Bizarre Statue

In the past year, particularly, I’ve come across several comments, both direct and indirect, from or about artists who have basically cut social media from their existence. I get it, and I’m almost there. But whatever its problems, I’ve connected with some wonderful musicians through social media, and Sugaar Pan is high on that list.

To the point: Sugaar Pan makes human music, and at some deep level this is the only kind of music there is. I wouldn’t push that point because I can imagine exceptions, but I’ll stand by it. We’re at a point in time where our machines have become sophisticated enough that they can appear to create things on their own. I’m not in a panic as an artist about AI, though its implications for the business of art don’t favor artists. I feel relatively sanguine about our situation because I’ve read many artists express what for me had been an intuition, that they had never come across an AI-generated anything that moved them. That’s my experience, so I imagine people will continue to seek out human art for the foreseeable future.

“Hug a Tree and Burn the Forest” is a six-song EP, though a long one, a bit under a half-hour if I do the math right — some people would release it and call it an album. Cosmetically, a person might name some musical antecedents but for me that misses the point. Some people talk about art generally and say that there’s nothing new under the sun, but I say the opposite: all art is new. I’m listening to this, right now as I write, and it’s something I haven’t heard before. I can’t give a higher compliment.

I’ve made a decision that on the rare occasions that I feel a need to make some point, I need to write up a blog post and do it as coherently as I can, rather than toss off a social media comment. My impulse to write about Sugaar Pan’s music is because when I hear it, there is very clearly a human being on the other end of it. I listen to all kinds of music, including entirely electronic stuff, but if I don’t feel that connection to a human being on the other end, the music leaves me cold. Sugaar Pan has that human quality in spades, and in particular it comes through wooden flutes. The music is instrumental, but truly, the flute here is a human voice. I imagine the mechanism for that feeling is the breath: the need for a person to breathe conditions the music itself. I know there’s a person there, in the most fundamental way.

More and more in my life, in many ways, I find myself saying “no” to what have become normal media. I’m reading more than I had for a while, and I consistently go to the movie theater. Indeed, I haven’t watched any movies or shows on my computer (I ditched my iPad a while ago) in months. I won’t say I’ll never do it, but internally something in me is seeking media that asks me to actively seek it. I don’t have a music streaming service. I hear more live music these days than I have since I was in grad school, and I buy more music from DIY musicians now than I have since I would buy stuff at the local record store in college, lovingly stocked with cassette-only releases from the good old days of tape labels. Sugaar Pan fits very well into this approach.

I was very happy to see Ildikó Enyedi’s “Silent Friend” recently at the Aero, and actually had not been aware that she had been scheduled to do a Q&A when I bought the ticket. So, walking up to the theater, I had a burst of joy when I saw her name on the marquee.

The film was great, but one particular point Enyedi made in the discussion that followed really stuck with me. When a person is living in a system which she or her feels is — I think this is how she put it — “not very nice,” then one has, she said at first, two choices. A person can choose to conform to the system despite misgivings. A second possibility is to fight the system directly.

After what I felt to be a pause, she said that there was also a third option. One can simply live and act in a way that is true to oneself regardless of the broader systemic context. Very significantly, she did not say to ignore the system, but rather that a person can choose not to let the system define one’s being. This doesn’t mean everything is okay and often people who choose this third option get hurt just the same as those who fight directly or indeed those conform. But there is an integrity in it, and that’s valuable. For me right now, her point was good to hear.

The film itself was fantastic, and especially heartening to see because it’s completely idiosyncratic. Nothing makes me happier than seeing any kind of artist follow her or his own instincts along a unique path. I have a pet theory that everyone has unique art, broadly defined, to bring to the world, if only the person can connect to her or his own uniqueness. Enyedi has certainly done this.

Concretely, the film centers around a ginkgo tree in a German botanical garden, with three diffuse narratives of people in different times — shot, effectively, with different film stock — revolving around the tree. At some basic level the film is about the plant, or plants, as there’s a geranium that can be considered a significant though minor character, much like “Star Wars” is actually about two droids rather than people. Again, Enyedi has connected to that uniqueness that every person brings to this world: I truly would not have thought to make a tree the main character of anything, but she did, and I’m better off because she did.

Go see the film in a theater if possible. Always, films in theaters. Books and records at home, films in theaters.

On a good friend’s recommendation I saw Chloe Zhao’s “Hamnet” recently, in a theater, I’m happy to say. It’s worth your time, for sure.

To be clear, I’ll never write a review, not here in any event and very likely not ever in the future. I’ve written reviews before, but if a review isn’t willing to assess quality, it’s no good. It’s like playing D&D where nobody’s character can get killed. For pushing 10 years now I’ve had a “no negativity in public” policy, and it means that on the internet I deal with things I can reference positively. So, never a review. Assume that anything I talk about is worth your time, as “Hamnet” definitely is.

