Fuzzy people 07 (Taos edition)

Sally

























Nala




















Otter















Thanks to Chipper for the "fuzzy people" appellation (and to Chipper and Kim for their fuzzy people!).

More road-lite blogging

Blogging lite Saturday (from the road)

Blogging light today, from the road. Lurking here, having driven over to ABQ from Lubbock in order to hang with Quantzalcoatl and spouse--in from Seattle with the rest of the flute dorks.

Great old-style greasy- spoon Rt. 66 breakfast at Lindy's diner on Central, followed by a visit to the arts fair (and hippie parade), followed by the Salsa festival in old town on the plaza, with ballet folklorico and pueblo dancers. Lots of fuzzy people too. More tomorrow.

"The Office" (Workstation series) 016

(Atypical) corner-front seat at the coffeeshop. This one is usually monopolized by the time I get here--and it sits right underneath one of the speakers playing whatever the staff currently want to listen to. But, Dharmonia's home (her pocket Dell in profile in this shot), and so the corner table provides a bit more space, and proximity to the all-important AC outlets.

Working with Rip Lhamon's Raising Cain book today. It's a fascinating and usually mind - bending experience to go back and re-read a scholarly analysis, with a specific research question or thesis in mind, having previously read the text with a less-specific more-general "digest" mentality. Lhamon's book (subtitled "Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop") is a very readable, very rigorous, and beautifully-written exploration of the "gestures" of expressive arts (especially dance and body posture, but also other visual data) as they recur in what he calls "lore cycles"--popular or vernacular idioms which, while typically undocumented or derogated by critical elites, have been shown empirically to be remarkably resilient, showing up again and again with remarkable high degrees of retention, of content and of meaning.














So that the dance/body postures which show up in an anonymous primitive sketch from 1820s New York ("Dancing for Eels 1820 Catharine Market"), Lhamon argues, recur for specific reasons in the much later iterations throughout the history of black dance (see, from the 1980s, M.C. Hammer's Please Hammer Don't Hurt 'Em).

This retention itself has been remarked by other journalists and scholars, but Lhamon's analysis is particularly clear, particularly articulate, and, especially, makes a key new insight about the significance of these lore cycles.

We know that, historically, vernacular and "rough" idioms have been derogated and ignored (even if they were frequently appropriated) as "trash," ephemeral, primitive, and so on. Eric Lott's (Love and Theft) contribution has been to show the sexual attraction of the black and female "Other" that drove white attraction to minstrelsy, but Lott falls down when he tries to formulate a workable theory of the aesthetic pleasure that minstrelsy provided to such audiences, becoming mired in Freudian theories of the pleasure impulse and Richard Middleton's rather limited Marxist analysis of the difference between "musematic" and "discursive" repetition. Lott's limitation is that he does not have analytical tools which recognize the very different aesthetics and functionalist goals that drove African performance, both on the Mother continent and here in North America. Those different aesthetics and goals are precisely what scholars like Robert Farris Thompson (Flash of the Spirit; art history), Christopher Small (Music of the Common Tongue; music education and improvisation), and Charles Keil (Music Grooves) have identified; there is no real reason why Lott should omit these approaches.

Lhamon's contribution has been to recognize that iconography can be a tool to get at these African aesthetics of pleasure, and to show the degree to which those aesthetics of pleasure, though appropriated, synthesized, and "cut" into North American popular idioms, can be shown empirically and analytically to maintain remarkable retention. The question becomes then, not to what degree "Africanisms" were "appropriated" or "distorted" in minstrelsy, but its inverse: the remarkable degree to which white vernaculars--white pleasure--were "cut" by these aesthetics, and were thus "Africanized." The question is not, "to what extent were African-American musical folkways homogenized or distorted," but rather "how much were white vernaculars Africanized?"

And the answer is--one whole fuckin' lot.

The contribution of my own research in the minstrelsy project is to tie Lott's insights about white repulsion/attraction; Cockrell's about minstrelsy European, liminal, and carnivalesque roots; Lhamon's about visual vocabularies and lore cycles, together, in analysis of specific artists' works, sketches, letters, and journals, and to use the Lott/Cockrell/Lhamon tools to analyze the artists' visual sources as keys to understanding the performance practice and the actual synthesizing sound of early minstrelsy: to show, parallel to Lhamon, the degree to which sonic "lore cycles"--like Lhamon's visual lore cycles--can be shown to have "cut", reiterated, and "Africanized" 19th century white popular music.

That's the field I'm tillin'. In three weeks, I'm going to drive cross-country, to spend another three weeks in the archives with a scanner and a laptop. Can't wait!


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Now playing: Dizzy Gillespie - Congo blues

Fuzzy people 06 (slobber edition)

Dogs just love their lives so much--when those lives are good. Lab-based mongrel and a boxer waiting outside the Office, hoping for muffin crumbs.

Thanks to Chipper for the "fuzzy people" appellation.

"The Office" (Workstation series) 015 - SW/Rt. 66 edition

Although it's not readily apparent, and although the city fathers of Lubbock seem mostly to manifest all the most close-minded, unimaginative, "Club for Growth-"esque stupidity that was the dark side of "good Texas values" in the 1930s-40s-50s (don't forget, these are the people who basically ran Buddy Holly out of town when they found out that he'd married "some Meskin woman from New Yawk"--and they still hate Maria Elena here), Lubbock does have that Great Southwest/Route 66 heritage. The old downtown--the putative Depot District whose potential the City Fathers have managed to completely mismanage--is full of buildings built during the New Deal and the war years. The Depot District on a Sunday morning looks very much like the "Anarene Texas" depicted in the McMurtry / Bogdanovich Last Picture Show (yes, I know that McMurtry was thinly-anonymizing Abilene, not Lubbock--but Abilene and Lubbock in the early '50s were very similar places--the metropolis of the region, God help us, was Amarillo). But there is a certain and very real beauty to those buildings from the 1930s: those unemployed carpenters, plumbers, and electricians who'd been put back to work by FDR's "First 100 Days" were fine craftsmen, who welcomed the opportunity to do good work for an honest day's wage.

The campus itself already existed--founded in 1923 as "Texas Technological College," a place where the sons of ranchers and, eventually, oilmen could get a college education and help manage the family's business upon graduation--but it was 2 miles west of town through cotton fields: "Broadway" and "Main" streets were beautiful bricked thoroughfares with streetcars, but there was fuckin' nothing out there but the college.

