A Picture By Mikhail Chemiakin

 

Russian artist Mikhail Chemiakin

Many years ago I went to a gallery in Hamilton, Ontario to see an exhibit of Dissident Soviet Artists.

Several  artists were represented in the show, but for a myriad reasons Chemiakin stands out in my memory.

Let It Be Strange To Its Maker

“Let It Be Strange To Its Maker” is the first entry in the Song Theory series.

 

Try to forget everything you know about your instrument.

Try to forget everything you know about songwriting.

Try to forget everything you know about music.

Of course, you can’t really do such a thing. But you can find a place of creativity that exists somewhere between a child-like blank slate and the feeling of being trapped by your hard won (or new found) knowledge and experience.

Methods, styles, formulas, influences, processes, practice habits, listening habits, scales, progressions, sounds, environment, practical or physical limitations – any or all of such creative building blocks can sometimes look like the wall at the end of the universe of originality when a songwriter is in search of something new.

Maybe not new to the world… but at least sort of new to the writer.

New enough to temporarily ease that endless hunger.

But sometimes we find ourselves  trapped within our patterns of knowledge and experience. We can be stuck in a rut and have great difficulty imagining anything outside of what we’ve already imagined.

Preparation is one of the most important aspects of playing music. It can also be a roadblock. When it comes to the raw material – the initial trolling for ideas of substance - the actual kick off point of  a song  -  well, at that moment, being completely unprepared can be a decided advantage.

As I said above, I know we can’t really do this. I know that our trained (or not so trained)  musicians hands will move instinctively into familiar positions and motions, our minds will find oft used rhymes and familiar cadences. I know that, absent a blow to the head (or something too strong for too long), we cannot banish awareness once it has been achieved.

But forget all that. All we need to do is create the illusion of unawareness.

Just for a moment – you need to fool yourself.

Just for a  second or two – and there it is.

The instrument in your hands is completely unfamiliar. In your other life you may know things about this instrument, about music, but not here and now. 

Here you are a child. You know nothing.

Well, you are pretending you know nothing, but in the world of creativity, that is enough.

That consciously created illusion of unawareness is the tiny crack in time and mind that is all your creative spirit needs to slip through and slide back with something you have never seen or heard before.

Something that, for the time being, belongs only to you.

 

********

             
 But how do you do that?

I think there are a number of ways.

Ideally, it is possible  – through intuition and practise –  to empty your mind of the immediate knowledge relating to your creativity. Not in any complete sense, and, as was written  above,  not even in a real sense, but it can be done effectively enough to allow you to move into easily accessible but personally uncharted creative territory.

A limited, targeted emptying of the mind sort of resembles meditation except that it usually happens very fast. By constant application, you can reach a place where you can summon unawareness at will. As in meditation, it helps if there are few distractions, though sometimes these distractions  can be slip-streamed into the process.

You likely did this as a child without knowing it. But what we are attempting to recreate is the blankness in the child’s mind in the moment before the imaginative game or song was created. As adults, we often seem to have a little trouble relating to this child-like state. We resist it and try to fill it with things we are certain we know. That may be why it is difficult to sustain this state.

But no matter. We don’t want to sustain it.

We want to fill it with music of uncertain origin.

If this state of mindful emptiness seems unattainable, there are other, more physically real ways to get to the same place.

For example,  in the spirit of unpreparedness I sometimes grab my guitar in passing when I least expect it. I try to surprise myself (and my muse – that’s another story) by pivoting off what I probably should be doing to suddenly find myself on the edge of a creative cliff.

Then, figuratively speaking,  I jump.

Whether by mindful emptiness, by an impulsive real world act or by some other method, the result is almost always exhilarating.

At first, the song (or whatever) is just the air rushing past my ears. But I know there is something else out there. I know, even in my illusionary ignorance and naivety, that I will land somewhere. And that if I jump right and land right, I’ll be somewhere I’ve never been before. It almost has to be that way - there’s just so much out there and I know so little.

Maybe I’ve unconsciously sounded a note or a partial chord – maybe it’s a dis-chord – it doesn’t matter. Go with it. If you don’t like where you land, quickly jump again. Another key. Another chord, riff or melody. Remember, you don’t know where you are , where you’re going or what your doing, so it doesn’t matter what it sounds like. Groan out a tune. Search for a phrase, look for a sign. See if they’re related. Listen for the drone, the echo, the harmony, the counter-point. Move it around slowly and carefully or thrash and flail wildly, it all works the same.

