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On the quintessential question, What are we doing on MOG?, I would like to think that we're riffing. There are as many answers as there are Moggers but my favored theory is owing to the particular combination of music and blogging; one need not co-exist with the other but does, anyway, on MOG. We have a song that stirs up a story. Riffin'. We have a story intimating a song. Riffin'. We find a song without a story, a story without a song. Riffin', riffin'.
Forgive me, I will now ask you to hold the thought until days later, by which time the suspended riff will have revealed itself. On that note, those of us who like to ideate should take to leaving ideas to incubate. Kids, they like to fire away. It's raw and it's punk. Geezers, they like to linger. It is cool and wise. Perhaps it is putting these two together, another curious combination, that makes brilliant ideas. I will be firing away everyday this week (and to that effect, linger) and hope you'll forgive me for that, too.
riff: (noun) a short repeated phrase in popular music or jazz. (verb) play riffs. ORIGIN abbreviation of RIFFLE. [Oxford English Dictionary] Tuesday takes me to the plentiful stew of Bujumbura, jazz, and Europop by Khadja Nin who was born in Burundi and is based in Belgium. (For some more connection, Burundi along with Rwanda were a combined Belgian colony, Ruanda-Urundi, following WW2.) Her second full-length and earliest breakthrough, Ya Pili ... was released in 1994 by BMG. She has oft named the late Miriam Makeba as a great inspiration.
Gil Bruvel, Invisible Voyage
Comments (22)
you're up late!
Thanks for introducing me to the term "ideate".
I would never have ideated the word without you. You've reached out and taught someone something that they previously did not know. Your job for the day is done.
Dave - And I am still up at the moment. 5:17. Hooray to joblessness. However, are you looking blurry or do I need to sleep for real? Alright, I think my day is done...
I have waited all day to hear this...I've been waitin' all my life for a dollop of wisdom......As I type, I'm listening to this first track....It really is beautiful....but maybe I'm just bein' a punk wise guy. See,...all of this is off the top of my headbone. Spontaneity is the essence of now. Like the sax player testifying under the lone streetlamp at 3 AM...playin' what he's learned but stretching, reaching, feeding off the tossed off phrase....
"Geezers, they like to linger. It is cool and wise"
......Across the street from my house, not twenty feet from the road, an ancient, huge oak tree is slowly falling to the forest floor. Mighty limbs four feet around lie about, slowly bleeding their essence into mother earth. It is such an awe inspiring sight...sad wonder...envious admiration..this acient tree still reaches up...each spring a few leaves....not nearly enough but.....what's a tree to do? Yet on a hot summer's day this leave-less tree's massive shadow provides respite, a cool comfort.
........
"It's technopop with a chipped tooth"
..........and that's what keeps this tree rooted here. Well, that & a thousand other little phrases and images that float around here....dropped like lysergic fairy dust on a Salvador Dali Landscape by a mad mystic poet/philosopher/dreamer....... you see, in this MOG world an obsession with music is not seen as strange. Especially in the older trees. I twig my branches at them the way one thumbs their nose.
I guess I'm done....let me know if any of this makes sense....it baffles the shit outta me.
I guess I am guilty of said 'riffage'.
I gotta say I've been down on MOG lately. I feel like it's dying on the vine, sadly there is ripe fruit that may never get picked.
I need to write about politics again. Get the blood following again.
What do you say Jeff? Are you up for a little petty bickering?
Get the blood following again.
Okay, I'm guilty of having a bad self editor.
There are posters and then there are POSTERS. You, poebegone, are a POSTER, and if you didn't catch it, it's a compliment. I love reading your stuff.
I also happen to agree with your taste in other's posts. "We have a song that stirs up a story. Riffin'. We have a story intimating a song. Riffin'. We find a song without a story, a story without a song. Riffin', riffin'."
If the mood happens just right, the words and the music come together with a grace and flow that belys a natural world explanation.
Great songs by the way.
thanks
If the mood happens just right, the words and the music come together with a grace and flow that belys a natural world explanation.
Dammit, if that's not it in a nutshell nothing is. Well said John.
I'm riffin', riffin', riffin' ideation(sung to the tune of Creedence Clearwater Revival's 'Proud Mary')! Very pleasant tunes ilay. Khadja has a seductive voice.
Talk about firing away and riffing. You, poeby, are (metaphorically) on fire! As are those glorious songs from Burundi beauty Khadja Nin...
your incendiary mood is spreading like a wildfire. this post should be the preface when the "MOG 1.0" manual is published. and the coda.
"those of us who like to ideate should take to leaving ideas to incubate"
have I waited long enough? how many stanzas of repetition before you know the riff is magic? one
for the mere idea of seeking penance, we forgive you. now, more brilliance if you please.
the invisible journey is sonic revelation. Khadja Nin is an introduction of themic mastery. beautiful.
Riffin' is the new movin' and shakin'. Well said, darkling. Gil Bruvel, you say? And thus, yet another art investigation begins. I dread the day that there will be none left.
Jeff - Testify! You are among my #1 MOGpeeps who really get it. Hell, yes, we come from what we know/learned, reach even beyond our grasp, feed off one another. Ancient trees know these all too well.
That's my best reason for long-time Mogging, you know. The music-obsessed, and other obsessives, have a place here to call home.
Chris - Why did you ever even stop the political posts? They got a bajillion comments, and crazed strangers here and there (I don't mean Jeff ;p) who probably only signed up to rail at you. 'twas a riot.
"Get the blood following again." Ahahah. A bloodhound! (See what I did there?)
John - Thanks, that was so heartwarming. I also love the part of your comment about when the words and music come together (and what you wrote in your post).
You are a fellow riffer. The lack of comments shouldn't matter. (It never has to me.) We riff for the love of riffing.
Aug - Slapping me with some CCR, are you? I sang that in the shower. (Okay, not really.) I love Khadja Nin's voice, it is very smooth and soothing to me.
Mike - Yeah, I am thinking I will need to be extinguished after this bout of stubborn, relentless posting. Or, heaven forbid, I may never shut up.
Scott - Oof, I am so hip hop all of a sudden. Find Public Enemy, advise 'em to reunite and record it.
There is a MOG manual in the works? That isn't a bad idea although a MOG Annual might be a bit much. {:
Anna - Now I realize my dancing post was subliminally your doing! Being a fantasist (though not always darkly), Gil Bruvel may lose his nerve when he encounters Paris Hilton's new reality show.
My sixth-grade science teacher was first-named Riff. I never asked him, but logic, experience, and a strong desire for it to be so tells me that it was probably short for 'Riffle.' Incidentally, a sixth-grade friend and I once sat next to each other in Riff's class, repeating 'Riff-ter' back and forth to each other using various inflections and facial expressions until, after several minutes, Riff inquired, "You're being a little loud, don't you think?" It was the most tactfully, I think, that I have ever been told, "Will you finally just shut the fuck up."
good point poe. we riff for the love of riffing. humbling.
I read this yesterday and thought, thats good advice, to let things stew and simmer before serving up the goods. all too often an idea pops into my head and I rush off the half baked post as I extinguish all of the inspiration I had from the onset. patience is a mighty big pill to swallow sometimes. I fit into the kid category, but I do want to grow up. nice, I have no idea what ideate means, back to school...
Matt - I once maimed, and killed eventually, a fighting fish I had named Sashimi. How did your fish story end? I could not tell from the non-video although I have a few theories. One etymology reference offered that riff originated in refrain. This is a stretch, I thought, and makes less sense.
Someone, somewhere, is willing me to shut my mouth at this point but I am on a mission that requires some Rapeman-level loudness. (Choice Albini! Now for some Scratch Acid...) I will be thanked afterwards, maybe.
John - All in good faith, sir. The remark came from a good place in the heart. (:
Rob - Been there, been that. I was young once, it's an awesome state of being. (8 I still fire away without thinking. Ultimately, it depends on your desired effect. My most terrorizing boss/mentor in my most toxic job trained me - gagged me and force-fed it to me, really - to always start with the ending. I half-hate him so I wouldn't be euphemistic when I say it actually works.
Not to be contrary (well, my comment will be contrary, but not in a spiteful way) I have actually found that what I write in the spur of the moment gets more comments than those I plan too long. I think my planning may have too much grandiose expectations to produce a post that's of any use.
My Fish Story
by brand X
He wound up out of his bowl, somehow, but I rescued him after I was done taking pictures, pointing, and laughing.
I showed the picture to a Good Samaritan I knew, and after she decoiled from the horror, she volunteered to adopt the poor nameless and neglected goldfish. This spared me the crisis of conscience that was sure to accompany being single-handedly responsible for the cutting short of the poor fellow's life, but left my water-filled bowl bereft of occupants, which was itself a griefful situation. So, I got me one of them fighting fish you speak of and chucked him into the bowl.
I did nothing but love the little guy, but that didn't stop him from spending a few weeks slowly turning into a little fish-shaped block of wood, and I, reduced to a mass of curses and tears, flushed him down to a municipal-sewery grave. I then took the bowl, the accursed reminder of both my guilt and the Betta sized hole in my heart, and kicked it right out the damned window. No matter how bad things seem, there's noting like a little defenestration to put you right back on top.
Fortunately I never named him, for if I had I would had to come to terms with the abject failure of the moniker when juxtaposed with "Sashimi." It is also fortunate, I suppose, that I wasn't clever enough to come up with that name myself, because if I had, I probably would have swallowed the little guy whole one night after drinking too many gin drinks.
The End
You may now resume your mission, loudly.
Great Ceasar's Ghost. If only Khadja Nin could see what her songs have begat!
I can see how that's true, John. Perhaps a post can feel so completely done that no one feels the need to add more to it, and thus such a post becomes something to be read and not so much to be commented on, which is also fine by me.
Thank you, Matt. For future reading: I fished Sashimi out of the bowl to change the water one day and it somehow jumped out and landed onto the surface of the sink. That's how it came to be crippled, later dead and flushed down to its grave. The unoccupied bowl ended up being gradually filled with funny-faced stones I'd been finding during aimless walks on the beach. One day I found good reason to hurl the bowl at a target that was just quick enough to duck and so instead the wall broke the bowl.