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Charles Mingus - II B.S.
From Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus, this track swings as hard as anything I’ve heard; jazz that actually inclines me to headbang is usually awesome.
mills
My name is Mills Baker; I write about love, culture, art, religion, mental illness, philosophy, memory, politics and the rather random.
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“To think that we could have had an ordinary life with its bickering, broken hearts, and divorces! There are people in the world so crazy as not to realize that such is the normal human existence of the kind everybody should aim at. What wouldn’t we have given for such heartbreaks!”
Nadezhda Mandelstam, widow of the poet Osip Mandelstam, who was arrested and tortured and, in essence, killed by the Soviet State, in her memoir Hope Against Hope. Osip himself noted that
Only in Russia is poetry respected – it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?
Such histories can make one despondent, but there is also the consolatory power they posses: what we endure is nothing alongside the anguish of our forebears, and what they endured too pales in comparison to our distant ancestors, and so on.
I cannot recommend Riaz Moola’s blog, Twitter, or Flickr enough. I’ve tried to before, but I still feel the periodic need to mention him.
I love his photography so much that choosing something to post is hard; this is great, too. And this. And this!
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Kenny Garrett (with Pat Metheny) - Latifah
From Garrett’s excellent tribute to John Coltrane, Pursuance, this track features Garrett and Metheny going fairly berserk. Metheny’s guitar is processed to sound rather like a saxophone, which I found at first slightly silly but which, I now think, works extremely well in this piece.
I’ve posted some of Kenny Garrett’s work before; almost everyone I’ve played this song for just adores it, and it’s one of my favorites.
“Although he had received diagnoses for psychiatric illnesses, including bipolar disorder, a judge decided that Donald would get better care in the state correctional system than he could get anywhere in his county. That was two years ago. Donald’s confinement has been repeatedly extended because of his violent outbursts. This year he assaulted a guard here at the prison, the Ohio River Valley Juvenile Correctional Facility, and was charged anew, with assault. His fists and forearms are striped with scars where he gouged himself with pencils and the bones of a bird he caught and dismembered.”
Mentally Ill Offenders Strain Juvenile System - NYT. Because I am white and my family well-off, that I am bipolar has been a mostly personal struggle; had I been poor or a minority youth, I would be dead, in jail, or slowly winding towards the wretched conclusion of serious addictions.
My class has meant that my regularly insane behavior was excused, even romanticized: “Bright and disturbed, sadly; he’ll need our patience! An artistic sort!” A bright, disturbed black male will not receive the forbearance of the police, his teachers, his neighbors.
When I imagine what it would have been like to be as I was at sixteen, often quite deranged, locked in prison without the means to get treatment, without a support system to contextualize my infractions as “medical” rather than “moral,” without the tolerance of a society which looks to excuse what I do wrong, which wants to forgive me, I feel real despair.
I do not consider anything I’ve written above to reflect any political affiliation; I cannot imagine how it could be thought ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative.’ Is it not a matter which ought to stir concern in anyone?
“Even a friendly conversation which cannot at any given moment be broken off voluntarily with complete arbitrariness has something illiberal about it.”
Friedrich Schlegel, who obviously took the problem of gaffling very seriously. Because the term is one of the most useful I’ve ever learned and seems to be little-known, I here share what I learned from my doppelgänger:
gaf⋅fle [gaf-uhl] verb, -fled, -fling. to hold in mostly or entirely unilateral conversation; to detain in endless and unsought prattle.
It is one of the darkest feelings I experience when, through the fault of my unwillingness to be rude, I find myself waylaid by some monologist incapable of detecting the shifting of my weight from foot to foot, the darting about of my eyes, the rising color of my face, or the fact that I’ve not spoken or asked a question or engaged in any chat for a what seems like hours. These people who confuse conversation and speech, silence for receptiveness, their glut of time for my supposed interest: they are gafflers.
In use, I normally exclaim, once escaped and among ordinary companions, “Damn if so-and-so didn’t just gaffle the fuck out of me!” I hope that these phrases help you describe this tyranny to others so that they might scurry to the restroom or pretend to be on their cell phones when known gafflers approach.
(Notes: (1) I am probably a gaffler; I’m sorry, everyone. (2) Are there other terms or phrases to describe this problem?)
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“Mess Around”, by Professor Longhair
I love the way Professor Longhair puts notes together. Most important, of course, is that straight boogie beat, which rolls forward so steadily in its groove, I can’t believe he’s doing it with just his fingers! Then, on top of that are the melodic riffs, which sound to me like he’s building—on the fly, and with his eyes closed—temporary, intricate sculptures out of staccato notes that are like discrete ceramic pieces. By the end of one riff, the ephemeral micro-edifice is already falling apart to be reclaimed for the next one.
I’m trying to learn this one. I’ll get back to you in a year or so.
I like this piece, Professor Longhair (I used to work for Tipitina’s!), and Thakker’s description of the music all very much.
The camera belonging to the amazing Joshua Heinman, of Cursive Buildings, “died a spectacular death” and as it did so it captured a beautiful cityscape: “This was the final thought as the circuit brains scrambled & blinked out of existence. Sort of a beautiful parting shot.”
He later used the resurrected camera for this lovely zombie video.
My friend Velvet Robots posted the image above and the explanation below; it’s totally wonderful, in my view, another reason to love Christian Bök, about whom I’ve posted before.
