keep on dancing
Theo Parrish, “Dan Ryan” (1998)
Repetitive?
Yep.
That’s the idea.
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lagniappe
reading table
There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.
My heart’s on fire . . .
Nona Hendryx (with Ronny Drayton, guitar), Philadelphia, 2012
“Temple of Heaven”
*****
“Rock This House”
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lagniappe
reading table
Her life, she said, was an out-of-tune piano played with passion.
***
This evening I sat listening to five presidential candidates offering their imaginary solutions for a country that doesn’t exist.
***
“Imaginary maladies are much worse than the real ones, because they’re incurable,” an old friend who walks with difficulty was telling me.
***
Much of what our eyes see and our ears hear is lost in translation.
***
“An alarm clock with no hands, ticking on the town dump,” is how he described himself.
***
They gave the nice old gentleman I met at the bake sale several medals for the misery he caused in some country that no one could find any longer on the map.
***
I bet all our elected representatives in Washington spend a great deal of time in front of mirrors admiring themselves. They lift their noses and chins, stare straight ahead without moving an eyebrow or a muscle, then nod their heads gravely and smile to themselves as they go out to meet the people.
***
He sat on a bench in Washington Square Park whispering something extremely confidential to his dog, who sat before him with ears perked, wagging his tail cautiously from time to time.
***
The crosses all men and women must carry through life are even more visible on this dark and rainy November evening.
—Charles Simic, “A Year in Fragments” (excerpts), New York Review Blog, 12/31/12
He wasn’t content with the sounds he found—so he created new ones.
Harry Partch (1901-1974), Music Studio (1958)
#1
#2
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
There’s a world, somewhere, that sounds nothing like this one.
Ernest Dawkins’ New Horizons Ensemble (ED, alto saxophone; Steve Berry, trombone; Darius Savage, bass; Isaiah Spencer, drums), live, Chicago, 2005
Happy New Year!
Albert King & Stevie Ray Vaughan, TV show (In Session, Canada), 1983
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
Once upon a time there was a common musical culture. Certain dialects, like blues, were known to nearly everyone. No more.
William Ferguson, “The Music They Made,” New York Times (12/27/12): Etta James, Dave Brubeck, Davy Jones, Levon Helm, Donna Summer, Chuck Brown, Ed Cassidy, Greg Ham, Jimmy Castor, Ravi Shankar, Earl Scruggs, Doc Watson, Ronnie Montrose, Jon Lord, Michael Davis, Joe South, Chavela Vargas, Duck Dunn, Johnny Otis, Whitney Houston, Jimmy Ellis, Adam Yauch, Mickey Baker, Bill Doss, Ketty Wells, Bob Babbitt, Robin Gibb, Andy Williams, Terry Callier
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
To love anything—music, literature, comedy, sports, whatever—is to be perpetually saying goodbye.
*****
reading table
clamoring geese—
over there is the year
ending too?—Kobayashi Issa, 1763-1827 (translated from Japanese by David G. Lanoue)
*****
found words
FASTEN SEATBELT WHILE SEATED
USE BOTTOM CUSHION FOR FLOTATION—Saturday morning, on a flight from Chicago to a family gathering in Lincoln, Nebraska, this was on the back of the seat in front of me
*****
random thoughts
Some things are better left unexamined. Like, for instance, flying on a commercial airplane. If I thought much about it, I’d never do it.
*****
radio
WKCR-FM’s Bach Festival, mentioned the other day, concludes at midnight.
Here, following up on Monday’s post, is more of Inez Andrews.
Live, “I Made It,” Washington, D.C.
***
Live (with the True Voices of Christ Concert Ensemble), “Come In,” Chicago
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lagniappe
reading table
“[B]eing able to ask a question means being able to wait, even one’s whole life.” (quoting Martin Heidegger)
***
“Someone who proposes a non-strange answer [to the question ‘why is there something rather than nothing’?] shows he didn’t understand the question.” (quoting Robert Nozick)
***
[T]he universe was created by a being that is 100% malevolent but only 80% effective.
—Jim Holt, Why Does The World Exist? (2012)
two takes
How To Dress Well (Tom Krell), “& It Was U” (2012)
***
Bear//Face, “Taste My Sad” (2012)
Nineteen-year-old Bear//Face—his nonvirtual self, that is—lives in Belfast.
keep on dancing
Then suddenly I could hear Q-Tip—blessed Q-Tip!—not a synthesizer, not a vocoder, but Q-Tip, with his human voice, rapping over a human beat. And the top of my skull opened to let human Q-Tip in, and a rail-thin man with enormous eyes reached across a sea of bodies for my hand. He kept asking me the same thing over and over: You feeling it? I was. My ridiculous heels were killing me, I was terrified I might die, yet I felt simultaneously overwhelmed with delight that “Can I Kick It?” should happen to be playing at this precise moment in the history of the world, and was now morphing into “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” I took the man’s hand. The top of my head flew away. We danced and danced. We gave ourselves up to joy.
—Zadie Smith, “Joy,” The New York Review of Books, 1/10/13
A Tribe Called Quest, “Can I Kick It?” (album, 1990; single, 1991)
tonight
These guys will be playing at the Hideout, a small club on Chicago’s near northwest side, which is where I’ll be too.
DKV Trio (Hamid Drake, drums; Kent Kessler, bass; Ken Vandermark, reeds), live, Italy (Sant’Anna Arresi Jazz Festival), 2008
music clip of the day 