Letters allow me to think out loud in a way that a journal, with its audience of one, can’t. Even without a dialogue, I can imagine my audience’s reaction, just as perhaps John, Abigail, and the other assorted family members thought of each other centuries ago as they sat at their desks, dipped their quills, and looked out over the bleak fields of winter and the ripening fields of summer.From a beautiful piece on letters and mailboxes:
Rod Blagojevich has a book coming out tomorrow, with the reality-resistant title The Governor. The other words on the front cover, perhaps not an official subtitle: “Finally, the Truth Behind the Political Scandal That Continues to Rock the Nation.” Is the scandal, from Blagojevich’s perspective, his wrongdoing, or his impeachment? It’s doubtful that either one rocked, much less continues to rock, the nation. As his recent Elvis impersonation suggests, the ex-gov has difficulty rocking even the house.
He also has difficulty managing vainglorious, self-pitying metaphors, as a passage from the book, quoted in a New York Times article, reveals. It’s about Barack Obama and himself:
He’s now the president of the United States, like Zeus in Greek mythology, on top of Mount Olympus. I’m Icarus, who flew too close to the sun. And I crashed to the ground.Uh, no. Icarus fell into Lake Michigan and was never heard from again.
In the New York Times, former publishing exec Joni Evans recalls a lost material culture:
[I]t was our office archaeology that I remember the most. There was a primitive chaos to it all — the hybrid scent of tobacco and mimeograph ink, and the sounds of ringing phones, of typewriters zipping along until the warning bell pinged near the end of a line, and of the clack-clack-clack of the return handle as the carriage reset.I like using a thrift-store rotary telephone in my office; the ring is startlingly loud and delightful, even though I should know by now to expect it. (Thanks for my phone, Rachel and Ben!) A diehard might bring back more lost sounds with the 1964 Folkways recording The Sounds of the Office (still available from Smithsonian Folkways). Alas, there’s no easy way to recapture the deep purple fragrance of fresh mimeographing.
On C-SPAN’s In Depth this afternoon, Jonathan Kozol shared the advice that he offers when talking to college students:
“You won’t believe it at your age, but life goes so fast. Use it well.”
The Trio at the Petrillo Bandshell, Grant Park
Chicago Jazz Festival
September 4, 2009
Muhal Richard Abrams, piano
George Lewis, trombone, laptop
Roscoe Mitchell, soprano and alto saxophones, flute
[Photograph by Michael Leddy.]
It is unusual to hear musicians in their fifties and sixties and seventies introduced as “the cutting edge,” but the description is indeed accurate. The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, of which Muhal Richard Abrams (b. 1930) is a co-founder and of which George Lewis (b. 1952) and Roscoe Mitchell (b. 1940) are distinguished members, represents still, at least to my ears, the last giant step (or two or three steps) forward in jazz composition and performance practice.
At a time when the word “jazz” is for many people synonymous with, say, Diana Krall or Wynton Marsalis, terms like “cutting edge” and “experimental” can serve to enforce artistic marginalization. I remember being told, only a few years ago, that Charles Olson was an inappropriate choice for a student of postwar American poetry: “He's not mainstream!” Well, that depends on where you’re standing. I doubt that the radio personality who introduced Messrs. Abrams, Lewis, and Mitchell as “cutting edge” last night has played their music on the air. But I’m happy that the Chicago Jazz Festival brought the trio to Grant Park and honored Abrams as the festival’s artist-in-residence this year.
The Trio played one nearly hour-long spontaneous improvisation last night. It might be more appropriate to think of these musicians as a quartet, with Lewis’s MacBook Pro as the fourth voice. The group’s performance was a matter of uncompromised concentration — no grooves, no riffs, no tunes, nothing to fall back upon beyond a resourceful attention to the moment, developed through years of practice. The performance began with a lacy piano figure. A duet for alto and piano followed, with foghorn-like accompaniment from Lewis’s Mac. A muted trombone statement followed, while Mitchell sustained notes via circular breathing. Then a open-faced trombone solo, with traffic-like sounds from the Mac. Sometime later, Mitchell repeated a single long tone on flute as Abrams and Lewis raced around him. An Abrams solo passage suggested an atonal, swirling version of boogie-woogie piano. Later still, an alto solo against jungle noises. Not long after that, a slightly raucous balladic interlude for alto, trombone, and piano. Near the end, a strange and wonderful moment in which it was impossible to tell whether faint engine and exhaust noises were the work of Lewis’s Mac or Chicago. The close was unexpectedly beautiful and apt, with the Mac producing a repeated percussion figure and what sounded like train engines, while the three musicians sat as an audience at their own performance. And then Abrams plucked a repeated high note on a piano string. The train had left the station.
A coda: on our way back to the underground municipal parking garage, we heard on Michigan Avenue the beginning of a performance by a chorus of young people representing Mennonite Innercity Evangelism. I wonder whether they too had come up to Chicago from downstate Illinois.
[Photographs by Michael Leddy.]
Further reading
About Streaming, a 2006 Abrams-Lewis-Mitchell recording (Pi Recordings)
Interpreting Avant-Garde Music (Elaine’s thoughts on the interpreter for the deaf at the side of the stage)
Muhal Richard Abrams, George Lewis, Roscoe Mitchell (Wikipedia articles)
George Lewis’s A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008) tells the story of the AACM.
News from the Telegraph:
Cartrain, a 17-year-old graffiti artist embroiled in a feud with Damien Hirst, has been arrested after stealing pencils from the millionaire artist’s latest installation. . . .Cartrain then created a parody police poster.
Cartrain visited Hirst’s installation Pharmacy in July, which was being shown as part of Tate Britain’s Classified exhibition until it closed last month, and removed a few of the rare “Faber Castell dated 1990 Mongol 482 Series” pencils.
Stanley Auster (b. 1928) is the grandson of Louis Auster, the man oral historian Jeff Kisseloff describes as “the patriarch of the Lower East Side’s first family of egg creams.” Stanley’s father Julius was also in the business:
He always smoked a lot of cigars. Typically, you would see him behind the counter with his foot up on a low shelf, puffing away, completely satisfied. He was always completely free of worry. Honestly, he never seemed to be preoccupied with anything. I was just the opposite. I was always worried about everything. One day when I was about ten, I asked him about it.Outsourcing worry! I wish I’d thought of it. But whom to hire? How much to pay? And how to be sure the job would get done?
“Daddy, why don’t you ever worry?”
He thought for a moment, and then he said, “If I tell you, do you promise not to tell anybody?”
“Yeah.”
“I have someone who worries for me.”
“What do you mean?”
He had a friend, little Ike. They both loved cigars and they were inseparable. They didn’t talk much, but they liked being together. Ikey was out of work most of the time, but somehow he could afford those cigars.
My father explained it to me. “Little Ike and I have an understanding. Anytime something bothers me, I tell it to Little Ike, and he says he will worry about it. I tell him these things, and the moment I tell him, it’s over. I wipe it out of my mind, and Ike takes care of it.”
He was serious. He then suggested that when I get older I should find someone. “It’s worth it. I pay him for it.”
He actually paid Little Ike to worry for him, and that was how Ike could afford his cigars. It was what you call a symbiotic relationship.
Jeff Kisseloff, You Must Remember This: An Oral History of Manhattan from the 1890s to World War II (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1999), 64–65.
Van Dyke Parks, in an interview with an Australian newspaper:
“A song is an intimation of immortality, sometimes approached with piety, sometimes approached with vanity but generally the latter. Always feel that there is a reason to be doing this that survives that judgment call: an alternative something.”Parks is of course borrowing from William Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality.” Wordsworth is also a source for “Child Is Father of the Man,” from the Wilson–Parks collaboration SMiLE.
The word of the day and of the day before this one and of the day before that one and of the one before that is dang. Since Monday, Elaine and I have been saying dang. Just for fun. It is the week of the dang. (We make our own fun.)
I consulted the Oxford English Dictionary, hoping for a history of the word rich and strange. But no. The verb steps on stage in the 1790s: “A euphemistic substitute for DAMN.” The noun follows in 1906: "A damn, cuss." A few sample sentences, and that’s it.
Dang.
If anyone knows a good remedy to remove the Schaefer jingle from a human head, please advise.
A related post
SCHAEFER
