L.A. Weekly, May24, 2002
A FEW YEARS AGO, PASSING THROUGH EUGENE, OREGON, where
there are many hippies and no sales tax, I bought a used flute -- a
thoroughly manly instrument, I'll have you know -- which, after a brief
flurry of investigative tootling, rapidly 
became an unused flute. (That is not a
sexual metaphor, by the way.) This wonderful silvery contraption of levers
and axles and perfectly fit pads, the culmination of millennia of
ever-evolving flute technology, lay dismembered in its case, put away on a
shelf, forgotten but not gone -- like the box of paints, the Ab-thingy,
the Five Weeks to Perfect Classical Greek cassettes, the
cold-fusion reactor not even half finished. (It's the old story: I
couldn't keep the film from cracking on the quartz substrate during
electrolysis.) Life can sometimes seem an accumulation of accusing
clutter, of closets full not of skeletons but of the serially abandoned
means of self-improvement: They take up a lot of space eventually, those
failed good intentions, they can really hem you
in.
A not insubstantial portion of the
room in which I write is taken up by an old eight-track tape
recorder/mixing deck, the handsome-in-a-mid-'80s-kind-of-way Tascam 388
Studio 8 -- love the wood-grain laminate -- that I bought several years
ago on a whim from a friend who was leaving town. (Perhaps to get away
from the Tascam 388.) I definitely thought we could get something good
going, the Tascam and I, and here again was an initial flurry of use; but
for a long time now it has served only as a surface, upon which I
have piled other things I can't quite get around to. (Lloyd's First Law of
Stasis: Anything that can be used as a table will be.) But old
dreams die hard, and two weeks ago I purchased, for the price of about 20
trips to the cappuccino house, its contemporary equivalent, a software
program called the Cakewalk Home Studio 2002™, which takes up no room at
all except on the hard drive of my computer, and which though it is not a
particularly new kind of program, is nonetheless fomenting revolution in
my brain. I am always a little late to the party, but party no less hard
for that.
Every little thing it does is
magic. I won't bore you -- and believe me, I could -- with a full
rehearsal of its capabilities, but the best part is the little orchestra
that lives in there: You feed it notes and it spits back music. You can be
as random or as careful about it as you like, and the Cakewalk players
follow your lead without comment or complaint. It can't, of course,
replicate the special experience of playing with living musicians, each of
whom brings to the mix his own style, schedule and aroma, and if I could
afford to keep an orchestra on call, lodged perhaps in a palatial
countryside manor with heliport and grotto and fire pole, I can see how
that might be better than the Cakewalk Home Studio 2002™. But this will
do.
THERE IS A CARPENTER BEE AT WORK outside my
window. It is -- according to its reputation -- busy, though its job (not
carpentry) is, after all, just to have sex with flowers. They are making
beautiful music together, the bee and the blossoms. I am taking flute
lessons.
Making music seems to me not so
different from sex with flowers (now I am speaking metaphorically),
part industry, part luxury, part bumbling around, part aiming to score.
Yet notwithstanding the carpenter bee's easy way with a dahlia, the
best-known bug fable is that of the sober, hardworking ants and the
improvident fiddler grasshopper, which, having played the summer away, is
caught out when winter comes. I have never been able to see music as an
altogether respectable activity; it is too much fun, and insufficiently
profitable, in the usual sense. Time spent on it seems not exactly wasted
or misspent, but stolen from the time I might spend instead producing
actual goods (though I would first have to learn how to produce some
actual goods) or trying to resolve the
film-cracking-on-the-quartz-substrate problem. Practicing the flute or
action-composing abstract tunes on the Cakewalk Home Studio 2002™ MIDI
grid are not without value -- value to me -- but it's not a social value;
it's possibly even an anti-social value, given that I work alone in a room
with the door shut.
But I am doing it
anyway.
I HAPPENED -- ACCIDENTALLY IS THE ONLY WORD -- to
be watching This Old House the other day, and a couple of guys were
going on about some sander with a suction pump like it was, I don't know,
the Cakewalk Home Studio 2002™. (And I must say it really did a job
evening out the dry wall.) We love our toys, childishly, but we love and
respect our tools, we revere the beautifully useful. Somewhere there are
people getting serious, and maybe a little stupid, about shovels and rakes
and food processors, band saws and copy machines, are discussing
18-wheelers like fine wine. If it's in the natural way of things to always
grow bored with toys, whose nature is to be outgrown, used up, tossed
aside, when you tire of your tools, you drift toward existential crisis,
if you believe at all that what you make is in some way who you are. And
that what you don't get around to finishing is who you'll never be. (Come
with me to my closet of accusing
clutter.)
At the same time, there is a
kind of mortal danger with tools, and I don't just mean amputation.
(Though no sensible musician practices carpentry.) Once you've got the
hang of something, once you've crested the learning curve, you are thrown
back on yourself, your own resources. You can spend years learning the
tools of self-expression only to find you have nothing to say. Now that
you can drive that nail, what are you going to build? Having mastered the
hammer, you might find yourself putting the hammer down for good. This is
why initial results are often the most delightful: the first driven nail,
the first saved file on the Cakewalk Home Studio 2002™ (a little piece I
like to call "project1.wrk"). The first decent note I got out of the flute
seemed like a miracle; then came the work of getting the second decent
note.
If you're lucky in life, your
tools will stay toys. Orson Welles once likened a movie studio to an
electric-train set, though it's worth noting that when he said it he
hadn't completed a picture yet, and that he wound up the patron saint of
squandered promise; the films he didn't finish are almost as famous as the
ones he did. Still, he kept starting them, and he never blamed his
tools.
Illustration by Hadley Hooper
Hear the results here.