a blog of songs, many of them from the nations of eastern & central europe, & also of musings, links, poems & poetics, vertices, hand-sparrows, modal shifts, trefoils, the efforts of searching, chalk, astrolabes, a light on swamp gas.
fans have been lately shit-proximate, which is why I haven't been making lots of blog posts.
I know, I know: you want more blog posts.
I tell you this, citizens: I will write more blog posts soon.
sooner than you think,
you can't believe how soon.
in the meantime, here, I made you a youtube playlist. think of it as a video mixtape. it has everything some mixtape some guy made might have, & in this case, the guy is me. please to enjoy.
surrender to his magic:
something that's really terrific & amazingly so great:
one thing I recommend is opening nine or ten of this video & playing them at the time. just hit play on each of them once, & then let them do their thing. every time one of the windows finishes playing, hit replay. continue till about 3 minutes before you want it to stop. aaaah, sweet calliaphone:
it is especially great to do late at night in a quiet house in the country.
but it works anywhere.
I think upon our heroes with great admiration mayonnaise. real: extra heavy.
no I saw this on the street & almost had to be hospitalized. admiration mayonnaise. so good. it reminded me of, deep in bushwick, there's a legendary sign painted on a high wall of a building that reads paramount tortellini. you can go there, it's great to see the words paramount tortellini & it offers the pleasure of being a secret place in the city. but admiration mayonnaise, besides being the one & only admiration mayonnaise, was such a nice surprise.
thank you, admiration mayonnaise.
also did you know the word serendipity was coined by Horace Walpole & means literally sri lankanness? is that not the most ickety & colonial thing you have ever heard?
this very interesting article made me sad. they have this beautiful silence room but they use it to sell products. still, I like the aristotelian question of "metaphors for what sound should, well, sound like." I like the pictures. I would like very much to need a chair in this deep & tiny room.
Clayton Eshleman, speaking of his burgeoning interest in the art of the upper paleolithic:
Before returning to the Dordogne in 1978, I read an essay, later published as a book, by the archetypal psychologist James Hillman, called "The Dream and the Underworld." Hillman was not concerned with prehistory in this work, but what he had to say about dreams and the way we have used them suggested a way for me to begin to think about cave imagery.
According to Hillman, modern people have interpreted their dreams and treated them as a reflection of daylight and daytime activities, thus denying them an autonomous realm, an archetypal place that corresponds with a distinct mythic geography -- in short, an underworld that is not merely a reflection or diminution of an empirical sense world. I was astonished! This was exactly the same kind of interpretation that had been cast over the Upper Paleolithic caves. Like Plato's allegory of the cave, the caves, since the discovery of prehistory in the mid-nineteenth century, were thought to contain a world of shadows in contrast to a "real" sunlit world of higher good above them.
It was not a matter of merely reversing such a verdict, but of acknowledging how the mysterious animals, human forms, and signs behind what might be called "the history of image" might pre-figure a way to dream and imagine. In a contemporary way, Upper Paleolithic cave imagery is a language upon which all subsequent mythology has been built. From my point of view, the distinction between history and prehistory started to look like the distinction between poetry and prose at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Of course Cro-Magnon people were affected by all that was in and around them, and undoubtedly they brought their desire to live -- to kill, eat, and wear animals -- into the depths of the caves. But the work on the cave walls has behind it a much more formidable crisis than depicting game.
After I crawled for four hours in Le Portel or Les Trois Frères, I realized that "sympathetic magic" and "sexual pairing" interpretations had only skimmed what has been recorded. There I glimpsed outlines of isolated animals (with only several possible exceptions, no hunter/animal juxtapositions occur until after the Upper Paleolithic), or crouched before friezes of hundreds of entangled animal figures, sometimes scratched on one great bison outline, as if the earth were seen as a ripe pelt of animals. I saw within this labyrinth little half-human animals beginning to appear, more often than not as mere dancing mites. I felt that I was witnessing the result of the crisis of Upper Paleolithic people separating the animal out of their about-to-be human heads, and that what we call "the underworld" has, as its impulse, such a catastrophe behind it.
reading this, I'm reminded that our word autonomous, in its original greek form (αυτονομος), was invented by Sophocles, a gift to his Antigone. Antigone is sentenced to be sealed up in the cave, alive, a punishment for burying her dead brother against the theban king's wishes. a chorus croons her the news that what she did was right, but that her tragic flaw, αυτογνωσις, autognosis, has set her afoul of the sovereign & spelled her end. translators varyingly have given autognosis as 'self-determination', 'stubborn mood, self-chosen', or 'self-will', & the simple meaning of the familiar greek would be self-wisdom ("or, as we might say, ego strength"). then, in being sent, alive, to the underworld, the chorus tells her that she goes to the land of shades αυτονομος, autonomous, sometimes 'of her own motion', but literally 'self-lawing' or 'herself a law'. that is, she will be alive in the land of the dead. drawing breath in the underworld, diving into the knot, catastrophic impulse of differentiation.