The oldest "university neighborhood," which began to be built in the '30s as the College and air force base began to gear up for the European conflict that war profiteers, anyway, saw coming, was directly east of campus, and still has beautiful old houses--mostly now sadly decrepit, because, as is typical in underzoned college towns, it was allowed to devolve into a student- and crack-house neighborhood by greedy slumlords. The next oldest university neighborhood, and the one where Dharmonia and live, is still a student, professor, and medical-faculty neighborhood, directly south of campus.

It's mostly a viable mix, though Lubbock neighborhoods' quality is very much block-by-block, and even house by house. And you're always vulnerable to the depredations of spoiled punk-ass kids from Houston or Dallas whose parents have bought them houses to trash while they "go" to school. But Dharmonia and I have lived in student towns or neighborhoods since at least 1984, so we're somewhat attuned to the synthesis of confrontation, disregard, and surrogate - parenting - to - compensate - for - previously - negligent - and/or - distant - parents such situations can call for (favorite moment from the other night's visit by EMT's to the spoiled rich boys next door: the Lubbock cop who, having kicked in the bathroom door in order to rescue some scared little bunny who thought she was, quote, "OD'ing on marijuana (?!?)," unquote, told us "Don't ever hesitate to call LPD. I'm the door-kickin'est SOB you ever saw").

And, the architecture in this neighborhood is pretty nice. We love our little house, a region-inappropriate Cape Cod bungalow which, being New Englanders, we actually know what color to paint. But we were also sobered to discover, upon closing, that the original platte of the land that broke it into housing lots in 1936 forbade selling to "Negroes or Mexicans"--and so we go out of our way to manifest as many different goals and behavioral models as possible to cause those crusty old ranchin'-and-awl fuckers to spin in their graves.

And the block of (overpriced, price-gouged-by-greedy-landlord) shops where the Office is located, in addition to the interesting history about which I've blogged in previous entries, also has some wonderful, region- and period-appropriate plaster, design, and paint. This is the ve3iw just outside the Office, of the tower over the shops, with the name of the old art-house theatre which the coffeeshop building originally housed.

To work.

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Now playing: Sajjad Ali - Jhullay Lal

"100 Greats" streaming and on radio: Vote for your Top 6!

Friends: As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m working on mocking-up several of the “100 Greats” posts as podcasts/radio broadcasts. I’ve winnowed the field to 12 (and thanks for those who voted!), but need to winnow further to 6. So, if you’re interested, have enjoyed the “100 Greats” posts, and/or would just like to contribute, can I ask you to list your “Top 6” in “Comments” below? I’ve included links to each of the installments under consideration.

Many thanks!

• Planxty [link]
• Tom Binkley [link]
• 3 Musketeers [link]
• Public Enemy [link]
• Lou Reed [link]
• Mikrokosmos [link]
• Son House [link]
• Robin Williamson [link]
• Basie [link]
• Cooder/Bhatt [link]
• Kate Bush [link]
• Blind Willie Johnson [link]

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Now playing: Malik - N' Touma

Dustin Hoffman Wags the Dog

"This war is about what most wars are about: hegemony, money, power and oil."

Dustin Hoffman
Born August 8, 1937

Happy birthday, man. Thanks for your honesty and advocacy, over many years.



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Now playing: Fadela & Sahraoui - La Verite

Fuzzy people 06

Dharmonia and Caoilte share a nap.

Our old friend Sonja has a set of dicta she calls "Rules for Living." They're not dissimilar to rules I've heard from old infantry soldiers. I can never remember all of them, but I do remember two:

• Never pass up an opportunity to go to the bathroom.
• Never pass up an opportunity for a nap.

Hmm. Maybe those should be "rules for Feline Living."

Thanks to Chipper Thompson for the "fuzzy people" appellation.

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Now playing: Wynton Kelly Trio and Wes Montgomery - Unit 7

"The Office" (Workstation series) 014 - Contrails edition

More Eric Lott today: hafta try to get through his text in order to continue work on the Fulbright application (which, with a Sept 1 deadline, is now hull-up on the horizon). Having a bit of that experience which I think others have when they read good Marxist critiques: the fundamental sanity of the economic and political analysis, which has been overshadowed by the incompleteness (and context-specific nature) of Marx's views on culture, and the criminal misapplications and fascist repression of his theories in realpolitik. Nobody's ever successfully erected a Marxist state--I'm not sure that Marx is best understood as a blueprint for a state. But as an analysis of how empire works (and let's remember that he was writing in Paris, Brussels, and London in the 1840s--the very heart of three oppressive colonial empires) he's unmatched.

Marx has been dreadfully discredited, as I say, by the criminal misapplications and appropriations of his analysis as doctrine--but also, I think, because the power elites who read at all know that his analysis is sufficiently accurate as to represent a threat. Marx understood how capitalism works, not only in terms of economics, but also in terms of cognition, culture, and the arts. I wouldn't want to live in any Marxist state that's ever existed and I wouldn't trust any politician who claimed to want to create one, but in order to understand how culture works under capitalism, I think he's a good tool.

Apropos that: Dharmonia and I, with a friend, saw Bourne Ultimatum last night. I'll confess to a bit of a guilty-pleasure attraction to the first film: not so much for the combat and "clicky-clicky" (e.g, voluptuous heavily-Foly-ed scenes of weapons being readied) but because Ludlum's basic premise (a more macho riff on the Manchurian Candidate trope) is a very effective narrative skeleton for an episodic thriller; because Damon--unlike many of his generation of Hollywood studs--can play tormented without preening; because, let's face it, an Irish kid from South Boston knows a lot fuckin' more about violence than some jumped-up MTV dancer or TV star; and because I've been a huge Franka Potente fan ever since Run Lola Run. Also because the first film, shot on location in Europe to save money, feels more like Europe: partly a result of the German female lead, but also the color palette, the fact that, in these films, the good guys walk and take public transit, and the overall feel of the street cultures depicted.

