Bizarre Statue

A few goings-on in the world of Bizarre Statue in this September, 2026:

1. Most importantly, there’s a new bit of the ongoing work-in-progress, called “Roughing It.” A part of me thinks it took a while to get to a point where I had a sense of it, but then I realize that outside of a couple very productive summer vacations in college, I’ve never really made a lot of music I’d want to let out into the world. In any event, there’s a slow process I have of getting to know a piece as it’s happening, but nearly always with patience it comes together.

I realize I haven’t written much about the work-in-progress, and that’s because I am not at all sure how it will come together or what it will be. After some dithering, I’ve continued to work on Bitwig, which operates with loops similar to Ableton, and which is still a new process to me. For the moment, what’s of interest is that rather than build up to a final mix, at least for the moment I build up (and very often tear down) various loops until I get a take, rather than a mix. I feel like the process is semi-spontaneous, which isn’t bad. On “Roughing It,” the primary electric guitar and then later the fake Mellotron flute were both done live, and the timing of shifts between sections is done live as well. I’ve figured out some randomization that works well for me, so for several bits rather than have a single repeating loop, the thing randomly bounces between different loops that fit into the same musical slot, so to speak.

My musical ideal is a jazz combo, where real spontaneity is possible. I feel like what I’m getting with this software is variety rather than spontaneity, but it’s really pretty good, and a big shift from working with tape or some kind of software modeled on tape. I’ll see where this goes, but the thought is to take the individual bits and put them in one big file, call it a “set,” and then go from there.

2. I’ve said it before, but the last project, “Two Songs About Fire,” which I guess is still the next project, is definitely done, and it’s found a home on a label. It should come out in 2027, which is great. The music isn’t going to get old, and I suppose good things come to those who wait. I listened to it again a few weeks ago, and it holds up nicely. I imagine I could say a lot about it but the point is that it’s good, I think you’ll like it, and there’s lots of other great music in the world you can enjoy until it comes out.

3. It’s not especially important but if anyone noticed, I’m more or less completely inactive on social media at this point. Probably when “Two Songs About Fire” comes out I’ll post a bit more then, but if anyone wants to be in touch, use the contact form. I’ll respond, I promise!

I’d only seen the three last films Kieślowski made, “Blue,” “White,” and “Red,” before going to five Sunday nights of “Dekalog” at the Los Feliz 3 in June and July. I’d seen those three films more or less when they came out, though I think I saw them all on videotape, possibly not “Red,” though honestly I can’t remember. I know I had seen at least one of them before he died, and I remember clearly asking one of my professors, who happened to be Polish, how to pronounce Kieślowski’s last name. My professor was gratified that I asked for help, incidentally. But in any event, for some reason, I never explored the rest of Kieślowski’s work at the time, though I’d really liked what I’d seen.

I knew “Dekalog” by reputation and there is a large contingent who rates it the single best work made for broadcast television. I don’t deal in ratings but I am not aware of a better series. It definitely can be called a series, I think, though a person could also say that it’s a series of ten one-hour films, in which characters from one occasionally pass through another, with one character, or I might say “figure,” who appears but never speaks in — I just looked it up — all but two of the episodes.

As a work of art, and of cinema in particular, because unlike a lot of excellent television, “Dekalog” benefits from a big screen, the project is worth its reputation, and I don’t feel like I can add much to what’s been written and said at length about it. I’m a musician, and my personal concern is making music as well as I can. To that end, I want to talk about budget. Wikipedia remains a great resource:

The whole thing was done for $100,000, and despite inflation, etc., it struck me. If there was any better proof that what makes a work of art great or interesting is not the size of its budget, “Dekalog” is it. What we should focus on, then, is what in fact makes a work of art meaningful: ideas, emotion, whatever it is a person calls beauty. I’m certain that while working on the project, Kieślowski and crew knocked their heads against the budget constantly, but the real stuff of the work costs nothing. A story, like a melody, costs nothing in itself. There is no replacement in narrative film for a compelling story, and all ten parts have these in spades, however people might prefer some parts over others.

Kieślowski’s skill is that he knows how to use the materials at hand — a small amount of money, everyday locations in more or less a single metropolitan area, precise camera work by skilled cinematographers, and more than anything moving performances by first-rate actors — to communicate the stories as well as anyone has communicated a story. At $100,000 per “Dekalog,” how many “Dekalogs” could we have with the budget of the new Spider-Man movie? Because art is not math, we know that the answer is precisely zero, because the process that gave us the Spider-Man movie, which may have its virtues, could not possibly produce anything near “Dekalog.”

In many ways, musicians are more fortunate than filmmakers, because for us, if we’re skilled, the amount of money we need to produce extraordinary music is really very little. We really don’t need a better guitar. We need to play better music on the guitar we have. If we keep this in mind the results are better and definitely cheaper to produce.

Again, lots of people have said more or less what I would say about “Dekalog” more skillfully and definitely more concisely than I could say it. But a couple things struck me about the work as I watched it over the course of five weeks. One is that keeping each part to basically one hour strikes me as a liberating constraint if I can call it that, along the lines of Welles’ famous line, reported by Henry Jaglom, that “the enemy of art is the absence of limitations.” Certainly this applies to the budget, too. The editing is brisk, and I imagine (pure imagining) Kieślowski asking Ewa Smal, the editor, “how can we get this shorter?”

A particular shot stands out in my memory, probably because it ended the second parts. The shot is a very brief response from a doctor to a patient, revealing, though obliquely, an enormous amount about the doctor’s long-term inner life. There is barely enough footage to contain the actual dialogue, and the effect is stunning. Very likely a lesser filmmaker would have stretched the shot out, and a still lesser filmmaker would have slowly zoomed in on the doctor’s face after he had spoken. The effect, in these lesser filmmakers’ hands, would be no different than the awful tendency in some films made with contempt for their audiences, where we see a shot of some group of people running away, and then in the next shot we have a closeup of someone saying, “they’re running away!” Kieślowski respects his audience by giving us what we need and no more. This is how things should be done in general, absent some particular, compelling reason.

For me, the last two big projects I’ve done, the second finished but not yet released, have followed the 18-minute optimal length for a vinyl record side. At some point the things may come out on vinyl, but that would be icing on the cake, so to speak. What’s more important to me is that it was actually a struggle to keep things brief. I cut out a ton of stuff, particularly with the second project, and even with the music I used on the final project, more often than not the music that made the cut was a minute-long bit taken from a longer piece, in some cases quite a bit longer. I felt at times that I was being a bit brutal, actually, but the result was good, and also forcing myself — not so much forcing the music but forcing myself — to work within an 18-minute side got me to places musically I would never have gotten if I’d only worked without constraints. Working without constraints is a good and necessary part of the process, but it’s one part rather than the whole thing.

I got a few paragraphs into writing something about David Lynch, as I’ve been going to see screenings of “The Return” recently. But the truth is that you know Lynch, or almost certainly do, but you most likely don’t know Kukan Effect’s work, and so Kukan Effect is a better use of our time.

I came across Kukan Effect’s music because my Bandcamp stats, such as they are, showed that someone had come to my Bandcamp page from Kukan Effects. I figured that a link to my stuff was a sign that I should investigate, and there I went. What I found was a musician who clearly made music for the love of it, and more or less consciously (I would describe myself this way, too) had chosen to follow the ear rather than the contours of any algorithm of any type.

I received a really sincere thank you email after my purchase, and part of it was a comment: “life is ambient.” At some deep level, I agree, and more to the point, this struck me as an absolute dedication to the music. I don’t say to the genre or form, because listening to Kukan Effect’s music one immediate impression is that this is a person who is wholly dedicated to music.

To the point, Kukan Effect plays the music rather than the genre. In my own mind, and sometimes aloud, I go back to Brian Eno’s point about “ambient” music:

Too often, what gets called ambient at this point gets the “ignorable” just fine, but absolutely misses the “interesting.” Kukan Effect, on the contrary, makes absolutely interesting music. Specifically, on this EP, the four pieces, some leaning here on guitar and others there on synth, are each deeply melodic, though perhaps not in a way that’s as out-front as “Penny Lane” or “God Only Knows.” I have a small set of points I make again and again in ways that differ slightly enough that I can imagine I’m making some new point, but I’ll say this nonetheless: one of the things about music that connects me to it is the living quality of a melody, melody broadly put. I like a lot of stuff that a person might classify as “sound” rather than “music,” but when I connect to a piece of music, it’s because I have some sense of a kind of spirit inhabiting it, some living thing distinct from the musician but somehow brought into the world by the musician. It seems to me that most people who love music know this sense, and each of the four pieces on Kukan Effect’s EP bring up that feeling in me.

A second point, and this maybe goes back to David Lynch in a tangential way: as musicians, we need to be grateful that we can work as cheaply as we do. What’s clear, looking both at the Bandcamp page and the website, is that Kukan Effect is a musician who loves music and made the choice to work independently with the tools at hand, and who decided to let the results be what they will. I recently saw Werner Herzog’s “Cave of Forgotten Dreams,” and Herzog’s frequent references to these early artists’ impulse to create were, as intended I’m sure, inspiring as a musician and moving as a human being. Why did these people take it into their heads to make these paintings on the walls of these caves at Chauvet? Because that’s what people do, and it’s precisely this impulse that’s all over Kukan Effect’s music.

Art has no budget, but some art forms — thinking of Lynch and any number of less well-known filmmakers — require quite a lot of money to get through to the art. As musicians, however, our limitations are primarily human rather than financial, if we take these limitations as opportunities, and Kukan Effect’s broader project demonstrates this. Indeed, as I finish this, I notice that there’s a new piece available as of yesterday. As Punch put it, “that’s the way to do it!”

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.