translated by Susannah Pabot 

FUCK / JAZZ / FUCK JAZZ / FUCK-JAZZ / FUCK FUCK-JAZZ (Fragments from the life of a jazz critic in post-heroic times)

 

In memoriam David Foster Wallace (1962-2008)

A man – to simplify matters, let's call him G – stands at a Currywurst stall in Leipzig. G eats a Currywurst (red, extra spicy) and drinks a beer (Radeberger). Blue sky, din of everyday life, babbling tourists. G gazes about. He sees St Thomas Church and thinks of Bach (Johann Sebastian). Fragmented tunes whir through G's mind.

Currywurst and Bach. Karstadt is broke. Fast food ... heavenly music ... crisis-cant in abundance. Is everything really going from Bach to worse?

A few days later G is lying on his bed in Zürich. He hears birds twitter and traffic noise. Every now and then (Catholic) church bells ring. G entangles himself in a snarl of associations. It is summer now. In the winter many birds fly to Africa. The writer Ken Saro-Wiwa lived in Africa. Ken Saro-Wiwa was put to death. He stood in the way of boundless greed for crude oil. The catholic priest here in this neighborhood comes from Africa. Sometimes the pope wears red shoes.

Now* G is sitting on his sofa and writing this text (on an iBook G4). If he wanted to, he could google for a while (“Currywurst” or “Johann Sebastian Bach” or “Ken Saro-Wiwa” or “crude oil” or “Karstadt” or “St Thomas Church, Leipzig”). But G does not want to google. Not now**! (More than five minutes have passed since the last now*!) Googling disrupts one's conZENtration. And G is now*** (still!) very unconZENtrated. Even without googling. G turns his gaze from his laptop's screen. Next to him lies, amongst other things, Philip Hensher's new, over 700-page-long novel («The Northern Clemency»), which G has been devouring for the past days whenever the circumstances allow him to do so. Now**** the circumstances are not allowing him to do so. (Since the composition of the next-to-last and the last sentence, G has changed the title of this text as well as determined (of course using Google) the date of birth and death of David Foster Wallace, to whom this text is dedicated.) And four more minutes have passed.

Now***** - after a short break during which he thinks and scratches his foot - G begins to work on this text again. His is super-motivated and disoriented. He does not know whether he should favor triviality or complexity. In vain he tries to reconstruct the calming and inspiring effect of a Single Malt Whiskey from the Scottish Isle of Islay into a sort of mental dry-run exercise. Now****** it is still too early for alcohol. After all, G does not want to end up like Bix Beiderbecke. Oh well, to be precise it is already too late for a departure à la Beiderbecke, as he drank himself to death at the ripe old age of 28 (and with 99.99% certainty the poor guy never even tasted a drop of Single Malt Whiskey).

Now******* G has finally succeeded. The link from classical (Bach) to jazz (Beiderbecke) has been made. Why should things be simple, when they can be complicated? Because sometimes complicated is simply more interesting. Whether this is true or not in the case of this pseudo-intricate text, that is something about which one could justifiably argue until the cows come home. But hand on heart: would you have forgiven G, if he had begun this text with the statement STUDIO DAN IS DAMN FUCKIN' BRILLIANT? Precisely! I knew it ... And yet! You can never know ... at least that would have made for a curt and crisp introduction – better than Currywurst in Leipzig, am I right?
And yet! Perhaps not ... after all, music that in a downright ingenious fashion approaches the synchronicity of the asynchronous in order to reflect and transcend it and that consequently, despite centrifugally fragmenting currents, finds a meaningful coherence and therefore captures the spirit of our scattered times without abetting senseless distraction or falling for the ephemeral zeitgeist – such metaphysical, parabolic, erratic, zappaesque, enigmatic, cosmological, symbiotic, pynchonesque, kaleidoscopic, euphoric, ironic miracle-magical-easy-listening-serious-music (for this is, after all, roughly what Studio Dan is: a friendly yet anything but harmless monster-creature!), cannot be praised in the primitive slang of fuckin'-brilliant-spirited advertising flack! In that case Currywurst in Leipzig is preferable, am I right?

Of course I could have also begun like this: “When Strawinski entered the disco, he couldn't have guessed ...” Or: “When Donald Duck happened to run into Karlheinz Stockhausen in Donaueschingen, he couldn't help but cackle very loudly ...” Or: “What am I doing here of all places? Anthony Braxton asked himself in Bayreuth ...”

In the end G luckily remembers that people do exist who are much more intelligent than he is. Specifically he remembers (although very dimly) an interview with George Steiner, which he read weeks ago in the NZZ. Lo and behold! Thanks to Google that exact interview appears magically on his computer screen. Duped, he reads: “Spending hours in front of a screen is a lowly form of human contact. Moreover, electronic devices are very deceiving.” And yet also damn seductive (and convenient and sometimes even useful!), one could add. But we'll let our wise guy Steiner have his say: “There exists not one single moment of comprehension, but rather a dynamic in relation to a text. The great writer, the great poet, the great thinker is so much grander than the possibilities of our understanding that one can never exhaust his text. Ever. Schumann played a very difficult etude for his students, and when they asked him to explain it, he played the same etude for them again. That is precisely the correct method.” So: put CD1 or CD2 of «Creatures and other stuff» into your player and don't forget to press “repeat”.

Now* = 11.45

Now** = 11.52

Now*** = 11.56

Now**** = 12.01

Now***** = 12.11

Now****** = 12.17

Now*******= 12.28