Though Supremacy (film II) got better press and reviews, I was not such a fan, with the exception of recognizing the great addition of Joan Allen's character. The basic premise of the Bourne films, which the critics are only really recognizing in this third film, has always been a subversive and oppositional one (and that connects back to Candidate): that your government lies to you. This premise immediately separates the Bourne series from many other "clicky-clicky" "guy" movies, which are much more likely to find the Enemy out there amongst the Brown People. This contemptible, essentially colonial and exploitative "Othering" finds its most egregious and blatant (and blatantly fascist) expression in the grotesque triumphalism of Tom Clancy's novelistic infomercials for American oligarchy, which have proven to be the final resting place of any artistic credibility Harrison Ford ever had.

But the Bourne films invert that equation: in this series, you know only that the "bad guys" are the ones who lied to you, who made you do things (or did things in your name) that you would never do otherwise, and who never, never pay for their crimes. Ultimatum, appropriately, goes much further in names and assigning blame: unlike the first film, in this third installment there's no ambiguity: Jason Bourne was recruited, brainwashed, and turned into a murderous machine by the CIA, and an NSA/CIA black-ops unit at the center of the US intelligence community, who are answerable to no-one, practice torture, "extraordinary rendition," "extreme prejudice" unchecked by either government oversight or the nationality of the targets, and so on.

There is no question that this film, in both screenplay and cinematography, is intended to be seen as commenting on the Bush White House: waterboarding, hooding, multiple visual allusions to Abu Ghraib and Gitmo, medical personnel as part of the torture apparatus, the ubiquity of data-mining and privacy-invasion in a CCTV-driven surveillance society, and even the internal revulsion expressed by some CIA personnel (the great Joan Allen again) at the depths to which the Agency has been made to sink. At one point in the film, David Strathairn's Cheneyesque Deputy Director even says, in the reply to the anguished question "How long does this [kind of abuse] go on?!?": "Until we've won."

Make no mistake about it: this is a film about the lies, oppression, high crimes and misdemeanors of the Bush/Blair regimes. As with V for Vendetta (a much-flawed comic book of a film, but one that raised justified paranoia about authoritarian government) I hope everybody in America sees it and that it makes 100's of millions. And I would love for some reporter to stand up in the Rose Garden and ask Junior if he's seen it.

[ETA: Stephanie Zacharek at Salon agrees.]

Bonus:



Contrails in the late summer sky












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Now playing: Albert King - I'll Play The Blues For You

"100 Greats" # 066: Blind Willie Johnson: Sweeter as the Years Go By

In the 1920s and early ‘30s, Blind Willie Johnson took sanctified singing deeper on recordings than had anyone else; and in 1977, he was represented on a gold record of audio recordings included in the payload carried by the Voyager space probe, a ‘wild-blue-yonder’ launch which exemplified the best impulses of NASA in the Jimmy Carter years, and which took human-kind—or at least our artifacts—farther than we had ever been. Those were also heights we will probably never reach again: after the 1986 Challenger disaster and the subsequent Reagan-appointed Rogers Commission whitewashing, and then after 7 years of George W Bush’s Republican dictatorship, Bush-appointed NASA administrators claimed the ‘jury was still out‘ on global warming. In the bread-and-circuses ‘pay no attention to that man behind the curtain’ end-days of empire, any money that might at one point have gone into the public expression of the nation’s pan-universal curiosity and capacity to reach for the stars is siphoned into the pockets of the wealthy. And the odds seem good that we might destroy ourselves, which means that all that will be left of homo sapiens will be sun-bleached oxidized acid-rain-pocked machines sitting on the surface of a dead world.

But in 1977, Jimmy Carter—a president who looks better and better through the bar of history: an ex-president who builds houses for poor people, rather monuments to his own legacy—authored the message which Americans opted to send ‘Out There.’ And the music that was included celebrates the best of the human race’s infinite diversity: Bach and Mozart, Louis Armstrong and Chuck Berry, gamelan, didjeridu, and pipa music. But perhaps the most beautiful, and most spiritual, music on the Golden Record—that which best expresses both the courage and the terror with which humans have faced the inexplicable indifference of life, death, and the Cosmos--are the Beethoven 1803 Fifth Symphony (though I’d argue that Beethoven Six is both more human and more transcendent, and carries less imperialist and toxically-individualist, it didn’t make the Gold Record), and Blind Willie Johnson’s 1927 ‘Dark was the Night, Cold was the Ground.’

His songs have been covered by everyone from Peter, Paul and Mary and the Grateful Dead to Led Zepplin and the White Stripes. Ry Cooder has built a musical identity and an honorable career out of the implications of this piece of music. To me, Willie's music has a depth that mine has tried for 30 years to live up to.

Listen to Johnson’s storming version of the Samson and Delilah story, ‘If I Had My Way, I’d Tear This Building Down‘. It captures a lot of the things that make Willie inimitable: the rasping “false-bass” singer which was a staple in gospel preacher’s vocabulary (listen to Rev C.L. Franklin, Aretha’s daddy, for great examples), which was borrowed by both pre- and post-War blues singers (Bobby Bland’s) and best exemplified by the titanic Howlin’ Wolf, but which reaches all the way back to the jaliya and possessed blacksmiths speaking in tongues in West Africa—and which found great modern expression in the singing of South Africa’s Mahlathini, the “Lion of Soweto.” It’s got his great gospel-style open-chord guitar picking (Willie, like Booker White, played with a slide and the guitar flat down on his lap), and the wonderful hypnotic ostinati that he used to accompany his preacherly exhortations between choruses. There’s a story that Willie was nearly arrested in New Orleans for singing this song in front of a building that turned out to be the US Customs house, but, dearly as I would love to identify Willie as a brother vernacular radical, I think his version Samson’s fall is speaking of a more spiritual and autobiographical than political apocalypse. Willie’s “If I Had My Way” also captures, even in the limited-duration imperfect fidelity of the 78, something of the intensity Willie must have generated live, when his improvised sermon riffing off the scripture catches fire, driven by his boogie-woogie bass line—he almost goes into a trance. When Willie sang, you knew he understood Samson, blinded and shorn, chained to the columns of the Temple at Jerusalem, just before he pulled it down on top of his enemies and himself.

