The Two Arabesques (Deux arabesques), L. 66, is a pair of arabesques composed for piano by Claude Debussy when he was still in his twenties, between the years 1888 and 1891.
Although quite an early work, the arabesques contain hints of Debussy’s developing musical style. The suite is one of the very early impressionistic pieces of music, following the French visual art form. Debussy seems to wander through modes and keys, and achieves evocative scenes through music. His view of a musical arabesque was a line curved in accordance with nature, and with his music he mirrored the celebrations of shapes in nature made by the Art Nouveau artists of the time. Of the arabesque in baroque music, he wrote:
“that was the age of the ‘wonderful arabesque’, when music was subject to the laws of beauty inscribed in the movements of Nature herself.”
Floating Fields by Thomas Chung is premised on a vision for ‘Re-Living The City’, speculating on a place-based bio-social urbanism. It aspires to an alternative, organic living based on reinvigorating post-industrial architecture by creating enjoyable public space through a productive edible landscape, at the same time reviving the roots of the polyculture ecology (multiple agri + aqua-cultures) that once defined the unique territorial landform of the Pearl River Delta. The project forms the major landscape piece for the Shenzhen Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture UABB (SZ) 2016.
The series of connected ponds holding various aquatic functions create a complete ecological water cycle that wraps around the old dormitory, a linear block which has itself been converted into a multi-use learning resource centre with exhibition, roundtable space, library and a café restaurant. A contemporary version of the dyke-pond cultivation is combined with low-tech aquaponics; mulberry trees are grown to feed cocoon-spinning silkworms inside a pavilion; the waterway inspires a corridor of filtering ponds with water-cleansing plants and grasses for fish feed; and colourful micro-algae is expertly cultivated and harvested to enhance the water purification and produce fish feed.
After a while you learn the subtle difference Between holding a hand and chaining a soul,
And you learn that love doesn’t mean leaning And company doesn’t mean security.
And you begin to learn that kisses aren’t contracts And presents aren’t promises,
And you begin to accept your defeats With your head up and your eyes open With the grace of a woman, not the grief of a child,
And you learn to build all your roads on today Because tomorrow’s ground is too uncertain for plans And futures have a way of falling down in mid-flight.
After a while you learn… That even sunshine burns if you get too much.
So you plant your garden and decorate your own soul, Instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.
I HATE IRONY. I think it’s so lazy. I was just talking about this with someone the other day. We were in a car and they were playing Thin Lizzy’s ‘Boys are Back in Town’ and I turn to one of the guys who does (our) sound, who’s younger than me and he was like, ‘nobody under the age of thirty could listen to this without hearing it ironically.’ That’s such BULLSHIT, because so many people who do that sort of thing now are just unwilling to say THEY REALLY LIKE IT. They have to hide behind the charade of irony because they’re afraid of falling on their faces and failing publicly. I know for me personally it’s frustrating because whenever I do things on my own people always say 'oh he’s being ironic’ and it’s like 'FUCK YOU, I LIKE RUSH’
Jim O'Rourke - “Radical Adults: An Interview With Sonic Youth’s Jim O'Rourke” by Danielle Prokop (Offbeat Magazine Iss. 171, Oct. 2002) (via nursehella)
1) Out of the Vinyl Deeps by Ellen Willis. For figuring out how to analyze and integrate your own reactions with broader socio-political context into criticism that is personal to the writer and accessible to the reader while being packed with ideas and insight.
2) The Heart Of Rock & Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made by Dave Marsh. Broadly speaking, I’ve never been a fan of Dave Marsh. But if you are going to write about music, you’re going to find yourself writing lists and blurbs from time to time (if you are lucky, it’s only from time to time). And I think this is a fantastic primer for the art of blurb writing. Every approach to the blurb is represented here somewhere and done well.
3) Energy Flash: A Journey through Rave Music and Dance Culture by Simon Reynolds. The best book I know for figuring out how to explore and articulate emotional meaning of sound. Most music criticism is heavily weighted toward lyrics, and this shows you another way.
4) Mystery Train by Greil Marcus. Shows you how to burrow deeper into a song or artist to turn up something new. Obviously a cornerstone of U.S. pop criticism also.
5) The Recording Angel: Music, Records and Culture from Aristotle to Zappa by Evan Eisenberg. The best book I’ve ever read about music and technology and how the interface between the two has changed our hearing. Probably had the strongest reaction to this of any book on music I’ve read, really rewired my brain.
6) Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties by Ian MacDonald. If you write about music for any length of time, you’ll eventually have to grapple with the shifting meaning and quality of a band’s catalogue over time, and this is the best single example I know of to show how it’s done.
Here is something I wrote about Chantal Akerman when I was very young, aka like five years ago. It was originally posted on Canonball, the feminist blog I ran with my friend Mia. This piece sort of makes me cringe now, the way things you write in your early 20s probably should, but I am reposting it in the spirit of Akerman, who taught me about the radical power of writing your own story, particularly when you are young and “untrained.” Consider a placeholder until I get a chance to write something more meaningful and up-to-date about her.
Even though Akerman herself had qualms about being labeled a “female filmmaker,” I believe that when we lose a female genius we have a responsibility to make as much noise about her as possible, because we can’t trust history to do the same.
*
“It is often said that New York is a city for only the very
rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least
for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city only for the very
young.” – Joan Didion
Lately I’ve been compiling a mental list of books and movies
about the experiences of young women in the city that do not contain any
references to any of the following: expensive shoes, lattes the size of Big
Gulps, or, above all things, appletinis. Too many books and movies about Young
Women in the City seem to act as though this holy trinity is the key to female
happiness, but my life in the city has found a way to persist without them. I
can’t afford nice shoes (ain’t getting paid to blog, as they say), I prefer
Slurpees over lattes, and I’ve only once tried an appletini (fresh-faced and
under the influence of said books and movies, no doubt) and found it so
sickeningly sweet that I couldn’t even finish it. The stereotypical trappings
of the Young Woman in the City have always felt ill-fitting to me, and so I’ve
sought out writers and artists who embrace a different and more honest
representations of this familiar trope.
Which brings me, first and most obviously, to Joan Didion. Her
1967 essay “Goodbye to All That” has got to be one of literature’s
most definitive statements about being young, female and living on your own.
Didion writes, with stinging clarity, about her time spent in New York in the
late 1950s. She was twenty when she arrived there from Sacramento. “All I
could do during those years was talk long-distance to the boy I already knew I
would never marry in the spring. I would stay in New York, I told him, just six
months, and I could see the Brooklyn Bridge from my window. As it turns out the
bridge was the Triborough, and I stayed eight years.”
“Goodbye to All That” – and more or less all of the
other personal essays that appear in Didion’s collection Slouching Towards
Bethlehem – pulls off the tricky feat of being both particular and
universal. Her prose pivots from striking personal imagery (the gold silk
curtains she hung in her stark apartment and the way they’d get “tangled
and drenched in afternoon thunderstorms;” the movements of a cockroach on
her neighborhood bar’s tiled floor) to universal sentiments (“I began to
cherish the loneliness of [New York], the sense that at any given time no one
needed to know where I was or what I was doing.”) The material things that
Didion catalogues are never things in themselves, but rather triggers for the
memories they elicit. After having moved to Los Angeles, she wrote, “Now
when New York comes back to me it comes in hallucinatory flashes, so clinically
detailed that I sometimes wish that memory would effect the distortion with
which it is commonly credited. For a lot of the time I was in New York I used a
perfume called Fleurs de Rocaille, and then L'Air du Temps, and now the
slightest trace of either can short-circuit my connections for the rest of the
day.” The feelings conjured by these flashes of memory range from joy to
despair, but Didion’s careful cataloguing of the good and the bad makes for a
refreshingly multi-dimensional account of her days of being young, broke and
female in New York.
I can’t think of a film that conjures and celebrates that urban
“loneliness” that Didion describes (“the sense that at any given
time no one needed to know where I was or what I was doing”) as accurately
as Chantal Akerman’s 1977 film News from Home. Its premise is simple:
Akerman documents her experience arriving in New York from Belgium in her early
twenties by filming the city in wide, emotionally detached exteriors. The
soundtrack records the ceaseless hum of traffic and sidewalk chatter, overtop
of which Akerman reads aloud the letters her mother wrote her from home. The
letters progress in chronological order and recount very little narrative
drama: news of family members getting married or having children, accounts of
family members’ minor illnesses and Akerman’s mother’s expressions of boredom,
loneliness and dissatisfaction. We’re privy to so much personal information
about the filmmaker – the visual details that fascinate her, the intimate
words of her mother – but the film creates an element of detachment since her
responses to her mother are omitted.
