music clip of the day

testify!

United House of Prayer Shout Bands, live, published 2011

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lagniappe

random sights

a while ago, Ireland (Dingle Peninsula)

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reading table

Do you sometimes imagine that you’re getting used to the emergency? I think I can guarantee that you’re not, burdened by states of mind that will be comprehensible only retrospectively, when they no longer pertain. The world going on nonetheless, as the world will, feels bizarrely conditional, subject in thought and action to a blanketing subjunctive mood: things as we wish they were. We are waiting this out with nostalgia for lost freedoms, fear and empathy in the present, and, perhaps, vague anticipation of eventual survivor’s guilt. Never has social privilege seemed more unfair while being clung to so tenaciously. Some of us—artists—are undergoing the siege in ways that can alert us to the subjective dimensions of an objective calamity. We should want those people to keep it up as best they can.

—Peter Schjeldahl, “The Art World: The Melancholy Gestalt of Isolation” (reviewing  100 Drawings from Now, Drawing Center,  New York), New Yorker, website (12/14/20), 12/21/20 issue (“The Fix We’re In”)

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streaming

Tomorrow, 6:30 a.m. (CST): the 30th annual winter solstice concert by Chicago-based percussionists Michael Zerang and Hamid Drake (MCOTD Hall of Fame).