04-02-2004

David Michael Curry - Empty House Cooperative

"Five digressions"

We met David Michael Curry as a viola player for Willard Grant Conspiracy. DMC is a kind of a free electron there, the heir of generations of folk violinists, bringing a creaking dangerous element to the band. DMC also made us discover his project named Empty House Cooperative, a collective fed on improvisation, comprising Thalia Zedek, Chris Brokaw, members of Molasses...

These are the five words that David Michael Curry picked:
Improvisation
Procrastination
Modernization
Tangent
Simplify



Improvisation
Fun to do, easier than planning, instant challenge at moment of problem requiring no forethought, a school of thought applicable to life things as well as music (cooking, poetry, painting, rap, humor, etc.)


Procrastination
Takes the pressure off, lets you think "Things happen when they are meant to", my least-liked personal trait that is also easiest to ignore. I'd work on it if I weren't so lazy.


Modernization
(LITTLE MODERN THINGS): Computers and video-games, DVDs, e-mail and modern toys, all fascinating, but also adding to my procrastination problem as distractions, and eroding old-fashioned things like playing marbles, walking outside in fresh air, writing letters with real handwriting to friends on paper, folding and putting them in envelopes and licking a stamp...
(BIG MODERN THINGS): historic side effects of modernization that I think about include cutting down forests, paving the world, pollution. Modern pollution is so much more evil than pre-industrial pollution.
(HISTORY OF MODERNIZATION): I'm currently fascinated by the early history of cities, particularly New York City (from colonization to the slum tenement problems documented by Jacob Riis in his late-1800s book "How The Other Half Lives".


Tangent
A well-used thought process and conversation channelling tool - the opposite of the way I write, which is slow and often over-composed like a haiku with too many syllables.


Simplify
As in the lifestyle movement, a path to clarity (if you don't need it, don't bother with it) - this is my mantra, nirvana, Shangri-La, personal utopia... whatever... I suffer from clutter.