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Mandates

This corn must know it’s growing
Near a chocolate factory
Must smell the smokestacks
And know its own good murder

And we walk a chocolate town
Known by its chocolate river
And its invasive bugs, red on its
Underwings, stretched across
The calligrapher’s book to write its
Invasive thoughts upon,
Looking up with its orange eyes
In hopes of devouring the corn
And leaving its prolific eggs

The kids and the corn and now bugs know again
They are growing near a chocolate factory
And who slaved for what is sweet

D.H. Lawrence wrote of a sensual need for justice

And likewise
The beautiful red-brown lanternfly is smashed under thought
Blue Converse and mandate of state law
Just as the bug serves his own mandate
To devour the Pennsylvania picture at night

Salon de la Guerre has released its first music video. It’s for the song “Lanternfly,” which appears on the album Wings Made of Cash. The video was directed by yours truly.

Wings Made of Cash

I’ve hit a couple of milestones recently in my musical career. One is that I copyrighted my 400th song. I’m also starting to put together what will be my first music video–a mix of animation and photography.

And last but not least is the fact that Salon de la Guerre’s 31st album is available as of this week! It’s a 20-song cycle of pop, rock and electronic silliness about money and obsession and money obsession, as well as the various ways people flail about trying to make themselves happy and follow their own existential bliss.

The album is called Wings Made of Cash, and it’s out on Amazon, iTunes, Spotify, YouTube and other places where music is still sold.

I spent the summer recording this album (along with two classical albums and an ambient album) after getting my hands on Apple’s Logic Pro X software. As I’ve mentioned previously, this was my first time working with a musical score editor, and now that I’m writing in musical notation, I’m finding myself more prolific than ever. Part of my philosophy of music, after all, is to keep things new by changing the approach every so often. I once put Sonic Youth sounds to marching band rhythms. Later, I tried mixing Maybelle Carter’s guitar strumming with Thurston Moore’s alternative tuning. I once tried to mix country music with avant-garde microtonal experiments. I have an album called Yipano in which I improvise a bunch of songs on my son’s keyboard and let the audience in on the intimate and embarrassing fact that I’m very much learning to play the piano in real time.

Sorry to sound like I’m shilling for the late Steve Jobs, but the Apple software has opened a new and magical window in my brain that’s let me conceive many different new musical ideas that I’ll likely be investigating well into the future. For my next act, I’ll likely start plugging real musical instruments into the program (I used only MIDI instruments for this and the three other albums I made over the summer) to see what different sounds emerge.

Wings Made of Cash was composed, arranged, performed and produced by yours truly at my home studio in New York City during the summer of 2021. I also designed the cover. The male model photo is by an artist named “FatSprat” that I came by on a photo service.

Dog photo by Irina Kashaeva

I know that I promised you a pop music album, and damn it, I’m trying to live up to that promise. But in the meantime, I’ve managed to string together another classical piece.

The Dog Opus is my 30th album, and it just hit the virtual shelves. It was conceived as a string quartet but synthesized on my computer. I was inspired by Sergei Prokofiev’s “String Quartet No. 1” (Opus 50) and “String Quartet No. 2” (Opus 92, “Kabardinian.”) I used the two violin synthesizers on Apple’s Logic Pro X, as well as the electronic viola and cello. I am not sure how well these would transpose to actual instruments, but I do have the score, and maybe someday in the future if I found amenable musicians … who knows? I’ll leave smarter people than I to decide what key I’m playing in.

Why a dog quartet? Well, I was running out of the family members I normally put on my classical works.

The Dog Opus, released under the name of my musical act Salon de la Guerre, is now available on Amazon, iTunes, Spotify, YouTube and other places where music is streamed and (still) sold.

–*College kid surprises girlfriend by showing up at her high school homecoming. She surprises him by having a new boyfriend.

–*This kid found out the hard way that wingsuits will not allow you to float through brick walls.

–*These precious young Velvet Underground fans made a cute video for one of the band’s songs that will reinforce your belief that nobody understands the Velvet Underground but you.

