• 20 grams Rogue whiskey
• 80 grams Ikea pear cider (I suppose another, better cider would be fine, too)
• splash Angostura aromatic bitters

Just put them all in a glass and stir. Ice if you want it.

It’s got a little whiskey bite that goes pleasantly with the pear. We already knew whiskey and fruit go together. You could try with any other fruit cider or any other whiskey, but there’s another reason I reached for the Rogue.

Rogue is mostly known for beer, and their whiskey is made from the same yeast that they use for all of their beers. Yes, they use the same strain for all their beers; and they also use it for their whiskey. If you know that, when you drink the whiskey you wind up thinking of a fairly sweet, malty beer. Sweet, malty beer you say? Don’t a lot of fruity beers use that kind of beer as a basis?

Yes they do, which is why I thought Rogue would work particularly well with fruit. I added the angostura because the combination was still a little flat and needed some lift. I didn’t use enough to get the stronger flavor of the bitters clearly into my mouth, though that could be fun, too. I might add a tiny bit of lemon juice next time or an even tinier bit of salt to finish the balancing job. Add sugar to that list of lemon and salt and you’ll have, probably, the right tools to adjust the drink’s balance to other whiskeys or pear ciders.

The resulting drink has an aroma of malt, a distinct but not overpowering pear flavor, and some whiskey heat. Fun, but largely a useless cocktail recipe.

Government is the name we give to the things we choose to do together.
-Barney Frank

Christine Quinn delivers State of the City speech. She calls for NYC govt to use @kickstarter to fund civic projects twitter.com/ystrickler/sta…

— Yancey Strickler (@ystrickler) February 9, 2012

The world hasn’t changed yet, but it’s going to. Nation states collect taxes, and then have giant democratically accountable institutions decide how to spend the money. These governments are the best scalable way for the citizens of a country to pool their resources and govern themselves so far devised. But look at how opaque and frustrating these governments can be, even if you believe in them (which I seriously do).

They make sure that we have roads, equal protection under the law, national security, and, fingers crossed, universal healthcare. That’s pretty cool. And these institutions are filled with people who devote themselves to serving their society. That’s kind of awesome, too.

But paying taxes is frustrating and uncomfortable, and watching the legislative process unfold is time consuming and confusing. And trying to influence that process is really difficult, and holding your political representatives accountable is nearly impossible without changing careers and becoming an activist or a political operative.

The idea Quinn put forward today, of supporting civic spending projects on Kickstarter, opens the door to some amazing possibilities. There’s work to do to bridge Kickstarter’s existing framework (or that of any extant crowdfunding site) and the Pentagon’s annual budget. We don’t want the rich to get to pick and choose which civic projects get done, and there are issues of confidentiality and civil rights that need to be addressed. We can’t just crowdfund the government – we don’t know how to do it yet.

But imagine if the experience of paying taxes and watching that money be spent were as smooth as supporting a project on Kickstarter. What would that do for the civic engagement of our society? What would that do for your experience at the post office, with police officers, with parking tickets?

The standards for transparency and accountability that are developing for web-native financial transactions are already transforming business. I for one can’t wait for them to transform governments.

P.s. if you want a sneak peak at what this kind of accountability could be like, spend a couple hours reading everything you can about my Jersey City Councilman, Steve Fulop.

People have vastly more choice about what culture and entertainment to consume with their time than they did in the past. And they can get all the films, tv shows and music they like from home, plus all the stuff being created specifically for the web. So getting people out of their houses to actually go to stuff is harder than it used to be.

“Come hear my music” “But I can hear it at home, it’s cold out, and tickets are expensive” “I can’t really argue with that….”

That’s changed into something like this:

“Come to my show – we’ve got music, food, drinks, your friends, foursquare specials, and generally a really awesome night out” “Okay, that sounds fun!”

There are two ways to look at this. First is the hidebound traditionalist way. Artists have to spend time on all this other stuff to go with their concerts that they should be spending on their art and just their art. This is terrible, it’s distracting from the real work and diluting our cultural blah blah blah…

Obviously I’m on the other side.

