Spooksville: Getting in the Mood

    Night Music
—AD, piano, processing, bells, effects, soundscape

Wine, Because Life Is Short

Life is short.



So enjoy life. Live to the fullest.



Wine is the beverage of the gods. Drink deep. Drink responsibly.



Wine is one of the great pleasures in my life. I'm not about to give it up. Although, honestly, I don't drink more than the occasional glass of wine with dinner, and not all the time, I do enjoy good wine. It's one of life's pleasures. I'm not about to turn into an ascetic monk living on bread and water. So.

Back from the recent roadtrip, I brought home some wine from Paso Robles, CA, and, surprisingly, Lubbock, TX.

Some wine from my favorite vineyards in Paso, Chronic Cellars, which I very highly recommend—I finally bit the bullet and joined their wine members' club, so I'll be getting wine twice a year without having to travel there myself—and J. Lohr, who are bringing back some older grape varietals that haven't been cultivated or bottled for awhile.

As are some of the other vineyards in the region. Paso Robles is all about trying new things. A lot of the winemakers there are taking what has been learned in places like Napa Valley—which is now very well-established, with several famous and excellent vineyards, famous around the world, a tourist destination, etc., and all that—and are trying new things. Paso Robles is an innovative region, and in my opinion, some of the best and most interesting wines I've tried in years. I'll take Paso wines over any other region in California, these days. Every time I visit there, I find new, interesting, high quality wines from exciting new vineyards.

If you're going to do a wine region tour in California, consider Paso, or maybe Santa Barbara, rather than Napa. Avoid the crowds. Try something new. Talk to any of the really personable and enthusiastic people at any of the wine tasting rooms. And they are enthusiastic; I spent a full hour talking wine, music, art, sculpture, and more at Sculpterra, after spending a half-hour wandering around their fantastic sculpture garden.

Now, for Lubbock. Wine in Lubbock, TX? What?

Lubbock is on the high plains of north Texas. There's nothing there. The soil is red. There are no hills. In fact, I recall years ago that some clever student at Texas Tech, which is a good university in Lubbock, made a t-shirt that had a line of fence on it, and a single tree off in the distance, along a totally flat horizon; the t-shirt caption was "Ski Lubbock." Which is the joke of course, as you can't; all the skiers there drive over to New Mexico to go skiing. But I digress. Anyway, there are no hills, no terrain, just cotton fields and flat lands. So where are they going to grow grapes?

Well, not too far from Lubbock, there is some beautiful canyon and hill country, where the plateau falls off over the eastern rivers, and the land has some of the most beautiful north Texas canyon landscape I've ever seen. So, they can indeed grow grapes near to Lubbock.

There are now four vineyards in the region, or so I gather. I went to a wine tasting at one of them, and heard very good things from my local friends about the other. So far, so good. Some good wines might be appearing out of Lubbock, in the not too distant future. Stay tuned.

Entering the Matrix

Consider creativity as a matrix of possibilities.

Visualize, if you can, a multi-dimensional grid, with various loci on the grid being locations of different types of creative action. You can add as many dimensions as you can work with. I do a lot of 3D geometry in my mind; I have a knack for spatial geometry, I've always been able to do it. (It took me longer to absorb the algebraic equations that describe spatial geometry, not to mention nonlinear dynamics, but being able to visualize everything is a big help.)

At the moment, I'm idly watching woodworking shows on public television. Or listening, mostly, as I slice red potatoes chip-thin to fry them up in olive oil and spices. I like them extra crispy, so I get the potatoes going before I throw the Angus beef burgers on the grill. When the potatoes are three-quarters done, you throw the burgers on the already-heated grill. Don't need anything on burgers but a little sea salt, but I like to spice up the potatoes. Not eating a vegetable tonight, mostly because I didn't get to the store earlier. A glass of one of my favorite wines from Paso Robles, CA, J. Lohr Wildflower Monterey Valdiguié, and my evening is complete.

Earlier today, at sunset, I was on the public park docks at the Rock River north of town, making HD video of the sunset, gold past the bare trees, the thin pinking clouds, and a hundred Canadian geese on the river, drifting, calling, sometimes taking off in flights of a dozen, heading west. Other flights come in for a landing. The geese follow the light west, as the sun goes down, till they cannot see, and rest for the night.

The woodworking (or other craft) shows have become something I leave on the TV in idle moments, if I have nothing better to do while cooking and eating, because of my own deepening interest in woodworking. I don't have the shop full of amazing tools that they use on these shows, nor do I have the tools to make some of the custom tools they use; but I'm learning. And I'm getting ideas. I love the look of laminated woods, layers of color and texture. I will work up to some larger projects someday, but I have become interested in making small wooden boxes, as parts of larger art pieces.

