Offbeat: Stay Wild Child (2017 Radio Race)

This Offbeat episode was produced for the KCRW 2017 Radio Race. The theme was Down With Whatever and included a special bonus clip of David Bowie performing for special consideration. Everything had to be recorded and mixed within 24-hours.

Tape Extracts: 

Unnamed Child: So, what I am making here is a little family.

Garrett Tiedemann (Narration): Thinking is difficult. Getting up is difficult. Planning is difficult.

This morning I left the record player on mistakenly. The old analog hum lingered in time as I got my kids' lunch together. Made me remember what it was like before being a parent. Made me remember my wife sleeping in. Me reading. Time. The air not doing anything.

Instead of taking an idea and planning it out, grabbing a microphone, and going outside; I gave a microphone to a child, to wander around with, carry it. An identity from a child who cannot speaking. Chasing after a child who can. 

Garrett (to unnamed child): You're making a family? What are we going to do with the family once you finish coloring them in?

Child: Go to the park!

 Garrett (Narration): Ideas over product. Ideas over thought excursion. As I just let the recorder go. 

I have this book. It's, in the closest sense, my book. Because they are notes. They are notes that I write as I'm making things, writing things, coming up with ideas. And from time to time I go back through them. Like now when I don't have any idea what I'm doing. Grabbing at words. Trying to screw things together. And when you do that, you're not only taking something and making something anew, but you're reengaging with an idea from a past time. Trying to get a sense of what it was, trying to see its connections to the rest of the page. How a thought got put down and forgotten. How a thought became a thought. Became something obliged to exist.

It's an idea I want to live with, it's an idea I want to store; contain and have as a moment in time. 

I did what the instructions said. We went out, did our day, a certain day in the life. I had this idea for a story about a day in the life of living with children. Being a part of children. Being enrapt in the abstraction and curiosity and experimentalism of sound that is children. Children naturally are an orchestra billowing out at the edges.

It's the thing that drives some people nuts and it's the thing that's most stimulating; a house is dead when your children are gone. There is no sound like their presence or their absence. 

Offbeat: These Fair Possessions of Democracy

America is less. Resist.

Tape Extracts:

Orson Welles: To be born free is to be born in debt. To live in freedom without fighting slavery is to profiteer. My plane last night I flew over some parts of our republic where American citizenship is a luxury beyond the means of the majority. I rode comfortably in my plane above a sovereign state or two where fellow countrymen of ours can't vote without the privilege of cash. Surely my right to having more than enough is cancelled if I don't use that more to help those who have less.

My subject today is the question of moral indebtedness. So I'd like to acknowledge the debt that goes with ownership. I believe, and this has very much to do with my own notion of freedom, I believe I owe the profit I make to the people I make it from. Any public man owes his position to the public. That's what I mean when I say I am your obedient servant. It's a debt payable in service of the highest efforts of the debtor. The extension of this moral argument insists that no man owns anything outright since he owns it rent free.

A wedding never bought a wife and the devotion of his child is no man's for the mere begetting. We must each day earn what we own. A healthy man owes to the sick all that he can do for them. An educated man owes to the ignorant all that he can do for them. A free man owes to the world slaves all that he can do for them. And what is to be done is more, much more than good works, Christmas baskets, bonuses and tips, and bread and circuses.

There is only one thing to be done with slaves: free them. If we can't die on behalf of progress we can live for it. Progress we Americans take to mean a fuller realization of democracy, the measure of progress as we understand it is the measure of equality and joy by all men. We can do something about that. 

If we waste that gift we won't have anywhere to hide from the indignation of history.

I want to say this: the morality of the auction block is out of date. There is no room in the American century for Jim Crow. The Times urge new militancy upon the Democratic attitude. Tomorrow's democracy discriminates against discrimination. It's charter won't include the freedom to end freedom.

I come with a call for action. American law forbids a man the right to take away another's right. It must be law that groups of men can't use the machinery of our Republic to limit the rights of other groups. That the vote for instance can't be used to take away the vote. It's in the people's power to see to it that what makes lynchings and starts wars is dealt with. In a people's world the incurable racist has no rights. He must be deprived of influence in a people's government, he must be segregated as he himself would segregate. Our liberty has every day to be safe from marauders whose greed is for all things possessed by the people. Care of these possessions is the hope of life on this planet. They are living things they grow. These fair possessions of democracy. And nothing, but death can stop that growth. 

Let the yearners for the past, the willfully childish, learn now the facts of life. The first of which is the fact of that growth. In our hemisphere the growing has begun, but only just begun. America can write her name across this century and so she will if we the people brown and black and red rise now to the great occasion of our brotherhood. It will take courage. It calls for the doing of great deeds, which means the dreaming of great dreams. Giving the world back to its inhabitants is too big a job for the merely practical. The architects of freedom are always capable of hope. The lawmakers of true democracy are true believers, they believe quite simply in the people in all of them.

Be of good heart. The fight is worth it. But, what will be here when we are gone. America is the less. 

Offbeat: Sounds of La La Land

Part of this year's more diversified Academy Award nominations, Ai-Ling Lee and Mildred Iatrou Morgan have been nominated for Best Sound Editing for La LA Land; becoming the first all-female team nominated in the category (Ai-Ling is also nominated for Best Sound Mixing along with Andy Nelson and Steve A. Morrow). As sound supervisors and designers on the project, their job was to lead the teams that brought every sound you hear. With a heavy emphasis on using production sound versus pre-recorded mixes of music; the performances in the film often feel more organic and real, not so decentered from the overall sound of the narrative as is customary with the genre. This approach informs every step of the audio process; a fine balance of imaginary realism, with key components of audio that connect to the makeup of our everyday living.

Tape Extracts:

Taken from the print version of this piece, which appeared on YourClassical.

Morgan: Ai-Ling and I were both working on a film by Cameron Crowe called We Bought a Zoo. I was working at Fox and I was brought onto the show by one of the mixers, Doug Hemphill, who had worked with her and thought she'd be perfect as a sound designer for the film. I was already supposed to be the sound supervisor on it and I was going to supervise with another person, but [that other person] couldn't do it. So as we were working really well together, I asked her if she wanted to supervise it with me and she said yes — so that was the first time we worked together as a sound supervising team. Since then we've done four [including] La-La Land, and now we're also working on Battle of the Sexes, which is about the Billie Jean King versus Bobby Riggs tennis match.

