Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Ulysses Brown

Here's a short and cheerful song in celebration of a new set of guitar strings. I always love a new set of strings– so fresh and so bright.

<a href="http://danbandstra.bandcamp.com/track/ulysses-brown">Ulysses Brown by Dan Bandstra</a>

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Albert

Here is a song which I post by way of celebration at the end of a quarter whose difficulty was characterized by both nervousness and drudgery. Of course, the song isn't particularly celebratory. Probably its sole cheerful feature is that I have come to like it since the time when I wrote it.

<a href="http://danbandstra.bandcamp.com/track/albert">Albert by Dan Bandstra</a>

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Ten Is the Magic Number

For no strong reason, except perhaps that ten songs make an album, I'm calling an end to "The Office Tapes." The new album will be called "Notes From A Homemade Tree." Further updates as events warrant.

. . . And now an event warrants. A new song, this one with an electric guitar that brings the rock. Ten points to whoever guesses the make of the guitar:

<a href="http://danbandstra.bandcamp.com/track/oh-what-a-morning">Oh! What A Morning by Dan Bandstra</a>

Sunday, November 15, 2009

How I Do

I realize that I was going to post a song, but then I got distracted by my reminiscences:

&amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://danbandstra.bandcamp.com/track/how-i-do"&amp;amp;amp;gt;How I Do by Dan Bandstra&amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;gt;

Old Geography

In the summers between college years, I used to bike to a grocery on South Shore Drive in Holland Michigan. This was about two miles. It seemed like a long way because I was extremely sedentary (fat) then. It gave me time to write a (very bad) poem in my head about people from college. I don't remember the poem, but I remember the people involved.

If I were going to make the ride in Holland again, I would probably take a side-trip down 32nd Street, to see the repairs on the road. A nigh-biblical (ok: maybe only nigh-minor-prophet) flood completely washed out 32nd Street and mostly washed out 147th.

Then, in the summer after I got married, I was living in the South Shore neighborhood in Chicago. (That the neighborhood shares a name with the street in Holland is pure coincidence. It's not even the same lake that each is on the south shore of.) From the apartment in Chicago, I rode my bicycle to a chain guitar store in Burbank, Illinois. I had no particular need, I wanted to go somewhere cool. That ride was about eleven miles.

In Chicago, when I was going to the guitar store, I got a little lost because of another disaster straight out of the bible. (Measured demographically, disasters in Chicago are probably at least an order of magnitude bigger than anything that ever happened to Jerusalem.) I'm referring to the freeway that runs through the neighborhood. It may be a freeway to the cars on it, but to bicycles and houses, the skyway is a giant wall, like something put down by the Assyrians or the Romans to symbolically punish the natives for their feeble resistance.

Racially– and Chicago is an amazingly race-conscious place– I would be a Roman in this situation, getting lost under the seige defences built by my own government. I didn't realize this at the time, I just thought I was on my way to a music store.

Monday, November 2, 2009

My Dissertation

Walking home from school today, I realized that I could pretty well sum up my entire dissertation (or, more to the point, the whole of Longinus' On the Sublime) in about one sentence: If you write, you are a legitimate writer in exactly the same way that the greatest writers of all time were writers. (One could logically extend this thought to any other activity: If you paint pictures, then you are a painter just as Picasso was a painter.)

This sounds a little starry-eyed for academia, but it is an interesting thought. Another version of the same thing: only a small collection of logistical difficulties prevents any person from getting in the ring with Vitali Klitschko. It is otherwise a physically and conceptually possible thing to do. Most people wouldn't even feel demeaned by the ensuing knockout.

Monday, October 19, 2009

Honeymoon Waltz

You can think of music by analogy to two-dimensional art. Recordings are all different kinds of printed media: a CD of a symphony is (at best) a photograph of an oil painting like you would find in an expensive book. I mostly work in black and white. If it's not reproducible in the back pages of a newspaper, I probably wouldn't know how to do it. Now we might be approaching my sense of what defines folk music as opposed to, say, rock and roll.

<a href="http://danbandstra.bandcamp.com/track/honeymoon-waltz">Honeymoon Waltz by Dan Bandstra</a>

Friday, October 9, 2009

Know Me By My Name

I know this isn't as close as I will ever get to the wall of sound, because someday I will record a song that has a bass line in it. However, with the addition of a glockenspiel, this is probably the greatest number of instruments so far that I have used at once (unless whistling counts).

