the joys of ECM records...

"In his biography of Jarrett, Ian Carr explains that the pianist spent much of the gig vamping, just waiting for the others to come in. In this vacancy, Carr claims, can be heard the imminent disintegration of the group. Well, I was happy to wait indefinitely, the longer the better in fact, because the infinitely prolonged suspense makes the climactic reintegration of the group—with just five minutes of the second side left to run—all the more intense. And the waiting, in any case, never felt like waiting; it felt like being where you wanted to be, never wanting to leave, but still curious to know who else might turn up, what else might happen. I never have this feeling when the Jarrett-Peacock-DeJohnette trio play standards, but I get it every moment when they play those surging, tidal originals: "Sun Prayer," "Dancing," "Endless," "Lifeline," "Desert Sun," "The Cure." Except that's not quite true, because the greatest moments of all occur when a standard turns into a Jarrett original, when "I Fall in Love Too Easily" smoulders into "The Fire Within" (on the fourth CD of At the Blue Note). These transitions express in miniature the larger contribution of ECM to musical history, as the accumulated riches of a tradition give way to something that lies beyond it, new, but waiting to be discovered. At the risk of projecting a listener's response onto the music's creators, it seems to me that an unspoken assumption underwrites many of the most successful ECM recordings: namely, that by the late twentieth century you could only make jazz if you were simultaneously trying to find a way out of it..."

The Dark Side of the Gilded Age

"The concentration of wealth is not quite at the Gilded Age chasm, but we’re getting there. Back then Americans could not imagine a fairer society; inequality was continuous with the unequal past. Today we can remember a fairer past—the New Deal era from the 1940s to 1970 saw real family incomes double, high marginal tax rates on the rich, and unions representing more than a third of the private-sector workforce. Memory is a radical organ in today’s America. Between 1950 and 1970 for every additional dollar earned by the bottom 90 percent of the income distribution, the top .01 percent earned $162. Today, the top .01 percent earn $18,000. Gilded Age Americans lived before equality. We live after equality. Outrage over business rule and the un-American concentration of wealth and power spurred the early twentieth-century reform movement known as Progressivism. Corporate contributions to political campaigns were outlawed. Monopolies were broken up. Progressive income and inheritance taxes were passed. Will history repeat itself? The Gilded Age has repeated itself; why not the Progressive Era? That should be the question decided by the 2008 election..."

thanks RC for these Tim Knowles - Tree Drawings

Piping and quacking of queen bees

"The 1609 edition shows a four line staff with the letter G on the second line from the bottom indicating that this is a treble clef. There are no bar lines but the two semibreve rests at the beginning of the staves indicate that we are in a triple metre, and indeed the text states that the bees 'sing' in triple time. The notation indicates that the two most common results of the simultaneous piping and quacking of the rival queens are the musical intervals of either a perfect fifth or a major third...The 1634 edition presents a two-part madrigal for four voices incorporating melodic elements based on the actual sounds produced by bees. The music has been printed in the manner of a part-book to be read by the Mean [soprano] and Tenor sitting on one side of a table and by the Bassus and Countertenor facing them on the other side. This edition also incorporates the use of what is referred to as 'Butler's reformed spelling'. In his English grammar of the previous year (1633), Butler had condemned the vagaries of English orthography and proposed the adoption of a system whereby 'men should write altogether according to the sound now generally received'."

from Bangor Maine this handsome Flowering Chestnut

(continued)

He wakes in the pollarded half-shade of a dying
walnut. The half-audible early birds tweet
ear bones press against each other
a passing satellite pings its archive.

Night had been a tree to him moving through space,
sparing him memorable dreams, something
medication never quite achieved
but if you sit there thinking, it goes dim
the golfball grain comes rushing in
like water through a window. All he knows
of the moon--its interlocking t-shapes
of broom yellow fanning
oilslick tailfeather--is that its
both outside & above, a bell held in a cup.

The pain is such a little thing to be wandering
abroad like that. He becomes aware of the
heavy air & that he's awake,
a hiss of decompression through the leaves
hanging heavy in a hoary-hanging sky
sickly after the rain hit, turning west
he hallucinates as it falls each ring of the tree.

review of the Philip K. Dick Library of America volume, here on "Man in the High Castle"--

"Some characters appear to wonder if they’re actually participating in a work of science fiction, but Dick is way ahead of them; he seems to know he has written one of America’s enduring expressionist novels of alienation and disillusionment, whose environs are no more far-fetched than the West Egg mansion of an ersatz millionaire or the newspaper offices of a wretched advice columnist with a Jesus complex..."

nice reconsideration of Hall & Oates'Abandoned Luncheonette (1973):

"The breezy “Las Vegas Turnaround (The Stewardess Song)”, a character study of sorts about a woman named Sara (perhaps the Sara of another subsequent hit, “Sara Smile'), casually exploits what must have been the inherent fascination at the time with the displaced people who made a living in commercial aviation. That they can pass off this gimmicky concept off-handedly, with little trace of desperation, is characteristic of much of the duo’s material and is suggestive of what would ultimately make them so successful; audiences are perhaps primed to forgive them their transparent attempts to be hip because they simultaneously come across as implausible, likable underdogs who can’t be held to a higher standard..."

JACK KIRBY'S "2001: A Space Odyssey"

Captain Beefheart's rules for guitarists:

"9. KEEP YOUR GUITAR IN A DARK PLACE When you're not playing your guitar, cover it and keep it in a dark place. If you don't play your guitar for more than a day, be sure to put a saucer of water in with it."

Star man

Housman is not the only poet in the nineteenth century to have been part of a living orrery; evidence uncovered by Nicholas Roe suggests that Keats enjoyed similar educative games at Enfield School, where each pupil was given a card listing key facts about specific planets (“I represent the grand Georgium Sidus . . . I move round the Sun in about 83 years, and at the distance of 1,800,000,000 miles”), and then put into orbit around a classmate representing “the great Sun”. But it seems significant that Housman, as well as taking part, was also the bossy god who created this mini-universe and set it in motion. For whereas most people grow out of the desire to have whole worlds at their command, just as they grow out of tending ant-farms or using train-sets to stage elaborate crashes, Housman might better be thought to have grown into it. His inaugural lecture as Professor of Latin in Cambridge pointed out that the boy who makes mud pies shares “in modest measure the activities of the demiurge”, as he sets out to “evoke a small world out of a small chaos; let him also behold the work of his hands and pronounce it, if he can, to be pretty good”, and he exercised similar talents in his twin lives as classical scholar and poet.

Cruel Summer

He was in Nanaimo writing letters to
Marshall, every now &
then walking down to the playhouse
for a smoke. The heavy leafage
of a wet June absorbed the roar
of the highway so he sat on the damp
carpet he'd slung over the old garden
chair & picked up and put down
the book that had begun to curl
on the dusty table raising more dust.
He trades places with the cat
so that when the gravel trucks gear
down or loudly up the cat can watch it pass
& he can pretend to read.

It was almost time for "Rockford"
when the news intervened. Outside the last
bees on Planet Earth rubbed sagey
pollen on their undercarriages.
Noting this he raised his eyes from the
newscrawl to a copper Ford drifting
thru the twilit Bel-Air of the Ford
administration. This is the part of the sublime
from which we shrink: Sepulveda, Ventura
& Culver City are to him
an approximate haze as hard as calcium,
unspooling painkillers at every point
of the compass. Something shifts &
then he shifts. He apologises
to the dead space where he had been sleeping.

Aestheticizing Suffering

"Could it be that what were in the past necessary and substantive critiques of representation have become, in practical terms, hindrances to actually looking at images? And that this has contributed to an effective political passivity in the face of a rapidly changing communications environment? Hariman and Lucaites rightly point to “the larger problem identified by Peter Sloterdijk that modernity has entered into a terminal phase of ‘enlightened selfconsciousness’ whereby all forms of power have been unmasked with no change in behavior [my emphasis]. Irony is too widely dispersed throughout modern consciousness, subjectivity too fragmented, the administration of power too cynical, and critique too disposed to reification for unmasking to be other than a reproduction of the world it would change.”"

a couple of churches from an absolutely top-notch site devoted to one of my favorite American cities--Deep Oakland

"Affiliated with neither the tourism nor better business bureaus, Deep Oakland seeks to create a compendium of inter-linked images, text and sound that represent the complications and vitality of Oakland’s current moment..."

intelligent review of new Scott Walker film--

"Marc Almond touches upon a crucial point—namely, how much Walker shared the attitudes of Kitchen Sink Realism: the chasms and pitfalls on all sides, the sense of being deeply disturbed, thrown for a loop. It’s not that John Osborne’s plays or the social-realist black-and-white films of early and mid-’60s Britain directly inspired Walker, but that this was the world he was looking for when he arrived in London, a world he knew from television. For a while, the colorful hubbub of Swinging London obstructed his view, but Walker realized that he needed only to take a few steps away from the scene to find his beloved black-and-white world: bleakness, poetic dereliction, housing projects, bad weather. The irony of such a situation, in which a grim and depressing social reality was the almost cherished fulfillment of the promises of television, is perhaps something like the formula for Walker’s art as a whole. His music is not in fact about estrangement at all, but about all-too-familiar aspects of the world and its horrors..."

