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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I am not superstitious, but I offer this in lieu of a gratuitous photo of myself and as further evidence that I was not precisely born to Blake’s “sweet delight,” although I tend to be pretty damn happy despite it: The Panic of 1907 (above), a market catastrophe that led to the creation of the Federal Reserve, Black Tuesday, which began the Great Depression, and Black Monday, which in 1987 saw massive losses in worldwide markets, all happened in October, my birth-month. Indeed, the Great Depression is generally said to have started on my birthday in 1929, which I refuse to take as any sort of omen beyond this: it’s probably best not to bother with business on that particular day.

I am not superstitious, but I offer this in lieu of a gratuitous photo of myself and as further evidence that I was not precisely born to Blake’s “sweet delight,” although I tend to be pretty damn happy despite it:

The Panic of 1907 (above), a market catastrophe that led to the creation of the Federal Reserve, Black Tuesday, which began the Great Depression, and Black Monday, which in 1987 saw massive losses in worldwide markets, all happened in October, my birth-month.

Indeed, the Great Depression is generally said to have started on my birthday in 1929, which I refuse to take as any sort of omen beyond this: it’s probably best not to bother with business on that particular day.

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Gonzalo Rubalcaba -  Well, You Needn’t.

Since Nudawn enjoyed Art Tatum’s almost inhumanly dextrous performance of Gershwin, I thought I post Gonzalo Rubalcaba’s version of this Thelonius Monk standard. I tend to dislike excessively flashy, technique-oriented stylists, but I find Rubalcaba to be just barely on the right side of showmanship: he uses his remarkable skills to achieve textural and propulsive playing that turns the piano -already a combination of drum and string- into something like a percussion section.

It’s one of the only Monk covers I’ve ever liked, because Rubalcaba actually expands on Monk’s staccato style by making it even more aggressive, more geometric.

“But let’s break the flow of eloquent opacity at that point and ask ourselves about its author. The essay is called “A Critique of Violence” and yields a lot more in the same strain. With Benjamin, “strain” is the operative word. Part of his sad fate has been to have his name bandied about the intellectual world without very many of its inhabitants being quite sure why, apart from the vague idea that he was a literary critic who somehow got beyond literary criticism: he got up into the realm of theory, where critics rank as philosophers if they are hard enough to read. Clever always, he was clear seldom: a handy combination of talents for attaining oracular status.”

Clive James on Walter Benjamin.

James’ brilliantly lucid, cogent, and comprehensive essays on various subjects from Louis Armstrong to Hegel to Raymond Aron to Leon Trotsky, have been one of my happier recent discoveries. I mentioned him previously here.

In his essay on Benjamin, he discusses the tragic intellectual figure more honestly than anyone I’ve yet read and gives me permission to finally admit something it is quite out of fashion to say: I not only don’t understand Benjamin, but don’t believe the fault is entirely mine.

While remaining sympathetic to Benjamin and frankly admiring his many talents -most notably a gift for examining the peripheral minutiae of life for their cultural meanings- James makes a strong case that Benjamin was mostly wrong: about Stalin and Marxism, certainly, and not just as exposed by history, about the relationship between art and reproduction, and about the theory of science that, as Popper would note, is not used or needed by scientists in any way.

Moreover, he argues persuasively that Benjamin is admired primarily for the reasons undergraduates often love Derrida: they understand him too poorly to do anything but fall prostrate intellectually before him and declare him a god. His suicide while fleeing the Nazis contributes a romantic air to his works, as well.

Most people, myself included, have a naturally arrogant and culturally solipsistic attitude towards thought: what they understand, they accept; what is just beyond their grasp, they may revere or reject based on aesthetics; and what they do not grasp, they declare “meaningless.” Ask an ordinary citizen about modern art and you’ll often hear that “if it doesn’t make sense to me, it doesn’t make sense.”

I have for years worried that my resistance to Benjamin’s ludicrously difficult and seemingly distracting style -a style which almost seems like a camouflage disguising obviousness or incoherence- was simply my ordinary vanity inclining me to believe that “if I don’t get it, it’s not worth a damn.”

But I don’t think this is the case any longer. James quotes Novalis: “To philosophize is to make vivid,” and on this basis alone I am comfortable abandoning my semi-annual efforts to appreciate Benjamin, whose prose makes vivid neither his subjects nor the esteem in which he is held.

