things to read

[onetwofeb]

Arthur Lee & Love - Alone Again Or - on Later With Jools Holland (2003)

[irenelichtensteinblog]

Lee Friedlander, New Orleans, Louisiana, 1961

[henk-heijmans]

Dolce via (sweet way) - by Charles H. Traub (1945), American

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[onetwofeb]

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Milton Nascimento - MPB Especial (1972) HD

[dustedmagazine]

Joseph Allred — The Old Gods (Carbon / Feeding Tube)

Spiritual seekers numbered among the founding fathers of the Takoma school of guitar playing. In addition to recording several albums of sacred and holiday music, one of which was the best-selling thing he ever did, John Fahey ended plenty of his records with a Christian hymn. He also dedicated one LP to a Hindu teacher, although he subsequently took it back, claiming that he was really just sweet on the guru’s secretary. Robbie Basho’s fantasias were infused with exoticism, mysticism and nature worship. Joseph Allred’s spent time with the music of both, and also pursued graduate level studies in theology and philosophy. When they invoke The Old Gods, they’re not being flip.

That seriousness of intent powers the four generously dimensioned instrumentals on this LP. Each is a solo performance that feels like a manifestation of a winding journey, played on a single instrument. The title track opens side A with some heraldic strums, each as radiant a mass of harmonics as can be tugged out of twelve guitar strings. Then the strumming blurs, initiating a cascade of sound whose turbulent surface is periodically broken by stern and sturdy melodies. The A side’s other piece, “Lonely Mount Koya,” is another twelve-string instrumental. It is named for a complex of Shingon Buddhist temples and graves, and it projects a Basho-like air of exaltation.

Flip the record over and you’re back in Tennessee. “Murmurations” is named for the complex maneuvers made by flocks of starlings, which sounds like just the sort of thing one might want to represent with a twelve-string guitar. Nope. Instead, Allred patiently plucks out patterns on a banjo, coaxing multiple voices out of the instrument’s relatively hurried string decay. They switch instruments once more on “Cumberland Yab-Yum,” to six-string guitar, whose starker output might be a metaphor for the title’s invocation of Tantric unity.

Allred’s notes on the album’s Bandcamp page frames the pursuit for old gods within boundaries of mind-blowing complexity and excessive simplicity. One is present to overwhelming reality and the other leads to comforting falsehoods. The dense swirl of these performances makes clear which side Allred trusts.

Bill Meyer

[onetwofeb]

Miles Davis – trumpet, organ Dave Liebman - tenor & soprano sax, flute Pete Cosey – electric guitar, percussion Michael Henderson – electric bass Al Foster – drums James Mtume – congas, percussion, rhythm box Reggie Lucas – electric guitar

Live at Kōsei Nenkin Kaikan Hall, Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan, June 20, 1973

[onetwofeb]

Mister-Lucky

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Mister-Lucky

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David S. Ware

Mother May You Rest In Bliss

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[onetwofeb]

It all wears out. I keep telling myself this

It all wears out. I keep telling myself this, but I can never believe me, though others do. Even things do. And the things they do. Like the rasp of silk, or a certain Glottal stop in your voice as you are telling me how you Didn’t have time to brush your teeth but gargled with Listerine Instead. Each is a base one might wish to touch once more

Before dying. There’s the moment years ago in the station in Venice, The dark rainy afternoon in fourth grade, and the shoes then, Made of a dull crinkled brown leather that no longer exists. And nothing does, until you name it, remembering, and even then It may not have existed, or existed only as a result Of the perceptual dysfunction you’ve been carrying around for years. The result is magic, then terror, then pity at the emptiness, Then air gradually bathing and filling the emptiness as it leaks, Emoting all over something that is probably mere reportage But nevertheless likes being emoted on. And so each day Culminates in merriment as well as a deep shock like an electric one,

As the wrecking ball bursts through the wall with the bookshelves Scattering the works of famous authors as well as those Of more obscure ones, and books with no author, letting in Space, and an extraneous babble from the street Confirming the new value the hollow core has again, the light From the lighthouse that protects as it pushes us away.

 -  John Ashbery, from A Wave

[onetwofeb]

“What is important, it seems to me, is not so much to defend a culture whose existence has never kept a man from going hungry, as to extract, from what is called culture, ideas whose compelling force is identical with that of hunger.”

— Antonin Artaud, from The Theatre and Its Double (via stoicremains)

[revolutionoftenderness]

Question: “You said that deconstruction is always accompanied by love…?”

Derrida: “This love means an affirmative desire towards the Other - to respect the Other, to pay attention to the Other, not to destroy the otherness of the Other - and this is the preliminary affirmation, even if afterwards because of this love, you ask questions. There is some negativity in deconstruction. I wouldn’t deny this. You have to criticise, to ask questions, to challenge and sometimes to oppose. What I have said is that in the final instance, deconstruction is not negative although negativity is no doubt at work. Now, in order to criticise, to negate, to deny, you have first to say ‘yes’. When you address the Other, even if it is to oppose the Other, you make a sort of promise - that is, to address the Other as Other, not to reduce the otherness of the Other, and to take into account the singularity of the Other. That’s an irreducible affirmation, its the original ethics if you want. So from that point of view, there is an ethics of deconstruction. Not in the usual sense, but there is an affirmation. You know, I often use a quote from Rosensweig or even from Levinas which says that the “yes” is not a word like others, that even if you do not pronounce the word, there is a ‘yes’ implicit in every language, even if you multiply the 'no’, there is a 'yes’. And this is even the case with Heidegger. You know Heidegger, for a long time, for years and years kept saying that thinking started with questioning, that questioning (fragen) is the dignity of thinking. And then one day, without contradicting this statement, he said 'yes, but there is something even more originary than questioning, than this piety of thinking,’ and it is what he called zusage which means to acquiesce, to accept, to say 'yes’, to affirm. So this zusage is not only prior to questioning, but it is supposed by any questioning. To ask a question, you must first tell the Other that I am speaking to you. Even to oppose or challenge the Other, you must say 'at least I speak to you’, 'I say yes to our being in common together’. So this is what I meant by love, this reaffirmation of the affirmation.“

[onetwofeb]

Julius Eastman (1940-1990) - Buddha, with original manuscript score.

[onetwofeb]

Julius Eastman (1940-1990) - Gay Guerrilla {Score}