CLEAR ACRYLIC THOUGHT PATTERN

I watched the Miles Davis doc made by PBS. reminding me why I chose the trumpet as a kid. Although it was In A Silent Way and Bitches Brew that forever changed the way I think about music when I was a teen, here in my 40s its his final burst of creativity in the 1980s that fascinates me.

After years of reclusion, he became somehow more humble and open about himself while draped in loud, garish, funky avant garde garments of the 80s haute couture. His paintings... reflecting a sort of wry sophisticated afro-funk post-modern primitivism, seem willfully and playfully naïve. Underneath, above, around and beyond all of it is the music - a sly lithe and airy approach to the modern synthesized sounds of the times. It might be so much projection onto the past, but he seemed unafraid to embrace the tepid, mauve-hued MIDI tonalities of the day to render musical flurries that are at turns tough, elusive and sublime. Under the pressure to live up to the caricature of himself as an "intense, dangerous and adventurous auteur", humbled by health problems, bursting out of a depression that lasted years....he becomes playfully funky, bemused and inspired by his new context.

All in all, an inspiring display of renewal and a return to the joy of growth into the unknown.

Anyway, here's some of my stupid music.

Season 2 of Clear Acrylic Thought Pattern podcast continues with another wordless, ambient guitar improvisation called "Even Lighter Sleeper", which comes as I continue my personal fascination with - and lively debate with some of my peers - of the Paul Schrader's 1992 film Light Sleeper, starring Willem DaFoe, Susan Sarandon and Dana Delaney. A subtle, quietly disturbing and debatably failed movie about the mid-life crisis of small-time drug dealers who've stayed in the game too long. It's got a classically Schrader-ian obsession with a sympathetically broken man, mixed with opaque dialog and an Ozu-inspired lack of momentum. Add to that a stubborn 80s/90s obsession with horrible blocking, claustrophobically tight framing and awkward, stillted editing and -aesthetically speaking- it's like chewing rocks. But somehow I am completely fascinated by it's almost un-nameable umami qualities. There's no easy nostalgia for its nasty early 90s style, costuming or set design. Its palette is completely gauche compared to, say, the flat-yet-chic neo-noirs of the 80s, or the hard boiled Schrader/Scorsese movies of the 70s. Anyway...maybe the guitar ambience I made after thinking about the film today is completely unrelated. Regardless, I hope the vaguely directionless, slightly melancholic and ultimately soothing music I made sits well within your newly weird personal/ societal situation.

Roger Ebert said of Paul Schrader's Light Sleeper:

"It is filled with great weariness and sadness; the party has been over for a long time, and these old druggies, now approaching middle age, have been left behind. Because they were survivors, because they were more intelligent and honest than most, this is the thanks they get: They continue to work in the scene long after they should have been replaced by a new generation of losers.
I've talked to some people who had this or that complaint about the plot of "Light Sleeper," often that they didn't like the way the ending seemed like an ironic echo of "Taxi Driver." This movie isn't about plot, it's about a style of life, and the difficulty of preserving self-respect and playing fair when your income depends on selling people stuff that will make them hate you.
In film after film, for year after year, Paul Schrader has been telling this story in one way or another, but never with more humanity than this time."

I remember vague malls

various colored doors

by coat tail or nape

you too can be a parachute

heat wave ambient

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