Tag: #Music

Musical Interlude

I often mention that live music is my main diversion from the intellectual and the mundane. Music, and/or walking in the wilds that is. After our regular annual walking holiday the last week in February – some great walks around Porte Soller in the Serra Tramuntana mountains of North-West Mallorca – these last two weekends have involved gigs.

The well-ordered writing project(s) haven’t quite recovered since having been back on track in the new year. Technical content-wise – the ongoing dialogue with Dave Snowden really needs some attention, his recent extensive blogs as well as our exchanges (Dave responded to my last post) – and the “more than science” conversation with ISSS members needs an update since I had a one-to-one with president Gary Smith. We’re in a good place. Onwards and upward.

The first of the two gigs was last weekend in Hull. Avalanche Party headlining their promotional tour on the release of their latest album recorded with the resources of the Joshua Tree studios and record company backing on the back of previous Austin TX “SXSW” success. (See more in the footnotes to my previous reference.) The Polar Bear Club is a famed UK venue with a great history in grass-roots music. The relatively low turnout – 40/50 people tops including the two support bands and their hangers-on? – might have something to do with the foggy Sunday night(*) and the surrounding road-construction access and parking difficulties – but the atmosphere could have been better.

Avalanche Party themselves were excellent again, with sympathetic support from the mixing desk and lighting, also now knowing most of their numbers, thanks to regularly playing the new CD recently. Full-on intensity, bass-driven riffs, with dynamic range and rhythm changes, as I’ve said before, puts one in mind of QOTSA with extra keyboards and sax (before I’d heard bassist Joe – originally met in our local bar – was a QOTSA fan too, and of course that Joshua Tree connection).

Support bands were a mixed bag. Second band were Bleach, competent but a little too conventional for me, very much led by their guitarist. But, first up were Wormfood, a bit “art-school”, chaotic but fun and bouncy, not taking themselves too seriously – self-identifying as “pretentious twats”. Really enjoyed them, and could easily get into them.

Hope the rest of Avalanche Party’s tour goes well, London and Belgium / Holland / Germany included. With recent serious signs of success and support behind them, it feels like now or never for fame and fortune. “Last roll of the dice” someone said. Good luck guys.

After the Polar Bear in Hull last weekend, this weekend was The Georgian Theatre in Stockton – again really about grass-roots support for original performers, and the evergreen question of what does it take – or even mean – to make it as a musical success these days? Creativity needs to be experienced and appreciated.

Headline were Wave Pictures, a band I didn’t previously know, and with some obvious “fame” behind them, commanding the £20+ ticket price, but I’d actually come along specifically to see the support, The Middle Management.

Although my own musical taste is rooted in blues-guitar-based and singer-songwriter “Americana”, Wave Pictures, like Bleach last weekend, were just a tad too conventional – led by the lead guitar – to be interesting for me, though obviously some quirky wit in the songs themselves which you can only ever get a hint of in one live listening.

The three fellas in Middle Management were previously in a band called The Young Hegelians (did I mention pretentious, but witty) and Simone the new member on keyboards and vocals is also someone we see regularly with her partner in our local bar (seeing the connection?) It was my first opportunity to see them, from previous enquiries they were busy rehearsing and recording. They were very much worth the entry fee. All I knew before were comparisons to Talking Heads and hearing their new single Influencer Influenza. Last time I saw Talking Heads live would have been Hammersmith Odeon (now Apollo) late 70’s, probably their first UK tour, so what’s not to like?

Actually, Middle Management were refreshing, much more original and a long way from any kind of tribute act – the covers bands that seem to fill every local music slot these days. It’s the rhythmic variety and dynamic range that gets you viscerally, but the fun of originality and intelligent wit that shines through. Loved them. When can I see and hear – embody the experience – more?

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FootNotes:

(*) Foggy Sunday Night? Being in Hull searching for the M62 home in the small hours of Monday 10th March 2025 – did I mention the road construction / closures? – I can vouch for the local fog on that night / morning. That weird coincidence meant I’ve been taking more than passing interest in the Russian connection in the Solong ramming of the Stena Immaculate that morning.

Perhaps not obvious, but with my intellectual topic being systems thinking – aka Cybernetics (or Psybernetics) being literally “governance” – the less-than / more-than science – of politics of government, local, national and international are integral to my interests. The fact that everything IS connected, doesn’t mean there’s a conspiracy or that you’re paranoid 😉

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The Brie Chronicles – Zen and the Art of Rock and Roll

The Preamble

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned (only on X/Twitter I think) coming across a Nietzsche scholar – Keegan Kjeldsen – who was clearly also a Pirsig scholar, and who happened to be a rock’n’roller in a doom-metal band, from Austin TX. “What’s not to like?” I opined at the time.

X/Tweet 23rd July 2024– Keegan Kjeldsen @untimelysalts is a scholar of Nietzsche and an ex-Doom-Metal rock’n’roller from Austin TX who also highly recommends and provides a fine analysis of Robert Pirsig’s work. What’s not to like?