Could you briefly explain the difference between a supervising sound editor and the distinctions that get broken down in the final credits?

Lee: I would think a supervisor would have more of a direct relationship with the filmmakers: going to meet with them to discuss ideas to see how the sound can help with the storytelling and to try to take everyone's ideas, including your own, and work on it to make it come to fruition. Typically in a sound editorial department for features it's composed by a team of sound editors; mainly broken up into dialogue, ADR [dialogue re-recorded for better sound quality], effects, and Foley. So, the sound supervisor would then coordinate with sound editors to try to achieve the vision of the filmmakers — and sometimes the sound supervisor also edits the sounds together or gathers everyone's work together to present it.

How does your collaboration work?

Morgan: Usually when we supervise together I focus on dialogue and ADR — all the spoken words, for the most part — and Ai-Ling deals with sound design, sound effects, backgrounds. Then there's usually a Foley person or a Foley supervisor, but she supervises that Foley supervisor to tell him what the director wants because the first thing we do is meet with the director and picture editor and we have a spotting session and we play the whole movie and take notes and they give us their vision of how it should sound.

So, what were your first thoughts when you saw La La Land?

Lee: You could tell, even early on, with how it's shot, the directions, the choices that [director] Damien [Chazelle] made, and all the beautiful original music that it was going to be a really beautiful, personal movie. It's a very brave choice for Damien.

Do you approach a film like this any differently than, say, Planet of the Apes, or any of the big-budget superhero films you've done? Is the process any different?

Morgan: Well, I think any time we approach a film and start working on a film you have to think okay, what is the style of the film? What is, as you said, the palette? What is the mood of the film? The textures of the film? And we do the sound work according to that.

In the case of La La Land, because [Chazelle] made it very clear that he wanted the sound to be very naturalistic and then had to seamlessly transition into the musical numbers, on my side, because I was doing dialogue and ADR, I tried really hard to use all the production sound that was recorded with the images and not replace a lot of it with ADR and dubbing — because I knew that he didn't want that, he wanted to sound real. Even with the singing there were several places where the singing was done live on set, for the more emotional numbers like her audition number at the end.

I did cover some of that in ADR, but sometimes I would just use a word or a syllable so that I could keep as much of the production as possible. But, on other movies, like Planet of the Apes or an action film, you know they're going to use a lot of ADR and you cover it and you record all the ADR and you try to get it in the movie. But, in this case I held back — I really tried to make all the production [dialogue] work and [with] Andy Nelson we decided we can make this production work, even though it sounds really noisy. We're just going to make it work and maybe sprinkle in a couple of words of ADR. That helped anchor the film and keep it in reality until it took flight and went into a musical fantasy world.

It really did. It didn't feel separated out like some musicals can — you get that feeling of the space in the room not being manufactured.

Lee: They wanted to make sure the music doesn't sound too Broadway-ish, so having a live recording helps ground it too.

Did it change how you worked, rather than if you had everything contained from studio recordings?

Morgan: Certain things. For example, the duet number where they're dancing overlooking Los Angeles, the first dance they have together where she's wearing the yellow dress; that duet goes from production speaking and there of course is background sounds, the noises of Los Angeles.

Ai-Ling put more backgrounds on it and then it transitions into the musical, but I don't know if it's Ryan Gosling's voice or the way it was recorded (possibly), but the quality of his [studio-recorded] voice was very similar to the quality of the production, and so it was this gradual transition. So, on my side I had to make a background fill of the noisy background that was with the dialogue. And we continue that over the transition to the music, and Ai-Ling did the same thing with her sound effects.

Lee: Yeah, basically for that scene I would maintain the background, the city sounds, and insects through their singing and as the song goes they slowly taper down so that the music would take more precedent. So, we established Foley cloth movement, back movement, footsteps, hand grabbing the lamppost, and stuff like that that helps ground them rather than just prerecorded singing voices. The Foley helps make it feel like it's a live recording, that they're really singing there.

How do you pinpoint those moments?

Lee: With a musical you have to be very selective. Even when you edit these Foley, you have to be really careful to make sure they are in rhythm to the music rather than too much in sync sometimes because your eyes can fool you because your brain just connects to the rhythm rather than what you see and sync sometimes. And, of course the pitch and tone of the sound, it should not clash with the music. Otherwise either they just get lost in [the music] or just poke out like a sore thumb.

For the opening number, even though every so often the dancers would be walking around while dancing, we were careful not to play all of the [footsteps] all the time, it's only used to accentuate the music or a particular move that you see. And Damien is very specific about that. He's very meticulous, down to almost an exact science — so even though sometimes, like in the middle of the traffic song, a group of them are dancing on the cars, we did not play that because sometimes those sounds may overpower the music. For those I opt not to play up the stomps at all, but later on in the traffic song when you see the wide shot of all the dancers on top of the cars, for that area I played some of their stomping and dancing on the car roofs.

That's after they introduce the percussion band in the truck, right? Which kind of justifies a shift in the sound.

Lee: Yes, yes. So you know, things like that — or even like the crowd, suddenly you hear them cheering and clapping in rhythm to the music. Little moments like that helps ground it and actually makes it more fun on the track.

Is working with someone who has that sort of sensibility you talked about, where he's really specific on what the sound is going to do, different than someone who maybe doesn't seem to really know how to talk about it?

Morgan: Sure, because sometimes you work with directors who will give you some notes but they're not very specific. And then it's up to you to bring them something, and then once there's something in front of them they can bounce off of what you've shown them or played for them and then they give you notes on that and you build from there. But with Damien...I mean, there was a really nice give-and-take, but he started off every scene and told us what he wanted. Then it would evolve, but we would usually start with that.

Lee: He would tell us what he would like to have, his vision. In the opening sequence, for example, he wants to slowly build up the horns and the car radio, built into this cacophony of sound, real sounds, and then through that the musical number comes in. So he would say "I want to make sure people know it's in a traffic jam. The cars are standing still," so he doesn't want to hear any sounds of cars driving by, just cars idling, not any kind of moving since we were trying to sell through a soundscape to the audience that we are in a traffic jam in Los Angeles without seeing it visually until later on when the camera pans down to the individual cars.

