And hell is deeper than the sea...
TEXAS GLADDEN "The Devil's Questions"
You can read about the great Virginia-based ballad singer Texas Gladden here. This song is from one of the Alan Lomax Portrait series discs. I know that Lomax's reputation is not of the highest sort these days and while I wish he'd done more to help black scholars and to remunerate the folks he worked with, it's always real easy to judge folks from one era with the cultural values of your own.
If you read my last chicken little post you might think I was losing my mind, but that is of course a rather moot point. Now, it's easy easy for me to see where I think that other people are acting selfishly and in some harmful way or another, I guess in the way that one thief can easily recognize another or that a junkie can always find another junkie no matter which dead stinking rock in the universe you may deposit him or her.
And this is going to sound ridonkulously facile, naive, hippie dippie and worse, Jack Handey-ish -- but for me I've found that the main thing is that if I do not act out of love, out of as pure and total a form of love as I can muster, as much as is fucking possible for me to, then I'm no good to the world. This doesn't wipe away my concerns that the apocalypse is upon us because the polar ice is going away and a zillion other things you can read about anywhere (on the Internet anyway). And simply being less flakey and better in touch with all my peeps would go a long ways to making things better, too. But when I'm in touch with that simple idea and believe in this love stuff, and act from it even a little bit, things just go so totally well it's crazy.
Of course, I fight against it alla time, and get wrapped up in self-loathing and watching too many Elliott Gould movies instead of doing work or I get lost in fear and eating too much Nutella instead of taking a walk out and about when it's nice like it was earlier today or I get weirdly stuck inside of helping somebody else with their problems (because other people's problems are always so easy to figure out and stuff -- but why don't they just listen to me what makes them so goddamn stubborn!) and etc.
Adam Forkner aka White Rainbow's fully tripped-out installation was the highlight of this year's Time Based Arts Festival, a swell 10-day dance/ theatre/ music/ whatever festival that I was sick for much of last week so I missed Antony and Mirah's last performance for a year and rad butoh dudes and some other stuff.
Thankfully I visited Adam's space twice. I keep thinking about it since then. I think I want a Forkner zome installed in my basement soon as I get mildly rich: full instant access to trips w/o chemicals. You can get a decent sense of it from Steve States Rights' rad Quicktime movie here, and allow me to quote myself from the W. Week: He's transformed a former office space in the Corberry Press into a mind-blowing, lo-high-tech meditation zone. Inside the all-white, soft, loungey space, Forkner crouches in the corner performing blissed-out, four-channel electro-acoustic drones, while the video projections (especially those by E*Rock) are overpowering and mostly brilliant. This is modern psychedelic art that approaches the same level as Yayoi Kusama's reflection pool piece at last year's Whitney Biennial or the spirited and spiritual kitsch of the Assume Vivid Astro Focus collective.
I am not sure if I love the new Constantines record though I definitely dig it a lot; everything people seem to like about the egregiously awful Hold Steady I find happening here instead, with this also-Canadian band. In a pinch, if forced to choose between working class heroes I'd always take Lynott over Springsteen; could that have something to do with it?Anyway.
I can't wait to hear American Primitive Vol. 2, holy fuck. Its imminent release is great news (I have fallen off of many promo lists in the last year or two so I'm a bit behind in some kinds of news.)
Speaking of slightly old stuff, we all know that UBUWEB IS BACK AND NEW AND IMPROVED ANDS SHIT RIGHT?! Hallelujah. Also, has everyone read Alec's big-ass thought piece on the "new" visionary folksters yet?
You can read about the great Virginia-based ballad singer Texas Gladden here. This song is from one of the Alan Lomax Portrait series discs. I know that Lomax's reputation is not of the highest sort these days and while I wish he'd done more to help black scholars and to remunerate the folks he worked with, it's always real easy to judge folks from one era with the cultural values of your own.
If you read my last chicken little post you might think I was losing my mind, but that is of course a rather moot point. Now, it's easy easy for me to see where I think that other people are acting selfishly and in some harmful way or another, I guess in the way that one thief can easily recognize another or that a junkie can always find another junkie no matter which dead stinking rock in the universe you may deposit him or her.
And this is going to sound ridonkulously facile, naive, hippie dippie and worse, Jack Handey-ish -- but for me I've found that the main thing is that if I do not act out of love, out of as pure and total a form of love as I can muster, as much as is fucking possible for me to, then I'm no good to the world. This doesn't wipe away my concerns that the apocalypse is upon us because the polar ice is going away and a zillion other things you can read about anywhere (on the Internet anyway). And simply being less flakey and better in touch with all my peeps would go a long ways to making things better, too. But when I'm in touch with that simple idea and believe in this love stuff, and act from it even a little bit, things just go so totally well it's crazy.
Of course, I fight against it alla time, and get wrapped up in self-loathing and watching too many Elliott Gould movies instead of doing work or I get lost in fear and eating too much Nutella instead of taking a walk out and about when it's nice like it was earlier today or I get weirdly stuck inside of helping somebody else with their problems (because other people's problems are always so easy to figure out and stuff -- but why don't they just listen to me what makes them so goddamn stubborn!) and etc.
Adam Forkner aka White Rainbow's fully tripped-out installation was the highlight of this year's Time Based Arts Festival, a swell 10-day dance/ theatre/ music/ whatever festival that I was sick for much of last week so I missed Antony and Mirah's last performance for a year and rad butoh dudes and some other stuff.
Thankfully I visited Adam's space twice. I keep thinking about it since then. I think I want a Forkner zome installed in my basement soon as I get mildly rich: full instant access to trips w/o chemicals. You can get a decent sense of it from Steve States Rights' rad Quicktime movie here, and allow me to quote myself from the W. Week: He's transformed a former office space in the Corberry Press into a mind-blowing, lo-high-tech meditation zone. Inside the all-white, soft, loungey space, Forkner crouches in the corner performing blissed-out, four-channel electro-acoustic drones, while the video projections (especially those by E*Rock) are overpowering and mostly brilliant. This is modern psychedelic art that approaches the same level as Yayoi Kusama's reflection pool piece at last year's Whitney Biennial or the spirited and spiritual kitsch of the Assume Vivid Astro Focus collective.
I am not sure if I love the new Constantines record though I definitely dig it a lot; everything people seem to like about the egregiously awful Hold Steady I find happening here instead, with this also-Canadian band. In a pinch, if forced to choose between working class heroes I'd always take Lynott over Springsteen; could that have something to do with it?Anyway.
I can't wait to hear American Primitive Vol. 2, holy fuck. Its imminent release is great news (I have fallen off of many promo lists in the last year or two so I'm a bit behind in some kinds of news.)
Speaking of slightly old stuff, we all know that UBUWEB IS BACK AND NEW AND IMPROVED ANDS SHIT RIGHT?! Hallelujah. Also, has everyone read Alec's big-ass thought piece on the "new" visionary folksters yet?
posted by Mike McGonigal at 3:33 PM
1 Comments:
The following sentence from Alex Bemis' L.A. Times piece left a sour taste in my mouth---
"Miami doesn't have a thriving indie rock scene—its polyglot ethnic mix of black and Latino immigrants is inhospitable to the lily white world of underground pop—but Beam doesn't mind."
There are suburban white folks there, and anyway it reads like he's saying that those darn black and Latino folks are somehow blocking the rock. The rest of the article was a bit too worshipful, and I don't think there are enough record sales yet for these new quiet folkies to be described as representative of a generation(it's more like 'college rock' circa 2005 ). -Steve K
Post a Comment
<< Home