The Situation with Inflation (Sorta)

Today I realized that I don't really know anything about inflation. Strike that. I know all about forcing air into things to increase their volume. That sounds awful. Strike that, too. What I'm trying to say is, I don't know much about the concept of inflation as it relates to currency and the economic climate. I guess, basically, inflation is an increase in the price of goods and services as a result of a decrease in the purchasing power of a particular form of currency. I've been doing a little research this afternoon, and what actually causes inflation seems difficult to wrap one's head around. Apparently the causes aren't even agreed upon by many financial experts (or, I should say, that in cases where inflation isn't extreme, the potential number of contributing factors is such that it is very difficult to determine exactly what combination is the actual cause of the inflation).

The reason I'm thinking about inflation right now is because of recent news stories detailing the hyperinflation that Zimbabwe is currently experiencing. The Zimbabwean government is about to introduce a $100 trillion bill (300 bucks, U.S. currency). A loaf of bread costs $300 billion. The inflation rate in November was something like 89.7 sextillion percent, which means the price of goods doubles less than every 15 hours. How does something like this happen? Part of what exacerbates hyperinflation is the fact that people immediately exchange whatever money they get for some tangible goods in an effort to squeeze as much value out of their dollars as they can before the purchasing power decreases again. Entire countries get caught in vicious cycles of over-consumption and resource-hoarding in an attempt to stay ahead of the plummeting value of their currency. This can lead to a scarcity in goods that only further drives prices up.

Most transactions occurring in Zimbabwe right now are conducted with foreign currencies. It seems as though most people don't care what sort of money they're getting, as long as it's not the Zimbabwean dollar. How does a market stay afloat with no fixed currency (to the extent you could even say Zimbabwe's economy is "floating")? Surely it must be nightmarish to have to hash through exchange rates for multiple currencies, all of which change day-to-day as inflation makes the Zimbabwean dollar more and more useless. Essentially, what is occurring is called "dollarization," in which a country adopts the currency of another country as its official currency. Except this is illegal in Zimbabwe. So is inflation, for that matter. Goods-providers, under law, are not allowed to raise their prices. But it doesn't stop the train. It keeps barreling down the tracks, seemingly heading for a concrete wall. What exactly does a government do when its currency goes extinct? I find it all kind of brain-scrambling.

Apologies for not offering any clarification on all of this. Because I don't have enough understanding of economics, the best I can do is draw all of these events to your attention so it scrambles your brain, too. Cruel? Maybe. Then again, maybe you fully understand the forces in action here. Then the joke's on me, and the only inflation I should be worrying about is that of my silly little head.

Photos by AP and Reuters, respectively.

Nels Cline: Dar He Drone

It seems Nels Cline is finally getting his due. As a guitarist, he's got chops out his ears, a thorough knowledge of guitar technique, a lovely lyrical bent and impeccable ear for note selection, a healthy obsession with electronic effects, and, most importantly, a fearless attitude when it comes to experimentation, improvisation, and self-reinvention. His long-time fans know him primarily as a brilliant, unpredictable jazz man, the greater public knows him as "the dude that plays all the crazy solos" in indie-rock sensations Wilco, and the underbelly of the noise scene recognizes him as an occasional collaborator with Sonic Youth main-man Thurston Moore and a purveyor of ambient and drone music. After years of spreading himself around the experimental music scene, there's finally some weight to his name.

His work in the drone genre is what we're considering today, because it's an aspect of his improvisation and musicianship that many people still aren't aware of. In the past ten years, Cline has made three drone albums with Devin Sarno. Sarno has recorded under his own name and the moniker CRIB for over a decade, focusing on solo-bass improvisation that explores the use of feedback and subsonic frequencies to create ambient music. The multitude of bizarre and ominous noises the two men conjure up is impressive, and often one is left wondering how a guitar and a bass can create such dense, ethereal tonal clouds. The following video, recorded last November in Los Angeles, provides an interesting peak into the creative process.

Nels Cline + Devin Sarno - The Wulf from ZF FILMS on Vimeo.

And for good measure, here's Cline performing with Wilco, letting his 70s guitar-rock side shine brightly:

Wilco - "Impossible Germany" performed live in Benica, Spain, 2007 from WilcoClub

Desperation

A crumbling empire, a life disintegrating. Well, perhaps it seemed an empire to you, your little cluster of accomplishment in Indiana, but even being a millionaire isn't enough to lift you from obscurity in modern America. Still, it was the Dream in a way, and like many under its hallucinatory grip, the power was too tempting. Now: a federal investigation, a divorce, seizure of assets, home searches, angry investors, no number or combination of lies or deflections that could smooth it all over this time. No hope for recovery. In this economy, ("in this economy;" you hate when people preface with that) when you're still ahead and suddenly it looks like you're about to lose it all, how can you ever picture the future where you'll be ahead again? Or even caught up to the average? Not as this persona, not with what fate dictates for this life. But you can beat fate. Free-will. You're sure it's what made you your fortune. (So then, is it what is undoing it?) If Marcus Schrenker is no longer in the picture, if he could only become someone else, then what fate befalls Marcus should no longer concern you. It will be hard for you to start again as someone new, but perhaps it will be easier than starting again as Marc with the tarnished reputation and the wounded pride. You doubt that anyone would take you seriously again. You believe it to be a tragic mistake, but you know it to be the case.