One of the records I recorded with my medieval band included another version, a Latin sequence (narrative sacred song) of the Samson and Delilah story (link). We recorded in a small church in the cornfields of central Iowa (link) and I certainly think it’s one of the most transcendent performances my colleagues ever put on record: both David’s epic solo vocal turn, and the astonishing, orchestral, through-composed vielle part Jann created, put it in the category of one of the greatest medieval performances I’ve ever heard. But for me, sitting in that hot dusty church in the Iowa cornfields, and thinking of that hot dusty day in Dallas when Willie recorded his version, all I could hope was that our own version of this story of life, death, and transcendence could come within hollering distance of his.

“John the Revelator” features more of Willie’s thumb-led melodic 12-string guitar picking (the only 12-string players even in Willie’s league were Lead Belly and Blind Gary Davis, both of them with their own preacherly inclinations) and his call-and-response duet with first wife Willie B Harris. It’s not hard to imagine Willie preaching this “end-timers” sung version of Revelation in a gospel church, and it’s not hard to imagine the reaction of a black congregation. This may have been the source of Son House’s slightly later but equally intimidating a cappella version.

In my personal pantheon, Willie stands for all those hellfire-and-brimstone ministers in the black South whose apocalyptic visions preached the Christian life-that-conquers death, but also the dark grim fatalism of those who knew their only hope for salvation was in the Sweet Bye and Bye, because it damned sure wasn’t coming in this life.

“Lord I Just Can’t Keep from Crying” sets up a catchphrase borrowed by everybody from Bob Dylan (who, more and more explicitly over the years, has made clear just how literally he meant the dictum “you can learn everything you need in life from traditional music”) to Springsteen to the Stones to John Renbourn.

“If It Had Not Been for Jesus”, a duet with his first wife Willie B Harris, reminds us that Willie was a Texas singer, and that there was an awful lot of working-class white, as well as black, sanctified music on the streets of Dallas—it sounds like Maybelle and AP Carter, “boom-chick” guitar part and all.

“Church I’m Fully Saved” is maybe the flip side of the coin to “If I Had My Way”. It’s got a lot of the same Willie thumbprints: bass-picking, call-and-response, false bass, but here Willie, like any great artist, uses the building blocks of his particular artistic palette to construct the distinct and individual expression of salvation, instead of damnation. Willie sings, his wife Willie replies like a gospel congregation, and you get some sense of the reality of the salvation that they’re singing about, and that carried Willie through loss of his eyesight, his family, and life itself. For the three minutes and eight seconds of “Church I’m Fully” you, too, believe that Willie’s going to be saved. That it will all come right, some time.

In the past several years, I’ve gotten in the habit, on gigs, of seguing “Jesus on the Mainline” into Willie's “Need Somebody on Your Bond.” “Jesus” has been covered by everyone from the Pilgrim Jubilee and Chosen Gospel Singers, to the Gospel Harmonettes, to Ry Cooder and Joseph Spence (and I always felt, somehow, that Spence and Blind Willie would have understood each other: maybe it was the wildly idiosyncratic singing, or the thunderous guitar-picking, or the sheer intensity with which they both inhabited their songs—but I always felt that, despite the contrast of Spence’s exuberant hedonism and Willie’s steamrolling preaching, they would have gotten along—and then there’s the compatibility of their ubiquitous use of dropped-D tuning).

Anyway, one night on a recent coffeehouse gig with the Juke Band duo, me and fellow guitar slinger the Dearly Deported were playing the “Jesus/Need Somebody” medley. And for some reason—maybe because the groove was working well, or because the posturing over-dressed high-school students were shutting up for a change, or because we had a lot of friends in the house—I “got happy” a little myself, and starting chanting out the names just everyone who I’ve had “on my Bond”--who's ever had my back:

Well I got…Professor Vela on my bond
I got…Prof Vela on my bond
Thataway, in the midnight, when death come creepin’ in the room
I got..Prof Vela on my bond.

Well I got…Dharmonia on my bond

…Sugar Brown’s, on my bond

…Manjusri, on my bond

…my students, on my bond

…Blind Gary Davis, on my bond

…Blind Willie Johnson, on my bond

Racism, greed, and the Middle Passage—the genocidal conviction that “we are God’s chosen people, and all others can be considered damned”—have been some of the most lamentable and contemptible outgrowths of Cotton Mather’s ‘shining city on the hill,’ the most horrible mis-firings of God's Earthly Kingdom which the Puritans thought they were departing into the wilderness to create. In the event, it was no beacon, because the first Anglo settlers in North America, as the great novelist Michael Herr put it, were so ‘spooked by the darkness and emptiness of the continent to which they’d come, [they] felt the necessity to fill up its forests with their own devils.’ And, as Herr says, it led to the Middle Passage, the Trail of Tears, and the jungles of Vietnam. But somehow that sad history also led to a vision of a society based on effort and community rather than inheritance, and the Bill of Rights, and Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms. And it gave us African-American music, and the entire universe—the entire cosmos—of musics it in turned birthed.

If in the End the Voyager is all that remains of us—if in our greed, stupidity and culpability we do succeed in destroying the capacity of the planet to sustain us (which would serve us right, at some level)—then I hope and pray that the Golden Record reaches some kind of sentient organs of audition, that they hear Beethoven Five and ‘Dark was the Night,’ and know that, at some time and in some way, homo sapiens demonstrated the capacity to transcend the greed, cruelty, squalor, and psychotic self-centered “I got mine Jack, so fuck you!” individualism with which we seem to have been hard-wired. And to express, as captured on this record, the desire to reach for the stars. The record is inscribed with the following words:

This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. --President Jimmy Carter

For the past 30 years, and ever sweeter as the years go by, I’ve had Blind Willie Johnson—and Spence, and Magic Sam, and Hendrix, and Duane, and Tommy Makem, and June Pointer, and FZ, and Diz, and Fela, and Charlie Christian, and JB, and Trane, and Eric, and Chris McGregor, and Mingus, and Albert King, and Stravinsky, and Basie, and Ed Bradley, and Tom Binkley, and Bartok, and Nusrat, among many others generous beyond words, or deeds, or even the limits of life and death—on my bond.

These musicians are my fallen heroes, the linchpins of my artistic life, the stars by which I steer. And in the way they have shaped me, I am blessed, and grateful.

Beyond measure.

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Now playing: Dandy - Reggae in Your Jeggae

"The Office" (Workstation series) 013 - Juggling & Lies Edition

Monday morning, Monday mornin'
Closing in on me
I'm packin' up and I'm runnin' away
To where nobody thinks of me.

