concerts coming up in June, July, and August.
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And in another corner, TravisH is constantly and readily on the prowl for excellent and relevant music news:
-----Original Message-----
From: Travis Hartnett
Sent: Monday, June 06, 2005 11:19 AM
To: SB
Subject: Innovators vs. re-heaters
Innovators vs. re-heaters
By ELIZABETH RENZETTI
Saturday, June 4, 2005 Globe and Mail Update
It would have been so easy for Robert Plant to fade into irrelevance, revisiting his Barbie-haired, rock-stud past on endless concert tours and singing Kashmir to the glow of 20,000 Bic lighters.
Instead, he's reinvented himself on the fine new album Mighty Rearranger ("all killer, no filler," according to Mojo magazine). By surrounding himself with younger musicians bent on discovery and drawing on Middle Eastern and African instruments and influences, he's pulled himself out of the tar pit in which so many of his contemporaries are stuck. He may be a dinosaur, but at least he has new tricks.
Plant, 56, never seemed to be the articulate one in Led Zeppelin (which is saying something), but on The Charlie Rose Show recently he painted an eloquent portrait of the artist as an aging man: "I thought I'd reached the age where I had nothing else to say. I was a comfortable guy," he told Rose. "I've got my life, my children, my grandchildren. And I felt my whole persona was a little bit obsolete. And then suddenly, out of nowhere, I was armed with all this detail."
That's a telling phrase, "armed with all this detail." Not "going through the motions to sell DVDs" or "putting on the sausage-skin trousers because I haven't got anything better to do."
Being armed with the details is a genuine artistic impulse, and it separates the innovators from the re-heaters. It's a valid question to ask, in the year when Woody Allen has two new movies, Clint Eastwood a best-director Oscar and Paul McCartney a new concert tour: Why do some artists remain artistically relevant well into their careers, while others are content to dish out from the stew they cooked 30 or 40 years before? How does creativity wax and wane with age?
Everyone can name artists who thrive beyond what is considered their prime: Bach, Rembrandt, Hitchcock, Stravinsky, Matisse painting from his wheelchair. But equally there are those who feel that at a certain point packing it in is the graceful thing to do. I interviewed John Fowles in 1998, when he was 72, and after listening to him thunder about his brethren ("almost all writers are appallingly vain"), asked if he would publish another novel. "I'm getting too old to publish. It's not too old if you need money, but I do not need more money." He then went on to talk about meeting Harold Robbins on the set of a talk show, and asking why he continued to churn out the potboilers. "All he could come up with was more and more sales, which I thought was just awful."
The flip side of the Robert Plant story is, of course, the Rolling Stones, who will also be on the road this summer. At least on this tour (unlike the last one), there will be tunes from a new record to play. In fact, they played one of the new songs, Oh No, Not You Again, at a New York press conference last month, shortly before a reporter had the temerity to ask which was the greater impetus this time around, money or music? "We're going to pass on that silly question," Mick Jagger replied.
A more serious question might be, why have the Stones been unable to produce a great record since Some Girls almost 30 years ago? The band repackages old material more diligently than it produces new hits (their last record of new material was 1997's Bridges to Babylon, and it's a challenge to name a song off it). This lack of resonant new stuff doesn't affect the success of their live shows, which routinely sell out.
They're a nostalgia act now, just like Paul McCartney, who is also out touring this year (and producing yelps for the cost of his concert tickets, which top out at $275 for his Toronto date). McCartney doesn't even have a new record, which shouldn't disappoint fans as long as they get to hear Hey Jude and Let It Be. So if the Stones and McCartney possessed genius once, as they surely did, where did that creativity go?
Perhaps it's because they fall into the category of early-peaking conceptual artists. David Galenson, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, who studies the arc of artistic creativity over a lifetime, identifies two groups of artists: the conceptual, who flare bright and fizzle early, and whose approach is visionary and ground-breaking, and the experimental, whose best work tends to come later, the product of accumulated experience and wisdom.
