I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: COLIN STETSON-Those Who Didn’t Run (10″ vinyl) [CST084] (2011).

This 10″ vinyl contains two more of Stetson’s amazing bass saxophone solo monstrosities.  Each is over ten minutes.  And while ten minutes can be a bit much to take for one of these songs, the music is so powerful and so jaw dropping to listen to that, frankly he could play for days (and maybe he actually could) and I’d enjoy it.

The amusing thing about this 10″ is that when I played it on my record player, I didn’t know what speed to play it at.  And, since the whole platter is full of bass saxophone blasts, and all of the percussion is clacking from the saxophone, I honestly couldn’t tell what speed it was supposed  to be played at.  It wasn’t like a song with vocals or anything.  And the first song I played was the B Side “The end of your suffering ” which is played on a low alto sax–meaning it’s higher than his usual stuff, so the 33RPM actually sounded like it might be right!

After knowing the proper sound (you can stream the music here), it’s funny to hear the slow version–which just sounds meaner and angrier (especially around the 6 minuite mark of “Those Who Didn’t Run,” when he’s really hitting some crazy notes.  But I was so intrigued by the slow version that I went back and listened to both sides at the slow speed, just for fun.  In the dark.  By myself.

[READ:May 22, 2012] “About the Typefaces Not Used in This Edition”

This seemed like a perfect piece to put next to Rivka Galchen’s piece about the future of paper.  This is listed as a short story, and in a way it is, although not in any conventional sense.  This was published in 2002, long before Safran Foer’s book of cut up text, Tree of Codes was even conceived, so it’s obvious that he has been interested in type, in the way words play off of each other, in the way words appear on the page for quite some time.

This short piece (two pages) discusses the eight fonts that the editor chose not to use for publishing “this book.”  I don’t know if this references a specific book or not, although he does include character names and broad concepts from “the book”: Henry, Elena, an unsafe wooden bridge, the last word is “free,” and many times the words, “I love you.”

The typefaces are:

• Elena, 10 Point:  This typeface disintegrates over time, especially with repetition, the more the words are used, the fainter they become.
• Tactil, Variable Font: This typeface depends on the heaviness with which the words are typed.  Loud words are big and bold, while whispers are nearly invisible.
• Trans-1, 10 Point: This typeface refreshes itself on the screen with synonyms of the existing words, showing the richness of the language.
• Trans-2, 10 Point: This typeface refreshes itself on the screen with antonyms of the existing words, often freezing when it cannot find a suitable one.
• Trans-3, 10 Point: This typeface refreshes itself with the same words–replacing themselves every second–you can’t read the same words twice.
• Aviary, Variable Point: These words are tattooed onto the underside of birds’ wings.
• Iceland, 22:13:36. April 11, 2006, Variable Point: Each person living in Iceland gets one word from the book.  They are given the word in descending order of the age of the person, and each person says his word consecutively.  It didn’t work because of the overwhelming fear of mortality that it introduced.
• Real Time, Real World, To Scale: This typeface grew organically as emoticons and symbols began taking over the language.

This was a fun piece, perhaps going too far, but really, it works as meditation on what a book is, what words are and how we will ultimately read or experience books in the future.  And it’s kind of funny too.  It’s worth a read.