I always have time for a work of art that is about art, and among other things that’s what “Hamnet” is. Very specifically, it’s about tragedy and catharsis. Agnes Hathaway and William Shakespeare’s son Hamnet dies. Each more or less grieves separately. The film at root is about Agnes, and Jessie Buckley deserves the praise she’s received. But the character of Shakespeare is both well-written and performed, by Paul Mescal. Shakespeare’s process of grief and its transformation results in his famous play, and the film culminates in a performance Agnes attends.

Agnes arrives in deep grief and anger, and very correctly the film offers her no resolution. Real life doesn’t resolve. What the film does is show, very concretely, how art transforms, rather than resolves. While there are definitely levels of grief and trauma in life, everyone has their measure of both. This is what we see in the picture above: onstage, Hamlet dies. Agnes, by this time engulfed by the performance, extends her hands to the actor. Quickly, others in the audience do the same. Everyone brings their own experience to the work and in the process is transformed. Nothing resolves.

Like I mentioned above, I always have time for art about art, and what the film does exceptionally well is demonstrate — demonstrate, rather than tell — that art is a function of human life, and specifically of human relationships. As the film, and I imagine the novel as well, shows it, Shakespeare for very understandable reasons isn’t able to express his grief in precise sentences so that Agnes clearly understands everything he feels. Over some unimaginably long time, people have found that the various arts express things that need expression but which otherwise would remain unexpressed. E.P. Thompson wrote that class is not a thing, but a relationship, and I’d say the same of art. There needs to be human beings on either end of the relationship.

As an aside, I think I worry less about A.I. art than a lot of people, because I’m absolutely certain that it’s not art if a machine made it, and because art is a basic human function, people will continue to need it. A.I. can give us art-flavored products, but not art. Hopefully I’m right about this.

I was able to get to the Old Town Music Hall for a recent showing, with live organ accompaniment, of Buster Keaton’s “Sherlock, Jr.” It’s public domain now, so watch without guilt. Keaton would surely be pleased. If you’re in Southern California, even if you’re not particularly near El Segundo, take a look at the Old Town Music Hall’s schedule. It’s a true blessing to have around and every showing has a performance on the Mighty Wurlitzer, which is a musical experience unlike any other.

Music was always my first love and some of my earliest great memories are of playing my mom’s copies of “Revolver” and “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” on my little kid record player, damaging the records in the process to be sure but without diminishing the joy the music brought me. “Star Wars” was a bit later, on my eighth birthday at, if I’m right, the Cinema 21 in San Diego. I was hooked on film from then on, and was completely put out when “Star Wars” lost the Best Picture Oscar to “Annie Hall” some months later.

Interestingly, it was as a young adolescent that my dad took me and a friend of mine to see a Woody Allen double feature. I can’t remember precisely what we saw, but quickly, and probably because Allen did comedy, his work was my in, so to speak, to film as art.

I mention all this because it led me to Keaton. In tenth grade, I think, I read something that unfavorably compared the last moments of “Manhattan,” so thoroughly messed up we know now, with the end of Chaplin’s “City Lights.” New to all this, I somewhat skeptically watched the Chaplin film once I found a VHS copy, and to my surprise I became a Chaplin fanatic. Indeed, “City Lights” trounces “Manhattan,” and not only in its ending. Chaplin in his turn led me to Keaton.

If I had to pick a favorite filmmaker, I probably would pick Keaton. I don’t say “best.” “Favorite” is a different matter. Keaton’s work, ranging from great to really great throughout his career working independently, is an almost perfect match for what I value in art: simultaneously light and substantial. The closest cousin to Keaton’s work in this sense for me is the first Basie band, the one with Herschel Evans and Lester Young.

Much is made of Keaton’s technical innovations in “Sherlock, Jr.” for good reason, and the point is often made that what raises Keaton’s work to the highest level is that while he was as technical a filmmaker as any there’s been, the technique is not at all the point. Everything produced laughs, and this gets to the quality of lightness in his work that I value so deeply and which for me is the primary function of art. My feeling is that all of us who love art in any form have experienced it: we watch, we listen, and when our guard is down we’re somehow lifted, clearly felt but with no precise sense of any place we’re rising toward or even a direction. It’s just light.

The famous scene in which Keaton uses a vaudeville trick and disappears through a fence with his assistant’s help is as good an example of this as I know. There’s plenty of technical discussion to be had about how Keaton filmed something that we, watching it, know is impossible and yet know equally well that what we saw wasn’t fake. But the real point is that Keaton puts the viewer in position of deep unknowing, stunned in a good way.

I’ve read and, in 2025, seen/heard commentary about Keaton’s work, in “Sherlock, Jr.” particularly, that the response is “how did he do that?” But that’s not the actual response at all of a person watching the picture. It’s the response of someone who has already finished watching the picture. In the moment, the feeling is completely inexplicable without an impulse to explain: it’s just an experience. For me, this is the goal and also the function of all art, and whatever technical questions there need to be revolve around how to produce moments like that.

