It’s fun to think about whether boredom and repetition have some kind of allopathic/homeopathic relationship; whether it’s asymptotic. Is the psychological Saraha inversely proportional to, say, one’s desperate need for Stein or Ligeti?

It’s also Tim Ramick’s fault that I first watched Martin Arnold in juxtaposition with Chris Marker’s La Jetée, an affecting exercise which I highly recommend. The two together leave the viewer with an unsettled, vertiginous sense of linearity, not unlike reading Time’s Arrow and then being unable to shake the visceral conviction that time is flowing in the wrong direction, i.e., forward rather than backward.

And now I will stop defacing this fine post.

“There is yet another way out of boredom, however. Not a better one, perhaps, from your point of view, and not necessarily secure, but straight and inexpensive. When hit by boredom, let yourself be crushed by it; submerge, hit bottom . . . . The idea here is to exact a full look at the worst. The reason boredom deserves such scrutiny is that it represents pure, undiluted time in all its repetitive, redundant, monotonous splendor.

“Boredom is your window on the properties of time that one tends to ignore to the likely peril of one’s mental equilibrium. It is your window on time’s infinity. Once this window opens, don’t try to shut it; on the contrary, throw it wide open. For boredom speaks the language of time, and it teaches you the most valuable lesson of your life: the lesson of your utter insignificance. . .”

http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/paleopsych/2005-May/003252.html

As a longtime fan of Ramick (and, thanks to him, Martin Arnold), I’d still never had the nerve to take in any Orthrelm for exactly the reasons you give here. Today I finally listened and am glad I did. It’s immediately obvious that Barr is working musically with the equivalent of what Arnold does with visual slices; and while I can imagine that many listeners would find his micro-mutating lines far too mathy to offer much in the way of emotional payoff (e.g. sentimentality?), others will find repeated rewards in, well, repeated encounters. As is invariably the case with Ramick’s work.

Concentration is a great pleasure, perhaps one of our few remaining. Thank you again for writing in praise of this particular kind of tedium, and for drawing our (scattered, fractured, dissociated) attention to its practitioners.