Small Lives

"The barren desert that I was, I wanted to populate with words; I wanted to weave a veil of writing to hide the hollow sockets of my gaze; I did not succeed; and the stubborn void of the page contaminated the world that it completely evaded."
Pierre Michon Small Lives

breath out

And then there's Gary Snyder:

"It is a perfectly simple, ordinary activity to be silent, to pay attention to your own consciousness and your breath, and to temporarily stop listening or looking at things that are coming in from the outside. To let them pass through you as they happen. There's no question that spending time with your own consciousness is instructive. You learn a lot. You can just watch what goes on in your own mind, and some of the beneficial effects are you get bored with some of your own tapes and quit playing them back to yourself." 

breath in

Re-reading a book of interviews with Beat writers and poets, I realized many talk about breath and meditation and how it pertains to the writing practice. Here's Allen Ginsburg lecturing an NYU class in the mid-90s:

"So the basic classical practice is paying attention to the breath leaving the nostril and following the breath until it dissolves, not controlling the breath, just any regular old natural breath that comes along will do. What you are adding is your awareness of the breath rather than any control...When you notice you are thinking, label it thinking and take a friendly attitude toward your thoughts. That is the nature of the mind to think thoughts."

Wickerby

"What technology really does is make our days seem to move too slowly, the nonstop flicker and flight of all our mechanisms stranding us within what, by contrast, becomes an even more static present. We, in other words, devise the illusion of our own discomfort even as we continue to make life easier. We resist our mechanisms even as we go on inventing them."
Charles Siebert Wickerby

Ocean of Sound

"Imagine the most likely use for the wired city of the future not in cyberpunk or megatripolising world music frameworks then but as a hi-tech campfire, people plugging in to remind themselves of life as it was when they were plugged out, twisting their isolation into something resembling community."
David Toop Ocean of Sound

In Patagonia

"Now I play Chopin. Yes?" and he replaced the bust of Beethoven with one of Chopin. "Do you wish waltzes or mazurkas?"
"Mazurkas."
"I shall play my best favorite. It is the last music Chopin is writing."
And he played the mazurka that Chopin dictated on his deathbed. The wind whistled in the street and the music ghosted from the piano as leaves over a headstone and you could imagine you were in the presence of a genius.

Bruce Chatwin: In Patagonia

bukka beta

I wrote a succinct set of liner notes for the first-ever CD reissue of this Bukka White recording on John Fahey's Takoma imprint, out now. This was recorded by Fahey one afternoon upon tracking Bukka down to his room in Memphis and finding that --after not recording for 30 years-- he could still play those relentless, iron-horse blues as he did in the early 1930s. There's a tactile joy in the man's growl on this one.

Shangaata

Aside from having my lobes re-arranged by the vuvu drones during World Cup matches in Johannesburg, I've also been spending an exorbitant amount of time with this new compilation from Honest Jon's, Shangaan Electro. "Bananas" doesn't quite encapsulate this ludicrous music, but as exhausting/ exhilarating as the comp is, the videos of folks twitching to it is beyond words. A few favorites below:

washington, bc.

While we will no doubt be veering towards the Rothko exhibit at the National Gallery instead, D.C. is also hosting Telling Stories: Norman Rockwell From the Collections of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. Revisionist American mythmakers to rival that of Rockwell, a fine article by Blake Gopnik in the Washington Post deftly unpacks this pre-packaging of "America" to Americans. He writes: "Even after all these years, high realist pictures never fail to play the magic trick of making us think that because they look so real, they must show things as they are."

That uncanny mindset of our country might be best summed up by this disconcerting quote from Speilberg, also in the piece: "I look back at these paintings as America the way it could have been, the way it someday may again be." So...something that was already delusional we might once again return to? Doesn't that just mean we already are in a state of delusion? While appropo for someone like Lucas, for a man who has seemingly been intent on re-addressing such mythologies with Schindler's List and The Pacific, it sounds off coming from Speilberg.

Rockwell has so whitewashed our psyche that even for my generation, it's hard to imagine a past that doesn't look like those damned pictures. It's become the mindset of political rhetoric as well, a return to a place that never was, even when Rockwell was painting them. Gopnik again:

In the hands of America's Favorite Artist, it stood as a willed repudiation of the new... Rockwell panders, in his very substance of his pictures' making, to his public's fear of change. Rockwell's greatest sin as an artist is simple: His is an art of unending cliché. The reason we so easily "recognize ourselves" in his paintings is because they reflect the standard image we already know. His stories resonate so strongly because they are the stories we've told ourselves a thousand times."

VAta

Visiting down in the mid-Atlantic region, our holiday has already been soundtracked by nu-Patriot classics like "The Lady in Red," "I Think We're Alone Now" and "Born in the USA," added to the endless parading of Sousa marches. Almost all got repeated ad nauseum during the festivities on the Great Lawn in the capital. Darius Rucker and more brass bands made the eyes roll so far back in the head, the fireworks couldn't even be glimpsed.

What was fascinating though was when headliner Reba McEntire strutted out and performed Bobbie Gentry's "Fancy," deftly inserting it into the Americana lexicon. The family frowned as I sung all the words to this obscure country song, fortifying those Texas stereotypes. Greil Marcus rightly sussed Gentry's "Ode to Billie Joe" as a devastating snapshot of our country in The Old, Weird America yet the less well-known "Fancy" resonates at this moment of our consumer culture:

We didn't have money for food or rent
to say the least we was hard-pressed
when Momma spent every last penny we had
to buy me a dancin' dress. 

Stuck in my head now, so I'll be humming it while wiping hot dog mustard off my mouth with an American flag napkin.

RIP Rammellzee

RIP Rammellzee.