From the very beginning, when you introduced Mia and Sebastian you articulated who they were and who they were going to be through their sounds so she's driving a Prius, very clean and sort of non-disruptive — whereas he's driving an old car that's loud and he's rewinding tape and making all these sort of noises until he honks at her and it's like that archetypes how they're going to come together. Was that the forethought going into it, or was it that just worked for the opening?

Morgan: I'm sure that that's how Damien wrote the characters. It's funny, I never thought of it 'til now, but when you described it I thought, yes, Sebastian's very analog and she's a little more modern and digital even though they're both dreamers and they both love old Hollywood. He loves jazz and she loves old Hollywood but he's a very analog character.

Lee: Thinking about the dinner fight scene, though, and Damien having such a good concept and idea about music and rhythm...you could even tell in his dialogue scenes, such as this dinner scene, that there's rhythm between Sebastian and Mia: how they paced that fight, the dialogue between them, and how Damien liked to use the production almost like production Foley props, like all the cutlery sounds or the drinking in between the lines to help accentuate the rhythm of that scene. It's not like obvious that it's music, but in the way it has this musical rhythm in there too.

Morgan: The thing I love about that scene is I have watched that scene hundreds of times, maybe, and I never ever notice exactly when the music goes away because I get so sucked into the argument every time, but then at a certain point you realize the music has stopped. But for me, I don't hear it when it stops. I realize "oh my gosh, the music stopped." And I think when Ai-Ling brought in the sound of the record, the record hitting those grooves...

Lee: Oh, yeah, the hiss.

Morgan: It doesn't start right away when the music stops. It starts later on.

Lee: Yeah, so you have this tense silence, moment of silence, between the two of them. And then you hear the hiss of the record coming in.

I realize films today have a lot of music in them, but did it feel like this had more music than you're used to working with, and did that complicate it at all, or since it was a musical was it kind of like "nope, this is the world"? Morgan: Yeah, I don't feel like it had more. It's funny because especially when you work on some of these bigger action movies, they have so much music in them and often when we're at the final mix on movies like that, inevitably someone, one of the producers or the director, says what if we took that cue out and we took that cue out. But in La La Landit was different because it was all mapped out ahead of time and maybe because the music was so integral to the story, I didn't feel like there was more music than usual. I felt like the music...

Lee: ...was just such a big part of the story.

Morgan: It was very organic. It's the best. It really is the best-case scenario in terms of doing sound for a film when it's organic like that and it's all of one piece and everything goes together so well.

Offbeat: Status Update

Cover art for this episode provided by Dana Elizabeth Gerber-Margie from Bello Collective.

Caly McMorrow is an interactive art and sound artist based in St. Paul Minnesota. Immediately after the 2016 presidential election she participated in social media catharsis by covering a well referenced Leonard Cohen song and sharing it for those who it may benefit. In this episode she talks about the post and her continued efforts to unify and connect people together through the complications of life and art.

To see photos of the piece Status Update visit: http://www.calymcmorrow.com/status-update/

Music in this episode by Caly McMorrow is from her album All of This is Temporary and can be found here: http://www.calymcmorrow.com/music/

Tape Extracts:

Caly McMorrow: So when I learned piano, it was very much classical and I didn't really play popular music growing up. And so when I sit down and play, I often just play - I joke not joke that I got good enough at piano to play Beethoven sonatas badly. 

But, interactive installation art...means making for people to interact with. So, there's a lot about museum culture that's look and don't touch or you're the audience and I'm a performer and so I'm the creator and you're the consumer. And the thing I like about interactive installation art is that that line is blurred or goes away entirely. So, creating experiences or environments that an audience is invited to participate with and the purpose of the art work isn't really realized unless they do that. 

No, no. It was, actually the line in the song, in the chorus, one of them is forget your perfect offering. And so I thought, well this is not perfect and here you go anyway.

You know, everybody was quoting this line from Anthem. I didn't really know it very well and I went and found it and listened to it and read the lyrics and it just one of those things where; oh man, this really captures what I'm feeling right now. And it's kind of prescient because he's gone.

I like having something that's prepared, but still has that random thing in it as well. But, having that safety too I felt like putting this recording up took a lot of that away and so it was a scary thing for me to do actually.

It was a link that a friend of mine...and this was like  Tuesday, Wednesday morning when I couldn't sleep and I was up at like four in the morning. I kind of wanted to put Facebook down, but at the same time it was this...I knew that other people were awake and posting and going through the same thing so I wanted to sleep but I didn't want to put it down because I felt connected to these people that way. 

And a friend of mine said, you should Google Amanda Palmer reading Goodnight Moon,and I hadn't seen her do it. And there's just a bunch of videos when really terrible things have happened in the world where she would say a lot of bad stuff is going on right now, but I've got a baby and I've got Goodnight Moon and I'm gonna read Goodnight Moon and there is something about these simple comforting things, especially as somebody who that was my favorite bedtime book as a little kid. That was just really cathartic to watch and kind of the same thing, this imperfect spur of the moment thing that she did; I think maybe to comfort herself and hopefully comfort other people. And it did, for me, so I thought OK, maybe if I do this thing. It's kind of crappy, and the music nerd in me is AAAH, there's parallel fifths and I missed that note and all whatever.  But, maybe people don't care a much as I do.  

Garrett Tiedemann: So, I guess the first thing we should probably do is what did you actually do?

Caly: What did I actually do?

Garrett: Yes.

Caly: I decided to make a video of a Leonard Cohen cover, kind of to help process feelings about the election, feelings about so many awesome creative people dying this year. 

Garrett: So, it's a performance a  Leonard Cohen song. What was the Leonard Cohen song?

Caly: Anthem.

Garrett: OK. Why Anthem?

Caly: Kind of a lot of reasons. I was thinking about why I did it because it was a really spur of the moment thing and...After he died...It affected a lot of art friends and the thing that people kept posting was the refrain from that song which is: there's a crack in everything, that's where the light gets in. And it occurred to me that I didn't really know that song very well. And I went to find it. 

So, I listened to it and then I actually tried to find covers of it that kind of spoke to me, maybe even a little more than his version, and there really weren't any. So, I found the chords and wrote it out and played it a couple times and then I just decided to put it online. It was, you know, a crappy sloppy cold rainy day and I decided to work from home, from my job, and I like playing piano when nobody's around.  And no one was around and so I woke up wanting to do that because I was kind of the mood of the day. 

Ok, I'll do this thing and then I'll go. 

Most of the music that I make is electronic and has a lot of layers and has a lot of production behind it. And I also, I'm an introvert, I kind of dislike playing live and especially singing in front of people makes me feel really vulnerable. But, it feels like everyone is feeling really vulnerable. So, it was kind of like, well, if I share this maybe it will help somebody.

Garrett: Well, and you told me, you hadn't posted music in a while, like you hadn't exercised that or at least released that to people for a while. 

Caly: Yeah I really hadn't. The last time I played a show was July and just, in general, I make less music than other kinds of artwork lately, but it's still a big part of who I am artistically. 

This one that's actually in front of us on table... 

Garrett: That you set fire to

Caly: That I set fire to accidentally. Yeah. This has almost completely just been a project for me to learn how to do stuff. And it's an interactive twister board. There's panels that light up that have pressure sensors in them and as you play the game they light up, so it's kind of a play on a disco floor. They light up and each one has a sound associated with it. So, it's a remix - you remix audio based on where you're stepping on the board. And then I have multiple sets of sound loops.

The biggest piece that I did called is Status Update. And it was a spiral of vintage light bulbs and at the center of that was an antique desk with a candle stick phone. The phone would ring every once in a while so the idea was for audience participants to walk into that spiral and pick up the phone and there was a prompt and people could record thoughts or answers to questions and the installation would collect those recordings and then play them back. Every light bulb had a speaker attached to it and it would replay what they recorded back. And then two speakers at the entrance to the spiral played a collage of any of the recordings that past participants had left. So, the longer the installation was up the more it collected and hopefully the more interesting it got through the life of it.

Offbeat: Phone Calls (2016 Very, Very, Short, Short Stories Submission)

The phone keeps ringing.

This piece was produced for the 2016 Very, Very, Short, Short Stories contest and was inspired by the rules of CLIFFORD THOMPSON

Dialogue: "Do one thing for a person, and he think he owes you; do everything for a person, and he thinks you owe him."
Sound: Cicadas whirring
Narrative: The action takes place during the hottest summer on record.

Offbeat: Last Breaths (2016 Very, Very, Short, Short, Stories Submission)

In a small shop they gather, knowingly submitting to the last breaths of suffocation, exsanguination, and repose in a world torn by snow flakes.

This piece was produced for the 2016 Very, Very, Short, Short Stories contest and was inspired by the rules of CAROL ZOREF:

Dialogue: "The animals kept arriving."
Sound: Knives being sharpened.
Narrative: Someone dies from suffocation.

Last Thursday (in Fragments) - "I think that's it"

"The memory came faint and cold of the story I might have told, a story in the likeness of my life, I mean without the courage to end or the strength to go on."

Tape Extracts:

[Opens with the story of Libby Cantrell as told by Don Chambers as Recorded at the Show]

Don Chambers: Yeah, obscurity has been...when I was in college my professor Judy McWillie used that description for my paintings that I like to obscure things and I'd never thought about that before. But it is it is part of the way I work and that goes back to that that Tarkovsky idea of poetics and film, that's not. It's a little bit of different from that. But the idea of weaving words or images together in a way that there's plenty of gaps in the weave that need to be filled in by someone. By the intelligence of another person, the person who's coming to it, so the piece remains open.

Obscuring is another way of doing that. Make somebody else do some work too. I don't want to give it all away. I don't have anything to give all away either.  I don't have a message. I'm not interested in messages. 

Ideas are always, the big ideas are abstract and wily and and hard. The big ideas you shouldn't be able to look at all at once, you can't. We're too close to em'. They are very large animals and we are getting a little glimpse of their hind leg and then of their their main and then the eyeball if you get lucky one day, but you're just moving around this really big thing that it'll take you your lifetime to get to understanding the sublime mystery of the world and how we're here, what are we doing here, all the basic questions these are giant, giant questions and they're the things. Art making is just moving around that big giant beast. And don't get stuck in its mouth.

Garrett Tiedemann: Did you start off as a painter? 

Don: I did. I started off, I went to school in South Carolina and then in Georgia and I got a degree in painting and printmaking and worked as an artist for a bit of the 90s. I got a few grants. I did this collaborative piece with sociologists. We went down to Florida and interviewed retired circus performers and I photographed all their like scrapbooks and personal memorabilia. And then I would kind of mess them up. I did installations based on those. And we also had a book of interviews of all those performers. But I was playing music because I was in Athens and that just kind of took over. It was just funner.

There was a point where I felt like I had to decide whether I was going to go one way or the other in my in my 30s and I was like alright, I'm just gonna music for now and let's see what happens. But I keep coming back to it. I had a painting show last year. First time in 10 years. But I keep, I've always done visual stuff, but I hadn't really done anything that I felt like was worth it, was focused enough to show. But, last year I had a painting show and I'll probably do like a three or four month painting stint. 

I just, the older I get the more I like working on one thing at a time and focusing on it and making it a project. And then when I'm done with it I'll do three or four months of painting and then I'll go back to music.

I had a dream last night. I had a dream last night that I was talking with Tom Waits. And we were talking about something and I was referencing a book. And he got out. He got out of his really fucked up artist brush. And he had some paint with him and he's like looking at the book and in order to make his points he was just painting onto the book that we were talking about. So, I've been doing watercolors while we've been talking in my notebook.

I stole from my dream. 

Garrett: I always find it interesting to encounter people who aren't locked in a singular idea of what they're supposed to do because I mean I know growing up even if you're studying artists and whatnot who did a lot of different things you're sort of given this, and maybe it's an American idea I'm not totally sure, but this idea of the artist doing like, they are a painter or they are a composer or they are a filmmaker. And it's always the ones who never were settled in that that I found the most interesting, where it just all overlaps and feeds a larger piece that's not satisfied with just one medium. 

Don: And there they always say you're not supposed to try and be more than one thing. But, to me they all feed together. I mean, why not? Who says?

 Orson Welles (from Archive tape): Be of good heart. The fight is worth it. That just about means that my time is up. When my time's up it's time for me to say goodbye and to invite you please to join me at the same time, at the same station. Until then. Thanking you for your attention. I remain as always...

Don: Well if you didn't get enough we can always come back to it man. 

Last Thursday (in Fragments) - "Limitation"

"To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking..."

Tape Extracts:

Garrett Tiedemann: So what did you find? 