It’s all how you feel, not what you know.

Confusion is good. That’s often where the music comes from anyway and for sure imposing order on chaos is the end goal. But don’t worry about imposing order now. That part comes soon enough. So if your confused, your doing this part right. Revel in it. Play with it. Have fun with it.

But within the confusion, you keep your ears open.

You are listening for something.

 Two or three notes hummed up against a chord that you’re not sure you could name. Maybe the hint of  a rhythm inside a riff. The ghost of a melody behind a random inversion or perhaps an accidental phonetic nonsense sound that triggers an unusual harmonic phrase.

It could be anything, but if you’re listening, you’ll know it when you hear it.

Follow it. Track it down and own it. Work it. Play with it. Shape it.

Once that process is complete – it could be seconds or minutes – rarely longer, your time of sublime unawareness is over. 

You’ve got an idea and you don’t know where it came from. During the sequnce above, you could have tapped into memory streams related to literally anything you’ve ever heard in your life. (Remember, your state of unawareness was largely an illusion) Any sound, any source. And if  you think all that music and sound is in neat orderly little rows, you would be gloriously wrong.

Although these various streams can be separated, they are also present as a massive multi audio mash-up in your brain. It’s like an endless spiritual ocean of sound and you just reached in and pulled out a few silvery gossamer threads.

Pure liquid music.

Now make it real.

 

********

 

Knowledge, awareness and experience are again at your fingertips.

In fact, they come crashing back into the picture.

As the waves of knowledge and experience wash over you, they will try to re-shape what you’ve found. To make it fit familiar patterns, to bend it into what you already know.

You can, to varying degrees, allow this re-working to unfold as it will. It’s pretty much unavoidable to some extent, and  it’s driven by the very same creative impulses that made you take the leap in the first place.

At this point, you can trust in what you know. Acknowledging the danger of backsliding your creation into overworked ground will encourage you to be vigilant in avoiding familiar traps, backwaters and dead ends. They might have been twelve lane highways once, but for this new music they lead nowhere.

While shaping the idea, allow enough room for exploration to keep it from getting too comfortable too quickly. If – despite resistance –  chord patterns evolve into obvious forms, work to keep other important aspects such as melody or lyric from following and vice versa.

If you find that  intuition or habit is dragging a new found sound back into old grooves, it is worth the effort to consciously resist by easing through the ebb and flow of the music (the exploration) while striving to be aware of  the original sounds that started the process.

In other words, let it be strange to its maker for as long as possible.

If memory fades, you can still hear faint echoes of the sounds that started it all.

And those faint echoes are exactly what the Loon Theory is all about.

 

Free Form Guitar Practise

The Wizards of Fraud

Krugman, in his NYT article of March 26/09 – The Market Mystique - is among the few who are not afraid to call securitization what it actually is: fraud, lies and cheap stage tricks.

Underlying the glamorous new world of finance was the process of securitization. Loans no longer stayed with the lender. Instead, they were sold on to others, who sliced, diced and puréed individual debts to synthesize new assets. Subprime mortgages, credit card debts, car loans — all went into the financial system’s juicer. Out the other end, supposedly, came sweet-tasting AAA investments. And financial wizards were lavishly rewarded for overseeing the process.

But the wizards were frauds, whether they knew it or not, and their magic turned out to be no more than a collection of cheap stage tricks. Above all, the key promise of securitization — that it would make the financial system more robust by spreading risk more widely — turned out to be a lie. Banks used securitization to increase their risk, not reduce it, and in the process they made the economy more, not less, vulnerable to financial disruption.

My view is that it was never intended to be anything other than fraud. That was its entire purpose.

Those who believe otherwise and are not directly benefiting from the rigged game are indeed the useful idiots of the financial world.

Iron Radiator

Iron Radiator

A strange, stormy night of recording in a deserted one hundred fifty year old building…..

 

Iron Radiator (1:59) – Underground Sun 2004
Music and Lyrics by David Archer

Download mp3
(right click – save target as)

Lyrics/Notes

Sacred Tree

Sacred Tree

Written during the Iraq invasion.

Sacred Tree (2:37) – Underground Sun 2004
Music and Lyrics by David Archer

Download mp3
(right click – save target as)

Lyrics/Notes

Is the “Dear A.I.G., I Quit!” Letter Real?

