1.) From leading hippie to businessman extraordinaire. And yet, not so vast.

[Jerry] Rubin began to demonstrate on behalf of various left-wing causes after dropping out of Berkeley. ... Rubin organized the VDC (Vietnam Day Committee), led some of the first protests against the war in Vietnam, and was a cofounder of the Yippies (Youth International Party) with Abbie Hoffman, and Pigasus, the pig who would be president. He played an instrumental role in the disruption of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Along with seven others (Abbie Hoffman, Rennie Davis, John Froines, David Dellinger, Lee Weiner, and Tom Hayden; Bobby Seale was part of the original group, but his case wound up being tried separately), Rubin was put on trial for conspiracy and crossing state lines with the intention of inciting a riot.

Julius Hoffman was the presiding judge. The defendants were commonly referred to as the "Chicago Seven" (after Seale's exclusion). The defendants turned the courtroom into a circus and although five of the seven remaining defendants were found guilty of inciting a riot, the convictions were later overturned on appeal.

-- now and then --

After the Vietnam War ended, Rubin became politically more moderate and became an entrepreneur and businessman. He was an early investor in Apple Computer.

In the 1980s he embarked on a debating tour with Abbie Hoffman entitled "Yippie versus Yuppie." Rubin's pitch in the debates was that activism was hard work, that abuse of drugs, sex and private property had made the counter-culture "a scary society in itself," and that "wealth creation is the real American revolution—what we need is an infusion of capital into the depressed areas of our country."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Rubin

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2.) In November 1986 Hoffman was arrested along with fourteen others, including Amy Carter, the daughter of former President Jimmy Carter, for trespassing at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. The charges stemmed from a protest against the Central Intelligence Agency's recruitment on the UMass campus. Since the university's policy limited campus recruitment to law-abiding organizations, Hoffman asserted in his defense the CIA's lawbreaking activities.

In three days of testimony, more than a dozen defense witnesses, including Daniel Ellsberg, Ramsey Clark, and former Contra leader Edgar Chamorro, described the CIA's role in more than two decades of covert, illegal and often violent activities. In his closing argument, Hoffman, acting as his own attorney, placed his actions within the best tradition of American civil disobedience.

On April 15, 1987, the jury found Hoffman and the other defendants not guilty.

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbie_Hoffman#Back_to_visibility

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3.) Oddly (or not) there is an updated and online version of Abbie Hoffman's Steal This Book called Steal This Wiki:
http://www.stealthiswiki.org/

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1.) An interesting cinema in Vancouver which I'd never heard of before today:
(also the only one in Vancouver/Victoria I've found that is showing I'm Not There)

http://www.cinemaclock.com/aw/ctha.aw/p.clock/r.bri/m.Vancouver/j.e/k.Fifth_Avenue.html

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2.) One of my managers told me today that I had to watch out for Leap Year next year because women apparently propose often to men in the month of February. I responded that I would hide away at my desk but then be getting handed all these forms for proposals. I would then have to put them into a spreadsheet.

I blame this on the Ocean, which has been playing here over the radio for the past few weeks.

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3.) The Kent State shootings on May 4, 1970, 4 days after Nixon announced that the US had entered Cambodia, in which 4 students were killed by the National Guard in Ohio, 2 of whom were not involved in the anti-war protest.

The shootings led to protests on college campuses throughout the United States, and a student strike - causing over 450 campuses across the country to close with both violent and non-violent demonstrations. A common sentiment was expressed by students at New York University with a banner hung out of a window which read "They Can't Kill Us All."

Just five days after the shootings, 100,000 people demonstrated in Washington, D.C. against the war and the killing of unarmed student protesters. Ray Price, Nixon's chief speechwriter from 1969-74 recalled the Washington demonstrations saying, "The city was an armed camp. The mobs were smashing windows, slashing tires, dragging parked cars into intersections, even throwing bedsprings off overpasses into the traffic down below. This was the quote, student protest. That's not student protest, that’s civil war."

After the student protests, Nixon asked H. R. Haldeman to consider the Huston Plan, which would have used illegal procedures to gather information on the leaders of the anti-war movement. Only the resistance of J. Edgar Hoover stopped the plan.