Don Chambers: Well, that I was really hungry, I was really hungry for getting back into song writing, but that's that's not really finding anything.

When I was a kid, there was nothing more satisfying than cutting the grass. Because you've got that immediate change of landscape and I like the immediacy of the songwriting process at the beginning stages when you're just making things up and having an immediacy in my songwriting I think the Last Thursday did give me more willingness to push myself further in taking chances with songwriting because one of the other keys to the Last Thursday was its limitation. 

It's a great idea to give yourself a list of things that you can't do or some kind of limitations. So, you get things done, basically. I don't work well if I have too many choices. And the Last Thursday, because of the time limitation and I tried to do as much as I possibly could with the palette I had made for myself. And so moving back in the songwriting, I think it's given me the willingness to just push, push out further.

Johnny Cash with Woody Guthrie and with Dylan's 60s stuff. My first band before Vaudeville was called Cursing Alice. And we used to cover a lot of that and we were purposely acoustic because I was afraid if I picked up a electric guitar and got a couple of pedals that I wouldn't learn how to write a song. 

So we kept it really simple at the beginning. 

The themes, the general approach to the whole thing, it's a very visual show and the thing that I'm working on next is going to definitely pull in a lot of those themes and a lot of the visuals and turn it into something else. It was too fruitful here to to just leave it behind. But, I want to leave it behind as the thing that it was. I don't want to try and ever repeat that, at that place, with that set up because it was special in that way. Small theater, intimate, pretty much I had a mailing list. So the crowd was, a lot of the same people came every month and were along for this ride you know and we'll see what's going to happen next, what's going to be in the Christmas stocking. 

I don't want to try and repeat anything like that, but it is folding into the next thing. I just, I'm just honestly I'm not sure I want to go there yet with talking about it.

Putting words to it, then it becomes somehow committed in your head to this is the way it is supposed to be even though you might have only said it to one or two people, but I think your brain starts to think oh, it's going in this direction. Right now, I'm pretty sure I see which direction the things going in, but it's gonna. I want to let it gestate for a while.

Last Thursday (in Fragments) - "Interpretation"

"Everything is to be had at such a bargain that it is questionable whether in the end there is anybody who will want to bid."

Tape Extracts:

Don Chambers: Andrei Tarkovsky talks a lot about poetics in film and the idea that he's making something that, the interpretation has as much to do with the audience as it does to do with the filmmaker and that they are trying to make a piece of art that, a piece of film, that is participatory and he's not giving you. It doesn't have a, it's not telling you what it is. It's allowing you to make it something. 

I don't believe any technology should be a limitation. Dylan was a huge influence on that early on. I admire people who are willing to follow what's important and the monetary part of it is really not all that interesting. It would be lovely, but it's not interesting and it doesn't make good art. It might make a cooler looking video or get into a better studio, but...

It's Werner Herzog who, he talks about, he stole the camera from his film school to shoot his first movie. This kind of we've got to do this any way we can possibly do it and if you don't have the burn to be able to do that then you won't do it.

Garrett Tiedemann: The films that you did for these, did you make them or did you have other people help you make them?

Don: I made them. They're all over the place though. Some of some of them I filmed, some of them I took YouTube stuff and messed with it, mashed it up together, so it's a little bit of it's kind of across the board.

Garrett Tiedemann: And then when you play them would they be background or would they have their own place where the point was just...

Don: No they would have there they would have their own place.

Don Chambers (in film excerpt): I was recently hired to copy the Encyclopedia Britannica. My name is Jobez Wilson. I'm a pawn broker. My assistant recently drew my attention to an advertisement in the paper for an opening in the League of Red Headed Men. A foundation established by the late Ezakaya Hopkins to promote the interests of red headed men by paying them to perform small tasks.  As my pawn shop had been in decline of late, this was a welcome opportunity. While there were many other red headed applicants waiting in line the day of the interview. Miraculously I was hired.

My job was to copy the pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica. I only had to provide pen and paper.  I went home that evening in high spirits, but soon became perplexed. This must be some kind of hoax, or fraud. He's paid so well for such a simple task. This copying the Encyclopedia Britannica. 

Well, the next day I arrived to the office at ten o'clock and everything was as it should be. Duncan Ross, my employer, started me off on the letter A and at two o'clock bid me good day and complemented me on the amount I had written. Every day I work a four hour shift copying and I was paid handsomely. The only stipulation of the job was that I must not leave the room during my shift.

Every day was the same and it suited me well.

Eight weeks later I was nearly finished with all the A entries and looked forward to moving onto the Bs when it all stopped. I went to the office that day only to see a sign tacked to the door. I was disappointed, I was confused, bewildered, so I turned to the only man in town who I thought could help.

Don: Second month was random. It was the theme. Pretty sure that's the month that I just with my iPhone I filmed clouds in the sky and for like ten second pieces of clouds in the sky. And I did that for the month. And then at the end put that all together and coupled it with some Charles Fort, the guy who wrote the first book that was all about anomalies and he collected frogs falling from the sky and you know just strange anomalies so I kind of mashed those two up together just to bring up some ideas. 

I've gone through periods of time where I wished I was someone who could just get a job, buy a car, and have a nice house and come home and we'd have dinner and then we'd watch a movie and then we'd get to bed and you get up and do it again the next day. 

Last Thursday (in Fragments) - "Making up a mystery"

"Getting lost is the best way to find something."

Tape Extracts:

Garrett Tiedemann: The ability to film and photograph so easily has created this thing where we are always at a distance in this ever need to document that we were there to begin with. But then you can't actually, even in being there, you can actually talk about what it was to be there so you can't narrativize it, you can't put it into your own story. That's what's really interesting about what you did. You created this microcosm of moments that people can then turn into their own story.

Don Chambers: Which is going to be better than what they were at. 

It was like I set up a thing that I wanted to do. Initially it was only going to be three months and then it turned into the longer thing. Initially it was just going to be a winter thing. Even though it was crazy, from my point of view the first one was like beautiful and a fiasco. It had moments of beauty and moments of like utter terror. But, I was I want to do that again was my immediate response. I want to do it again, I want to get better at it. At this point I want to be a lot better at it and I'd like to do. But, that's down the road at this point. 

The one thing that this did, the whole process did, was it didn't allow me to write. I wrote, I mean I wrote I was writing for the thing, but I wrote like two songs last year which in my work mode that's basically I took a year vacation from songwriting. And so I was really hungry to get back to that, which is what I'm involved in now. 