the exhilarating anthropologist Michael Jackson (listen, what do you want from me?) writes:
"Fetish" comes from the Latin facticius ("to do"), though the earliest English use of the word, in the late fifteenth century, dervies from the Portugese word feitiço, which was applied to the "charms" used by Africans on the Guinea coast. The archetypical fetish was possibly the BaKongo nkisi (plural: minkisi) from the region that today encompasses Cabinda and western Zaire.
The word enters European discourse with pejorative connotations, a synonym for idolatry, primitivism, and savagery. Early anthropologists such as Tylor and Frazer considered fetishism to be a form of irrationalism, magic, and superstition precisely because it denied or blurred the distinction between persons and things. How can an inanimate object be imbued with intentionality and moral consciousness, addressed, fed, and cared for as though it were human?
They protested too much. Those who were most repelled and outraged by the African's apparent indifference to the ontological divide between persons and things were, as often as not, engaged in the kind of colonial ventures -- such as slave trading -- that conspicuously reduced Africans to the status of beasts, chattels, and mere things. Moreover, the European Enlightenment's excoriation of anthropomorphism was from the outset a rhetorical device for concealing its pervasive presence in European discourse. In fact, in no human society is it possible to draw anything but a transient and ambiguous line between subject and object. In our practical lives, the line is infringed continually. The field of intersubjectivity inescapably involves an ongoing reciprocal movement in consciousness between a sense of being a subject for oneself and being an object for others.
A rejoinder to this point of view would be to admit that we often liken persons to things and things to persons, but that this should not be taken to imply that we confuse them. It is a matter of metaphor, so to speak, not a reflection of how we think things really are. But the pathetic fallacy that erases the distinction between subject and object issues from direct experience and is not conjured out of nowhere -- a mere figure of speech. Similes that merge persons and things are grounded in our continually shifting sense of ourselves as having and not having autonomy, of being embodied and disembodied, of acting and of being acted upon. And the similes arise in specific contexts, and have to be understood as such.
Consider Kuranko thought on this subject. If sacrifice is a form of gift giving that opens and clears paths between people, creating transparency and reciprocity, fetishes work to seal off, enclose, safeguard, and protect. Accordingly, Kuranko social life vacillates between openness and closure. For every adage that encourages generosity of spirit (morgoye), there is one that extols guardedness.
Yani wolen na don sise na don (literally, "let the chicken rather than the bushfowl eat it") -- rather than give to a stranger, give to someone you know so that the gift will come back to you.
Ni ya bolo kolon kononto ko i lile mala a tan nyorgo la (literally, "if you give to nine poor people you'll be the tenth to be poor") -- don't be so generous as to leave yourself in need.
Thus while gifts and sacrifices serve to clear channels of communication, fetishes serve to monitor and reinforce boundaries where uncontrolled traffic jeopardizes a person's sense of autonomy and threatens his or her secuity. The difference between fetish and gift is that the fetish withholds or prevents communication, sealing self off from other, while the gift opens and mediates communication. The fetish closes gates; the gift opens paths.
However, in no human society are people so open to others that they are able to forfeit their self-identity completely. Even the most charitable and self-sacrificing individual feels personally gratified or somehow saved by giving unstintingly. Without possessing some sense of ontological security and substantiality, others are experienced as destabilizing influences or threats. For the Kuranko, fetishes may be understood as a specific instance of the imperative to "have miran," that is, to be self-contained and self-possessed. The analogy is with a container like a calabash or a country pot. Thus miran can denote qualities such as self-confidence, self-possession, a commanding presence, and charisma, as well as material possessions, particularly those things that bolster one's sense of self-containedness and autonomy -- personal property, clothing, a dwelling or granary, protective charms, and magical ointments.
Just as these things can be stolen or spoiled, so too can a person's self-confidence and sense of autonomy be taken away. Miran, like mana for the Polynesians, is continually waxing and waning.
To strengthen miran the Kuranko have recourse to fetishes and magical medicines that boost their sense of substantiality or, as we might say, ego strength. When used to protect farms, villages, or chiefdoms, they act as symbolic containers, rendering that unit of social space impermeable to unlicensed extraneous influence. Commonly known throughout West Africa as jujus (from the French jou-jou), among the Kuranko these magical artifacts include guardian angels (kanda malika), djinn (nyenne), and magical medicines (bese). In short, though some are man-made objects and others are quasi-human, all are considered to have the ability to bolster the power of one's own will.
all this hot fetish action reminds me a favorite scene from the torah, genesis 31. Jacob has been working twenty years for his shifty Aramean father-in-law, Laban. Laban is a kind of a good old boy, a rich, elite yokel, & crooked to the bone. Jacob and Laban first meet when Jacob falls in love with Rachel, Laban's younger daughter (her name means ewe), and asks Laban to marry her. Laban sets the bride-price at seven years' labor on his estate, which Jacob dutifully performs. But then, in some Scott-Walker-level dirty dealings (sorry had to), Laban pulls a devious switcheroo: and since the bride's face is hidden behind a veil, not until it's too late does Jacob realize he's been married instead to Rachel's older, uglier sister Leah (whose name means, sorrrry but, cow). Jacob then works another seven years so he can marry the sister he really loves, and afterwards he stays around, caring after Laban's flocks, for another six years. during those six years, Laban repeatedly tries to cheat Jacob out of his fair share, but Jacob continually wins thru magic & cunning, and amasses much of his father-in-law's fortune.
finally, one day, Jacob overhears Laban's sons fuming over how much of their inheritance Jacob has taken, and he decides it's time to get the hell out of dodge. he gathers up his family and their belongings. without telling anyone (& sans textual explanation), Rachel also steals התרפים אשר לאביה, hat'rafim asher l'aviha, 'the idols of her father'. then they leave. (the torah at genesis 31:20 also uses the celebrated phrase ויגנב יעקב את-לב לבן, vayig'nov ya'akov et-lev laban, literally 'and Jacob stole Laban's heart'. the heart being, in the ancient hebrew worldview, the bodily seat of cognition & knowledge, this is generally interpreted to mean 'Jacob kept Laban from knowing', ie 'Jacob kept his plan to run off a secret'. but I can't help doubting that's the only intended meaning -- I mean, he's disappearing with the guy's daughters!)
a few days later, Laban realizes what's happened and sets after them, catching up in the hill country of gilead. he corners Jacob and excoriates him in a passage (gen 31:30) celebrated in the talmud for its colloquialism (even now, the hebrew reads a little like seinfeld banter: 'you wanna leave? so leave!'), ending with the question למה גנבת את-אלהי, lamah ganav'ta et-elohai, that is, 'but why'd you have to take my gods?!' (the word Laban uses for gods here is nearly identical to אלהים, elohim, used as God's name for much of genesis.) Jacob, who doesn't know about Rachel's theft, insists he had the right to run away, but swears he knows nothing of the gods being taken and promises to kill the thief if he's discovered. & Laban starts rummaging thru Jacob's stuff, looking for his idols.
things here get pretty cinematic. Rachel, on seeing her father sifting thru the camp, quickly palms the idols & stuffs them into her camel-hair menstrual pillow. when her dad makes his way into the tent she tells him she can't stand up because she's got her period. so Laban looks everywhere except the right place, and finds nothing. Jacob explodes into anger and seethes at Laban: מה-מצאת מכל כלי-ביתך, mah-matsata mikol k'ley-vaytekha, that is, 'so what have you found of those household things of yours?' not idols (תרפים) or gods (אלהי), but things (כלי).
did I mention Laban means white? it does. (cf arabic لبنة, labneh). admiration labneh.
(actually that's the origin of the word lebanon too, I guess originally in reference to snow-capped mount lebanon?)
Virgil in the aeneid writes:
sacra suosque tibi commendat troia penates
hos cape fatorum comites...
and holy troy commends its household gods to you,
accept them as the retinue of fate...
I'm gonna stop now. listen, are you reading this? you are, we both know you are. please, please, won't you send me an email, or write me a blog comment or two, & let me know how this is sounding to you? I haven't left the house in weeks. for all I know, nothing is real. don't turn your head into birds, please, let's hear from you!
in a meditation class recently I was reminded that recollection is literally re- con- lectio, to be gathered & bound back together.
take out the con-, I first thought, & you get religion.
well, maybe. there's a debate about the etymology of the word religion, & it's really, really old. what is not in dispute: our word religion comes from the latin religio, meaning supernatural feeling of constraint, taboo or obligation originating in awe, superstition, piety.
but what is the origin of the latin religio? one school has long held that it comes from the latin religare, meaning 'to bind'. Lucretius in de rerum natura, circa 58 bc, uses the phrase religionum animum nodis exsolvere ('to loose the knots of religio from the mind'), which Augustine & co (following the thought of, originally, Lactantius in 313) read, persuasively, as a pun on religare. what can bind can be knotted. & the idea of binding the daily to the eternal, the human to the divine, conduct to duty, becomes central to the senses the word takes on, until by the 8th century religio can also mean monastery.
on the other side of the debate are Cicero & longtime friend-of-the-blog Aulus Gellius. In de natura deorum, Cicero, twelve years after Lucretius, writes qui... omnia quae ad cultum deorum pertinerent diligenter pertractarent et tamquam relegerent sunt dicti religiosi ex relegendo..., 'those... who have devotedly pondered all the duties of honoring the gods, practicing every one, even, so to speak, repeating (relegent) them, are called religious from all this repeating (relegent)...' here, the sense of periodic activity, of rituals consistently re-observed, texts reread, interceding moons, remains prominent.
by the mid-second century, Aulus Gellius writes in attic nights that religentem esse oportet, religiosum nefas, usually translated 'a person should be religious, not superstitious'. but religious in the ciceronian sense, performing (always again) some necessary rituals, re-observing rites at the appointed times. anyhow, the root has by this time clearly ramified into two contrasting words.
& if it isn't clear here, my thoughts tonight are to Trayvon Martin. or, more accurately, they're to George Zimmerman. I like all of us have been hearing a lot of clamor about 'justice for Trayvon', & have seen a lot of friends exult in George Zimmerman's arrest. & I was there we all stood around in our hoodies, a commercial for outrage.
the first thing I want to say is, of course, it is a good & an important thing that he has been arrested. this country, with its dripping red sky, its conspiracies of gentleman pederasts, its hills of teeth, & also with all of us sitting hugely & dumbly in its preposterously nice geography, this country, & all of us,need, I think, to see that a white person can no longer kill a black person in the benign, knowing shadow of the law. in an america that permits barbarity on so spectacular a level, we are all a smirking sheriff & the pain is intolerable. of course it is right that he be arrested. George Zimmerman is a murderer. he has acted, as the peculiarly beautiful language of the common law had it, with an abandoned and malignant heart.
but George Zimmerman's arrest does not achieve justice for Trayvon Martin, any more than any number can be thought a fraction of the infinite.
the only morning such a country can know is despair, I think. masks burning. George Zimmerman -- oh I mean fuck that guy & heartily, but. but -- no fury we exact on him can at all reduce the ghastliness of what's happened, wake the opened human being in the street in florida, impossibly remote, unbearably close. we cannot go deep enough into George Zimmerman to recollect Trayvon Martin's plainly speaking voice, piece this ash together into that vanished book. the incredibly terrible thing has already happened.
& there is a difference between being bound together with something & being forced to repeat it.
Robert Kelly wrote:
The abyss
was syntax
& we lost our way.
I am terrified of hatred. it's annoying when people focus on the skittles & the iced tea, because all that is is a way of not saying that George Zimmerman murdered Trayvon Martin because he was black. part of the history of genocide against black people in america has long been the giant blind eye of police to horrific violence that white people committed against black people. arresting George Zimmerman is important because of that.
but it's american people murdering black people that killed Trayvon Martin, & I feel heartsick at how quiet a part this has been of all the honest, caring, horrified things people have been saying. we have this uproarious depravity tearing in us. we need to cross the streams, or something.
or, I don't know what freedom is, but god do I want it.
music to accompany these thoughts, hm. I got so serious, ha ha! got to find some serious music!
well, one song that's really beautiful & funny & sad & has a anti-racist trajectory is bilbo is dead by Andy Tibbs. Bilbo was indeed dead, but, as who Bilbo was was the proudly racist kkk-member mississippi twice-governor once-senator & author of take your choice: separation or mongrelization, the lugubrious tone is a bitter put-on. also the band is so completely great & Andy Tibbs has a voice that responds to everything & it's really beautiful. & plus, death to racism!
& mostly because it is beautiful, also this live recording of the song eden blues by Georges Moustaki. besides its great & gentle loveliness, let's include it for the sake of bringing this:
et les fleurs couchées par le vent
semblent prier pour son repos
la lune sème une larme d'argent
sur la croix blanche du tombeau
in flushing, queens, not far from where I grew up & very near where I go to school, there long stood a restaurant aptly named The Palace Diner. I went there a lot with my family as a kid, & for most of school it's proved a valuable recharge depot, where we've often meandered after particular depletions (often of the multiple-choice variety) for mediocre, hyper-greezy consolation lunches. the palace was a reasonably staunch exemplar of the high style in queens greek diners: inexplicably vaulting architecture, insouciant staff, jukeboxes at every table, neon-&-faux-everything décor. in its crummy exaltatedness, it's long been a particular favorite of mine.
recently, tho, I was taking the long walk up main street, northward, from the area of my school (which is comparatively suburban, heavily jewish) to flushing's downtown, far more asian (especially chinese and indian), & I saw the old palace diner looking like this:
(sorry for the lousy picture quality -- snapped this with my phone.) as you can see, the palace diner is being reinscribed as a chinese restaurant. there's nothing surprising about this: more & more businesses with chinese names have been appearing further south on main street, increasingly appearing on blocks whose businesses cater primarily to orthodox jews. but what really got me thinking was how unsurprising it is on a bigger historic scale, too: how many buildings over the centuries have been rededicated under arches bearing the script of china, that hegemon di tutti hegemones?
for all the annoyingness of the Eastern-Wisdom-Ooh-La-La style in which people who cannot read chinese characters often describe them, I, a person who cannot read chinese characters, am really really interested in talking about them. navigating around the shoals of Fenollosa-Pound-overfacile-adoption & of lame-motivational-powerpoint-sacrality, I still think it's spellbinding how prestigious the chinese script has become and remained, and how radically (no pun intended) it differs from the alphabetic systems of writing that are more familiar to me.
even tho I chafe when people talk about how chinese is "written in pictures" (as opposed to... anything?), there really are times when sinograms really are bracingly direct pictorial representations of what they refer to. examples of this include characters like 女, for nǚ, woman, & 子, for zǐ, child. famously these two combine, one semantic orbit out, in the character 好, for hǎo, 'good' (& also hào, 'like' or 'be partial to'), which apparently really does represent the concept of goodness thru the adjacency of a woman & baby. 女 + 子 = 好, so to speak.
another character that looks like what it talks about is 串, chuàn, which means skewer or kebab. (in my mind's ear, the word is cued up in that glorious, super-rhotic beijing accent, closer to chwàrrr.) the word is cognate with 穿, chuān, 'to pierce, penetrate, or drill thru', & 贯, guān, 'to go thru'. (so in beijing, 贯吗?) so just imagine my delight, in flushing this afternoon, when I stopped to get a kebab from a halal truck, on a narrow street with chinese characters in every direction, & saw this:
there does indeed seem to be some correlation between rising & convergence. as tho the sheer imperial charisma of the chinese script had begun to magnetically colonize all the ambient language on the street.
spent the whole day researching rhetorical contrasts among supporters of & detractors from the patriot & affordable care acts. a whole lot interesting there, so stay tuned for future extrusions.
for now, tho, here are some of the merry distractions that've been briefly bursting onto the scene:
here's a really delightful must-watch for Henry Cowell fans, fellow grouch-travelers, & humanoidanity at large. it turns especially great about three & a half minutes in:
Lang Lang is pretty likable, huh?
here, the unfortunate history of our diplomatic failures is retold via chipper death foods & lively splatch noises.
I listened to some Don Byas. I listened to that new(ish) Action Bronson mixtape, he's really great & I guess not surprisingly he doesn't like being mistaken for Ghostface. Charles Ives's 4th symphony, which is so beautiful & gray-weather & paradiso that sharing it feels like practically the reason having a blog was invented. I listened to a song called deddy oh deddy by Grace Simon, an indonesian froth-bubble that is horrid, yet beguiling.
I got a little nostalgic for early-90s rapping cartoon cereal commercials:
I wished a few times I was reading Anne Porter. David Shapiro wrote that she "reminds us that the idea of the holy is still possible for us." that's so sweet.
Fire, And Torrential Rain It's midnight, I'm alone
My house is suddenly sheathed
In a thick tent of rain
These sheaves of throbbing water
This quenching cold
This dark poured into dark
Are the pure opposite
Of fire, and yet this night
Is whispering and singing like a fire.
* * * * * * *
Fire, most beautiful of flowers,
Whose only perfume is brightness,
You have no season, and you bloom
On the highest of high altars
And under the vagrant's pot.
Through centuries on centuries,
Like Christ you are everywhere,
To kindle the half cigarettes
Which the homeless find in the gutters,
And the tall paschal candle.
love that. so, c'mon out there -- you reading this? do this poor Blechtoven the grace of some comments!
hello everybody! it's a thursday, in new york so beautiful, air & the wind's eye & I have the day off now we're blogging with gas.
there's something really great that caught my eye recently, a video piece by a dutch guy called Sebastian Schmieg. the title is Search by Image, Recursively, Transparent PNG, #1, & what it actually is is a chain of 2,951 images, each the result of a google 'visually similar' search based on the previous. I so completely love this! if I may, I'd recommend using as a soundtrack vc love song by Eo Sing & Namh Hao. (you can also stream it on youtube here.) they both follow a complicated line of transformations & strange visitations, both situated in the richness of a lot of ambient noise. (vcls is on a terrific german compilation of vietnamese songs of many kinds & incidences.)
watching this -- which I have been doing a lot of -- really got me thinking about things that operate, at least partly, by closely remembering other things. Michael Palmer:
Finisterrae
The eye on each wing, for example,
many have mentioned this.
That it sees nothing,
no one has mentioned this.
the semiotic ecology of this is spellbinding to me. resemblance, maybe, is adaptive repetition, a form of change that stammers its sympathies. but it is not ambivalent -- a street may run in any number of ways, but traffic only one. I got to thinking of songs that seemed to have ghost referents, that stammered a sympathy with something off-site. music with unseeing eyes.
for instance, there are a lot of eyes in extended niceties by Peter Gordon & the Love of Life Orchestra, and I'm pretty sure a lot of them see nothing. how anything can so much like so much & yet so little like anything is amazing. this is straight molten disco mirror, a song that sounds like back-then but could only be from now, that pulverizes itself toward freedom but only in struggling against a pretty rigid form. also, it is a fucking marathon dance party squeezed into seven minutes of ultraluminous boogie-down. this is a howl so go go get scorched.
my nuclear vision is everybody's business, sings Dr. John on his new record locked down, maybe channeling Michael Palmer. the record, produced by Dan Auerbach of the black keys, has been getting gigantic amounts of attention. Dr. John has done some truly uncute things over the years, but I'm with the consensus on this one: great & good & vital stuff. here, dig on ice age. eh? eh?
ice age isn't more immune than the rest of the record to occasional bouts of Winehouseworthy retro-chintz, but it's still a power station. please disregard the stupid lyrics, & instead could we talk about how reminiscent this song is of any number of times & places & other songs & how none of these times, places, & songs has, in fact, ever existed? incomprehension magic what's not to like. & besides that guitar riff (which sounds like the 1970s with all the fluids zipped out), I can't even really describe what it doesn't sound like -- instead, I feel put on the defensive by it, like before I can get a word out it's asking me what songs I sound like.
so maybe this song should be called well, me neither. but I dig it.
a totally different kind of deceptively elusive correspondence is found in this song, which is called пусть все будет так, pust' vsjo budet tak. an overly literal translation of which would be let it all be so. russian lacks the modal it of english -- one says not it's warm but warmly, & I've heard russians learning english puzzle over what the mysterious it of it's warm refers to. so let it be is a complicated thing to try & say in russian.
the band is called коммунизм, kommunizm. this is off their 1989 record лет ит би, a hard title to translate well because it is a transliteration into russian of let it be. kommunizm were the amazing Egor Letov, Oleg Sur, Valerka Rozhkov, & Kuzja Uo, who I hope in english goes by Kuzya Whoa!, but I dunno. when you hear it, unless yr from pulao or something, you will immediately recognize what it is. here's what they're singing:
опять пришла весна и деревья распукаются
и поют повсюду птицы нам о весне
я иду по улице и сердце мается
нежно сердце мается о тебе, о тебе
opjat' prishla vesna i derev'ja raspuskajutsjai pojut povsjudu ptitsy nam o vesnjeja idu po ulitse i sjerdtse majetsjanjezhno sjerdtse majetsja o tebje, o tebje
spring has come again & the trees are in blossom
& all around us birds are singing of spring
I walk down the street & my heart is breaking
tenderly my heart is breaking over you, over you
then here's how they sing the chorus:
лет ит би, лет ит би
пусть будет так а не иначе
мы с тобой давно решили
пусть все будет так
ljet it bi, ljet it bi
pust' budet tak a ne inache
my s toboj davno reshili
pust' vsjo budet tak
ljet it bi, ljet it bi
may it be so & not be otherwise
you & I decided long ago
let everything be so
& then dig the last verse:
ты идешь с работы и сияет солнце в окнах
и смеются звонко дети на все голоса
и гуляют солнечные зайчики по крышам
и счастливый смех мы слышим тает в небесах
ty idjosh' s raboty i sijajet solntsje v oknakh
i smejutsja zvonko deti na vsje golosa
i guljajut solnechnye zajchiki po krysham
i schastlivyj smjekh my slyshim taet v njebesakh
you head out of work & the sun is blazing in the windows
and the children are all laughing out their voices loud
and the beams of sunshine are walking across the roofs
& we can hear happy laughter melting in the heavens
yeah, what?! the original let it be is a total false eye on the wing of this song. on one level, it's the ebb & tug of the original, which russians feels is theirs as much as everyone's (see also: the movie лимита, or am I the only human who's seen that?). the phonemically transposed title of the original anchors the chorus. & the loveliness of the original melody (which is all that haughty bullshit has going for it, sorrrry beatles-lovers) is brought into relief by how the new lyrics don't actually fit, or maybe by the tensions that brush up as the russian lines don't conform to the smoother contours of the original. (e.g. the way the word сердце, sjerdtse (heart) is stretched out in the third line.) classic pleasures of the palimpsest et cetera.
