Shadow Klan

So I was biking by Comerica Park this morning, stopped at a red light, and this guy approached me, shook my hand, handed me a CD, and started rapidly telling me about its contents in a charming hustler sort of way. The CD cover was deep green with these psychedelic pencil drawings all over it. He told me he rapped about science -- "You like science, right?" "Yeah, I'm down with science," I murmured. He said he rapped about the genome and molecular biology, and he showed me these clippings from the Detroit Free Press science section he had pasted to some cardboard. Well, lately I've been getting my mind blown by the excellent pop-science book Genome by Matt Ridley, so I was very interested. Then he started going off on evidence for aliens on Mars, supported by more clippings. I didn't have any money on me to buy the CD (and I'd want to preview before buying anyway) but I asked for his website (myspace.com/shadowklann) so I could check him out. He gave me a fist bump and said he'd catch me next time. His myspace songs sound pretty whacked out, especially the backing tracks. It's fun, I like it. On the other hand I was disappointed there wasn't more hard science content, and I think the musicianship could be better. Now I'm struggling to make up my mind whether to buy it the next time he approaches me, which I'm sure will happen soon. I want to support local music especially weird local music but I can't support everything.

Works in progress

I thought I'd use this blog to share works in progress. The majority of my pieces will probably never be completed so if I don't post them here they'll just never be heard. I'm using MediaFire to host these for free, the cost being that you might get annoying pop-ups when you click the links, sorry. Besides that, downloading should be easy; let me know if anything is messed up or if you know of better alternatives for file hosting.

The main order of business recently has been to get final recorded versions of the songs in my live set, suitable for a CD and for promoting myself. Today I added the final touches to a version of Marketable that I'm tentatively satisfied with; I'll come back in a week or two and see if I think it needs any further tweaking. A lot of the other songs are close and I'll post them as I finish them.

Aside from that, I've been working on some classical-flavored stuff, instrumentals with emphasis on complicated polyphony, more intricate than the poppier stuff I do. I have over a hundred solo piano recordings from 2001-2004 of fragments that never developed into songs, which I'd like to develop this year. A few days ago I started developing one of those old kernels: "And Here's Another One" (the old idea is just the opening pattern).

I have a couple young cousins in Grosse Pointe who play cello and clarinet and I thought it would be fun for us to play a trio. Here's a sketch of an idea that I wrote today: Trio. (My computer doesn't have a clarinet sound so I used organ.)

I've also been working on random unfinished things in my more usual rock style, such as "I Set Fire To My House" (the last part with the harmony vocals is what I recently added).

My usual mode of operating is to switch between the hundred-odd open projects I have, adding a little each time, so that they sound fresh when I eventually come back to them. So, it may be awhile before the above get completed, if they ever do. But maybe this year I'll try a more focused approach.

My routine lately has been: biking in the morning, making music in the afternoon, and in the evening doing productive stuff on the internet (e.g. looking for happenings in Detroit, downloading music, playing with music production shareware), or sometimes visiting friends/family. I average about two hours of work per day on the music; past that I usually get tired and my brain isn't productive anymore. I'm taking weekends off to recharge.

Living alone in relative isolation gives one a feeling of being free, to let one's mind wander randomly unconstrained by responsibilities or fear of what others will think. There's good days and bad days but on average I feel significantly more creative than I have in recent years. Last week I even wrote down some notes for a bizarre short story about how games might theoretically play meta-games against other games. Don't know if there's any promise in that premise, but whatever, at least I'm thinking about stuff.

Biking on the freeway

When I was a kid I was fascinated by freeways. I used to create these really complicated maps of freeway interchanges and freeway systems, which probably would have been a huge headache for people to try to navigate in real life. Occasionally I built road systems out of pieces of wood. At one point I decided that when I grew up I was going to live in a house in the middle of a particular freeway interchange along the Ohio Turnpike. I just remembered that now. I wonder if I could actually do that.

I also had a fascination with the streetlights along freeways (and to a lesser extent streetlights in general) and the variations among streetlights in different locales. When my family vacationed in another city the most anticipated thing for me would be the freeways and the local streetlight design. For awhile after I graduated from college I planned to be a truck driver. As a small child my favorite streetlights were the assymetric ones found along the I-75 median; I thought these were hilarious. There were some of these downriver just before the lights end, but later I was happy to find that a few were put up at the M-10 intersection; the latter were quite close to where I've been biking.

A Google search of "freeway fetish" turns up mostly porn (conventional, no freeway porn) and condemnations of American car addiction. Here's one summary: "The California automotive fetish had resulted, locally, in the planning of an extensive freeway network, which included I-480, an unsightly and obstructive..." Unsightly in whose eyes? I bet it's gorgeous. I have a friend who's involved in activism against the new I-69. I'm 2/3 as liberal as him but in this case I'm secretly rooting for the freeway.