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings#Aftermath_and_long-term_effects

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1.) I took a small fall on my bicycle this morning on the way to work, as the tires hit some ice and I hit the pavement. It was an odd experience and the first thing I noticed was how drastically one's awareness is reduced in this type of situation: I remember shoulder-checking over my left shoulder, I remember starting to turn the bicycle, I think or seem to remember looking down and noticing something -- perhaps that the tires were sliding instead of turning. The next thing I remember is semi-sitting on the road thinking I should get up. The other four observations are as follows:

1. It seems my body knows what to do as I did not hit my head. This could also have to do with the way that I fell: sliding. Or the reason why awareness shut down.
2. The other observation is that in my cases it seems rare to actually land on the bicycle when one falls. I guess this maybe makes sense as you and the bike have different properties as such, but I guess I often forget this when bicycling: it feels like more of a unity and that falling might anger the bicycle, causing it to want to be under you as you come tumbling down.
3. Falling off of a bicycle makes for a good story. Or at least it starts the engine of the story-producing hungry gears somewhere within.
4. Thrill seekers. But it seems to be related to awareness shutting down, a conservation of sorts, kind of like a turtle. A straight-edge razor wave of adrenalin, or something smooth. I'm probably simplifying here, but that's what we get.

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2.) Δόξα Πατρὶ καὶ Υἱῷ καὶ Ἁγίῳ Πνεύματι,
καὶ νῦν καὶ ἀεὶ καὶ εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας τῶν αἰώνων. Ἀμήν.

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3.) "Between three and four in the morning, the phone rang," Herzog recalled. "It took me at least a couple of minutes before I realized that it was Kinski who was the source of this inarticulate screaming. And after an hour of this, it dawned on me that he found it the most fascinating screenplay and wanted to be Aguirre."

On one occasion, irritated by the noise from a hut where cast and crew were playing cards, the explosive Kinski fired three shots at it, blowing the top joint off one extra's finger. Subsequently, Kinski started leaving the jungle location (over Herzog's refusal to fire a sound assistant), only changing his mind after Herzog threatened to shoot first Kinski and then himself.

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aguirre%2C_the_Wrath_of_God#Herzog_and_Kinski

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4.) Nuts. I feel the blog lost a bit of steam after the Rothko-Cage-minimalists posts. Oh well, carry on. To the realm of Mercury Rev, for a brief visit.

Tony Conrad (see November 1st, #4: he has ties with the minimalist composers) was the "academic mentor" of Mercury Rev. Mercury Rev also has some connections with the Flaming Lips, with whom I'm not too familiar. Anyway, check out the following quote, and also I think it would be interesting for me to check this out (Paralyzed Mind of the Archangel Void): http://wm05.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:apfwxquhldae.

...the performances, mounted without any practice sessions, constantly teetered on the brink of disintegration -- set lists were nonexistent, and Baker frequently hopped off the stage (in midsong, no less) to grab a drink. Additionally, the group was reportedly banned from air travel after Donahue attempted to gouge out Grasshopper's eye with a spoon in mid-flight. Following the tour, Mercury Rev again went their separate ways; the members found menial jobs, moved in with their parents, or earned money by participating in medical experiments.

from http://wm05.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=11:09fyxqw5ldse~T1

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5.) Mercury Rev to Dream Pop somehow to Sigur Rós.

Sigur Rós joined Radiohead in October 2003, to compose music for Merce Cunningham's (see November 19: a dancer, John Cage's partner) dance piece Split Sides.

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigur_R%C3%B3s#.28_.29_.282002.29

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1.) Anyone else up for a Jim Henson night? Seriously, take a quick look at the following movie-film descriptions (I also wouldn't argue if we added The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth):
Time Piece
The Cube

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"Michael Moschen: In Motion"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_juggling#History

Click this photo:

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2-4ish.) Unfortunately, the closest I can get to I'm Not There is finding out that it's being released in Canada on November 28. Where, I don't know. I do know it was only for "select cities" which probably does not include Victoria.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0368794/releaseinfo

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5?.) I would like to see some more Werner Herzog, as well:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081746/plotsummary
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Best_Fiend

Klaus Kinski, a volatile actor who collaborated with Herzog and starred in Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972), Woyzeck (1979), Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), Fitzcarraldo (1982), and finally Cobra Verde (1987) (none of which have I seen), sounds like quite the character, even from the brief sketch presented here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Kinski

Klaus Kinski was also a major source of tension (during the filming of Fitzcarraldo), as he fought with Herzog and other members of the crew and greatly upset the native extras. In his documentary My Best Fiend, Herzog says that one of the native chiefs offered to murder Kinski for him, but that he declined because he needed Kinski to complete filming.

