More Community Organizing

(Click image to enlarge.)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Plate of Shrimp

Although my own reserve of faith is modest and my religious interests mostly ethnographic, I do have a special pocket of conviction in the power of the lattice of coincidence. (Don't know about the lattice of coincidence? See Miller in Alex Cox's film Repo Man : "A lot o' people don't realize what's really going on. They view life as a bunch o' unconnected incidents 'n things. They don't realize that there's this, like, lattice o' coincidence that lays on top o' everything. Give you an example, show you what I mean: suppose you're thinkin' about a plate o' shrimp. Suddenly someone'll say, like, "plate," or "shrimp," or "plate o' shrimp" out of the blue, no explanation. No point in lookin' for one, either. It's all part of a cosmic unconsciousness. ") On the one hand, this is mostly surprising but ultimately trivial connections that are, statistically seen, bound to happen,...
Read more

Prosaic is more than Academic

This is a fascinating confluence of activity:  The composers James Saunders and John Lely have begun a major project about prose scores ( here ) and Phil Ford of the Dial M for Musicology has been using text based exercises in his teaching and there's some interesting discussion about this at the blog ( here ) . Also, Frog Peak Music has recently placed Christian Wolff's very influential Prose Collection online ( here ) and, of course, there is Upload...Download...Perform, which is just chock full of textual/musical excitement ( here ). Such text-based exercises or pieces or scores were central to the teaching (in music and extra-departmentally)  of the extraordinary pianist and theorist Jon Barlow at my grad school, Wesleyan, with immediate connections to Cage, Wolff, Oliveros, Lucier, Young, Fluxus, but also to Barlow's other interests, which ran to Euclid, C.S. Pierce, Wittgenstein, Ives,  Baseball, Blake, Faulkner, Joyce, and Stein.  Barlow's student, Kenneth Maue,...
Read more

Think Again

Repetition is opportunity. A nice line from Xenakis: When you say repetition, it is "thinking again about the same thing." This is what I think of as the meaning of "repetition." (from here ), reminds me  ( once again ) of my favorite Lewis Carroll verse, The Mad Gardener's Song : He thought he saw an Elephant,   That practised on a fife: He looked again, and found it was   A letter from his wife. "At length I realise," he said,   "The bitterness of Life!" (...) and, of course, John Cage's advice: If we are suffering, and we are able to recognize it, we have the opportunity to change our minds.   
Read more