Mostly, though, you know this won't ever work. It's quite clear that accessing your means of starting anew somewhere else, as someone else, will only get you caught as the person you are now, Marc Schrenker, a stupid, fallen man, a laughing-stock, a wounded effigy of all that is wrong with deregulated markets and capitalism and the dirty-underside of the American legacy, to be paraded around and made an example of. They'll be waiting for you to tap your sure-to-be-flagged bank accounts, to swipe those credit cards and reveal your location. You know this can't work. But part of you thinks that it also can't get any worse, that maybe you don't need grand plans of rebirth, you needn't be the proverbial Phoenix, you just need to disappear. Worry about the rest later. For now, vanish. They can dismantle your "life," take apart what you've built piece by piece, but they can't take your life, can't rob you of your freedom. You can't allow them to. Part of you feels embarrassed that such thoughts cross your mind. It seems trite, stereotypically American. "You've ridden the American horse as far as you can, Marc" they'll say, "it's time you get the hell off." How offensive, really. How stupid it would be to invoke American liberties, to don a Patriot's hat while you undermine the establishment.

Yet you plot. It's a mess, you're aware. You've rented a storage unit in Alabama under an assumed name, tucking away in its dark corner a motorcycle, saddlebag-laden, as unassuming a vehicle as any for a multi-millionaire on the run. Hours of restless thought have turned up one obsessive thought: you're going to "die" in a plane crash. It's distracting and intense. You're alarmed that it makes sense. Grisly and macabre, but perfectly suiting your purpose. Accident, suicide; it doesn't matter what history records, it matters that you're sufficiently removed as the end result. You imagine an explosion that obliterates the plane. You imagine Marc Schrenker vaporized, reverted to tiny molecules, pulled apart more thoroughly than any Federal probe could ever hope to manage. You imagine all the anger, which is both directed at you, but also not, because you've left Marc behind when you jump from the plane. In your thoughts, a nameless man emerges from the forest, which hides a deployed parachute, tangled in the underbrush.

And so, the next day, you take to the air in one of your planes, point its nose towards Florida. For a long stetch you fly, the world silent but from the hum of your engines. As you enter Alabaman airspace, you send out a distress call. Your windshield has imploded, you say, you're bleeding profusely. You try to sound panicked, and then marvel at how it's working, the adrenaline driving your voice from out of your chest and into your head, high-pitched and dizzy. A voice on the radio tells you help is being sent, planes are being dispatched to intercept you. You shut off the radio. Lost contact. They should assume the worst. You steel yourself, strapping your parachute on. The plane is set to auto, and you find yourself hesitating at the door. Maybe you just won't open the parachute. Maybe that's what's easiest. Or just stay in the plane, try to sleep, knowing you won't ever have to wake up. It seems cowardly, prideless. You open the cockpit door and jump.

The past 24 hours have been a haze. You blindly march ahead, completing each portion of the plan, but feeling like an automaton. In a way, you really have succeeded in eliminating Marc, because in your fleeting moments of clarity, you're pained by the absurdity of all this. The man in your mind did in fact emerge from the forest, but not so much born anew, just the same man as before, only now wet and feeling a little more pathetic. You remember knocking on a door in the night, then the blinding glare of the ER, then the beams of light chasing each other across the ceiling of the police cruiser as it moved through the night, the oblivious officers depositing you at a hotel just down the street from your motorcycle, such a blinding red it nearly glowed in the dark storage unit. The wind as you ride is a bit chilly, despite the fact that you're quickly approaching the Florida border. It hits you: your plan has run out of steps. You're just riding and tired. You checked for news with your Blackberry, and you learned of how your plane nearly struck some houses when it finally came sputtering down. The realization that you could have killed someone, that things have blown this far off course, hung heavily around you like a cloak, or at times, like an unbearable weight pressing on your chest. You sent an email to a close friend, insisting that the crash really was an accident, but you immediately regretted sending it as soon as it disappeared from your screen. Now you just ride. The tears in your eyes are just from the wind, you'd say, if anyone was there. You'll have to get used to being alone. This is only the beginning. This has just begun, and already, you know you can't handle it.

