2/5/24
Newsletter #556
The Crack of Dawn
Part of the way that I keep in touch with contemporaneous political thought is from Bill Maher. This week, neither Bill, nor any of his guests, mentioned this upcoming 14th amendment Supreme Court case. They’re not discussing it on the news, either, that I’ve seen. Therefore, mixing my metaphors, it’s off the radar and coming out of left field.
Lately, I have watched a number of interviews with Brian Eno. I’ve been a fan of Eno’s from the very beginning. I own the first Roxy Music album, Virginia Plain, on vinyl, along with all the other Roxy albums, although Eno quit the band after the first record. I have many of his solo records. I used a track of his from Another Green World in one of my better Super-8 films, Acting & Reacting, in 1978, and it worked great. One of my very favorite albums of all time, The Joshua Tree by U2, was co-produced by Eno with Daniel Lanois. I’ve always considered him a smart, thoughtful, well-spoken, intellectual artist. Bono once said, “All the other guys went to art school; we had Brian.”
The way Eno comes at things is unique, and I think it transcends generations. For instance, our western, Judeo-Christian society looks at things from the top down. The godhead is at the top of the pyramid, and everything flows down from there. But Eno says that as a Darwinian, he looks at everything from the bottom up. Life grows upward.
One of Eno’s many topics is systems. He loves to set up systems. All of his early musical work with mellotrons and tape loops are variations on setting up systems, then letting them run their course and watching what happens. He feels that one of his most satisfying “songs” or “soundscapes” from his early record, Discreet Music (which I have), is five tape loops of a female voice angelically singing, “Ahhhh,” at different volumes. He started with a lot of loops, then kept reducing the amount, and decreasing their frequency, but never allowing it to go completely silent. Once he had it all in place, he let it run for ten minutes. That’s the song. It’s oddly emotional, too, in its own random way.
Here's my point (if indeed I have one) – Eno discussed how he believed complexity should be achieved. I am forever hearing about simplicity, but I don’t often hear about complexity. Eno put forth that to achieve a complex system, one must come at it through a simple system that becomes increasingly more complicated. You don’t start with the hard part, complication; you start with the easy part, simplicity, then complicate it.
Which I’m able to apply to the topic I’m always coming back to in one way or another, story structure. In my book, The Complete Guide to Low Budget Feature Filmmaking, which is now nearly 20 years old, the first third of the book is about how to write a screenplay. The book is in about 100 short chapters. I have several chapters dedicated to how to complicate a story. These complications are themes, irony, allegory, parable, metaphor, all of which arise from within a story.
So, as Brian Eno purports, once you have a complete simple system, like a story, then you have a framework within which you can now complicate to your heart’s content.
In a discussion of how does one begin or end a project, Eno quoted Picasso, “There’s nothing worse than a brilliant beginning.” Brian Eno himself said, “Beginnings are easy; endings are hard.”
With that I will end this little ramble.
Thanks for Eno reference; good inspiration to re-listen, Interesting to compare a song with a story. Endings are more memorable. Yes.