His heirs are filing claims to many of the characters co-created by Jack Kirby.

Yesterday a friend and I went to Long Beach to see the Brian Eno installation, “77 Million Paintings,”  at the University Art Museum of California State University Long Beach. The genesis of the 77 million paintings enumerated in the title — which, Eno later said during his lecture, would actually be 77 million cubed —  is described well in this piece by the LA Times’ Reed Johnson. In short, a video mosaic of 12 individual screens pulls images randomly from grouped sets contained in databases held by three different computers, generating an ongoing series of freshly executed video “paintings,” which are sonically supported by a soundtrack of  sound loops on six separate tape decks, resulting in randomized musical accompaniment. The intention is to remove deliberation and intention from the artistic process; the result is mesmerizing. As my friend and I found, it was quite easy to get lost in the neverending self-generating inventions of the computers and the tape decks. For one brief period, I felt detached from space and time. I’ve had this feeling before with some art, in various disciplines, but only rarely.

Later, we attended Eno’s lecture at the Carpenter Performing Arts Center (also part of Cal State Long Beach). After 30 years of following the man’s career in all its phases — rock star, record producer, artist, writer, thinker — this was our first chance to see him in the flesh. Eno proved to be thoughtful, puckish, droll, and concerned, in equal measures. I would characterize the first third of his lecture as an admonishment to let go. (This should be expected from an artist whose visual work is created largely from computer generation.) He started by reminding us of something we’ve known for 566 years, since Copernicus:  that not only we are not at the center of the universe, we are off in a small corner, in one of a billion billion solar systems, and we exist as only one of innumerable species just on this one planet, where only an estimated 10% of species have been cataloged. In other words,  Get over yourself. Again, this viewpoint should be expected from someone extolling the virtues of random, unemotionally generated, art.

On the way home I wondered aloud how well these theories that can work so well  in visual art and music would work in long-form narrative. Having read (or tried to read) Samuel Beckett’s novels and some of William S. Burroughs’ longer pieces, I unfortunately believe I know too well. In such cases, even a little plot can go a long way. Organic writing — which I practice and preach — benefits from pruning and shaping. Effects can engage an audience, but only for so long; the best effect is an emotional verisimilitude, however achieved, that transports people into a deep level of caring about what happens. That occurs in better productions of “Waiting for Godot” because Didi and Gogo are present and we can relate; it never happens with “The Unnameable,” which is a true chore to read. When he’s collaborating with, say, Robert Fripp, Eno is free to produce an album of electronic feedback loops, but when he’s producing records for U2 or Coldplay, he must serve the song. To his immense credit, he never claimed in this talk that he was abandoning all oversight; rather, he talked about intentional balance, moderating oneself along the continuum between surrendering all control, or controling all elements, depending upon the desired outcome. I think that’s about right.

If you’re interested in “77 Million Paintings” and cannot make it to Long Beach, where it runs through December, here’s some good news:  a beautiful software-and-DVD version exists. Here it is on Amazon.com.  I bought a copy at the museum, and at about 35 bucks, it’s a steal. The package includes the software to run these self-generating images on  your computer, with accompanying soundtrack. In addition, there’s a beautiful booklet with notes from the artist, plus an interview DVD. Get it and surrender all control to it.

Imagine my delight — and astonishment — at seeing Pere Ubu written up in today’s LA Times.

The headline of the piece attaches the band to punk music, which I think is unfortunate. Whatever the definition of “punk” now, it does more to limit than to explain. If The Clash and Elvis Costello and Husker Du and the Sex Pistols and Pere Ubu are or were all “punk,” then I surely don’t know what it is. First and foremost, through all its incarnations, Pere Ubu always has been a band, a band with a particular (though evolving) sound, and that sound has little to do with anyone we think of as “punk.” I understand the need of the human brain to confine things to groupings, but it’s unfortunate when groupings remove subtle shades of difference.

That quibble aside, I’m delighted to see the band in today’s newspaper.

The L.A. Times predicts boffo box office for, wait for it, Michael Moore’s sarcastically named “Capitalism:  A Love Story.” (That is, unless the Illuminati derail it.)

So last night my good friend Larry and I went to the red-carpet premiere of “Capitalism: A Love Story,” Michael Moore’s new film. We didn’t dress well enough to get on that red carpet, but neither did Michael Moore and he got on it.

I am and I’m not a fan of Mr. Moore’s work. Actually, given that ambivalence, I guess I’m not. He’s a good entertainer, and I agree with some of his points, and I always enjoy it when truth is spoken to power. But I’m insistent on one point:  that it’s truth. As we know right from the beginning of Mr. Moore’s body of work, “Roger & Me,” he plays with the truth to comic effect or just to score points. This is fine with comedy; this is not so good with documentary. So I don’t know into what category these films belong; I like my documentaries to be grounded in truth.

To Michael Moore’s way of thinking, the near collapse of the American economy last fall was the result of a nefarious plot originally cooked up during the Reagan presidency and served to variation by everyone in Washington, DC since then. Evidently, every Treasury secretary, plus the major investment houses, plus the Congress, plus the banks, have all been in on it. They have colluded to:  strip important regulatory commissions, imbalance the tax code, privatize government functions, cripple labor unions, disseminate fear, and do whatever else it takes so that it can all result in their backing their armored cars up to the U.S. Treasury and leaving with billions of dollars in taxpayer money. Now, it’s almost irrefutable that all these things have happened to some degree; it’s the collusion that I question. Throughout the film, Moore insists upon cause-and-effect relationships that are impossible.  The Democrats can’t agree with themselves on anything — how did they agree to this scheme? If you’ve ever sat on a committee of any sort, you know what I’m talking about. To quote Jean Paul Sartre, “Hell is other people.”

Leaving the difficulty of interpersonal relationships aside, he draws bizarre conclusions. According to Moore, somehow or other, the tax code is to blame for Hurricane Katrina. I thought the hurricane was a natural disaster, but hey, I only know what common sense tells me. If he’s implying that the death and suffering that followed result from poor response, then I’m unclear what that’s got to do with his overall theme, especially while there’s plenty of other addresses one can situation that blame:  local, state, and federal officials. Even if all those authorities had had the best response in history, almost no conceivable amount of engineering was going to save New Orleans, a city that resides below the water level on a flood plain. The lack of government response was appalling. But is it irresponsible to live in a flood plain? Is it irresponsible to rebuild on cliff faces where mudslides are common? Or to build in forestry areas where wildfires routinely rage? Ultimately, we can’t afford a government response to all of this. In Michael Moore’s mind, if you walk into a building and it’s on fire, then clearly you caused this fire. Where there’s smoke, there’s blame.

Much of his film centers around the collapse of the housing industry. His reading:  The fiends ensnared people into finance schemes they couldn’t afford, then made off with all the loot while the economy crumbled. Well, yes and no. I know a number of bankers, and I have to tell you, they’d rather be collecting mortgage payments right now than trying to hawk underwater houses no one wants. During the real-estate bubble I saw two different things that Moore never touches upon: people who bought houses they couldn’t afford to use as investments, and people who refinanced their homes so they could pull out money and buy more stuff. I think those two scenarios covers almost everyone I know who owns a home. What sold most of those big plasma TV’s? The real-estate bubble.

I could go on in this vein, but it was exhausting enough trying to parse it all in real time during the screening as the movie flitted from one far-flung outrage to another in a desperate attempt to string them all together. It was gut-wrenching to watch farmers get evicted from their home, and it was appalling to learn that employers were collecting life-insurance claims on dead employees, and it’s sickening to see the state some people have been left in by the trampled economy, and it’s an outrage that CEOs of bellied-up corporations get rewarded with enormous payouts, and it’s maddening to be reminded yet again that every Western industrialized nation but one — ours! — has a national health-care plan. But every fault should start with the first question:  “What did I do, and what can I do about it?” And the first part involves acknowledging your own role in the ruination.

Imagine my thrill when David Thomas of Pere Ubu emailed me just now to thank me for this blog post. In return, I tried very hard not to sound like a sycophant.

I wish I could boil incredibly complex issues down to simplistic and illogical outcomes while drawing absolutely ridiculous conclusions from completely unrelated events.

Because clearly, there’s fame and fortune in it.

And now I have to go to bed. I’m exhausted from performing hours of rhetorical reconstructive surgery.

I don’t have a lot of interest in pleasant music. Yes, I can hear that it’s soothing, but I can’t figure out why you’d want music to soothe you. I want music to snap me out of it, to communicate something new in an interesting, dynamic way that’s impossible to refute.

So, it’s easy to see why I like a lot of what I like:  Roxy Music, Talking Heads, David Bowie, the ubiquitously written-about (here, anyway) Pere Ubu, TV on the Radio, Frank Zappa, Sonic Youth, Van Dyke Parks-era Beach Boys, King Crimson, and the like. What are the common elements? Intellectualism, contrapuntalism, dissonance, and surprise. What else do many of them have in common? Brian Eno.

It’s impossible to track the music I like without repeatedly stumbling across the name Brian Eno. The best Bowie albums? (Lodger, Low, “Heroes,” Outside.) They all featured Eno writing,  producing, providing “atmospherics,” or a combination of all three. Same with the three Talking Heads albums truly worth owning, including the astonishing Remain in Light. Eno has had the immense good taste or good fortune to work repeatedly with the likes of Robert Fripp, Harold Budd, John Cale, Philip Glass, David Byrne, and many others, and I’ve gotten this far without mentioning another act he’s produced by the name of U2 because their music does nothing for me. Along the way, he invented ambient music and made a lot of money doing so.

Eno can’t “really” play music, although his ability to twiddle knobs on early synthesizer systems and tapeloop machines he stapled together in the early 1970s enabled him to play live with Roxy Music. As someone with lots of ideas and very little skill, Eno is the prototypical modern artist. The abstract expressionists couldn’t paint, Martha Graham’s dances don’t look like dance, there is some doubt that most of the current academically hailed playwrights can write a play, and Brian Eno can’t play an instrument or read music. When asked by one interviewer if he would have been a music had he been born at an earlier time, the 61-year-old Eno said no, because his instrument would’t have been invented yet. What instrument is that? “The recording studio.” There is obvious enormous benefit to the presence of a naif. Why does Eno’s 1974 album Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy still sound so fresh, and so wrong? Because it wasn’t  hampered by someone who knew how to do it “right.”

The past few years, Eno, who is also a painter, and is a painter in a similar way that he is a musician albeit with more training, has been doing installations of changeable art created by a random shifting interplay of abstract images, shown against a backdrop of ambient music. He’s now brought that show, “77 Million Paintings,”  to Long Beach, where I’ll be seeing it on Sunday with a friend similarly well-versed in all things Eno before, miracle of miracles, we’ll also catch a lecture by Eno at the Carpenter Center that evening. Yes, I got those tickets almost as soon as the event was announced; good thing, too, because the lecture sold out almost immediately. I’ve been following Eno and his work with great interest for 30 years, and this is the first time he’s made an appearance anywhere near me, so I wasn’t going to miss out. Expect more here after the event.

• President Obama’s health-care speech last night (great job!) and his killer tactic of inducing that thick-necked GOP jerk to yell out “You lie!” That alone will have swung enough support. Once again, other people have misunderestimated you, sir president. We watch and learn.
• The Gallup-originated “Strengths-Based Leadership” test I took today, which sized me up as having strengths in Strategic, Activator, Individualization, Responsibility, and Input, resulting from oddly dichotomous choices like “You believe in ghosts” vs. “You like chocolate.” More on this tomorrow, I think, when my neck isn’t killing me. I also would have preferred that the test conclude in words of the same form — all adjectives or all nouns or all gerunds or all something the same. These qualities — Strategic Activator, etc. — sound like mistranslations from the Chinese, like Glorious Serving Sword of Destiny.
• My second night of rehearsals with my cast, and hearing my rewrites for the first time. Short version:  New opening line sucked (and my actor rightly asked for the old one back); new purposely bad poem is deliciously bad and probably earns a laugh right where I planned because, as I suspected, the actor has the chops to get that laugh and got it right away; still very glad to have the director and actors I have. The director has better ideas than I do, so again, I’m glad he’s directing and I’m not.
• How “lack mentality” drives me crazy. Brief definition:  “I lack [fill in the blank], so I can’t do [fill in the blank].” It’s just reflexive with people. (Most people?) Once you’ve trained your ear to hear it,  you hear it all the time. Why not instead:  “I want to [fill in the blank], so I have to [fill in the blank].” That’s more actionable; you can actually do something about it. I think today I heard the lack mentality about six times. In one case, I’m concerned that an important arts institution is going to go under — or at least suffer greatly — because of all the lacking going on.
• My thrill at getting a new script by one of my favorite playwrights. In fact, right now I’m going to go read it in the jacuzzi because, for some reason, my neck is killing me.

Yes, today is 9/9/09, the day that a bunch of 40-year-old albums by a certain band got re-released in various CD re-packagings, to the delight of millions around the world.

For others among us, it was another day in the countdown toward the new Pere Ubu album, “Long Live Pere Ubu!” Even if it turns out I hate it, I guarantee it’ll be far more artistically provocative than any other new music coming out this month. Yes, the Beatles were provocative. Forty years ago.

The new Ubu album brings together two things I’ve been interested in for a long time:  the band Pere Ubu, and the inspiration for their name, Alfred Jarry’s “Ubu Roi.” “Ubu Roi” was an adolescent prank — a play written by a high-school kid to mock his teacher. I wrote a novel in a similar tone when I was the same age, but my novel’s still in a box somewhere while Jarry’s play radically changed its artform. (Do we get to have Ionesco, or Theatre of the Absurd as a whole, without Jarry? Probably not.)

Fittingly, Pere Ubu the band has been every  bit as influential as “Ubu Roi,” and even more doggedly uncommercial. One of the bonus features on an Ubu CD is a series of documents, including one that references an album’s sales as numbering about 6,000. This for a band with a three-decade history and a sound that influenced Nine Inch Nails, the Pixies (and, therefore, Nirvana), Joy Division, REM, Thomas Dolby, Hüsker Dü, Henry Rollins, Bauhaus, and innumerable others including the entire industrial-rock movement, a band rightfully recognized in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (albeit in an undeservedly small corner), where one of singer David Thomas’ instruments is proudly displayed:  a railroad spike with accompanying ball peen hammer. And if you listen closely enough, you can hear that very instrument on some early tracks where it is played to perfection.

This FAQ about the rationale behind the concept and recording of “Long Live Pere Ubu!” speaks to some of the many reasons I love this band. Imagine this sentiment, by David Thomas about the resurgent appearance of the monstrous Pere Ubu wherever you look, being uttered by any other recording artist this long in the game:  “Regardless of whoever or whatever it is that you personally choose to lionize, it’s more than likely that such a person or organization is Père Ubu. Every talking head that you see and admire on the tv is Père Ubu.” Thirty-four years on, 20 years past the last gasping relevance of the Rolling Stones, Pere Ubu retains the industrial crackle of original thought. That makes every new CD by them a release worthy of anticipation.