Neon Roads

Mingus was a funny guy, but I still have no idea why he decided to write out a Cat Toilet Training Program. I’ll look into it more later. 

But when reading it it made me think of a new strategy for practicing an instrument that has worked really well for cleaning up a lot of sloppy technique and actually fixing those little errors that keep recurring. And wanted to share - specifically with Mingus’s Program in mind.  He was a good musician, and I wonder if his clarity in “training cats” may have come from a similar intelligence for training himself as a musician - that is, unconsciously, slowly and methodically changing behavior, versus some conscious quick fix.  I developed this for piano, so some specific notes will be for that instrument, but this should work for any instrument.

Things you will need to get:

1. A handheld voice recorder. 

2. A metronome.

For #1 I used to try to record with my laptop and play back, but I found that the frictions of having to move the laptop around and then play it back somewhere kept me from following through on this very often.  The handheld voice recorder makes this really easy. And you want this to be as effortless as possible.

Before you start rigorously practicing, get the notes in your head by reading through the piece pretty slowly.  If a passage is really rough and impedes you from going forward, skip it.   At some point playing through the whole piece you’ll feel yourself suddenly willing to try to shoulder through it.  It’s important to make it all the way through to the end a number of times before really attempting the piece, or else you may spend ages practicing just the first bit.  

The key for piano specifically in reading and getting the notes in your head is to NOT LOOK AT YOUR HANDS.  Going back and forth between looking at your hands and looking at the sheet music will mean you will slow yourself down about 500%.  And it will mean you won’t read through things enough to get the notes in your head.  Technique can come later, though as you get better this should become cleaner.   You’ll surprise yourself with how much your fingers can find the right note without your looking.

Now here are two practicing habits that are GOALS to shoot for; ones that I’ve observed in professional musicians for a long time but have been unable to duplicate because of bad practicing habits and impatience:

1. Practice about 15% slower than the tempo at which you can play something perfectly.  Practice with a metronome.  It may feel hard at first but it will help you with control a lot going forward, and keep you honest for when you want to speed up before you’re ready.

2. Take breaks after a small success.  I try to go no more than 15 minutes without taking a break.  Barrelling through things leads to loss of concentration and sloppy technique.

The key thing is that you want to ARRIVE AT THESE HABITS UNCONSCIOUSLY, not consciously.  Your practicing habits are unconscious, and the vast majority of learning an instrument (as with all things) is unconscious. 

So how to change these habits?

Start recording yourself. 

Play a piece you’ve been playing for a long time, and record it with your handheld recording device.  Then hit play and bring the recorder with you while you go do something else.  Don’t worry about “consciously” listening; just have it on in the background. 

You’ll unconsciously or semi-consciously start to register two things:

1. where you are making mistakes, which will make you cringe (stick)

2. where you are playing something correctly, even beautifully (you may surprise yourself to find a lot of what you are playing does sound really good).  (carrot).  This second part will subconsciously motivate you to “bring up” the faulty parts to this level. 

Keep doing this for a few weeks, just playing things as you normally play them, as you’d play them for someone else if someone asked you to play a piece.  And record, and listen, while washing dishes or cleaning your room or doing laundry or whatever else (incidentally this has helped me do chores quite a bit because it gives a structured way to do them while still feeling like I’m working on something I actually enjoy). 

This will get you in the habit of taking breaks.

You’ll be surprised at how much just listening to yourself will make you better.  A lot of errors come during lapses in concentration, so it’s precisely at this time when you’re making errors that you’re not paying attention enough to notice.  But there will be a lot of things you will need to fix.  So:

After about a month of this you should start recording yourself actually practicing.  Practice how you normally practice, but keep the two details above (practice 15% slower than the tempo at which you can play something perfectly, and take breaks regularly, especially after you’ve done a small thing correctly) in mind.  These are “goals,” but you don’t need to start on them right away.  You need to reprogram your habits slowly. You should also have the metronome out staring at you; if you don’t immediately feel like using it, that’s fine, because if you haven’t used it before you’ll be resistant to using it.

