reading table | music clip of the day

Category: reading table

2017

Wednesday, March 1st

basement jukebox

Howlin’ Wolf (vocals, harmonica; 1910-1976), “How Many More Years,” “Moanin’ at Midnight,” 1951

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lagniappe

reading table

We drew from the models, and you cannot imagine how fantastically boring it can be to look hour after hour at a beautiful body. But an ugly body can be fascinating.

—photographer Lisette Model (1901-1983), quoted in Colm Toibin, “That Little Minx” (reviewing Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer and Silent Dialogues: Diane Arbus and Howard Nemerov), London Review of Books, 3/2/17

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2017

Sunday, February 26th

back to church

Choir Rehearsal, “Walk Through the Streets,” White Hill AME Zion Church, Rock Hill, S.C., 2007

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lagniappe

reading table

Picasso would be incomprehensible to Rembrandt, but Nijinsky would understand Michael Jackson.

—Zadie Smith, Swing Time

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2017

Saturday, February 11th

If I knew I had a week to live, this is one of the recordings I would want to hear.

Frederic Chopin (1810-1849), 24 Preludes
Alfred Cortot (1877-1962), piano, 1933/34

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langiappe

reading table

dizzying, adj. making you feel dizzy. E.g., reading a John Ashbery poem.

Listen to it the way everybody
here was naughty today,
of how broad it is.

Foreign man with an affluent cigar,
he used to live on top of this bed
on the local rails he was so proud of
among the recyclables, this morning,
spouting words that I thought were other.
Yes, and they became addictive. Oh,

make me a boy again! Do something!
But the little candle just stood there,
reflected in its lozenge-shaped mirror.
Maybe that was “something,”
a lithe sentence.

He’s only going to do it for the first time.
It’s snowing hard.

Hand me the orange.

—John Ashbery (1927-), “Just So You’ll Know,” New Yorker, 2/13 & 20/17

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2017

Wednesday, February 8th

not the same old stuff

Maja S. K. Ratkje, live (performance begins at 1:30), Norway (Kristiansand), 2013

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lagniappe

reading table

Happy (106th) Birthday, Elizabeth

From the few states I have seen I should now immediately select Florida as my favorite. I don’t know whether you have been here or not—it is so wild, and what there is of cultivation seems rather dilapidated and about to become wild again. On the way down we took a very slow train from Jacksonville here. All day long it went through swamps and turpentine camps and palm forests and in a beautiful pink evening it began stopping at several little stations. The stations were all off at a tangent from the main track and it necessitated first going by, then stopping, backing up, stopping, starting again—with many puffs of white smoke, blowing of the whistle, advice from the loiterers around the station—all to throw off one limp bag of mail.

—Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), letter to Marianne Moore, January 5, 1937

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2017

Wednesday, February 1st

more

Wet Ink Ensemble, Pendulum V (Alex Mincek), live, New York, 2009

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reading table

in such an ugly time the true protest is beauty

—Phil Ochs (1940-1976), Pleasures of the Harbor (1967), liner notes

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2017

Monday, January 30th

two takes

Phil Ochs (1940-1976), “The War Is Over”

Lady Gaga, live, 2016

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Phil Ochs, live, 1960s

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lagniappe

reading table

Our credo must be the exposure of the plunderers, the steerers, the wirepullers, the bosses, the brokers, the campaign givers and takers . . . So I say: Stew, percolate, pester, track, burrow, besiege, confront, damage, level, care.

— journalist Wayne Barrett, 1945-2017 (on his prayer card)