I. Beyond Ironic
​
​In 2019, it is beyond ironic that the last gasp for method, setting-focused ensemble work on a cape-and-CG dominated cinematic stage is within the superhero tentpole. “Beyond” because irony barely has a pulse when the insidious meme has mulched thesis and antithesis into ADHD-riddled snark.*

As a musician (and come to think of it, writer) who carefully assembles improvised riffs and elements, I identify more than a little with the way that Joker, as a movie — as a character — creates narrative. Riff, rift, repeat.

“The last day of shooting we did a scene with seven wildly different takes. That was the last thing we shot. So [up until the end] we were still thinking of ideas, what could we do differently.”

2. Lean, Mean, and Non-CG

With many bloated exceptions, comedy is a form of entertainment that thrives within non-CG parameters — two ferns and a baby is stretching it. A lone microphone, the phantom smoke of unlit cigarette, proves ample stand-in for an apartment room, an airport waiting lounge, a food truck, a flute-haunted beach.

While not exactly low budget, the Joker is that rare film (I’m also thinking of another Joaquin Phoenix vehicle, the Master) in which the director spent the money on the types of things that matter. Props, actors with real lines, scenes with individuality and vernacular. No erasure of age through CG, whether for purposes of plot line, novelty, or stupid vanity.
In its assured narrative form, Joker hearkens back to what the Raging Bull renegades let loose in the old studio china shop, striking blows against artificiality through sheer purpose and stagecraft, at a time when there was a coherently informed audience (read: stoned?) to impress.

What strikes me is that — unlike many contemporary movies set in the pre-digital past, Joker is not afraid of its shadow, the specter of device and beat — the looming, unalterable presence of technology in the wings. Maybe this is because the director and actor have assumed responsibility, flame or fail — there is no burden of the “crossover” to nail it to a superhero cross.** The film’s makers, if not its funders, are not losing sleep over whether it will sell tickets in Bangor, Rio, Moscow, or Beijing.

And if it bombs? Cancel culture says it never happened. No crossover, no proba, brada.

“The reason why I choose movies is the filmmaker. I thought that Todd had a really unique understanding of this world and the character, and great sensibilities. I knew that he liked to work in a loose way at times, and there was also this really solid script.”

Hate to do this, but the rest of the article is available exclusively on Medium for the next few months. It is behind a paywall, but this link will get you in: 

https://medium.com/@damonshulenberger/no-crossover-an-auteur-distillation-of-joker-for-dark-times-45fcb787ea28?sk=8a96d8c71407a12d3808e48466dca9d0

Also. The artwork is on sale at damonarvid.com. I think the nice price is $500 each, $850 for the set. Don't blame me, I'm just the unpaid hack. Anyway, it's an investment. 

 This week I found time to upload a pair of distinct musical recordings and videos, and therein lies a story.


It’s a story about quality, virality, timestamps, and the inability of the Internet to signify much beyond noise and feed. What may seem a minor gripe to those who have yet to paint their masterpiece, becomes a major issue for artists who have created worthy art and choose not to promote themselves in a viral way––


Yea, art is its own reward. In many ways the very creation of the pieces I present on Utube is an honor. To have a drummer, a bassist, a violinist, a trumpeter, a singer I respect learning what is in my head, without my giving them anything but the equivalent of sign language and ESP.... We get it done. 


How is it that something that connects, when it comes to actual musicians, is lost in translation when it comes to the current medium of conveyance, Internet? (Hint: algorithms and fleet fingers.)


Over the last year I have put up more than a dozen videos, many with an hour’s worth of music, all of it meeting pretty high standards of originality and quality. This has netted:


º nine subscribers
º 2,885 views
º no money or monetization possibilities*


So why am I putting the stuff up? 

1. It’s nice to be able to point people to what I do quickly and efficiently
2. Timestamp

What is a timestamp? 


It is proof that I created and uploaded some original composition at a certain date, in case… and don’t laugh, it happens much more often than you think––someone takes the idea, song, etc., and monetizes it. It is my insurance policy in a world gone at least half mad.


Why is this important? Well, take this song that I recorded as a sketch in Manila, about a year before the hook was incorporated into a song by a boy band that is kind of the antithesis of what I am about. I actually spit out my coffee at the coffee shop when I heard it. The notes, the measures before the stutter refrain "where do we, where do we go" are virtually the same as Why Don't We & Macklemore's I Don't Belong In This Club.

I may have been an unconscious zeitgeist conjurer with my tune, but it seems unlikely. I came up with the song not thinking of pop at all, but of the style of 1960s Czech folk singer Karyl Kryl. Created at a time and place when the message in music mattered. It was definitely not about getting into a club populated by Ferrari-driving ballers before hair has sprouted on one's chin.

When an idea you have come up with on your own appears completely out of context, it's a pretty big wallop to the brain. (this is hardly the first time, but the provenance of wordy ideas is much harder to cookie crumb than music)

How could the song idea have been poached? Easy. Overheard at the hostel where I worked it out for a couple days? Very possible, devices are everywhere, shared in instants. Somehow leaked from the studio sessions where I adlibbed it as part of the usual jam? Also possible. Psychic spies from China try to steal your heart's elation? Bingo.

Sadly, incorporated into a highly infectious pop track, the solemn query as to where we as collective humanity go has become an earworm unpalatable to its creator. 

So that's wind in my sails, in putting original music up faster than my usual snail’s pace. Mona Lisa, Jamming Along is a prime example. Not finished, but finished enough to claim authorship. And original enough. My intuition: bluesy songs that are not simply a variation of what has been done before do not come along every day. Ditto intelligent lyrics. 


Note to myself and to any original artist, especially those who don't work in beats: get that shit timestamped (I have quite a queue, more than 100 song ideas in various stages of completion) and…. find someone with legal knowhow to help nail down song authorship and all the rest. A consultant. Pay them if you have to, a whole lot of free get you ... where we are today.

Back to that timestamp thing...  the voice memo audio recording I made has an iPhone timestamp of 5/16/18. Perhaps that alone is admissible in a court of law, it would depend on precedent and whether the technology forensic witness made a compelling case. Any way you slice it, a public streaming video timestamp seems more powerful. I imagine any claim of authorship woul   have been bolstered by having even a  WIP version up on public platforms well before the pop song  came out.

As an artist who makes nil from his art I shouldn’t have to mention this, but it’s not about greed. I want to share whatever money comes from the  creative process with the musicians who helped me get there, whether they were participating in a paid studio session or not. That is part of the fabric concept. Banish thy ego. Oh yeah, and fund that fabric platform that will (sustainably) rip a hole in Internull reality as we know it. 

​*Youtube does not allow an official channel to be created and monetized  (through more or less intrusive ads) until 1,000 subscribers and some unholy number of looped streaming hours occur. I am never going to vie for that particular  race-to-the-bottom.


**Here’s the little blurb I incorporate in the video: “This is a little fabric video that came about when I was at the Civet Cafe in Cebu and heard Why Don't We & Macklemore's "I Don't Belong in This Club."  Well the rhythm and melody of the chorus is pretty much the same as a fabric song I came up with at a hostel in Makati a year before, as timestamped on iPhone voice memos at the time.  Probably played a couple days, may have also recorded off-the-cuff as I am wont at Strawberry Jams studio session. So I got into a little debate with erstwhile fabric drummer Nils about whether it is possible that they took my song idea. He said he couldn’t identify anything in the song he hadn’t "heard a thousand times before walking past radios. "Well, that said, it was original enough to be marketed as a new song on YouTube and all the rest, which apparently got 16 million views without being identified as a Radiohead, Hollies, Lana Del Rey, Marvin Gaye, Robin Thicke, Led Zeppelin, or Randy California ripoff. 


So lets say it is original and I came up with the hook a year earlier... just saying.... where do we, where do we go? (fabric is a thing, it's powerful. :)”

He had almost forgotten the rule of dry bone and dust. On the Gold Coast Kyle’s primary fears had related to watery predation. Shark attacks on the upswing in recent months as sources of food were depleted offshore––the year-in, year-out reality of scorched earth trawling having its effect. The sense of danger that hit him paddling out, a feeling of elemental heave within heavy surf, of the bottom dropping off the coast. Odd that the bone dry landscape Kyle had found so comforting in his youth, eloquent in its emptiness, would turn out to be the most hungry. 


The sun crept now into easy embrace with the horizon, giving as yet faint hint of its role as cruel enforcer. Brushing the rocks with just a kiss of warmth, its rays would only intensify and lengthen, transforming myriad shades of red and orange into washed out desert. The hard surfaces becoming radiant forces of their own, trapping the sun's heat––earth turned into ovenware. 


Kyle gazed out onto the flat, the sun now steady above the horizon, unblinking. The few clouds that passed just wisps and fragments. What he needed was distance from the ridge, enough to gain daytime perspective of its contours––pick out Cowachunga, or a sun-protected traverse.

​Read the entire Cowachunga, a cloud novel, and others like it at DamonArvid.com. Below, the perfect fabric song for sunny daze.

