Everything That Rises Must Converge from Sam L. Richards on Vimeo.

Suite of Roads, II. From from Sam L. Richards on Vimeo.

With the advent of commercial flight, the value of travel itself has largely been transformed from what was once a journey-centric experience to what is now a destination-centric one. What we miss when seated in our aircraft speeding along at high altitudes is everything in between. We miss how we have shaped the land and how the land continues to shape us; what is ultimately a profound enculturation of human history and experience. Travel, to me, is the art of observation—spinning otherwise disparate experiences into threads of power and personal meaning.

Some of my most vivid and formative experiences consist of events and narratives that have unfolded along these corridors of dirt, rock, and pavement. With open eyes, ears, and hearts, the unexpected people, places, and things that one encounters along the way are often more valuable than the carefully calculated and frequently unremarkable plans made by the most imaginative of us. Suite of Roads.

Suite of Roads, I. To from Sam L. Richards on Vimeo.

limp, sickened, disfigured hands to mouth
plodding in a stench of present— The lamp inside burns,
torching, glowing and christening from with the dogged licking flames,
spewing, capturing, and defying everything below, Courage!
it has courage! to lick the sky and back again through atmospheres and life shimmering

And here’s another:

“I have my fabric”—she said, and swept me out of sight
a klezmer incognito fright-
-ened witches on the prowl, protruding legs and corpuscles clasped around the tortured toes—
we sat and watched it all explode- what a delight!

According to Amanda Ameer’s blog over at the ArtsJournal, several works by the Bang on a All-Stars are now available for download for at-home Rock Band “rocking”. Works include David Lang’s Cheating, Lying, Stealing, Michael Gordon’s Yo Shakespeare, and Evan Ziporyn’s Shadowbang (Head). Julia Wolfe’s Believing will also be available soon. To quote Amanda:

Alex Rigopulos and Harmonix co-founder Eran Egozy were actually Evan Ziporyn’s students at MIT in the early and mid 90s . . . Evan remains a faculty member at MIT today. The “Rock Band Network” just launched, which allows artists to submit music to Rock Band for XBOX via the web, so the Bang on a Can All-Stars went into the studio and recorded 4 pieces!

Bottom line is: I can’t wait to try out my Rock Band/Guitar Hero chops on Evan Ziporyn’s Shadowbang. Let’s rock and roll.

Please read more about it on it’s own page, or you can just watch the video below.

With Bated Breath from Sam L. Richards on Vimeo.

The profundity of this succinct and pithy poem written by my own father haunts me. I cannot walk through sand or hold my children without thinking of its lessons. It is here set to music, a soprano duet, for the occasion of Lucy Shelton’s spring 2010 residency at the University of Oregon. It bears a dedication to my son Beckett, born in January of the same year, and whose bones support both the shape of his beauty and his miraculous birth.

In other words, my life has been ridiculously busy over the course of the past few months, but very productive. I have quite a bit of new music and projects that I have completed in the interim and I will be spreading the resulting posts out over the course of the next week and a half. For now, I thought I would share some joy from a game I used to play with my family as a child, and recently played just for kicks and giggles.

The game goes like this:

1. Get a group of people, and sit in a circle. Each person needs a piece of paper and a pencil or pen.
2. Fold each sheet of paper into four equally sized rows. Each section of the page will correspond to a portion of the bodies that will be drawn: head, arms and torso, legs, and feet.
3. Everybody begins by drawing a head on the top row of the sheet. (In order to ensure the most hilarity it is best for each participant to cover their work). When everybody is finished with their heads, they proceed to draw two lines which extend from the body part that they have drawn (in this case it’s probably the top of the neck: two short lines) into the row beneath.
4. The portion of the drawing that has just been completed is then folded back (so the next artist can’t see what your portion of the drawing looks like) and then passed to the next person in the circle. The only portion that they see is the two lines extending downward from the top of the page, and they can then proceed to connect the torso and draw their torso as they please.
5. Proceed similarly until every portion of the body has been completed by a different person (with each artist not having a clue what the rest of the body looks like).
6. Open up the folded sheets for riotous laughter to ensue.

Some examples from my own family’s recent efforts can be seen below. Click on them to see larger images. Zippideedoodahhh!

Come! See! Hear!