To Dwell is to Garden
I know I said that I wouldn’t post again for a bit, but for this I can’t help it…
Listen to the words of this beautiful song! Absolute brianworm. Enjoy.
I would kill to see Deerhoof live:Buy Friend Opportunity by Deerhoof.
While you read this, a song is being performed in Halberstadt, Germany. It is called Organ2/ASLSP. In order to allow the maximum amount of people to hear this masterpiece, it is being performed as slow as possible. For your convenience, it will play for the next 637 years (it began Sept. 5, 2001). Don’t miss it.
Cage is one of the early masterminds of the 20th century. Like Einstein in physics and Heidegger in philosophy, Cage, in the very act of composition, questioned the foundations upon which he would build his castle. For anyone who cares to think deeply, the grammatically simple question ‘What is music?’ produces an irresolvable aporia. For Cage, this was a problem to romance, and he fell in love with it. Ultimately for Cage, the question ‘What is music?’ graduated from mistress to wife.
But here is something beautiful and accessible – In a Landscape:
The piece is from Cage’s In a Landscape performed by Stephen Drury. It can be argued that Cage invented conceptualized noise. Don’t be afraid. Your ears are there for something more than taking orders. They can give them, too…
Dinnertime growing up was never much of a family affair, even though the standard meat-and-potato combo plate was consistently available self-serve style from the fridge whenever hunger struck. But every then and again, we would all sit down together around a table full of warm paper bags and non-biodegradable styrofoam containers to savor the exotic flavors of the East – no one ever used the disposable chopsticks that were included…
I can see now how naïve I was to consider the food that I consumed on these occasions to be anything other than a kind of pricy mockup to suit the Western palate: “Why would the 60$ order of ‘Chinese food’ delivered to my snowy Canadian front door be any different from what the average Chinese family sits down to every night?”
Here in Korea there are certainly some dishes that wouldn’t be delivered to your door in that way – a hearty bowl of doggy soup, a paper cup full of boiled silkworm larvae and live baby octopus all jump to mind. But consistently placed beside more conventional dishes is something that I couldn’t now think to live without – kimchi…
There are innumerable varieties, but the standard fare is Chinese napa cabbage smeared with a thick layer of chili sauce and some fresh anchovy glue (and the long pre-table fermentation can sometimes give it an almost carbonated effect – it bubbles in your mouth!). As I said, I don’t think that I could do without this Korean masterpiece now, but I have met people who took one look and swore a single chopstick-full would never enter their mouth. I don’t blame them for this attitude, but just as the shoes of a non-drinker sit askew on my feet, I have no empathy for their partisan point of view…
I do not like it in a box. I do not like it with a fox. I do not like it in a house. I do not like it with a mouse. I do not like it here or there. I do not like it anywhere. I do not like it…
I apologize – the post title is backwardly written.
The track is off ‘Beach Boys Party’ – incredibly, it was their third official album of the year, following hard on the heels of the live Beach Boys Concert and Summer Days (and Summer Nights!!). It is also the official release to precede the legendary Pet Sounds.
I can’t imagine that this was the happiest of times for the band. Capital (their label) was placing significant pressure upon an already fragile structure and demanding another 1965 release in time for the ‘holiday season.’ Brian Wilson was finished with touring (and dancing publicly in general) due to extreme anxiety (thankfully for us on the ground, his genius was still superbly intact). I’m not even sure whether or not to call it irony that the ‘party sounds’ of the album were strictly a studio add-on mixed in after the tracks were strenuously recorded over multiple takes. Makes me feel a little sad, actually…
The albums are old, so you can search them out for yourself (it’s worth the effort – the Beach Boys kill…). But here’s a short story. Everybody knows that the Beatles (at the behest of George Harrison) had a stint in India with the Maharishi Mahesh yogi. Again, everybody knows that it eventually came apart at the seams (‘Maharishi, what have you done? You’ve made a fool of everyone…’). But the Beatles had such gravity at the time that they pulled Mike Love into their Indian orbit as well (crazily, Love became a teacher of ‘Transcendental Meditation’ after the fact). Here McCartney debuted a little parody for Love. The latter responded that he liked it, but that a little something more was needed – perhaps McCartney could mention how U.S.S.R. girls compare worldwide? Ya, excellent bridge.