EVEN 2.2 
Kombucha Heaven

What was his worth then? As perfect and pacific as it seemed, this had been arranged. He was not here by accident––he would have hazarded that the algorithm had let him in, but that was yesterday. As Xit described it, facial recognition was nothing without knowledge infill,  curation instead of culling. 

It was not his flute, that was too low key and off-the-grid for even the hippest to grasp. It was not his baby blue eyes, which contrasted intensely with a beard going grey. It was not even his semi-pure thoughts, as long as he unplugged from the insidiously debasing feed. How had John Bucket put it in "Slowly Learning?"

What would you tell me, you tell me
if I confessed that you were not my type
what would you sell me, you sell me
that algorithms make a like

chemistry drives evolution,
bots break that down to the level of vice––
institutions make bot-theft solutions,
theft of humanity through a device.

He took another sip of kombucha. Ah yes, it was that which he carried with him, the one brew he allowed himself in this traveling game. Layer and layer of teas, fruits, honey, coconut sugar, seeds even, nuts, built up over time, distilled, smoothed over, tasted, until what he got was often a sip of perfection––though it varied from day to day, hour to hour. 

​They wanted his kombucha. They said it was part of of the fabric. And who was to say it wasn't?

Art funds the creative projects. Avocado Sun is for sale here. 

I had a dream last night and a new chapter of EVEN came to me. With 3-4 novels ongoing (in my head, intermittently on paper) and not yet arranged on the new personal site, the start of chapter one EVEN 1.1 — The Writer Who Ignored the Feed can currently be accessed on Medium. 

EVEN 2.1 
​12 months earlier

Est sat at the wood cafe, bar, hangout, coffee shop––place that was about something other than making money––though they nominally did that on the side. It was not about drugs, as some trolls would certainly claim, two sentences into the chapter. Some of the people smoked weed and hell, he was not adverse to a little kind. 

Mary Jane was not legal here and he respected that. No high was worth police state paranoia and possible intervention. His thing was currently yoga, walks on the trail, and a bitter mixture of kratom and tea, once every three days. 
​
The six varieties of live beer on tap were bracing, but then so was the kombucha they had 15 varieties of. As the proprietor had explained, some were green tea base, some English breakfast, some genmai cha. Add whatever fruits were predominately available, a little every day, like a chef carefully pinching herbs and tasting. This one was predominately Darjeeling/papaya/mangosteen and would go head to head with any fine wine in everything but the alcohol category. There was no signage, no price list. By sitting down you contributed and if  you had not contributed enough, your time was up.

Mildly satisfied in a way that lasted, having reached some epiphany, he was not sure if he had that straight. But he was more sure that he had something now than he had ever been, since the dream of UC Santa Cruz and its state-enabled happy edifice came tumbling down upon the reality that all sojourns in the sun were temporary. 

In yesterday’s distractified world, ruled by a feed-informed dark hole of Internet algorithms and Insta-mobs (fundamental user flaw he had identified 20 years ago), he was kept never quite sure of anything. The way that years of work could be devalued to less than free. Trollable. It no longer mattered, at least in this little beta corner of reality that fabric had changed and, he was confident, would continue to alter in ways in line with what people, and the earth, could afford.

On a nameless island, I was immersed in Margaret Atwood's Blind Assassin for weeks. Immersed is the word, though the ending was... sketched. As are the endings of most novels, where the groundwork of the early pages rarely pays off. That said, I was immersed. You can't fake that kind of way with words... whatever genres Atwood was bending, she meant what she wrote. Conviction, that's something.

Standing firm against the current,
life itself a big deterrent. 

The album Station 2 Station is tentatively finished, lacking a few embellishments. It's original if nothing else. A CONCEPT, once again.

Now have a backlog of three albums completed since the year begun, none of them mastered or released. I don't know, I enjoy puzzles. Realized that capturing and arranging sound is a  complex endeavor that has very little to do with having people listen to it.

Real instruments. People playing something in their bones. When I get these sounds in my bones I try and transfer it in ways that others may draw something from. What is art? Its about influencing the right people. Person. Could be a single listener. 

In this age of wrong information. Depth.

​#endwriter

•The Fabric - Chasing Sun album is up. It sounds great to me each day as a listen-straight-through experience. Like everyone I have have doubts and I relapse, but music takes me back to the mindful place. 

• yin and yang tho:

"Trump simply threw away the single most valuable tool America had for shaping the geo-economic future of the region our way and for pressuring China to open its markets. Trump is now trying to negotiate trade openings with China alone — as opposed to negotiating with China as the head of a 12-nation TPP trading bloc that was based on U.S. values and interests and that controlled 40 percent of the global economy."

ah Ipanema
I just listen again
to strike the delicate balance

is this trumpets or violins,
is it the sound the heart makes
every time...