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:

Here’s what I mean. If you’re putting on a show, and you’re not a drummer, at some point you’re going to be standing around, having totally finished “your bit” of the work. You’ll have set up your guitar, or soundchecked your flute, or whatever, and the drummer will still be running back and forth to the car and lugging gear bags back to the stage.

It always happens. Drummers just have more to carry, more to set up, and then more to take down again when they’re doing a show. And if you, with your hands free, don’t decide to go help the drummer, here’s the thing:

I will never work with you again.

I won’t say anything, and I won’t think you’re a terrible person, and the show will go on. But when it comes time to put together the next show, I’m not calling you. Because you don’t carry drums.

When someone else has more to do than you, and you’re working towards the same goal, help them. Don’t look at the job as “my bit” and “their bit”. Look at the job getting done.

The new music group Eighth Blackbird is well known in music circles for passing this test with flying colors. There’s one drummer, and everyone moves the gear. Between shows, often most of them fly, and there’s a van on the ground driving filled with drums. They all take turns driving the van. Also they play music really well, and are doing a really cool thing right now with Amy Beth Kirsten, but that’s a different story…

Why talk about this now?

Because we have a show coming up on Saturday at the Exapno New Music Community Center. And it’s got all kinds of music on it, all kinds of different performances. And everyone working on the show would, I know, carry drums.

We’re going to be putting on a great show, and that’s the most important thing, but even before we load in to tech on Saturday afternoon, I’m proud of these artists. I’m looking forward to showing the audience not just a good time, but a great bunch of people making it happen together.

I could do that alone, imagining everything in my head. But theater’s funny. Once you get it up on its feet it’s a completely different animal. So I did something odd. I got a bunch of actors, a director, a choreographer, two cameras and lunch together one Saturday. And we rehearsed just those scenes. We experimented, changed, explored the characters, and came up with these videos here. They aren’t finished films, or even finished performances – we had 1 rehearsal. But they do tell the story I wanted to tell for these two scenes. I may change the timing to speed things up a little, and I may tweak a few of the gestures, but what I have to work with now is a video libretto for two of my mime sequences.

These two scenes happen before the play proper begins. We’re getting a look at both couples as they were before the plot happens. The four of them have gone off into the woods for a “picnic”, and then both couples go off on their own to… well… you know… canoodle. In these two videos Puck had the curly hair, and is watching what the humans are up to…

Wait, was that a pair of handcuffs?

Yes, that was a pair of handcuffs. We’ve created a motivation for Demetrius. Yes, we’ve created it out of thin air. Where else would we find one?

In the play, Demetrius spurns Helena and tries to force Hermia to marry him for… some… reason. She’s pretty, I guess. In this version, Demetrius is a stuffed up prude. And Helena, being a little more adventurous when they’re off canoodling in the woods, spooks him. That’s why he runs off and tries to get Hermia.

This way Demetrius has a motivation other than being randomly evil, Helena’s character is all set up for “use me as your spaniel” and, we hope, you can finally tell the four lovers apart! That’s not usually a feature of productions of Midsummer.

Here’s a final bit of video, that didn’t make it into the final run we did of the Helena/Demetrius scene, but I think will be useful as I actually start to compose this passage:

So…. whaddya think?

Funny? Convincing take on Midsummer? Good structure for the scenes? How about the crappy Cat Stevens I was playing in the background for mood music?

This Saturday, 8 PM, at the Exapno New Music Community Center, the curtain goes up. But we don’t have a curtain, since this is an extremely DIY, seat-of-your-pants, make-it-up-as-we-go-along kind of show. But we’ll start at 8. Or maybe a little later if people are having too much fun enjoying the cocktails.

Check out Exapno’s website if you need help getting there, and feel free to circulate the concert flyer as far and wide as you like. Doesn’t it make us look like an awesome underground dance club? Thanks, Victoria!

Check out the full program below for the astonishing range of stuff that will be happening this Saturday. As for my own music, Rachel Gawell is going to perform The Seafarer, which I wrote for her way back in the day, and which premiered on one of the very first No Signal shows.

Summer’s Twilight

We’re also going to be doing some improvisation with Mike Compitello on marimba and miming actors for Summer’s Twilight. At the heart of that piece is the interaction between the four lovers, played by singing actors, and the two fairies, who speak all their lines through the marimba or the cello. As I write the different sections, I need to know how the actors and the instrumentalists can communicate, how much they understand, how they control each other. I also need to know how much of that interaction is clear to the audience, so that I actually get the laughs that I want instead of just playing some music and doing some blocking and no one understanding it.

So this is research, but it’s also comedy improvisation. That’s why I’m quite so glad to have Mike Compitello, Casey Middaugh and Rose Ginsberg on hand. We’re going to learn a lot about Summer’s Twilight, and we’re going to make you laugh while we do it.

Ruckus Amongstus

The best way to RSVP is through the Facebook event. If you’re curious about who’s playing what or what any of this stuff is, just let me know in comments and I’ll tell you all about it – especially the delicious cocktails we’re creating for the evening, or your choice of youtube videos for us to use in improvising film scores….

Here’s our program, as it currently appears on the facebook event page.

Come out to Exapno for a VERY unusual evening.

We’ve got virtuoso performances of contemporary classics alongside pieces by composers right there in the room.

We’ve got a Bad Plus cover, spoken word, V-Day, physical improvisations, haunting female voices, and a folk/rock band jamming to close out the night.

PLUS: We’ve got Fantastic and Original Cocktails!
PLUS: We’ll play YOUR favorite YouTube videos, and IMPROVISE A SCORE!
…..Start submitting now in comments…..

And if you can’t make it in person, we’ll put as much of the show as we can up on YouTube in the weeks after the show so you can catch up on all the action!

Suggested donation: $10

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RUCKUS AMONGSTUS!
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Gestenstücke by Juan María Solare
Strangeloop by Victoria Cheah — WORLD PREMIERE
Giant by The Bad Plus
Khan Variations by Alejandro Vinao

***IMPROVISED YouTube Film Scores***

Physical Improv testing for Summer’s Twilight by Kevin Clark — WORK IN PROGRESS
We Two Boys by George Lam
Phthia

***IMPROVISED YouTube Film Scores***

Textual Healing
Monologue from “A Memory, a Monologue, a Rant, and a Prayer”
The Seafarer by Kevin Clark, translation by Burton Raffel
My pain by Edward Thomas-Herrera

***IMPROVISED YouTube Film Scores***

JAM!!!!

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PERFORMERS:
Peter Bellomo, Sara Phillips Budde, Kevin Clark, Dennis Clark, Dave Cohen, Michael Compitello, Sean-David Cunningham, Matthew Dunnam, Lainie Fefferman, Michael Feldman, Rachel Gawell, Rose Ginsberg, Zach Herchen, Jaime de Jesus, Alan Jeffries, Emily Kadish, Orlando Klass, George Lam, Robert Maril, Casey Middaugh, James Moore, Domenica Romagni, Andie Springer