“I heard a string quartet a while ago by Los Angeles composer Art Jarvinen titled 100 cadences with four melodies, a chorale, and coda (“with bells on!”). As the title suggests, the piece keeps ending, over and over again, each time promising to conclude a musical adventure that never was. Over forty-eight minutes, the consecution of endings, punctuated by solos and glimmering silences, draw out an irritatingly radiant array of mock-perorations. And I am always more or less aware of this: More aware when the sheer materiality of these several endings intrude upon my sense of contempt, and less aware when, like Swann listening to Vinteuil’s sonata, I am taken away by time passed. I am alternately with the music, my attention buoyed by a procession of simulated extinctions and untimely non-events, and beside the music, dreaming counterfactuals, shifting backward, forward, side-to-side in fantasies of otherwise. Sustained in the messy immanence of a perpetual conclusion, my attention floats on nothing in particular, nothing but a sense of loose intensities that are now and again interesting, or boring, or both.
“Listening to Jarvinen’s piece, I hear David Foster Wallace’s summons: Ride out the waves of boredom, Wallace insists, and ‘it’s like stepping from black and white into color.’ Maybe once upon a time, when there was a patience to let the swells and breaks slowly teach us to ride its current, one could learn to surf the waves of boredom. But being bored is not the ride it once was. Through the second half of the twentieth century, boredom bored so many holes in the body of every genre, every medium, every performance, and every criticism, that it bled its promise of bliss into ever-narrower furrows of distraction. The problem with boredom now is that the rituals of bloodletting that go by the name ‘boring art’ are largely indistinguishable from the practices of everyday life such that our interests have, in a sense, hemorrhaged. Bored to death, post-industrial culture is dying by a thousand little interests. Boredom no longer compresses into a tight bundle of bliss; now it just splays out—the pullulating temper of postmodernity’s bad or ‘sensuous infinity.’”
