Haunted Ink: Live in El Centro

1. Lose weight
2. Create more songs and post them on this site for all to enjoy
3. Read all the books I got for Xmas
4. Fine tune this site somehow
5. Go to Europe with my mom and in-laws and live to tell about it!

• Personally, 2005 was the ultimate Dickens year for me. On the best of times side, I got a new job teaching English full time, my wife and I bought our first house, and, in December, I got yet another new job coordinating the distance education program at my college. All this was overshadowed, however, by the death of my father in February, which was devastating for my family. I'm heartened, however, by the fact that my dad would have been proud of my accomplishments this year. I just wish he'd been around to see my new house--he would have loved it.
• Another thing my dad would have loved would have been the Seattle Seahawks' season so far; they're the best team in the NFL right now, and my dad and I were big fans. In fact, when the Angels won the world series in 2002, the first thing my dad said to me was, "Now we just have to get one for the Seahawks." So, hopefully, this will be the year--too bad he couldn't be here to enjoy it.
• My dad was never as big a baseball fan as I am, but he still would have enjoyed the Angels beating up the Yankees this year in the first round of the playoffs. He hated the Yankees, as do I, though the Red Sox and their incredibly annoying fans are a VERY close second. I'm a huge Angels fan, so the loss to the white sox this year was depressing, but at least the team won its second straight AL West crown--something the Angels have never done before. Even better, the future for the team is as bright as it's ever been.
  
• Because of my dad's death and my new job and move, I scaled back my music reviewing here and at Stylus. I don't know how many reviews I'll be doing in the future, but I will continue to write review whenever I can, and when I can't, I'll at least post recommendations here for all to check out.

• The White Stripes, Get Behind Me Satan--best album of the year from the best rock band anywhere
• Sigur Rós, Takk...--Another great work by a great band. Once again, haunting, original, and utterly beautiful, just like Iceland.
• William Basinski, The Garden of Brokenness--see my review below
• Boards of Canada, The Campfire Headphase--fantastic work
• Seu Jorge, The Life Aquatic - Studio Sessions--Wonderful Bowie covers in Portugese by great Brazilian singer. The movie is really underappreciated, too.

• The Daily Show with Jon Stewart--If you're not a fan, then just leave this site right now. Best thing on TV.
• Arrested Development--Five years from now, people will be talking about this show as the Seinfeld of the 00s.
• Battlestar Galactica--Surprisingly intelligent scifi.
• Lost--Caught up with this show thanks to iTunes. Good stuff.
• South Park--As usual.
• Rome--"Who doesn't appreciate a large penis?"
• Full Metal Alchemist--How many other shows out there are about alchemy?

• Werner Herzog boxed sets--one of his films with Klaus Kinski, the other a collection of his other greats. Amazing stuff, especially Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fata Morgana.
• All three original Star Trek seasons--what I did while recovering from my broken bones.
• All sorts of Ray Harryhausen DVDs, including a collection of his early work and Jason and The Argonauts, still the best special effects film I've ever seen. I got to see Harryhausen in person this year at Comicon.

• iPod video--got it a few weeks ago (my third ipod). Great tool--will change movies and tv the way the first ipod changed music.
• PSP--also changing video as well as gaming, but still waiting to see if better games will emerge on the system before pronouncing it a true success.
• TabletPC--my school gave me one this year; has the potential to transform computers, provided they become easier to use.

The Garden of Brokenness is certainly different from that otherwork. It’s neither creepy nor complex. In fact, this might be the simplest work Basinski has ever released. However, buried in this simplicity is a universe of fascinating aberrations, and it is the aberrations that really make this piece memorable.

The work consists of two parts that blend together over the course of fifty minutes. The first part is a tranquil piano melody that is played over and over again, in fits and starts, throughout. The second is an echoing, feedback-laden wall of noise that reflects the piano melody back on itself like a room of mirrors, turning the initial melody into a self- replicating monster at one moment (repeating itself over and over in sharper intensity) and dissolving into a gigantic chasm of noise at another moment. The work, then, is a series of waves of differing intensities crashing against the reader’s ears.

At times, the waves are utterly tranquil—the wall of noise barely penetrating the melody. At other times, the melody itself barely penetrates the noise. At still other times, the two sounds fight for bragging rights, slugging it out between our ears. And then there are times when Basinski organizes the two parts of his creation so that they remain separate from one another—the beautiful melody in the foreground, the wave of noise building and humming and breathing in the background.

Taken together, the work is a little like walking through a cave with a boom box in your hand. In smaller spaces, the boom box’s speakers dominate; in larger spaces, the reflection of the speakers dominate, bouncing off the cave walls and echoing in all directions until there are hundreds of different variations on the same sound all blurring together in a haze of noise. Since Basinski himself refers to this music as “dark” and “swampy,” I guess you could say that the cave metaphor might be an apt description of this music—provided that the cave in question is the one you float through on the “Pirates of the Caribbean” ride at Disneyland!

Basinski also refers to this music as “sad” and “elegiac,” and I suppose those two words are appropriate ones to use for this music, given how the end result of many of these loops is a disintegration of a basic melody into a rumbling noise. However, I see more hope in this work than in, say, Basinski’s epic Disintegration Loops. There, the music falls apart, and he records the dying. Here, the music doesn’t really die; rather, it grows and expands and reverberates in the same way the sounds of nature can echo and expand across a landscape. Natural sounds die out, too, of course, but there’s no sadness in it—it’s just the temporal nature of sound. And that, I think, is what Basinski has created here, an illustration of the true beauty and frailty of sound itself, both as it exists in our world and as it exists in our imaginations.