Resolution: Actually update my blog

With the year coming to an end, I think it's time I get my act in order and start updating this blog again.

Quick updates and thoughts since my last post in Feb. 2008:

1. Still working at the Las Vegas Sun and living, therefore, in Las Vegas. On Dec. 18, I was mesmerized by the six-inch blanket of snow that covered everything. Tree branches groaned and broke under the weight of the powdery sleet, yet I stupidly walked from the office to the restaurants across the street for dinner. As I waited for my take-out order to be filled, the snow had started to fall again. As my overweight frame made its way back to the warmth of the Sun building, I looked like an out-of-place Yeti trudging beneath a sidewalk lined with frosted palm trees.

2. Someday I will finish my record. Waiting until February when I hope to buy some new equipment (a better analog-digital interface without built in microphone preamps is high on the list; I bought a nice tube microphone preamp that I'd like to start using).

3. SNDVegas went well. The highlight of the whole affair was when I gave a "Team Gaspard" shirt to TBall, who immediately paraded around in the orange monstrosity in front of the "Gaspard" as in Bill. "Take it off," he said with some obscenities before stomping off. Also, had a great time hanging out with all the Mercsters, past and present, that were in attendance. The place does get into your DNA.

4. Even with all the financial woes in the journalism industry -- now the New York Times has to worry about its debt and the Washington Post Co. is trying to figure out what to do with the struggling Newsweek -- it's an exciting time to be working for a print product. A lot of the Tribune redesigns crackle with a lot of energy, and the possibility of a very different Detroit Freep in the near future is plenty thrilling.

5. I am now on Twitter.

6. That she of the buzz, Tina Brown, continues work on her latest venture, the daily online magazine The Daily Beast (so named for the fictional 'paper in Evelyn Waugh's satirical novel Scoop). I've found it to be a must in the morning for quickly browsing the news. Their aggregations are smart, and some of their contributing writers -- Tucker Carlson, Stanley Crouch, Brown herself, Jessi Klein -- are fantastic. Downsides? Editing of original content can be scattershot from day to day, and there's an overwhelming fascination with the rich and powerful. Do we need a story about how a woman landed a sugar daddy? Even with all the useful analysis, there's a salaciousness and upper crust fascination that is just so jejune in the final days before 2009.

7. Bay Area singer-songwriter Brittany Shane, has put out a new record, Have Heart Live Young that fulfills the promise of the EP she made a year ago. She's added some new sounds into her song arsenal, including girl group-style arranging and melodies, more complex vocal harmonies and a more disciplined approach to her vocal lines to augment her sturdy folk rock sound. There are also some awesome musicians on the album, including guitarist Michael Lockwood, who plays on Aimee Mann's records. Anyway, it's been great fun hearing Brittany develop her songwriting since we first met about four to five years ago.

8. This is an old post by now, but Marc Myers of Jazzwax blasted the Kennedy Center for honoring the Who with its lifetime achievement award while neglecting American jazz musicians. While I have none of his prejudice against rock music and the Who (he argues that their impact on music is negligible; perhaps so if one is considering the actual internal workings of the whole of music, but their societal impact and influence on rock and roll is quite large) nor do I consider the rehashing of the Pete Townshend child pornography allegations a worthwhile argument against, I do agree with Myers on the point that it's a problem when one of our country's highest art awards goes to two members of a British rock group. Where's Wayne Shorter? Maria Schneider? Or (not a jazz musician) STEVE REICH!

9. Greg Sandow has made a point of examining the slow demise of classical music in his blog, and I don't mean to poach his territory. But I do want to note a point about classical criticism. Here are three New York Times articles, one giving conductor Gilbert E. Kaplan a virtual encomium for his bizarre and fixed focus on the Mahler second in a long profile; a second straight review that is positive; and a news report that might as well dispense with all its quotes and just call Kaplan rubbish. So which is he? Therein lies the rub and the quandary. If the critics and musicians can't come to a consensus on his work, what about the average listener whose musical education has been on the wane for generations? Does the inability to ascertain a well-formed evaluation of the performance's quality make the average listener more interested in Kaplan's human story? Is his narrative -- his journey from average businessman to conductor of renowned orchestras -- what makes audiences like him? And is that so wrong? Maybe I don't want to hear the Australian pianist David Helfgott (immortalized by Geoffrey Rush in the biopic "Shine") on record, ever, (technically untrue -- he was on Silverchair's excellent "Emotion Sickness") but I'm sure it would be a great pleasure to see someone once so incapacitated by his psyche mount a stage and play the instrument he had won mastery of once, no matter how vexing his performance is. The notes may be disjointed, wrong and inartistic but there is still a narrative in the breaks of his mind and the attempt to bridge those gaps all made audible in real time.