Think of a shadow box, which has an image or a small sculpture on its face, perhaps a relief carving or a glued abstraction. Then you open the box, and inside discover another mystery. An image, a smaller puzzle sculpture within, who knows. All of it themed to an idea, or a cluster of ideas. Imagine a wall filled with art, including boxes, photographs, triptychs, and pieces that break the frame of assumptions around both 2D and 3D art.

At some point I'd like to get a woodturning lathe, and turn some bowls from tree logs, using the grain and faults in the wood as features. Natural woods interest me for woodcarving, because of their irregularities and flaws, which bring character to the piece.

I feel myself entering a new phase of creative productivity. As if I wasn't already productive enough. I am gradually recovering my strength and health. (The IV drug therapy treatments are working, although from my perspective it seemed to take a long time to notice real results. But I'm a lot less anemic than I was, and that takes at least a couple of burdensome stressors off the list, now.) I am gradually improving my outlook on life. Even though my body is still tired much of the time, it's not all of the time, they way it had been for over a year now. Not to say there aren't still the occasional setbacks, the days where you have to take the day off and rest, and the times when you still feel like crap. Yet I feel myself more able to do things, even on those days, because my mind is clearer now than it has been in many months.

Some good things have happened, creatively, these past few weeks. I have my new piano, and have been playing regularly. I am starting to compose a new piece. I played the Monster Jam gigs for Hallowe'en in Madison last week, even though I had walking pneumonia at the time, then came home in time to give out treats to the kids. And even though I'm tired out, I'm not so tired out that I'm dead on my feet. Nothing that down and out. So I guess that's another sign of improvement.

I've made a lot of visual art this past month. October has always been a month of unusually high artistic productivity for me. I first noticed this when I was in college. Something about October always makes me extra-productive, extra-alert. There's a quality of light that's unique, a smell of autumn in the cooling air. There's the thinning of the veils between worlds coming up to Samhain. There's the sense of the Yearwheel turning, the old year ending and the new one beginning. And there's often the first tentative snowfall, which doesn't endure for now, but crisply chills the air with prescience of winter.

Creativity is for me a vast underground river of black water, which can rise up to be tasted from many wells. I don't just write words, I make visual art, and I write music. In fact, writing words is not even my principal means of artistic expression. I know I've said this all before; I'm restating it to make the case for another kind of analogy about creativity.

My purpose here is to demonstrate that creativity is not a scare resource. It's infinite. One can always tap in.

I recently read some commentaries on fine art by critics who, it seems to me, don't really understand the creative process. One of these opinions was that anything that isn't recognized as fine art is not art. Another opinion was that artists should be in a vacuum, with no consideration of the rest of the world. Both of these opinions are incredibly wrong-headed, and no working artist would agree with them.

Dealing with the second opinion first, it's not possible to be a human being, making art or not, and be totally isolated from the world, from the need to make a living, from relationship, from contact. HIstory has proven that total isolation is liable to drive one crazy. Of course it's also been proven that too many distractions interfere with getting the work done. So the truth, as usual, lies in the balance.

Now, I might actually agree that fine art is art, and that many things that are called art are not. But creativity is not restricted to the fine arts. Anyone who states that creativity is only in the fine arts knows nothing about creativity. Creativity can be found anywhere apply imagination, intuition, ingenuity, and heart to whatever they're doing. Creativity can be found in cooking, in woodworking, in photography and videography, in winemaking, and almost anywhere else that people apply themselves. In my experience ,creativity is the most available thing in the universe, as abundant as hydrogen. The only thing that blocks you from applying your creative process to whatever you're doing is your own inner idea that you can't. Or some critical idiot telling you that you shouldn't. Both of these voices are just plain wrong.

So consider creativity as a matrix of possibilities. Visualize those possibilities as points in space on a multi-dimensional grid. Some cluster close together; others are farther apart, some quite far off by themselves. Each locus is a way of being creative. Not all of them are fine art. But all of them are true.

Summerland, Greening, Memory

Images from Paso Robles, CA, February 2010



One purpose of this roadtrip was to get away from the deep winter cold and snow of the Midwest. In California and Oregon, where I spent most of my time, it may be winter still, full of rain and clouds and storms, but to me, it's like spring and summer.



I have been storing up memories of the greening to take back with me, to keep me warm and alive through the remaining winter in my own lands, till the green returns there, as well, some months from now.