Now do the same thing as before - practice (however it is that you do, say, doing something a little bit slower and without pedal), and play your practice back.  Keep doing this for a few weeks and see how your results are.  Are you still slopping through certain parts? Also you should regularly (a few times a week maybe) try playing the whole piece to see what problem spots still occur. 

Is your practicing working?  If so, and your problems are getting fixed, then that’s great.  If not, try slowing it down.  Try taking more breaks.  Try with the metronome really slowly.  Etc. 

You’ll slowly start to inch yourself toward better habits and in a few months be a lot better at your instrument. 

The essential ingredient here is to record yourself.  Studio players are light years tighter than other players (keeping time, dynamic control, etc.), because they have to listen to themselves all the time.  They develop an awareness of how it actually sounds that is bound very closely to how they play. 

People who play live a lot also get a lot tighter.  This is because you don’t want to suck in front of people, but it’s also because in those circumstances you actually listen to yourself vicariously through the audience.  You’re in a heightened state of awareness that’s very similar to simply recording yourself, though not exactly the same. 

Anyway, if Mingus can get a cat to flush a toilet, then a recording device can definitely get you on your way to being a tighter musician. 

There’s the problem that comes up for us every once in a while when we’re watching a show or film, reading a book, engaging in fictional narrative of any kind - it’s bullshit. It’s a fraud, a fake.  “Suspension of disbelief,” which has to take place, still takes place somehow, and easily, because of something we hunger for, that we understand sub-rationally. When we have those moments of apprehension about “why art,” we forget that what good art does is strengthen our reality by permitting us viewpoints to phenomena that happen all the time, but that we wouldn’t be privileged to except through the lens of the falsity. 

Dramatic irony is the first and deepest example that comes to my mind.

And our desire to be witnessed, to have all the tense moments, close calls, concealed risks, and so on, be seen by someone else, are created and re-experienced vicariously through art. 

As the linked-to part mentions, Oedipus Rex  in which the main character does not know his own significance (and hence the significance of his whole story) - enhances awareness of those aspects of our own lives in which the whole chain of events could be interpreted as a whole before the cataclysm.  Likewise some of the best drama of Shakespeare (Othello), or tense parts, between the meth-producing chemistry teacher and his DEA brother-in-law who has no idea, in Breaking Bad, which I’ve been hooked on since yesterday, etc.  In fact, how much of something like Breaking Bad could be told outside fiction?  Because of the taboos around and illicit nature of most recreational drugs none of this could be accessed in “real life” reportage.

All good fiction, gives us a lens into our own world that we wouldn’t ever see otherwise.  It stores the essences of our most moving and unconfessable (logistically!) moments, with the particulars rearranged, moments that would otherwise remain unrecorded.

Art doesn’t falsify - it bottles.

(to watch breaking bad for free you can go to sidereel - http://www.sidereel.com/Breaking_Bad ) avoid the iTunes/Amazon things, find the episode you want and then click thru links. lots of annoying ads but you will eventually find one that works. megavideo or the bb whatever. limits, so switch between the 2

I took these down when reading it several (10?) years ago and am now pasting. too tired to edit/curate but may have time to do so tomorrow.  Excuse typos as well. -

Nin, Anaïs: The Novel of the Future. 

“Henry miller always refused to cut anything out of his books.  He accepted himself, the good and the bad writing.  He did not feel that perfection was natural.”  (86). 

                “The dream, scrutinized by scientists in various experiments, has been found to be an absolute necessity to man.  It keeps our psychic life alive, in its own proper climate.  It sustains a life not corruptible and not susceptible to the pressures of society.  When we cease to believe in this spiritual underground, to nourish ourselves on feelings, our lives became empty shells, automatic, mechanical.  We only believed in it when it showed symptoms of neurosis.  Literature and the poets continued to assert its presence as the source of creation.” 6

“Art establishes its own controls.” 12

“Pierre Mabille in Miroir du merveilleux:

                He who wishes to attain the profoundly marvelous must free images from their conventional associations, associations always dominated by utilitarian judgment: must learn to see the man behind the social function, break the scale of so-called normal values, replacing it by that of sensitive values, surmount taboos, the weight of ancestral prohibitions, cease to connect the object with the profit one can get out of it, with the price it has in society, with the action it commands[…]” 14

“For a long time in our utilitarian culture the dream was considered an escape, literature of imagination and experiment an escape.  The young could only find a way out of such rigidities by extreme and dangerous methods.  Semantically curious is the use of way out as derogatory, when it means the way out (or “the leading [or drawing] out,”  from educare) and was once a definition of education.  We brainwashed the young as to what constitutes reality.  The young are not seeking escape but expansion.”  16

From Wallace Fowlie in the Age of Surrealism: It was found that our conscious speech and our daily actions are usually in contradiction with our true selves and our deepest desires. “ 22

“It is the function of art to renew our perception.” 25

“It is paradoxical, too, that in an age willing to look inside of the human body with all kinds of newly discovered prying instruments, we are fearful of looking inside of our feelings.  It is only in emergencies we allow the psychiatrist to do this.  We carefully observe and watch the happenings of the entire world without realizing they are projections of our inner selves.  What we are watching outside is a representation, a projection foo our inner world into the universal.  There is no distinction.  When I seek to interpret the behavior of a nation, I interpret it with the same means I would use to interpret a human being.  Nations have neuroses.  Nations have egos.  Nations have pride.”  29

“I often felt that the emphasis on cruelty so prevalent in films and novels, the taste for horror and humor, two extremes, without the middle state of serenity, may be an expression of schizophrenic insensitivity, a need to feel things violently because the sensitivity is atrophied.  Violence instead of aliveness, and violence instead of strength.”  35

“The impotence to relate to another is the impotence to love others, and from this impotence to crime is a natural step.” 38

“Nobody has made a connection between alienation and the pressures of collective life.  We tried our best to annihilate the individual life, but it is only a well-integrated individual who has something to offer to collective life.  To achieve this he must first be related to himself, then intimately to a few, before he can enter collective life.  What we have seen is not a participation in collective life but passive submission to it, a blind adhesion which creates nothing and is even dangerous because it can be manipulated by unscrupulous leaders.”  38

“The American created a monolithic image of maleness which is a caricature of maleness, an exaggeration of maleness (no sensitivity, only toughness, logic, factualness).”  39

“The world as untranslatable language..” 51

“Neurosis causes a perpetual double exposure.  It can only be erased by daylight, by an isolattd confrontation of it, as if it were a ghost which demanded visibility and once having been pulled out into the daylight it dies. “ 54.

“It was Proust who said: “Style is a matter of vision, not technique.”  59

“From within, a character does not see all around himself or all around others.  No one does this in life.”  59.

“The artist and the scientist do not today speak the same language.  Someday they will.”

“In a true relationship there is not taking sides, no feminine claims in opposition to masculine claims, no reproaches at all.  There is an effort to confront together what interferes with genuine fusions.”  76.

“Intimacy comes from the novelist who has had his passionate experience first, […] and then examines it, dwells on it.”  78.

“A new kind of absolute is in sight, which, although it contains a refusal of what we logically call logical intelligence, is an elevation of the subconscious of man into a position of power and magnitude and surreality.” 79  

“If the pattern of the new novel is to be one in which everything will be written as it is discovered by the emotions, the form will be similar to that of life in which memories, reveries about the future, and present action interweave.  The subconscious will determine the theme and the theme will determine the form.” 82

  “The subconscious is not the place of chaos it may seem to those accustomed to artificial order.  yet only when its message is grasped by contemplating its natural order does its meaning become clear.  There is a rigorous pattern in the unconscious but it only appears at the end[…]”  82

“The old concept of chronological, orderly, symmetrical development of character died when it was discovered that the unconscious motivations are entirely at odds with fabricated conventions.  Human beings do not grow in perfect symmetry.  They oscillate, expand, contract, backtrack, arrest themselves, retrogress, mobilize, atrophy in part, proceed erratically according to experience and traumas.  Some aspects of the personality mature, others do not.  Some live in the past, some in the present.” 84

“We know now that we are composites in reality, collages of our fathers and mothers, of what we read, of television influences and films, of friends and associates, and we know we often play roles quite removed from our genuine selves.”  84-85

‘..the danger for American writers is that while in motion they are effective, but when depth and reflection are necessary or inevitable, they occasionally flounder because they have not learned to stop the physical action and watch the psychic action. 

