If everything can seem indifferent when you have encountered the most beatiful of things, why don’t we regard the opposite situation as equally fateful: having read the worst book, having seen the dullest landscape, having met the stupidest, ugliest woman? There should be a perfection of – and hence an absolute limit to – the insignificant, the useless, the trivial and banal, beyond which, as in the contrary case, there would be nothing more worth waiting for.

In fact, it is not that way. After seeing the worst, you do not say “O time, suspend they flight!” There is no ecstasy of uselessness.

If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.

I particularly like that he uses powers of two to solve the dilemma.

Start of day, in the bathroom window:

On-way to mid-day (keep in mind above quotation if your patient enough to watch):

Mid-day, Union Square:

End of day, dinner:

This universe does not appear to be the work of a humanoid sentient deity to me, unless it has a very perverse sense of humour.

And another, which I find a little scary…

I have often found it a good exercise to try and enter the paradigms of people I meet who hold extreme views and to keep taking those views a little further with each turn in the conversation until a positive feedback leads us into realms where the absurdity of the original premise becomes apparent.

…but I like the goal of discovering a core of absurdity.

You can check out the ASCAP Podcasts but it’ll probably fall off when the new podcast comes up. So you can:

Download the podcast

Discover what the Village Voice called the “Best Literary-Musical” Crossover of 2009 – songwriters inspired by books. Download and listen to a special podcast featuring an ASCAP in-house recording session with members of the Bushwick Book Club, including Susan Hwang (pictured left), Dibson Hoffweiler, Corn Mo, Laura Brenneman (pictured right), Phoebe Kreutz and Duck and Swallow’s Lillie Jayne, and also listen to selected tracks from the upcoming Bushwick Book Club CD release.

Old Hat - photo by Alison Cartwright

The second act of the night is Old Hat, and what can one say? Two men and two women take the stage and proceed to give us songs divined from their spiritual leader W. Alan Yankovic (who has a blog, and unconfirmed connection to the musical parodist of similar name).

Songs in Friday night’s set included “Dominic the Donkey,” “Uncle Pat’s Pig Roast,” and “Fucking Morphine,” which was described as “the song about the time we took drugs and nothing happened.” They take breaks in between songs to auction off a macabre painting, and end up taking a collection from the audience – twice, because they weren’t satisfied with the results of the first go-around.

All this, and the music itself was fun, spectacularly entertaining, and very often witty. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen someone play the acoustic bass with intensity, but that is what Old Hat’s bassist Preston Spurlock did. Besides being a talented musician, his violent outbursts with and towards this usually-docile instrument were perhaps the most entertaining part of the show. I don’t know if his rage-fueled bass-playing was part of the act, or just part of an artist’s passion in the moment – I don’t care, it was fucking fun.

These musicians (the others are Dibson Hoffweiler on guitar, Deenah Vollmer on mandolin, and Fran Agnone on drums) smile out the side of their mouths throughout the set, as though they’re getting away with something. Indeed, at one point Hoffweiler – their sort-of lead man – remarked that they must be doing something wrong, because not nearly enough people had walked out yet.

Old Hat and Kung Fu Crime Wave at The Debutante Hour’s Telethon Bash. The accordion/drum/cello power trio, presents a variety show with folk-rock group The WOWZ, Phoebe Kreutz and new cult phenomenon Old Hat. And magic too! The Ukranian National Home. 140 2nd Ave. 8:00pm.

Variety Show Telethon Bash
The Debutante Hour, a lively female vocal trio whose members play the accordion, the cello, and the drums, needs money to record a new album, so they’re putting on a show, with performances by other bands, jugglers, puppeteers, opera singers, and comedians. (The roster includes Jonathan Wood Vincent, the Wowz, Phoebe Kreutz, Old Hat, Kung Fu Crime Wave, Rachel Feinstein, Michael Richter, Victor Varnado, Herb Scher, Marti Newland, Sweet Soubrette, Grits and Harmony, and the Orange Teardrops.) Donations will be accepted on twenty old—allegedly Soviet—rotary phones, and there will be a silent auction for such prizes as a private show in the winner’s living room, cupcakes baked by the Debutantes, and a canoe trip with the group down the Gowanus Canal. (Ukrainian National Home, 140 Second Ave., between St. Marks Pl. and 9th St. 212-529-6287. Dec. 5 at 7.)

Knowing that all truths are meerly metaphors is perhaps the greatest advantage you can have at this point in history. Thinking that you know the “Whole Truth” keeps you from learning anything more; hence you stagnate; hence you die. But knowing that every thruth is merely a metaphor, merely a tool, leaves you free to learn and grow, by setting aside old metaphors as you learn or evolve better ones.

Aidan Kelly, quoted in Margot Adler’s Drawing Down the Moon

Here’s what the New Yorker said:

Books inspire many things: movies, plays, religions, and even political platforms. Less frequently, they inspire songs (Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights,” Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit”). For the past year, the Bushwick Book Club, which meets monthly, has addressed that deficiency by choosing a bill of songwriters to compose songs prompted by a chosen book, ranging from “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” to “The Origin of Species.” In celebration of its one-year anniversary, the Book Club offers a best-of performance highlighting the year’s most inspired tunes. Songwriters include Dan Costello, Dibson T. Hoffweiler, Phoebe Kreutz, Ben Krieger, Corn Mo, and the club’s founder, Susan Hwang. (Goodbye Blue Monday, 1087 Broadway, Brooklyn. 718-453-6343. Dec. 1 at 8.)

“Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with,” the Mock Turtle replied; “and then the different branches of Arithmetic—Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.”

The Mock Turtle, from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Did you know that all of Lewis Carroll’s works are in the public domain?

Dan showed me this video a few weeks ago. It’s not in the public domain, but it stars Ringo Starr as the Mock Turtle. I really like this video because it’s easy to hear Carroll’s wordplay. I skip to the above quotation: