Berio's birthday, an Egoslavian Holy Day before there was Blegsylvania, Egoslavia, reminds me now of my early blogging days. I was invited to join a group blog called Best of the Blogs. It still exists though I only recognize Max's name on the roster of contributors. I think I quit in 2007, 2008, Sasha might remember since I helped enlist her to join. She quit too. I don't remember the parameters of the mostly amicable divorce or the details of final straws. I was invited by Jerry Bowles, still proprietor of Best of the Blogs and, more importantly, proprietor of Sequenza 21, a wonderful group blog on contemporary classical music (whatever the fuck that term means, but you come up with something better). For X time - I think it more than a year, less than two - I had a blog on Indie music on Sequenza 21. I quit because I sucked at it - you may have noticed, I don't write reviews, I don't like to write reviews, I'm not good at writing reviews, and more than that, I'm an indiscriminate slut (Kinder people than me have called my taste eclectic), music has got to suck for me to hate it. Point being, I think of bleggal history on Berio's birthday because Sequenza 21 was named for Berio.
Serendipity is awesome: the second group blog I contributed too was Agitprop, now dead dead dead, though I'm still digital friends with most if not all of the contributors, including Montag - who I saw this past Friday on Sideling Hill in Washington County, Augusta, and El Serracho who I saw at a petting zoo in Ohio this past Sunday. I didn't remember today is Berio's birthday until yesterday afternoon when I scanned the birthday lists.
- Zombie's brush with serendipity.
- Va, pensiero.
- Reinventing square wheels.
- Dear DC United, please sign Zlatan Ibrahimovic.
- Leaf of my spoken thoughts.
- Krasznohorkai, for those of you who do.
- Flann O'Brien, for those of you who do.
- Out of the past: Beckett and Proust, for those of you who do.
- Someone hacked into Richard's blog and did a remarkable imitation of a Richard post.
- Stevens, choral music, sand animation.
- Not killing music.
- Serge Gainsbourg and The Origins of Melody.
- On Genesis' Battle of Epping Forest.
- Love the below, and I hate the bassoon.
UNDER THE SIGN
Ann Lauterbach
Having dreamed of my dead sister
raging with urgent
need, she
conducting us through intolerable
passages, now forgotten, I
have burned by right hand
after sunset
small dark clouds above
the river I cannot see
while listening to
a scratched CD of a Haydn
piano sonata so that
certain passages
rapidly repeat
and having spend some moments
thinking of the vision
that accommodates
all that is unforeseen
as the world now
becomes without sequence.
Nice change of pace re the tunes.
ReplyDeleteYou say: "music has got to suck for me to hate it." I thought your criteria was whether you hated the lead singer a la Jim Morrison or Glen whatever his name is with the Eagles (only quick examples at the tip of my tongue). Have I been misreading you all these years? Tell me personality doesn't enter into it.
Starts and ends with the music. Hating on Jim Fucking Morrison and Gordon Fucking Sumner (and baiting their fans) is bonus fun. I've no doubt Mark E Smith, for instance, is as big an egotistical jerk as Morrison and Sumner but I love The Fall so....
Deleteyou've linked to scorn heaped upon glenn greenwald - i'd like to point to
ReplyDeletehttp://www.newsweek.com/glenn-greenwald-and-future-leaks-758
the author, david cay johnston, presents greenwald's defense of his "withholding info", as silber et al. characterize it
from the piece:
"Although [Greenwald] bailed on his career as a lawyer, his legal training at NYU Law School still permeates his comments, and he clearly has a long-term legal strategy to avoid arrest or being shut down. He also has a nuanced appreciation of the strengths – and weaknesses – of the American government in trying to limit what he can report. He says a big reason he left The Guardian, the paper that made him world-famous, is the Official Secrets Act, a 19th-century British law that grants the government powerful tools to protect secrets. The law had a “public interest” defense for leakers until 1989, when Parliament struck it from the statute."
from the top of johnston's website, describing his most recent book: " No other modern country gives corporations the unfettered power found in America to gouge customers, shortchange workers, and erect barriers to fair play. A big reason is that so little of the news . . . addresses the private, government-approved mechanisms by which price gouging is employed to redistribute income upward.
You are being systematically exploited by powerful corporations every day. These companies squeeze their trusting customers for every last cent, risk their retirement funds, and endanger their lives. And they do it all legally. How? It’s all in the fine print."
Re the post above (I'm too lazy to go through all the logging nonsense more than once. And once is sometimes iffy.) David Cay Johnston's work is some of the most reliable around. He's smart and clever and tuned in without hubris, an unusual combination.
ReplyDeleteand BOOB - I think you have the dates close to correct although I barely notice birthdays so I'm not someone you can rely on for the timing of things. Sad to think of the demise of Agitprop though.
Fire Up The Bassoons, as some stupid zombie said.
ReplyDelete