This gets to the matter of substance. Keaton’s work is light, but it’s absolutely substantial. He is definitely doing particular things to produce particular responses in people, and he used or developed new methods because the old ones, not very old in 1924, for sure, wouldn’t produce the desired result. Orson Welles, particularly in “F for Fake” but across his work generally, emphasized the artificiality of art as a process, and though we definitely can appreciate how Keaton did his own stunts, there’s no filmmaker whose work is more artificial than Keaton’s. Everything we see on the screen is concrete, produced, developed, and all very intentionally. But when it builds and then hits us, in the audience, the experience is like nothing is there. That’s the trick.

I saw “Hamnet” a couple days ago, and it seems to me that while the film is about a lot of things, the last stretch of it is basically about the above. I’m not one of those people who goes on about the classics or whatever, and with the grave authority of a history major I can guarantee that concept of “Western Civilization” are not useful for understanding the Greeks, the Romans, and either Medieval or Renaissance (whatever we take those terms to mean) Europeans, but it definitely can help explain why 19th century imperialists were willing to slaughter so many people around the world. This is to say that I have no interest in Shakespeare as canon, but I definitely will say that the man knew how to write and more specifically knew how to put together a play, to be performed, in front of an audience. The film really nails how art hits an audience, and if you can manage to see it in a theater it’s worth it.

As a preface, I’ve long felt that music and musicians were better served by print media than digital, bearing in mind that my experience of print media included zines. I’ve considered doing a zine but the truth is that I’m a musician and not a writer, and whenever I start to write something I have a nagging, guilty feeling that I should work on music instead. That said, there’s room in life for detours if the detours are positive, and I know that independent, living musicians can always benefit from someone taking the time to respond to their work, and the type of brief posts that social media engenders don’t do music and musicians justice. So, here’s something about Luiza Brina’s “Prece.”

I heard “Oração 17 (risco)” on an NTS Radio show and as has become an intermittent habit, I made a quick search, found the album, and nearly immediately bought it.

I have a pet theory that at least for US popular music culture, subject to disagreement, that the last truly great musician who combined top-level commercial success with not only artistic integrity but artistic innovation, whatever that means, was Prince. He arrived at the tail-end of a music industry that had began and grown by casting its net widely: lots of small labels, regional and local labels, finding musicians and pressing records. The big hits paid for the merely adequate sellers and covered the losses as they happened. Things consolidated, and increasingly the companies put effort into cultivating massive hits on established models. Likely, this was sensible business but it meant was that as music increasingly became product (and worse, with the internet, “content”), music that did not follow an established model became a commercial liability. That is to say, the more unique the music, the greater the commercial liability, at least from the vantage point of large commercial labels, increasingly as time passed themselves assets in larger corporations.

A massive casualty in this process has been melody. For whatever reason, I have this feeling that a real melody, difficult to define precisely, has some kind of living presence, like a unique being. Some unique beings are simple, and some complex, and with a complex being, to simplify it is to kill it. Its complexity just needs to be accepted, because it’s what makes it unique, and as something unique, beautiful. I’m happy if any musician has massive success, and the current crop of truly big performers seems like they’re largely on the side of whatever is good and right in the world. But I haven’t heard someone working at that level who made me think, “now there is a real melodist” since probably D’Angelo, and he seems to have slipped in to that level somewhat by accident.

All this is to say that among other things Luiza Brina is what I would call a real melodist. The various musical traditions in Brazil surely encourage this, and I also imagine that musicians outside the Anglosphere are insulated from some of the musical constriction the industry places on actual musicians. There are a couple pieces on “Prece” that function as introductory or transition pieces, but broadly speaking each track on the record is a living, breathing being, identifiable through its unique melody like a person can be identified by her or his face or voice.

I can’t give a higher compliment to a musician than this. Why did I get drawn to music as a kid and stay with it for the rest of my life, which is hopefully in its middle, its early middle better yet? Because like so many musicians, I encountered a piece of music, mostly but not entirely in song form, as a friend or companion. I had a sense that there was not only something but someone there. I still get that feeling, and that feeling is what makes the deep experience of music inexplicable.

Needless to say, melody is one aspect of music that some musicians lean into and others don’t, and Brina is in command of her music as a whole. I have no idea what the budget for the project was but it feels like a proper record from the good old days, the likes of which were recorded with real musicians in the Capitol Records building back in the day, though with a skillful use of electronics that obviously is new. My point is the feeling: “Prece” feels real, and it’s a sign of Brina’s command of her process that it does.

From what I can see, Brina’s been making music independently for years, and indeed one of the things on her Bandcamp clearly has a cassette cover. There’s a link to a website, which appears to be down, regrettably. I found her stuff about six months too late, because I would definitely have gone to her L.A. show last year had I known her music.

I recently got to see Werner Herzog take questions at the Egyptian Theater here after a screening of “The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser,” and in response to a foolishly-phrased question about the supposed death of cinema, Herzog pointed out that cinema is far from dead if you look at the world as a whole and include independent filmmakers. What is crucial, Herzog said, is for those of us who love cinema to concretely patronize cinema. Go to the movies, go out to the movies. If a movie you want to see is playing, go see it. The problem, he stressed, is not a lack of worthwhile films. The same obviously applies to music.