You always want everything to come out exactly how you imagined it in your head. And of course, that's never the case. The best part of the Last Thursday was, or one of the things that I took away from it was that reminder of like, making art is not, you don't sit down and plan it out and then six months later you made what you planned out. If you do that, you'll be bored out of your mind.

Although, that was not my intention when I was doing the Last Thursday, but it was a good reminder of even though I thought I'd left things pretty open ended, it was a good reminder that if you're doing something that that has some life to it then it actually has its own consciousness about what it's going to do that you cannot control at all. And so that's when you're caught up in the thing and that's where the good stuff happens. That's where the sandbox is for you making something is when it's too much and you don't understand it. And. It's creating its own ideas. That's what you want to do in general whatever you're doing if you're a painter or a song maker or whatever. I mean it's all about getting outside of yourself. And If you can't get to the sandbox then you're the the person who planned something out, executes it, and that's great if you're a chef, but it doesn't work for art making. Then there's no strings showing, there's no vitality to the thing. 

I've written plenty of songs that I knew as soon as I finished them, oh it's nothing more than what it is. It doesn't have any mystery in it because I didn't allow it to become wild and run away and do bad things and become out of my control. I need to not understand what I'm doing in order to make. 

That's kind of key to what I do. 

Making up a mystery that I don't understand and then playing around with it some and then if things go well it'll give me something back and I think this whole thing did that and gave me things back. 

Getting lost is the best way to find something.

Last Thursday (in Fragments) - "No photography. No video."

"We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art."

Tape Extracts:

Don Chambers (from show recording):  For whom the phenomenon was supposed to have been presented to itself, had been caught cheating time and again. I believe in a hereafter and no greater blessing could be bestowed upon me than the opportunity once again to speak with my sainted mother who awaits me with open arms to press me to her heart in welcome. Just as she did when I entered this mundane sphere.  

Garrett Tiedemann: I find myself asking this a lot because it's part of the main thing that I've been thinking about, looking at all this stuff, but is that film out anywhere or did you strictly make it to be shown that night.

Don Chambers: I strictly made it to be shown that. 

Don Chambers (from show recording): There is one thing I'm going to ask for cooperation with and that's, a little later in the show, I'll remind you again, a little later in the show we're going to need complete silence and complete darkness. And therefore I'm going to ask you to turn your cell phones off, put em' in your pocket, put em' in your - not now, but a little later; you can still check your twitter account or whatever for the next thirty minutes or so, but at some point we're going to ask you not to leave the room for a brief period of time. 

Garrett: It's one thing to do performance, whether it be  music or spoken word. And then it's one thing to kind of combine. It's insanely complicated to put it all together. 

Don: You should have told me that before we started.

Garrett: Yeah I know. What drove you to go for it all? 

Don: I've never seen a show like that. I've never seen a show that could put all that together and I kind of just wanted to see if I could make it happen. You know, I think one of the takeaways from this is we probably needed about four people behind the scenes making this all happen if you wanted to do it on a less discombobulated, less less mistakes level. But, the fact that most of the time it was John and I doing all the heavy lifting meant that there was this random thing that fed through all of it.

There was definitely random mistakes that happened in every single one, of course. But, the reason I wanted to do it in the first place is because I hadn't seen anything like that. I like a lot of different things. I just thought, why aren't why are shows. For one thing most rock shows are for bands basically doing the same thing or three bands and they're basically doing the same thing for the evening and you like one you don't like the other whatever, you like all three of them. 

But, why not make a...I wanted to make a contained thing that started at a certain time and ended at a certain time. That's another big thing about Athens is our shows here really start at 10 or 11 and they end at 2:00 in the morning.

Now that has its has its own built in. There is a theater to that. But it's, but it's a long drawn out theater that doesn't really like. I'm older now, I kind of want things I want to go in and get something really good and then get the hell out of there. And that's what I was trying to build. 

Doing it this way, the audience never knew what was going to happen next.  And I really like that aspect of it.  Of course, the flipside of that was sometimes I didn't know what was going to happen next.

[from a recording of the show - John Barner is introduced to read An Halloween Poem to Delight My Younger Friends by Leonard Cohen]

Fewer and fewer moments that happened that you can't say I had this wonderful experience. Here's a video of it. And, to me it's not nearly as sexy not nearly as fun as just experience something and being able to talk about it. And. And. The only thing the person can experience from it is your enthusiasm or your wonder at having been a part of it. And. I'm much more interested in that. You know, I like going to shows where they have no photography no video signs on the walls because I want everybody to be present. I want to be present and in the moment of the thing happening.

John Barner (from show recording) reading An Halloween Poem to Delight My Younger Friends by Leonard Cohen:

Impassive frogs, skins stretched taut,
grey with late October,
the houses down my street
crouched, unaware of each other.

Unaware of a significant wind
and mad children igniting heaps of rattling leaves
and the desperate cry of desperate birds.

Dry, stuffed, squatting frogs.

I don’t know where the children got the birds.
Certainly, there are few around my house. Oh,
there is the occasional sparrow or robin or wren,
but these were big birds.
There were several turns of parcel twine about
each bird to secure its wings and feet. It was
that particularly hard variety of twine that can’t
be pulled apart but requires a knife or scissors
to be cut.
I was so lost in the ritual that I’m not sure if
it was seven or eight they burnt.

(“The effluvia of festering bodies was so great
that even the Mongols avoided such places and
named them Moubaligh, City of Woe.”)

Soon they grew tired of the dance
and removed the crepe-paper costumes
and said prayers and made laments.

It was a quarter-to-nine
when one bright youngster
incited the group to burn the frogs,
which they did at nine.

(Now that I think about it, the birds
must have been pigeons.)

If one of Temujin’s warriors
trapped a deer to eat,
it was forbidden
to slit its throat.
The beast must be bound
and the beast’s chest opened
and the heart removed
by the hunter’s hand.

Last Thursday (in Fragments) - "It was, in some ways, a total disaster"

Certain that she had made a good painting at last, she pedaled home from the studio in the moonlight, fervent and giddy with glee.

Tape Extracts:

Don Chambers: The first month, so I had never shown a film at Flicker before, at the place we did the thing. And the first month I got there and they're like oh well this cable doesn't work and this one doesn't work and we don't have a laptop. So I ended up, like, at the last minute, an hour before the show started, I drove around and someone said that I could borrow their laptop and I drove over to their house and they weren't home anymore.

