Kissing The Sky

In 2003, Rolling Stone published its 100 Greatest Guitarists issue.

No surprise, topping the list was Jimi Hendrix, and Pete Townsend wrote a gorgeous tribute, a reflection on that lightening flash made flesh for not quite 28 years.

I found this YouTube upload of an MTV production sometime ago, and have long thought to do an entry on it. It’s not a great video on it’s own, but what the MTV crew managed to do was capture so much of what made Jimi special, and what made him an icon for the era: the creativity, the destruction, the raw sexuality, the power, the rebellion, the poetry, the skewed beauty attached to a new musical form tethered to the black blues, while simultaneously reaching for melody and dissonance.

“Are You Experienced” is my favorite Hendrix tune, for it captures all of these strange and beautiful qualities, or as Pete Townsend writes, “What he played was fucking loud but also incredibly lyrical and expert. . . It was a high form of eroticism, almost spiritual in quality. . . . He made the electric guitar beautiful. It had always been dangerous, . . . Jimi made it beautiful and made it OK to make it beautiful.”

“Are You Experienced” reflects all these things, and this little video offers some of Jimi’s most magical moments.

Are You Experienced?

If you can just get your mind together
Uh-then come on across to me
Well hold hands and then well watch the sunrise
From the bottom of the sea.

But first, are you experienced?
Uh-have you ever been experienced-uh?
Well, I have.

(Well) I know, I know, youll probably scream and cry
That your little world wont let you go
But who in your measly little world, (-uh)
Are you tryin to prove to that you’re
Made out of gold and-uh, cant be sold.

So-uh, are you experienced?

Have you ever been experienced? (-uh)
Well, I have.

Uh, let me prove it to you, yeah.

Trumpets and violins I can-uh, hear in the distance
I think they’re callin’ our name
Maybe now you cant hear them,
But you will, ha-ha, if you just
Take hold of my hand.

Ohhh, but are you experienced?
Have you ever been experienced?

Not necessarily stoned, but beautiful.

Ali Akbar Khan

April 14, 1922 – June 18, 2009

The master’s death is

joy to the one who lovingly crafted

that heart, that spirit, and

those hands.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

See also:

Ali Akbar Khan & Swapan Chaudhuri – Brindabani Sarang (YouTube video, embedding disabled).

NYT article on Ali Akbar Khan.

“Indian music is like a river or stream that has come down to us through time, bringing nurture to man’s soul. From the past masters, this music flowed to my father and through him to me. I want to keep this stream flowing. I don’t want it to die. It must spread all over the world.”

–  Khansahib

*

YouTube Find Of The Week: Alanis

Citizen Of The Planet

(From ‘The Flavors of Entanglement’)

I start up in the north
I grow from special seed
I sprinkle it with sensibility
From French and Hungarian snow
I linger in the sprouting
Until my engine’s full.

Then I move across the sea
To European bliss
To language of poets
As I cut the cord of home
I kiss my mother’s mother
Look to the horizon.

Wide eyed, new ground
Humbled by my new surroundings . . .

I am a citizen of the planet
My president is Kwan Yin
My frontier is on an airplane
My prison’s homes for rehabilitating.

Then I fly back to my nest
I fly back with my nuclear
But everything is different
So I wait
My yearn for home is broadened
Patriotism expanded
By callings from beyond.

So I pack my things
Nothing precious
All things sacred.

I am a citizen of the planet
My laws are all of attraction
My punishments are consequences
Separating from source the original sin.

I am a citizen of the planet
Democracy’s kids are sovereign
Where the teachers are the sages
And pedestals filled with every parent.

And so the next few years are blurry
The next decade’s a flurry
Of smells and tastes unknown
Threads sewn straight through this fabric
Through fields of every color
One culture to another.

And I come alive
And I get giddy
And I am taken and globally naturalized.

I am a citizen of the planet
From simple roots through high vision
I am guarded by the angels
And my body guides the direction I go in.

I am a citizen of the planet
My favorite pastime edge stretching
Besotten with human condition
These ideals are born from my deepest within.

Quan Yin: Anonymous, 14th Century Japanese Painting

YouTube Find of The Week: Sinéad O’Connor

Today I downloaded Sinéad O’Connor’s “Theology” from iTunes.

So far, I am mesmerized, but I’ve not listened to it through.

I briefly checked YouTube for links to send friends of some of the songs I’m enjoying (Psalm 33 and Something Beautiful), and I stumbled on this recent interpretation of Prince’s song.

No need to explain why I immediately posted as my YouTube find of the week.

YouTube Find Of The Week: Two From Sarah Vaughn

Gorgeous:

The next one is a montage video, not a filmed performance.

But the audio quality is exceptional.

A sublime interpretation, one of my favorites:

Rostropovich: YouTube Find Of The Week

The cello is my favorite instrument. I love its sonority, expressiveness, the emotional depths it attains when in the right hands.

Mstislav Rostropovich’s mastery of it, and his performance of Bach’s Cello Suites, go places few instrumentalists ever reach. Bach’s composition is one of the world’s greatest, and Rostropovich’s performance perhaps the most nuanced ever given. In a single lifetime, I could never tire of listening to Rostropovich play this cycle.

Rostropovich once said that no cellist should attempt to play the Cello Suites until they are at least sixty, as they lack the emotional wherewithal necessary to interpret the work. He carries all the emotional wherewithal and more into his performance.

This YouTube find of the week I find lovely for many reasons, the first being just watching the master play. Second, the sound quality is exceptionally clear. I assume this is in part because he is playing in a Romanesque Cathedral, its heavy stone walls and asp providing the perfect resonance for the cello and the intimacy of this composition in particular.

There are quite of few uploads on YouTube of Rostropovich performing parts of Bach’s cello suites; this one is a bit longer than most, coming in at a little over four minutes.

I very much enjoy the opening shots, which the other videos seem to omit.

Mstislav Rostropovich, Bach Cello Suite No. 3, Prelude.

Wiki Entry on Bach’s Cello Suites. Must read for music lovers.

Internet Cello Society: Interpretational Angst And The Bach Cello Suites by Tim Janof

Music at Rhapsody.com: J. S. Bach Cello Suites Complete — Rostropovich

Bruno Schulz: A Writer To Remember

A few years ago, I took a class on modern Jewish writers.

The Jewish part of that description was important, for each of the writers experienced deep personal conflict because of their Jewish identity.  Much of that conflict was rooted in being a “modern Jew,” a kind of oxymoron, modernity being the enemy of tradition.

And being Jews living in the first half of the twentieth, to varying degrees, each of these writers experienced hatred and persecution simply because they were Jews.

Three writers who I read in that course and who forever changed me were: Isaac Babel, Franz Kafka, and Bruno Schulz.

This morning on the front of the New York Times, there is an article on frescoes created by Schulz, who was a painter and graphic artist as well as a writer. Schulz died when he was shot in the back head by a Nazi officer, his creative life cut short by the intense ignorance and cruelty of that regime.

New York Times: Behind Fairy Tale Drawings, Walls Talk of Unspeakable Cruelty.

Bruno Schulz is a writer to remember the next time you’re looking for great literature. His oeuvre is small and comprised of short stories, so you’re not committing yourself to a lengthy undertaking. Google books offers a preview of his most well regarded collection “Street of Crocodiles,” and the introduction and notes should be enough to tantalize you further.

Schulz’s writing style reminds me of Chagall’s painting. Surrealistic, full of fairy tale like imagery and symbols which move around freely in space, executed in bright painterly colors.

Although Isaac Bashevis Singer has compared Schulz to Kafka, Kafka’s world, more often than not, reminds me of M.C. Escher; his writing palette is stark, complex, each part meticulously dependent on the other. Kafka’s musicality is far more abstract than romantic, think Hofstadter’s “Gödel, Escher, and Bach,” though a bit more elastic.

