I think tonight, somehow, I started coming around to hearing some of the Claudia girl-with-guitar songs on 69 Love Songs as negative commentaries on faithfully performed songs of those genres or styles. The trick seemed to be thinking, OK, there's no way this could be sincere because it's too awkward, or too lame, or too etc., and Merritt is too good a songwriter. (Obviously this trick elects not to accept the filler thesis.) I'm not totally sure why I have resisted this in the past, despite knowing full well that the album and band have a reputation for, how shall we say, "the irony" and the other things that are supposed to get in the way of sincerity, feelings, all that good love song stuff. Perhaps because so many of the other songs ring truer?

It may say something that these girl-with-guitar songs (I'm not going to go back and check to see that they all fall neatly into a group as I'm suggesting, because I don't want to be wrong at the moment) share this quality, and that it's not just Claudia's presence (some of the other songs she sings on being not apparently deliberately awkwardly written, adverbs oh yeah, and also despite Merritt's predilection for using singers that don't fit the song, which he seems to do more with Claudia, in my recollection, than Dudley or LD or Shirley or himself) that gives them the quality. It's unclear to me simply from the record how ultimately sympathetic Merritt is to music that doesn't value strong soundwriting, in the "traditional" sense. ("Traditional" in quotes because there is obviously a wide historical and stylistic variation in what he's apparently interested in and thus probably values, and while there are probably people who might make a case that this broad variety of "good songs" can be assayed by some single way of "strong songwriting", I am of course suspicious.) But. If you take a number of the songs that don't seem to use any of these deliberately-lame devices (there may be other such devices) as positive assertions of the value of "strong songwriting", then an even stronger case for the girl-with-guitar songs being critical of entire styles of songwriting or performing, or at least a number of instances of those if not the ideas in general.

I am aware that this could have been said more succinctly.

Reading on Wittgenstein in the Tractutus in the past few busy days has got me eyeing the showing/saying distinction all speculative like. Like, lazily thinking, yeah yeah yeah the ethical and aesthetic, value is not part of the world, can't be expressed propositionally, must be shown, consequence fuck music writing. Now, I'm a serious reader and thinker and all so I know that this view is supposed to fall out of or be consistent somehow with the dubious (because of Investigations criticisms and just inherent dubiousness) metaphysics of the same book, and I dig that consistency shit so I can't just glom onto this showing stuff all piecemeal, but see I'm busy and excited about other things and also at the same time still tired, tired of finding just that right expression for capturing what was wonderful about what I heard today (a busy day, a short list: first Wu-Tang, 69 Love Songs Vol. 1, Red & Meth, and Getz and Gilberto), tired of hoping for things to sound wonderful when they don't (just sounding alright or even just sounding, period, is plenty fine on some days, many days, but this sounding alright doesn't deserve to be valorized as some special end, reviews written about it, archetypal sounds-alright records picked out and lined up, because of course those things betray the point of sounding alright), tired of well lots of things.

This will pass, no big deal.

Michael Hardt, co-author of Empire, has some very helpful notes on Capitalism and Schizophrenia on his Duke page. His dissertation is also surprisingly helpful on the development of Deleuze's thought during the time when he was doing studies of individual philosophers.

The professor for my Wittgenstein course noted that Wittgenstein admired Georg Lichtenberg, whose advice in writing he seemed to take. A couple of quotes from Lichtenberg:

"Merchants have a waste-book in which they enter from day to day everything they have bought and sold, all mixed up in disorder; from this it is transferred to the journal, in which everything is arranged more systematically; and finally it arrives in the ledger, in double entry after the Italian manner of book-keeping. ...This deserves to be imitated by the scholar. First a book in which I inscribe everything just as I see it or as my thoughts prompt me, then this can be transferred to another where the materials are more ordered and segregated, and the ledger can then contain a connected construction and the elucidation of the subject that follows from it expressed in an orderly fashion."

"Waste-book method highly recommended. A note made of every phrase, every expression. Wealth can also be acquired through saving up truths in pennyworths."

Information about how Wittgenstein wrote, even in the pre-Tractatus notebooks but especially later on, shows that he followed this advice not only by organizing and arranging his thoughts after writing them, but constantly reworked pieces of writing as small as or sometimes smaller than the sections of the Investigations. I knew this before but on being reminded of it, it occurred to me that there might be a conflict between this method of writing, and the confessional approach to writing here that I have been not completely deliberately taking for a long time now.

Question to consider later: why do I have trouble reworking the older entries, or rather, why does it seem as if it would be wrong to do so?

Been thinking idly about how to describe what I like about Dylan - has always seemed very elusive to me (what I like, not Dylan). Add to the list: everything is so flat. (Obviously not literally true of many things, but the general sense is right; Frank Kogan remarked that Dylan was depressed, which had never occurred to me before. Sounds depressed? Or was?)

Relevant to this is the sense of things going on and on, the repeating being done with little apology. (?)

Two typical components of rockism: transparency of recording, and psychological realism. The transparency of recording doesn't secure the psychological realism, but it has a practical function, weeding out records whose psychological realism may be compromised by recording "tricks". (NB: of course, "weeding out" is rarely totally accurate.) The psychological realism is probably a criterion against which the other parts of the music are judged, too (as "performances" because the recording is supposed to be transparent), but it's especially applied to the singing, and thus the lyrics because the singer is supposed to be singing words, or, an exception, making noises suitably representational of the singer's psychological state.

One tenet of psychological realism: honesty or sincerity unless mediated by dramatic or poetic expression, generally of the sophisticated sort as what should be expressed is sophisticated.

(breaks off here)

Looking back at what I wrote here, I think I may have left an important part of it unsaid, or even obscured because of the mention of Wittgenstein on intentions. It intrigues me that talk of getting by might be like talk of intentions in that respect, that it derives from certain usages and then is sort of extended. But W's writing on intention is also often critical of that extended idea of intentions, the one that is used in cases where nothing goes wrong. I suggested otherwise, but I think it could be that what is obscured by the extension of talk of getting by that derives from "paradigm" usages (like someone listening to "uplifting" music, or especially personally meaningful music, especially in times of extreme difficulty) -- that what is obscured by it is that music often serves similar purposes in less paradigm circumstances, so that it may still make a good deal of sense to talk about using music to get by in those circumstances.

It may have been that the reason any of this stuff about getting by came to mind was the difficult time I was having at the end of the semester (around the time of writing), but what interested me in bringing out the distinction above is that I had in mind the time I had just mentioned, during the summer, when I did little but work a bit, and listened to Murray Street. I don't think I can say I felt especially great before this, but once I was regularly working, leaving the house, and doing something, I felt pretty well surprisingly often from day to day. Even at the time, but certainly moreso in retrospect, I counted listening to the record so often as contributing to my relatively stable sense of well-being. Yet I can understand why someone else might press me if I claimed that the album helped me "get by" in anything more than the prosaic sense in which music is said to be important to people's lives, without really appreciating the texture of that importance, the subtlety it can take on, or does always take on.

I was prompted to take note of this by something David wrote me.

Missy is growling, here. I had never noticed that before.

It is quite fierce.

Well not really.

At times during this, my first sitting with Derek Bailey's Ballads, I feel confident in using something like Monk's short version of This is My Story, This is My Song as a kind of model: a familiar song subtly altered by the introduction of dissonances. There's a significant obstacle to my doing so, though; I don't really know most of the standards being performed (if that is indeed happening). I should have a chance with "Body and Soul", but despite owning more than one (bop-era or later) version of it and having tried to learn the song, it's never stuck with me. (Being bop-era or later performance may be involved in this.) I do have an out, though. Standards sound pretty and normal, those being relative terms. So I can listen for the pretty and normal-sounding parts, and then appreciate the ways they are subtly transformed by the introduction of dissonances. As far as this takes me, it's alright.

("Pretty" is doing a lot of work here, in terms of referring to my comfortable and happy and chills-down-the-spine reactions and hopefully dragging along a few of those sorts of things from the constellation of things associated with "pretty".)

But as far as I am able to tell, Bailey only uses this technique so much. At many points, there are audible (to me - most of this revolves around "to me", around worries about how the ways I hear the record are parochial, because it's the most comfortable way for me to open up conceptual space, to try to imagine reasons that the record might sound the way it sounds that are more involved than my initial reaction to it) departures from the pretty or dissonant-pretty modes. These other sections - for simplicity I'll just call them out sections - are more complex than I am able to give them credit for in writing at the moment. But my experience of listening to them, as different from each other and as complex as they can be, tends to fall along similar lines. I pay attention less, perhaps because I have less of a sense of development, or forward motion, or dynamic of tension and resolution (marks of the western tradition or variants on it, that show up in the pretty and dissonant-pretty sections). To the extent that I do pay attention, I seem to put more emphasis on the rhythms, which have what sounds to me (there's the parochial worry again) like a typical avant-garde twitchy stuntedness. Focusing on these rhythms, with relative inattention to the (more confusing because weird sounding) harmonic and melodic aspects of the playing, is not so pleasurable.

Now that I say the above about stunted rhythms, I notice that although Bailey often plays, in the out sections, dissonant chords that bear no untutored relationship to the chords from the nearby standard, which chords are in something of a parallel relation to the material in the pretty and dissonant-pretty sections, he also plays faster in the out sections. He also plays more arpeggiated chords, and more single notes, and perhaps more prepared guitar sorts of things like behind-the-bridge notes. This seems to not have a parallel in the pretty and dissonant-pretty sections, where he mostly just states the basic melody and harmony.

I've seen Mark Sinker say that Bailey doesn't like being called a jazz musician, but I wonder if he's using a common technique from the bebop era and after - state the melody quickly in the head, then depart drastically from it during the improvisation proper. A number of the tracks here (fourteen total for 41:29) start with the pretty and dissonant-pretty parts, and then there's the break. Some of them have more out or more dissonant openings, and then soon a pretty part soon after. Because of the way the record is indexed, this makes some sense - the tracks are identified by the standards they contain (or reference? or quote? are performances of?). It may obscure the way the improvisation moves from standard to standard, though. I say that not knowing how it does, if it does in any way we might normally expect or hope - just that breaking down the more or less continuous performance in this way might obscure that movement. One kind of movement that seems typical to expect, to me, is some kind of associative or transformative movement. Bailey might eventually, in an out section, play things that bring to mind a standard - so he might start playing it. He might also (this might be separate, or it might be a way of deliberately moving from an out section to the basic theme of a standard once he's thought of it, for example) play in such a way that less arbitrarily introduces the standard.

But I'm being kind of optimistic, there, hoping that I am being overly parochial, interestingly enough. Because what I hear, more or less, is a forty-minute stream of Bailey's non-idiomatic free improvisation punctuated (yes, punctuated - before many of the tracks begin, often with a pretty section, there's a slight flourish or dramatic pause, slight, but evident) by brief statements of themes of standards. This isn't to say that if this is all it is, that it's bad. But if I can't tell whether or not that's all it is, I'm not sure what I think about it. It is a lot more pleasurable to listen to than, to pick a random example out of the one other Derek Bailey record I own, The Sign of Four. If you don't know anything about Derek Bailey, that praise might be misleading, and I wouldn't want you to buy a record you hated. Anton Webern comes up in Marc Ribot's liner notes, and the comparison is appropriate; this feels to me like listening to Anton Webern, only more fun, not as boring, potentially more interesting. If you really don't care for Anton Webern, though, there might be a problem here.

I have been able to extract at least one thing from the out sections; at times, after playing out for a bit, Bailey will play a fairly dissonant chord, but one which sounds to me far prettier than I reckon I would find it in a more conventional context. This is a strange experience, hearing a not-all-that-pretty thing as pretty, and I'm sure it's simply and directly related to the somewhat disorienting experience of hearing Bailey avoid tonality (pre-1900 tonality, at least) in the out sections. This is somewhat meager, as far as deep insights about free improvisation go, but it does suggest something more. Ribot's notes are brief and especially for that length they lean a bit too much on mystery - "The approach is integrative, standards inform the improvising and vice versa. How they do so is both mysterious and strong." Also: "The beautiful paradox is that this doesn't sever the relation of song to improvisation, but creates deeper, less predictable relations." Something is happening here because of the juxtaposition of pretty parts (which are the same time the standard parts) and free improvisation, and I would like to think that at the very least it's similar to my reaction to the pretty-not-pretty chords.

But Ribot pre-emptively attempts to ruin that for me: "Yet I don't hear this as a pastiche work, juxtaposing a preconceived concept of free improvising against a preconceived idea of how to play jazz standards." The complexity I begged off describing above is where this record is more than simply juxtaposition.