"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.

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Notebook collage

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"Time is not just years and dates, but weeks and seasons. Time is a pack of cards, to be shuffled by skill and chance, or gathered into suits through complex games, built up or down black on red in endless sets of patience, or of solitaire, with care perhaps not to get the ace of spades ... covered up so that you can't get him out, or a gambling game, no trumps, somebody winning and somebody losing, or else laid out in mysterious formulae from which some Madame Sesostris foretells the future, reads character, digs out the vital spots ..." ('Timing the Thunder', A ZBC of Ezra Pound, Christine Brooke-Rose)

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Steve Lacy 'Only Monk' on the stereo.

Thinking 2017 is the year my friend Eric didn't live to see. & I've only just discovered Ray DiPalma died a week or so into December. Kind of strange that while thinking of a way to assemble a text for Eric I dug out DiPalma's Obedient Laughter (although I'm not entirely sure why).

A List of Books I've Been Reading During 2016 ...

... & Which You Might Find Interesting, Too ...

1. Deep Listening, Pauline Oliveros
2. Commotion of the Birds, John Ashbery
3. My Private Property, Mary Ruefle
4. A ZBC of Ezra Pound, Christine Brooke-Rose
5. The Book of Beginnings, Francois Julien
6. Taction, I. Kyuyoh
7. The Unknown Craftsman, Soetsu Yanagi
8. A Picture Is Always A Book, Robert Seydel
9. Modern Music & After, Paul Griffiths
10. Archeophonics, Peter Gizzi
11. Selected Poems, Keith Waldrop
12. tout droit vers la fin en sifflotant, ARPAIS du bois

For more on the Black Ice CD & the thinking behind the project ...

https://youtu.be/QQX-5L9Mkgk

Ear Food : Ten Highlights of 2016 ...

(in no particular order)

1. Discovering Tord Gustavson's music
2. Julian Bream playing Britten's Nocturnal after John Dowland
3. My appreciation of J.S. Bach piqued, reawakened, transformed, affirmed ... through the playing of Anna Gourari, Til Fellner & Igor Levit
4. Discovering Gyorgy Kurtag
5. That Saturday in Antwerp & hearing Barbara Hannigan's voice for the first time & all that opened up ... Abrahamsen ... the Satie collaboration with Reinbert de Leeuw ... etc.
6. Nikolaus Harnoncourt's Beethoven
7. Thomas Ades - Aracadiana in particular
8. Mette Henriette & Anna Thorvaldsdottir - very different but somehow linked in my brain
9. Finally getting Pierre Boulez - Le Marteau sans Maitre is the one!
10. Anything & everything by the Belcea Quartet (& actually getting off my arse & being there at Flagey the other evening)

& one (two) more ... acknowledging that Frank Zappa & Keith Jarrett still cut the mustard (Chicago '78 & A Multitude of Angels respectively)

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A playlist to bring 2016 to a close & ease into 2017 ...

Black Ice, Wolfert Brederode Trio

Voice of Chunk, The Lounge Lizards

Ed Blackwell box set (including Old and New Dreams)

Vespers, Rachmaninoff