–*This extremely slow docking procedure on the International Space Station is a great reminder that if you viewers at home were doing the math, people would die.

–*Space litter!

–*A lion gives an antelope a hug because that would really happen in the wild.

–*This video on Bayes’ theorem overestimates the number of people who would use Bayes’ theorem if they understood Bayes’ theorem.

–*A montage of people accidentally pointing AR-15s at their family members.

–*This woman used a needle, thread and fabric to make clothing.

–*This pilot’s face did not melt off at Mach 2 like the thumbnail promised.

–*Jordan Peterson destroys trans cashier trying to give him change for a half gallon of milk.

–*Joe Rogan refuses to take a stand on putting your penis in a blender. “I’m not going to tell people not to do that.”

–*This 230 foot mega yacht will fairly quickly get your Marxist class consciousness and general covetousness confused.

–*A cartoon of Slavoj Žižek eating an apple, even though cartoons, apples and Slavoj Žižek only exist as constructs masking the reality of the non-self.

–*Ducklings getting eaten by herons.

–*A man made his own flamethrower even though a flamethrower masks the reality of the non-self.

–*A man who proves that Western music practically didn’t exist until Céline Dion changed keys in this version of “All By Myself.”

–*Demonic possession hack: You’ll invoke Satan if you play a chord with a flattened fifth.

–*Dude Imperfect can’t quite get past the “throwing eggs at people’s houses and videotaping it” concept stage.

–*Neville Gamer TV begs you to subscribe to his videos playing handheld Mattel football electronic games.

–*NASA tries to up the sex appeal by having an astronaut’s clothes come off spontaneously under 3 G’s of force at rocket launch.

–*Clips from The Sopranos.

–*Clips from Game of Thrones.

–*A video you made yourself of your baby puking.

Cold For Mars

In a few days, I’ll be releasing another album on the major music platforms. This one’s an ambient album and it’s called Cold For Mars. I’ve avoided making ambient albums in the past because I felt they were too easy to create, and if I were to pursue that line indefinitely, I could be making 20 albums a year and producing even more noise pollution than I do now. That’s not to say I don’t greatly admire acts like Four Tet and Bonobo and Oneohtrix Point Never. And I love Brian Eno’s ambient albums, of course. Furthermore, I understand the great need people have for albums with a hallucinatory effect and their need to chill out to them.

I suppose I could have called my album Golem Vs. Duende ambient, but it was closer to industrial and I’m not sure it’s something anybody chilled to.

In any case, I’ve released the latest album early on Bandcamp, and you can find it there if you’d like to sample it and decide if it’s your thing.

As usual, I composed and recorded the album myself at my home studio in New York City. I conceived of, recorded it and mastered it over the course of eight days. (My other albums this year took quite a bit longer, that includes my next album, Wings Made of Cash–a pop work that is taking a bit more time to fuss over.)

Check out The Black Sheep Symphony, a modern classical work I composed over the summer. It’s now available now available on iTunes, Amazon, Spotify and YouTube and appears under the name of my musical act, “Salon de la Guerre.” This is my 28th album and my fourth symphony. It was composed, arranged and produced by yours truly.

It’s a sequel of sorts to my albums Gravitas: A Life, The Widowhood of Bunny and Infinity Boy.

I’ve got a couple of other albums following close on the heels of this one if this isn’t quite your bag. One’s pop and one’s ambient. If you’re into it … enjoy!

–*Everyone forgets that these celebrity couples were once just zygotes.

–*There was a candy bar in this picture a minute ago. Who took it?

–*Why Hollywood won’t hire William Holden anymore.

–*Could writing a check on somebody’s back be the new TikTok dance craze?

–*This hot stock tip has the SEC waiting to arrest you for this hot stock tip.

–*Click here for a dopamine rush!

–*Could sexual intercourse be the new day trading?

–*What happens at the end of this colonoscopy is not dinner conversation, damn it!

–*This can of Fanta sitting by itself is just awkward!

–*This anti-vaxxer comedian made that famous joke thief look not so bad in hindsight.

–*This Kanye West made that Taylor Swift look not so bad in hindsight.