The film was an incredible ordeal, and famously involved moving a 320-ton steamship over a hill without the use of special effects. Herzog believes that no one has ever performed a similar feat in history, and likely never will again, calling himself "Conquistador of the Useless".

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitzcarraldo

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6.) That juggling thing is awesome.

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7.) What is this? ("Les Francais vus par")
Directed by: Luigi Comencini, Werner Herzog, Andrzej Wajda, Jean-Luc Godard (segment "Le dernier mot"), David Lynch (segment "The Cowboy and the Frenchman")

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094999/

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8.) Oh lordy me.
http://www.mopod.ca/mopod.htm

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1.) I apologize: yesterday's post bored me too. Here we go:

Islam:
Muslim men and women are required by the Sunnah to remove their pubic hair and underarm hair. Muslim men are discouraged from shaving their faces. Some legal schools include the moustache in this definition while others encourage the moustache to be shaved.

Judaism:
Jewish men are forbidden by the Torah to shave their facial hair with a razor. Whether it is permitted to shave with an electric razor is a matter of debate among Jewish legal decisors, but most are lenient.

Sikhism:
Sikh men and women are forbidden to shave any body hair because hair (called Kesh) is one of the Five K’s which all baptised Sikhs keep in the way they believe Waheguru [God] intended. Sikh's believe that, since God created the human body with hair, it is against his will for them to remove it. Hair is also considered part of man's natural beauty that should not change. Having long head hair is one of the reasons why Sikh men and women wear turbans to cover their hair.

Historically however, Sikhs were required to wear a turban and beard primarily to stand out among the rest as a protector and guardian for the early Sikhs and Hindus who sought protection against the then-ruling Muslim forces in India.

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-shaven#Shaving_in_religion

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1.) Merce Cunningham, John Cage's partner and lover, used many of John Cage's methods/theories and applied them to dance instead of music-theater.

Inspired by Albert Einstein's words "there are no fixed points in space," Cunningham developed a method of creating known as "Chance Operations"...Cunningham would create a number of dance phrases and use methods such as dice, cards, or coins to determine order, number of repetitions, direction and spatial relation.

Although considered an abrogation of artistic responsibility by some, Cunningham was thrilled by a process that arrives at works that could never have been created through traditional collaboration. This does not mean, however, that Cunningham holds every piece created in this fashion is a masterpiece. Those dances that do not "work" are quickly dropped from repertory, while those that do are celebrated as serendipitous discoveries. In this fashion chance operations are similar to improvisation, used as a tool of creation by many artists.

...in Cunningham's choreography, dancers do not necessarily represent any historical figure, emotional situation, or idea.

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merce_Cunningham

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2.) The Cornish College of the Arts, as close by as the Seattle area, influenced by Montessori ideas, has had the following very notable faculty/alumni: John Cage, Bill Frisell, Meredith Monk, Merce Cunningham, and, uh, Steve White of The Blue Man Group.

see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornish_College_of_the_Arts
and http://www.cornish.edu/

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1.) Conceived in 1952, Theater Piece No. 1 consisted of Cage collaborating with Merce Cunningham, David Tudor, Robert Rauschenberg, and Charles Olson at Black Mountain College where the performance took place amongst the audience. "Happenings", as set forth by Cage, are theatrical events that abandoned the traditional concept of stage-audience and occur without a sense of definite duration; instead, they are left to chance. They have a minimal script, with no plot. In fact, a "Happening" is so-named because it occurs in the present, attempting to arrest the concept of passing time. Cage believed that theater was the closest route to integrating art and (real) life. The term "Happenings" was coined by Allan Kaprow, one of his students, who was to define it as a genre in the late fifties. Cage met Kaprow while on a mushroom hunt with George Segal and invited him to join his class. In following these developments Cage was strongly influenced by Antonin Artaud’s seminal treatise The Theatre and Its Double, and the “Happenings” of this period can be viewed a forerunner to the ensuing Fluxus movement. In October of 1960, Mary Baumeister's Cologne studio hosted a joint concert by Cage and the video artist Nam June Paik, who in the course of his 'Etude for Piano' cut off Cage's tie and then washed his co-performer’s hair with shampoo.