As you pass a sign welcoming you across the state line, you realize the flaw in your original plan. You think, the mistake was dying a symbolic death. The mistake was in assuming that I could both erase and preserve myself. Tonight, you decide, you'll correct the error. The fix is simple enough.


The tale continues: http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/01/14/missing.pilot.found/index.html

Liberated Drums

"'Free' doesn't mean you can just do what you want--rather, that you are responsible for your own limits." -Fred Frith

I mentioned Jon Faelt's drumming in the brief blurb I wrote about Bobo Stenson's Cantando in my Top Albums of 2008 entry, and I can't stop thinking about it lately. Drumming in general, really. Must have been all that Guitar Hero World Tour I played last night. I should be specific. I'm more interested in two things: free drumming, and in the ways a skilled drummer can imply a melody without having access to the full spectrum of chromatic notes.

A word of clarification regarding free drumming: "free" does not imply that drummers of the school are only banging on a drumkit with no abandon, that it takes no talent to be a "free" drummer. Arguably, it's more difficult than standard types of drumming, and many free drummers possess a stellar rhythmic sense and have completely mastered traditional styles of drumming. What's remarkable about the best free drummers is how drastically they alter the musical climate when they are freed from the responsibility of keeping time for the rest of the musicians. When done right, free styles of drumming are highly musical and lyrical, careening from idea to idea in an attempt to dramatically frame the movements of the other players. As Lewis Porter writes in the liner notes to the reissue of Coltrane's Ascension, the idea is to "mov[e] away from playing over a steady beat" and instead to aim "for a general churning pulse of fast or slow." The clatter of Han Bennink or Hamid Drake comes to mind for many, but the style needn't be so busy or violent. This is why Faelt's drumming is remarkable for someone so young and new to the international jazz scene; his level of restraint and his very subtle, unorthodox ideas are quick to gain the listener's attention. You starting listening closely to what he's doing because he's interesting, not because he's dominating the proceedings.


Check out Faelt's freewheeling drumming in the right corner.
Bonnie 'Prince' Billy's "Willow Trees Bend" is also driving my interest. The song features sparse chords that are strummed so loosely as to be nearly arpeggiated, coupled with a quiet, very free drumming element that makes the chords sound as though they're breathing, pushing the song along in swells of sound, or at times, lending it a gentle tumbling quality, like water splashing over rocks. It's an arresting effect that sets the song apart from the rest of Lie Down in the Light. Or I think of Chris Corsano's contribution to the massive title track on Six Organs of Admittance's School of the Flower, heated to boiling beneath Ben Chasny's acoustic plucking and ominous Eastern drones. In other realms of music, the free percussionist Vincent de Rougin markedly elevated the tension in the dark, bassy drone of Æthenor when he was added to the line-up for last year's Betimes Black Cloudmasses. And though there are countless examples in the various permutations of jazz, it is when free drumming is used in these different contexts that I find it most exciting. Sadly, they're few and far between.


Chris Corsano playing in the Flower-Corsano Duo (Mick Flower is playing a shahi baaja, a Japanese electric dulcimer)
My other drumming fixation is simpler and more prevalent. Like I said before, I enjoy when particularly musical drummers are able to imply the melody of a song through careful selection of the elements used in their drumming patterns. You can hear Ron Carter's bass line in Billy Cobham's drumming long before Carter starts playing on the live version of "Red Clay" on the reissue of Red Clay, and there was a video going around the internet a while ago that, despite the smug drummer, documented some particularly effective drumming to accompany the MIDI songs from Super Mario Bros. 3. Really, with a healthy mix of pocket and ostinato drumming, any good drummer should aim to highlight the melody while keeping the beat, but it unfortunately is not always the case. That's where we bassists come in. Although, looking back to the rhythmic freedom exhibited in the first type of drumming I discussed, bassists aren't always satisfied with being a non-melodic anchor, either.


Top photo of Jon Faelt by Aleksandar Zec
Han Bennink photo by Miemo

Fragmented Thoughts on Algorithms

An algorithm is simply a finite set of unambiguous instructions performed in a prescribed sequence to achieve a goal. There are three key factors to algorithms that must be satisfied in order for the process to be legitimate. These are:

1. Substrate Neutrality.
The result of the algorithm is dependent upon the logical structure of the steps, not by the materials used to complete the process.

2. Underlying Mindlessness.
The series of steps must be utterly simply, in that no judgments, decisions, or intuitions are required for steps to be completed correctly.

3. Guaranteed Results.
If all of the steps are followed accurately, the algorithm must do whatever it is that it does. (This seems redundant, but is important.)

