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More Zorn ('Gnostic Gospels') & David Murray (the famous 'Ming') plus an unknown - 'Makrofauna' by the ampersand glued Vilde&Inga (not, in fact, a new fragrance or hair salon). 

The Zorn is disturbingly beautiful - a quality I find with all the CDs in the Mysteries series. That sort of head achey faintly nauseous sensation I experience with incense. The Murray is top flight (so, yes, everyone was right). As for Vilde&Inga it's the type of stochastic twang & screech & rattle I can listen to for hours (or not) depending on the mood. They're soul sisters to Mette Henriette - no doubt a Norwegian music school style declaring itself. 

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Drove back from the UK with the Murray 'Dark Star' & The Lounge Lizards booming out. I drive therefore I listen (to music) - to rephrase Descartes. How else endure the tedium of sitting behind a wheel? 

Now that would be an interesting car programme: following people around with their favourite listening. What do you play, say, on the M25 (The Jam - ha-ha! cheap joke) as against a windy country road? How music can transform the most mundane journey.

I remember listening to Radio 3 one Sunday morning coming up to 8am on the long descending stretch towards the M20. Mozart's aria Soave sia il vento came on just as the sun was rising - so exquisite a coincidence of sound & setting I very nearly swerved off the road. 

(After it finished the announcer paused as if he, too, had been profoundly moved & then said "perhaps the most beautiful three minutes ever committed to vinyl". I'd find it hard to disagree.)

& the name for my new programme concept? Tracks - what else? 

(Needless to say anyone remotely involved with Top Gear would be strictly off limits). 

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The Picture of Little J.J. in a Prospect of Flowers

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According to the handwriting on the back (whose?) I am pointing out a dog somewhere out of frame. I recognise the high chair - it had a blue & white check pattern. The chair could be separated from the metal stand & I used it for some years afterwards. As for where this is taken - my guess is the front lawn at Freshwinds. The year? 1965. 

Anyone familiar with current corporate managerial behaviour - i.e. put a positive spin on everything, dress up facts, pick & choose statistics to suit - should have little difficulty in recognising the way the three-day old US Government is behaving. Except - wait ... wasn't this meant to be a new way of doing politics? Cutting through the professional deception! Power in the hands of the people!

Big joke.

& even then, not at all funny.

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Today's haul.

It's the first time I've heard the 'Godard' piece (my own CD is the earlier non-Tzadik release). It's interesting enough but seems to lack the logic of Spillane. And I was rather expecting more of an engagement with the films, the culture ... The exuberance & joy of Godard (especially the early period) is entirely missing. Odd.

Angelus Novus I've not yet listened to. Of course, Walter Benjamin haunts the title - silly of me not to have made the connection earlier.

The Lurie CD is a very different style to his Lounge Lizards work. Needs time shorn of the visuals.

As for the Marcin Wasilewski Trio ... beautiful. The first two tracks alone (the second is Bjork's Hyperballad reinterpreted) confirm that this is one to play & play again.

He wanted to found a school called Everyday Life and it would have courses on the seasons.

(Attributed to Joseph Ceravolo by David Schapiro - back cover of The Green Lake Is Awake).

"Imagine you have the sky at night ... with all the stars. Then, you put a bookshelf on it."

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Strange weather of alternating clear skies, rain & snow. I find myself digging back into my John Zorn CDs of the 1980s & realising that this is now but a fraction of what he has produced.

So ... a trip to the Mediatheque to borrow some more recent releases ... Mysteries & Lemma among them. As always such beautiful entities in terms of cover art & inserts.

Nosing around the internet there's a good hour long interview plus this experimental documemtary ...

https://youtu.be/7W458zmPFhE

I'm in two minds as to whether the style of the film is inspired or simply intrusive but the insights it affords of Zorn's compositional & performing practices are valuable.

Worth a look.

On a day when yet more sad news arrives ... December was bad, now January ...

... The Guardian runs a piece on favourite funny books.

Here are the ones that occur to me ...

1) Any of the Wodehouse Jeeves series
2) Murphy & Watt (& maybe Mercier & Camier) by Beckett
3) Tristram Shandy
4) Early Waugh - Decline & Fall, Vile Bodies in particular
5) Oscar Wilde (obviously)
6) The S.J. Perelman of the short pieces
7) Flann O'Brien? Maybe ... Depends ...
8) Viv Stanshall's Sir Henry saga (OK, not really a book)
9) Ivor Cutler - the one about his Scottish childhood
10) The Mr Gum books by Andy Stanton (also him reading volume one on a CD) plus Just William & the Nigel Molesworth chronicles (How To Be Top etc). Definitely NOT anything involving Adrian Mole.
11) The bits of Gerald Durrell's Greek memoirs that feature Larry
12) Lyttelton's Britain - actually reworkings of the I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue intros written by Iain Pattison

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Explorations into Icelandic modern composition continue with Orphee by Johann Johannsson (interestingly filed under Rock & Pop in the Mediatheque). Another JJ! 

I also happened upon this CD from the luxuriously bearded Norwegian saxophonist Trygve Seim. Rumi seems to be everywhere at the moment. 

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(Bad Scandi-jazz joke: not enough Rumi to swing a cat? ...

... Apologies.) 

the idea

becomes a machine

which makes art

                           (Sol LeWitt)

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Re-mix yourself

                           Gordon’s Dry Gin ad (Boondael bus shelter)

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(from an old notebook, 2003) 


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Incidentally, track 3 - Estimated Prophet - on the David Murray/ Grateful Dead CD Dark Star is a cracker. 

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The Lounge Lizards, Live '79-'81

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“Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery – celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from – it’s where you take them to.”

Jim Jarmusch, The Golden Rules of Filming

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Also ... 

David Murray Octet, Dark Star : The music of The Grateful Dead

String Quartets by Penderecki & Lutoslawski (Royal String Quartet) 

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The new Sherlock episode was obligatory viewing for myself & the Cumberbitch of a younger Wafflette. However ... decent as it was there's that nagging feeling developing into a more tangible wince that ... well ... it's lost the plot.

Thankfully, there was no grating Graham Norton Moriarty or the irritating 'and-then-I-woke-up-and-it-was-all-a-dream' type of reframing (although the last five minutes seemed to promise that). The problem lies in the increasing Soap Operatics - as if we bloody cared about Watson and his family! No, really, not interesting. God knows why Mark Gatiss has decided to foreground this aspect of the story - pressure from the BBC to make it more 'audience friendly'? A lack of confidence in spinning true suspense & criminal deviousness? The scathing put downs from Sherlock drying up?

Frankly it's all becoming a bit maudlin - ironically, the very tendency that would prompt a dismissive "dreary, dreary" riposte from Holmes.

Over lunch we agreed that the first series was head and shoulders better. Why? A case per episode. Just like the books. Sufficient sparring between Sherlock, Watson and the police plus the occasional and truly disquieting appearance of Mycroft. Wonderful. (Actually, the younger Wafflette admitted that she was beginning to think Mycroft was starting to eclipse Holmes ... Gatiss consciously or not upstaging his star. Oh dear ...)

In report writing mode as I am, let's give this Sherlock Holmes a B minus/ C plus? With a stern recommendation to go back to basics.