Richard Thompson has written an awful lot of great songs in his life (the question would probably be "which songs has he written that aren't great songs?") but the above was one of my first favorites: "When I Get to the Border", from 1974's masterpiece I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight, which features not only his howling bagpipe guitar solos in the 15/8 outro but also the rackets and oboes of John Tams.

A good weekend, this last:

Good pub session on Friday: nice fellow-feeling in the room, and the one table of greasy little yuppies at a birthday party, the guys in their Izod shirts and Top-siders chain-smoking and the gals in their teased hair and fuck-me pumps cackling like guinea hens, actually recognized "Happy Birthday" by the time we'd played it for the 3rd time, which in turn gave us the opportunity to say "Are you enjoying the music? That's good. We'll make you a deal: if you don't shout over the music, we'll play quietly enough so that you can converse." Which is much nicer than I tend to be in such circumstances. They took the hint, drank up, and left. After that, the room filled up with friends of the band and the music and we had a nice time: the Honors undergraduates, old friends, returning friends, set-dancers and martial-arts teachers, kilted students and tattooed bikers at the bar.

Wedding of grad-school-bound students north of here on Saturday: tiny little Church of Christ congregation, "dinner on the ground" at the reception. They're such good kids: smart, talented, disciplined, going off to a top-notch graduate program, where, in the time-honored tradition of grad students, they're going to work hard, expand their minds, be broke, and build a life--together. Dharmonia and I don’t have kids, but when we get invited to an event like this, and are treated as honored guests, it feels a little like what I infer that must feel like. It feels good--and I always say to such kids "I'm proud of you," because I remember how much it meant to me when an admired teacher said exactly those words to me.

Last night, a superb Japanese dinner from one colleague as part of her house-warming regime, and then on to a party for another colleague shortly to be departing for new pastures. Dharmonia and I have been going to parties like this since at least 1975, all over North America and around the world, and they’re usually well-oiled: by red wine or tequila or Guinness or Glenfiddich or Shiner Bock or Sierra Nevada India Pale Ale or ouzo or retsina or arrack or strong coffee and Arabic pastry or Laphroaig or poitin or, now and then, by a little bit of Jah Rastafari’s holy herb. And these parties are more significant than they might appear, especially for a musician. Because in such a gathering, you look around, and realize that every single person in the room is someone whose musicianship, or writing, or acting, or storytelling, or just plain larger-than-life personality both enriches your own life and sets you a standard to try to live up to. That’s our tribe.

I was a fan of musicians before I ever became a working musician myself. And, over and above the beauty of the sounds they could create, I was entranced by the capacities of the musicians’ life: of a life whose priorities--to create beauty, to express emotion, to connect with community--I instinctively knew were better, more lasting, more eternal than those of the greasy little yuppies amongst whom I was raised.

Unlike those greasy little yuppies (by which I really only mean anybody whose live begins and ends with owning things) whose apparent purpose for existence is to buy-and-sell shit (or to persuade others to buy-and-sell shit), artists make things. We bring beauty into creation. And that craft, task and purpose connects us, in the European tradition, back and back through the epochs:

To the fishermen, longshoremen, and slave boatmen dancing for eels on the Catherine Wharf in antebellum New York; to the players and singers in the streets of Mozart’s Vienna, who borrowed tunes from Giovanni and Zauberflote and played them on the barrel organs—to the Master’s delight; to the dancers and tumblers playing for drinks and tips in the courtyards of Versailles, where Lully would steal our bits for the newest ballet eulogizing the Sun King; to the panhandlers and dance musicians scavenging alongside the pilgrims who slogged their way up the Camino del Santiago toward Compostela—and who gave those pilgrims the songs they sang; to the jongleurs and menestrels who improvised love songs in the villas of Provence, as the aristocratic poets cocked their ears to hear our rhymes; to the nameless vielle- and lute-players in the souks of Andalucia and Aragon, trading the tunes with Moorish masters which found their way into the Songs of St Mary;

To the satirists and graffiti-artists who gave Juvenal his best lines; to the comedians and tragedians at Roman Saturnalia; to the dancers at the Dionysian rites who birthed the first theater; to blind Homer chanting the verses of the old War of Achilles and Agamemnon that had been passed along to him via the ear and the memory; to the nameless bards who sang the epic of Gilgamesh before symbols ever existed permitting the stories to be written down;

To the Neolithic priests under the hill at Newgrange, who, at the Winter Equinox, sang the songs that illuminated the altar at the hill’s heart; to the shamans, draped in totem skins, who chanted the holy prayers to Bear and Horse and Buffalo in the caverns below Lascaux; to the first holy seer, clad in wolfskin, who danced out of the shadows and into the firelit circle of the first sentient homo sapiens, and sang: "Let me tell you a story..."

Years ago my brother-in-music Larmo wrote a song that reached back to those ancient and medieval archetypes of the jongleurs and menestrels who could never be trusted, but who could always create the beauty that gave expression and meaning to human existence. He called the song "Juggling and Lies."

That’s us. That's our stock-in-trade. That’s my tribe and my lineage.

We make it possible to be human.

"The Office" (Workstation series) 012--Weekend Edition

Don't do musicology work on Sunday, but do try to crank out a radio program on that day. This is the workstation (iTunes, Adobe Audition).

Playing when published: IFC, "O Brother Where Art Thou?"

Fuzzy people 05 (Coyote edition)

Coming back from Amarillo last night, around 10:30pm, booming up out of the canyon on I-27 just north of Happy, Texas, around 75mph, Coyote sashayed across the highway just in front of us. We tipped our hats and traveled on for home.

The Long Memory

This is the Long Memory and historical consciousness that the Giuliani's of the world really fear:

An anonymous Irish-American longshoreman, quoted in David Roediger's article on the history of black-white labor collaboration:

“I wasn’t always a n****-lover. I fought in every strike to keep Black labor off the dock. I fought until in the white-supremacy strike your white-supremacy governor sent his white-supremacy militia and shot us white-supremacy strikers full of holes…[T]there was a time when I wouldn’t even work beside a n****…You made me work with n****s, eat with n****s, sleep with n****s, drink out of the same water bucket with n****s, and finally got me to the point where if one of them…blubbers something about more pay, I say, ‘Come on, n****, let’s go after the white bastards.’” [Quoted in David Roediger, “’Labor in White Skin’: Race and Working-Class History.” In Reshaping the US Left: Popular Struggles in the 1980s. Ed. Mike Davis and Michael Sprinker, 287-308. London: Verso, 1986.]

