Reaching Through to the Other Side - Real Efforts (Real People)

Could this be the foretold, fanciful something... or just another of the numbing nothings. Fleeting grins and mouse-clicked morphine shots guzzled quickly and forgotten just as fast -these quips, these videos, these digital bathroom stall one-liner philosophic-puns...

We have a forum here. What do we really want to start talking about... How about the fact that you all have a guitar, drum-kit, or at least one shoddy amp in your bedroom; ...that you're apart of some alternate-community, a bizarro block where you wear your true faces, true wardrobes, (and hopefully speak your true minds...) A potential cooperative...

I am ruminating on the wondrous and eerie workings of this great Influencing Machine... (...read more from On The Media's recently published comic-book hero / award winning reporter/media analyst Brook Gladstone)... The media and it's various evolutions, inevitably, leading me to hone in on the snippy snack-vending conveyor belt of every-little-thing's...known as Facebook...

In this new book, we are encouraged to play an active role in our media consumption; to become, as it were, netizens... "assemble(d) in networks of peers" drawing "attention to unreported information..."

This has worked, and continues to work, week to week, year to year, from effecting reforms of election ballot returns to spreading evidential indictments of tyrannical governments or brutalities committed by authorities that can thus spur the kinds of movements akin to the Arab Spring or the Occupy Wall Street's American Autumn...

Real Efforts... one might say... by Real People...


Fate would have it that, as I write this, I'm listening to the latest single by local singer/songwriter Ben West, who, under the moniker Real Efforts by Real People, has written a couple of EP's with fellow Great Fiction mates' Danny Zott and Kris Pooley; a delicate, organ-thrummed indie-pop sound, warmed with syrupy crooned vocals and decorated with a quieter, chill-er chamber-pop vibe, jangled with shuffling rhythms and a few surfy guitar flares; it glistens like the multitudinous sunrise-reflecting dew drops upon blades of mid-Spring grass.....kinda nice to hear it in the early winter time.

Anyway....

I'm not naive about my readership here... I'm assuming anyone picking this blog up is made up, mostly, by those already lassoed into a Facebook "group" recently put up called Club Cool. It comprises quite a considerable round-up of those persistently playing in / contributing to / collaborating within and continually galvanizing -the Detroit music scene... If, albeit, maybe more so heavier on the rock sound side of things...

But that's still a start. I mean, what are we doing here? You're on your computer right now because you don't want to be thinking about your day job - you're likely even at you're day job, killing time, and reading about your own respective local music scene, (Detroit, or elsewhere) -and daydreaming about the creative-arts-Xanadu it could one day resemble, further soothing yourself with the high you get from writing a new song or performing in front of your friends and that feeling, however deluded or substantial, you get... (is it true inspiration, is it mad narcissism, is it genuine and effective local pride),
...that feeling... that these weekly gatherings of local bands upon wooden stages under blue lights with loud music and people shouting into each other's ears per conversation while gripping plastic cups slippery with condensation...
...that these things are building something...building toward something.

Too much coffee...

Anyway - Facebook was integral in coordinating the recent demonstrations for Occupy Detroit. That's one thing.
Meanwhile, as you can read in December's Ann Arbor Current - in the Rock Column, I've been ruminating on the potential of music scenes. It's a painfully old and run-out question. But, seriously, not to get all jittery and bittery - not to get all real world pessimist like the sweater-vested dad who turns the stabbing white fluorescents back on to dash the dim dremay ambiance of your teenage basement dance party...

But ...what else are we doing, here? - save the heartbreakingly beautiful and by all means acceptable/commendable act of pure expression out into the void - When someone starts wondering what more we can do, beyond posting the next album on bandcamp... What, then, is the answer? (Cuz I don't have it, yet).

But, can't we find it together - and can Club Cool, as an ostensible "spontaneous network" of social interaction with which we can draw attention to... shit, man, anything... not just our music scene, not just the fine work of our many non-profits, or the multitude of issues facing our community, from education, to infrastructure... But to stir up echoes, amplify our sounds... One gigantic squeaky wheel for some kind of oil.
I don't know...

"Hindrances, distresses of substance / I turn them over / Is this something?"



I am also listening to Shara Worden's latest work, as My Brightest Diamond - All Things Will Unwind - an album of imposing baroque-pop elegance, wispy, operatic, autumnal dreamscapes - cleansing my palette of, by-comparison, overly-esoteric or experimental offerings and grand presentations from other songstresses such as a St. Vincent or a Bjork or a Florence... This, this is what I want to be listening to, in my hermetic living room scenes, to warm to, by an already crackling fire, as the skies become a carousel...
I'll probably write more about it later... as I know I'll be listening to it, more, later, as well... So why not?
 
"One foot follows the other / This stone, this finite place / Is it limitless? / / To touch the boundless / I hear a measureless rise" (My Brightest Diamond - "Reaching Through to the Other Side").  


Read on: Yochai Benkler's "Wealth of Networks"
Brooke Gladstone / John Neufeld's "The Influencing Machine"