–*She gave up everything for a blood test device that didn’t work.

–*This hack will allow you to read the work of journalists for free by using the internet.

–*This hack will allow you to hear the work of musicians for free by using the internet.

–*Who is Lionel Barrymore dating 95 years ago?

–This Grecian urn hack will have you saying that truth is beauty and beauty truth.

–*This tomato bisque … um, awkward!

–*She wore a tiered skirt over jeans. Next thing you know, we were at war.

In the next few weeks, I’ll be putting out a crazy amount of music, including my 28th, 29th and 30th albums. The first one is another contemporary classical piece called The Black Sheep Symphony, part of a series of sorts I’ve developed around a fictional family and their individual biographies (it started in 2016 with Gravitas: A Life, followed by The Widowhood of Bunny in 2017 and Infinity Boy in 2019. The new work continues with some of those same musical themes, but also allowed me the opportunity to get familiar with my new music software Logic Pro.

I have no mission statement for this music nor theory of tonal or microtonal music to discuss, just an abiding love for Prokofiev and Stravinsky and occasionally the mercurial Harry Partch.

The album that will follow this one is a 20-song collection of pop music, but I’ll leave that discussion for another time.

Like many people, my family has endured a bit of turmoil over the past 18 months (though our issues were not directly related to the Covid-19 pandemic). I even thought I might have to stop making music for a while. But then I found a lot of time at home with a new computer and new software–whose musical notation function has allowed me to compose every day and done wonders for my creative flow.

Again, if you’re into it, here’s a sample of The Black Sheep Symphony. As usual, it was composed, arranged and produced by yours truly. (Photo credit: Tatyana Maximova.)

One of the memories of 9/11 I’ve never shaken: I took a subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan to write about the event (I had to lie about my intentions to the MTA staff to get on board). When I popped out in the West Village, I found a man with an easel and canvas planted right in the middle of empty Sixth Avenue. The sun hadn’t even set on that day, and he had already nearly completed a richly colorful painting of Lower Manhattan smeared in smoke and debris.

In a moment of crisis, I didn’t know what to make of this. The words “Who does he think he is?” came to mind. I was probably also jealous of his nerve and alternatively affronted by the fact that he was making sure to draw attention to his act by making a public stage out of an empty New York thoroughfare. At a spot near Houston Street where many people fleeing lower Manhattan were likely going to be marching past.

This happened before the age of cell phones. If somebody had taken a picture of him and it had gone viral, I always wondered what the Twitterverse would have done with him. Would they have hailed him as an example of superior coping skills or would they have called him a crass opportunist trying to draw attention to himself and his own cuteness while thousands of people lay dead a few miles south? I can’t help thinking now that, given people’s desire for bloodlust in the wake of the attacks, that this artist would have been canceled, stalked, doxxed and threatened.

But that’s why I’m using this little anecdote, hopefully to illuminate a bigger point. We all felt varying degrees of helplessness that day. Everybody. (If you’ve ever interviewed a 9/11 first responder, you know what I’m talking about.) Human beings aren’t good with helplessness. We must create ways to compensate and cope and feel some agency over world events that make us feel tiny.

For some of us, that meant getting in a car and driving away from town (perhaps with no explanation to anybody). For others, it was helping rescue workers. For those who couldn’t even help with that, it meant telling tasteless jokes (yes, they were being told in New York the day of. I heard them). Some created meaningless conspiracy theories. Others attacked innocent Muslims. Most Americans simply supported any military action put on the table.

And if we’d had Twitter, I would imagine it would mean going after the tragedy painter. “I’m going to cope by fighting with another person coping.”

My own coping mechanism after pulverized bits of the World Trade Center snowed down on my neighborhood in Brooklyn was to write a story or two about it. It wasn’t good enough. We all come face to face with our own limitations in a crisis, and that’s what makes the events of like 9/11—yes, it was a very beautiful day in New York—so personal to many. Trauma is a part of your body. It doesn’t forget.

So I’ve accepted that the painter was coping. It’s in human nature to act when we think we’ve got a picture of things. We also have to accept that the real picture of things is always going to change.