The point of interest is this: whatever it is a given algorithm does, it doesn't have to have a conceivable use or value. People are accustomed to considering such systems from a perspective of interest or utility, and many don't realize that there are some algorithms that are so irregular or pointless that there is no way possible way to articulate just what it is they are for. As Daniel Dennett says, "they just do what they do and they do it every time." For the majority of people, it's simply not worth the effort to identify and understand an algorithm that has no apparent purpose.

And so: it is interesting to wonder how many of the phenomena we experience in the world are controlled by such seemingly useless algorithms. How many useless processes does it take working in concert to produce something that does have apparent value and/or purpose? And would each useless algorithm simply constitute a single step in a larger one? As I said, it would be difficult to even recognize such systems, as human thought patterns generally aren't likely to devote much power into handling inherently pointless processes, especially if the series of steps required to produce the useless (or more accurately, the apparently useless) result is staggeringly large.

I initially encountered the discussion of algorithms in Daniel Dennett's book on evolution, Darwin's Dangerous Idea. Everything above ties into evolution and natural selection as follows: the mistaken assumption is that natural selection is an algorithm with the intended result of producing us. For opponents of evolution, it is difficult to view the theory of evolution outside of its relevance to the origins of human design, and thus they falsely classify the process of natural selection solely as an alternative explanation for the existence of human beings. While natural selection may occur as the result of a series of algorithms, it is erroneous to assume that those algorithms must specifically be for something, that there is a certain meaningful goal to their process.

Something I Was Thinking About Several Months Ago But Am Not Posting Until Now, And Only Out Of Boredom

"Hell is the place we don't know we're in."

In Don DeLillo's The Names, one of the characters considers this quote, wondering "Is hell a lack of awareness? Once you know you're there, is this your escape?"

At first this seemed to be a terrifying paradox. But if you don't know you're in hell, how bad can it be? And when you do suddenly realize that you've been living in hell, that precise moment is the one in which you are released, so you never gain the ability to reflect on what your punishment in hell means or repent for your wrong-doings. At that point you're now free, and didn't recognize your punishment as such while it was occurring. So really, how much of a motivating force can hell be? The only way you can perceive it is through memory! If, when recollecting, things didn't seem that bad, then the knowledge that you had been in hell isn't likely to drastically alter your moral choices or influence the future course of your life. And presumably, if after that point you were to continue on in a manner that warrants your return in hell, you'd once again simply not realize you were there. It also isn't enough to deter evil behavior for those who have yet to visit, because who would care about the consequences of their actions if they're not going to be aware of their punishment while it's occurring?

Perhaps DeLillo's characters are experiencing some sort of Projection bias: they encounter people in situations or states-of-mind that surely would feel like hell to them, and mistakenly assume that the ignorance of those involved must be part of the tragic package.



Photo by Patrick Doheny.

Disintegrating Reality

Frozen Ledge #3 - Oil - 2007

Since I've been employed at the State House, the art displays maintained by the Maine Arts Commission have become one of my favorite parts of the building's decor. A large amount of space on the first floor of the building and additional areas on the second floor outside of the Governor's office are home to a variety of work created by Maine artists. Every few months, one series is taken down, and new work is brought in to replace it. Often, the displays are a mixture of pieces by several different artists, but the most recent display contains paintings by a single artist, Belfast resident Dennis Pinette.

Pinette states that he likes to "push realism to the edge of disintegration." It's a strange claim that takes on eerie significance when you finally see his art. I find myself stopping to look at it nearly every time I pass. His paintings possess a quality that is difficult to articulate, existing in some surreal blur of intense light and brooding darkness. I decided to take some photos to post here because I wanted to share his excellent work, but upon reviewing them, I found that the energy and vibrancy of the paintings was lost in the reproductions. Even in searching online, examples of his work seem lifeless compared to the originals.

I've done my best to adjust the contrast and saturation in these photos to try to convey, even in the smallest of ways, the color and motion captured in Pinette's work. My real hope is that people in the Augusta area who read this will take the time to visit the State House and see the exhibition, or, for those who have seen the paintings briefly or in passing, that they will take the time to stop and appreciate Pinette's unique and entrancing landscapes. You really do need to see the originals to get the full effect.

“The elusive geometries of fire and water in motion are timelessly hypnotic and transcendent. As ultimate solvents their powers are absolute in determining life and death.”

-Dennis Pinette

Burning Sky #2 - Oil - 2008

Woods in Flames #2 - Oil - 2007

Searsmont Woods Moody Mountain - Oil - 2003

PLEASE NOTE: All work is by Dennis Pinette. The reproductions here are my own photographs taken of his original work. I take no credit for what you see here, and only wish to share what I have found so that others might appreciate it, too.

READ MORE:
Dennis Pinette at the Caldbeck Gallery Website
Dennis Pinette on the Yankee Magazine blog
Dennis Pinette on the Phoenix website