Bye bye 2006

A day for resolutions - one of which is to listen & read more selectively, more concentratedly, more purposefully.

First up: Miles Davis. And 'Star People' is a revelation - from what I can gather the studio album lying behind 'We Want Miles'. I'd never bothered with it before for a variety of reasons (read prejudices). Anyway it's a great way to round off 2006 and to start in on 2007.

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And this:

"Transformative moments are very rare, or they seem so due to our inattention. It takes so many processes to coincide JUST SO for us to arrive at a transformative moment (if we're watching). But maybe this is wrong, and they happen constantly, though WE are absent ... We are all players and we are all being played."

(Keith Jarrett, liner notes for 'Radiance')

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A Happy New Year to any Belgianwaffle readers out there.

The Brothers Quay (again)

"There was a poster there for Janacek's House of the Dead. And it just went (in our minds): Janacek – House of the Dead – Dostoyevsky. Three constellations. And we immediately went: “Never heard of them!” And we continued from there. It just exploded for us, from footnote to the next, without a precise order. There's a certain randomness which is the most exciting part about these discoveries. You can't learn these at school because you're meant to go logically from A to B. The accident is what we love. To be the hunter, the trapper, who goes out setting the traps for these little madnesses that do exist. They're the openings through which maybe life is really working, coming through. In that little moment of randomness. Sometimes you sit and read a fragment from Schulz, Walser or Kafka… I remember one text by Walser, at the beginning of The Comb. It was an essay on freedom. Every time I read it, I just couldn't understand it, it was elusive. And yet it set up a strange mystery. There are things that move you deeply because you can't trap them down. They're beautiful in their elusiveness."
(from http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/01/19/quay.html)

Constellations (again)

Robert Walser ... Bruno Schulz ... Franz Kafka ... The Brothers Quay ...

"In a way, one's reading is totally disorganized, there's never direct relationships, but there are things you discover over years. All of a sudden you realize that your constellation has a certain consistency. In its randomness, you actually bring things together. (silence) "
(Brothers Quay in an interview)

The key of G

Mesmerizing.

Uh?

From 'The Independent' a couple of days ago ...

As well as the odd bits of furniture, the sale included more personal items such as his notebooks, which contained jottings on subjects ranging from cathedrals to the weather, interspersed with cut-out pictures and postcards. One lot, consisting of two A5 spiral-bound notebooks, were bought by Theresa Northrop, a technical writer, who had travelled from Ohio for the event. She paid £1,300 for the two books, one of which entitled "Garden" contained just one page of notes, and the second, labelled "Art" contained nine pages of notes. "The notebooks are something different these are the original words of Syd, all hand written," she said. A collection of reference books, some signed by Barrett, went for £4,000 while a dictionary with his own abstract collage cover went for £900.

"And I'm most obliged to you for making it clear
That I'm not here" - as Barrett himself put it.