The best way to listen to "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" is to be so absorbed in the verse and the mysterious, swirly parkscape it presents that you fail to anticipate what's happening next, so that the metaphysical departure of the chorus is experienced not as an inevitable part of the song's structure but as a spontaneous and extremely lucky accident. Of course, you can't will yourself to hear the chorus this way, any more than you can throw a surprise party for yourself; it just sneaks up on you sometimes. But here's something you can do on purpose: try to hear each of the three performances of the chorus as distinct event with a unique interpretation of time. I'm pretty sure the second one is the slowest and heaviest. Moreover, each chorus seems to be deeply rhythmically undecided within itself; maybe it's an epiphenomenon of the flanging, but it seems to me if you follow the drums you can hear it like a hip-hop recording where the sampled drumbeat not only understands something different about 16th notes but is oddly matched to the song's primary tempo, speeding up over the course of the bar and synchronizing again on the downbeat. Such effects are more evident on the mono mix, which, because slower, does less to blur anomalies of time, as pounded out by animals, into the evenly divided continuum of geometry.

When you go to a movie or play or concert, do you consistently prefer to sit on one side of the theater, as though one side more reliably allowed passage into the realm of fantasy, while the other encouraged vigilant real-time monitoring of the theater itself? Why is this? (And in view of the fact that the seat a 1L chooses at the beginning of the term becomes his for the rest of the term, should he prefer a leftward or a rightward view of the lecture hall?) With reference to nothing but the image of the painting on the screen, one can tell immediately if the slide is backwards in the carousel. Why is this? (And in view of our biases toward particular visual asymmetries, their fittedness to the different ways the halves of our divided brains present the world, does perfect symmetry somehow represent a radical imbalance of our natural forces of cognition?)

Looking at reproduction 19th century American wallpaper this afternoon, in particular at a pattern of interlocking twists whose forms, both biological and abstract, seemed to present a simplification of sea-weeds or lichens, in which one white twist overlapped and seemed to be holding hands with one black twist in such a fashion that the white twist was apparently the agent or initiator of this conjunction, I felt that I again understood the essence of Nathaniel Hawthorne, or rather, that I saw the figures in the wallpaper as he might have, and that I had access to his quite particular form of vision.

Strange Maine 4/3/11

When I stepped into the shop this afternoon, Terry Riley's A Rainbow in Curved Air was on the turntable, and "holy shit this is awesome" quickly gave way to "no way am I playing this for my baby at home." If she can't have electronic cause-and-effect toys, why should she be allowed to listen to this sort of music? Riley's aesthetic innovation is formally parallel to my pre-teen discovery that I could ball up and eat the crustless middles of slices of white bread. This record was released in 1967, and Paul certainly put it on for his friends; he may have even walked home from some mod boutique with it under his arm. The blueprint for 1000 modern-day touring acts, many of them from Baltimore.

I was pleased to find a copy of David Crosby's If I Could Only Remember My Name (1971). I don't usually buy records solely on the basis of their appearing on Top Ten lists, but I made an exception for #2 on the Vatican's Top Ten Pop Albums of All Time. With Revolver as #1 and Dark Side of the Moon as #3, one can surmise only that the criteria called for expressions of morbidity. But unlike those records, which, by summoning and organizing energy into improbable artistic forms, enact life's battle against entropy, If I Could Only Remember My Name accelerates the decay of once-rich musical structures into increasingly generic rhythms and modes, enacting death rather than representing it, approaching the final heat death of the California sound. The harmonies of "Tamalpais High (At About 3)," the album's best song, help us imagine how McCoy Tyner might have sounded to himself while taking LSD with Trane. Once we've overlistened to all the best and second-best music of an era, we must become archaeologists of garbage.