After one quick read, my view is that the “Dear A.I.G., I Quit! ” letter is totally bogus. If there is any validity to it – if there really is a  Jake DeSantis and he did write this - then at the very least it is written not as a letter of resignation but as a rather transparent attempt to shape public opinion.

The subtle combination of self righteousness and poor little rich boy victim-hood is actually nauseating.

I find it an interesting meme that absolutely every Banker and Insurance exec is completely innocent – COMPLETELY INNOCENT – of any wrong doing at all and that ONLY a small  handful of bad actors at AIG-FP have brought the sky down on our heads.

Now remember class, it’s only that small group at AIG -FP. Every other Banker and Insurance exec is COMPLETELY and TOTALLY INNOCENT.

In fact, we should all be grateful that we get to inhabit the same planet (if not breathe the same air) as these paragons of private and public virtue.

These folks are so awesome I just want to believe each and every word they write or utter.

I just want to BELIEVE!

P.S. This line from the letter:

“ Like you, I was asked to work for an annual salary of $1, and I agreed out of a sense of duty to the company and to the public officials who have come to its aid.”

seems at odds with the $742,006.40″ theme. Was he working for the dollar or the three quarters of a million?

But then, this is Financial Neo Con Land where everything is the opposite to what it appears.

Canadian Counterparties:Let’s Start With $832-billion

Back in September of 2008, the Financial Post cited RBC Capital Markets analyst Andre-Philippe Hardy as estimating that top Canadian Banks –  referred to as the Big Six -  are likely  holding about $832-billion of credit default swaps.

Hardy said some of those positions may be in trouble because of the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the potential failure of the insurance giant AIG, both significant players in the US$62-trillion global credit default swap market.

On March 16 2009 The National Post reported that  Bank of Montreal, Canada’s fourth largest bank, received over one billion dollars of U.S. Taxpayer money funnelled through the AIG bailout.

The documents show a least US$1.1-billion of bailout money was funneled to BMO alongside payouts of up to US$13-billion each to U.S. and European banks.

The payments to BMO included US$200-million in collateral owed for credit default swaps and US$900-million to unwind separate swaps under a scheme that saw the Fed and AIG buy the underlying securities.

John Aiken, an analyst at Dundee Securities, said: “Was this all of BMO’s exposure? How much is still out there? We just don’t know, which doesn’t help from the point of view of investor confidence.”

The analyst said one of the key reasons Canadian bank shares were depressed was the “whole unknown of just what the full capital repercussions would be from the various exposures. This is not something that is going to shake itself out anytime soon.”

BMO declined to comment.

 Despite payouts to BMO, no one seems able to clarify the full extent of Canadian Counterparty exposure. If, several months ago, a bank spokesperson told me that only 2% or 5% or 20% of those deals were of concern, I might have believed it.

No more.

The 832 billion refers to Credit Default Swaps, but we know this is the language of fraud so the more important point would be:

the whole unknown of just what the full capital repercussions would be from the various exposures

Well, yeah. I guess.

 

UPDATE :

As posted earlier, not everyone  is in agreement with Ed Liddy and other financial figures who maintain that other AIG units ae in sound financial health.

From a March 18/09 Newsweek article entitled  “The Next AIG Scandal?” :

AIG’s supposedly solvent insurance business may be at least as troubled as its reckless financial-products unit. Far from being “healthy,” as state insurance regulators, ratings agencies and other experts have repeatedly described the insurance side, Gober calls it “a house of cards.” Citing numerous documents he has obtained from state insurance regulators and obscure data buried in AIG’s own 300-page annual reports, Gober argues that AIG’s 71 interlocking domestic U.S. insurance subsidiaries are in hock to each other to an astonishing degree.

Is AIG Really Solvent?

While watching some of Ed Liddy’s testimony before Congress the other day, I frequently felt as though Liddy was hiding something.

(A financier in a three piece suit hiding something. Gee, what a surprise)

That feeling was most intense when Liddy was speaking of the sound financial health and resiliency of the overall AIG Insurance company once the Financial Products division was walled off.

I think he was lying through his teeth.

