Gubble gubble gubble

     "Bending over her he saw her languid, almost rotting beauty fall away. Yellow cracks spread through her teeth, and the teeth split and sank into her gums, which in turn became green and dry like leather, and then she coughed and spat up into his face quantities of dust. The Gubbler had gotten her, he

PKD reading Blade Runner article
Photo courtesy of Philip K. Dick Trust

realized....
     "Her eyes fused over, opaque, and from behind one eye the lashes became the furry, probing feet of a thick-haired insect stuck back there wanting to get out. Its tiny pin-head red eye peeped past the loose rim of her unseeing eye, and then withdrew; after that the insect squirmed, making the dead eye of the woman bulge, and then, for an instant, the insect peered through the lens of her eye, looked this way and that, saw him but was unable to make out who or what he was; it could not fully make use of the decayed mechanism behind which it lived....
     "The dead mouth twitched and then from deep inside at the bottom of the pipe which was the throat a voice muttered, 'You weren't fast enough.' And then the head fell off entirely, leaving the white pointed stick-like end of the neck projecting.

— Martian Time-Slip, Philip K. Dick

Lullaby for District 12

Deep in the meadow, under the willow
A bed of grass, a soft green pillow
Lay down your head, and close your sleepy eyes
And when again they open, the sun will rise.

Here it's safe, and here it's warm
Here the daisies guard you from every harm
Here your dreams are sweet and tomorrow brings them true
Here is the place where I love you.

Deep in the meadow, hidden far away
A cloak of leaves, A moonbeam ray
Forget your woes and let your troubles lay
And when again it's morning, they'll wash all away.

Here it's safe, and here it's warm
Here the daisies guard you from every harm
Here your dreams are sweet and tomorrow brings them true
Here is the place where I love you.

— The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins 

Skrillex does Marley

"It's staying true to the Rasta lingo," says Skrillex. "It's got a traditional dub vibe, but it's very dancefloor friendly. It caters to his vocals really well."

More@: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/skrillex-slips-new-remixes-into-packed-fest-schedule-20120501#ixzz1tfMmJiwA

A Hollywood Treasure

"The darkness placed its arm around her and drew her close." - The Blood Spilt, Åsa Larsson

"Her heart ... was an empty kitchen: floor tile and water pipes and a drainboard with pale scrubbed surfaces, and one abandoned glass on the edge of the sink that nobody cared about." - A Scanner Darkly, Philip K. Dick

004

003

005

002

001

encore - Flow My Teares

 Copenhagen, 1941

Chunky Moves

Chunky Move is at MASS MoCA March 24 & 25.

Flow My Tears - the policeman said

"Flow, My Teares (Lachrimae)"

(John Dowland 1563-1626)

Flow my teares fall from your springs,


Exilde for ever: Let me morne


Where nights black bird hir sad infamy sings,


There let me live forlorne.

Downe vaine lights shine you no more,


No nights are dark enough for those


That in dispaire their last fortunes deplore,


Light doth but shame disclose.

Never may my woes be relieved,


Since pittie is fled,


And teares, and sighes, and grones  
My wearie days 
of all joyes have deprived.

From the highest spire of contentment,


My fortune is throwne,


And feare, and griefe, and paine
 
For my deserts, are my hopes since hope is gone.

Hark you shadowes that in darnesse dwell,


Learn to contemne light,


Happy they that in hell


Feele not the worlds despite.

Flow My Tears - The Policeman Said, the novel by Philip K. Dick, refers to this haunting song from long ago and only yesterday (the Sting 2006 recording). By the time the novel's policeman appeals to his tears, they well-up easily enough in the reader. There seems to be reference to Dick's long departed twin sister in this work which, of course, adds to the melancholy.

I particularly like this version of the song because it employs at least rudimentary vocal harmonies rather than being set as a vehicle for countertenor solo.

Lachrimae (the song to which words were later added) is sometimes presented in counterpoint form, but, sadly, not at the same time for voice. I'm just not a period purist in aspiration.

"It is hard to write a beautiful song. It is harder to write several individually beautiful songs that, when sung simultaneously, sound as a more beautiful polyphonic whole. The internal structures that create each of the voices separately must contribute to the emergent structure of the polyphony, which in turn must reinforce and comment on the structures of the individual voices. The way that is accomplished in detail is...'counterpoint'." - John Rahn

A Telephone Call

A Telephone Call is a short film by Melissa Sullivan based on a classic short story by Dorothy Parker. 
     " God, aren't You really going to let him call me? Are You sure, God? Couldn't You please relent? Couldn't You? I don't even ask You to let him telephone me this minute, God; only let him do it in a little while. I'll count five hundred by fives. I'll do it so slowly and so fairly. If he hasn't telephoned then, I'll call him. I will. Oh, please, dear God, dear kind God, my blessed Father in Heaven, let him call before then. Please, God. Please.

