Last Sunday night my girlfriend and I saw Shellac perform the third of three performances at Lincoln Hall in Chicago, Illinois and were forever changed. The next day at work we found it difficult to describe what we had witnessed. Simply – Shellac is not a band. Shellac is a way of being – mercilessly patient, ruthlessly precise, gloriously faceted. Todd Trainer (drums) is a god among men, a fact made all the more evident by his position at the front of the stage – the traditional rear apex of the trio formation (guitar and bass forming the outward facing bottom of the typical inverted pyramid, more often than not regretfully adorned by a preening ass forming the outward facing tip of a thoroughly fraudulent gem) is in this case taken by single cymbal elevated to an outstretched arms reach above the band members (a detail to be noted like the loaded gun in the first act of a play by Chekov – as the performance reached a crescendo nearly an hour later as all three band members took their place on the kit, joining forces near the end of – was it Watch Song? I’m honestly not certain). As I watched the opening acts moments before the band took the stage, adorned with a single white flag baring the bands morally instructive logo, I wondered if Shellac would dispense with the conventions of rock lighting, which dictate a mindless refrain of lazily wandering, multi-hued spots illuminating feeble wafts of artificial fog – all of which were in evidence in the hours before they took the stage. I had been a little afraid that a second city sense of shame – ne nonchalance might concur that considerations of lighting and showmanship were incidentals unworthy of attention - afterall - in a sense one could argue that the sublime restraint that the band’s overall decisions exemplify is a kind of purified and absolute articulation of what in lesser hands presents itself as Minnesota nice – noncommittal, accommodating, un-presupposing. Needless to say – I was not disappointed. Shellac may be modest – but I would never call them ‘nice.’ The unforgiving lighting was high and unmodulated. Bassist Bob Weston was first on stage, dressed in a baseball jersey emblazoned in all caps “North America” (as in ‘Shellac of’…as they are also known) playing the interminable riff of the now infamous ten minute plus minimalist opus Didn’t We Deserver A Look at You the Way You Really Are. With Trainer taking center stage in matching jersey, his demented gaze like that of Saturn himself, Albini on vocals and guitar (occasionally on both consubstantially – as he later screamed into the magnets of his instrument during the second half of the nights performance producing the psychotic return of the sonic repressed to Peter Frampton’s blasé driftwood solo from Rock’s supposed Golden Age a young adult’s lifetime ago) took the stage to his left, removing his navy blue “E” emblazoned work shirt to reveal his matching uniform with its absurdly long 4 digit number on the back, donning a blood red cap, strapped his guitar firmly to his midsection above his slight baseball player’s paunch to launch into the opening lines of the song which Trainer and Weston have sustained for nearly twenty minutes in his absence “for decades….” The band held the stage as exemplary figures of Battaile’s decapitated anthropos, only magnificently inverted. The universe not a gob of a spit, but an asymmetrical five dimensional diamond of sound. Later, Bob Weston is as sardonic as his bass playing – a fact made manifest during the ‘question and answer’ period  – a Shellac tradition which takes the edge off of what could become a too-brittle blade of an event were it to go on indefinitely. At a glance it might seem that this part of the performance softens the blow of an otherwise relentless pummeling, but its real purpose seems to me to be twofold: first it reiterates the overriding restraint of the entire endeavor by (temporarily) varying its intensity; and second – it puts one at ease – allowing the adrenaline surge of the first half to subside and find release – just long enough to reset one’s senses – all the better to ravage them in the second half. But there’s more to it than that. What the comic intermission does is to allow the audience to acknowledge their relief – their collective gratitude – that something could actually be this exactingly executed. This Good. It feels like a miracle. Post-coital. The band doesn’t have a set list. The songs they perform (which – since their albums arrive so infrequently – roughly half a decade – more than a single presidential term between them – at this point twenty years on from their first seven inch are for the members of their ever-faithful audience near hymns to psychic resistance to all that is mediocre and half formed) develop and solidify from improvisation, so it makes perfect sense that the performance of these holy rites incorporate the spirit of spontaneity that gave rise to them. What’s always most fascinated me about their albums is the way Steve Albini (who needs no introduction) is able to suspend these unruly beasts of searing sound in the middle of an otherwise rigid song structure. It is as though Trainer and Weston through the discipline of their playing create the necessary conditions for the summoning of four-dimensional beings, which never fail to untether one’s sense of composure. Could these solos (such as the one that takes hold at the one minute mark of Canada, on 1998’s Terraform) be the sonic emissaries of the Machine Elves Terrence McKenna claimed to have encountered while tripping on DMT? Perhaps. But what makes their appearance so astonishing here is that they are earned. This is not the pseudo-sublime transport of the easy fix. These are the hard-earned rewards of exacting judgment. Genuine spontaneity is not easy. It takes time…twenty years, to be precise.