“To demand of the novel an objectivity which condemns us to be mere spectators is to deprive ourselves of the original intent of the novel derived from the Italian word novella – the never-before-experienced.”90

“The close study of one human being is as important to a community as the study of mass movements.”  91

“I do not believe that we can communicate with banalities[…] for this reason I stress the expansion and elaboration of language.  In simplifying it, reducing it, we reduce the power of our expression and our power to communicate.  Standardization, the use of worn-out formulas, impedes communication because it does not match the subtlety of our minds or emotions, the multimedia of our unconscious life.  the concept that we communicate by simplicity, by denudation is erroneous.  the writer’s role is to express what we cannot express.  He is our virtuoso; he can help us out of our prison of inarticulateness.” (93).

“Man’s thoughts and feelings are far more subtle than those he can usually formulate himself if the writer fails to endow him with the fullest range of expression.” 93

“[…] our senses participate in our reception of words, and our senses were undernourished.  In this generation we see the explosion of color, too long restrained, and like all things too long repressed, rather garish.” 94

“The writer’s role is not ornamental; it is to teach us to speak as we feel and as we see.” 94

“Standardized speech and writing may have come out of a minsunderstanding of democratic education.  We talked down to our audiences to reach their untutored limitations rather than exalting them to the difficulties of following our highest reaches.  To be popular with the many, we failed in our less popular role of educators[…] Our admiration of the self-made man turned perversely into admiration of the unskilled, the amateur, the imperfect, the childish, the unformed, immature, incomplete, with a prejudice against the virtuoso, the origina, inventive, talented individual.” 95

“There is no language of the common man.  there is the problem of inarticulateness common to all of us.”101

“What i am stressing is the use of language as magic, the use of rhythm and image.”  101

“Another frequent cause of blocking is looking at one’s work through the eyes off a hostile world.  When we lose our own inner vision, our self-confidence, and our faith, we begin to see our work through the eyes of the enemy.  We adopt the vision of the enemy.  We believe him.  This is fatal to a writer, as fatal as it is for the personality who lives to create a false image invented by public relations.  Falsity in writing destroys the source of inspiration.” 102

“A sense of organic meaning, sincerity, and grace can make any subject possible.” 102

“All through my life, whenever I encountered something I did not understand, i questioned first my own limitation.  When I first read Giraudoux, I felt he was verbose, tiresome.  When I first read Proust, i felt the rhythm was too slow.  But I never blamed them or turned away.  I knew the deficiency was in me.  I tried again, and  again, until I initiated myself to the extraordinary delights they can yield.  I learned from them.” 

“The business of the mind is first and foremost the pure joy of knowing and comprehending, the pure joy of consciousness.” 117.

“…the novelist’s task was to pursue this dream, to unravel its meaning; the goal was to reach the relation of dream to life.” 118

“We have feared the writers who do not chart the routes because we have an erroneous idea that to let go of reality is to let go of sanity.  That would be like saying that Cousteau, when he went down to the bottom of the sea with oxygen, was losing his life on earth.”  122

“The fear of being cut off from reality by indulging in the imagination, in reverie or fantasy is neurotic.  Every creator and every inventor goes into uncharted realms.”  122

“Part of the novelist’s richness comes from how much he assimilates, observes, registers from all the sources.  A new word, a new bit of information – all is nourishment.” 125