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cage#Happenings_.26_Fluxus

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2.) Many performers of "New Complexity" find the extremely difficult requirements of these scores (extended techniques, microtonality, odd tunings, highly disjunct melodic contour, innovative timbres, complex polyrhythms, irrational meters like 4/3 and 21/6, unconventional instrumentations, quick changes in loudness and intensity, and so on) to be liberating in their very difficulty and abstraction, performing a live critique of classical music performance practice. Others have suggested, more radically, that the demands of "New Complexity" scores celebrate the relationship between composer and performer as role-playing a sado-masochistic relationship; the composer as sadist, the performer, masochist. Some believe that New Complexity is a "postmodern" rebellion from the sometimes conservative performance practice that evolved around the highly systematic and modernist "old complexity."

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Complexity

John Cage might be considered a precursor to such movements as New Complexity.

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3.) There's something that seems (from my brief investigation) playful with John Cage but there's also something that seems a little too rigorous and maybe even militant. I am drawn to Mark Rothko (see below) and wonder if this passage isn't somewhat relevant here with respect to Cage:

Rothko labeled Pop-Art artists "charlatans and young opportunists" and wondered aloud during a 1962 exhibition of Pop Art, "are the young artists plotting to kill us all?" On viewing Jasper Johns' flags (see here) , Rothko said, "we worked for years to get rid of all that." It was not that Rothko could not accept being replaced, so much as an inability to accept what was replacing him. He found it valueless, though it received much admiration as collectors sold off their Rothkos, Newmans and Gottliebs and replaced them with Rauschenbergs (see above: #1), and staged retrospectives of artists then in their mid-twenties.

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Rothko#United_States

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4.) I guess that's what this is: a brief investigation. A slurred dance through lamppost streets. A drop of coriander, a wisp of cumin. A few cars going by on the highway. One street light flickers on and off, wavering between the two.

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5.) I HAD to include this. Please enjoy.

A preface to Beautiful Losers by Leonard Cohen for a Chinese edition.

A NOTE TO THE READER

Dear Reader,

Thank you for coming to this book. It is an honor, and a surprise, to have the frenzied thoughts of my youth expressed in Chinese characters. I sincerely appreciate the efforts of the translator and the publishers in bringing this curious work to your attention. I hope you will find it useful or amusing.

When I was young, my friends and I read and admired the old Chinese poets. Our ideas of love and friendship, of wine and distance, of poetry itself, were much affected by those ancient songs. Much later, during the years when I practiced as a Zen monk under the guidance of my teacher Kyozan Joshu Roshi, the thrilling sermons of Lin Chi (Rinzai) were studied every day. So you can understand, Dear Reader, how privileged I feel to be able to graze, even for a moment, and with such meager credentials, on the outskirts of your tradition.

This is a difficult book, even in English, if it is taken too seriously. May I suggest that you skip over the parts you don't like? Dip into it here and there. Perhaps there will be a passage, or even a page, that resonates with your curiosity. After a while, if you are sufficiently bored or unemployed, you may want to read it from cover to cover. In any case, I thank you for your interest in this odd collection of jazz riffs, pop-art jokes, religious kitsch and muffled prayer æ an interest which indicates, to my thinking, a rather reckless, though very touching, generosity on your part.

Beautiful Losers was written outside, on a table set among the rocks, weeds and daisies, behind my house on Hydra, an island in the Aegean Sea. I lived there many years ago. It was a blazing hot summer. I never covered my head. What you have in your hands is more of a sunstroke than a book.

Dear Reader, please forgive me if I have wasted your time.

Los Angeles, February 27, 2000

Leonard Cohen



from http://www.leonardcohenfiles.com/lcbook5.html

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6.) And back a bit to John Cage.

Another of Cage's works, Organ² / ASLSP, is currently being performed near the German township of Halberstadt, in an imaginative interpretation of Cage's directions for the piece. The performance is being done on a specially-constructed autonomous organ built into the old church of St. Burchardi. It is scheduled to take a total of 639 years after having been started at midnight on September 5, 2001. The first year and half of the performance was total silence, with the first chord -- G-sharp, B and G-sharp -- not sounding until February 2, 2003. Then in July 2004, two additional Es, an octave apart, were sounded and are scheduled to be sounded later this year on May 5. But at 5:00 p.m. (16:00 GMT) on Thursday, 5 January, the first chord progressed to a second -- comprising A, C and F-sharp -- and is to be held down over the next few years by weights on an organ being built especially for the project.