“So the work of art, as has been generally argued since the time when the slave-owning societies which gave us the word democracy also gave us aesthetics…is in a sense at the very least a kind of training ground for the very idea of difficulty, a kind of unserious zone where the serious might be properly considered as a form, difficulty turned into a game.”

Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe

“Full head of nothing
Fail to see the difference
Fail to feel the mercy
Off to join the flagstaff
Always crush me
Picture my amazement
When it doesn’t always pain me
And I will reproduce faster

Commitment trailblazer
Your trail is quite a puzzle
And you are such a daredevil
And you are such a collector
Always crush me
Picture my amazement
When it doesn’t always pain me
And I will reproduce faster”

R. Pollard, Guided By Voices

I’ve been sitting on this essay (of sorts) for weeks for a couple of reasons, one of which is that one of the last images I posted garnered enough attention that I started to feel a little self conscious about speaking up, and also a little more committed to my studio proper – since it was the source of this image which had gone micro-viral. Like a lot of people who choose to blog as a halfway point between silence and speech, I initially found this platform a relief from the pressure (mostly self imposed) to be cautious and reticent in my public behavior. As I pretty much expected, this is very much the ideal site for repressive desublimation. Moreover - what can be said of the internet generally can also be said of tumblr: it offers an expanded connectivity who’s flipside is increasing isolation; it holds out the promise of increased visibility who’s flipside is a blasé anonymity; it promises a greater involvement with the world outside of oneself  - but at a crucial distance that seems to grow as the dissociative scope of this particular dreamtime syncs with our nervous systems (or more so the other way around). Recent studies point to an established link between time spent online – especially social media – and depression, mania, and even psychosis in individuals who might otherwise not be susceptible to it. Rest assured dear readers – I have not succumbed. But I have been a little nervous to jump back in the fray. For starters – just as each image posted on my other, less diaristic blogs exerts it’s pressure on every previous and future post (most especially on those closest to it in time and placement) each statement made here builds upon, reiterates, or contradicts the others made up to this point – not to mention those which will be made in the future – though how exactly this differs from life in general is worth considering.  It’s been said that this is exactly how these media sharing platforms in particular (tumblr, vimeo, youtube, pinterest, facebook et al.) consume our attention. By providing a seemingly perfectible outlet for expressing oneself though the indirection of presenting things we like to the world, we divert more and more of our attention to this space which seems so connected, and both curatorialy expansive, and masterable in a way which we ourselves rarely feel in our daily lives offline. And yet this feeling of perfectibility is elusive at best. Yes – we are each the masters of our domain (and yes – those of you who remember are welcome to think of Seinfeld here) within the confines of our separate blogs, but what happens to all of our scrupulous curatorial attention when it is scrambled in real time with the posts of other users on the dashboards of our followers? There is a kind of virginal space that unfurls before each user when they first encounter another’s blog – a world unto itself – expressing the judgment and character (or lack there of) of the blogger. But once you like that blog enough to follow it, what happens? It enters the feed with all the other blogs you follow, and just like any other long term relationship, it’s up to you to devote sufficient attention to it so that it doesn’t start to recede into the background. Here I mostly speak and exhibit things I’m thinking about from the studio or related experiences, but elsewhere I mostly devote my love (be it tender or punishing) to the work of others. I’m interested in how these fragments contextualize each other – and in how by contextualizing the work of others we contextualize ourselves, but I’m also interested in something else, not unrelated, which I’ve been wanting to address, but unsure of how to go about doing so for a little over a month now - namely that sites like tumblr function as mediums for many of us - I think in more ways than one.  What is expressed (again in more ways than one) is not only ourselves, but something collective, and something beyond the collective, which is enabled by it.  I’m thinking here not of matter, but of energy. Think Madame Blavatsky and Teilhard de Chardin. This is the sense of medium which I would like to invoke.

For those of you who have followed me this far, permit me to present to you a recent acquaintance, one Maxwell’s Demon. For those of you who are unfamiliar, a brief introduction, from our favorite source: