Steve Reich Wins 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Music.

It's.

About.

(expletive)

Time.

It's a shame that he didn't win it for one of his landmark earlier works.  Music For 18 Musicians is probably the strongest work, and Different Trains, though not my favorite Reich piece, would have been a perfect candidate from a marketing standpoint alone (and it's a really good piece to boot).

Oh well.  We'll take the victories where we can.  Ornette Coleman, David Lang, and now Reich.  Anyone care to propose the next logical winner?  Philip Glass?  John Luther Adams?  Can they give a posthumous one to Feldman, or Cage, or Miles Davis, or John Coltrane, or...

Craftiness

One thing I find very helpful is having a resource where I can quickly go and get a small but pertinent piece of advice about art and creativity. While the advice is generally not as good as the advice I'd receive from a live human, this resource would be available 24/7, whereas people sometimes need to sleep.

My favorite is the aphorisms page at Guitar Craft. Guitar Craft was started in the mid-1980s by King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp, and what started as a course in guitar technique broadened to become applicable in almost any way you choose to use it. The aphorisms touch on truth with speed and precision, and they've been very helpful to me. If you want another one, you can just refresh the page.

It's worth checking them out. (The one that came up just now was, "Sometimes no answer is an answer, especially when the answer is no." Not always sunshine and smiling bunnies, but useful.)

The Approach of Sleep

In anticipation of Sommeil, Tanner Menard is running a great series of interviews over at his blog this week. The first interview is with experimental media artist and Creative Commons mover-and-shaker Jon Phillips. Check it out!