Galenson, whose book Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity will be published in early 2006, includes in the first group artists like F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was 29 when The Great Gatsby was published, and playwright Alfred Jarry, whose crowning achievement, Ubu Roi, was first produced when he was 23. Conceptual artists, says Galenson, are dependent on the confidence of youth, which lends them a simplicity of vision as well as an optimism and iconoclasm. Experimental innovators, on the other hand, like Dostoevsky and Frank Lloyd Wright, continue to refine their ideas through trial and error, and revel in the journey. It's in this category he places Piet Mondrian, who said, "I don't want pictures. I just want to find things out."
It's an intriguing way to look at the careers of artists that are otherwise perplexing. Why, for example, does Robert De Niro continue to choose such shoddy and unchallenging roles after an early career that saw him explode on screen? Should an artist of his stature really be starring opposite Dakota Fanning and a toilet-trained cat?
On the other hand, who thought that Alan Alda -- whose principal trait as television's Hawkeye Pierce on M*A*S*H was the ability to maintain a leer over a half-hour -- would turn out to be such a great, nuanced actor? He's boldly taken on three different media recently and drawn raves in each (on television in The West Wing, on the big screen in The Aviator and on stage in David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross).
Perhaps Alda, at 69, is in his "liberation phase." This period of exploration, which begins in a person's 50s and lasts until the early 70s, was identified by Gene D. Cohen, the head of the Center on Aging, Health & Humanities at Washington's George Washington University in his book, The Creative Age.
"It's a time when people begin to hear an inner voice that says, 'If not now, when?' " says Cohen over the phone from his office. "These are powerful feelings of liberation. People often move into areas they haven't tried, or embark on experimentation. In many ways, it's aging's counterpart to adolescence, but with a formed sense of identity."
Cohen also points to research in the field of brain plasticity, which gives insight into how creativity can evolve over years. For one thing, the brain does continue to produce new cells, "especially in the area called the hippocampus, which is involved with information processing."
On top of that, the connections between brain cells, called dendrites, continue to be created and are most numerous in humans in their early fifties. Myelin, the covering of the brain cells, which speeds communication between them, continues to build up until the age of 50 or so. "So this rich density of dendrites and improved connections between cells is probably contributing what translates into wisdom," Cohen says.
Wisdom, in Woody Allen's case, might involve slowing down his output, so that his film-a-year factory doesn't crank out product characterized mainly by a watery sameness. (Allen's latest, Match Point, received some good notices at Cannes, which may suggest a return to early form. But doesn't every Allen movie raise that hope?) On the other hand, Clint Eastwood seems to be getting stronger with each outing, culminating in this year's Oscar for Million Dollar Baby. There was a point when he might have been remembered only as a squint-eyed punch line, or as the director of such non-classics as Firefox. But since the biopic Bird in 1988, he's spent his capital widely and well, directing everything from tough dramas like Mystic River to the well-crafted ballad The Bridges of Madison County.
In an essay published just after his death, Edward Said -- wrestling with the highly personal issue of his own mortality -- looked at the new patterns forged by artists at the end of their lives, the period he called "late style." He points out that what is often most celebrated about the older artist is a reconciliation or calmness, a summing up of a life's work. But what Said found more intriguing were the artists, like Ibsen, who took all the jigsaw pieces and flung them in the air -- the artists who used the end of their creative lives as a time for unorthodoxy and chaos. "What if age and ill health," he wrote, "don't produce serenity at all?"
At the risk of giving Said heartburn in the hereafter, let us now say two words: Sylvester Stallone. That's right, Sylvester Stallone. At this point in his life, Rocky could sit at home staring at his dining-room table with an image of Brigitte Nielsen carved into it, or look for a home for his kooky mother. And admittedly, he is planning a new Rambo film. But he has also written a screenplay and wants to direct a film about Edgar Allan Poe.
Only a person liberated by age and experience (or one very young and foolish) would embark on such a project, which carries with it the prospect of manhood-shrivelling mockery. More power to the geezer. If not now, when?
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