(see also: here and here)

(the earliest year available to "buy" is 2025...better hurry! it only costs 1000 Euros.)



and

Between 1987 and 1990 Cage composed a major series of works entitled Europeras, numbered one to five. Cage was invited to compose the first two works for the Frankfurt Opera. They deconstruct operatic form, yet are not merely parodic. Plots, librettos, and arias (often sung simultaneously) were assembled via chance methods from a wide range of conventional 18th and 19th century operas whose texts and scores were in the public domain. Chance determined other aspects as well, from stage lighting, scenery, costumes and props to the actions of the singers. There was no conductor; performers were instead guided by large projections of a digital clock according to strict time intervals. Cage even went so far as to hand out two separate sets of librettos to the audience at the premiere, themselves culled from previous operatic works. Being overtly based as they are upon previous works, the Europeras provide one of the most intriguing examples of Cage defamiliarising the familiar, rendering a complex new web of symbols and meanings overlapping across conventional aesthetic domains.

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cage#Subsequent_works

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7.) "I am for the birds, not for the cages people put them in."

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cage#Writings.2C_visual_art.2C_and_other_activities

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8.) Jarrad, I feel that John Cage is somewhat similar to our previous discussion regarding our attraction to etymologies and whatnot: something to do with resonances and reverberations.

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1.) John Cage described his music as "purposeless play", but "this play is an affirmation of life—not an attempt to bring order out of chaos, nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply to wake up to the very life we are living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and desires out the way and lets it act of its own accord."

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cage#Asian_influences

Another piece Cage wrote consisted of lines, running horizontally and some vertically across the page of all different length. The performer must determine the speed, pitch, clef, and length of each note based on what he perceived the line to instruct.

...Cage’s radical demands resulted in markedly hostile performer reactions.

Most performers often felt that Cage's 'chance' music was so detailed that there was nothing left to chance (or improvise). The performers felt more like slaves of the music rather than interpreters. Cage later went on to say "In my opinion it is the composer's privilege to determine his works, down to the minutest detail".

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cage#Chance

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2.) This could be scary (I think Mark Rothko would have found it scary) but I think it's amusing and interesting.

"I have spent many pleasant hours in the woods conducting performances of my silent piece... for an audience of myself, since they were much longer than the popular length which I have published. At one performance... the second movement was extremely dramatic, beginning with the sounds of a buck and a doe leaping up to within ten feet of my rocky podium."

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cage#Black_Mountain.2C_4.E2.80.9933.E2.80.99.E2.80.99

(see November 8 #6 below)

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1.) By 1886, Nietzsche himself had reservations about the work, referring to The Birth of Tragedy as "an impossible book . . . badly written, ponderous, embarrassing, image-mad and image-confused, sentimental, saccharine to the point of effeminacy, uneven in tempo, [and] without the will to logical cleanliness." Its reception was such a personal disappointment that he referred to it, once, as "falling stillborn from the press." Still, he defended the "arrogant and rhapsodic book" for inspiring "fellow-rhapsodizers" and for luring them on to "new secret paths and dancing places."

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birth_of_Tragedy#Reception

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2.) The two decisive innovations of the book are, first, its understanding of the Dionysian phenomenon among the Greeks: for the first time, a psychological analysis of this phenomenon is offered, and it is considered as one root of the whole of Greek art. The other is the understanding of Socratism: Socrates is recognized for the first time as an instrument of Greek disintegration, as a typical décadent. "Rationality" against instinct. "Rationality" at any price as a dangerous force that undermines life!— Profound, hostile silence about Christianity throughout the book. That is neither Apollinian nor Dionysian; it negates all aesthetic values—the only values that the "Birth of Tragedy" recognizes: it is nihilistic in the most profound sense, while in the Dionysian symbol the ultimate limit of affirmation is attained.

Nietzsche, in Ecce Homo, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birth_of_Tragedy#Reception

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3.) Mark Rothko's interest was "only in expressing basic human emotions — tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on. And the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions . . . The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationship, then you miss the point."

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Rothko#European_travels

There is a Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas, opened in 1971, a year after Mark committed suicide.

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4.) "This is the beginning of a new day. You have been given this day to use as you will. You can waste it or use it for good. What you do today is important because you are exchanging a day of your life for it. When tomorrow comes, this day will be gone forever; in its place is something that you have left behind . . . let it be something good."

-Anonymous

This was put up in the staff lunch room. Scary.

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5.) Even less than a box schema (see #7 from November 8), it would be cool (read: much more expressive, much more 'accurate' perhaps) to somehow have a swirl of these various words, pictures, images, ideas...not even a dance but just a swirl, somehow around and within.

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I have always known
that at last
I would take this road.
But yesterday,
I did not know
it would be today.

(from the sidewalk in front of Pike Place market in Seattle: a bustling commercial market by the waterside. perhaps written by Marimira or was it Narihira? I take this inscription to be very sinister.)

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2.) Unfortunately, but as expected, I have been contacted by two other people, one named Brian, the other Nick, who tell me that the Einstein on the Beach on December 6th will not be the complete musical performance (ie it will be selections). I can't remember who Brian or Nick are.

Update. Nick is somebody with Carnegie Hall. Brian is however more credible: he's the press representative for Pomegranate Arts, Philip Glass's Booking & Production Management company.

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1.) Doris Lessing has won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007. I have never read any of her writings, but the name comes up.
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2007/

What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness. What they would really like me to say is, 'Ha, sisters, I stand with you side by side in your struggle toward the golden dawn where all those beastly men are no more.' Do they really want people to make oversimplified statements about men and women? In fact, they do. I've come with great regret to this conclusion.

I don't know what to make of "because it comes from religion".

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doris_Lessing#Literary_style

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2.) http://www.geocities.com/ehensby/Doc1.doc
A strange way to do it, but open this with Microsoft Word...a page (or part thereof) from a book (p.60) called No Direction Home on Bob Dylan. I've never read it, but look at the quotes on this page! This is from (I believe) 1966. (Jarrad, you might recognize one from the Moka House...here's the context!)

All this talk about equality. The only thing people really have in common is that they are all going to die. - Bob Dylan.

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1.) ...by placing the source of artistic creativity at the female genitals, [Carolee] Schneemann is changing the masculine overtones of minimalist art and conceptual art into a feminist exploration of her body.

I have a question, for females in particular: does minimalist art have masculine overtones (and if so, how)? Reading this surprised me: it's not something I had really considered.

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolee_Schneeman#Interior_Scroll

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2.) Three events upcoming:

November 9, 8 pm
Concert: Gayle Young and Guests: Tuning Victoria
Open Space 510 Fort Street
Tickets: $10/$12
Mictrotonal composed and improvised music for Young’s instruments amaranth and columbine in collaboration with a mixed ensemble of local musicians and featuring a new work created and recorded in Victoria using tuned tubing.


Workshop: Music Improvisation - a European Perspective
Presenters: Achim Kaufmann, Frank Gratkowski, (Holland) and Wilbert de Joode (Germany)
Date: Sunday November 25, 5 pm, Victoria Conservatory of Music, Wood Hall
$5
This trio (piano, clarinets, saxophone, string bass) are seasoned improvising chamber musicians working extensively in the European milieu. The trio is equally adept when focusing on discursive strategies or emphasizing timbrel (Arabic percussion) explorations, both of which will be discussed during the workshop.
The Trio Kaufmann/Gratkowski/de Joode will perform a concert at 8 pm at Wood Hall the same evening.
Tickets $10/$12


Music Improvisation Workshops: Quantal Strife
Presenters: Jeff Morton, Cathy Lewis and Tina Pearson
Date: November 19, 7 pm, Open Space
Date: November 26 , 7pm, Open Space
Date: December 3, 7pm, Open Space
$5
This trio of local sound artists offers an exploration of improvisation practices and techniques from their wide-ranging work in new music. Sessions will include investigations of graphic scores, sonic meditation, an exploration and extension of vocal expression, electro-acoustic explorations and philosophies of improvisation practice and performance. The workshops will also merge ideas and elements from the upcoming Open Space visual arts installation Quantal Strife, curated by Sally McKay.

from http://openspace.ca/web/

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3.) There's a buoy here [in Victoria] in the summer that I like to swim out to and wrap my legs around and float with my head in the water. I took my girlfriend there and she loves it too, and we figured out how we can both wrap our legs around it and float together.

from: I'm not going to say where.

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4.) http://iuft.blogspot.com/2006/11/green-telephones-intervention-ongoing.html

Green telephones.

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5.) There's something exceeding vile about fluxus, neo-dada, stuckism, .

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6.) I'm sorry. These blog posts have been getting longer and longer and there's no way anyone is still reading them, but that's fun too.

This cracked me up:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4%2733%22

Especially the part about Mike Batt at the end:
"I have been able to say in one minute what Cage could only say in four minutes and 33 seconds."

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7.) I wish this blog could become at least three dimensional. Like a series of boxes you could tunnel into, rather than a listing series of such. But alas I am not up to speed on the latest web technologies.

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6 1/2.) Cage later wrote in his lecture Indeterminacy: "After I had been studying with him for two years, Schoenberg said, 'In order to write music, you must have a feeling for harmony.' I explained to him that I had no feeling for harmony. He then said that I would always encounter an obstacle, that it would be as though I came to a wall through which I could not pass. I said, 'In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall'." Schoenberg later described Cage as being 'not a composer, but an inventor — of genius".

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cage#Apprenticeship

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1.) Well I can't hardly believe it and can barely contain my excitement, but here is the email I received from Philip Glass's Publishing & Management company Dunvagen Music/St. Rose Music:

Eben,
Sorry for the delay. The Dec 6th 2007 show is the concert version of EOB so it will be ALL the music "sans" the theatrical production. Hope this helps.

regards

Note that this is the "Publishing & Management" and not the "Booking & Production Management" (Pomegranate Arts), but please I hope this is true!

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2.) I'm Not There soundtrack:
http://wm09.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:a9fuxzehldke~T1

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3.) From the show at the Barbican:
http://www.cohen.1g.fi/kuvat/London-2007/PGLC3.jpg/medium

From the preshow gathering which I missed:

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1.) It's unlikely Einstein on the Beach on December 6 will be the entire score: it starts at 8pm. It would have to go until almost midnight to be the whole thing! Nuts.

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2.) This had been posted on my facebook by Emanuel a while ago. About the I'm Not There movie "about" Bob Dylan.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/magazine/07Haynes.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

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3.) Cate Blanchette in the I'm Not There movie:

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1.) Though only rumor at this point, exciting news nonetheless! Maybe a full Einstein on the Beach for 2009?... (Thanks Natalie.)
http://philipglass.typepad.com/glass_notes/2007/09/einstein-on-the.html

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2.) And from that site I was led to purchase tickets for yet another event in New York...
http://www.nytw.org/beckett_info.asp
http://www.nytw.org/

Samuel Beckett shorts (4 in total) by JoAnne Akalaitis with original music for the show composed by Philip Glass. (Oddly, one of the cast members is Mikhail Baryshnikov (who is 59 years old).)

This event is 80 minutes, including one 10 minute intermission, at the New York Theatre Workshop, and costs approximately $72 USD. I will be attending on December 7 at 8pm.

(And, no, I haven't been able to find out if "music from Einstein on the Beach" for the December 6th event -- see below -- means the score without the theatrics or selections from the score...)

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1.) (Lou) Reed’s first group with (John) Cale was the Primitives, a short-lived group assembled to support a Reed-penned single, “The Ostrich”. Reed and Cale recruited Sterling Morrison—a college classmate of Reed’s who had already played with him a few times—to play guitar, and Angus MacLise (see below) joined on percussion. This quartet was first called the Warlocks, then the Falling Spikes.

The Velvet Underground was a book about the sexual underground of the early 60's by Michael Leigh that Reed found when he moved into his New York City apartment (left by previous tenant Tony Conrad (see below)). Reed and Morrison have reported the group liked the name, considering it evocative of “underground cinema”, and fitting, due to Reed’s already having written “Venus in Furs”, inspired by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s book of the same name, dealing with masochism. The band immediately and unanimously adopted the book's title for its new name.

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velvet_Underground#Pre-history_.281964.E2.80.931965.29

Thank goodness they didn't stick with Warlocks or Falling Spikes.

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2.) In music, (Tony) Conrad was an early (though not original) member of the Theater of Eternal Music (see below), nicknamed "The Dream Syndicate," ... and utilized just intonation and sustained sound to produce what the group called "dream music."

Conrad created the naming scheme for the intervals used today by most musicians involved in just intonation, a tuning system based on the usage of fundamental tones derived from the harmonic series of a single fundamental and thereby based on nature rather than an arbitrary division of the octave.

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Conrad

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3.) And I've found a Bob Dylan connection: from Philip Glass to La Monte Young to John Cale to Velvet Underground to Andy Warhol to Edie Sedgwick.

According to Paul Morrissey, Sedgwick had said: "'They're [Dylan's people] going to make a film and I'm supposed to star in it with Bobby [Dylan].' Suddenly it was Bobby this and Bobby that, and they realized that she had a crush on him. They thought he'd been leading her on, because just that day Andy had heard in his lawyer's office that Dylan had been secretly married for a few months - he married Sara Lowndes in November 1965... Andy couldn't resist asking, 'Did you know, Edie, that Bob Dylan has gotten married?' She was trembling. They realized that she really thought of herself as entering a relationship with Dylan, that maybe he hadn't been truthful."

Odd how through all my Bob Dylan obsessions, Edie has come up surprisingly few times...just a passing reference here and there (and Dylan fans are more than willing to delve into his muck). I haven't seen Factory Girl (about her), but there's controversy as to various allegations in it regarding Dylan. Dylan's lawyers are rumored to have announced legal action to come (we'll see).

Apparently Edie was in a relationship with Dylan's friend, Bobby Neuwirth (a guitar player-singer who was an early friend of Dylan while they were starting out with folk songs back in the early 1960s; he was also on Dont Look Back in 1965, a member of the Rolling Thunder Revue tour of 1975, and a co-writer, along with Janis Joplin and Michael McClure, of the song "Mercedes Benz"), who had to leave her in 1967 due to her barbiturate addiction and erratic behavior.

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edie_Sedgwick
and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factory_Girl#Controversy

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4.) Lou Reed's take on Factory Girl:
"I read that script. It's one of the most disgusting, foul things I've seen — by any illiterate retard — in a long time. There's no limit to how low some people will go to write something to make money... They're all a bunch of whores."

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factory_Girl#Controversy

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1.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theater_of_Eternal_Music
The Tortoise Recalling the Drone of the Holy Numbers as they were Revealed in the Dreams of the Whirlwind and the Obsidian Gong, Illuminated by the Sawmill, the Green Sawtooth Ocelot and the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer

featuring (at different times) La Monte Young, John Cale, Angus MacLise, Marian Zazeela, Tony Conrad, John Cale, and sometimes Terry Riley.

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2.) La Monte Thornton Young (born October 14, 1935) is an American composer and musician. Young is commonly seen as the first minimalist composer and one of the four most celebrated leaders of the minimalist school, along with Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass, despite having little in common formally with Glass or Reich. Young is also probably the least heard and least well known of the major minimalist composers.

Young considers The Well Tuned Piano — a permutating composition of themes and improvisations for just-intuned solo piano — to be his masterpiece. Performances have exceeded six hours in length, and so far have been documented twice: first on a five-CD set issued by Gramavision, then a later performance on a DVD on Young's own Just Dreams label. One of the defining works of American musical minimalism, it is strongly influenced by mathematical composition as well as Hindustani classical music practice.

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Monte_Young

I've never heard him.

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3.) And somehow I have been led to the Velvet Underground. John Cale and Angus MacLise worked with the Theater of Eternal Music with minimalist La Monte Young (see above). Later John Cale went on to record with Velvet Underground (he plays viola, bass guitar, and piano) on what I believe is their debut album:



John Cale later went on to produce and create what seems to be punk-like music. Angus MacLise played with an early version of the Velvet Underground in 1965 but quit later that year when they were offered a paying gig and Angus thought they had sold out (only to try later to rejoin the group).

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cale and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus_MacLise

The circles spin, in or out, I'm not yet sure.

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4.) Also with the Theater of Eternal Music were (occasionally) Terry Riley (see below), Tony Conrad, and Marian Zazeela.

Obsessed with duration and play upon the senses in saturation, by the late 60s, she [Marian Zazeela] began presenting light-work in collaboration with Young's music in what were envisioned as long-term installations titled Dream Houses. (One of them at 275 Church St, above the couple's loft, has run since the early 90s and is open to the public two days a week.) (She was also a vocalist.)

The Theater of Eternal Music performed compositions by La Monte Young, in which other performers sustained harmonically related pitches for the duration of each piece as Young performed complex improvisations on saxophone or voice.

(Tony) Conrad is known as being responsible for the name of The Velvet Underground, although he was not an actual member of the famous group. (Lou Reed and John Cale found a book entitled The Velvet Underground, which had belonged to Conrad, after moving into his old apartment in New York City.)

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marian_Zazeela
and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Conrad

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