<a href="http://danbandstra.bandcamp.com/track/know-me-by-my-name">Know Me By My Name by Dan Bandstra</a>

Monday, September 28, 2009

The Other Melody

As Melody Harmon walked victorious from the courtroom, she ignored the waves of her parents, who wished to talk with her. She preferred to savor the small, warm tension of victory in her stomach. This feeling was destined to repeat itself throughout her legal career.

Alone in her car, she tuned the radio to 103.1FM, Kane County's Classic Rock Party. She chose this station on the basis of some highway billboards that combined the voluptuous silhouettes of electric guitars with the names of great bands from the sixties and seventies. Those names, along with the song titles that flashed on the digital display of the car radio, were to Melody nearly self-sufficient pieces of poetry: "The Rolling Stones," "Since I've Been Loving You," "I Saw Her Standing There." Melody looked for a moment into the empty passenger seat, then drove to her apartment.

* * *

The jury awarded Melody forty million dollars in damages in the case Harmon v. Harmon. This judgement effectively bankrupted Mark and Judy, her parents. It would force them to sell the little parcel of land on which they used to garden and raise their child. After that, they would have to look for more lucrative work just to have paychecks worth garnishing. The difficulty of their situation would fulfill Melody's lifelong dream of punishing them for the many injustices they had inflicted on her.

(Melody, recently admitted into the bar association of Illinois after a legal education at her own expense, was qualified to represent herself in court. Mark and Judy, whose entire education consisted of a year and a half of community college between the two of them, a mountain's worth of travelogues and mystery novels borrowed over the course of several decades from the public library, and some rudimentary advice now and then from the proprietor of a neighboring gentleman's farm, were not really qualified to act as lawyers on their own behalf. Nevertheless, they went into the sixteenth circuit court of Illinois pro se because they didn't have the money for a lawyer and because they thought that a lawyer's expertise would be irrelevant to their strategy of appealing to the basic humanity of the judge and jury. Their notions of familial love and loyalty were defenseless against a legal case constructed from the steel springs of their daughter's mind.)

Melody successfully argued that the incompetence of her parents in the course of raising her had severely diminished her future employability and earning power while also inflicting life-long emotional distress. Out of the many instances of neglect, she selected the following three as the most significant:

–When Melody was in college, she requested but did not receive assistance from her parents to meet the additional costs of her wardrobe, hair, and makeup. Mark Harmon believed that he did enough for her by building her dorm-room bunk bed out of plywood and two-by-fours and by buying the books for her first semester of classes. Without the proper assistance, Melody was unable to gain membership in a sorority. This robbed her of a network of social contacts which could otherwise have provided personal happiness and might have formed the basis of a professional career.

–Throughout grade-school and high-school, Melody's parents relegated her to the public education system, which employed only one speech therapist for over ten thousand students. Melody saw this therapist for a single hour every other month. Her awkward and glottal attempts at friend-making did not improve between kindergarten and sixth grade. At that time, the Harmons sued the school district and won. This was, for Melody, a pyrrhic victory. In order to pay for a full-time speech therapist, the district cut its entire music program, thus putting Mr. Fellows, an extremely attractive and popular choir teacher, out of a job. While Melody's speaking voice improved thanks to her three-times-weekly therapy sessions, she was known and hated as the "music-killer" among the girls who had formerly populated the school choir. (Melody had hitherto hoped– longed– to be a part of that choir.)

–Bill Frisch, the father of Judy Frisch, was born deaf. When Judy met Mark Harmon, it seemed like a pleasant coincidence that he was raised by an uncle who was also deaf. Mark and Judy enjoyed communicating by sign language in public. They pretended it was their secret code. This familiarity added to the intimacy of their eventual marriage. What Mark and Judy failed to grasp was that their families suggested a one-in-six chance that any child they had would also be congenitally deaf. By haphazardly reproducing, they played god with the same odds as someone playing Russian roulette.

When Judy got pregnant, she and Mark studiously avoided the office of the genetic counselor. This office was right down the hall from their obstetrician of choice. The records of that obstetrician show that he suggested the services of this person to Mark and Judy, who demurred. At that time, Melody's deafness was a condition which could have been detected and, when found, prevented by means of a safe and legal procedure.

* * *

The court agreed that by not taking the necessary steps to detect and prevent a difficult condition which their family histories made likely, Mark and Judy Harmon demonstrated a severe neglect of their eventual child. Because of their malice, Melody was not all that she could have been. This diminution, the court decided, was worth about forty million dollars.

The verdict ratified Melody's nearly religious belief that a better version of herself existed. Her perfect self had been rendered unrealizable because of choices made before her birth. Still, she did exist, Melody was sure of it. The other self talked clearly. She was always able to make friends, she sang in the middle-school choir, she looked as pretty as she wanted, she joined a sorority in college, she got a satisfying and well-paying job. When she drove home from work, she listened to music. Melody could swear, when she played the radio and focused on the road, that she saw the upraised hands and rhythmically shrugging shoulders of herself in the passenger seat, dancing to the Rolling Stones.

Friday, September 18, 2009

Poor Boy Blues

<a href="http://danbandstra.bandcamp.com/track/poor-boy-blues">Poor Boy Blues by Dan Bandstra</a>

Thursday, September 17, 2009

Fear of Perfection

I don't normally fear perfection, because I'm unlikely ever to achieve it. This partially the result of my own efforts. I scarf down cheeseburgers and keep my music ragged with half a thought that Adonis and Jesus died because they were too good at what they were and did. There is, however, one part of my life that threatens to become so good I wouldn't belong in it: my office.

My office is the result of a multi-year process of furniture acquisition, disposal, rearrangement, and modification. The changes in my office tend toward the smaller and simpler thing. I traded in a five-ton, particle-board-and-laminate desk– a bona fide Ohisian antique with drawers and roll-out surfaces that could have put another respectable hole in the Titanic– for a narrow stand of shelves. I replaced a wheeled office chair that had levers and hydraulic adjustments with a pine dining chair.

These spurts of acquisition are relatively rare. More frequently, I decide that the acoustics or ergonomics of my office are all wrong, so I shove the desk from one end to the middle, or from the middle to the corner, I rearrange all the bookshelves, I raise or lower my computer screen, I change the microphone stands around, and I rewire my mixer and speakers. All this within about 70 square feet.

I was perfectly happy with this ongoing draft of an office. I liked shaking it up every two or three weeks. Every time I moved things around, it was like moving to a new place. I decided what I needed and didn't need, cleared out some piles of papers, and really thought about which things I wanted to have quick-to-hand and what I wouldn't mind walking ten feet to look for.

I almost have it. Now that I found place for my computer mouse, I can almost see not having to move or change anything else. This worries me because, as I said, I like moving things around. What if my self-made environment is a reflection of my mind? I'm fine with most of what that implies: pieces from my grandparents, a shelf full of books I hardly remember, a general sense of precarious half-assedness. But if I never have to move or clear this space out, it will never change. Will my mind never change? Will it calcify under a mudslide of just-right arrangement?

Two consolations: I will certainly have to move, for real, sometime in the near future. Grad school runs out, real life calls. I plan to populate a house away from the city, preferably by some woods. That will be a process. Second, I will never be satisfied. (This is a consolation.) I am judging from the evidence of my entire life so far: there is always another desk I want to make, a better position for the microphones, and a new way to write. Thank goodness: nothing to be afraid of.

Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Jezebel in Repose

I'm going to have to read some Charles Bowden, now that I've heard this episode of "Hearing Voices." Bowden's voice reminded me of this song, written a few months ago:

<a href="http://danbandstra.bandcamp.com/track/jezebel-in-repose">Jezebel in Repose by Dan Bandstra</a>

Friday, August 28, 2009

Mercy for the Merciless

<a href="http://danbandstra.bandcamp.com/track/mercy-for-the-merciless">Mercy for the Merciless by Dan Bandstra</a>

Monday, August 24, 2009

Welfare State

Death-panels aside, the fundamental assumption in the current debate seems to be that federally-run healthcare would be a step toward the establishment of a welfare state. I agree that a universal entitlement to sufficient medicine, once set, would probably become as immovable as the expectation that everyone should be allowed to go to school for free through the twelfth grade. Universal healthcare could also lead to a widespread belief in the advisability of universal food and universal housing– add all of these together and you gradually get a cradle-to-grave welfare state. The real debate is whether that would be a good thing. Or would it be un-American?

Many of the things in history that were American were bad. Slavery was our peculiar institution. Al Capone happened in Chicago, which was also the home of the nuclear bomb. Besides those things, there has been a general streak of meanness against poor and weak people running through this country from way back– see, for instance, the folk song "Penny's Farm." From the historical perspective, it seems perfectly American to have only these two options: either be able to take care of yourself or die.