This is all by way of explaining why I got excited when I biked past an I-75 exit ramp yesterday and noticed that I-75 had been closed and you could just bike down the exit ramp. I biked the length of the closed off section and explored the I-75 / I-96 interchange. This is one of the more interesting interchanges in the Detroit area; I think only the I-696/M-10/US-24 and I-696/I-275/M-5/I-96 interchanges are cooler. What's unique about it is the half mile where I-96 and I-75 run parallel, interlocked with each other. A daring idea.

Unfortunately the interchange ramps, which I had been anticipating biking on most strongly, were under construction and unbikable. Also my stupid "smartphone" won't talk to my stupid PC to transfer the photos I took. So I'll be returning. Still, it was pretty cool just to bike down the center of the freeway all by myself, with the cranes towering all around.

The Siwatu Effect

Out for my nightly walk tonight, I was thinking about the Siwatu Effect. Last week I was just reveling in the city, like "Living among all these ruins is so cool, it's like living in Rome or an ancient Middle Eastern city." Then Siwatu visited and was like, "Man, this place is so depressing," the entire time. So for the past couple days I was biking around thinking, "Living among these ruins is so depressing, it's like living in a tomb. Get me out of here!!" So tonight, just as I'm thinking about the Siwatu Effect, I walk around the corner and see the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit:
Except the above picture is a little out of date; it now reads "NOTHING IS GOING TO BE ALRIGHT." I blame Siwatu.

The story thus far

For the record: I got admitted to Stanford to get a Ph.D. doing artificial intelligence, and decided to defer till Fall 2009 to have a little music career. Also, to generally give myself some space for creativity and personal growth, self-discovery, and whatnot. When you're busy and stressed out a lot, parts of yourself may go neglected for long periods, and when you're idle you can remember that those parts exist again, and be more of a whole person. If that makes any sense.

For a week now I've been living in Detroit in an apartment building in the Cass Corridor by Wayne State, in an apartment that shares a porch with my friends Dave and Sara who are attending Wayne. Also my family is close by in the inner burbs. So I have the solitude I need but also it's easy to break it when I need to. I feel a lot more free, relaxed, and creative without the 35 housemates I had at the co-op... I liked them but I can't relax with people around unless they're really close friends. The Cass Corridor has sort of a bohemian reputation; there's lots of arts and music stuff in the area. It only looks slightly decrepit, though there's a lot of more seriously decrepit areas within a mile or two of biking.

I took a little trip to Chicago a couple weeks ago, hunting for apartments there based on the fact that there's cooler meetup.com groups there (math enthusiasts, composers, sci-fi writers, etc.). The groups were exciting in themselves, and more generally it indicated there was a broader range of people in Chicago with more opportunities for me to find a niche. I stayed at a co-op there and instantly remembered how stressful it is for me meeting new people, and made up my mind that night to stay in Michigan -- that was when I remembered the vacancy in Dave and Sara's apartment building. I did enjoy biking around Chicago though.

A strange parking garage

Can you imagine trying to find a place to park in Detroit and randomly finding yourself here?
It used to be a theater. Living in Detroit is fascinating, like living in an archeological site, or some old city like Rome or Athens, living among ancient ruins. My friend Siwatu showed me these pictures; I haven't actually parked here, yet. He called it "depressing", which I can certainly see... but on the other hand in what other city can you suddenly find yourself in a beautiful ruin, while looking for a place to *park*?

I spent the afternoon at the Detroit Public Library with Siwatu helping him with research for some fiction he's writing set in a now-abandoned hotel building in Detroit.

Stumbling on things in Detroit

I was biking around this morning through some typically rough-looking areas of Detroit and randomly came across this amazing looking building, Dabl's African Bead Gallery, on Grand River just southeast of Grand Boulevard. The whole thing was elaborately painted and decorated with mirrors, stones, and mosaics; also the entire sidewalk around the place was inscribed with art and African names... then I went down the dead-end street it was on and there was a vacant lot filled with scrap metal and rusted tractors and such twisted into art, with the inscription "IRON TEACHING ROCK HOW TO RUST" spelled out in colored stones... then I looked across the lot and saw on the far side an abandoned building decorated all over in the same style as the first. Here's an image from www.freep.com, with the artist:

Update 9/18: another picture from an article in the latest Metro Times:


Yesterday I was randomly biking around and I came across the strangest little neighborhood I've ever seen... it was just this one little dead-end street, only half a block, stuck between I-94, the Lodge Freeway, Henry Ford Hospital, and some Wayne State buildings. The street was a mass of filled potholes, like the proverbial sock that was mended till none of the original material remained... a narrow street with old houses and apartment buildings crowded close on each side, and again there were bits of art in random places, also a little stage in a yard. When I got home I found that the street was known as a bohemian enclave and they hosted the 4th Street Fair every summer.

It seems like there's this notion of taking advantage of the gradual abandonment of the city to turn it into a giant canvas for artists to fill... I like the idea of a city where works of art vastly outnumber inhabitants, filling all the empty places between the pockets of habitation; it would be pretty wondrous. But if it got too cool then people might want to come back... in which case we'd have to take up arms :-(