Tim Schuler’s Weekly Challenge #3 :: Interview

[the following are selections from an interview with Belgian producer/musician Vincent Kenis on the subject of Konono No. 1, a Bazombo-trance-music group from Kinshasa, DRC]

::

<<<On first hearing Konono>>>

“When I heard them on the radio, it was ’78, ’79, I don’t remember, maybe ’80, but it was the New Wave period. I was playing in a group called the Honeymoon Killers, and I found a sort of link with this African punk music. And actually I was lucky enough to record that music from the radio onto a cassette and I took the cassette on tour with the Honeymoon Killers and we were listening to this cassette for hours during the travels in the bus and it became like a muse for us. So I wanted to see them in the flesh, in person. This was so radically different from the rumba and the soukous, it intrigued me, and I found a really personal affinity with it.”

::

<<<On Konono’s founder, Papa Mingiedi>>>

“He came to Kinshasa when he was very young. I think he came when his father died. He was born in the village, and his father was a musician, and the leader of the king’s orchestra. You know they had local kings in the Congo region. He learned the likembe from his father, and carrying the likembe into town was maybe for him a way to continue to evoke the sounds he heard when he was a kid. It’s like a portable village you’re carrying into the town.”

“Mingiedi doesn’t read. He doesn’t really want to know what’s going on around him, he just plays his thing and goes to bed. If you ask him what kind of music he likes, he would mention probably the styles of the 60s and 70s in the Congo, but he won’t ever make a relation to what he’s doing. “I asked him, ‘Did you ever want to play rumba with your instrument?’ He said, ‘No, there’s no point. It’s not the same thing, it’s not the same planet. I play traditional music.’”

“He could tour the world for 200 years and he wouldn’t change a bit in the way he plays.”

::

<<<On the music’s complexities and foreignness>>>

“When Konono plays live, after 10 minutes people start asking, ‘It seems the same all the time, it doesn’t change much song to song—what’s this?’ There’s kind of uneasiness. And then the uneasiness usually goes after 20 minutes, because they just catch the thing…and they just want them to continue forever.”

“Konono music is really very good music for dancing, once you catch the swing. It’s not just square music; it cannot be divided by two infinitum. It’s not in 4/4—it’s like 5/4, or 3/4. It’s quite specific. As soon as people get into it with their bodies—without knowing it, just intuitively—they get it.

”You have to come to terms with the sound—which is evolving constantly and minimalistically over time, but basically staying the same—and realize the shifts in that sameness is the whole game.”

::

<<<On recording in Kinshasa>>>

“[The stage] has a corrugated iron roof, which sounds really incredible on the reverb. I always put two microphones pointed toward that ceiling, and it gives that really industrial nice reverb.”

“The drums—they just take scraps of metal and build something that sounds like what they like. One day its hubcaps, the other day its just some boxes.”

“I record everything with a Mac Book Pro computer, so I can take it wherever I like. I transform my hotel room into a recording studio. The rest of the production work was to invite people into my hotel room and hand them a guitar or percussion or even a fader or even the mouse and say ‘OK, just fool around with this and see what happens.’”

“I’m just trying to interpret it in a way that it’s more clearly legible. If I have a role, it’s like a translator…[it’s the] difference between a literal and a literary translation.”

::

Weekly Challenge 4: Uniformity

Topic: UNIFORMITY.  No other stipulations than an 864-word limit.

Sean Conner’s Weekly Challenge #3: A-Z

After Breakfast Walter walked down past the farmer’s market to do the Times Crossword at Nina’s Cafe, his weekly ritual ever since his son moved out.  Bloody Marys, always two, mild.  Chair and table next to the window.  Donut for dessert.  Each week it passed without consequence, two, three hours, until the church crowd emerged in their best digs to overtake the place.  Fanciest dressed invaders Walter had ever witnessed.

Greg was working today.  “Hello Walter,” he said. “I’ve got bad news, we’re out of mix.”

Just like that, a breach.  Kathy had been better equipped for situations like this.  Lateral plays drawn up fast, alternate routes assessed and settled upon.  Moments, for Walter, were best served as scripted events.  Nina’s Cafe was a one-act play, few props with little or no dialogue.  Ovationless.  Paid with exact change: $8.25.  The quarter he coul feel in his pocket, a divot between his wallet and leg.

Reaching into the pocket he pulled the quarter out.  Silver as it should be, matching his wedding band.  The United States of America minted along the top of its circumference.  Under this, Washington’s profile, steely, gaunt and decisive.

The vacuum of the tip jar in front of him, Walter slipped in the coin.  Windows framed the yawn of a Sunday morning.  Extended behind Walter now, a line.  Years spent, he thought, waiting in lines.  Zipping his coat he moved outside.

Timothy Schuler’s Weekly Challenge #3: A-Z

LOOKING OUT, LOOKING IN: AN ESSAY IN 26 SENTENCES

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Accentuating the inexplicable, inescapable ugliness of our lives is meant to be reassuring.

But I wonder.

Constant exploration into our brokenness through emotional trauma-dramas like Margot at the Wedding and Rachael Getting Married (how rich our familial rottenness when viewed through the lens of The Wedding!) can sometimes come across as celebration. Despite our feelings about the quality of such films, the trend to accept and publicly discuss our ugliness is becoming full of that from which all trends suffer. Excess.

Film may be the most obvious venue for it, but in religious circles, too (among others: academia, for one) it now is popular to advocate messiness over perfection. Grace over piety. Holiness no longer as strict adherence to a law (or even a sacrificial attempt at adherence), but as process—a messy, muddy process.

I comes before the e’s of everyone else—not in ideology (though it does in its spelling), but out of necessity (off again here), as nihilism (only i’s) becomes a tenet of faith: the result of cultural studies and a whole lot of guilt and uncertainty. Journey is the popular metaphor. Kickstands on which we prop our beliefs while we take some time off to explore or disengage, knowing we can resume at any point; we’ll never arrive, so why push the pace?

Lamenting these dangers—and I believe they are valid ones—it is true, however, that acknowledgment of our messiness can be valuable—what I have to say is not all shit and cynicism. Many of the implications of messy spirituality and Wabi-sabi culture are (just as proponents assert) truly beautiful, helpful, and as I mentioned before, reassuring. Negativity is part of life—it comes in the form of failure, guilt, fear, self-loathing, difficulty, brokenness, and error. Only a fool would deny the existence of these things, and therefore I am a fool if I ignore them and invent for myself an incomplete, Utopian philosophy. Pretense doesn’t get me very far; so despite the dangers, the excess of the trend, I accept those unpleasant, distracting, difficult elements of life, which actually makes me needier than ever.

Quiet introspection becomes incalculably valuable, a balm for the wounds I inevitably reopen.

Resting within myself; dreaming my thoughts and organs; metastasizing my daily visions, fears, and ideas; organizing these and then loosing them upon the world—this is a picture of health. Simply listening to life—mine and that of others—allows me to synthesize my minutes, days, and years into experiences with meaning.

Taking advantage of introspection, for me, turns the attention I give to my inherent ugliness into more than just escapism. Ugliness can be a sounding board, a rubric, a measurement, an impetus, a wake-up call, a catalyst, an enemy, or simply part of life.

Viewing the hard moments, mistakes, and utter failures of our lives, and those of human history, through the question, “What do we do with this?” has led me to some of the greatest realizations of my life, ones that ultimately lead to greater beauty and peace. Without a philosophy that encapsulates (without encouraging) ugliness, I would be unaffected by it—it only would stir up more of itself within me, which I would be forced to pack down, stuffing it into myself so as to disguise its presence. X-ing out my failures, deleting them from the record, is to X out my eyes, to relegate myself to a slow death in the land of the fake. Years, all those remaining, spent in the world of artifice, where we mail order a façade of greatness, manufactured in plastic factories—detachedly and with little care or satisfaction.

Zeal is not, then, the coveted virtue—though many energetically convince themselves of this, thinking to overpower ugliness— rather the fluid, churning passion and compassion that come from introspection—the greatest force with which to understand and reckon the distress and fracture of our world.

::

Weekly Challenge 3: A-Z

Short, sweet, simple. Draft a 26 sentence scene, each sentence of which starts with the corresponding letter of the alpahbet. Sentence one begins with ‘A’ etc.

Example:

A few people have been hearing about this blog. But I, Sean Conner, haven’t been doing much with it. Curses, Sean, for being so lazy. Despite such setbacks, I’ll try and become a more proactive moderator / admin / all around wellwisher….

Oh, and remember, anyone can post anything they want feedback on. It’s not all about these challenges.

Tim Schuler’s Randomography: Aeron Chair + Karin Brownlee

1. Office Chair

In 1994, Herman Miller designed a chair that now holds a spot in the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. It was an office chair. It had arm rests. And wheels. But it was more than the sum of its humdrum parts.

Before the green movement, in the midst of the dot-com bubble, the Aeron chair was a visionary diversion from the growing number of manufacturers who cobbled crap and subsequently destroyed entire ecosystems. Two men—Don Chadwick and Bill Stumpf—understood how bad desk jobs were for human beings and wanted to distinguish themselves and the desk job from the run-of-the-mill office products that had become necessities since the time of Charles Eames and his chairs.

Ergonomic, anthropometric, functional, environmental—these are words used to describe the Aeron chair. From the mouths of the designers:

“The human form has no straight lines; it is biomorphic. We designed the chair to be…curvilinear, as a metaphor of human form in the visual as well as the tactile sense. There is not one straight line to be found on an Aeron chair.”

Not many people can afford a piece of this ergonomic art, and those who can—doctors, politicians, and well-to-do businesspeople—no doubt buy them simply because they can, marking a corruption of the chair’s intended goodness.

Lower-level politicians, however, probably cannot afford—or afford to care about—such a chair. Karin Brownlee, of the Kansas Senate, has no time to think about her body’s needs. Her constituents’ needs take up all her time. They call her up and write her letters and attend important meetings and lobby for greater representation.

Actually, they probably do not do these things. They probably call the parents of their children’s friends. And write letters to the editor to the Kansas City Star. And attend PTO meetings. And go to Hobby Lobby.

2. Rocking Chair

This is because the average American is disconnected from politics—Kansans especially, as dramatically proven by Thomas Frank in What’s the Matter with Kansas?, a scathing expose on how the uninformed, hard-headed, over-religionized morons of the Nation’s Breadbasket are ruining the country. That wasn’t quite his point. He actually made several thought-provoking cases for what happens when tradition trumps the truth. He just did so in an insult-riddled style that, in the end, only perpetuated the rift.

But Karin—whose name is much too cool (or at least spelled much too coolly) for her fake-blonde, news-caster hair (and who presumably has more in common with fellow Kansas Republican Sam Brownback than a colorful last name)—can’t be held responsible for the disconnect. Neither can Frank.

It’s the Aeron chair. “The chair’s exclusivity became a symbol of the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s,” Wikipedia states in its introductory paragraph. With every bubble, comes a big ol’ burst, and we find ourselves in a sticky, pink mess. It was no different this time; the housing bubble popped for the same reasons the dot-com bubble did. People take too much risk for the sake of getting rich.

But come now, the Aeron chair is no accomplice here. A chair was never going to save the world, and it could never destroy it. Even the most classic chairs will at some point falter:

• The throne is too narrow-minded. It can’t see the problems inherent in monarchies, because it’s blinded by the luxury of having its gilded arms polished each morning by unpaid, shaggy-haired serfs.
• The wingback chair is egotistical. Its history is riddled with tyrants, sociopaths, and wigged-out super villains. The world of the wingback is cruelly short. Nuclear holocaust within minutes.

The rocking chair, however—it may have a shot. Picture its humble simplicity. Its timelessness. It would rule as the world’s grandmother, setting pies on the windowsill to cool, reigning over us with the wisdom of the ages. It would be a long, graceful sovereignty.

But many grandmothers are scared to sit on their porches today. Gun violence runs rampant both in low-income ghettos and upper-class grottos.

They have no reason to. They are separated from their children and grandchildren by hundreds of miles and are isolated from their neighbors.

They wouldn’t want to. Building methods are now so bottom-line driven that beautifully crafted wrap-arounds are the luxuries of refurbished Victorians sold only to the ultra-rich.

And then there’s this: for a growing number of grandmothers, their porches are no longer their porches. They are the bank’s. The rocking chair too.

Blame a bubble.

3. Nonintrusive Chair

When Herman Miller’s design duo took to making a chair that had no straight lines, they couldn’t have been further from the mode of thinking employed by most politicians. Senators, representatives, mayors, governors, presidents—they all represent an unwavering ideological path from the past to the future, with no diversions, squiggles, or (indeed) options.

The political system as we know it is a man-made channel—unnatural and largely ineffective. A naturally formed stream serpentines, cutting an ever-changing, ever-deepening, snake-like groove in the Earth’s contours. It responds to other forces of nature.

The American political system is a canal, a drainage ditch.

It flows straight ahead, tepid and increasingly toxic. It shares almost nothing with the majesty of the river, which courses toward the ocean, simultaneously gaining momentum and giving of itself, bestowing life upon the fields and pastures and people it passes. And it is aware of its greater purpose: continued life and sustenance for an entire planet.

From another angle, a straight line doesn’t seem the metaphor for political discourse. Straightforward? Straight talk? Hardly. Political arguments are circular like the reasoning often fueling them. Yet we accept them. We don’t want to. But we do, through confused complacency. NPR’s editorial director of digital media nails this aggravating conundrum in Why We Hate Us: American Discontent in the New Millennium:

“…I’ve talked about typical complaints we have about everyday life and popular and commercial culture. In these arenas, you can control your exposure to some degree. You can turn off the television or throw it out the window. You can leave the cell phone at home or never go online…You can ignore any movie and any news story you want. But you can’t pay your taxes to a different government. You can’t control the health coverage your company gives you, if it gives you any…You can ignore politics, as many do. That doesn’t help your community though, and so in the end it doesn’t help you.”

Chadwick and Stumpf had the luxury of controlling what they were creating. “Transparency is a major design movement,” Stumpf explained. “Its purpose is to make technology less opaque, to communicate the inner workings of things, and to make objects less intrusive in the environment. Aeron is a nonintrusive chair.” The political climate we’ve created embodies none of these things. Government policies are far from transparent, despite oversight committees and this precious democratic system.

If this were all, perhaps we could live in peace. But Stumpf’s final statement is likewise untrue. Politics is intrusive, in the way that a year-round forecast of freezing rain would be intrusive. It grates on us, wears us down, fosters bitterness instead of optimism.

We would love to change this. But the time has passed. It’s a different world. As music columnist Brandon Stosuy recently said in Paste magazine, “Everyone is out there searching for the next big thing, but it’ll never be the next big thing on the scale Nirvana was.” This is true in many more ways than in music. Going the way we’re going, we’ll probably never see the country collectively angry enough to protest like it did in the 60s or banded together like it was during the Second World War.

But we’re always in flux. Might as well grab a seat—an Aeron if you can afford it—and enjoy the show.

N. Istas’ Weekly Challenge 2: Interview

This is the first release of a series of audio-visual portraits and stories of people I’ve met.

Mohammed

15 July 2009

Nyeri, Kenya; Downtown

I met Mohammed, a street boy, when meeting with Victor and Sammy, former street boys turned musicians, and Sam Kairu on a sidewalk in Nyeri town. We brought him some food, and Victor and Sam asked him questions, translating into English. Mohammed told us how he came to live on the streets of Nyeri:

Weekly Challenge 2: Interview

This challenge has two options.

1.  Interview somebody else.  This can be a friend, an influence, a stranger at a bus stop.  Just get out there and talk with them.

or

2.  Interview yourself.  Ask yourself some ridiculous questions, and see how you think about them. 

or do both.

Use whatever medium conveys your interview the best: Photo slide show, a literal transciption, something created out of the experience.  Whatever.  Then post it here.