CURRENT LISTEN: Gabriel Faure, "La Bonne Chanson, Op. 61"

The death of classical music

The prevailing wisdom among stuffy critics and patrons looking to shower their largess is that classical music is an art to be appreciated like fine wine, with a discerning palette to augur through its complexities. To them, any addition beyond oscillating frequencies will kill the form. But they're wrong.

In his piece "When Histrionics Undermine the Music and the Pianist," Bernard Holland of the New York Times posits that the physical "histrionics" -- the performing tics -- of musicians have nothing to do with the music of the composer. That, in fact, those gestures out of the theater are laughable to the eyes of younger listeners eager to discover yet soon to be estranged from the majesty of art music.

Holland's argument fails because he neglects several facts:

1. The score is NOT sacred. As music notation matured, it became more and more exact, but the nuances of its performance remain impossible to accurately delineate. (And that is not including the grid and chance notations of Cage disciples.) To say that a performer acts merely as a middleman -- as a bridge between audience and composer -- does violence to the idea of interpretation. If a performer can elevate their performance from the rote, mechanical and cliche to the fresh and exciting, then it must be new, not some return to some totemic paragon, which must be familiar by definition.

2. The pseudo-avuncular tone of the piece is condescending in its assumption that younger listeners will be so caught in the tableau of performative histrionics that they miss the substance. What an insult to the intelligence! If the performer makes some non-musical gesture as a natural result of their intense concentration, I think the young listener -- and the audience in general -- will be further moved.

And for a smarter response, go to Henry Fogel's blog On the Record.

Week no. 2 Sketch no. 1: "My Own Teeth"

Don't tell my newspaper colleagues, but only one entry into my project of releasing a new song every other week, I've already blown my deadline. So, let me introduce a new series of sketches of unfinished music.

Here I am with hat in hand. A song every other week used to be laughably easy for me. I mean, I used to make a record a week. Granted, they were uniformly awful, but still it's fascinating how much slower the whole process is for me.

With that said, I don't present to you a completed song. This is a sketch of "My Own Teeth," which began as an acoustic guitar ditty. The lyric conceit is from a Fela Kuti song ("Only a fool eats his own teeth"), which made me think about a fool and then a cuckold. Musically, I wanted to sound like the Beatles, but the prolonged Fmaj9 vamp as an intro pushed it in a different direction with the almost classical piano melody leading into big Who-style suspended chords, a verse out of Motown and a pre-chorus stolen from the Band. So where's the song going? Who knows!

What the sketch doesn't have is any live instrumentation overdubs, and I didn't really mix it at all. This is as is. Enjoy.

Current reads no. 1: Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace

The first in a series of posts about the books I'm reading.

My first brush with novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace was in the 150th anniversary issue of the Atlantic Monthly released last year. His short piece -- the rule was 300 words maximum -- effectively conveyed the problem facing the United States as it ages. That is, can it continue to protect the safety of its citizens in the days of relentless, resourceful and faceless terrorism?

All the formal tics are present including the endearing (or infuriating) use of footnotes for asides. Even so, he managed to condense a nuanced set of ethical questions for our fair nation into a tight word count. (Very much unlike Tom Wolfe, whose bloated piece was three times the size of the next largest yet nonsensical in its self-aggrandizing pomposity.)

With that said, I can't really give a more detailed breakdown of Wallace's work. His career in letters has been so vast and varied it's impossible to begin at just one point. He's written novels, including the gargantuan Infinite Jest. He's a frequent contributor to magazines as a fiction writer and as a journalist, including humorous coverage of the 1998 Adult Video News Awards for Premiere Magazine.