That isn't usually what people mean by "American." The word is supposed to refer to our highest ideals or, as it is put without specificity today, our "freedoms." I like freedom too, but I have another idea of what people think they would lose if their government threw too many safety nets under them. My reliable informants from Sweden tell me that they have a common phenomenon of able-bodied people just giving up. If you live and don't work in Scandinavia, you'll apparently get enough money from your government to keep an apartment and to keep eating. You may not be comfortable, but you don't have to look for a job. Ultimately, some people don't want to. They have the security to do nothing until they die. Nobody forces them to try anything different.

In America, we have welfare-to-work. Realistically, it's probably more often welfare-to-hoping-there's-a-jar-of-peanut-butter-left-in-the-local-church-foodbank-so-your-kids-don't-go-hungry. All the same, there's no lifelong security without the effort that gives lives meaning. What do people do after the state's generosity runs out? Here in Chicago, many of them start to feel shooty and stabby. Having been on the receiving end of a few who felt merely punchy, I can say that if the result isn't pleasant, it at least represents an entrepreneurial fighting spirit.

Americans who give up show that they are angry because something is wrong. We have a bad habit of going down shooting. In general, though, I like that people here aren't pacified. American events, attitudes, and governments may often be tiring, but they never sedate the soul. Would you rather live in a land that spawned ABBA, or the place that made Woody Guthrie, Duke Ellington, "Boom Boom," and "Born in the USA?"

Friday, August 21, 2009

Werewolves

<a href="http://danbandstra.bandcamp.com/track/werewolves">Werewolves by Dan Bandstra</a>

Friday, August 14, 2009

750cc (The Diner)

In honor of good, old, and (relatively) small motorcycles that don't quit, here's a song about a woman on one:
<a href="http://danbandstra.bandcamp.com/track/750cc-the-diner">750cc (The Diner) by Dan Bandstra</a>

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

In Praise of the Thing


Here is a conversation which I had with my wife:


Me: I think I could use a pocket knife.

Her: Okay, let's see what they have at the store.

Me: It looks like mostly Leatherman tools. Why is there plastic in the handles now?

Her: Yeah, they used to be better made.

Me: I just wanted the Thing.

Her: I know.


A plainer pocketknife would be a good example of the Thing, which is a tool that has been designed with as much simplicity as it can bear. Simplicity brings several benefits, including the following: The Thing performs its task very well. The Thing, because it lacks superfluous gewgaws, has a minimum number of moving parts. It usually lasts a while, is repairable, and can be relatively cheap.

Compared to the Thing, human beings come up a little short. We have an infinite number of superfluous gewgaws: tonsils, trick thumbs, hiccups, agoraphobia, and music, among others. We are expensive. Our high costs include college tuition and the difficulty of childbirth. We break down easily, we are difficult to repair, and we only last for a few decades.

The main similarity between people and Things is that they all have occasional beauty or grace. However, the beauty of the Thing is a result of the thought that went into making it fulfill one purpose very well. What is the source of the beauty of people?

Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Retro/Weirdo

You might have noticed that I'm reading some Vonnegut. Listen: what would have given anyone that idea? The novel of the week is Timequake, in which Vonnegut, Kilgore Trout, and the whole world have to go through the nineties twice. Something like this had occured to me even before I got the book from the library yesterday, as fashionable people on the streets of Chicago moved from the seventies to the eighties.

You can't miss the faded jeans, the mohawks, and even the occasional neon leg warmer walking around Hyde Park. I know that the seventies preceded the current fad, because I recently bought a lot of t-shirts on sale that were yellow or blue with retro bands of black around the collar and sleeves. Before the seventies came the sixties. There have been at least two complete cycles of the styles of 1960-1989 in my living memory. A girl I had a crush on in middle school wore bell bottoms.

But why does the cycle start at 1960? This is the thing I noticed recently: there's a porous barrier that floats between 1920 and 1959. Fashions from after the barrier are retro, anything from before is just weird. Sunglasses that go from dark on top to clear at the bottom? Retro. Top hat? Weirdo.

A closed loop of styles has been repeating itself since the early nineties. This conveniently removes free will when setting trends, but it also requires a never-ending series of periodic updates to wardrobes. Cha-ching! Here is my theory: the loop seems to be defined by those styles that appear without comment in the movies that we watch. Those t-shirts I bought? "Boogie Nights." Slicked-back hair on over-monied jerks downtown? "Wall Street."

My theory also explains two outliers. First: we have occasional flashes back to the forties. This is either because of all the noir and war movies that are still watchable, or because of the style and mood of "Blade Runner." On the other hand, a few years back my brother got for Christmas (and wore happily) a knit cap with a short bill and a sort of squat, cylindrical construction– a hip, knit version of the kepi hats worn by various militaries through history. Where would it occur to my brother that something from the Civil War would be stylish? Ask Arch Stanton.


Friday, July 31, 2009

Going North

I wrote this a little while ago. Now that I've posted it, could it be that we finally know what the "Song of the Summer" is for 2009? Perhaps. . .

<a href="http://danbandstra.bandcamp.com/track/going-north">Going North by Dan Bandstra</a>

Thursday, July 30, 2009

The Gift

The title of this post ("The Gift") is ripped off from a book of the same name by Lewis Hyde. That's one of those Big Brain books where the author takes one idea and tries to make all sorts of different phenomena fit that idea. (I should know what that's like– I'm writing a dissertation. Other culprits: Malcom Gladwell, Henry Petroski, Chris Anderson.) Hyde's idea is based on looking at different "economies," especially artistic economies, in the sort of anthropological way of thinking that lets you count anything as evidence. The end result is a very detailed, prose version of "The love you take is equal to the love you make."

That's fine. It might even make sense sometimes. But there is something more interesting about freebies that catches my eye: they're unexpected. It's really hard to find unexpected things. I would almost say that you can't buy them. More precisely, you can't buy them new. The book with the big secret– you know, something like the actual recipe for the philosopher's stone as printed in the Boy Scouts of America Fieldbook between 1937 and 1939– will not be found at Border's or Barnes and Noble. Those shelves are filled with remaindered "Eating Lite the Sufi Way" cookbooks. You have to go to a used bookstore, preferably one like "Rare, Medium, and Well Done" in Chicago, a store so recondite it doesn't even have a website. My wife won't go there with me because the stacks, loosely piled to eye level, could actually fall over and kill you at any time. But because the store is so disorganized, and because books are automatically discounted just for being on the shelves too long, there is always the promise of a $0.50 book with the actual answer to life, the universe, and everything. I'm still looking.

I also search used record stores and junk shops. But now we can look for the same things– surprises and freebies– on the internet. This is probably not a bad thing. The junk shops and used bookstores will exist long after Amazon has eaten the chain stores alive. Independent places– including holes in the wall on the Internet– don't suffer from competition because they were never in the running in the first place. The only difference is that now anybody can float into the ether a little gift that just might surprise any other person. Nobody needs the prior approval of a publishing house, manufacturing company, or record label. This is old news by now, but just in case you didn't believe it, here's my own submission to the big sea of small surprises:


Wednesday, July 29, 2009

The Introduction

Listen: I'm not yet on Facebook, though it beckons. How else will my mom see pictures of my cat? Myspace may never know me (deo volente). I am happily anachronistic. So why, while listening to a new CD of old-fashioned music, do I start a blog? Some reasons, like the central traumas of Vonnegut novels, are more interesting when we talk around them.

With that unanswered, the next question is: what does "batholudens" mean? I made it up, which is a convenient practice when you're looking for an unused title on Blogger. The word is a bastard, a centaur, Greek on the first part and lewdly Roman at the end. I mean to imply three or four things with the name. First, "batho" comes from the Greek βαθύς, meaning "deep." Don't worry, I'm kidding. The word has been a joke ever since Alexander Pope got his hands on it, which is fine. I'm not bitter. The next part is "ludens," Latin for "playing," which, according to a certain Huizinga, is one of the more important things that we do with our lives. Third, the miscegenation of the title is about as weird as the word "television." This is on purpose. I mean for this blog, like me, like TV, to be as American as wars of choice and apple pie. Being American makes for a fun, strange time if you're paying attention. This place was a little off already before David Lynch looked at it, just ask Harry Smith.

That's the best I can do to communicate something of what I think this blog will be. I'll link when the obiter dicta demand, but otherwise posts will be based on my own writing more than on shout-outs to Youtube videos of bacon cats acting out scenes from "The Breakfast Club." In any case, your comments are welcome, even appreciated.