Be afraid, you racist right-wing oligarchs and "Minutemen" and politicians and hate-radio talking-heads and cowardly leafletting skinheads. That cross-ethnicity intra-class unity is coming, and then your kind will fall.

Be very afraid.

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Now playing: Bob and Earl - Harlem Shuffle

The fascist appeal of 24's Jack Bauer

This is why, in the current climate, wingnuts love them the fascist fantasy of 24's adolescent "fight-terror-with-torture" model. Quoting Eric Lott on the urban 1840s:

“Disarticulations of hegemony accompany periods of extreme capitalist crisis, generating fresh repertoires of domination.” [Lott, Love and Theft, 70]

Betcher ass, you fascist mothers: your hegemony is being disarticulated, we are in a period of "extreme capitalist crisis," and your childish new "repertoires of domination" (cf 24) are no longer as opaque as you used to be able to count on. Anymore, we do see the Man Behind the Curtain.


And there's a war-crimes court in all y'all's futures.



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Now playing: Muddy Waters - Down South Blues

Fuzzy (or feathery) people 04

Hard to see (that's part of the point), but this is a Mississippi Kite over the TTU campus. Good friend (and trad-music student) Clint Boal has their backs:

"The Mississippi Kite is an attractive falcon-like bird of prey with a gray body and black wings. Although its 3 foot wingspan makes it appear rather large, it in reality is a small bird, weighing approximately 1/2 a pound. Mississippi Kites are present only in the summer months, during which they nest and raise their young in urban areas. They are beneficial in that they feed almost exclusively on large flying insects. It is not a threatened or endangered species, but is protected from harm or harassment by both federal and state laws.

Every year 12 to 14 pairs of Mississippi Kites nest on the Texas Tech University grounds from April through September. Recently, there have been several reports of people at TTU being swooped at, and occasionally being struck, by Mississippi Kites. Although there are 14 known nesting pairs of Mississippi Kites on the University grounds this year, only 2 of those pairs are consistently aggressive.

The reason some Mississippi Kites occasionally become aggressive is they perceive people as a threat to their nestlings. Two things in particular appear to incite Mississippi Kites to swoop at pedestrians. First, the Mississippi Kites select their nest sites and are habituated to normal foot traffic. When people depart from these normal patterns, such as deviating from sidewalks or normal foot paths, near a nest tree, the kites may become agitated. They become particularly agitated when pedestrians stop under their nest tree.

Grounds Maintenance will be placing signs on campus locating the nesting areas. If you are swooped at by a Mississippi Kite, you are undoubtedly too close to the nest. You should exit the area quickly, as they do not follow pedestrians beyond about 30 yards of the nest tree. If you were deviating from normal foot traffic patterns, refrain from doing so in the future. Do not search for a nest, as this can be perceived as especially threatening by the kites and can lead to increased aggressive behavior. Remember that often the swoops are misinterpreted as aggression when the kite is in reality simply flying to or away from their nest and happen to fly over pedestrians. This especially occurs near sidewalks where the kites are used to people walking.

If you are swooped at by a Mississippi Kite, please report the incident to Dr. Clint Boal via e-mail at cboal@...edu or call 742-xxxx. Please include your name, contact information, location where the incident occurred, date, and time of day."

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Now playing: Joseph Spence - Just a Closer Walk with Thee

"The Office" (Workstation series) 011

Saturday morning. Different crowd on the weekends: the retirees playing scrabble, blue-collar folks in their Bible-study groups, new parents with infants and grandparents.

Good presentation this AM by Mac Tire--dry run for her presentation on Irish traditional flute playing at National Flute Association convention in ABQ, which Dharmonia and I have the good fortune to be attending purely as tourists, visiting with Quantzalcoatl and spouse. May get a music session with old friend Roger Landes here on the Saturday: look in or drop a line if you'll be in the area.

Still working on Eric Lott--damn this book is good: essentially a post-modern Marxist reading of the racial and gender attraction / aversion / appropriation dynamics in early blackface minstrelsy. Very useful for terms, tools, and formulations to aid looking at minstrelsy as "doing social work." Will style need to be supplemented in my own work with analysis of performance practice and musical collaboration: my pilot article coming out in this journal will lay out the template.

As a teaser: here's a short tune transcribed from the artists' archival materials with which I'll be working in September, about which the artist's brother said:

While in Hillsboro I heard a short Reel played which I was so well pleased with that I took the notes of it. If you wish to give it the Negro-touch, you must raise the bass string one note. I will endeavor to collect something better if a favorable opportunity should occur, until then you may saw away on :

To work.



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Now playing: Joseph Spence - Conch ain't got no bone

The price of Republican assault on infrastructure; and, the courage of ordinary people

Jeremy Hernandez is 20 years old, too poor to continue tuition for an auto-mechanics program, and then he saves the lives of a bus-load of children on a broken bridge.

Let's see how soon the right-wing haters find a way to blame Jeremy Hernandez for the collapse of our infrastructure.
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Now playing: Miles Davis - But Not For Me (Take 1)

Tommy Makem RIP

[crossposted to http://kohm.org]

Tommy Makem (1932-2007), RIP.

This is a great loss--but we can hardly regret Tommy's death. He was a great musician, a kindly man, a strong advocate for younger musicians, and was, truly, the public face of Irish music in America. Going all the way back to his childhood in the Armagh of the "Hungry Thirties," and his impeccable lineage (son of the legendary source singer Sarah Makem), his 1950s appearance with the Clancy Brothers in the New York night clubs, and their legendary "extended" appearance on the live Ed Sullivan show when other acts were stranded in traffic and the Brothers woke up next morning to find themselves stars, to his ongoing very passionate advocacy for traditional music and for Irish independence (he wrote and sang angry songs, but he never condoned violence), Tommy was a great gentleman and a class act. It's hard to believe that he was "only" 74 years old--he crammed so much experience, so much music, and so much positive action into those years that he seemed both older, and ageless.