News from Home is an exercise in duration and, for many
viewers, patience. It rejects the traditional rules of film narrative and
suspense in favor of minimalism and formal experimentation. But if you can get
lost in its meditative pace, it’s a hypnotizing film that I think really
captures the banalities of everyday life in the city and forces you to look at
them in a new way. The closest thing News from Home gets to a dramatic
climax comes in the pattern-breaking moment when Akerman’s mother’s voice
becomes, in mid-sentence, obscured by the whoosh of a passing car, never to
become fully audible again. It’s a tiny detail, but it speaks volumes about
detachment, disconnect and the freedom that comes when no one needs to know
where you are or what you’re up to.
True,
none of these accounts are as exciting or melodramatic as many writers might
want you to think the experience of being a young woman in the city actually
is. But they capture some of my favorite things: the quiet moments between the
bits that make it into the montage, the poetry in the stuff of everyday life.
Maybe they’re not as sweet as appletinis, but I’m starting to believe that
nobody really drinks those things anyway.
Not sure about when this book was published, but I think it dealt with a sort of of “Desert Island Discs” scenario. Jim was one of those surveyed for the book.
Van Dyke Parks “Song Cycle” (Warner Bros 1968)
How can life go on worth living without this? The most perfect musical statement I’ve ever heard. Really the extension of Charles Ives into our century, really the one that truly moves that vision into our time. His greatest song, greatest lyrics, arrangements that can’t be decoded until you arrange yourself into the ground, and an attention to the use of the studio as an arranging element that is still second to none.
Tony Conrad “Outside the Dream Syndicate” (Virgin Caroline 1972)
What can you say? Tony Conrad is the man. Along with Phill Niblock and Arnold Dreyblatt, truly the great minimalist, took the music to its honest conclusion, working for the music and its ability to move us. While I would want all of Tony’s recordings with me, this one has a special place in my heart. How could it not. Also of interest, young Tony on the cover looks exactly like Axel Dorner.
Sparks “Propaganda” (Island 1974)
Oh boy, lyrics that are the best match of misanthropy and angst filled laughs that I’ve heard, incredible songs, amazing arrangements, really words don’t suffice. “Kimono my house” comes a close second, but this one has the best riff break I’ve heard, end of Thanks but no Thanks. I have nearly crashed the car many times during this section. Not recommended for driving, but who drives on a desert island?
Roy Harper “Lifemask” (Harvest 1974)
It’s tough to choose one Roy Harper record. How could I pass up "Valentine", “Come out fighting…”, “Stormcock”??? Well, I choose "Lifemask" for the B side full lenght The Lord’s prayer, which if I’d heard when I was 12, I woulda learned it note for note instead of learning "Supper’s Ready". Still my favourite Roy track. The genius can’t be stopped.
Led Zeppelin “Presence” (Swansong 1976)
There’s no argument. I don’t care what people say, THIS is Zeppelin’s best album. Usually people who don’t like this are either confusing it with “In through the out door” (ugh) or “Coda” (nevermind…) or have never heard it. Achilles last stand, c'mon, how can you not lose your head???
Talk Talk “Laughing Stock” (Verve 1991)
Another case of people think I’m talking about their new wave records, which were fine for what they were. But this, wew… One of the best sounding, best written, oh what’s the point, this record is beyond words. If only the organ solo at the end of “Spirit of Eden” album were on this, it’d be absolutely their ultimate statement.
Judee Sill “Judee Sill” (Asylum 1971)
What the hell was in the water in the early 70’s? Why do people bother buying records made now when they can buy David Crosby’s “If Only I Could Remember My Name” for a dollar, or 10cc “How Dare You” for 50 cents?? Why pay 14 bucks ah, whatever, 99% of what comes out now, I’m tellin’ ya, the standards have slipped! Judee’s first record is the best singer songwriter record of the period, bar none.
Philip Glass “Einstein on the Beach” (Tomata 1974)
When I was a teenager, it was easier to find albums of Glass, Reich, etc. than the other bunch. When I was 18 THIS was my Black Sabbath, my Zeppelin. The original recording, played loud, can still send shivers up my spine. Along with “Music in 12 parts” all of Reich’s stuff until 78 (inclusive!) really really made life worth living.