The aforementioned piece -- titled "Big Red Son" -- opens his collection Consider the Lobster. It's both robust and precious -- he refers to himself and a group of porn journalists as "yr. corresps." He also manages to provide a point-of-view perspective of the affair while maintaining some critical distance. Wallace isn't afraid to write what any person attending the AVN awards for the first time would be thinking: "Are we going to have sex?" He answers truthfully.

No.

And with one negation he's managed to humanize an industry that does not a priori dehumanize as feminists would like to claim, although it indeed does so by merit of the demands it makes on its workers' ethics, self-image and physiology.

Other thoughts as I read:

"Certainly the End of Something or Other, One Would Sort of Have to Think": A sharp critique of John Updike and, by proxy, his great white, male generation of writers. No throwaway bit of criticism here.

"Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness from Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed": The text of a speech by Wallace. He attempts to reveal the humor students are missing in Kafka's writing. Unfortunately, I think most of the general populace fails to recognize the humor in Kafka. Wallace doesn't make a clean case.

"Authority and American Usage": Wallace sinks his teeth into the decisions -- and thus intellectual movements and politics -- involved in how the American language is used. Not finished with reading this essay (it's on the long side), but it's fascinating and a great overview of many different threads, including a brief stroll through Chomsky's universal grammar.

Looking forward and "Week no. 1: 'Finlandia Cried'"

Sounding off on the future of the Chatterbox and introducing a new feature: a song release every other week.

As I said in my first post on this site, I never intended this blog to be about culture. Rather, I was planning to do simple, "Here's what I'm doing" posts. Even with the launch completed, there were a couple of nagging thoughts in my head about what I really wanted to be doing.

With that said, I'd like to turn the Chatterbox into a small-circulation magazine someday -- perhaps two years down the road -- with a separate, integrated Internet component and contributors from the ranks of all the talented folks I know.

You're yelling, "Why?" I can't blame you. Surely such an ambition is ripe for emotional, physical and financial breakdowns. But I'm tied to the idea of doing something small scale, bold and personally fulfilling. I also want both the print and Web product to be a place of experimentation for the kind of work one does personally and for the work itself.

Now you're asking about the kicker because there's always a kicker. Well, with this post, I'd like to launch the first in a series of songs every other week in the spirit of the Chatterbox experiment. The challenge: Write , arrange, record, produce and post a song every other week for public comment. It's a watered down version of what Michael Zapruder did.

Interlude:

I never met Zapruder, but I covered him during my brief sojourn as a music writer. At the time I was writing about the Mission Creek Music Festival for the San Francisco Bay Guardian. I stumbled across his name, Google-d him and discovered a fine songwriter whose work anticipated the recent crush of literate, hyper-orchestrated adult contemporary* that people are considering indie these days. What really caught my attention was a project he did called 52 Songs, in which he challenged himself to write one song a week. He put it out as a 3-CDR -- I think -- set. I couldn't afford it then, so I didn't buy it. I regret that decision now because it's out of print. I did a brief e-mail interview with him and gushed about 52 Songs. I made his show one of my picks for the festival but couldn't make it myself. Another missed opportunity.

* Feist anyone? I personally don't get why she's so popular. I might just have to buy her album The Reminderto find out. Future blog post?

End interlude.

So I kick it off with "Finlandia Cried," which is just a pop song. Nothing much to recommend the words beyond the allusion to the death of Baldur. But there's a backwards guitar solo! I just like saying that -- makes me feel like Jimi Hendrix. If you don't know my music, it is, as usual, performed by my lonesome with an assortment of guitars, sequencers, synths and drum machines.

"Finlandia Cried"
By Alex K. Fong

Finlandia cried
I was struck down by
mistletoe
launched by some Nordic cripple

And I don't care how far you are
'Cause we were meant for so much more

I will wait for you
I will waste for you
On and on and on and on

Finlandia cried
I was trapped under black ice
You weren't there
You were in the atmosphere

Music nerd alert: It's written in G major, built on a I-IV progression (voiced as add9's) for the verses, a V-II (with 7ths added) on the pre-chorus and a VI-IV-II-IV (again with the 7ths). The guitar solo is mostly over a one-chord, Gadd9 vamp except for a bar or two of Amin7, which leads back into the out chorus. Again, not a particularly complex tune.