I remember the first time I saw Tommy Makem perform live (I vaguely remember seeing the Brothers on the Sullivan show in the one of their early-'60s appearances): it was around 1970, at the Arts Festival my father ran every summer in my home town. There were all kinds of visual arts exhibits, openings, gallery shows, workshops, so forth, but for me, even at age 10, the performances were what lit a fire under me.

I remember when Pete Seeger's Hudson River sloop the Clearwater sailed into our harbor, and Seeger and his beyond-cool crew of proto-environmental activists tied up, climbed the wooden stairs that ran up the cliffs above the harbor, and gave a concert on an open-age stage with the silver-dollar summer full moon rising over the water behind them. That was the time I met Pete Seeger (who for whatever reason was a prick, that night) and, before I could even speak to him in the autograph line, had grabbed the cast on my broken left arm and signed it.

But that was also the time I saw Tommy Makem: tall and skinny, already growing out his hair and sideburns (Tommy in the '70s came to look *exactly* like one of those long thin Irishmen caricatured in the Victorian English press), playing tin whistle and a long-necked Seeger-style 5-string banjo. I didn't really register the repertoire itself--I was 3 years away from hearing my first trad dance music, and Tommy was basically an American-folk-revival-style ballad singer--but I remember how cool they all seemed, even to a 10-year-old.

Go raibh mile maith agat, Tommy. Safe home.

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Now playing: Miles Davis - Doxy

"The Office" (Workstation series 10)

From the front table on a very overcast and gray day: spitting little bits of rain (more atypical Gulf weather). View of the designer-caffeine menu board. It's actually a nice room: while the back room was an art-films house, the front looks like it was retail space (maybe a video rental store?): pockmarked dyed-concrete floor, floor-to-ceiling retail-style windows on the north and west walls, high ceilings, exposed duct-work. One reason I like the Hickok chair (aside from the neurotic back-to-the-wall issue) is because you can both people-watch--as they come in to the counter, in the southeast corner of the room--and also weather-watch--out the north windows (over my left shoulder in this shot). And, on the South Plains of Texas, what a damn pleasure to look out at the rain. Also the top of Dharmonia's head (Dharmonia's home!).

These are the kinds of days, 'round here, when I'll ring my flute-playing buddy Steve and propose a "guerrilla session." That's where we'll just grab our instruments and head out to some local bar we like the looks of. If the vibe seems right, we'll strike up a conversation with the bartender, and ask if we can play. Sometimes we don't even have to ask: this is one of the only places I've ever lived where, when you walk into a bar with an instrument case, the patrons turn around on their barstools and say "Are you guys gonna play?!? Can we unplug the jukebox? Lemme talk to the bartender about getting you guys set up. You want a beer?" And it's one of the only places I've ever lived outside Ireland where, if the patrons tell the barman, "these guys are gonna play some music," the barman says "OK, lemme unplug the jukebox and turn down the TV. You guys want a beer?"

Despite the constant and tiresome dissing which inhabitants of both Left and Right Coasts direct towards us, commiserating that we "have to" live "someplace like that," the region has an absolutely pristine record, both condemnatory and supportive, vis-a-vis live music. For 100 years, the fundamentalists have condemned music (along with dancing, gum-chewing, television, movies, you name it; old joke: "Why don't Baptists screw standing up? Because people might think they were dancing") and the young kids driven nuts by the region's social conservatism have created great underground music. As Waylon Jennings said: "Around here, you either had to play music or go crazy."

The region birthed Eck Robertson, Bob Wills, Tommy X Hancock, Waylon, Roy Orbison, Joe Ely, Butch Hancock, Terry Allen, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, and a host of others, and everyone from Charlie Christian to BB King to Stevie Ray Vaughan played the local juke joints and barbecues. 'Course, most of 'em left as soon as they could (hence Mac Davis's "Lubbock in the Rear-View Mirror"). The music is top-notch, the bar-band musicians are bad mothers, and the bar-owners and bartenders know that music is good for business, not bad. Thus the welcome for the guerrilla sessions.

Raining harder now. Goddamn but this reminds me of Ireland: need to go play tunes tonight!



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Now playing: Josh Graves; Kenny Baker - Step It Up And Go

"The Office" (Workstation Series) 09

Blogging light today: Blogger has been bloggered (hence delaying uploads), and Dharmonia is back home. Also--and unexpectedly--there's the topsails of a Fulbright showing on the horizon.

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Now playing: Taj Mahal - 01 - Stagger Lee

Fuzzy People 03

His Highness sleeping on my funky sleeveless workout T-shirt. When he's in this posture, he'll growl at me if I try to drag the shirt out from under him: pretty endearing!

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Now playing: Taj Mahal - Taj Mahal - Queen Bee

"The Office" (Workstation Series) 08

Tuesday morning (Dharmonia gets home tonight).

Remarkably unproductive day yesterday, mostly because of an unexpected and rather unpleasant dental event. Concentration's difficult today, due to discomfort and also looming additional work.

However, further browsing in the Nathan Dan Emmett and the Rise of Negro Minstrelsy has both confirmed and nuanced my sense of the limits of current minstrelsy scholarship. As I commented yesterday, Nathan's book, though published way back in the early 1960s, is still commonly referenced for specific musical details on the repertoire. The majority of scholarship (some of it extremely good) since Nathan has been on the semiotics, theater history, cultural and physical vocabularies and the allusions they make, context, and so forth. There has been, in other words, a relatively dearth of commentary or analysis on musical content: typically, more recent scholars have referenced Nathan's detailed exegesis of the interplay between Anglo-Celtic and Afro-American tune-types, and the rhythmic implications of both the borrowed melodies, and the instruments (fiddle and banjo) on which they were realized.

This has helped to clarify for me the particular gap in the scholarship which I am identifying, and which, no doubt uncoincidentally, I feel equipped by background, training, prior work, and aptitudes to address: the elements and implications for performance practice. Clearly, there is a demonstrable musical synthesis going on in minstrelsy, for analysis of which Nathan's book is the cornerstone. Similarly, there is a demonstrable cultural synthesis (and cultural work) going on, as the more recent scholarship of Lott, Mahar, Cockrell, and Lhamon confirms. There are bits and pieces of analysis in these later scholars' work (and in that of Jacqui Malone) of the physical/dance vocabularies which the period iconography reveal. There are even period recordings and/or reconstructions of the sound of the later "classic" minstrel troupes, in the cylinder materials collected on sets like Monarchs of Minstrelsy, though those latter collections, having been recorded in or after the 1880s, are necessarily retrospective, nostalgic, and reflect the "late Golden Age" of post-Civil War minstrelsy.