      Five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twentyfive, thirty, thirty-five.…"

A Dangerous Method

What is Truth? (Ah, sorry, I forgot — there is no such thing in our post-modern age.)

Not an awful lot of Fassbender's bourgois Jung rang true for me, but A Dangerous Method tries, nevertheless, to tell a fascinating story. Freud doesn't come across any better — there's just not much room left for the men.

To me the storytellers and their camera are so fascinated by Sabina Spielrein (as portrayed by Keira Knightley) that they can find no room for any other dynamic characters, not even the likes of real life giants — Jung and Freud.

About the only thing that rang remotely real was Jung's love of sailing. What was there about him that so challenged Freud, that so attracted women? That, apparently, is a different film — certainly not this one.

Delicate Steve - band of the month

July 11, 1986 - Montreux

Grand Rapids lipdubs its way to fame

My film buff friend, Bob, calls this video, "the most amazing single shot I've ever seen." You may think you've seen this done before, but, as verse after verse of "American Pie" goes by and singer after singer picks up the tune, you begin to say to yourself, "Wow", and, then, you're just left Speachless in Grand Rapids.

The video's Director & Executive Producer, Rob Bliss says, "the Grand Rapids LipDub Video was filmed May 22 [, 2011 for $40,000] with 5,000 people, and involved a major shutdown of downtown Grand Rapids, which was filled with marching bands, parades, weddings, motorcades, bridges on fire, and helicopter take offs. It is the largest and longest LipDub video, to date.

"This video was created as an official response to the Newsweek article calling Grand Rapids a "dying city." We disagreed strongly, and wanted to create a video that encompasses the passion and energy we all feel is growing exponentially, in this great city. We felt Don McLean's "American Pie," a song about death, was in the end, triumphant and filled to the brim with life and hope."

Classical as you don't remember it

Heard the George Hurd Ensemble at the Red Poppy. It's a tiny performance space in San Francisco's Mission district, but the ensemble's music was BIG.  The house was packed and loudly

appreciative as long as the electronic track played along with the "band".

It's the rhythm of the electronics that takes Hurd's music out of the straight classical and makes it special. Sadly, this clip doesn't give you the full sense of the electronica. Maybe fans will grab more of this stuff to share as the ensemble becomes more widely known.

He gives life!

It may be hard to imagine seeing a horror show with a bunch of people who are howling in laughter, but that's "Re-Animator:The Musical". I saw the show in March, but it refuses to die. Herbert West gives life! ...not merely the semblance of life, as he proves here in a scene that usuals gets an audible gasp from the audience.



And this is just ONE scene. Music Director Peter Adams is no longer playing every night, but even that can't kill this show. There's talk of opening another venue in Chicago, but for now it's all yours LA!

Electronic Music Marathon April 30

At the BEAMS Electronic Music Marathom, Brandeis University, Saturday, April 30, sometime between approximately 7 and 8pm Mari Kimura performs three songs. Her repertoire combines the violin with signal processing, interactive computer, pre-recorded sound, and GuitarBot- a robotic guitar simulator.

Sadly it doesn't appear that the GuitarBot will be coming with her.

Artists for Peace & Justice

April 12 is the official launch of "Acting Together on the World Stage," a documentary film about theater artists around the world whose artistry nurtures peace and social justice. Created by Cynthia Cohen, director of peacebuilding and the arts at Brandeis, and local filmmaker Allison Lund in partnership wtih Theater Without Borders. A reception follows the 4 pm screening. At the Shapiro Campus Center Theater, Brandeis University.Again on Thursday, April 28, 12 - 3 p.m., Shapiro Campus Center Multipurpose Room during Festival of the Arts.

Existence is playful - Alan Watts

Trey Parker and Matt Stone go all Buddhist on you.  Takes me back to a lot of years of listening to Alan Watts on Sunday morning radio.

Music and Life


Prickles and Goo 

Re-Animator: The Musical finally opens!

Re-Animator: The Musical finally opens this Friday (March 4) at LA’s Steve Allen Theater! For months rumors have predicted this hilarious staging by Stuart Gordon of his 1985 comic/horror film “Re-Animator”. It’s for real fans: I saw it in preview last week, sitting center stage just one row beyond the “Splash Zone” where blood-shy patrons ducked as they howled in laughter.

George Wendt (Dean Halsey) is the name star, but for me the story really comes to life in the hands of Jessie Merlin (mad –and headless- Dr. Hill) and Graham Skipper (uber-kook Herbert West). Then, of course, there’s the music —

Mark Nutter (composer and lyricist) has done himself proud. You’ll go home chanting “He’s dead, Dan!” and laugh  yourself silly all through Dr. Hill’s amorous vocal pursual of  the shackled Megan Halsey (Rachel Avery). Nutter’s songs really come to life in their full-orchestral* arrangements by Music Director: Peter Adams and the singers are mostly up to their challenge. 

Fans of the film will find most of the original dialogue right there in the songs. Some critics compare the disturbance Nutter's songs engender to Tom Lehrer's acerbic wit.  I heard a more profound connection to Gilbert and Sullivan farce.

*As keyboardist, Peter Adams produces all of the sound from five octaves of keys running one computer. Looks like a really simple rig to those who know no better. Musicheads watch him with one sharp eye while wiping away the laugh tears from the other.

 Jessie Merlin

Graham Skipper 

Rachel Avery 












The trailer from the film sets out its romantic plot:

Paul Dresher -You see my problem?

If you have heard this, what more could you expect from me?

Happy Christmas to all!

Pat Steir: After Hokusai, After Hiroshige

thru January 30, 2011
de Young Museum
San Francisco
     This exhibition shows the continued influence of the Japanese print on Western artists into the late twentieth century. American painter, printmaker, and conceptual artist Pat Steir (b. 1938) was the first artist selected by Kathan Brown in 1982 to travel to Japan to make a color woodcut for Crown Point Press’s groundbreaking printmaking program in Kyoto. There she had the opportunity to work closely with artisans trained in the traditional methods of Japanese woodblock printing. In 1984 and 1985 she turned to subjects derived from famous prints by Hokusai and Hiroshige in color etchings she produced at Crown Point Press in Oakland: The Tree after Hiroshige; The Wave—From the Sea after Leonardo, Hokusai, and Courbet; and Yellow Bridge in the Rain after Van Gogh after Hiroshige.

In her appropriation and quotation of other artists, Steir participates in a practice used widely by contemporary artists. In the titles of her works, Steir openly acknowledges her debt to artists—for example, Leonardo, Hokusai, and Courbet in The Wave—and she has described her particular choices of artists and artworks as having been drawn from a sameness of look and feel. Acknowledging the influence of earlier artists on her work, she comments, “When you find an artist you identify with, it’s like finding a father or a mother.”

The Dead in their Stone Boats Know

"The Truth the Dead Know" 

by Anne Sexton, from All My Pretty Ones

     For my mother, born March 1902, died March 1959
     and my father, born February 1900, died June 1959

Gone, I say and walk from church,   

refusing the stiff procession to the grave,   

letting the dead tide alone in the hearse.   

It is June. I am tired of being brave.

We drive to the Cape. I cultivate

myself where the sun gutters from the sky,   

where the sea swings in like an iron gate

and we touch. In another country people die.

My darling, the wind falls in like stones

from the whitehearted water and when we touch   

we enter touch entirely. No one’s alone.

Men kill for this, or for as much.

And what of the dead? They lie without shoes   

in their stone boats. They are more like stone

than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse   

to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.

Her Awful Rowing

"Rowing"

by Anne Sexton, from The Awful Rowing Towards God

A story, a story!

(Let it go. Let it come.)

I was stamped out like a Plymouth fender

into this world.

First came the crib

with its glacial bars.

Then dolls

and the devotion to their plastic mouths.

Then there was school,

the little straight rows of chairs,

blotting my name over and over,

but undersea all the time,

a stranger whose elbows wouldn't work.

Then there was life

with its cruel houses

and people who seldom touched -

though touch is all-

but I grew,

like a pig in a trenchcoat I grew,

and then there were many strange apparitions,

the nagging rain, the sun turning into poison

and all of that, saws working through my heart,

but I grew, I grew,

and God was there like an island I had not rowed to,

still ignorant of Him, my arms and my legs worked,

and I grew, I grew,

I wore rubies and bought tomatoes

and now, in my middle age,

about nineteen in the head I'd say,

I am rowing, I am rowing

though the oarlocks stick and are rusty

and the sea blinks and rolls

like a worried eyeball,

but I am rowing, I am rowing,

though the wind pushes me back

and I know that that island will not be perfect,

it will have the flaws of life,

the absurdities of the dinner table,

but there will be a door

and I will open it

and I will get rid of the rat inside of me,

the gnawing pestilential rat.

God will take it with his two hands

and embrace it.

As the African says:

This is my tale which I have told,

if it be sweet, if it be not sweet,

take somewhere else and let some return to me.

This story ends with me still rowing.

"TURF Dancers from Oakland, CA honoring Dreal's brother (the man in the white shirt is Dreal) who died on this same street corner the night before this rainy day. Dancers featured are from the TURF FEINZ crew. YAK FILMS is a company that works with dancers world wide, but which was started a few blocks away from that corner, in East Oakland, CA."  - DeEMaSsIvE  

Water Walk

German improviser and composer of experimental and new music, Andrea Neumann performs John Cage`s Water Walk.  

According her publisher, Sofa Music, Neumann has "reduced the piano to strings, resonance board and metal frame. With the help of electronics to manipulate and amplify the sounds (sometimes to make parts of the sound audible which are inaudible without amplification), she has developed numerous new playing techniques, sounds, and ways of preparing the dismantled instrument."

She performs here at the Henie Onstad Art Centre in Bærum, Norway. The museum itself is quite a striking example of Norway's Neo-Expressionist architecture. It was designed more than forty years ago by then young Norwegian architects Jon Eikvar and Sven Erik Engebretsen and named for Sonja Henie, the famed figure skater from Oslo.

Compare Cage's own amused 1960 performance of Water Walk on What's My Line? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63HoYXUeUTA&feature=related

Motion graphics by Marta Topolska, Illinois Institute of Art-Chicago graduate.  Poem by Gloria Sarasin. Marta has also created a brief video of work by Boston area visual artist Marlena Bocian.

The Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge

Imagine our surprise innocently cruising down Rte. 17 in South Carolina on our first pilgrimage to the Holy City, when suddenly there before our parochial eyes rises what can only be a Boston landmark!

The Cooper River bridge connecting Charleston with Mount Pleasant uses the same cable-stayed construction as Boston’s Leonard P. Zakim Bridge across the Charles River. It was completed in 2005, two years after the Zakim. Driving across either bridge produces the same awe in the beholder; both are instantly the visual center of attention.

Proud members of the Andover Newton community

On a February night in New England divinity students from around the world gathered in the student lounge on the Andover Newton Theological School campus. They enjoyed food from around the world, talked about their homelands, and shared stories and song.

Justin & Peter hit the road again

It all starts again on Thursday in Lincoln Hall, Chicago.  They'll come whistlin' through Boston on the 18th.
But, then, it ends all too soon a couple of days later
and it's back to Scotland — The Great War is over
in record time.

You don’t really care for music, do you?

“Hallelujah” is not, as [contestant Lee]DeWyze conceived it on American Idol, a shout of praise. It is too confused to shout, too self-concerned to praise. Cohen’s song is disturbing stuff. The Buckley version always leaves me reflective and bothered, if aesthetically uplifted. “Hallelujah” manages to be a psalm, a lament, and a paean to romantic ecstasy all at once. And like Psalms, Lamentations, and Song of Songs, it manages to do so while drawing on the rich and messy personal histories of the Bible’s most notables. That’s the hard-fought lyrical production that has sustained the song, and that will—of course—make it outlast Idol. 

 —Patton Dodd, writing in the blog

Killing the Budda

To Touch the Stars

From To Touch the Stars: A Musical Celebration of Space Exploration from Prometheus Music in partnership with the Mars Society and the National Space Society.  Inspired by the BBC documentary "If We had No Moon".  Music is by the New York singer/songwriter Christine Lavin; video by the Vietnamese artist Vu Trong Thu.

Nico Muhly

We travel through strange hair-worlds with geometrical birds and foam-sky created by Icelandic animator, Una Lorenzen, for 'It Goes Without Saying' from the album Speaks Volumes (2007) by New York based composer, Nico Muhly. Produced by Valgeir Sigurðsson at his home studio in Reykjavík. Be sure to see it full screen, if you can.

Muhly was born in Vermont in 1981 and raised in Providence, Rhode Island. He graduated from Columbia University with a degree in English Literature. In 2004 he received a Masters in Music from the Juilliard School.

His orchestral works have been premiered by the American Symphony Orchestra, the Boston University Tanglewood Institute Orchestra, the Boston Pops, the New York Philharmonic, and the Chicago Symphony.

His film credits include scores for Joshua (2007), Best Picture nominee The Reader (2008), and the Argentine drama Felicitas, and he has worked extensively with Philip Glass as editor, keyboardist, and conductor for numerous film and stage projects.

Muhly has also lent his skills as performer, arranger, and conductor to other musicians, including Antony and the Johnsons, Sam Amidon, Björk, and Jónsi from Sigur Rós.

Many of his most frequent collaborators are colleagues at Bedroom Community, an artist-run label headed by Icelandic musician Valgeir Sigurðsson and inaugurated by the release of Speaks Volumes.