Harumi Hosono “Cochin Moon” (King 1978)
Sadly one of his least known records. I love his Dr. John inspired records like “Hosono House”, or his Van Dyke-ish stuff, but his pre-YMO record is still the record that blows my mind. When I asked him about, it took him a minute to even remember the record, oh it’s a weird world.
Bill Fay “Time of the Last Persecution” (Deram Nova 1972)
While I also love his first record “Bill Fay”, this album somehow taps some sense of serious grave digging that I’ve not heard before on a record. With amazing backing from Ray Russel’s group (Ray himself was involved in some awesome rock record at the time, like the first rock Workshop record, "Running Man", and his own mind blowing “Secret Asylum”). Really one of the great lost treasure.
(P.S. I think maybe Patto’s The Man is the most perfect rock song I’ve ever heard.)
1. Stories by Julio Cortázar 2. & 3. The Apocryphal Gospels 4. Amerika and The Complete Stories by Franz Kafka 5. The Blue Cross: A Father Brown Mystery by G.K. Chesterton 6. & 7. The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins 8. The Intelligence of Flowers by Maurice Maeterlinck 9. The Desert of the Tartars by Dino Buzzati 10. Peer Gynt and Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen 11. The Mandarin: And Other Stories by Eça de Queirós 12. The Jesuit Empire by Leopoldo Lugones 13. The Counterfeiters by André Gide 14. The Time Machine and The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells 15. The Greek Myths by Robert Graves 16. & 17. Demons by Fyodor Dostoyevsky 18. Mathematics and the Imagination by Edward Kasner 19. The Great God Brown and Other Plays, Strange Interlude, and Mourning Becomes Electra by Eugene O’Neill 20. Tales of Ise by Ariwara no Narihara 21. Benito Cereno, Billy Budd, and Bartleby, the Scrivener by Herman Melville 22. The Tragic Everyday, The Blind Pilot, and Words and Blood by Giovanni Papini 23. The Three Impostors 24. Songs of Songs tr. by Fray Luis de León 25. An Explanation of the Book of Job tr. by Fray Luis de León 26. The End of the Tether and Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad 27. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon 28. Essays & Dialogues by Oscar Wilde 29. Barbarian in Asia by Henri Michaux 30. The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse 31. Buried Alive by Arnold Bennett 32. On the Nature of Animals by Claudius Elianus 33. The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen 34. The Temptation of St. Antony by Gustave Flaubert 35. Travels by Marco Polo 36. Imaginary lives by Marcel Schwob 37. Caesar and Cleopatra, Major Barbara, and Candide by George Bernard Shaw 38. Macus Brutus and The Hour of All by Francisco de Quevedo 39. The Red Redmaynes by Eden Phillpotts 40. Fear and Trembling by Søren Kierkegaard 41. The Golem by Gustav Meyrink 42. The Lesson of the Master, The Figure in the Carpet, and The Private Life by Henry James 43. & 44. The Nine Books of the History of Herodotus by Herdotus 45. Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo 46. Tales by Rudyard Kipling 47. Vathek by William Beckford 48. Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe 49. The Professional Secret & Other Texts by Jean Cocteau 50. The Last Days of Emmanuel Kant and Other Stories by Thomas de Quincey 51. Prologue to the Work of Silverio Lanza by Ramon Gomez de la Serna 52. The Thousand and One Nights 53. New Arabian Nights and Markheim by Robert Louis Stevenson 54. Salvation of the Jews, The Blood of the Poor, and In the Darkness by Léon Bloy 55. The Bhagavad Gita and The Epic of Gilgamesh 56. Fantastic Stories by Juan José Arreola 57. Lady into Fox, A Man in the Zoo, and The Sailor’s Return by David Garnett 58. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift 59. Literary Criticism by Paul Groussac 60. The Idols by Manuel Mujica Láinez 61. The Book of Good Love by Juan Ruiz 62. Complete Poetry by William Blake 63. Above the Dark Circus by Hugh Walpole 64. Poetical Works by Ezequiel Martinez Estrada 65. Tales by Edgar Allan Poe 66. The Aeneid by Virgil 67. Stories by Voltaire 68. An Experiment with Time by J.W. Dunne 69. An Essay on Orlando Furioso by Atilio Momigliano 70. & 71. The Varieties of Religious Experience and The Study of Human Nature by William James 72. Egil’s Saga by Snorri Sturluson 73. The Book of the Dead 74. & 75. The Problem of Time by J. Alexander Gunn
Anonymous Asks:
dogonite Said:
