The Golden Age

The following in an excerpt from W.B. Yeats's story The Golden Age:

A man got into the carriage and began to play on a fiddle made apparently of an old blacking-box, and though I am quite unmusical the sounds filled me with the strangest emotions. I seemed to hear a voice of lamentation out of the Golden Age. It told me that we are imperfect, incomplete, and no more like a beautiful woven web, but like a bundle of cords knotted together and flung into a comer. It said that the world was once all perfect and kindly, and that still the kindly and perfect world existed, but buried like a mass of roses under many spadefuls of earth. The faeries and the more innocent of the spirits dwelt within it, and lamented over our fallen world in the lamentation of the wind-tossed reeds, in the song of the birds, in the moan of the waves, and in the sweet cry of the fiddle. It said that with us the beautiful are not clever and the clever are not beautiful, and that the best of our moments are marred by a little vulgarity, or by a pin-prick out of sad recollection, and that the fiddle must ever lament about it all. It said that if only they who live in the Golden Age could die we might be happy, for the sad voices would be still; but alas! alas! they must sing and we must weep until the Eternal gates swing open.

God Bless Chris Rock

Salon quoted (and now Saturday Night Live) Chris Rock that the country may be ready for Barack Obama in the White House, "Is America ready for an African American president? I say, why not. We just had a retarded president!"

One More Story of the Sea

A postscript to the compilation Stories of the Sea is this track from that old sea dog Bonnie "Prince" Billy. Billy once released an entire record of instrumental sea chanteys. He returns to the sea for inspiration time and again.

This song comes from a performance in Scotland (I believe) combining Is It the Sea? with My Home is the Sea to create a haunting and triumphant tale and sound. It's worth the time to download and listen. Download here.

Creep Juice

This week I traveled to Raleigh for a conference and visited the North Carolina Museum of Art for the first time. A number of memorable works from Joseph Cornell, Ed Ruscha, Daisy Youngblood and much more.

Though I've never been an enormous fan of Andrew Wyeth, this painting's enduring creepiness continues to haunt me. From the ghostly images in the upper left window to sheet pushed out of the upper right window looking like the head of a crazed ram, it's damned spooky. What doesn't translate in this scanned image is the placid water in the can in the foreground of the painting and the clothesline dividing the image in two.

The Geography of Sound

The following is an excerpt from a lecture titled The Geography of Sound by David Thomas, the former leader of the band Pere Ubu:

Ike Turner's Rocket 88 from 1951, frequently cited as the first out n out rock n roll recording, is about a car and a car is about space. The car is a form of poetic meter, only suburbanites and soccer moms think of it as transportation. A windshield frames the Big Out There in wide-screen, cinemascopic proportions while the car has a radio that frames a broadcast signal which in turn frames a recording which is in itself a complex of frames within frames, wheels within wheels, and all the while you yourself in either of the heavily symbolic roles of Driver or Passenger are navigating across a no-doubt wacked landscape from within this resonating soundscape frame-container and all the scales are fracturing very artistically and the gyroscope of your sixth body sense is flipping around getting pleasantly confused as to what exactly is the distinction between internal and external geographies... and that's what they used to call "Cruising." And in Old America the real artists did not work with marble or paint or even cine film, the real artist was a slob with a pint of oil and a set of spark plug wrenches.

Howlin' Wolf

Producer Sam Phillips said upon first hearing Howlin' Wolf's music: "This is for me. This is where the soul of man never dies."

Seas of the Mind

Joseph Cornell's early collage Untitled (Schooner) is a remarkable image hinting at his later masterful (and slightly precious) handmade box collage creations using junk and ephemera gathered from his wanderings among junk and old book stores in Manhattan.

It recalls a piece by Tennessee artist Andrew Saftel, a mixed media sculpture called Past Away. Another mysterious creation hinting at the child-like desire to explore one's dreams on a boat made by whatever materials are on-hand.


















Or Saftel's ship could be Sir Francis Drake's galleon discovered in the middle of the jungle by Jose Arcadio Buendia in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's circular time narrative One Hundred Years of Solitude. Marquez is also creating by using the materials on-hand by using the Drake galleon as a way to re-create his home in the dreamland of One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Deep Blues

W.C. Handy first heard the blues on a train platform in Tutwiler, MS in 1903. Handy called it the "weirdest music I had ever heard." He heard a mysterious man accompany himself on the guitar and repeat the line "Goin' where the Southern cross the Yellow Dog." South of Tutwiler, the tracks of the Yazoo & Mississippi Valley Railroad - known as the Yellow Dog - crosses the tracks of the Southern in Moorehead (modern photos here). All this can be found in Robert Palmer's book Deep Blues.

In 1966, Bob Dylan recorded "Absolutely Sweet Marie" in Nashville and released on Blonde on Blonde. This song includes the line: "And now I stand here looking at your yellow railroad / In the ruins of your balcony." A line that Dylan once said was "not a lie."

In 2006, Dylan recorded the song "Nettie Moore" and released it on Modern Times. It includes the line: "I've gone where the Southern crosses the Yellow Dog / Get away from all these demagogues."

Yellow railroads, yellow dogs and lots of weird music.

Dead Snake

The following quotation by Stephen Crane was found in a Luc Sante piece in the New York Review of Books:

"An artist, I think, is nothing but a powerful memory that can move itself through certain experiences sideways and every artist must be in some things powerless as a dead snake."

A line filled with mystery and force. The image of the snake in the second half of the sentence coils back to the first half as one envisions an artist moving sideways snake-like through collected memories sorting motivations and impulses while lacking the ability to change outcomes or determinations of a lifeless reptile.

Sante says that this line from Crane is quoted by John Berryman.

Two Up

Two recent music purchases: John Coltrane's One Up, One Down: Live at the Half Note and Yo La Tengo's I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass (the title supposedly comes from a comment from Knick Kurt Thomas to fellow Knick and all-around prick Stephon Marbury). The Coltrane set is phenomenal especially the title track. 27 minutes long, Coltrane and drummer Elvin Jones (Best. Drummer. Ever.) engage on an extended duet that find both stretching towards the heavens like two half-crazed prophets. The recordings come from a radio broadcast that only provide a snippet of the actual set and realizing that the 27 minute-long song is actually 45 minutes in length in the actual performance. That's a pretty good sermon length.

Yo La Tengo's latest disc finds the band returning to their find-the-influence game shifting from extended feedback-driven guitar workout to white man soul. Many found their last record Summer Sun to be too singular in sound, so this hodgepodge collection may be a response. On first listen, the energy is there and the songwriting is as strong as ever. There are a few clinkers, but most of all, a celebration on the joy of creating music. (Download two samples here.)