What we don't have is much--if any--information about the performance practice and actual sound of the earliest roots of blackface minstrelsy, the period before the 1843 foundation of Emmett's Virginia Minstrels: the period of early Jacksonian democracy c1815-30, when GW Dixon, with "Coal Black Rose," and TD Rice, with "Jump Jim Crow," were first introducing the synthesis of the ancient technique of blackface "delineation" and actual African music/dance practices to urban audiences at the Bowery and Chatham Theaters in Five Points.

The reason my particular visual artists' iconographic evidence is important is because (a) the artists were musicians and demonstrably accurate reporters of musical data; (b) the artists were present in NYC in the 1820s and '30s; (c) in these artists' works you can see blacks and whites interacting musically, and you can see the incorporation by each group of physical vocabularies and performance practices from one group to the other, and vice versa. This in turn makes it possible to use musicology's already-existent tools for iconographic analysis (this is precisely what scholars of medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque dance do).

Iconography is essential for looking at historical dance vocabularies. Absent audio recordings or technical dance notations (Labanotation, etc), text descriptions of dance are not adequate. This is why the study of dance iconography in any era is an essential element of understanding that era's dance musics--particularly when those musics are swiftly synthesizing and evolving. And doubly, triply important when those synthesizing dance vocabularies involve a percussive "sounding" element to the dancing. And quadruply important when those percussive "sounding" dance vocabularies are remarkably receptive to one another. Black cloggers, character dancers, and those "jumping Jim Crow" must have found points of resonance with Anglo-Celtic hard-shoe and step-dancers.

This is why iconography, dance, the physical techniques of instruments, and, overall, the issue of performance practice is both essential to understanding the sound and the cultural synthesis of early minstrelsy, and represents a gaping hole in the current scholarship.

That's the field I'm tillin'.

Playing when published: The Carter Family, "Sow 'Em on the Mountain"

Fuzzy People 02

One of Milky Way's (prolific neighbor cat) multifarious kittens. Occasionally (which is still too frequent), they'll wander into Caoilte's orbit, and there'll be a scrap, which usually ends up with him way out-of-bounds across the street, hiding under a bush and growling when I try to chase him back home. I now keep a pair of hockey gloves around for such situations, after having tried to grab him when I had mistakenly concluded he was past and out of "fight-or-flight" mode, and getting slashed to bits as a result.

Thanks to Chipper Thompson for the "fuzzy people" appellation.

Playing when published: The Carter Family, "John Hardy"

Random sports blogging

[DFH edition]

Oooooowwwwww!!!!!!!! Danny fuckin' Ainge! (GM)

Could be a new day, baby.

<>Okay, here's the thing:< /kathy griffin voice>

My elder brother was the sports-nut in the family. Of the three brothers, he was, by body type, probably the least suited to any sport except, maybe, aquatics (although, unlike the other two, he tended to sink like a stone when he swam): tall, very thin, light-boned, low body fat. But he was by far the most fanatical of any of us--followed every pro sport all through high school, spent several seasons as sportswriter for the Harvard Lampoon (where, in the '70s, the chief recreational sport was probably bong-construction), only decided against a career as a sportswriter when he realized what a low-paying crapshoot that career path was, and every Thanksgiving and Christmas would chivvy the siblings and visitors out to play touch football or soccer. He still writes very eloquently about sports, and with a perspective that most of those jumped-up jocks and failed weather-casters can't even touch (his stories of Superbowls 36 and 38 read like great short fiction).

But I do remember the 1970s-80s Celtics, who were the biggest bunch of homely white boys in the world in the era, and could not have been more different than the slick, grinning, top-dollar superstars of the Lakers, their great foes. You always got the sense with the Celtics (Bird, Parrish, McHale, Ainge, Danny Johnson [RIP] was the classic lineup) that they were a bunch of homely, not-naturally-tremendously-talented kids who didn't date a lot in high school, and stayed out back of the barn or the playground practicing jump-shots instead of being popular. They were gangly (McHale), stumpy (DJ), or jumped like they had lead weights on their feet (Bird)--and against the superstars of the '80s Lakers, led by the genetic freakery of Kareem and the card-sharp con-man genius of Magic Johnson, they looked like a scrubby high-school team.

But in DJ and Ainge they had two incredibly scrappy, tough, long-minutes-playing guards--with the added bonus that Ainge's on-court demeanor was that of the smart-mouthed bratty kid who would pick fights on the court and then, when he was getting his ass kicked, would run to get his big brother. And in Bird they had what was, in the '80s, the greatest coaching player in the league. Bird just understood the game better than anyone except, possibly, Pat Reilly or Phil Jackson, with the incalculable bonus that he was out there on the court. He didn't have to tell his team-mates how to play with a brilliant strategic sense--he could show them. Add to that his assassin-accurate shooting (product of all those thousands of hours out back of the barn in high school) and astonishing peripheral vision (I read somewhere that Bird's peripheral vision is freakishly wider than the norm: an enormous advantage on the basketball court), and his absolute chess-player's calm in the eye of the hurricane (a trait he shared with Michael Jordan, who, in describing the clutch shot at the close of his career which won the Bulls one last championship, "It was like one of those Zen moments Phil [Jackson] describes, when everything just goes very slowly, and you know the shot's going to go in), and you had a team who didn't look like they could even play even with the Lakers. And yet they kept winning.

[The Celtics other nemeses in the Bird era were the infamous '80s Pistons, easily the dirtiest, whiniest, and most cheap-shot-prone in the league, with that dirtbag Bill Laimbeer (compensating for mediocre skills by specializing in dirty play, now coaching women's basketball) the chief culprit.

If the Garnett deal is as good for the Celtics as the writers think, this deal instantly catapults them into "contender" status for the Eastern Division. And that means three once-in-an-era teams (Patriots, Celtics, Red Sox) in my home town.

Yeah baby!

Playing when published: The Standells, "Dirty Water (Boston, You're My Home)"