Value Village Is Booby-Trapped!!

"Waterloo Ballad, or, Why Glenn Gould Always Wore Gloves

In the land of Finger Eleven
under hand dryers
everyone will have
a lackadaisical outing today

There I experienced trout
and the beavers that try
so hard
to get a hand-out

The residential parts
have yellow-brick houses
and many incidents
of purposely-falling pianos

Though the waiters
failed to make it clear
wheat beers
have a spicier, less bitter flavour

And shock --
Smash!!
went my
glass

the pathos
only matched
by the photos..."

The Sweet Tea Line(flash) sweet memories of Marshall & Hot Springs! (thx Mike!)

today's YouTube - Laura Nyro - He's a Runner (Jan. 15, 1969)

"June is now sealed, silent.
Form without springing makes of it
a wrong season,
makes even this perfumed rain
autumnal."


--Margaret Avison

Isola di Rifiuti on Ben Friedlander--

"Poundian

The first principle of academic cricketism
is expand,
wandering home
gaseous in our anti-chastity

The flimsiest of whistlings
to shiver the saving graces
of the cold damp night
of art"

from Lorine Niedecker | Lake Superior Notes

"At home we're in the drowned lands ? trees standing permanently in the water.

"We slept on a kind of bog which the men call Tetes des femmes.

treaty of limits between the tribes

Pike (of Pike's Peak) when he went up the Miss. R. ? north of the St. Croix R. he said the river (Miss. I take it) became "black in the depths and clear in sandy shallows."

calcite ? a native calcium carbonate also called calc spar, occurring in many crystalline forms, such as chalk, marble, etc . . .

The face of the earth is a graveyard and so it has always been.

My inner midwest

I was in a St. Ignace fog

Why this fascination with rock terms, name, probably because we like to think the first geologists took their finds and created them ? name to thing ? out of the nature of things ? plus sometimes their sound or reflection of colour that delighted their senses..."

from the LRB archive lovely 1979 William Empson on Fairy Flight in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’

"The distance to the Moon is about 60 times the radius of the Earth, as was already known in Classical times, and the Moon goes round the Earth in about 30 days, so the speed of the middle of the Moon’s sphere, the part which carries the Moon, is about twice the speed of the equator, which revolves in a day. So the working fairy does at least half a mile a second, probably two-thirds, and the cruising royalties can in effect go as fast as her, if they need to. Puck claims to go at five miles a second, perhaps seven times what the working fairy does. This seems a working social arrangement. But if all the stars go round the Earth every day, with the Moon and planets lagging only slightly behind, the speed of the Moon’s sphere is about 60 times the speed of Oberon when he remains in the dawn, and the working fairy is going very much faster than the boast of Puck. I agree that the phrases are meant to sound rather mysterious – probably Shakespeare asked the advice of Hariot, who was certainly a friend of Marlowe – but they would not be meant to be sheer nonsense, as has for so long been assumed..."

today's YouTube - High Llamas - "Nomads" from 1996's epochal "Hawaii", which starts winding things up on the first track until the whole 79 minute album becomes about endings, fades, bonus tracks, hidden tracks, side threes...dedicated to everyone on location...

new Tyee music-writer-to-watch on 1993: The Year Rap Died


""I Ain't Goin' Out Like That," "Hits From the Bong," and "Hands on the Glock" gave young people, as in Hendrix and The Doors before them, the anthems they needed to gather in fields and get really, really stoned, all while sounding scary and insane. Which makes "Insane in the Brain" not only their best song, but also an accurate depiction of their oeuvre..."

