three of today's ideas

• Design a deck of tarot cards that symbolically represents American politics and its people, processes, hierarchies, stages, interactions, influences, and obstacles. Use that deck in political consultations
  
  
• Write an interactive play that deconstructs the art world's roles and typically formulaic interactions to be performed with the audience at an art opening
  
  
• Diligently practice smiling at strangers. Document the practice and the interactions. Compare the experiences in different cities and contexts.
  

Balkan Fascination: Creating an Alternative Music Culture in America

this book is going on my reading list now.

I'm going to begin to conduct and compile interviews with people involved in the American Balkan folklore community, and see where they lead me. I think I may post them here as they progress. They will compose part of a publication I will produce in May.

Golden Festival

Last weekend I traveled to New York City for the long Martin Luther King Day weekend to see family, old friends, and to attend the Zlatne Uste Golden Festival in Park Slope, Brooklyn (nevermind that whole escaping Santa Fe necessity...). The festival is an annual two-day festival of Balkan music of every kind imaginable, and it has been going on for 26 years now. This was my first Golden Festival, and after the lovely, and dare I say perfect experience I had there, I'm definitely going to make it a yearly ritual. If we're diligent enough, the new Macedonian folk project I'm involved in now might request to play next year.

All of the 70+ ensembles that perform at Golden Fest are completely unpaid, and all the profit from the festival is donated to charities operating in the Balkans. There were at least two or three thousand people there on Saturday night and the cover the second night was $30-45.

I was very busy dancing during the best moments of the festival, but I do have a few decent-quality cellphone videos of lovely vocal music to share. David Byrne also attended the festival, and he did a much better job of blogging it than I am doing.

When I arrived on the second night of the festival, I was greeted by these lovely singers outside of the Grand Prospect Hall. I was later told that they were the Yale Women's Slavic Chorus:

cellphone video of singing outside of Golden Festival from Alysha Shaw on Vimeo.

This video is of Æ (Ash). They're a Brooklyn-based folk fusion group that gorgeously intertwines Balkan and Appalachian folk music. They're touring intermittently, so check them out if they come your way:

cellphone video of Æ (Ash) at Golden Fest in Brooklyn 1/15/11 from Alysha Shaw on Vimeo.

Post-Golden-Fest, I've been wishing I could go folk dancing every night to gorgeous Greek music like that of Seattle-based Dromeno, who closed the weekend with a cozy afterparty in the lower east side on Sunday night.

cyborg anthropology

whoa:

http://cyborganthropology.com/Main_Page

stars, cigarettes, radio phantoms, runaway urges

Perhaps he consumed too much coffee that day. His body was soaked in fear and cigarettes. The woman's voice on the radio was seductive and foreboding. She sounded like a preacher, but there was no god in what she said, except for her subtle forecast of the end.

He turned the radio off after ten minutes, thinking that if he listened to everything the woman said he would somehow curse himself with her evil words.

Why do so many people talk about apocalypse these days? Surely, there were equally barbaric times before this.... but perhaps they weren't so mechanized....

He thought to himself.

Music. Music will fix the problem.

The record of French pop music from the 1960s was worn from overuse. Post-punk refused to make him happy.

Debussy?

No.

Hmmm...

Little could.

He was restless, and the sky was dark outside. His sleepy town was sleeping. Since childhood, he fantasized about running away, always, for no explicit reason except for the experience of flight. He had an addiction to movement. The cigarettes gave him excuses. He always needed excuses to go outside and watch the clouds or the stars. He always needed excuses to give himself time.

If I ran away right now, where would I go, and would it matter? If I stopped, I would only want to start again. I can't stop. Ever.

As a child, he used to be afraid of the night sky. Its infinity terrified him. These days, he would sit outside for hours in the cold and let himself be drawn in by the tides of ancient stars. It was one of his few consolations. It gave him odd comfort and a feeling of grace. It was one of the only meaningful things he could consistently observe.

On the rare occasions when he would sleep and remember his dreams, he would dream of long lost lovers and alternative realities. In daylight, he drew out the experience of standing at crossroads presumably for the thrill of conflict and uncertainty. He never enjoyed responsibility.

His education told him that he could do anything he wanted to, and he hated his teachers for making him believe. The possibilities paralyzed him into boredom and forced apathy. He wasn't sure whether his love of whiskey was his savior or his end.

After pacing around his living room for a full 20 minutes, trying to decide if he should take a late night drive, he turned the radio on again. The woman's voice was gone. Jazz. He withered into his most-worn chair and wept.

I'd like to have a home and a purpose and some peace of mind.

for auld lang syne

so it's a new year. It feels good and I feel good. I spent my first Christmas and New Years in Santa Fe this year. I discovered that Santa Fe's Christmas Eve Farolito Walk is probably its most lovely well-known tradition.

I could share some photos of the Farolito Walk, and possibly even a video of songs by the bonfire-side, but I feel like my blog is a little too conventional. I've been reading this local blog, as well as this other local blog that I am a lazy contributor to, and I feel like I need to step up my game a little and get a bit more creative with this. My diary is a hell of a lot more interesting than this blog so far, but it's certainly not for the internet-going-masses.

I think that's it actually. There's a weird self-consciousness that occurs in our interactions in the internet world. The various social networking websites that plague our increasingly cyborg-like existences turn people into their own reality TV stars, or at least get them to self-document their lives as if they were on their own personal versions of "Jersey Shore" or "The Real World." As Andy Warhol said, "in the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes." The reality seems to be more like: in this great year of 2011 people will think they are famous so long as they have hoards of Facebook friends and Twitter followers and tweet every time they take a shit or get wasted at a club or watch an episode of Glenn Beck, etc. etc. etc.

But the self-consciousness I refer to is not limited to the aforementioned gradual disintegration of culture and language at the hands of instantly accessible internet applications that can broadcast and stoke human vanity with fewer and fewer written characters. No, the self-consciousness I refer to is a simple product of the high-speed context-less communication new media offers us.

When we have no audible voice, no physical presence, no visual picture, no human context of experience, no human idiosyncrasies, no emotion, and just virtually typed words-- words that are so heavy with different contexts for each special human being-- communication can become a very self-conscious act, and it can become very challenging to effectively express one's self-- it can feel unsafe to explore provocative ideas in such an inhumane medium.

Such self-consciousness can hinder an exploration of new ideas. Learning and experimentation require comfort with uncertainty and the possibility of being wrong, as Sir Ken Robinson mentions in this really phenomenal TED talk that I happened to watch on Christmas with friends:



So here's to the New Year, and all the new endeavors it will bring. Here's to more experimental internet communication. In the meantime, here is some farolito walk documentation: