Inactivity

For the past seven months, I have experimented with giving up art. I have spent very little time with music, either making it or listening to it. I had to decide whether to lead a practical, normal life or to make the sacrifices necessary to continue making music. The results of the experiment are conclusive, and I will return to art. I have a lot more to do. As incomprehensible as the things I have created may be to some or all who have heard them, they speak to me too clearly. My sounds will gain a comprehending audience eventually. Meanwhile, I will be throwing myself back into my art. It is too important an activity to give up. In a world where the most lauded expressions of creativity are the various technological, managerial, and cultural means of oppression, art is our only hope for redemption.

The Open

The Open - 46:25

"Life is good"

I have heard no combination of words more ignorant and offensive.

why i will never take money for my music

If you are involved in making art of any kind, you are involved in an activity of leisure. Art is not work. Paintings, poems, or musical compositions — these things do not put food on anyone's table, or a roof over anyone's head. This is a reason why I will never take money for my music.

When pieces of art (or reproductions of them) are bought and sold, our encounters with them are transactions. Art becomes a luxury object, instrumentally used for the self-aggrandizement of those who pay for access to it. I see no ethically valid approach for the artist in this arrangement. And I would quit making music straight away if I thought it had no ethical, and political, potential. This is a reason why I will never take money for my music.

Heart of Glass, by Werner Herzog

If a letter reaches someone with the words scattered around. . .

World

World - 33:49

Fuck your free time and fuck your money.

I was just reading Debord's Society of the Spectacle and I was struck by this pithy sentence:

"None of the activity lost in labor can be regained in the submission to its result."

one from Rilke

TO MUSIC

Music: breathing of statues. Perhaps:
silence of paintings. You language where all language
ends. You time
standing vertically on the motion of mortal hearts.

Feelings for whom? O you the transformation
of feelings into what?—: into audible landscape.
You stranger: music. You heart-space
grown out of us. The deepest space in us,
which, rising above us, forces its way out,—
holy departure:
when the innermost point in us stands
outside, as the most practiced distance, as the other
side of the air:
pure,
boundless,
no longer habitable.