GUEST POST ~ by "Anyjazz" on Music Monday

What follows comes from a post written by my husband on his blog "Thinks Happen" in 2008. I stumbled across it in searching for something else and decided the post ought not to be wasting away, hidden in the depths of defunct blogdom. In its original setting the piece can be accessed via the link at the foot of this post.

NEVER THROW AWAY A PICTURE. WE ARE ALL WE HAVE.


The camera tried hard to get a shot for me but the lighting and the inept operator gave only a marginal result. The shutter was open too long and Alison Young moved.

That’s okay. The memory of listening to her play live comes back just as well with this shot as with any other. As my wife and others will attest, when I hear a really talented musician or a really wonderful performance, I tend to weep. Yes, I know.

As I sat in the dark at an after-hours jam session during an Ottawa Jazz Festival, I was often a bit misty eyed. Talented musicians, relaxed before a small audience, played as they felt, often only for their own appreciation. Good stuff.

One such night, a young fellow played an alto sax solo backed with rhythm and piano. His technique was good, polished; his chorus was fresh and welcome. Then as he finished, he unhooked the alto from its neck strap and handed it to a red-haired girl standing just out of the spotlight. After a couple hearty solo piano choruses, 19 year old Alison Young stepped into the light and began to play that same alto sax. And tears came instantly to my eyes. Yes, I was impressed.

It was the same saxophone but nothing else was the same. Her tone and range set her apart. Her attack and enthusiasm made it fascinating. Most of all, her inventiveness kept the listener sitting up straight. I’ll never forget it. When she finished we all realized we had been holding our collective audience breath.

Every moment of our lives has that possibility to connect with someone. Each moment has that ability to be an important moment in someone’s life.

Perhaps as a race we are losing that capability to empathize with our fellow humans. We have become protectorates, isolationists in our own being. We fear or loath connection so much that we avoid sharing any of ourselves. We only perceive the surface of others, not the warmth within.

A child knows how. A child has the ability to freely observe moments from everything, collecting, mimicking and blending. But just like the fairy tales and goblins, this talent fades away as adulthood comes jack booting down the life path.

We can rail on about conservation and brotherly love. We can preach about faith and hope and charity. We can be reliable or lie and make work or leisure for ourselves. We can vote and debate and scoff and complain.

But in the final analysis: we are all we have.


http://jabberclarks.blogspot.com/2008/02/alison-young-and-moment.html

Music Monday ~ GUEST POST

GUEST POST by "anyjazz" (my husband)

I felt badly about not caring for rap performance because it destroyed my status of being able to enjoy and appreciate all forms of music. I finally rationalized, “How can anything be music if it is not musical?”

Most (and I feel safe in saying “most”) rap performance is merely inflammatory, profanity-filled, roughly rhyming couplets, set to a rhythmic background of raucous and thumping sounds. It is seldom musical.

How can that which is not musical be termed “music”? Simply put, rap is not music.

I don’t know what it is. Some kind of performance art I suppose.

And there’s something else that worries me: We hum and whistle the songs and music of our youth. That’s what makes them so eternal, so legendary to us. Just what are people going to be humming 20 years from now? It’ll be slim pickings surely. Will it be “bomtiddy bomtiddy bomtiddy bom”?

I have pawed through the cut-out bins, the pawn shops and the abundant thrift stores for cast out and cast away recordings, 8 track, cassette, 45rpm, LP and now CD. Years of doing this taught me (among many other things) that the music that is temporary and disappointing in our lives ends up there in the discard bins, reverting to dust.

Sometimes it was heart-throb entries like David Cassidy or Michael Parks there in the bins. Or maybe classical albums like Ravel’s Bolero or Handel’s Messiah orchestrated and played by small town bands in Europe or Alabama somewhere and bought from magazine ads. There were stacks of stand-up comedy albums, played once and never touched again. I found lots of vanity albums from show-biz personalities hoping to supplement their income in the music business. But, “William Shatner Sings?” or Robert Mitchum’s “Calypso is Like So” although treasures to the collector now, were turkeys when released. The used boxes contained albums by one hit wonders and head bangers. Never a Sinatra, never a Brubeck. It was seldom any jazz album would appear in the charity shop or garage sale. A used Charlie Parker album? Get real.