We’ve got more competition, and we’re upping our game. Instead of just presenting music, and relying on the scarcity of the art to draw people into whatever situation we can present it in, no matter how unpleasant, we have to create a full experience that will get people out. Is the booze and food and relaxed social atmosphere pandering to how people want to experience culture? Yes. That’s good. People have more options to experience culture how they want to. It’s for everyone now, and in these new contexts they have a much better chance of having those transformative artistic experiences that feature in the memories of all of us who decided to do this with out lives. Isn’t it great?

Yes, artists have to work on a full experience instead of the narrow bit they used to focus on. That can look like a dilution, but really it’s a shift of focus from the materials and tools of the art itself to the experience of the audience. Instead of thinking fundamentally about rhythms and pitches, I get to focus on making people happy, and giving them life-changing artistic experiences. Pitches and rhythms are just tools. I think that’s awesome.

In case you’re worried about the death of classical music

To start with, the art isn’t going anywhere. The reason live events are under pressure to change is that art is in more places more of the time and more accessible to more people. There’s a problem paying people properly (a big one – it’s for real), but at a basic level more art = good. The art is not under threat. At all. Stop it with the culture is dying malarkey.

“But live performances have more competition now, and it’s harder to put on shows than it used to be,” I hear you cry. I thought we were capitalists? More competition means we have to get better, it means we have more pressure to actually serve the cultural needs of people. And the great thing about the huge variety of choice on the internet means that we’re no longer competing to be one of the 20 songs on the radio this year. It means we’re competing to authentically reach people who want great cultural experiences.

It’s true that great art is often misunderstood and shouldn’t have to pander, and it’s hard to be a visionary and lead people if you’re trying to give them what they already know they like. But if anything the pressures on the live event from the internet are helping solve that problem, not making it worse. The old system was terrible at that.

Now I use the word social

Look around at these new cultural events, and what you’ll notice is the same thing that you hear about businesses. “It all has to be social now, from the ground up. Connect authentically with your market! Let people talk to each other! be friendly!” Everywhere you go people say the word social as if it’s the revolutionary way of the future. And it kind of is, but it’s more a tearing down of old ways that people were stuck relating to each other, and replacing them with the even older ways that people have always liked relating to each other.

Look at concerts in pubs and people are more comfortable because they’re talking to each other in a social context. They’re making friends. People are getting their culture now in ways that are more like parties and less like single-purpose professional gatherings. They’re more receptive in that context, they’re more comfortable, they’re happier, and they’re more likely to leave their houses and come to your show.

After Ruckus Amongstus, I thought, as a lot of showrunner types do, about how much of the audience was my friends and how much was strangers. There were plenty of people in the house I didn’t know. Come to think of it there were plenty of people on stage I didn’t know. But I could trace my connection through friends of friends to almost everyone in the room. As musicians we’re trained to think of knowing everyone in the audience as a kind of failure. But here’s the thing: it’s not just my audience’s relationships to each other that are more social. It’s my relationships with them.

It’s not that my friends came to my show (though they did). It’s that new technology lets me think of my audience as my friends.

This stuff is awesome. It’s meaty, warm and spicy with a background sweetness that makes it very hard to stop eating it.

• 1 lb lean ground beef (more if it’s fatty)
• 1 medium onion
• 5 cloves garlic
• ~1/4 cup gochu chang
• 1 pint baby portabello mushrooms
• 1 16 oz. can kidney beans
• 2 tbsp. garlic sambal
• rice

First, fry up all the ground beef in your biggest skillet. Don’t just cook it till it’s grey, get it browned and crispy. Cook it as much as you can bear before it burns. This is important. If the beef is too lean (like mine was) and you have to add some fat, go for an animal fat (I used bacon fat, ran out, and finished with schmaltz) or a neutral oil like canola.

Take out the beef, leaving the fat behind if there is any, and put it aside. Then throw the medium onion, sliced, into the pan with the garlic cloves, whole, and the gochu chang. You’ll probably need more animal fat, my pan was totally dry by this time. Let this cook for a long time on medium low. The gochu chang will start to dry out and the sugars will start to caramelize. The onions will get thinner and will turn red. The garlic will be very red. When you think you’re in danger of burning the gochu chang from all the chewy caramelized bits (seeing a pattern here?) turn off the heat and scoop out the paste into a food processor. Leave as much fat behind in the pan as you can – you’ll need it for the mushrooms.

Buzz the paste in the food processor along with some water to make sure it can really come together. This substance is your chili paste, as if you were making chile con carne in the usual way. Leave it to one side for now.

Clean and halve the mushrooms (quarter the biggest ones to even out the sizes), throw them into the hot pan with a good pinch of salt and more fat if you need it. Cook ‘em hot. Get some color on these guys, as much as you can stand (sound familiar?). While those cook, drain the beans and rinse them.

When you think the mushrooms are just about to burn, throw in the beans, chili paste, and beef. Add the sambal now as well – it’ll give you some more heat and a nice vegetable note to balance all the meaty maillardy stuff going on with the beef, mushrooms and beans.

If you want it hotter, you probably have a favored heat delivery system fairly close to hand. Use it.

If you want to eat it right now, go ahead. It’ll be spicy and have plenty of sweetness leftover from the gochu chang, and you’ll taste the caramelized onions binding everything else in the dish together. If you want to let it simmer for a while (adding water if it gets too dry) you’ll find that the oniony flavor melts away and you get more a chili/spice/beef flavor. Even longer on the heat (total an hour?) and you’ll taste more of the beans up front, with layers of spice and the other ingredients behind it. After that I don’t know because I was hungry, and served it over rice.

But after even a small bowl, I’m completely full. Wow is this a filling substance. It’s made our superbowl day a lot more interesting, while still having something to do with the whole football/heavy food thing. Now I have to go put away the leftovers so it can make my Monday awesome too.

Enjoy!

But here we are. Michael Feldman, who directed the film, and I got to work on submitting our film to festivals, and on February 17th I’m headed off to the New Jersey Film Festival to screen our work. If you’re around, come and join us!

We’re second on the program, too, so if you have a problem with Film Festivals in general (an allergy to thick plastic-rim glasses and black turtlenecks?) you can duck out early. Here’s the YouTube embed in case you want to see exactly what we’re screening in New Brunswick, but in HD:

This is a lot like what my sketches looked like for Seafarer, too, if I remember right. The lines of poetry were there, with the possibility of rhythmic stretching from an actor, and there were noteheads above and below the syllables, giving a contour segment at least, and giving a rough idea of the rhythm I wanted, as well as some notions of timbre, etc. Sometimes I mark intervals, usually I don’t.

I don’t know if other people write like this, but then again I don’t know if other people are as obsessed with wrapping the music around the full freedom of an actor’s delivery. If there are other ways to do this kind of mapping, I’d love to see them.

For now, though, back to sketching. If I start to feel comfortable enough with my cut of the poem, maybe I’ll post that too soon.

But I’m at a strange place with this piece, and swamped with everything happening in my life right now, so I’m letting myself work late tonight, albeit equipped with an old-fashioned.

The piece is called Poems Without Names – and it sets a poem by Burton Raffel, who translated The Seafarer from Old English. It’s meant to be about five minutes, and I’m doing it for Rhymes With Orchestra, which is a new orchestral side to the lovely Rhymes With Opera organization, run by George Lam and some other good friends from Peabody. Poems is going to be premiered on March 17, so it’s a good thing I haven’t written a note of it yet. George and I cooked up the idea on December 30, at my New Years Eve-Eve Party. He’s got a lute and a saxophone in the orchestra, and I’ve got this poem that Burton Raffel sent me a while ago that has two characters: a living poet and a dead Roman poet. How about I pair the sax with the living poet, the lute with the dead one, and give you five minutes of music? Sound good?

A lot of people make strange decisions at parties. I don’t think many of them involve the lute. Now I have one in my house, lent to me by John Orluk, the fabulous and patient lutenist for this piece.

Poems Without Names, or PWN for short, at full length takes about half an hour to read aloud. I’ve timed it. I’m cutting it down considerably for this performance, and hope to be able to re-expand it at a later date. There are a few discussions on the nature of art, and one love poem from the dead Roman that I would dearly love to turn into a set piece song in this version, but there just isn’t time – either in the piece’s intended length or for me to write it.

You said a strange place with this piece?

Yes. I’ve got a strong cut of the poem done. I have the basic tectonics of the story settled. It’s time to start moving into a map that involves more music. I’m a very top-down composer. I don’t take a motive and expand it into a piece. I take a story or an idea and look for what elements I need to tell that story, on down from the mission of the piece to the individual note. Once I know what the dramatic moment requires from the piece, I rarely revise. If I don’t like a passage of music, it’s usually because I’ve mistaken the intention of the moment.

It’s sort of like an actor asking “What’s my motivation?” when they’ve given a lackluster performance. I could push notes around, but I’d rather grab hold of the tree holding them up and move that – more effective that way.

I’m not totally sure what I’ll be doing to the text tonight, probably tweaking the words a little more, probably imagining dramatic beats and sonorities and maybe, if I’m lucky, sketching out a melody or two. Then it’ll be back to the shape of the piece, the development of the characters, and then back to the music.

Should be fun….

Think piece I don’t have the energy to write but maybe you do:

Internet memes seem to be moving towards the smallest sub-cultural groups possible and catching on that way.

- I made Judgmental Bookseller Ostrich as a joke on how there was starting to be an advice animal for every possible field/major/career.

- People who didn’t care about Ryan Gosling care once there’s a blog of him talking about a field of stat-based library science all of 200 people have a degree in.

- Shit Girls Say became Shit every possible racial, religious, and sexual identity say or have said to them.

Like, now it’s not enough for things to be universally funny? If they are micro-funny I feel super-special that someone made them Just For Me and I’m obligated to share/love them?

So memes are getting bigger by getting smaller? The hyper-specification of internet humor? Identity-based memetics? Anybody?

I think this is a pretty cool observation about what for want of a better term I’m going to call micro-funny. I don’t have much to add to the discussion of the evolution of memes, and how they’re changing, but this a really interesting trend to me for another reason.

It’s a great example of what I’ve talked about recently: increasingly complex tasks being accomplished by increasingly loose groups of people who aren’t in fact part of any organization at all.

As an example it’s great because you can see a lot of complex creation being done without any kind of organization. This isn’t a bunch of people who decided to be a group, even a loosely affiliated group, dedicated to making Ryan Gosling stuff. It’s a bunch of people individually deciding to do something related to it, but without any overall plan, without much effort, and without any reward in mind. They’re just doing it because it’s awesome.

It’s important that what they’re doing goes beyond sharing. It’s also making, and curating, and promoting and refining. “That Ryan Gosling thing” involves a lot of jokes written by a lot of different people in a lot of different contexts, and while they all get turned into white or black text plopped on top of a photo, and get shared on tumblr or facebook or whatever, there’s still creativity happening. It isn’t just sharing.

This isn’t a centrally directed thing, and no one is part of any organization however loose, and it won’t last one jot longer than it should, because people will just get bored at stop. But it’s happening. And the better communications and social media tech gets the more complex tasks we’ll be able to accomplish this way, without needing certain categories of businesses or service people or volunteer organizations. We’ll be able to just use our extended network of friends and acquaintances to cause all sorts of complicated things to happen.

For me the important part is that people naturally organize themselves socially, and it’s those social connections that underlie so much of business and politics as it is. As more and more stuff gets done explicitly through social collabroation, people will get a lot more comfortable, and a lot faster, because the only organizations they’ll be part of will be social, not corporate.

Give it 100 years.

Okay, Huckleberry, bring it on back to the stable

Right. Yes.

So what does the rise of micro-funny memes matter at all to what you’re rambling about? Well, the fact that memes are going in this direction means that there’s something about them particularly suited to thriving in this loose-social-connection-based environment. Of all the complex things that could get done with social media based organization-less collaboration, why this?

What Rachel was saying about the hyper-targeting of the jokes, I think, tells us something about the nature of the behavior that leads people to participate in these things. Why did I make a judgmental bookseller ostrich? Because it’s awesome. Why do I think it’s so awesome…. well, I work in a bookshop, or I love bookshops, or I love people who work in bookshops. I personally am a giant bibliophile and grandson of a librarian who promoted banned book week by stuffing anything scandalous on her shelves into the hands of students – an amazing woman. I love it, so I laugh, and I share, and here’s the cool part, that’s only getting huge because the technology is faster, I create my own versions.