Michael Hirsh cites Thomas Gober, a former Mississippi state insurance examiner who has tracked fraud in the industry for 23 years and served previously as a consultant to the FBI and the Department of Justice as saying,  in a Newsweek article entitled “The Next AIG Scandal?” :

AIG’s supposedly solvent insurance business may be at least as troubled as its reckless financial-products unit. Far from being “healthy,” as state insurance regulators, ratings agencies and other experts have repeatedly described the insurance side, Gober calls it “a house of cards.” Citing numerous documents he has obtained from state insurance regulators and obscure data buried in AIG’s own 300-page annual reports, Gober argues that AIG’s 71 interlocking domestic U.S. insurance subsidiaries are in hock to each other to an astonishing degree.

In the same article, an AIG spokesperson rejects Gober’s claims, but here at Loon Theory proclamations from Insurance Conmpanies carry little to no weight, so you can go read the Newsweek post if you want to see exactly what was said.

Hirsh continues:

Public outrage has been building, along with the outcry about bonuses, over all the taxpayer money that has gone to keep AIG afloat by paying off the credit-default-swap counterparties. While some worries have surfaced about the various insurance companies’ risky securities-lending practices, most have escaped scrutiny. But if millions of AIG policyholders are at risk too and no one’s saying it yet, the populist backlash could get really ugly.

It’s not the populist backlash that we should be worried about.

I am also starting to believe that Canadian banks and Insurance Companies are exposed to AIG to a far greater extent than we have been told.

 

UPDATE: 03/21/09

Emptywheel has good analysis and discussion on this issue.

AIG: The First Shadow Of Truth

My view from afar is that as the AIG house of derivatives unravels, unfolds and comes crashing down – and I do not mean the inane bonus situation – we will begin to see the first edge of a shadow of the looming, unimaginable truth of what has actually been going on.

The Obama administration and everyone close to power appear to be circling round an invisible black hole, the anti matter of veritable evil (a word I do not use often or lightly) and financial insanity that we can not see but know must be there.

AIG  is just the beginning of the beginning of the real game.

Only the rage will lead to the truth.

Better Living Through Toxic Chemicals

From Martin Mittelsstaedt’s Globe and Mail article about the estrogen-mimicking chemical BPA (Bisphenol A) that has been found in soft drinks.

The estrogen-mimicking chemical BPA, already banished from baby bottles and frowned upon in water jugs, has now shown up in significant levels in soft drinks.

Health Canada assures us everything is safe, yet they seem to do that even when they have no clue.

It’s good for the business world and of course, that’s all that matters.

Frederick vom Saal, a biologist at the University of Missouri and an authority on BPA, seems to have a different view than other experts:

Dr. vom Saal says there is also a growing body of scientific literature, based on animal experiments, that has found harmful effects due to BPA at concentrations up to 1,000 times below Health Canada’s safety limit. These conditions include such hormonally linked illnesses as breast cancer, and Dr. vom Saal called the government’s assurances of no harm “simple-minded.” (Bold added)

Assurances of no harm “simple-minded.”

Perhaps Health Canada should reasses their  procedures with vom Saal’s statement as their starting point.

Conservative Party Attack Ads Coming

From The Canadian Press

The Tories already have anti-Ignatieff ads ready to air at a moment’s notice, and are also combing through a lifetime’s worth of musings from his career as a public intellectual.

Let us note that we are not currently engaged in a Federal election. Let us further note that for the Conservative Party of Canada, anytime is a great time for smears and character assassination.

Just ask Stephane Dion.

I’m guessing there will be little to zero focus on Liberal policy or any realities relating to the Canadian people and their concerns.

There will be camera tricks (see “Harper’s Mob Surveillance” video), quotes taken fully out of context, voices brimming with cartoon levels of derision and contempt and of course absolutely fraudulent concern for the Canadian citizen.

But these days Conservatives won’t touch actual policy with a twenty foot pole.

This Harper minority government can be considered a colossal failure of policy, ideas and ideology and exactly the wrong political philosophy at the worst possible time.

But though the CPoC is bankrupt and bereft of ideas, they know how to do NASTY and more importantly, how to do NASTY and keep it just this side of unacceptable.

This will likely be ugly and the only one who may benefit from this crappy American style political thuggery is Steven Harper and friends.

But then nothing modern conservatives do is designed to benefit anyone but their fellow travellers.

As usual, when right wingers are in government, only a very small percentage of the population stands to gain.

The attack ads will be works of art.

Ugly, nasty works of art.