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Art Tatum - Someone to Watch Over Me. Although Gershwin’s authoritative rendition of this song is strongly connected in my mind with Woody Allen’s Manhattan, Tatum’s virtuosic performance is my favorite, possibly as it counteracts its sentimentality with technique.

One has to do whatever is required to avoid being maudlin. And Tatum is customarily astounding; in addition to his various accolades from Horowitz, Waller, Gershwin, and more or less everyone who’s heard him, he is also honored -I just learned- to have “the smallest perceptual time unit in music” named for him: the Tatum.

Greg Brown posted “a cenotaph in the Egyptian style” by Boullée, whose work he accurately described as ”terrifyingly monumental.”
Greg Brown posted “a cenotaph in the Egyptian style” by Boullée, whose work he accurately described as ”terrifyingly monumental.”
“Issue-driven politics in red-and-blue America is like a man whose appetite for steak is greatly enhanced by his contempt for vegetarians.”
Garret Keizer, in “Loaded,” from The Best American Essays of 2007. I think that this is absolutely the essence of most American political discourse.
mnksrs: I FEEL LIKE I’M ALWAYS GOING…  Shotdate | -location:2008 June 08 | Girona (ES) Camera | Filmtype: SX-70 Sonar Autofocus | 600

mnksrs:

I FEEL LIKE I’M ALWAYS GOING… 

Shotdate | -location:
2008 June 08 | Girona (ES) 

Camera | Filmtype:
SX-70 Sonar Autofocus | 600

“Also, if this is an hallucination, it more useful than sanity.”

Cricket posted an essay from John C. Wright on his conversion to Christianity which I found fascinating; the quote above was particularly striking, and might be said to apply to many forms of irrational thought, such as love.

Although I’m an atheist, I’ve long defended religion on the grounds of its personal utility and thought it notable that a believer admitted that whether a given religious experience was real or not was less important to him than how “useful” the experience was in providing him with meaning and directing his life.

That’s very human, I think, and something I do all the time: favor what brings joy or depth over what is rationally correct.

The Paintings of Jacob Lawrence

Sazerac posted the following piece on Jacob Lawrence, which I’m reblogging in its entirety; there are images below which are worth seeing, too:

“Why didn’t I learn about Jacob Lawrence in school?

He was given a $1,500 fellowship in 1940 to paint scenes from the Great Migration of blacks from the South. He used basic materials: primary colors of poster paints and small hardboard panels.

I caught the series today at The Phillips Collection in D.C. The scenes are beautiful, but I was most impressed with how well the 59 images and their terse captions combined to tell a bigger story.

11. Food had doubled in price because of the war.

“This was fat back … This was our salvation: we ate everything but the squeal,” Lawrence said in a 1992 interview.

31. The migrants found improved housing when they arrived North.

“My first consciousness of my physical environment came about when we made the move from Philadelphia to New York. I was 13 years of age, and I was seeing what I call tall buildings … And tall to me meant six stories high: tenements, fire escapes, and just blocks and blocks of geometric shapes … It wasn’t a shock, it was a revelation. I played in open fields. I played marbles … And here we arrive in New York, and kids were playing marbles in the gutters … on concrete and in between buildings … So there was this geometric kind of design throughout … It was like a dance, like a musical composition that appeared over and over and over again. And this is my response to the migrants facing the big urban community … I think it’s significant in formalistic terms in that it’s so different in the handling of content [from] other images throughout the series,” Lawrence said in a 1992 interview. (Crazy ellipses taken from the museum program)”

Minutes before my sister’s wedding was to begin, my father realized that he’d forgotten his bow-tie and cummerbund in another state; his solution, naturally, was to take mine and leave me at the front of the church looking like some strange Pentecostal opposed to ties. The photographs we received today document this scene, as he laughingly says something like, “Well, that’s not my problem, is it?” My mother calls his sense of humor, which I share, “Teutonic,” which I think is a euphemism.

Minutes before my sister’s wedding was to begin, my father realized that he’d forgotten his bow-tie and cummerbund in another state; his solution, naturally, was to take mine and leave me at the front of the church looking like some strange Pentecostal opposed to ties.

The photographs we received today document this scene, as he laughingly says something like, “Well, that’s not my problem, is it?” My mother calls his sense of humor, which I share, “Teutonic,” which I think is a euphemism.