And I’m much more likely to do all that if I feel special for getting the joke in the first place. If I think that joke was written just for me I’m going to feel that the joke is a lot more awesome, and I’m also going to feel that I’m a lot more awesome. (I’m using ‘awesome’ here in the technical internet sense).

And then there are really fun questions I should keep my armchair anthropologist hands off of: What governs whether these memes grow beyond the micro-communities they started in? Why these communities and not others? Is it that these are communities that tend to mess around on the internet, or communities that tend to be closely connected to people who mess around on the internet?

Are booksellers and Ryan Gosling people secretly running Reddit? Rachel?

I love examples of new complex stuff being done with nothing more than social ties. If you see more send ‘em my way. In the meantime, go laugh for a while at the Ryan Gosling stuff and the Ostrich of Judgment.

We had one hell of a day, starting with loading in and lunch, through last minute rehearsal, tech and soundcheck, forgetting to eat dinner (and then getting fed dinner by OCCUPY WALL STREET who were cooking on THE OTHER SIDE OF THE FLOOR FROM US!), through a little over three hours of fantastic music, monologues, spoken word, improvisation, live audio replacement for YouTube videos, triumphant, raucous applause, and then cleaning up and loading out – we were out of by building by 1 AM. For a few of us that was a 15 hour day, and I’ve never loved my job more.

Exapno was PACKED! We got out extra chairs, and filled those, and had people standing behind that. It was incredible.

Stay tuned for YouTube uploads

As promised, we’ll put as much of the show on YouTube as copyright allows. We’ve got to clean up the audio and edit the video a little, but we’ll be getting these videos out to you hopefully at a rate of around one per week.

And oh yeah – if you have photos or videos of the event from your telephone (I know some of you do!) please post ‘em in comments or email me – we’ll get a Flickr gallery together or something to go with the youtube videos.

To all of you in the audience who came up to me as we were packing up to say “please do this again soon”, I want to! So badly! We’ve got at least a few months before it happens though, so before then, let me know in comments what you loved, what you hated, what you want more or less of. We can do whatever we want, and if we’re going to put on a great show next time I need to know what you all thought of the dizzying array of performances you saw.

If you’re around Brooklyn today you can go see Zach Herchen perform a reprise of Victoria Cheah’s Strange Loop at Vaudeville Park in Williamsburg, and if you’re looking for the awesomest thing to do tomorrow, go see Sylvana Joyce & The Moment, who closed our show last night, at Webster Hall!

I’ll write more about the show after more coffee and brunch (yes, including the cocktail recipes!), but for now, THANK YOU EVERYONE for making the night a wild, wild success!

The Junior Bach program began as a volunteer student project. I looked at some of the community service work we’d been doing and thought, “we’re musicians, surely we can do better than painting a wall.” And we did. This sort of project is remarkably well suited to conservatories. You give the composers involved internship credit for teaching the lessons and supervising the performances, you ask for one afternoon of rehearsals and one concert from some of your student musicians, and you can really change people’s lives. The work ties the conservatory to the community in a meaningful way, and conservatory composers gain meaningful teaching experience which helps them advance in academia.

Making It Last

Part of my work was to get the program started, but a lot of student projects at universities shine while the student who created it is there to run it, and then disappear. Once we’d got it going, the important work was getting Peabody to make it a permanent part of the school. Professor Stephen Stone took over the program from me, with support from then-Dean Eileen Soskin and Chair of the Composition Department, McGregor Boyle. After a few years running it, Steve handed the program off to Judah Adashi this year, who’s making even more improvements to the impact and sustainability of the program.

From where I am in New York, I don’t have anything to do with the program anymore – but I do get to see what they’re up to in Baltimore. Judah’s got the internet involved. He’s got a twitter feed going, a facebook page, and just today he’s finished uploading the last of the pieces from the December concert to the Junior Bach YouTube channel. Love it.

These videos show you seven world premieres from last December, and one video from the first day of class: