by geeta on November 11, 2009
I’m turning 30 on Sunday, and now seems as good of a time as any to reflect. I’ve been writing about the arts for a living for eight years now, on and off. It’s not an extravagant living, to be sure. But I know now that writing isn’t a phase before I find something more “worthwhile” or lucrative to do, but an essential part of myself. I realize that I think more slowly and deliberately about things now than I used to, and I like going deep into one subject for a long period of time. I’m drawing up a proposal right now for a second book, a big book. It’s easier for me to write about difficult things when it’s cold and windy. The days in Boston are drawing shorter and darker, and the last of the yellow leaves are crumbling underfoot.
I’m happy that people seem to be liking Another Green World. The book is in stores now in the US and Canada, and will be out soon in the UK and Europe. I’m interested to hear what you think of it; drop me a line if you’ve read it. That small book on Brian Eno was a massive education for me, and continues to be now that it’s over. The work with books, I’ve learned, is never over. So many people think that writers write books, and then they’re somehow magically printed and put out into the world. Now I’m learning, in excruciating detail, about all of the things that happen after a book is researched and written. There’s the agonizing back-and-forth process of copyediting and typesetting the book, which can take months. Multiple iterations of proofs (in my case, five) are passed around. Apostrophes and em-dashes get argued about. Fonts get rearranged. Bibliographies have to be painstakingly formatted. There’s a lot of waiting, and a lot of staring. I found that after staring at the same text over and over, everything starts looking alien. Your words begin resembling something that’s not English at all; it all morphs into a vast indistinguishable text in some Martian language. You can try this yourself, by staring at a random page in a book for as long as you can possibly bear it, until it becomes numbing, and the words start swirling around you.
After all of that, there’s the printing process, which seems anathema to all of us in the Web generation. So many of my friends kept asking, “Where’s the book, already?” I tried to explain to them that printing books on dead trees takes time. There are books that need printing, boxes of books that need packing. There are big trucks that then ship these boxes to strange vast warehouses in distant lands, which then mysteriously dispatch them to bookstores. The whole process takes weeks and weeks. [click to continue…]
by geeta on October 21, 2009
An essay by me for Rhizome, the online hub for information on new media art, on Brian Eno, Peter Schmidt, and cybernetics.
by geeta on October 9, 2009
Me buried in my own book, earlier today. Another Green World is finished, hot off the press, and will be in bookstores (and Amazon) next week.
by geeta on October 8, 2009
A feature story by me on the German ambient musician Gas, also known as Wolfgang Voigt, for the October issue of a new British music magazine called Into. (Flip to pages 16-20 for the piece.) This piece was written in preparation for the Gas concert at the Barbican in London this week. I wish I could have been there.
by geeta on October 7, 2009
My book on Brian Eno’s Another Green World is being shipped to bookstores right now, and I’m told that copies should be at your friendly neighborhood bookstore next week. Amazon will also have copies ready to ship next week, so if you’ve pre-ordered the book already, you’ll be getting it in the mail very soon.
I wrote a piece on my top ten Brian Eno album covers for Print, the graphic design magazine. On a related note, here’s a piece I did for Print a few years ago about David Byrne. (He was a lovely guy to talk to. Music hardly figured into our sprawling two-hour conversation — it was all about different kinds of pencils, relative thicknesses of paper, the aesthetic importance of eraser smudges, neurobiology, and tree branches. I’m fired up to read his new book on long bicycle trips.)
What else has been happening? I went skydiving for the first time, jumping out of a small plane in rural Massachusetts with some of my Boston neighbors. The feeling of freefall is not unlike the transporting experience of listening to great music, I found. I went to Los Angeles for a week, managing to put my formerly intense loathing of LA aside. I gave in to the weird, wild city, finding myself incredibly impressed with the range of contemporary art galleries and museums. I saw a few great shows in Boston — Dirty Three at the ICA, and Yo La Tengo in a downtown Boston theatre. And I just came back from a week-long trip back to New York City. Highlights: The expansive Genesis P-Orridge retrospective, 30 Years of Being Cut Up, at Invisible-Exports on the Lower East Side; a performance by Krautrock legends Faust in Williamsburg; a sublime Dixon gig in a warehouse in Bushwick; lunches, dinners, and drinks with old friends (Simon Reynolds, Douglas Wolk, Paul Kennedy, Lauren Klein); nature walks down the High Line; the dizzying survey of contemporary Dutch art at White Box Gallery. I’m heading back to New York City for two more weeks at the end of this month for the 2009 NEA Arts Journalism Institute in Classical Music and Opera. On the horizon: Lots of trips to Carnegie Hall, Alice Tully Hall, and Avery Fisher Hall by night…and lots of intensive training in classical music by day. Master classes with Alex Ross, Anne Midgette, Greg Sandow, Justin Davidson, and lots of other critics I admire. I’m looking forward to it.