“There is a logic of language and a logic of mathematics. The former is supple and lifelike, it follows our experience. The latter is abstract and rigid, more ideal. The latter is perfectly necessary, perfectly reliable: the former is only sometimes reliable and hardly ever systematic. But the logic of mathematics achieves necessity at the expense of living truth, it is less real than the other, although more certain. It achieves certainty by a flight from the concrete into abstraction. Doubtless, to an idealist, this would seem to be a more perfect reality. I am not an idealist. The logic of the poet — that is, the logic of language or the experience itself — develops the way a living organism grows: it spreads out towards what it loves, and is heliotropic, like a plant.”
Thomas Merton, from the wonderful Bronze Medal.
Earlier, This Recording’s Alex Carnevale posted “Subway,” by George Tooker. I’d seen Tooker’s work years ago but had been unable to recall his name, and had searched fruitlessly for his terrifying cubicle landscape shown above, “Landscape with Figures.” I like to think of it when walking through office mazes. A review in the NYT from just a short while ago describes his work thusly: “Back in the days of the cold war and the Organization Man, George Tooker painted some of the 20th century’s most memorable images of modern angst.” The review goes on to discuss his overall oeuvre and aesthetic, as well as his rather interesting biography.

Earlier, This Recording’s Alex Carnevale posted “Subway,” by George Tooker. I’d seen Tooker’s work years ago but had been unable to recall his name, and had searched fruitlessly for his terrifying cubicle landscape shown above, “Landscape with Figures.” I like to think of it when walking through office mazes.

A review in the NYT from just a short while ago describes his work thusly: “Back in the days of the cold war and the Organization Man, George Tooker painted some of the 20th century’s most memorable images of modern angst.” The review goes on to discuss his overall oeuvre and aesthetic, as well as his rather interesting biography.

The Long Goodbye

Riazm quoted Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, which is particularly resonant at a time when I am reminded by tragedy in the lives of my friends of how full the world is of suffering, how densely populated cities are by instances of loss:

“No feelings at all was exactly right. I was as hollow and empty as the spaces between the stars. When I got home I mixed a stiff one and stood by the open window in the living-room and sipped it and listened to the ground swell of the traffic on Laurel Canyon Boulevard and looked at the glare of the big, angry city hanging over the shoulder of the hills through which the boulevard had been cut. Far off the banshee wail of police or fire sirens rose and fell, never for very long completely silent. Twenty-four hours a day somebody is running, sombedy else is trying to catch him. Out there in the night of a thousand crimes people were dying, being maimed, cut by flying glass, crushed against steering wheels or under heavy car tyres. People were being beaten, robbed, strangled, raped, and murdered. People were hungry, sick, bored, desperate with lonliness or remorse or fear, angry, cruel, feverish, shaken by sobs. A city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness.”

N0wak posted a performance of Steve Reich’s “Piano Phase” by just one pianist; reblogged by Filthyphil, it came to the attention of one of my heroes, Superdoofus-Stratodrive, who added some  illuminating commentary:

reich is one of the “big four” (young, glass, riley, reich), and this composition helps illustrate why. now, this may not seem all too special (“hay! you play piano with both hands anyway!”), but that’s only because you’ve allowed a mere cursory listen. what is actually going on here will sound somewhat familiar to those who understand how to modulate sinusoidal waveforms binaurally or have at least learned “beat-matching”. this instance, however, involves the pianist attempting to play one piano at a very precise tempo, while simultaneously (and very minutely) increasing the tempo (based upon a sinusoidal timeline) played on the other piano. thusly bringing the two pianos into, and then out of, phase — thereby never achieving actual synchronicity until the 1st note on each piano being played is matched up again, then the performance drops to 8 notes and the cycle starts all over, then again to 4 notes.

it is also worthy to note that this composition is twenty minutes long in its entirety and is meant to be played by two pianists. the fact that one person can mentally and physically process this is truly astounding.
“‘Clifford Learns Wage Slavery,’ ‘The Berenstein Bears Discover the Impossibility of Meaningful Love,’ and ‘Trucks, Cranes, Trains, and the Inevitability of Death, which is Both Consoling and Terrifying.’”
Le beau et l’ordinaire: A Never-Ending Cup of Sunshine, regarding children’s literature.