Leshia’s Weekly Challenge 1: Randomography

Sumbitted via email from Leshia Hansen. She gives us two shots at her experience with Randomography:

challenge one.
my articles were:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestor_(solitaire)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Rosier

my connections include:
the card game of public life.
ironically, often a solitary one.

http://www.samanther.com/rnc/politicards-moore.jpg
http:/http://www.the-playing-card.com/politics.html
www.politicards.com/

i did another one.

linamarase (enzyme found in cassava) and cecotrope (guinea pigs have them)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linamarase

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecotrope

cassava and guinea pig are both common foods in Central/South America and have links to the Aztecs and Mayan culinary traditions.

the history and culture.
http://www.faqs.org/nutrition/Smi-Z/South-Americans-Diet-of.html
http://www.foodtimeline.org/foodmaya.html
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/02/Roast_Guinea_Pig.jpg&imgrefurl=http://reference.findtarget.com/search/Native%2520American%2520cuisine&usg=__iwICXKU9D0zDMvhI7anGXZZgE7U=&h=1536&w=2048&sz=1108&hl=en&start=5&sig2=BjyN4Lhqn7WZ_JubSp4TRQ&um=1&tbnid=dQWlwZlK1hqelM:&tbnh=113&tbnw=150&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dcassava%2Band%2Bguinea%2Bpig%2Bdish%26hl%3Den%26safe%3Doff%26client%3Dsafari%26rls%3Den%26um%3D1&ei=BAteS5ixLM3JlAfM0syBBQ

some recipes.
http://south-american-food.suite101.com/article.cfm/making_cassava_bread
http://www.moreintelligentlife.com/story/how-to-eat-a-guinea-pig

Sean Conner’s Weekly Challenge 1: Randomography

Randomography: Line 5 Blue (Montreal Metro) + Pentagon City (Washington Metro)

(or, All Hail the Chew Chew)

Chew on this:

If humanity ever takes that dire step to hit the red button and scorch the skies, I imagine they’ll have to build a national metro system, and dump out the whole box of crayola crayons to cover the web of lines that would spring up. Can you imagine the map on the subway wall, itself the size of a football field, bright colors straining and colliding within the borders of the U.S. of A? If this happens, I hope I live somewhere off of the Burnt Sienna line. I have always loved the sound of it.

Pentagon City sounds like a wonderful hub for such an ambitious project, though it also looks dire and lifeless:

That’s the thing about metro’s though, isn’t it? Despite their profound convenience, they are remarkably apocalyptic in facade and ambiance. Sleek machines cut through Orwellian feats of engineering. People treat them like a car, solitary modes of transportation, despite the fact that in the next seat is a working, functioning, capable human being. It’s as if life is stifled in the underground, as if all the transit bound pedestrians are holding their breath until they can emerge from the stairwells and into the world again.

We’d really have to up the ante if we were going to live in that environment. Trees yes PLEASE! Skylights? Uh huh. Even if these have to be reproductions of the actual things (the skies would be scorched…). And we’d have to get about renaming it all. Pentagon City, pashaw. We’ll need to take a page out of Montreal Metro and make it alliteratively pleasant. Then we can brighten up each Crayola Line with Crayola influenced light bulbs. See Montreal Metro’s Blue Line:

Pleasant eh? The Blue Line is Line 5 of the Montreal Metro, and in some weird slip of etymology, Line 3 never got around to existing. I can’t help but thinking this ghost line is the future line between Pentagon City and the Montreal Metro.

Speculation aside, the future subway sub-culture will need some flavor. First I recommend a mandatory graffiti ordinance, where every patron carries a can and adds a bit of themselves to the concrete gangplanks. Secondly I’ll turn to the definitive practitioners of Subway Fun, Improv Everywhere. They currently do it every year, if we ever take refuge in the subterranean confines of American soil, we’ll need bi-weekly installments of such monotony breakage to survive:

Dibs on the polka dotted man thong. See you there.

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_5_Blue_%28Montreal_Metro%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_City_%28Washington_Metro%29

Montreal Metro photo from flickr user padme amidala

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxI46nl9pkc&feature=video_response

You can read more from Sean at:  http://seanconned.blogspot.com/