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Learning how to learn
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I’m missing his show in Chicago tonight, darn it. Stuck 200 miles away working. I’ve seen him live maybe 6-7 times over the years, large venues and mid-sized, indoors and out… he fascinates me, and I’d never pass up a chance to see him again. I also enjoyed his short-lived talk show.
I was a huge fan during his early “angry young man” phase, and really dug the shows he did with Nick Lowe. But even as he mellowed a bit and started trying more eclectic genre’s I stuck with him over the years, album after album, because he’s such an excellent lyricist, his material keeps expanding in subject matter, and he has such an emotional, evocative style. I wish he’d do another collaboration with Sir Paul.
And his songs stay pertinent. “Night Rally” has never been more relevant… hm… I should cover that one…
I did a cover of “Alison” once for uke, on a dare, and I’ve got wobbly footage of me fronting a live band for “What’s So Funny”, one time a decade ago, but I don’t think I wanna share it here, hit my e-mail and mayyyybe….
I’ll check out the link you sent this weekend!
Current work mantra: “I used to be disgusted; now I try to be amused”
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[Mark Suszko] “Current work mantra: “I used to be disgusted; now I try to be amused””
Genuinely words to live by!
My favorites are his first 5 (through Trust, which is my favorite in some ways) plus Imperial Bedroom and Punch The Clock, but he’s one of the guys I’m always paying attention to, for sure. I loved his talk show, too! He also did a fine job filling in as guest host for David Letterman in 2003, which I’ve always thought contributed to him getting a show of his own.
I haven’t seen him since 2003 or so (a not-great outdoor show on a wet, blustery night that I don’t blame on him of course), but I’d definitely love to again….
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Simon: Of course I knew you’d make it all about guitars!
(Grrr, “quote” script busted again. I’ll report it to the IT whizzes.)
Not because I vastly prefer guitars to clarinets or know much more about them, but because I DO know about guitarists. There are very active forums for guitarists that I sometimes find myself passing through for the pictures more than anything else, but I’ve always been struck by how fiercely argumentative they are.
What made me think about this is a too-frequently falsehood repeated in the Debates forum as if it were true, that the people in the COW forum who have the temerity to engage in any sort of debate (it’s there in the forum title, lad: if you don’t want to debate, you shouldn’t be there) are whackadoodles of a sort not found in any other area of artistry.
One such poster posited that surely nobody in the world of GUITARS or ART debates technique and the specificity of tools in the way that people in the COW’s debates forum do. Quite right: those people debate much, much more fiercely, and especially in the world of art, some of these debates have gone on literally for centuries.
Interestingly enough, one area of those debates in the art world involving how Vermeer could possibly have created art that was literally impossible to create at the time, yet literally WAS possible because he actually did it, made its way into the COW when I wrote about the documentary, Tim’s Vermeer. The “Tim” is Tim Jenison, who invented the NewTek Video Toaster among many other things, who set out to recreate one of Vermeer’s paintings.
It’s an amazing documentary, but even more than that, Tim is a wild man who attacked the problem with a ferocity I can’t even imagine. The painting had a harpsichord in it, so he taught himself to build THAT EXACT HARPSICHORD, scouring the planet for an artist who could show him the pattern painted on it. I could go on and on, but it’s one of my favorite interviews ever. He’s a fantastic storyteller, and goes deep into artistic passion, software development, and the nature of creativity.
But the comments, have mercy, they get super intense into the details of the art history debate, pulling up various camps of critics on multiple sides of this. I’m delighted to have any excuse to discuss David Hockney in the COW, but boy howdy were tempers flaring.
Not that we need to debate the validity of artistic debates, because I think that those were well-established not just centuries, but millenia ago. But I think a lot about how artists tick, including myself. I’m no Vermeer, no Tim Jenison, but I think of my creativity at the heart of my identity, and have come to understand that creative drive as part of my broader psycho-spiritual superstructure, so to speak. My creativity IS me, so it makes no sense to think about creative processes and decision making apart from the context of my own needs, desires, and my general approach to life and the world. Trying to abstract these discussions from internal dynamics and establish some kind of “truth” — like trying to create an “objective” project that will test render speed, or to count keystrokes to “prove” the “superior” efficiency of one NLE or the other: those ultimately have NOTHING to do with actual utility, and whether one or the other or a combination of them is a good fit for the way my mind works, and what my soul needs for comfort. LOL
I think of Zen And The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in this context, which the author was quick to note will teach you nothing about Zen and even less about motorcycles, apart from the notion that “paying attention to the details” reverberates in many different directions, not least of which are concepts like practice, repetition, finesse, the drive to improve performance, etc.
All of which is to say that part of learning how to learn includes learning some about oneself. It’s hard to navigate much in life without knowing your own internal landscape.
Hey, and thanks for that Hans Zimmer/Cubase link! What a fanastic ride! I’d actually come across something similar (albeit a bit more product-focused) for Jeff Wayne using Avid’s Sibelius software on the live production of The War of the Worlds. Old prog nerds like me and presumably some of you will remember Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of the Worlds very fondly as a two-record set from 1978 featuring Justin Lodge (The Moody Blues), David Essex (“Rock On”), and Phil Lynott (Thin Lizzy), along with Richard Burton narrating.
I couldn’t imagine a more analog project, so I was fascinated to see how he used Sibelius to re-score the project for a combination of live and virtual instruments (with many of the live musicians PLAYING virtual instruments), with sizes of the ensemble scaling up and down depending on the venue. None of the old dualities hold, and certainly no thought that old dogs are less inclined to learn new tricks. St. Walter of Murch should have been enough to disabuse anyone of such a notion, but Jeff here, much like Hans with Cubase, goes much, much farther than I would have imagined.
https://www.avid.com/customer-stories/war-of-the-worlds
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This entire thread is fantastic. It’s this type of dialogue that keeps the Creative Cow relevant. The conceptualization and execution of the craft of storytelling is priceless information that isn’t found in many places. By and large, the technical info can be found in a variety of locations on the web.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tmprods
tallmanproductions.net -
Lovely article. I tried to use the piano as a method for teaching my son a “methodology” for learning complex systems – it’s an ideal way to demonstrate how to solve what looks at first like an insolvable problem – by breaking things down to their simplest components and mastering them one at a time, you can eventually play sheet music that seems impossible if you take it all in at a glance. I thought it was a brilliant lesson, but my son thought I was a pain in the neck and I think I might be responsible for his absolute disinterest in music to this day.
On another note, this is the definition of “Clarinet” as found in the Devil’s Dictionary:
“An instrument of torture operated by a person with cotton in his ears. There are two instruments that are worse than a clarinet — two clarinets.”
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin\’ attached to nothin\’
\”Deciding the spine is the process of editing\” F. Bieberkopf -
Yes, indeed. “Break it down into parts that you can manage at a pace that you can manage” is a lesson that’s useful not only for learning to play music but also for life.
As you say, it’s an occult form of magic that makes the impossible easy.
However, the converse is true also. If you “learn” too much too fast, you’ll only inculcate the habit of making mistakes. In music (as in other things) those mistakes can be very, very hard to rectify.
I’ll ignore your intolerable slur on the sound of the clarinet … 😉
Simon Ubsdell
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