The Great Order of the Universe by Christian Bök
“The Great Order of the Universe” is a response to the fiftieth anniversary of the LEGO patent. Using a conceptual strategy reminiscent of Sol LeWitt, the image enumerates every possible way of combining two LEGO bricks, each with eight pegs. The caption consists of two texts: the first, a translated paragraph from a volume by Democritus; the second, a transcribed paragraph from the patent by Godtfred Kirk Christiansen. The two paragraphs are perfect anagrams of each other.
—Poetry (July/August 2009).
Breaking words and forms into their permutations and structural cores and reassembling them into variants and patterns seems to be Bök’s obsession, and he does so with the most fascinating enabling limits.
From Photophobia:
- The camera strap my mother made in 1981 and gave to me in 2009.
- My grandfather’s old belt.
- Both draped on a chair I used to pretend was a submarine or spaceship.
It is not solely because ever more of one’s life is in the past that as we age we grow to value memories and forebears. It is also because one begins to sense that in their lived lives one can see one’s own future more clearly than in one’s imagination. Your family: an assortment of iterative genetic variations on the same themes that lead you. When they confronted problems, they did so as you will; when they cultivated talents, they acted as you might.
The longer one lives, the greater the proportion of one’s life is in the past. But personal memories are the least of this: far greater is the expanding awareness one has that one’s own life is not novel, that one isn’t the first to feel, sense, and think as one does. This is balm for the irritation caused by narcissism.
As I’ve gotten older, every bit of evidence that assures me I’m another on a worn path has become important; I love these fragments from lives rather like mine. They are guiding, consolatory, resonant.
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Keith Jarrett - Opening
This live performance is one of the darkest and most overwhelming pieces of Jarrett’s catalog, and is best appreciated at extraordinary volume in pitch blackness; if it can be arranged, rain is appropriate as well; and if one is truly committed, one could do no better than listening to it during a storm at sea. I offer it as partial repayment to S. Stratodrive for his many contributions to my library.
(See here for other Jarrett posts).
“As for the natural faculties within me, of which my writing is proof, I feel them bending under the burden. My ideas and my judgment merely grope their way forward, faltering, tripping, and stumbling; and when I have advanced as far as I can…I can see more country ahead, but with so disturbed and clouded a vision that I can distinguish nothing. Then I realize how weak and poor, how heavy and lifeless I am, in comparison with [real authors], and feel pity and contempt for myself.”
Montaigne, uncontested genius and inventor of the essay, in a typical passage critiquing his stupidity and ignorance. I do not compare myself to him when I note that his complaint struck me as familiar, despite the esteem in which he was held. It reminded me of Nudawn’s description of me, which Sydney and others (and I) found amusing.
This thought has occupied me for some time: why is it that I am certain of my detestability, incompetence, fraudulence, and stupidity even when others generously compliment me? I feel ashamed of this arrogance: why should I ignore their kindness? Were they to recommend a writer to me, I’d be ecstatic; but if they recommend me to myself, I think merely that they are inexplicably mistaken.
Of course there are basic psychological reasons for insecurity, which are universal enough to be uninteresting; beyond those, a few points occur to me:
- Consider the ubiquity of quotes concerning ignorance: we hear often that the intelligence to which we aspire consists of knowing that you know little. I know I know very little, less even than I appear to, and much of that knowledge is debatable, wrong, predicated on what I want to believe.
- To whom do we compare ourselves? I do not look at my middling photography and think, “Well, this is better than what I did five years ago.” Perhaps I should. Instead, I think: this is not as good as what Riaz makes; this is inferior to nearly everything I like to see; this is not what I wanted it to be. It is the same with my writing, my conversation, my appearance, my habits. How could it be otherwise? Compared to our idols or our ideated paradigms, don’t we all seem rather silly?
- I fear I know what drives my creativity: the desire for affection, for reassurance, for the externalization of an imagined beauty I can conjure but not exemplify, dream but not embody. How satisfied can one be with what one makes when it is merely a screen for what one wants? A personality is an assembly of coping mechanisms, and creativity is an expression of their deformation, it sometimes seems.
Lately, I have been interested in how impermeable our senses of self are, how resistant they are to praise. When people compliment me, I enjoy perhaps a few moments of elevated glee and then a sense of gratitude and happiness: happiness that we should labor to find nice things in one another, happiness that we search our peers for things to praise. In other words: my sense of self remains the same, but my impression of others improves.
That’s its own sort of gift, of course, one I think more valuable than a change in one’s conception of oneself, which, in the end, matters less than I used to think.
Also from Andrew: this photo of the intersection of Mills Road and Rough and Ready Highway, which he sees while biking in Nevada County, CA. He very kindly sent this to me, and like many of his photos it’s wonderful.
Larger here.
“Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.”
Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye (quoted by Andrew). Generally I am quite pleased that I’ve yet to mature, although I imagine my extended childhood is taxing for my parents, and I was thrilled when Abby said my moon-shadow looked as though it were cast by Peter Pan in this photo.
On the other hand, this also reminds me of the persistent sense of fraudulence I and many others feel, the intimation I have that all around me are real, grounded, directed, engaged, and authentic people, all substantive in a way that I am not.
One wonders at this: is it related to the shame of the constructed personality? Is it, like so many of our inner preoccupations, actually universal? It calls to mind as well the various forms of self-delusion which assist our escape from engaged reality, with its overwhelming force and attendant awareness of mortality: the Walter Mitty fantasies, the John Marcher narrative, the idea we have that real life has yet to begin, that we are merely preparing for it, and that it will start once we have graduated, or married, or had children, or left our spouses, or aged further.
I worry that I will console myself about my aversions and fears and retreats with the story of my secret childhood until the day I am too old to believe it anymore.
