I originally had an article drafted last week on a few interviews I found on the internet by way of the hype machine. But friends of the Consortium, Better Than Yours, put me on to an interesting development — a little blogosphere beef between Heron P. and the writers over on the Complex Blog surrounding an interview Heron did with NYC coolguy A-Ron.
Basically what I drafted last week still applies. Here’s my take on the whole thing:
I don’t know if anyone’s been through Turntable Lab recently or recieves the emial updates but they’ve added a major new feature to the site that I think is nothing short of changing the music business. They now offer mp3 downloads of all those hard-to-find non-itunes bangers. They’re building their catalogue; not everything is offered yet but what they have is dope. They offer mp3s in high quality 320 kps mp3 or full uncompressed wav files with the idea that people who frequent the lab play the music they buy out. The high quality of the files means that no longer do DJs have to scour bit torrent and other sketchy sites downloading files of dubious origins for the latest music or wait for shipping on traditional 12″s. The files are even totally unprotected so you can play them anywhere, put them on cds, your ipod touch or where ever.
They recently put out Ed Banger Records vol. 1 as a digital only release…. straight fire. One of may favorite new disco/Ed Banger heaters below:
[kml_flashembed movie="http://youtube.com/v/eG-brC_NGNU" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
Check out the lab: TTL
Check out this Washington Post article about Blelvis; the black hobo “Elvisologist” that rambles the streets of Washington in a drunken haze looking for white hipster kids to regale with his corny Evlis-antics.
Hilarious stuff. I’ve never seen the guy myself, but clearly, if I ever do, I’ll know that he likes Blue Ribbon Pabst.
Blevis talks about his only vice… it has to do with Elvis and crack and it ain’t nothin nice.
Blevis even “shows off how he likes to cup women’s butts on the sly as he brushes past them” to the Post reporter.
Priceless.
an essay by haruki murakami published in the new york times. very simple, eloquent and inspiring
“I never had any intention of becoming a novelist — at least not until I turned 29. This is absolutely true.
I read a lot from the time I was a little kid, and I got so deeply into the worlds of the novels I was reading that it would be a lie if I said I never felt like writing anything. But I never believed I had the talent to write fiction. In my teens I loved writers like Dostoyevsky, Kafka and Balzac, but I never imagined I could write anything that would measure up to the works they left us. And so, at an early age, I simply gave up any hope of writing fiction. I would continue to read books as a hobby, I decided, and look elsewhere for a way to make a living.
The professional area I settled on was music. I worked hard, saved my money, borrowed a lot from friends and relatives, and shortly after leaving the university I opened a little jazz club in Tokyo. We served coffee in the daytime and drinks at night. We also served a few simple dishes. We had records playing constantly, and young musicians performing live jazz on weekends. I kept this up for seven years. Why? For one simple reason: It enabled me to listen to jazz from morning to night.
I had my first encounter with jazz in 1964 when I was 15. Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers performed in Kobe in January that year, and I got a ticket for a birthday present. This was the first time I really listened to jazz, and it bowled me over. I was thunderstruck. The band was just great: Wayne Shorter on tenor sax, Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, Curtis Fuller on trombone and Art Blakey in the lead with his solid, imaginative drumming. I think it was one of the strongest units in jazz history. I had never heard such amazing music, and I was hooked.
A year ago in Boston I had dinner with the Panamanian jazz pianist Danilo Pérez, and when I told him this story, he pulled out his cellphone and asked me, “Would you like to talk to Wayne, Haruki?†“Of course,†I said, practically at a loss for words. He called Wayne Shorter in Florida and handed me the phone. Basically what I said to him was that I had never heard such amazing music before or since. Life is so strange, you never know what’s going to happen. Here I was, 42 years later, writing novels, living in Boston and talking to Wayne Shorter on a cellphone. I never could have imagined it.
When I turned 29, all of a sudden out of nowhere I got this feeling that I wanted to write a novel — that I could do it. I couldn’t write anything that measured up to Dostoyevsky or Balzac, of course, but I told myself it didn’t matter. I didn’t have to become a literary giant. Still, I had no idea how to go about writing a novel or what to write about. I had absolutely no experience, after all, and no ready-made style at my disposal. I didn’t know anyone who could teach me how to do it, or even friends I could talk with about literature. My only thought at that point was how wonderful it would be if I could write like playing an instrument.
I had practiced the piano as a kid, and I could read enough music to pick out a simple melody, but I didn’t have the kind of technique it takes to become a professional musician. Inside my head, though, I did often feel as though something like my own music was swirling around in a rich, strong surge. I wondered if it might be possible for me to transfer that music into writing. That was how my style got started.
Whether in music or in fiction, the most basic thing is rhythm. Your style needs to have good, natural, steady rhythm, or people won’t keep reading your work. I learned the importance of rhythm from music — and mainly from jazz. Next comes melody — which, in literature, means the appropriate arrangement of the words to match the rhythm. If the way the words fit the rhythm is smooth and beautiful, you can’t ask for anything more. Next is harmony — the internal mental sounds that support the words. Then comes the part I like best: free improvisation. Through some special channel, the story comes welling out freely from inside. All I have to do is get into the flow. Finally comes what may be the most important thing: that high you experience upon completing a work — upon ending your “performance†and feeling you have succeeded in reaching a place that is new and meaningful. And if all goes well, you get to share that sense of elevation with your readers (your audience). That is a marvelous culmination that can be achieved in no other way.
Practically everything I know about writing, then, I learned from music. It may sound paradoxical to say so, but if I had not been so obsessed with music, I might not have become a novelist. Even now, almost 30 years later, I continue to learn a great deal about writing from good music. My style is as deeply influenced by Charlie Parker’s repeated freewheeling riffs, say, as by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s elegantly flowing prose. And I still take the quality of continual self-renewal in Miles Davis’s music as a literary model.
One of my all-time favorite jazz pianists is Thelonious Monk. Once, when someone asked him how he managed to get a certain special sound out of the piano, Monk pointed to the keyboard and said: “It can’t be any new note. When you look at the keyboard, all the notes are there already. But if you mean a note enough, it will sound different. You got to pick the notes you really mean!â€
I often recall these words when I am writing, and I think to myself, “It’s true. There aren’t any new words. Our job is to give new meanings and special overtones to absolutely ordinary words.†I find the thought reassuring. It means that vast, unknown stretches still lie before us, fertile territories just waiting for us to cultivate them.”
Haruki Murakami’s most recent book is a novel, “After Dark.†This essay was translated by Jay Rubin.
May 10th marks the birth of one of our fine members. Señor cablay is one year younger today and the consortium would like to take this time to say happy birthday to one of the finest gentlemen out there. where ever you are and whatever you’re doing, brother, the consortium is there too.
some of the great events throughout history that have taken place on this momentous day:
the fall of rome
the discovery of the new world
the american revolution
the french revolution
the spanish revolution
the end of world war I
man walks on the moon
the end of the cold war
the NASDAQ reaches it’s highest point since its inception
happy birthday to one of the consortium’s own. wish we were with you, brother
Check out this article on the front page of the New York Times business section today. Apparently Blackberry service went out yesterday for 10 hours. people, of course, were wylin out thinking that the world was gonna end and shit.
One guy said that the outage gave him “a lot of free time on my hands to spend with my wife, although I couldn’t find her since her BlackBerry was off.”
Now you know why I call it the Crackberry?