So, then I ended up going to my house and getting my computer, bringing it in and setting it on a chair and just showing the film on the computer. And I didn't even get there until after the show had already started. So it just kind of set this tone.

People seem to enjoy watching someone else in a slight state of panic. I found myself, I did, I found myself at least for the first three or four months...then there was sound. You know one month the PA just didn't work; halfway through the show, stops working.

And you're trying to do this show that I was really thinking of, I wanted to present, like, to create an atmosphere. So those interruptions for me were terrible, but from an outside point of view audience people were like: 

Oh that was great. I loved it that that happened.

Oh really, well I was panicking. 

That happened, that happened for the first six months. And it was nobody. I mean it was everybody's fault and it was nobody's fault. It was just the way the shows seemed to go. But, that also created you know weird, like, I had my schedule of the show printed out for every show, but I would get so flustered by something not working and then I'd forget something else that was actually key to something that happened later in the show because they did have within a two hour window they would have some things would happen early on that needed to be fulfilled later. And I would just forget about one part or the other. So, it was in some ways a total disaster that I learned a lot from.

You know, we're doing these things in one month. And it would take me three or four days to recover from the last one. And then I'd find myself, like, all right. I didn't have any kind of pre-scheduled I want to do this or that. I had, I had a few notes on one page here; building office stuff and it was kind of little what do you want to do next every month. But I didn't really have a... I didn't have any kind of timeline for what I wanted to do for the year.

I made a theme's page and that was based off of either a theme, a story for my life, or a trick that I wanted to do. 

Probably something I was reading at the time.

Well, the first one was hidden in plain sight and that was, the theme came about after I went out to Scull Shoals, John and I went out there, which is an abandoned town outside of Athens. It was abandoned at the turn of the 19th century. It was a town on a little river and it was flooded twice. And eventually the residents just gave the place up. So there's still some of the, there was a cotton mill there, there was a hospital there, there was like 3000 people lived in the town that eventually was abandoned. So, we went there to film that cause it's right outside Athens, not a lot of people know about it, and made a short, little film about it and that was the impetus for the first one, which was hidden. 

Don Chambers (from show recording): Well, we've been doing this for ten months now. This is our tenth and final month of the Last Thursday.  I think we're gonna need some duct tape. John can you grab some duct tape in the back, I think I left it on the shelf there. Always good to have duct tape for these shows. 

I want to thank you for coming out. So these last ten months, among other things, we've had poetry, films, painting, and scripts; readings, body doubles, Shakespeare, and a little bit of murder.  And finally tonight, with your help, we're going to try and recreate an early twentieth century, good ol' fashioned seance. We're going to try and conjure the dead. Anybody who is not comfortable with that, well you should have read the flyer.

Last Thursday (in Fragments) - "It started with a drawing"

The curtain rises on "[a] late evening in the future." Lit by the white light above a desk. Black-and-white imagery continues throughout. On the desk are a tape-recorder and a number of tins containing reels of recorded tape. A man consults a ledger. The tape he is looking to review is the fifth tape in Box 3. He reads aloud from the ledger but it is obvious that words alone are not jogging his memory.

Tape Exctracts:

Heather McIntosh: Kind of moved to Athens because of the music there. I love R.E.M. and Pylon and the B-52s. Playing in bands I was really fortunate to come into a crew of people that were like minded and making interesting things. You know, sort of experimenting in their own ways. Sort of, generation after,  the generation after those R.E.M., Pylon sort of bands. 

Don Chambers: It started with a drawing. Yeah, it started with A drawing. I really love the Beckett play Krapp's Last Tape. 

I had always wanted to do this soloish show, built around that play idea.

I just had, I have a drawing of a table, sitting on an empty stage, with one bare light bulb above it and a chair and some recording equipment on the table. And then maybe, you know, you bring in a guitar or something, but that was kind of how I imagined. 

I want to be free to go in a lot of different spaces artistically and emotionally - you know, from a ballad to a dirge to a rocker within one space. That was the impetus of vaudeville, but THIS was kind of taking the vaudeville idea of doing something, a variety show, minus the slapstick humor. I kind of thought it is somewhere between vaudeville theater and Dada theater of the absurd, you know. And also a little bit of just like a living room show that's really intimate like the Victorian parlor shows where so-and-so would read a poem and then so-and-so would play us a song and then here's my flower arrangement that I did last week and now we're gonna eat some food. I like that eclecticism and that's more of what it turned into. I think. Bringing in other people and bringing in other friends to play and do...I mean, there was all kinds of different things that went on over the course of the year. There was some comedy. There was, you know, a murder mystery theme night. It kind of bounced all over, all over the place.

Garrett Tiedemann: So each month, I mean I know like one of the things you and John shared with me you were the posters, so was each month sort of driven narratively by an idea like the idea that within this performance and within this telling is a narrative to break out if you want it to?

Don: Not a straight, it's very thematic, but not a narrative. But I was, it would be... 

Garrett: You are presenting something or presenting a series of ideas that are cohesive within the moment. 

Don: Yes. Yeah. 

Everything, the magic the...I did some films as well and all of that for each month had to be. It all had. The ship had to be pointing in the same direction narratively.

It definitely shifted around and I don't know that I can step away, step back from it far enough to see if there was an overall tone to the thing that it created itself. There was also a hell of a lot of crazy mistakes that became...First, liked the first three months were just hell of everything that could go wrong did go wrong. 

Last Thursday (in Fragments) - Series Preview - Quote Me

In 2015 Don Chambers hosted "a music and other things entertainment" each month called The Last Thursday. Each month had its own theme and governed not only the types of content, but way of presentation for the evening. These evenings lived and died in the moment with very little social media promotion or archiving. 

In the second series of The White Whale we offer snippets of these evenings; providing first glimpses beyond the nights of what went down and why their existence foregoing online permanence is important.

Visit Don Chambers for music and more.

Tape Extracts:

I had a dream last night, I had a dream last night that I was talking with Tom Waits. And we were talking about something and I was referencing a book. And. He got out. He got out this really fucked up like brush, artist's brush. And he had some paint with him and he was looking at the book and in order to make his points he was just painting on to the book that we were talking about. So I've been doing watercolors while we've been talking in my notebook. 