Giuliani: Worse Than Bush

"Rudy Giuliani is a true American hero, and we know this because he does all the things we expect of heroes these days -- like make $16 million a year, and lobby for Hugo Chávez and Rupert Murdoch, and promote wars without ever having served in the military, and hire a lawyer to call his second wife a 'stuck pig,' and organize absurd, grandstanding pogroms against minor foreign artists, and generally drift through life being a shameless opportunist with an outsize ego who doesn't even bother to conceal the fact that he's had a hard-on for the presidency since he was in diapers. In the media age, we can't have a hero humble enough to actually be one; what is needed is a tireless scoundrel, a cad willing to pose all day long for photos, who'll accept $100,000 to talk about heroism for an hour, who has the balls to take a $2.7 million advance to write a book about himself called Leadership. That's Rudy Giuliani. Our hero. And a perfect choice to uphold the legacy of George W. Bush.

Yes, Rudy is smarter than Bush. But his political strength -- and he knows it -- comes from America's unrelenting passion for never bothering to take that extra step to figure shit out. If you think you know it all already, Rudy agrees with you... "

from David Perry this Flickr set of Shanghai Trees

Harewood trees

happily received:

Monica Fauble TO PLACE TWO PALMS TOGETHER Philadelphia 2006 (excuse formatting)

I might be/a very bad/
Buddhist/but I
am an excellent/
ice skater

Michael Scharf FOR KID ROCK TOTAL FREEDOM Spectacular Red Hook 2007

"The contradictions produced by power are shared, and their
articulation, by poets and others, is a real, if unwanted, func-
tion within society, as is the modeling, in poems and other
media, of other possible modes of power, as on Saturdays on
Rain's tiny dancefloor on N 5 Street in Williamsburg, where I
was first brought by poets, and where the men of the neigh-
borhood admit me to a space of mutual movement that sub-
sumes in an explicit manner never approached on the street,
where I adjust my walk."

more bling (all trinkets and trade goods from Value Village junk jewelry grab bags which Daphne's sisters have already gone over)

"More than once, from this account, the First World War emerges not just as an inevitable clash between imperialist forces but as a great conspiracy of the rulers everywhere to rid themselves even if only temporarily from the intolerable demands of their subjects..."


from Paul Foot's review of the 1997 reprint of George Dangerfield's 1935 The Strange Death of Liberal England,long sought after & eagerly anticipated by this blog, acquired at Literacy Nanaimo yesterday along with Eric Bentley's "Thirty Years of Treason", a vast collection of testimony from the House Unamerican Activities Comittee--including those who named names (Sterling Hayden, Lee J. Cobb) and those who didn't (Lionel Stander, Zero Mostel) Walter Bagehot's "English Constitution" (with a 60 page intro by Richard Crossman) & vol 2 of "The Diplomats" featuring Moltke, Bullitt & the slide into WWll & a book called "The Pocket Venus" about a Victorian sex/horse-racing scandal...with change from a twenty!

lovely memoir of John Wieners

"Pain and suffering. Give me the strength
to bear it, to enter those places where the
great animals are caged. And we can live
at peace by their side. A bride to the burden

that no god imposes but knows we have the means
to sustain its force unto the end of our days.
For that is what we are made for; for that
we are created. Until the dark hours are done.

And we rise again in the dawn.
Infinite particles of the divine sun, now
worshiped in the pitches of the night..."

Capital

"What has happened is that a few very intelligent people (mostly advertisers, political consultants and assorted zealots) have, over a period of decades, figured out how to co-opt the ideals and enlightened thinking of both East and West and turn them into fertile ground for manipulative mischief that trumps the spiritual, emotional, intellectual and even material well being of the whole. While the enlightenment of the West becomes a pretext to justify a nihilism and hedonism used to promote a shallow, cynical, politically apathetic but shopping friendly populace (we can look back to the Marquis de Sade and advertising for the roots of this trend), the enlightenment of the East is used to justify an anti-rationalism that fixates on swarm politics and sacrifices critical thinking at the alter of individual conformity – all for the sake or social order, security and the prosperity of the whole (we can look back to Mao Zedong and advertising for the roots of this trend). Both bastardizations of the enlightenment agenda can be found in the rhetoric of globalization and the realities of a rule of capital that is fundamentally fascistic in its outlook. It is the rhetoric and rationale of advertising, pollsters and focus groups, of cynical linquistic manipulators for both the nihilistic hip and sound bite fundamentalists, of fear and desire quite effectively massaged in the mindless march toward material progress which in its wake leaves incredible waste and destruction to the planet and many of its inhabitants not only unfulfilled but in a blanket state of perpetual – and perpetuated – misery. And all of this to make a few hundred billionaires..."