Today what do you find? Rap CDs. Lots of them. LOTS of them. It seems they do not stand up to repeat plays. The rap protagonists listen to the recording once and then move on. They must. Apparently there is not enough pith in the helmet to wear it repeatedly.

Of course in any art there are exceptions to every premise and medium. I make no judgments here; it’s only an observation.

Since the advent of recordings, one generation of parents grew up listening to jazz and show tunes. That was the popular music of their time. They listened to songs with fine poetry and indelible melodies. They also carry the guilt of the “Charleston” and the “Lindy Hop” and other dances of that ilk.

Along came Bill Haley and Little Richard. Parents were wary because they couldn’t understand the lyrics and thought the dances too sexually symbolic. Turns out they were right and well … wrong. Rock didn’t promote sexual activity any more than the crooners and the snuggle dances of the ‘40’s.

Rap is not the same story. The older generation may just be completely right. The current younger generation may just be the victims of the emperor’s new clothes. The next BIG thing might just be the cash-cow of corporations, eager to exploit the markets with a product that is transitional and must be replaced often; another edition of the planned obsolescence ploy, geared to selling the same product over and over.

The jury is still sequestered on that and ordered Gulf Shrimp today. It's going to be a long session.

Music Monday ~ Front Porches & A Guest Post - by Anyjazz

If the world had a front porch like we did back then
we'd still have our problems but we'd all be friends
Treating your neighbor like he's your next of kin
Wouldn't be gone like the wind
If the World had a front porch, like we did back then

In the 1990s my husband relinquished his job in Oklahoma to move to Kansas and take care of his ailing mother who suffered from Parkinson's Disease. Below is what he wrote in his journal from that time. I found it particularly appealing, and use it here (again) with his permission - a guest post of sorts.


Sunday, July 27, 1997

After mother finished pushing her dinner around on her plate, spilling her water and dropping her pills, I ushered her in two cycles around the kitchen table for exercise and returned her to her TV launching chair.

Then I went out, with all necessary accessories to stay in contact, including beeper and telephone, to sit in the front porch glider. A couple small pillows from the couch and an icy bottle of tea went with me too. And a book to run competition with the busy activity on the street and sidewalks that pass my line of vision in the apron of the front yard.

Across the street, little Desiree was at work schooling her invisible playmate in the fine art of ballet and cheer leading. The new neighbor on the east kept to the house mostly, and the stout pair on the west did their usual, arrived and left, arrived and left. Nothing much new in the front yard world so the book had little competition for my thoughts. I read until nearly nine.

"The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplaceable being. The difference between love and logic is that in the eyes of a lover, a toad can be a prince, whereas in the analysis of a logistician, the lover would have to prove that the toad was a prince, an enterprise destined to dull the shine of many a passion." Tom Robbins in “Jitterbug Perfume”

Proving a toad is a prince or a prince is a toad.... Ponderings that take my mind. All the interactions of humans, luring, flirting, leading, flashing, feeding the mind, grooming the hair, daring to judge what's fault and what's fair, move only to a conclusion. A conclusion as certain as the last stop on the bus line, as illuminating as an eclipse and as dreaded and elusive as a cherry pit in a hot cherry pie. Nothing is certain. Everything changes. Toads are toads. Princes are princes. Fools are fools.

Of course to a cynic, the looming sunset of life can produce little beauty and not much comment except "I told you so!" But to a romantic a toad is a prince. The ends are merely a part of the beginning and all the pudding in-between. Life to the cynic is a clanking chain of events that prove everything is related, everything is temporary and everything is eventually as worthless as the inevitable last link.

But the romantic knows a secret. Life is the memories you make. Nothing more, nothing less. If you plant nightshade, as Mr. Nightingale quoted, you get nightshade...