I think I started off reading Simulacra.

Disregard it.

If you want, the other thing I'd throw out as a ridiculous idea is if you wanted to do some e-mail exchanges, if you felt like you needed more language, we could do e-mail exchanges and then you or friend could just quote me. Like, maybe a girl, but I don't know, if you feel like it. I don't know, it's morning and I'm not sure what we talked about. 

It's your burden now. You can have it. 

Go far. Go weird.

Offbeat: Life (2016 KCRW RadioRace)

This piece was produced by The White Whale as part of The 24-Hour Radio Race from KCRW's Independent Producer Project. Features the voice of Don Chambers, a musician from Athens, GA. For more information on his work visit http://www.donchambersmusic.com/

Tape Extracts:

Everybody was trying to imitate everybody else because there was a set rule of this is how we're going to do this.

(narration from performance film) I went to the office that day only to see a sign tacked to the door. I was disappointed. I was confused, bewildered. So turned to the only man in town who I thought could help.

If you can get your ego out of the way and let it take on its own life then I think copy and imitation, I'm not afraid of those. You're looking for the ghost in the machine.

It started off with a film of Disneyworld. Like these were my personal films of my childhood in Disneyworld. At some point I had a friend of mine get up and give a lecture on why the Beatles ruined Rock and Roll. And then Pete sits back down and I was like "now ladies and gentlemen, Pete" and another guy came up dressed exactly like him, who does a good imitation of him, did the speech in an exaggerated form of what they'd just seen. This guy's good though, this guy, Curtis, my friend Curtis. 

The one year I was working at the bar and I stepped outside the bar and looked up the street and there was Vic Chesnutt on Halloween night, rolling down the street in his wheelchair with this acoustic guitar in his lap.

(narration from performance film) I was recently hired to copy the Encyclopedia Britannica. 

And it was Curtis doing Vic who he could do, he could do Vic Chesnutt better than Vic Chesnutt. Later that week they played a show. Curtis came out, introduced as Vic, Curtis came out and did a Vic song and then like halfway through the song Vic comes back with ropes on him as if he'd been tied up in the back. And Vic comes out and they end up doing the song together, but I swear Curtis' version of Vic was, what I remember was Curtis' version. 

(narration from performance film) Everyday was the same, and it suited me well.

I definitely am a strong believer in stealing. I'm a strong believer in trying to copy something as exactly as you can and when you go back and compare it to the original thing, and the part that didn't quite get that original thing, that part of it is you. I think borrowing and stealing, pull from wherever you can pull from. I think copying and imitation is a little tricky because copying is more of what I am talking about. 

I don't know if you've listened to the book on tape of Keith Richards' story, 'Life'. That's a really interesting book on tape. It starts off with a professional actor, British guy, reading Keith Richards' story. Then, about eight chapters in, Keith Richards reads a chapter of his own story. And Keith Richards doesn't sound nearly as Keith Richards-ish as the guy who was just doing it. I kinda wanna know who that is.

 Everybody is borrowing from somebody else constantly. You can't help it. It's part of being alive. 

Offbeat: Bellhop (#ShortDocs 2016 Submission)

"We were lied to." This short audio work was produced for the 2016 #ShortDocs competition held by the Third Coast International Audio Festival. This piece was inspired by the "film noir" mini-movie produced by Manual Cinema. In addition to original music by Garrett D. Tiedemann there are music tracks by Manual Cinema within the mix as required by the competition for this year. To learn more about this year's competition and view the film inspirations from Manual Cinema visit Third Coast: http://thirdcoastfestival.org/competitions/shortdocs/2016

Tape Extracts:

I awoke from a dream. Trees lined the city. Night turned on. And we were still.

Kids playing.

(whisper) Why are they so loud?

There is no anxiety. No trace of despair. No pain. No regret. Or any sadness as one falls from great mountain heights. 

Instead the person who is falling often hears beautiful music while surrounded by superbly blue heaven that is filled with rosette clouds. And then suddenly, and painlessly, sensations are extinguished immediately from the body at the exact moment that the body makes contact with the ground.

I awoke from a dream. 

On these tapes was a man. A wall of a man. Held up.

(newsreel) Clearly this is going to have psychological importance.

In the story she asked the most fundamental questions. I work myself to keep from receding into the distance. To find her, playing in the streets, oblivious to the goings on of a tired old man. 

Fingers bleeding. Looking for a burial. Sunlight long in the distance. 

(deep voice buried in newsreel and other audio) Alright, we have to take him away.

Offbeat with Heather McIntosh

Heather McIntosh talks about her upbringing and what choices brought her to work on the films Z for Zachariah and Compliance, cornerstones of her evolution and increasing prominence in the musical communities she lives. This piece was produced by Garrett D. Tiedemann. Music was by Heather McIntosh and Garrett D. Tiedemann. To learn more about Heather's work visit: http://www.heathermcintosh.com/

Offbeat with Brian Reitzell

Brian Reitzell talks about his work on the show Hannibal and what went into the 3rd and (as of now) final season. Find his music for seasons 1-3 wherever you buy and listen to music. This piece was produced by Garrett D. Tiedemann. Music was by Garrett D. Tiedemann and This Line. To hear more from This Line visit American Residue Records.

Offbeat with Paul Fonfara

Paul Fonfara is a local legend of the Minneapolis music scene, having developed the band Painted Saints and playing with bands like Dreamland Faces and Brass Messengers. This after long travels with Devotchka and Jim White on his way to the current musical travelogue. Shifting more to a film composer role he received a grant to develop a record and make the leap. The record became its own thing that speaks further to his composer sensibilities and why this is in many ways where he belongs. 

Offbeat: What is Alpha 1?

What is Alpha-1? was originally produced in the Spring of 2015 for the Third Coast International Audio Festival ShortDocs Challenge. The story was trying to provide a small glimpse at the personal experience of the disease, which is still widely unknown to the masses. It is being released via The White Whale in prep for a collaborative episode with the podcast ARRVLS that will go further in depth with the experience of living with the genetics. Look for the ARRVLS episode next week.

Find the original post in the Third Coast library: http://www.thirdcoastfestival.org/library/1711-what-is-alpha-1

Aplha-1 is a genetic condition passed from parents to their children that may result in serious lung disease in adults and/or liver disease at any age.

For more information visit: http://www.alpha1.org/