"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.

an update

I stopped making regular posts here because I had started to question the purpose of the things that I was writing. I had begun to describe the philosophical approach of my work, but I ended up deleting a few of the posts in which I was doing so. I will return to regular writing on this blog, but I will do so cautiously. I became wary of the possibility that I was trying to use verbal description as a crutch to help somebody understand my work. I should not do that. I will write here when I think that the ideas are interesting in themselves, but I will avoid explaining my work. If someone listens to any of my music and does not understand it or just thinks that it's bad, then that is my fault.

With that said, my future updates here will be delayed for a while. My job in the "real world" will have me away and constantly busy for the next two months, so I will resume my activities here when I return from that. As for my music, I'm working on a new piece, but it won't be finished before I leave, so expect that sometime this autumn.

cowgazing

On Sunday I went for a walk. At one point I passed some cows that were in a field along the road. As I walked past them, they all started to follow me. I turned toward them, and I stood facing them while most of them assembled and faced me from about twenty feet away. There were sixteen cows altogether, but they did not form one cohesive group. Eleven of them were in the group closest to me. But there was one group of three that stopped about twenty feet behind them. And there was one cow standing alone off to the left, at least fifty feet from me and from the other cows. I stood still and watched all of them for a while. Maybe twenty minutes. Not one of them moved. Some were eating grass, some were peeing or shitting. They could stand there longer than I.

I want to dig a hole and fill it.

I want to spend a day digging a hole. Then I will fill it with the same dirt.