The conclusion for the day is, I shouldn't sit for long periods in the glider by myself. In only a short time, so many thoughts float like dumplings in my brain soup that the bowl expands and the scalp stretches and separates the strands of hair across even greater expanses of bald. Sitting in the front porch glider is one of the known causes of baldness. In men.

Women have to go to the bathroom more often. Women think in little concise thoughts that mean something useful. They dispense their considered wisdom to the summer air around a glider and then go to the bathroom. Women perform their magic daily. They run the world and all of humanity and make it seem as if they don't know the first thing about it. Magic. Daily magic.

GUEST POST by JD: The Choctaw-Irish Connection

Many thanks to JD, in the UK, for this post:


I've been watching this series on Channel4 with Ardal O'Hanlon doing a tour round Ireland.



Programme Information

In the third of the programmes he was talking to an artist called Waylon Gary White Deer who is of the Choctaw Nation and now lives and works in Donegal. Their conversation centred on something I had not known about. It was that the Choctaw Nation made a donation to Irish famine relief in 1847! I think gobsmacked is the (Irish) word for my reaction to this information. I didn't know that.

The story of the Great Famine in Ireland is perhaps not as well known in England as it should be. Approximately one million people starved to death. A further one million or more followed St Brendan's example and set off across the Atlantic to the USA and Canada.

Inevitably the Irish diaspora came into contact with the Choctaw who had themselves been forced from their ancestral lands, and they would learn each other's history including the Famine in Ireland.

On March 23, 1847, the Indians of the Choctaw nation took up an amazing collection. They raised $170 for Irish Famine relief, an incredible sum at the time worth in the tens of thousands of dollars today.

They had an incredible history of deprivation themselves, forced off their lands in 1831 and made to embark on a 500 mile trek to Oklahoma called “The Trail of Tears.” Ironically the man who forced them off their lands was Andrew Jackson, the son of Irish immigrants.

Here is a short video retelling the story and showing a commemorative statue erected in Cork and how that came about-



Last word must go to Waylon Gary White Deer, talking about the USA but it could apply equally in any country.

"Sadly, the day will come when all the carefully crafted and promoted white vs black and liberal vs conservative and rich vs poor and old immigrant vs new immigrant and MSNBC vs Fox News distractions will fade, and then everyone in the place they now call America will wake up surrounded by their military and finally understand how it feels to be Indian…"

Other references-

Great Famine (Ireland)
Brendan
Ireland Calling - Choctaw Donation Irish Famine
Ireland Recognises Gift from Choctaw Nation
Trail of Tears

Arty Farty Friday Guest Post

Guest Post by "JD" who lives in the UK.
Thank you for this JD!

I first saw this painting two or three years ago. It is hanging in The Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle [UK]. The reproductions of it on the net are poor and do not reflect the subtlety of the colours nor the depth nor the mysterious shadowy details upper left. The paint is very thickly applied over most of the surface, especially the whites of the dress which seem to have been almost plastered onto the surface.

A very interesting picture, very visceral and with layers of unknown meanings within it. When I then walked forward to read the label, I was rather surprised to see the name Lizzie Rowe. Surprised because I had previously seen some of her paintings in The Biscuit Factory and they did not engage me at all. I was more impressed by other paintings by Paul Harvey (one of The Stuckists) on display in the same show.

I have not met Lizzie Rowe but I know several people who have and who know her extremely well. On her web page she and others make no secret of the artist's journey from married heterosexual man (and father) to transgendered woman. Knowing the story, or most of it from those who know her, it is obvious that the change was traumatic and very difficult psychologically and this is reflected in part in her paintings. One hundred years from now such biographical details will be but a footnote of little consequence, it is the paintings themselves which are, or should be, the focus of attention.

I went back this morning to have another look at the painting just to see if it still evoked the same response in me. It does. The thickness of the paint is a very striking feature of it. The white semi-circle looks as though it has been applied directly from the tube. The record player, the TV and the ironing board on the right are more vibrant than in the reproductions and the strange ambiguity of the top left is even more mysterious than I remember. Thickly applied paint may suggest a slapdash approach but, in fact, it is very carefully done and the various details are clearly defined.

Last night I was looking through a book called "What Painting Is" by James Elkins. This is one of the best books about painting that I have ever read.

Elkins says that painting is the act of 'smearing coloured mud onto paper or linen' and that is the cold analytical definition but '... it is also liquid thought.'

That is a very profound statement. He goes on to quote the painter Frank Auerbach who wrote, "As soon as I become consciously aware of what the paint is doing my involvement with the painting is weakened. Paint is at its most eloquent when it is a by-product of some corporeal, spatial, developing imaginative concept, a creative identification with the subject."

What he is trying to say there is that painting, or any creative activity, is not a product of the conscious mind but is an unconscious process. Just like walking - learning to walk requires great concentration and much effort but the more you do it the less you need to think about how you do it.

Elkins continues the theme of the difficulty of explaining the thought processes involved in creating a painting- "Things only get harder to articulate when the religious meanings come into focus, and it begins to appear that the studio work - the labour - really is about redemption."

That may sound grandiose but art and religion are inseparable. They have been intertwined since the dawn of time. There is no religion or belief system in history that does not have its artistic expression.

Elkins uses the word 'religious' but I would suggest that 'spiritual' would be a better word. As I said above, any creative activity is an unconscious process which is what Auerbach was suggesting. The artist or the craftsman, and to a lesser extent the artisan and the tradesman, is involved in a strange synthesis of hand/eye/brain with the thing being created. It involves a physical effort in the act of creation and often produces a spiritual elation. The mundane, secular world calls that 'job satisfaction' but that is to trivialise it with its hint of smug self-gratification. It is not that at all, it is the calm or 'inner peace' which is the result of deep concentration and, as Auerbach notes, identification with the subject.

In the painting, the figure at the centre is deep in concentration in the act of gathering together the pearls from the broken string and that gives a stillness to the picture; a moment of calm between the activity depicted on the right and the strange ethereal quality coming from the top left of the picture. Others may have a different interpretation but that is my own reading of it.

With the reference to religion made by Elkins, we reach a point where the modern secular world closes its mind. It is not the done thing to discuss religion. The case is closed - there is no ghost in the machine!

But art is a perfect link between science and religion, between the secular and the spiritual. As the painter, the late Iain Carstairs says-

'Art is that endeavour in which consciousness imposes an otherwise intangible element of itself onto matter in such a way that it can be decoded by others: it is an alchemy which maths can never analyse or create.'

And the physicist Richard Feynman had this to say-

"I wanted very much to learn to draw, for a reason that I kept to myself: I wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world. It’s difficult to describe because it’s an emotion.

"It’s analogous to the feeling one has in religion that has to do with a god that controls everything in the universe: there’s a generality aspect that you feel when you think about how things that appear so different and behave so differently are all run ‘behind the scenes’ by the same organization, the same physical laws. It’s an appreciation of the mathematical beauty of nature, of how she works inside; a realization that the phenomena we see result from the complexity of the inner workings between atoms; a feeling of how dramatic and wonderful it is.It’s a feeling of awe — of scientific awe — which I felt could be communicated through a drawing to someone who had also had that emotion. I could remind him, for a moment, of this feeling about the glories of the universe."

Art is the gateway to the world of spirit, to heaven. If you prefer a scientific explanation you could say it is the gateway to what the physicist David Bohm calls 'the implicate order' from which the material world flows and to which it returns.

"Vita brevis, ars longa."
___________________________________________
References:
http://www.lizzierowe.co.uk/Lizzie_Rowe/Reception.html

https://laingartgallery.org.uk/

http://www.thebiscuitfactory.com/

http://www.stuckism.com/

http://www.jameselkins.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=227:what-painting-is&catid=2:trade-books&Itemid=9

GUEST POST by "JD" ~ Intimations of Immortality

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home"

In the hospital where my mother died they had a small prayer/meditation room with one wall decorated (and lit up) to resemble a stained glass window. That extract from Wordsworth was 'engraved' on the wall, it was a reminder that all things must pass away: to be reborn?

You will have heard that tired old cliche that we must "...live each day as if it were your last"

That is a philosophy of despair.

You must live each day as if it were your first! Look at everything and everyone with wonder as if for the first time!

Thank you, JD!

A couple of quatrains from my favourite go-to Persian philosopher (Omar Khayyam). He was in a rather more cynical mood, adding some edge, though not exactly arguing with what JD has written.

But leave the wise to wrangle, and with me
The Quarrel of the Universe let be:
And in some corner of the Hubub coucht,
Make Game of that which makes as much of Thee.


'Tis all a Chequer board of Nights and Days
where Destiny with Men for pieces plays:
Hither and tither moves and mates and slays,
and one by one back in the Closet lays.

JD counters with this though:

If you want to add some verses from the Great Omar that's fine but remember my original idea was to affirm the idea that we are truly immortal which was Wordsworth's view.

The Bhagavad Gita says "the soul is never destroyed when the body is destroyed"-

In a similar fashion that is the message of all the Sufi poets including Omar Khayyam. I have a small book called 'Magic Casements' by Sir George Trevelyan. Wonderful book and I didn't realise the whole book was on-line, so it is worth reading what he has to say about the Rubaiyat, as indicated beneath the quatrains below:

Sir George Trevelyan: At this point I include five verses from that great poem FITZGERALD's: 'Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam' [Sir GT's comments are beneath each quatrain]. This is usually treated as a wine-bibber's philosophy - 'Let us eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die.' It does, apparently, say that death is extinction – but as we have seen, every symbol is Janus-faced. You are free to read it in the way that gives meaning to your life, negatively or the reverse. Thus the poem really is about Life Eternal, the Wine of Life and consciousness. The Cup is the body, and the wine is the life given us by Him who said, 'I am the true Vine.'

Think, in this batter'd Caravanserai
Whose doorways are alternate Night and Day,
How Sultan after Sultan with his pomp
Abode his hour or two, and went his way.

The Caravanserai is our Earth life, with the moon-gate of birth and the sun-gate of death – the new dawn.
Listen to this:

Ah, my Beloved, fill the Cup that clears
Today of past Regrets and future Fears –
Tomorrow? – Why, Tomorrow I may be
Myself with Yesterday's Sev'n Thousand Years.

We must learn to live in the present, not because there is no future but that we have the creation of the future in our own hands, if we can learn to work with our Higher Self.

Ah, fill the Cup, what boots it to repeat
How Time is slipping underneath our feet:
Unborn Tomorrow and dead Yesterday,
Why fret about them if Today be sweet?

One moment in Annihilation's Waste,
One moment, of the Well of Life to taste –
The stars are setting and the Caravan
Starts for the Dawn of Nothing – Oh, make haste!

So easily can the poem look like negation – after death there is nothing. But the Life Eternal belongs to the ethereal realm beyond time, space and form. Thus it is the realm of No Thing, a condition of unborn-ness; a freedom from the limitations of form and embodiment. Life on Earth is 'Annihilation's Waste' – this is the 'Well of Life', the heaviest, densest vibration, which we enter for a brief span of existence. As Dawn comes and the stars set, the caravan starts for that Higher Realm – O make haste! Had the negative interpretation been valid, surely Omar would have urged us to miss this Caravan and have another evening of drinking and merry-making. This gives us the clue to the central verse which superficially appears complete negation and, interpreted, is the great affirmation.

And if the Wine you drink, the Lip you press,
End in the Nothing all things end in – Yes!
Then fancy while thou art, thou art but what
Thou shalt be – Nothing – Thou shalt not be less.

For 'Nothing' read 'No Thing' – a condition of 'pre thing-ness'.

Note that affirmation of 'YES' in the middle of this strange verse, the assurance that as a soul you will not be less than a free spirit united with your Higher Self. So, while here, imagine you are what you will be – a No Thing. Thus you will prepare for the great transition, with Donne – What you will be then, think here before, for Thought is the great reality.

JD: So that will be clear as mud now, will it? :)
I love having my synapses tickled into action and my consciousness expanded!