A few years ago, I queried at Pitchfork about the man's totemic 12" "Beat Bop": "If "Rapper's Delight" is the Odyssey of hip-hop, is "Beat Bop" its Ulysses?" To which the answer is an unequivocal yes. If you haven't picked up my friend Dave Tompkins's head-swimming How to Wreck a Nice Beach book, do yourself a solid, if only to get observations like this on Rammellzee:

Rapper, diver, sinister masked man, dentist, jeweler, letter defender, quantum engineer, painter. Toy encoder, toy assassin...His childhood distrust of the Catholic Church tops a list of aversions that includes mayonnaise and the word whatever. "He's a genius," says director Jim Jarmusch. "The kind of guy you could talk to for twenty minutes and your whole life could change, if you could only understand him."

kid betillions

While the living artistic example of Oneida's Kid Millions has always been a revelation/ inspiration to me, I'm still taken aback by the sheer power of his new solo drum album, Man Forever. The Times piece on the project is an enlightening read (as well as a much deserved profile of one of Brooklyn's most profound musicians), with this section being my favorite two-sentence approximation of the man/drum dervish:

But behind the drums his baby face transforms into a kabuki demon, and he becomes a blur of pounding limbs. “He has a very special way of playing drums, as if he were guzzling something very tasty,” Yoshimi, a drummer in the Boredoms, wrote.

joão gilbetã

With each annual Jazz Fest, I lacerate myself for not spending the exorbitant sum for tickets to see bossa nova maestro João Gilberto perform, his artistic stature undiminished. And when JVC pulled out of sponsorship and shuttered the festival last year, I was certain that my fate was sealed. Now I would never see the man perform. But with the festival's revival this year, I realized that pr string pulling is an art made specifically for such an occasion and was all set for tonight's show at Carnegie Hall. Until this email came through:

NEW YORK, NY, June 21, 2010 – Due to international travel regulations beyond the producer’s and artist’s control, the Joao Gilberto concert scheduled for the CareFusion Jazz Festival New York at Carnegie Hall on Tuesday, June 22, at 8:00 pm has been canceled.

Foiled again.

From the excellent Sam Anderson profile on musician/ comedian/ enigmatic beardo that is Reggie Watts in New York Mag from a few weeks ago:

He talks about the process of improv in quasi-mystical terms, as a kind of spiritual jazz—a way to honor the world through mindfulness. All his ideas come, he says, from being alert to his environment and opening his mind to something he refers to as “the Source.”

“Improvising music has helped me a lot,” he said. “Music is very similar to comedy: It’s all about texture, timing, context, vocabulary, performance. When someone’s onstage doing a solo, essentially it’s the same thing as what a comedian does. They’re in the moment. They’re listening. The environment is giving you stuff constantly: a woman yelling something, an animal making a weird sound in the forest, a window being rolled up, static on a radio. Someone turns to you and says something in the same key as the radio. If you pay attention to the world, it’s an amazing place. If you don’t, it’s whatever you think it is.”

pantha du prince

Last week, I got to do a very brief interview with Hendrik Weber, a/k/a Pantha du Prince. We chatted about the dark, efficient works of Georges Simenon (which we both wound up reading on our respective vacations), The Glass Bead Game (to which I recommended James Blackshaw's album of the same name), and a few other things.

bethailand

A few winters ago, I traveled to China for a piece and from there decided to traipse through Southeast Asia for a few months more. My head filled with the type of astounding music being unearthed in that part of the world by the Sublime Frequencies imprint, I was on the lookout for such musical encounters when I arrived in Thailand. We walked the night markets, in search of records, totally unaware of what might be great and what would be treacle, and came away with nothing. But one night, we could hear the thud of bass, the chirp of singing, and pushed deeper into the market, past the blankets laid over the parking lots, towards a hastily-erected stage in the middle of the concrete lot.

At first glance, it seemed like the real deal, a concert of Thai music. As we got closer, it instead looked like the world's mightiest karaoke soundsystem, complete with film flashing behind the singers. Only as my friends and I drew towards the crowd though did the onslaught of red flags, banners, and shirts denote something much different: a rally in support of exiled prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra. So as news about the violent rioting in Bangkok and rising death toll rolls out, I am struck by how such a small, inconsequential thing grew since my departure, to the point of death, fire and destruction. I still worry about my friends and the peaceful strangers I encountered at every turn there, yet communicating with fellow travelers who are still there, few could say much about the turmoil.

Talking with a budding Buddhist the other day and her vision of travel there, I realized that the country remains this slate for westerners to impart their own vision upon. Even a Times piece unpacks the notion of democracy in part of that world, how Thailand has to be an example of such governance. Our insistence on it being such a beacon pressurizes the strife. There were many places I stayed where it seemed the town had been overrun by expats simply seeking a space without an identity that they could practice their spirituality or dietary concerns in, rarely venturing into the Thai society around them. So even as such atrocities rage on, a piece about how tourists in Phuket remain oblivious to the violence isn't all that shocking either. And yet I still think of returning there, of finishing myriad short stories begun there about the search for spirituality within that country's folds, and how outsiders continue to think that peace and serenity resides there (or the young women to make into passive wives). Who there can hear the gunshots?

My interview with Black Dice's Bjorn Copeland appears in this month's edition of Theme Magazine, which was curated by Hisham Bharoocha.

Sunday Beta

Damn. Not even a week after my feature on the Sunday Best party, which kicked off along the Gowanus Canal over the Memorial Day weekend (peep the "Where's Beta?" party pic from their site), it was announced that the landowner was no longer honoring the lease and shuttered the party one week into their third season. Truly devastating news, as that three-block jaunt from my house to dancefloor bliss had become one of my favorite summertime activities.