But Schulz was a wordsmith enamored of color and the tropes of fairy tales.  There is a vibrant immediacy to his prose, his surrealism joined to rich romantic flights of fancy and symbolic evocations, punctuated only briefly with heavy literary brushstrokes. If I were pressed to make a musical comparison, I would choose Leoš Janácek, his folding of folklore into modern music quite similar.

Which is not to write that Schulz was naïve: his personal notebooks are full of sadomasochistic images, many born from his visits to brothels, and reflective of the personal pain he yoked to pleasure.  Notably, if my memory serves me well, these notebook sketches of his torment are usually rendered in black and white, but don’t quote me on that. (For the inquisitive, google images “bruno schulz” to see examples from his journals.)

The colorful richness of his prose seems an almost expected counterpoint psychic performance to those personal images of emotional torture, as if the former relied on the deprivation of the latter for its fruition.

Similarly, the fresco images shown in New York Times today seem another colorful outgrowth of Schulz’s intense bipolar imagination, a creative spirit that was taken from this world far too early, as the best ones are so frequently. 

Today I remember three Jewish writers, their courage and creativity, and especially Bruno Schulz. And I heartily recommend the New York Times article posted above, and its slide show, as an introduction to Schulz and his work.

Bruno Schulz, self-portrait

post-script: I see that “Bruno Schulz” has a page on Face Book. Well done with great information, links, and nice musical background.

Bruno Schulz on Face Book.

I was pleased to find that among Bruno’s friends are Schopenhauer, Kafka, and Proust. Apparently, his friends from the bordellos have faded into forgetting.

YouTube Find Of The Week

Alanis Morissette, Thank U.

Live at The Whiskey, 2002

Thank U

How about getting off of these antibiotics.
How about stopping eating when I’m filled up.
How about them transparent dangling carrots.
How about that ever elusive kudo.

Thank you India.
Thank you terror.
Thank you disillusionment.
Thank you frailty.
Thank you consequence.
Thank you, thank you silence.

How about me not blaming you for everything.
How about me enjoying the moment for once.
How about how good it feels to finally forgive you.
How about grieving it all one at a time.

Thank you India.
Thank you terror.
Thank you disillusionment.
Thank you frailty.
Thank you consequence.
Thank you, thank you silence.

The moment I let go of it was
The moment I got more than I could handle.
The moment I jumped off of it was
The moment I touched down.

How about no longer being masochistic.
How about remembering your divinity.
How about unabashedly bawling your eyes out.
How about not equating death with stopping.

Thank you India.
Thank you Providence.
Thank you disillusionment.
Thank you nothingness.
Thank you clarity.
Thank you thank you silence.

Yeah, yeah.  Ohhh, yeah . . .

To The Muse II

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Earlier this month, in my entry To The Muse, I started an informal list of works that I think are worth committing to memory.

More precisely, they are poems or prose pieces that have struck me at a particular time, which I know well,  and which are part of my memory.  Not exactly an objective standard for a memorization list, but it’s my way of returning to these works amid life’s demands, sharing with those who are interested works they may not know, or that they are happy to remember.

As time passes, I expect it will be a way of stumbling on other works that I decide should be part of this list. That is a bit away, as I have a nice inventory stored between the ears, and I’m simply adding works ad hoc to my chronicle.

I am archiving the list in the Muse-ings page, found above.

There is no conscious reasoning behind when I add a work; today’s rather dark tone doesn’t reflect a personal mood, rather it was probably driven more by the popularity of the poems, and the ease of copying and pasting from the web.

At some time during my life, the poetic imagery, cadence, and aesthetic import of these works has overwhelmed me.  Their greatness dictated by my response, not critical appraisal.

For the most part, the various type faces and fonts are an accident of copying and pasting, which I’ve double checked for accuracy.  The differences seem to me easy on the eye, and a happy circumstance differentiating the works from one other.

I apologize in advance for any editorial oversights; my eyes miss a lot in this format.

The following are today’s additions.

Happy Birthday, Toni Morrison

Chloe Ardelia Wofford

18 February 1931

“We die. That may be the meaning of life.  But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”

Toni Morrison,  Nobel Lecture.

Thank you Ms. Morrison for “doing language” and doing it as no one else.