but there's something else, another space my mind goes listening, magnetized interstice between the original let it be & this song, which sounds like Cyrill & Methodius having a drunken sing-along in bunker. I mean, you can almost feel the cinder-block yr sitting on. & there it is the ambiguity of let it be, floating sort of blankly in the ambient culture-goo, that seems to be the source of this song. an unhearing of this always already overheard song, that seems to me to take this glitch in the translatability (let it be? vat eez it? let it be vaat?) as an opening in. & then kind of lovingly tramples it, for an opportunity to do something beautiful. yes!
did I mention the band is called kommunizm?
something I was really glad for the chance to see recently was this movie of the first book I ever read in russian, Viktor Pelevin's Generation 'П' (there are two english translations, one called Babylon & one called Homo Zapiens. that same problem -- how do you translate a title that's mostly in english into english?).
the movie's recommended. it embraces the bombast & goofy exuberance & acerb impatience of the novel. hallucinogens are well-rendered. the notorious Che Guevara scene is given a loving best attempt. it extends things a little farther into the future than the novel & somewhat downplays the ancient-aliens aspect (never a winning move in my book), but still, give a viewing if you see it going by.
a record I'm much crazy about right now is Julia Holter's orthogrammically-entitled Ekstasis. it has so many terrific songs! some of them have videos:
yay.
"what we assume is given -- our humanity -- might be being taken away, eradicated, annulled before our very eyes.... do we cease to exist when we are here, in the actuality of the physical elsewhere?" Ann Lauterbach asks this in The Given & The Chosen, her super-interesting lecture & book, which begins by epigraphing that Michael Palmer poem. (the 'here', of course, right now, for us, is, uh, there. but read my blog!) the present elsewhere. what an unseeing eye would see. Gennady Aigi writes of "река -- уже иная", that is, "the river -- already other".
anyhow, thanks a lot for reading my blog! I mean, if you are reading my blog? listen, why not leave some comments! that way, I'll know you read my blog! or send me an email or something. let me know what you think! because that's fun. also, sorry if you had some trouble downloading the songs listed on last week's entry. there were a few problems (turns out file-sharing changes over the course of time? va savoir.), & they'll be fixed within about 24 hours. Team InGurgitem apologizes. profusely.
welcome to my new blog, ¡десятизначные леса! the basic story is this: a few years ago, I, reporter for metropolitan paper, began keeping a blog that tracked some of my musical enthusiasms, & shared them in the form of downloadable mp3s & associated prattle, accompanied by images, youtube clips, etymologies, occasional poems, and sundry dry goods I had culled from the ruby-studded shores of the internet. about three years ago I tapered off, distracted by a busy & glamorous lifestyle. now, with a new url & the thrall of a three-years-later set of fascinations & musics, I've got an urge to start it up again.
so, the basic format will be written text, with links from which you can download whatever song I'm talking about, & various links to recommended things of interest. needless to say, I'm a pretty nice person & will be glad not to engage you in a whole thing about intellectual property (what's next -- soul property?, but I digress) -- if you own the rights to anything I post & you wish I wouldn't have, please just let me know & I shall take it down with a plum.
a friend sent me this, & I don't know a lot about it. I think it's so beautiful! file under phantom pasts, well heard & attentively seen. the singer is Akiko Kanazawa, about whom you can learn on bulbapedia, the community-driven pokémon encyclopedia. a favorite sequence for me is from 1:03-1:25 or so. & I'm a sucker for the ending.
something with less fractal bowling-ball, but a similarly persuasive feeling of intimacy, is the song chiałbym kiedyś by Piotr Szczepanik. chiałbym kiedyś is polish for just once I'd like to. Piotr Szczepanik is a clean-cut guy from the 60s who sided with solidarity & remains a decent-size star over there. there's a weirdly latent tone to his songs, a kind of a pent-up cathedral sound. this one sounds to me like the slow dance at a party some ghosts might throw in lublin, to celebrate their haunting the humans out of an old bakery. here, give it a listen.
& speaking of things pent-up & ever building: ok, I dunno. listen, I dunno, there is a singer named ไวพจน์ เพชรสุพรรณ, which I have seen transliterated as Waiphot Phetsuphan. he sings in a very popular style, I guess, called ลูกทุ่ง, luk thung, which is short, I guess, for เพลงลูกทุ่ง (pleng luk thung), meaning, I gather, songs of the children of the fields. so, 'country music', maybe? apparently, he had a religious transformation in the middle of his career, & his music thereafter often considers buddhist devotion. so, yr thinking what I'm thinking: country music, mid-career religious development: he's Thai Bob Dylan.
eerier still, listen to the song สาวภูไท. I'm real sorry to say I don't even have a guess what that means (any thai speakers out there?), tho the transliteration sao phu thai is given. the song has a sound that's really thrilling to me -- I love the husk of this guy's voice & its five-cornered swivel into shape after unexpected shape. a lot of the time, he sings the opposite of what I expect -- I expect him to start a line low & swoop higher, but in fact he'll come in on a high note & then swoop down. & I mean, this guy's voice could melt the rust off a buick. but listen close, notice anything else?
there's only one chord! it just... never... changes! & the effect is so beautiful & meditative I think. Steve-Reich-tinged. so yeah, just one chord & the only other pop song I can think of like that is subterranean homesick blues by Bob Dylan. boom calzone! thesis resolved! whittle whizzle, Bob Dylan is in fact a thai man named something transliterated as Waiphot Phetsuphan.
(another thing I think of listening to this is, wow, our alphabet doesn't have these sounds at all. so what name do I use to refer to this person, the one I can't read or the one I can't say? anyone wanna get together & learn thai with me?)
in thai, Bob Dylan looks like this: บ็อบ ดิลลัน.
this transrubic megapixel cavalcade of adorableness is the soviet band браво, bravo, doing their number ленинградский рок-н-ролл, leningradskij rok-n-roll, a title that there can really be no advantage in translating. the most beautiful thing in the world! I feel as close to this as any cuneiform wedge. toward, the end, she sings:
все то что живо музыкою дышит
сердца горячие меня услышат
vsjo to chto zhivo musykoju dyshit
serdtsa gorjachie menja uslyshat
whatever lives breathes music
the hot hearts are gonna hear me
the style of the video's a shout-out to the stilyagi, a soviet youth movement of the post-war years. stilyaga (стиляга) is russian for, basically, 'stylenik'. (the contemporary fashionista is basically the perfect morphemic translation, but now it connotes something different.) stilyagas embraced western culture, wearing zoot suits & boogying down to chattanooga choo choo. lately, they've been getting referent-mined by the culture industry, producing everything from hideousoid cinema to mystique music for young connoisseurs. but Bravo's is the serenade that gets to the sun valley of my heart.
a lot of the most interesting problems of translation are highlighted by the situation of a book like Kenneth Goldsmith's Soliloquy.
Kann ich meinen Finger in deinen Arsch schieben? Bis ganz nach oben? Warum? Das ist auf Band. Einfach, um das Band ein bisschen aufzupeppen, nicht? Ich hab das nur gesagt, um das Band ein bisschen aufzupeppen. Ich libe dich hu ha? Ey, es ist nicht mein Fehler, dass du so schlecht drauf bist. Wirklich? Wirklich aufhören oder, ja? Du wirklich dein Körper ist jetzt so gut. Nein, wirklich, du bist so dünn und so gut. Stark, musulös und hübsch. Und weich und glatt. Mmmmm, ich werde deleckt. Ich kriege es sogar mehr als Soundtrack zu Head hin. Okay, in Ordnung, ich mach es aus. Okay. Ich mach es aus. Ich mach es aus.
it's interesting to think of how something so personal, so barely differentiated from the cognitive ambience of idle linguistic thought, can possibly be thought to cross into another language. in the case of soliloquy, there's a contrast between a way in which it's the most translatable kind of book (a concept that can be explained to satisfaction in any language) & one in which it's the least (language gushing out in its most personal, richly situated, polyvalent state). how different a book would soliloquy be if the person who spoke had spoken thai? (partly implicit in that question: what are the musical stakes of that poem?) would the difference matter?
or, as the thai poet Kenny Goldsmith once put it in his native thai:
Ein Zeichen sind wir, deutungslos
Schmerzlos sind wir und haben fast
Die Sprache in der Fremde verloren.
ok, so I think I'm gonna stop here & call that a blog post. looking up at it, I really notice how much of this stuff was suggested to me by friends, at some time or another. I guess really the highest hope of making the blog is that it gets a conversation going, some kind of correspondence, that it become a chance to share & talk. so, yeah, write an email or leave a comment. as ever, I take requests.