Some new pieces by me that’ll be out soon: an essay on cybernetics and art for Rhizome; a feature on the shadowy German ambient musician Gas for a new British music magazine; and an essay by me on Bollywood cinema and Michael Jackson for a new anthology edited by Mark “K-Punk” Fisher.
by geeta on July 20, 2009
An essay by me on Brian Eno’s 1983 album Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks, for the London Science Museum’s concert gala this week commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing.
Also: an essay by me on Brian Eno and cooking for the inaugural issue of Loops, a cool new music journal to be published biyearly by Faber & Faber. (You’ll have to buy the lush, expansive print edition to read the full piece.)
It’s grey and raining in Boston today. My calendar says it’s mid-June, but the chill feels like November. So I sit in my beautiful and bizarre brick house (pictured above — well, that’s actually an 18th-century Piranesi etching, but close enough), drink tea, and read books.
I read the entirety of Paul Auster’s 1997 collection The Art of Hunger before I went to sleep last night. It’s a dense anthology of literary criticism, interviews, and hazy, enchanting recollections. The criticism is mostly of books and poetry of the French persuasion. Auster got his start as a writer by translating French books into English, and French figures loom large over his life.
This particular passage reminded me a lot of Brian Eno’s approach to ambient music, which grew increasingly minimal and textural as the ’70s progressed:
“The one thing I try to do in all my books is to leave enough room in the prose for the reader to inhabit it. Because I finally believe it’s the reader who writes the book and not the writer…
In reading a book like Pride and Prejudice, for example, I realized at a certain point that all events were set in the house I grew up in as a child. No matter how specific a writer’s description of a place might be, I always seem to twist it into something I’m familiar with … I think this probably has a lot to do with one’s relation to language, how one responds to words printed on a page. Whether the words are just symbols, or whether they are passageways into our unconscious.
There’s a way in which a writer can do too much, overwhelming the reader with so many details that he no longer has any air to breathe. Think of a typical passage in a novel. A character walks into a room. As a writer, how much of that room do you want to talk about? The possibilities are infinite. You can give the color of the curtains, the wallpaper pattern, the objects on the coffee table, the reflection of the light in the mirror. But how much of this is really necessary?”
Suddenly I find myself reunited with my vinyl records, for the first time in nearly a year. It’s like Christmas! I forgot I owned half this stuff! I just found the amazing mini-book that came with the Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense LP. I tranced out to all four sides of Metal Machine Music. And I started scanning some of my favorite 12″ cover designs. This particular single is as good of a place to start as any. The arty minimalism of early ’80s new wave meets the neon bonanza of mid-’80s pop, in the crazy, crazy year that was 1984.
I’ve had a few recent conversations with friends in San Francisco about arts criticism, in which I invariably find myself having to rush to the defense — rather passionately, I might add — of criticism as a discipline. I quit my technology-related teaching job recently, choosing to focus, once more, on the quixotic quest of being a journalist and writing more books on obscure subjects.
San Francisco is not a town that’s overflowing with critics, the way that New York City always seemed to be. The news outlets that are still solvent in the Bay Area seem to focus on tech reporting. The big fish around these parts are hometown heroes like Yelp and Twitter (their headquarters are just down the street from me), Facebook, and Google (an hour’s drive away, in pleasantly sterile Mountain View.)
In comparison, arts criticism seems like small change, both literally and figuratively. There’s nothing more humbling than having to defend your chosen profession to your friends on a regular basis. According to some of the software engineers I know, reviews are something that can be automated by recommendation engines; music criticism is a charming anachronism ready to be supplanted by playlists on social networking sites. Among the “hard news” journalists I know who still have jobs — from the embittered City Hall reporters to the elite foreign correspondents — arts criticism is considered fluff, an ethereal sort of candy-floss hardly worthy of its own seminar at a journalism school. Many of the humanities academics I’m acquainted with don’t take criticism in the popular press very seriously either. They’re likely to tell me that the grasp of theory is weak, if there is any theory to begin with; that it’s too commercial; that the argumentation lacks rigor and depth. To cap it all off, the artists I know, by and large, hate art critics, evincing only a grudging, vestigial respect for larger-than-life figures (mostly dead) like Clement Greenberg. Critics don’t get much love these days from anybody, which is part of the reason why I love criticism. [click to continue…]
This one-hour documentary on John Cage, directed by Peter Greenaway in 1983, is a lot of fun to watch. Take a look:
