Dear Jack B. (Eno)
Brian Eno's Diary: my favourite clips
Dear Jack B.,
Happy Friday! As if it’s been a whole week since i saw you play
Can’t wait to see the 90s Wim Hof clip you’ve found for our next post.
I’ve just finished A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno's Diary and i’ve pulled out my fave bits. The following struck a chord when i think about this new Fffirst Time phase we’re trying to enter:
Less exploring of all the possible journeys you could make; more determination to take one journey (even if the choice of it is initially arbitrary) and make it take you somewhere.
Namely finishing stuff.
I’m definitely an all-possible-journeys guy by nature — holding on to the fantasy of how good it will feel once you’ve finished them all feels less scary in the moment than starting, middling or eep, finishing a creative project. This goes right down to the number of tabs i have open on a daily basis, 18 of them as i type.
So is it my fault we’ve got so many loose ends, false starts, fresh avenues to go down — or are you a bit like that too?
There’s a related bit where Eno is writing a letter to U2 about the idea of creating ‘an imaginary “surround” for the music’, like an imaginary film.
He remembers thinking the song Blue Velvet was ‘so pathetically white and wimpy’, before seeing the eponymous David Lynch film, where ‘it became weird and mysterious — as though the song was a kind of veil that concealed all sorts of kinky undertones’. It was ‘now a different piece of music’.
Whereas Eno suggests simple po-mo gestures for the U2 album, the ‘titles could allude to an imaginary film’ or there could be a filmic record cover, it fffeels like with fffirst time we’re more like: fffuck it, looks like we’re also making a fffilm… But then never fffinish it, see above.
Sometimes, the daydream of whipping whole contexts out like a tablecloth. Green-screened into the Western of your life.
Some other bits I liked:
From 23 JULY
Wasps — drank one in the garden of a pub (quickly spat it out before damage), got stung by another (on the foot — very painful), and discovered a third sitting next to me on the train.
From 29 JULY
Cage’s realisation: that ‘composing’ could consist simply of creating occasions for the act of listening
From ROLES AND GAME-PLAYING
At Christmas and other times the whole family play quite elaborate games which allow normally retiring people to become suddenly enormously extrovert and funny. Watching them, it occurred to me that the great thing about games is that they in some sense free you from being yourself: you are 'allowed' forms of behaviour that otherwise would be gratuitous, embarrassing or completely irrational. Accordingly, I came up with these role-playing games for musicians.
Of the musical rpg he goes on to describe, role number 3 stuck out lol:
3
You are a member of an early 21st-century ‘Art and Language’ band. You make incantations, permutations of something between speech and singing. The language you use is mysterious and rich — and you use a mélange of several languages, since anyway most of your audience now speak a new patois which effortlessly blends English, Japanese, Spanish, Chinese and Wolof. Using onstage computers, instant sampling techniques and long-delay echo systems, you are able to build up dense clouds of coloured words during performances. Your audience regards you as the greatest exponent of live abstract poetry.
Samuel Beckett is a big influence.
hahaha
Ages in days
I’m 11,805 at the time of writing.
30 SEPTEMBER
Irial: ‘Dad, how does a world get made?’
Dad: Long explanation.
Irial: ‘Is that really true? Let me look into the bottom of my heart and see.’ (Looks down T-shirt.)
Seamus Heaney, asked how he’ll handle Nobel fame: ‘In Ireland, everybody is famous from birth and they become skilful in handling these matters.’
Makes me think of:
(Oblique Strategy: ‘Don’t be afraid of using your own ideas.’)
On our last call, when I threatened a new possible project titled Clout, you said something similar to the ‘more determination to take one journey’ quote above All fffur coat. Fffalse starts. Fffuck it I’m starting.
New tab: Clout will not have been about art and marketing, a portrait of the artist as self-promoter; how the pressure to have loads of Instagram followers has promulgated a generation of quirky painters; how, following journalism’s nosedive, the allure of going paid on Substack has launched a thousand niche blogs, which are paradoxically all so idiosyncratic they all sound the same.
Since i’ll be starting and never finishing Clout, i enjoyed reading Eno’s riff on the artist as snake-oil salesperson. Exploring the critic Robert Hughes’ assertion that ‘Basquiat’s only real talent was for charisma-creation and self-promotion’, he asks, ‘Is this myth-making actually the process whereby grown-up people create valuable experiences for themselves?’
If so, art is an ‘elaborate polka of romanticization and charisma-manufacture, of canonization’ — but ‘Is it necessary that we be “believers” rather than “sceptics” for us to have the right kind of experience?’
Where I’d been interested in how the social imperative to self-promote is shaping the kind of art being made, Eno suggests all art is marketing:
Suppose you redescribe the job ‘artist’ as ‘a person who creates situations in which you can have art experiences’. Then you might accept the notion that an artist could be someone who convinces you, by some means or another, including outrageous fakery, that the test tone you’re about to hear is in fact a piece of music.
Suppose now that these means can include the creation of ‘media events’, networks of spin and buzz that make you think you are in the presence of something special — the event itself is minimal, but the spin is sufficiently powerful to infect you with enthusiasm, and you have a great time. Is that going too far ?
Suppose that you could even think of yourself as the media event, as the experience-trigger itself, so that everything to which you simply directed your attention transmuted mysteriously into art.
And suppose that people wanted that, and wanted to believe in it, and wanted to make each other believe in it. Who is then the artist? You or them?
Good job i can close that tab now. Hope the show goes well, clout a leg! And have fun in Bath
yrs sincerely,
Godot x
Excellent 👏