Trees are flowering. Bees are working the flowers. The rains come and go, and the land is greener than usual this year because of the long rains.

•



Paso Robles is an excellent wine-making area in California. In fact, in my opinion, most of the best wines currently coming out of California come from Paso Robles. I'm not an expert, that's just an opinion based on experience, tastings, and my own preferences. Paso Robles was where the native zinfandel grape was discovered; there's good water here, good terranes, and a long history of exploring new ideas in making wine. There are a lot of younger winemakers here, trying new things out, pushing the edges, and also respecting the families and traditions from which they come.



I like the accepting and open vibe of the place. To me, Napa Valley has become staid and predictable, dominated by conservative if classic wines. Paso is where some of the Napa winemakers have gone to try new things. Not all of them succeed—but a surprisingly high number of them do. That's how good the terranes are in Paso.



In winter the vineyards are resting. The vines are tied up and ready to grow, but not yet. The hills are covered with vines prepared for the next growing season, still resting, not yet buddinng with new leaves and vines. Nonetheless, even the bare vines are evocative of the greening, of the next harvest, of the wine of life and eros. Dionysus may be asleep right now, but he is turning over in his bed of leaves, ready to wake soon, and soon to dance and drink and sing as always.

Bottle Music

For several years, during and after finishing music school in Ann Arbor, I had regular radio shows on WCBN-FM Ann Arbor, the University-owned, student-run community FM radio station. It was truly great radio, because it was largely volunteer programming, and the format was that vanishing format called freeform. In other words, you had a slot of time, and the programming was up to you.

I did a weekly world music program called Hemispheres, a weekly new music program called Horizons, and a regular if not always weekly late-night experimental program in which I composed pieces for radio, and performed them live. These were largely mixes, sometimes of original sources, but also of pre-recorded sources, including several mixes based on, say, Tibetan Buddhist chant, or experimental noise, or other even more exotic things.

My longtime partner in radio, and compositional collaborator, Stuart Hinds, and I put on regular radiopiece broadcasts that were basically composed mixes. But we also did completely original composed and improvised performances live on the air.

This was a regular thing on CBN, actually. I was involved with a group of fairly radical DJs on CBN, and we did several live shows of improvised and composed music. I also hosted live performances of Indian music, folk, and other genres, too. Once, I engineered and hosted a live performance by a favorite band of mine just as they were becoming nationally famous: Los Lobos. That was a fun evening, indeed.

One of the pieces that Stuart and I organized, composed, performed, recorded, manipulated live, and broadcast live was Bottle Music. This was live performance mixed with pre-recorded performance, then tapes of the live performance were manipulated and re-broadcast along with other live elements. We collected bottles for a month or so before doing the piece, a full carload to take down to the station. We set them as microtonally tuned sets in the performance studio beforehand, as the primary performance location, with other bottles in other setups around the building. We began by playing a composed pattern piece for tuned bottles, notated as patterns of relative pitch, which later became a free improv. There were mics set up in the secondary studio, tapes were recorded and manipulated in both production rooms, there were mics in the resonant spaces around the building—the studio was in the basement of one of the University buildings—including the bathrooms, stairwells, and lobby. The overall piece had both quiet and noisier sections, depending on what was going on at the time. By the end of the evening we were breaking the bottles, to finish the piece, along with the previously-performed and reprocessed elements. it was three hours of glorious cacaphony, live on the radio, in four sections circa 45 minutes duration apiece, and it was tremendous fun to do.

Three are several more of these pieces in my cassette archives, that I am gradually digitizing. Several large projects with SH/AD, and many more individual mixes. I also used the production studios at WBCN, in addition to the Electronic Music Studio at the University of Michigan, to create several tape pieces, several of my text-sound poetry pieces, and other works for electronic music and/or tape. I was a volunteer programmer at WCBN from 1980 through 1985; very fertile years for making new experimental music.

•

Bottle Music (1984)

composed, produced, and performed by Stuart Hinds & Arthur Durkee

additional performers: Hairy Beanball, Case Krell, Jeff Sinclair, Ben Quada,
Jeff Wechter, Mark Murrell, March Wells, Steve Austin

engineered by Art Durkee, Hairy Beanball, and Mark Murrell;
assistant engineer: Case Krell

first broadcast live on

WCBN-FM Freeform
11pm till 2am
5-6 June 1984

excerpt from Part I

excerpt from Part 4

A Short Visit to Wine Country

On the recommendation of a friend, I stopped in briefly at Chateau Lafayette Reneau, an award-winning small vineyard on the eastern cliffs above Lake Seneca. I ended up getting four different bottles of wine to take home and enjoy later. A very nice little place, despite the rather daunting name.



The reason this part of New York state is wine country is because of the very suitable microclimates on the shores above the lakes, with good drainage, good soil, and plenty of sunshine and rain.



Not to mention some gorgeous views.

When I was at CLR, it was a Saturday and the region was flooded by college students doing wine tours, which means doing wine tastings at several vineyards in the region in one day. Some of them were getting a bit tipsy. But they were all on buses or in vans with designated drivers, so I didn't worry overmuch. They did crowd the tasting bars with their chatter, though.



Which led to a moment of humorous existential revelation: Apparently, I've either grown up or grown old. There was more than one young college-age young man and woman in prep-school dress—you couldn't tell if they're Ivy Leaguers dressing up or dressing down—on their cellphones or chatting with their peers. And their talk was, well, just inane. That's a period of life in which we still carry forward all the concerns of youth: appearance, peer group dynamics, social hierarchies, and the intensity of first loves. It's also a period of life in which we're intended to start thinking for ourselves, exploring the world outside the familiar home, and spreading our wings as individuals. There was a lot of the former type of talk going on, and almost none of the latter. Well, this was a vacation day for them, I suppose. I'm the last to begrudge anyone their fun, nor would I be the first to judge them for whatever kind of fun they find.



I do remember the pleasures of getting slightly tipsy in the company of friends, at that age, although for me in Michigan it was usually pizza and beer after Men's Glee Club rehearsals. I rarely drank otherwise.



In all, though, it was a pointed reminder that I've moved on. Or maybe grown up some. Because none of what they were caring deeply about, and loudly, was of any concern to me anymore.

Or perhaps it was a commentary on spring arriving, the sap rising, the juices flowing, the new growth opening flowers in both plants and certain mammal species often still largely ruled by their hormones.

•

And then there was the Green House, proving that whimsy still has a home here.



And forsythia everywhere.

Wine Refractions

When I was out West in August and September of this year, I spent a week with close friends in Paso Robles, in central California. This is a wonderful, up-and-coming wine district that has now achieved its own appellation. My friends live east of downtown, in the heart of the wine district itself; driving off the highway to their home, one must pass by acre after acre of grape vines. I brought home 12 bottles of wine from four different vineyards, after two days of tasting tours. I gave away about half the wine I brought home, to friends who are fellow wine appreciators.



I won't lay claim to being any kind of wine expert, mostly to dodge barbs from genuine Wine Snobs. I'm an enjoyer of good wine, not a snob about it. I doubt that my palette is so refined as to be able to tell the difference between a 50 dollar wine and a 500 dollar wine; although I can certainly appreciate the pleasure of a 50 dollar wine in comparison to a less than 10 dollar wine. But there are also many delightful less-than-10-dollar wines; wine snobbery is partly based on the snobbery of class and expense. People imagine rare and expensive wines must be better wines, and so they are. Perception can mean a great deal, and it's not as objective as many experts would have us believe. I have to say, though, the wines from Paso Robles are my favorite California wines right now. They're much better than anything coming out of Napa Valley, in my opinion. Of course this will be heresy to some. But even though some of the vineyards in Paso are owned by Napa companies, the Paso vineyards are being used to experiment, to try new ideas, new blends, new methods, and different grape varietals, and this is yielding excellent results.



When I got my bottles home—they did all survive the remaining three and more weeks of the journey—before I passed them on, I set them all up on my dining room table and took photos of the bottles in the bright fall afternoon light. I was fascinated by the colors of the wines refracting the afternoon light, and the glow and tone given to each bottle by both its glass and its contents. Wine bottle glass is its own beautiful science and artform; although hardly anybody looks at the wine bottles. What photographer could resist the delight of the interplay of light, glass, and the fruit of the grape? It's the small things in life that sometimes excite us most.



One of my best friends and I, when I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, frequently enjoyed browsing the wine aisles, just looking at the labels, to appreciate their graphic design, illustration, and typographic fun. Some younger vineyards have some delightfully funky labels and illustrations. The creativity of these vineyards is not limited to their product, but shows up in the intelligence and craft of their marketing. This puts their design aesthetic far out ahead of most similar advertising, which is usually about dull repetition rather than life-enhancing splendor. Try it some time: just browse the aisles, looking at the labels. Even if you don't like wine, I predict you'll find something to love, graphically and typographically, whether contemporary, quirky, or classic.