John Zorn, Book of Angels (excerpts); Uri Caine, piano; Masada String Trio (Mark Feldman, violin; Erik Friedlander, cello;* Greg Cohen, bass); live, France (Marciac), 2008
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lagniappe
reading table
There’s a line in Tarkovsky’s Solaris: we never know when we’re going to die and because of that we are, at any given moment, immortal.
—Geoff Dyer, “Diary,” London Review of Books, 4/3/14
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*It’s all related: Erik’s the son of photographer Lee Friedlander, whose work is often featured here.
Tommy Jarrell (fiddle, vocals), Chester McMillan (guitar), Frank Bodie (guitar), Ray Chatfield (banjo), “Let Me Fall,” live, Mt. Airy, North Carolina, 1983
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), Violin Sonata No. 1 in G minor (2nd Movt.)
Henryk Szeryng (1918-1988), live
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Arthur Grumiaux (1921-1986), recording
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Yoojin Jang (1990-), live
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lagniappe
reading table
[A] mad person not helped out of his trouble by anything real begins to trust what is not real because it helps him and he needs it because real things continue not to help him.
—Lydia Davis, “Liminal: The Little Man” (The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis)
William Parker (bass), Christian McBride (bass), Cooper-Moore (drums), Charles Gayle (tenor saxophone), Hamiett Bluiett (baritone saxophone), Jason Kao Hwang (violin), live (benefit concert), New York, 2012
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
Q: What would you do if you were not a composer?
Augusta Read Thomas (1964-): . . . I would spend all day listening. I could listen all day long until the day I die to music I’ve never heard and only begin to scratch the surface. There’s so much new. . . .
John Luther Adams (1953-), “The Farthest Place” (2001); piano (Clint Davis), vibraphone (Brian Archinal & Andy Bliss), bass (Satoru Tagawa), violin (Lydia Kabalen); University of Kentucky (Lexington), 2008
Julianna Barwick, live (studio performance), Seattle, 11/22/13
“Look Into Your Own Mind”
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“Crystal Lake”
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lagniappe
reading table
The Snow Man
by Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
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Stevens’s poems force us, as great poems always do, to live in the occasion of their language—not simply to extract a ‘meaning’ from the language. The point is not so much to understand the poems (for when we understand something, we don’t need it anymore, and we don’t read it again); the point is to inhabit the poems. By doing so, we recognize that our humanity is not constituted by our ‘mastery’ of something. It is constituted by our willingness to humble ourselves to the ‘mystery’ of something.
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