“Most novels always tried to include everything, like crowded thrift shops.” 126

“The writer who should be our guide fails when he sees each person only from the outside as a statue.” 132 (made more sense and profundity in context)

“The cult of ugliness is distinct from the acceptance that there is ugliness, just as taking pleasure in cruelty is distinct from the acceptance that there is cruelty in the world.” 165

“We are now in an intermediate period.  there has been a chasm between poetry and prose in which writing lost its magical power, a chasm between art and science, and a chasm between the conscious and the unconscious.  These will one day be fused.”  165

“The most powerful of literary movements, which I call “resistentialism,” consists of those who are afraid of going inside, who have a fear of intimacy or contact with human beings.  They feel such proximity will cloud their insight or involve their feelings.  They defend themselves against feeling with irony and clowning.”  168

“It is the absence of involvement which caused so much isolation, and lack of contact with others and with life.” 168

“The language of the streets is limited.  All life tends to crystallize into a mold. People accept constricted lives because they find it easier to surrender to such molds.  But within these molds man dies.  Men who live only by habit and routine die.” 170

“The subjective experience of a writer is not unique.  It is something he shares with others.  What may be unique is his way of expressing it, because each new experience requires a new form of expression.  He has to feel his way, invent new words for a latent, potential, as yet unexpressed emotion.  He has to light up with his expression worlds which may never have been lighted before.” 170

“We should have been able to detect the symptoms: absence of self led to the death of emotion; death of emotion to dead writing; and the death of emotion has led inevitably to excess violence which is the major theme of our literature today and a symptom of schizophrenia, violence in order to feel alive because the divided self feels its own death and seeks sensation to affirm its existence.”  173

“When we decided to believe only what was visible, we lost the faculty for apprehending what might be.  Out of such a distorted view of what is came the monstrosities of pop art.   Accepting what is (a complete service station in a museum, Campbell’s Soup cartons and billboards in our living rooms) is an act of passivity, an act of resignation, off impotence, lack of invention and transformation, also an inability to discard what is and create what might be.” 174

“The intellect has a dehydrating effect on experience.” 175

“The metaphysical concept that our life has meaning is deeper than that reached by the materialist that the world is absurd and meaningless (Camus).  The sense of emptiness came from accepting only what we see and not what lies beyond appearances.  What we see is altered by what we feel.”  185

“Action does not represent the whole character.” 194

“Unity should come from organic growth.  it should not be imposed from the outside, or premeditated.” 195

“Each man’s intimate history is a contribution to universal history.”  196

“I think that natural truths will cease to be spat at us like insults, that aesthetics will once more be linked with ethics, and that people will become aware that in casting out aesthetics they also cast out a respect for human life, a respect for creation, a respect for spiritual values.  Aesthetics was an expression of man’s need to be in love with is world  The cult of ugliness is a regression.  It destroys our appetite, our love for the world.” 197

I thought of this quote from Balzac that’s the inscription to Conversation in the Cathedral a moment ago, and then thought of a friend’s novel-in-progress that is quite along similar lines, in about the same instant, for some reason, while making a sandwich a minute ago:

Il faut avoir fouillé toute la vie sociale pour être un vrai romancier, vu que le roman est l’histoire privée des nations.

“One must have searched through all of social life to be a true novelist, since the novel is the private history of nations.”  

It’s a very masculine conception of making a novel, of writing.  (I mean “masculine” pejoratively here, with a feminist’s wry smile).  It typifies the kind of overambitiousness, the fascistic singularity, the desire to swallow up the whole universe, metabolize it and have it come out of the author’s guts gleaming miraculously like a sapphire, like some glittering cartography of all active human emotion - it betrays the desire to bring down judgment on all things like a mammoth stroke of a gavel, reverberating in the canopies of trees everywhere, disturbing all birds - that leads novelists to try their art in the first place. Can one person have searched through all of social life?  Experienced all things? I’m guessing Balzac was saying something about going through life in different social classes, but Vargas Llosa obviously took it in a different direction - to contain everything of Peru in the private misfortunes of his novel. 

It’s also the same desire to over-extend that leads so many novelists to fail, even when they complete their manuscript, because the essence of the idea gets lost in clutter.  Anais Nin once wrote in The Novel of The Future, a lucid, rich and insightful book few seem to have read, how “Most novels always try to include everything, like crowded thrift shops.” Re-remembering that quote a few months ago stung - it hit me as quite apt for where I was at with my mess of a manuscript.  I saw myself trying to swallow up all the air in the hemisphere and spit out some verdict and vendetta and expression of bitter heartbreak about all the shipwrecks of the future, probable and possible and far-fetched all together - and it all came out a mess.

There comes a point in the cycle of art, when enough is there, on the page or canvas or in Final Cut Pro, to start finalizing the shape - when the task is no longer to add, but to strip away, like excess material from a 3-D printer bathed away.  Reshoots, rewrites, new parts are needed to fill in the gaps, but these are now dictated by the order of the content.  The architecture of the child is, at some sudden moment, quietly and unannounced, there - and from then on it just needs nourishment, careful shaping, and breath to move it from clay to life, that אמת (EMET) finally written painstakingly on its forehead, the title bestowed, the child alive with a name to go risk its soul at sea in the dreams of others’ worlds. 

Everyone’s writing a novel anymore.  Or has a screenplay idea, or an idea for a big art installation.  How much of what we honor in someone finishing a project of that magnitude, and having it be good, is more than just fawning over celebrity?  Does finishing a work imply a daunting spiritual self-mastery?  Having organized one’s time so effectively, being able to move so singularly, with such ascetic focus, as to express even one of the private histories of nations, which even if not definitive is still expansive in its specificity?  Still contains everything, though it’s just a trinket in a drawer?  (I’m reminded of that quote of Pascal’s that Borges was fond of quoting, that the universe is a sphere whose center is everywhere…)  Being able to want a small world that much - as much as such a difficult task requires - is something that sets people on edge. 

To be able to turn back around, to put shape to a set of words, however few, to put deep order in thoughts, the luscious fruit of which the language is only the skin (to borrow a metaphor) - to have that strength is something that overawes many of us, viscerally.  Far from having not enough ambition, too few of us have the courage, the adult demeanor, the equanimity, to embrace our smallness, the smallness of a desire to say volumes, and the time constraint in which we can only say a few things - not everything - just a few small verses inscribed in a book of records somewhere.  Most of us have too much ambition.  There is no private history of nations.  There is us - our cold utterances in a room, our mess of nerves, the bower of obscurity forced on us by our walls, forced on the efforts of our miniscule bodies by the trivial scope of our days.  There is the invisibility that chokes us with its dust.  There is our insatiable hunger for our gifts to span the universe, and there is our silent inaction in the face of it, like the walls of a dream’s mausoleum, that soothingly polished stone against which our fists lose strength as we age inside.  

Who can break through!?

it’s the curse of writers to be always knowing you could be milked for splendor at any moment - condensation on a cobweb, a person’s casual glance at a restaurant, anything – that in a moment with a pen you could press down your intellect, and out comes (as proust mentioned) an unfolding japanese flower in water, a world from a teacup – it’s a frightening thing, you look at your clumsy hands, and then you look out and the world hovers everywhere around you, alluring and expectant, like some intimidating, gorgeous, and incredibly demanding art teacher. 

every bored moment you have is subject to her gaze, every drunken evasion of her in some dumb hookup with a hipster girl at a bar in Williamsburg comes back to haunt you in whispers before you sleep, telling you what you’re looking for isn’t there, isn’t there, isn’t there.

 your mind is drenched in words that never existed until you utter them – until with a groan you shake off your fatigue and set your hand to writing - stop slouching and speak. 

and then after, the spirits themselves rattle at the words like prisoners at the bars of jail cells, they bark at you, unsettle you everywhere, you with the flimsy pieces of human mouths this heft of soul is supposed to be contained in!

and most of the time, doing what most of us in the adult club have spent years learning carefully to do, we give up before we start.