Errata is a web journal written by Robert Davis who has neither spent a night in a ghost town nor pulled a turnip from the earth. He doesn't even know if turnips grow in the ground. Perhaps on trees, like candy corn. Therefore, Errata is a non-commercial project.

Observation #1: It may be appropriate, when leaving a movie theater, to say "mysterious."

Observation #2: It may be appropriate, when leaving a movie theater, to say "mysterious" at the top of your lungs. Bring your eyebrows together before you say it. Effective!

Observation #3: Same for books. Even at libraries.

There is a prize for people who correctly guess the thing about Metropolis, Nevada.

Except where the text specifically states otherwise, Errata's vagaries are indicated vaguely and its authors are indistinct in the traditional way of the Internet, except where the authors lay claim to their work. In some cases Robert Davis lays claim to work that is not his own but has been abandoned like so many ghost towns. Except where held presently, fistfuls of dirt are suspended via dispersal, or dispersed via suspension (in the air), and thus their dissolution is their transcendence, or their transcendence is their dissolution. And yet our eyes tear, and our vision is impaired, demonstrating for the umpteenth time that one entity's gain is another's fit of sneezes. Except where indicated, storms shall outlive the clay upon which they rain, unless storms are improperly delimited by their clouds, which dissolve, rather than by their inevitable return. Thus the clay loses, unless the clay is said to own the storm, to use it to make itself heavy, to make itself cling to white garments, refuse dispersal, cake upon the facades of abandoned buildings, and sit like Man [sic] upon the earth where it is pelted by a storm that it owns. In which case the clay still loses, if you ask us.

Some of the above is legally binding and should be considered a mental contract between Errata and those upon whom it acts. The bit about the prize should be considered an overstatement insofar as prizes differ from dirt and prize dispersal differs from dirt dispersal. Please recall that ownership is a weight and, therefore, hope that you do not win the prize.

One day Errata or its representatives will call upon you for a favor. It is expected that you will hop-to without delay.

You may contact Robert Davis by email unless it's about the rock that was thrown in anger. The rock is more properly called a clod. Why do you continue to raise the topic?

1 February 2004

Lip-Syncing

I had no idea before I read this article in today's New York Times that even singers who don't lip-sync might be using a technology that corrects pitch problems in real-time.

Amazing.

The excuse given in the article for why, say, Janet Jackson lip-syncs her vocals at the half-time show and Kid Rock sings to pre-recorded instrumentals — his band cohorts must be flashing back to the days of playing air guitar after school — is that, see, you can't mount a production like that with only a couple minutes of prep time. I feel the need to point out that another avenue would be not to mount a production like that, an avenue obviously overgrown with weeds.

When Brittany Spears was the musical guest on SNL some months back, she was clearly lip-syncing the first song and oh so clearly not lip-syncing the second. The priority throughout the performance wasn't to create live music — don't be ridiculous — but to move that body, shake that body, be in our proximity, yeah yeah yeah. Or for those of us not in the studio, to attach to whatever brain cells control the channel-changer and numb them. It's an ad for her live performances, which are ads for her albums, and so on. Keep that circle turning.

All of this lends credence to the quote attributed to T Bone Burnett, that we live in an age of music made for people who hate music. (I wish I had the source. Was it an LA public radio interview?) This quote often comes to mind when I see a cynically made Hollywood blockbuster.

[UPDATE: In case no one looks in the comments, Doug has found a link to the quote. Burnett says Larry Poons was in his kitchen talking about Ralph Stanley and said, "We live in an age of music for people who don't like music."]

As a producer, Burnett elevates anything he works on, through simplicity and authenticity. As a solo artist, he's made two or three of my all-time favorite albums (let's say Criminal Under My Own Hat and the Trap Door EP, not to be confused with Beyond the Trap Door, which isn't bad, either). And his flawed but brilliant album The Talking Animals should serve as a model of intelligent pop, slickly produced but layered over a bed of rock and featuring jokes about Keats and Byron. As much as I like his production work, he's far too good a songwriter to spend all of his time helping other people make their records and their rootsy soundtracks.

Posted by davis | Link

Reader Comments

February 4, 2004, 08:44 AM

Doug

Robert, although I'm musically illiterate, a lot of my friends admire Burnett greatly. I mentioned the quote and one of them suggested this url:

http://www.ibma.org/about.ibma/archived.articles/november.dec/keynote.asp

Another friend, who's a professional classical musician, signaled out this quote from the link:

"The more perfect music we have, the more attractive the peculiarities and anomalies of human performance become. Perfection is a second rate idea."

I like it.

February 4, 2004, 11:48 AM

davis

Thanks for the link. So the quote I mentioned is attributable to Larry Poons speaking in T Bone's kitchen about Ralph Stanley. Excellent.

I like the quote about "perfect music," too. I feel the same way about movies. Not that they're performances in the same way that live music is, but when movies are constructed by testing and formulas, stars and razzle-dazzle, the "attractive peculiarities and anomalies of human performance" are lost in the shuffle.

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