His recent excellent Pirsig analysis is here on his YouTube Podcast: youtube.com/watch?v=vWSYrq He was blogging since the 2010’s on Blogspot: untimely-reflections.blogspot.com/p/kjlk.html His ongoing Patreon Nietzsche channel (with links to other channels) is here: patreon.com/untimelyreflec And his autobiographical book “THE RITUAL MADNESS OF ROCK & ROLL: AN INQUIRY INTO AESTHETICS” is published here: blackrosewriting.com/biographymemoi #ZMM #Lila #Pirsig #RobertPirsigAssociation robertpirsig.org

X/Tweet 6th August 2024 – Mentioned coming across Keegan Kjeldsen @untimelysalts a couple of weeks ago. I’ve since acquired & read and now about to blog a “review” of his book. It’s very good. Recommended whether you’re a scholarly philosopher who appreciates Pirsig’s work, or anyone who finds lived quality in the visceral immediacy of rock’n’roll. I’m both 🙂 @ZmmQuality @aqualityexiste1 @_artun @goodisanoun

Robert Pirsig’s work on Quality primarily comprises two books, most famously Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZMM) – 50th anniversary in 2024 – and his follow-up on his Metaphysics of Quality in Lila. One of my main takeaways from Pirsig’s Quality (metaphysical and dynamic) has been that the scholarly considerations must be punctuated – interact dynamically – with the lived experience of embodied quality. If you only have the bandwidth for one, choose the latter over the former. For me personally, as well as the general moral imperative to always pay attention to the world as experienced, more so than the experience of (say) explicit meditative or mindful practices, such attention for me has two outlets. Communing directly in nature on the one hand, and on the other immersion in the visceral experiences of rock’n’roll and/or the poetry of the bards who write their songs. I’ve mentioned and written about all three aspects many time before. Not to mention my experiences of Texas and Austin, but that would be a digression too far.

Slightly less of a digression, the moral imperative is the attention to – the physical immersion in – the experience. Pet hates for me are people who talk with their mates at the tops of their voices or “watch” the performance through their cell-phone cameras, whilst performers perform their art.

The Review

The Ritual Madness of Rock and Roll
– An Inquiry into Aesthetics
Keegan Kjeldsen (Black Rose Writing, Texas, 2024)

The structure of the book is very much that of Pirsig’s work in both ZMM and Lila. The narrative of a road trip (or boat trip in the case of Lila) including some background memoir of the narrator’s life and relationships before the real-time narrative, explicitly interspersed with what Pirsig called chautauquas – little technical “edutainment” essays – on the philosophical topic of aesthetics in Kjeldsen’s case – “An Inquiry into Aesthetics” being his subtitle. A neat twist is the sequential chapters based on the daily legs of the two-week trip, but with sections that intersect the chautauquas as they change topics within any given chapter.

Within that structure it is a story well told. Some metaphorical parallel between the narrative around the geography of the trip and the current state of his philosophical thesis, though not as obvious as in the case of Pirsig’s ZMM. But, possibly more importantly for the reader, the explicit breaking up of the drier technical thesis into bite-sized portions, with the concentration refreshed by the what-happens-next anticipation of the next instalment of the biographical road trip narrative. The trip being his band on the road on a tour of smaller Italian, French and German cities.

Most of the rock’n’roll tour is described in mundane practical terms. The drudge of daily travel in the van, shared with a second band, cramped and sleepless, and all the people relationships that entails. Meals and ablutions. The loading out and in of the van, the venues, the overnight stops and the airports at either end. Very little sensational sex and drugs and … which put me in mind of Tommy Womack’s excellent band-on-the-road memoir “Cheese Chronicles” prompted by Kjeldsen’s mention of the actual cheeses experienced in the assorted European locations. Also very little description of the artistic content of the actual gigs, not the kind of experience that benefits from being put into words, but some, just enough. The Brie Chronicles maybe?

Philosophical analysis of art and the value of artistic content is the primary topic however. Aesthetics in the widest evolving sense, from pre-linguistic communities via Plato’s Republic and the Socratic dialogues to the endless footnotes to Plato we know and … er … love today.

Lots of touch points with Pirsig – eg the whole “rt” root of both art and craft, without needing to go further east than the Vedantic “rta”. Whilst ZMM and Quality (capital Q) are explicitly referenced in a long passage in Chapter 10 – “Dresden”, within which we morph into Section VII – “Chemistry of Concepts and Feelings”, his focus is in fact on the elaborations of the Metaphysics of Quality in Pirsig’s second book Lila.

The aesthetic continuum, Pirsig’s reading of Northrop, within which the quality events occur, including the ones we’d think of as subjective. His use of the old-fashioned word gumption as Pirsig did. A whole chapter on Dresden with no mention of Vonnegut? And earlier describing the traffic jams in 2019 Genoa without mention of the 2018 bridge collapse over Genoa? Tragedy! (*below)

Missed a Nietzschean trick there?

The timeline is interesting for me. This is a 2024 memoir about a 2019 trip by a narrator who, 30 in 2019, was born in 1989? Younger than both our sons and almost exactly 50 years after Pirsig’s timeline. So we have Debit Cards, ATM’s, 4G Cell phones and GoogleMaps – exchanging calls and texts with his wife back home in Austin. And yet, can’t fail to evoke Pirsig’s 1960’s/70’s intellectual journey. A ZMM for our times?

But lots of Kjeldsen’s own telling to appreciate beyond Pirsig. Little references to US vs European cultural differences, the shorter history. The strip malls that get “built” vs rows of shops that “evolved”. Not surprisingly, returning regularly to Nietzsche’s takes on all that had gone before. Felt like a good reading of Nietzsche to me. References to Usener, Cassirer and Hippel all new to me.  Positive use of Wittgenstein, the kind I approve, and Tolstoy over Plato’s Socrates. The latter’s fine analysis of what makes for art – its irrationality – but ultimately censoring its actual human value, so that today Socrates, the hero of 21st C rational scepticism, has come to dominate and divorce aesthetic value from rational science. Pirsig’s “church of reason”. And yet, the original positive take on censorship in preserving cultural values – moderation I say.

It’s the same problem still afflicting humanity at increasing pace and severity, but reassuring that newer writing – Kjeldsen’s – is finding the same diagnosis.

“[T]he more deeply you get to know [something] the less needs to be expressed in terms of language. And so it is a communication which is non-conceptual. The deepest communication is [verbally] silent communication. The deepest love is silent love.”

The most fundamental Quality is ineffable.
The Tao that can be spoken is not the true Tao.

Freedom of expression is fine, but sometimes we need less of it.

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[Original link above to sourcing Kjeldsen’s book from the publisher Black Rose Writing, as I did, but you’ll now find it on Amazon including Kindle and more.]

[(*) Another musical meme? In the same way I use Aretha Franklin’s voice in R.E.S.P.E.C.T to make good faith in dialogue stick, “Tragedy!” hopefully can’t fail to conjure up those falsetto voices of the Bee Gees.]

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The Connections Never End

John Wilson interviewed Simon McBurney on BBC Radio 4’s “This Cultural Life“ and I only caught it by chance this morning. Glad I did.

[McBurney – privileged life, archaeologist father, born and raised in Cambridge, boarding school, family holidays in Jersey, Eng Lit at Cambridge, the Footlights, Parisian introduction to a creative life in the theatre … and the rest is history.]

Same age as myself give or take a few months and shared a few touch points that pricked my ears up. Sailing round Portland into Weymouth – always an impressive piece of geography to experience close-up – and being part of Rock Against Racism at Victoria Park, Hackney, Sunday April 30th 1978 – the whole goodwill march, chaotic afternoon festival and the bonus evening gig at the Roundhouse oft noted as the best musical day of my life, amidst the whole formative experience.

But the real reason I’m moved to blog is his experience with one of the Xingu tribes in Amazonian South America. Consciousness of identity shared with their forest environment beyond, not even, any self inside their heads. “It’s more complicated“, to use the vernacular for real complexity. That and the archaeological / architectural perspective of time upwards, the new evolved / supervening on the lower older layers, just like our brains and emergence in any complex system. More strings to the West Meets East bow, with “East” being more generally non-Euro/US/Western.

That “Self” being the one invented by the Humboldts and the Jena set in Andrea Wulf’s account of “The Magnificent Rebels” in Prussian Germany from 1749 to 1806 when Napoleon rolled through, with William Godwin’s influence in cultivating it’s wider adoption in the “West” not acknowledged.

This Cultural Life was followed by Ep9 of an audio abridgement of “The Stalin Affair” by Giles Milton. The importance of the (tacit / implicit / “naughty”) interpersonal communications and relationships between Churchill and Stalin amidst the explicit agreements recorded. And despite Churchill’s long stay in Moscow working intimately with Stalin, the latter’s insistence that the final formal meeting between all three – Churchill, FDR and Stalin – be as far East as possible Europewise, in Yalta.

This riff on West<>East world-view connections is itself connected to yesterday’s diary entry, well the connections never end, as I say 🙂

Received this morning Mike Jackson’s (2003) “Systems Thinking – Creative Holism (for Managers)” in which, in response to that previous post, Mike pointed out he had in fact quoted Pirsig in his work, the epigraph to Ch15 of said book, explaining his holistic subtitle:

“This is the source of the trouble. Persons tend to think and feel exclusively in one mode or the other and in doing so tend to misunderstand and underestimate what the other mode is about …. To reject that part of the Buddha that attends to the analysis of motorcycles is to miss the Buddha entirely.” Pirsig (1974)

2003 incidentally is exactly the year I pointed-out Dave Snowden drawing on a Pirsig quote. What goes around comes around.

[Andrea Wulf was the first of the Annual Mike Jackson lecturer’s at Hull Uni … sadly no recording exists.]

Onwards and upward (as time would have it).

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