Saturday, July 07, 2007


useful collection of Theo Parrish playlists

"Love of the music should be the driving force of any producer, performer or DJ. Everything else stems from that core, that love. With that love, sampling can become a tribute; An expansion on ideas long forgotten, reconstruction, collage. Using the same understanding openly and respectfully can turn DJing into a spiritual participation. It can turn a few hours of selection into essential history; Necessary listening through movement."


FORGOTTEN FUTURE

1. main ingredient: rolling down a mountainside-rca
2. herbie hancock: thought it was you-columbia
3. bohannon: the groove i feel-dakar
4. patrice rushen: what's the story-prestige
5. gary bartz: carnival de l'esprit
6: oscar scully: bukom mashie_soundway
7. pleasure: straight ahead-fantasy
8. Todd Terry Presents The Dream Team - Love Is What We Need" (Freeze Records).
9. ? mr fingers: i'm strong+??+ martin luther king
11. three chairs: all over_three chairs
12. rotating assembly: illumination-ss
13. meg: kouro (theo parrish mix)
14. rich medina: minstrel speak-diaspora
15. rotating assembly: them drums-ss
16. theo parrish - timeislafinacharunninout-ss
17. larry heard: _trackmode
18. the dells: uget04
19. gap band: out of the blue_tattoo

numerous excellent mixes including new Theo Parrish (!!) at bozman website - Soulful Sound 4 Soulful people

cyanotypes of British Algae by Anna Atkins 1799-1871


all six parts of Kevin Brownlow's Cinema Europe a truly revelatory series about the silent era, are on Google video...

Friday, July 06, 2007

Thursday, July 05, 2007


at the always-interesting Courtauld site, bird photographer
Justin de Villeneuve's 'Krays'--

"Take my picture of the two Magpie Geese: When I was 16 and I was in dance hall in Tottenham and Reg and Ronnie Kray swaggered in. They had black Crombie overcoats, spotless white shirts, very slim black ties and they were so menacing that, even before I’d turned round, the hairs on the back of my neck went up - I knew there was danger. Behind them were about 50 guys, equally menacing but standing respectfully back - it was the elegance and the brutality combined that fascinated me. Later I became good friends with Reggie. So the picture of the magpie geese reminds me of Reggie and Ron; they’ve both got that swagger about them..."




Armond's Transformers

"When the Transformers explode from common tools into super beings, the kinetic imagery fulfills the surrealism of Fernand Léger, El Lissitzky—if only they had digital. Bay’s advertising eye creates shots that make you stare back, baffled at the intense clarity and depth. A couple of magnificent low-level shots, looking up at the Transformers overhead and traveling alongside their movements is the damnedest thing. One is suspended in awe—a triumph of TV-commercial aesthetics. Bad Boys II and Pearl Harbor had shots like this, but they lacked the fantasy context. That is, a context sustaining both dreams and dread. Bay’s desert battle with aliens is as terrifying as Starship Troopers yet, when linked to conflagration in our own streets, lacks Paul Verhoeven’s masterful use of absurdist nightmare..."



fine long essay on Jean Sibelius--

"In 1984, the great American avant-garde composer Morton Feldman gave a lecture at the relentlessly up-to-date Summer Courses for New Music, in Darmstadt, Germany. “The people who you think are radicals might really be conservatives,” Feldman said on that occasion. “The people who you think are conservative might really be radical.” And he began to hum the Sibelius Fifth..."

Wednesday, July 04, 2007

Tuesday, July 03, 2007



A Poem for the Seattle Poets

Blue from Player’s Plain
Pharoah & Coltrane
hopped-up hummingbirds
raging on raw honey, oysters &
barnacle-scraping soul-encounters
buzz the pre-dawn Lynnwood rain.

Blue from Winslow Homer
or someone with no home to go to
he wet his finger west
& traces out the weather week
his weakest hunch a sheriff’s gut
thrust out for the informer.

Blue Six’s “Music & Wine”
was a song we heard all the time
before the macrobiotic encounter
split the silver monitor—the crashing
symptoms came complete
with waves of “Om” on yellow gull feet.

Blue moon’s a passenger with no ID
& nothing solid in the dictionary
no per diem, no booking fee,
no very convincing reason to be
alone in swollen solidarity with
the puffer, the skink & the manatee.



late great tenor Fritz Wunderlich sings Richard Strauss's setting of "Monsdschein" from "Des Knaben Wunderhorn"...

just found City of Laughter at the library--

"Or, to put it more simply, the fact that a George Cruikshank print from 1819 shows the Prince Regent farting at radical petitioners demonstrates that someone, somewhere, apart from Cruikshank, must have thought the image sufficiently meaningful to have parted with cash for it. Even if only one punter bought it - unlikely, since the most popular of these prints sold in their hundreds - the image stands as a flag for what was still 'thinkable and doable' during that dark, difficult year of 1819, when scores of working men and women protesting against the government's increasingly jittery attitude to democratic freedom were mown down at Peterloo."
YouTube - Beverly Sills as (Handel's) Queen Cleopatra


farewell Brooklyn soprano Beverly Sills: "It is the coloratura aria to end all coloratura arias -- all trills, arpeggios and stratospheric leaps -- and it goes on forever. Still, when sung with Sills's radiant good humor and triumphant virtuosity, it calls to mind nothing so much as a Fourth of July sparkler that not only refuses to burn out but throws off ever brighter, bolder light as its time elapses..."