More Peter Gabriel-era Genesis

Glam or performance art? Who cares! "I Know What I Like in Your Wardrobe" is catchy as hell.

One of the most awesome scenes in The Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy is when Will Ferrell hops on stage to play jazz flute. The ending of this song always makes me think of that wonderful moment, and sometimes I imagine a quote of "Aqualung" for kicks. Regardless, this song is a wonderful pop nugget, especially with that great synth line on the chorus.

Bleak House by Charles Dickens

Dense and unapproachable for the first half but moving and fascinating in the second, here's what makes the denouement succeed and what it tells us.

Victorian authors will never be remembered for concise writing (not counting Jane Austen, who preceded but, I think, anticipated the style of writing in its treatment of class) in narrative or in prose. Of course they often more than made up for it with their impossible erudition. Some of the most beautiful passages in the English language can be found in even the era's more humble classics, such as the proto-pulp thriller and class-conscious novel, The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins.

But I'm not here to talk about Collins. I'm here to talk about his much more admired and remembered friend, Charles Dickens and his novel Bleak House which took four arduous months to read.

I actually made it through both high school and college -- with a two-year stint as an English major -- without ever having to read anything by Dickens, aside from quickly crashing through A Tale of Two Cities.

That first experience -- that plucking of the blossom if you will -- was unmemorable and slightly uncomfortable. This is the great novelist of bildungromans and entangled plots? This is the amazing stylist of the English language? This is the unrelenting chronicler of the elite and the lumpenprole?

Perhaps I could not stand the sheer verbiosity of his writing. Dickens was paid by the word, and he was well compensated, judging by the thickness of his finished works. (Someday, should I ever own them all, I'll measure the volumes' aggregate volume and post it.)

The first 400 pages of the book introduces the major characters to us and to its own denizens -- introductions that begin innocently and, later, reveal inner motives and inequitable interelationships. Nevertheless, it is those initial impressions that defy the modern reader's expectation of drama at the onset. There is no clean explanation of the rules or a weighing of the consequences. Indeed, I could only read three pages per sitting, often repulsed by the lack of propulsion. Not until that 400th page does the novel begin an inexorable march to conclusion.

What Dickens loses in concision, he makes up for in clarity and correctness. His use of diction is first-rate. No passage ever remains neutral. (For more, I refer you to "Writing like the Dickens," an article by Thomas C. Renzi in the Feb. 2008-issue of the The Writer.)

Its structure is nothing short of brilliant. It is terrible, yet fitting, that Caddy Jellyby and her invalid husband, Prince Turveydrop, would have a deaf and dumb child, whose physiological defects mirror its grandparents' sins, for both Mrs. Jellyby -- mother of Caddy -- and Mr. Turveydrop -- father of Prince -- were oblivious to their family and life. They turned a deaf ear to remonstrance and held conversations of no lasting import, completing an inevitable arc from generation to generation.

And this is in the novel's minor characters.

What really makes the novel succeed, however, belies Dickens' reputation as a sentimentalist. Although Carstone wins the aprocryphal court case that has locked away his and his wife's fortune, he receives nothing -- due to legal costs -- and dies. Like how David Simon describes The Wire, Bleak House is, in actuality, a Greek tragedy -- an existential meditation on the forces of chance that can favor or align against those caught in the middle.

The bittersweet ending is an antidote for the ills of today's culture. Popular opinion on the decline of newspaper circulation likes to point to the Internet as the cause, but, in reality, it's our culture. We put celebrity news and gossip on the front pages because our readers have said our news hole is too full of death and destruction. Reality television has made a point of highlighting swooping saviors. And when we do write about current events, it is of little substance and reflection. It's an ostrich approach to the world, one that values the silver bullet over practical solutions derived from past mistakes.

There is no silver bullet in Dickens. Only sensibility, perserverance and luck.

Correction: Jane Austen is not a Victorian author. She died before the birth of Queen Victoria in 1837. The original post did not provide additional context in the first paragraph.