Her stuff, I’ve found, can be habit-forming.
Grimes, live (studio performance), 2012
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lagniappe
reading table
washing my laundry
with my clothes on . . .
summer rain—Kobayashi Issa, 1821 (translated from Japanese by David G. Lanoue)
flashback
MC5: Kick Out the Jams (Leni Sinclair & Cary Loren, 1999 [with footage from the ’60s])
Rarely has dying sounded so joyous.
Glen David Andrews, “I’ll Fly Away”
Live, New Orleans (Zion Hill Baptist Church), 2008
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lagniappe
reading table
[P]eople exist for us only in the idea that we have of them.
—Marcel Proust, The Fugitive (translated from French by Peter Collier)
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Each year on this auspicious day, alone and foreign
here in a foreign place, my thoughts of you sharpen;far away, I can almost see you reaching the summit,
dogwood berries woven into sashes, short one person.—Wang Wei (701-61), “9/9, Thinking of My Brothers East of the Mountains” (trans. from Chinese by David Hinton)
Sometimes more is more.
Anton Bruckner (1824-96), Symphony No. 8 in C minor; Vienna Philharmonic (Herbert von Karajan, cond.), live, Austria (Abbey of St. Florian), 1979
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
Once upon a time, before the human attention span began to shrink, people could actually sit still and pay attention to something—a single thing—for over an hour.
timeless
Mississippi Fred McDowell, “Write Me A Few Of Your Lines”
Blues Maker, 1969
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More?
love it or hate it
Fire Room (Ken Vandermark, reeds; Lasse Marhaug, electronics; Paal Nilssen-Love, percussion), live, Poland (Poznań), 2011
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
What Emily Dickinson says of poetry applies to music too: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”
Happy (100th) Birthday, John!
John Cage, composer, September 5, 1912-August 12, 1992
Today, celebrating his centennial, we revisit past clips.
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10/9/09
No matter where you are, this landscape is just around the corner.
John Cage (1912-1992), In a Landscape (1948); Stephen Drury, piano
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
Music is a means of rapid transportation.
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What I’m proposing, to myself and other people, is what I often call the tourist attitude—that you act as though you’ve never been there before. So that you’re not supposed to know anything about it. If you really get down to brass tacks, we have never been anywhere before.
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As far as consistency of thought goes, I prefer inconsistency.
—John Cage
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5/22/10
Here’s a piece that sounds different every time you hear it.
John Cage, 4’ 33” (1952); David Tudor, piano
lagniappe
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*****
musical thoughts
I didn’t wish it [4′ 33″] to appear, even to me, as something easy to do or as a joke. I wanted to mean it utterly and be able to live with it.
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Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music.
—John Cage
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3/8/12
John Cage, Two (1987)
Live, Netherlands (Amsterdam), 2009
Dante Boon (piano), Rutger van Otterloo (soprano saxophone)
*****
Recording, 1991 (hat Art)
Marianne Schroeder (piano), Eberhard Blum (flute)
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
Every something is an echo of nothing.
—John Cage, Silence (1961)
*****
7/23/12
Monday, n. the day the weekly tide of confusion rolls in.
How about something simple?
John Cage (1912-1992), Six Melodies (for violin and keyboard; dedicated to Josef & Anni Albers), 1950; Annelie Gahl (violin) & Klaus Lang (electric piano), 2010
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lagniappe (new stuff)
radio
Today it’s all Cage all day at WKCR-FM.
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art beat: more from Sunday’s stop at the Art Institute of Chicago
Agnes Martin, Untitled #12, 1977 (detail)
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another birthday, closer to home
Today also marks the birthday of MCOTD—our third.
You don’t need to be asleep to be lost in a dream.
Maurice Ravel, Piano Concerto in G Major (1929-31); Martha Argerich, piano; Orchestre National de France (Charles Dutoit, cond.); live, Germany (Frankfurt), 1990
joy, n. listening to Paul Motian play Monk.
Paul Motian Trio (PM, drums; Joe Lovano, tenor saxophone; Bill Frisell, guitar), “Misterioso” (T. Monk), live, New York (Village Vanguard), 2005
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lagniappe
art beat: yesterday at the Art Institute of Chicago
Jasper Johns, Corpse and Mirror II (1974-75)
*****
reading table
up to today
such a healthy singer . . .
katydid—Kobayashi Issa, 1813 (translated from Japanese by David G. Lanoue)
Stevie testifies.
Stevie Wonder, “Falling in Love with Jesus,” live
music clip of the day 