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No Sir E
Monome performance edited out of this “Highlights From The L.A. Monomeet” video by Charlie Visnic.
Apr 3rd
Re: ECM by Ricardo Villalobos and Max Loderbauer reviewed on Pitchfork
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Andrew Gaerig:
If Re: ECM were to soundtrack a dinner party, it would have to be of the newfangled, slightly sadistic variety in which the chefs have lots of tattoos and serve mostly foie gras and bone marrow.
Anthony Braxton, just fucking with people now—I mean playing the contrabass saxophone, the lowest member of the saxophone family.
Charlie Parker laughing at Coleman Hawkins’s attempt to do playback on his own recorded improvisation
This is the coolest thing ever. In one of two known pieces of footage of Bird performing, the music is pre-recorded and the band is supposed to be pantomiming along. But he clearly thinks it’s stupid and starts to laugh until someone off-camera tells him to stop and then just look at his face. Bird was too cool for this world.
Don’t you drink? I notice you speak slightingly of the bottle. I have drunk since I was fifteen and few things have given me more pleasure. When you work hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whisky? When you are cold and wet what else can warm you? Before an attack who can say anything that gives you the momentary well-being that rum does?… The only time it isn’t good for you is when you write or when you fight. You have to do that cold. But it always helps my shooting. Modern life, too, is often a mechanical oppression and liquor is the only mechanical relief.
—Ernest Hemingway
UR
All the black men you see in America today are the direct result of those actions: all the freedoms we have, as well as the restrictions, refer back to the government and the Black Panthers in the ’70s. So we make music. We make music about who we are and where we’re from. Of course there are going to be links—that’s why we had songs with titles like “Riot.” Because that’s indicative of the era we were born in, and the things we remember. As time goes on, naturally I think the messages will get further away from that. It’s not a coincidence. There is a reason behind UR and Public Enemy and these people.
—Jeff Mills
Thoughts of Buckminster Fuller
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To start off with it is demonstrated in the array of events which we have touched on that we don’t have to “earn a living” anymore. The “living” has all been earned for us forever. Industrialization’s wealth is cumulative in contradistinction to the inherently terminal, discontinuous, temporary wealth of the craft eras of civilization such as the Bronze Age or Stone Age. If we only understood how that cumulative industrial wealth has come about, we could stop playing obsolete games, but that is a task that cannot be accomplished by political and social reforms. Man is so deeply conditioned in his reflexes by his millenniums of slave function that he has too many inferiority complexes to yield to political reformation. The obsolete games will be abandoned only when realistic, happier and more interesting games come along to displace the obsolete games.
Originally published in the Whole Earth Catalog.
Why Moralism Spoils the Appetite
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Kirk Leech for sp!ked review of books:
The pleasure of eating is increasingly weighed down with anxiety. Eating, once a relatively uncomplicated activity for many of us, has become laden with ethical and moral meaning and which has been tasked with grandiose political purpose.
“When predicting the future, favor entropy and luck over innovation and ideals.”
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—zzzzBov on StackExchange
“Story from North America” by Garrett Davis and Kirsten Lepore
