Howlin' Wolf (aka Chester Arthur Burnett) performs Highway 49 at the Washington D.C. Blues Festival, November 1970.
Muddy Waters (aka McKinley Morganfield) singing I'm A Howlin' Wolf, 1981.
and finally... Muddy Waters with the Rolling Stones singing Baby, Please don't go.
There are a couple videos of Muddy Waters with Eric Clapton also on youtube, which should be a great treat for blues fans but those I'll post later this week.
Just heard two versions of A Song for My Father by Horace Silver on the WGBH's Jazz with Eric in the Evening program for September 15th, which was a special for Horace Silver, who turned 80 earlier this month (and is reportedly in a nursing home and suffering from Alzheimers. :( )
First a recording from a 1964 album of the same name, which is on NPR's Basic Jazz Record Library...
* Horace Silver — piano, Carmell Jones — trumpet, Joe Henderson — tenor saxophone, Teddy Smith — bass, and Roger Humphries — drums
Picture by Dmitri Savitski, 1989. [Made available on Wikipedia under creative commons license]
..followed by a more recent recording by him from a 1993 album It's Got To Be Funky.
I'll put three videos here...one of Horace Player playing the above song in 1976..
the next from Newport, 1950.
and the last one is a performance by the Horace Silver Quintet from 1968.
Personal Note: I am not a religious person but my mother told me that today is Sarvapitri Amavasya, which is followed by Hindus in memory of those who are no more among us. So, this post is for my father.
I turned to WGBH this evening and found that WGBH's Jazz with Eric in the Evening program has a special today with music by John Coltrane (the later years, 1960-1967). It seems, he had a program last Monday (playlist at link) with many of the famous pre-1960 tracks, including Equinox, Blue Train, Stairway to the Stars, My Favorite Things, So What (with Miles Davis), Giant Steps, Epistrophy (from the recently found album of performances at the Carnegie with Thelonius Monk in 1957), Naima, and lots more. (The mind boggles at how much he recorded and achieved in his short life...40 years!)
Here's some Coltrane videos to enjoy.
If you, like me, missed the first program on Sep 22nd, you can currently listen to it online here. Today's program will also eventually be put online. Thanks, WGBH. I think you've just earned a donation check from me for this year. Let me get a job and I'm sending in the check (not that I cannot afford to spend right now but just does not feel right to be sending out contribution checks, albeit to a good venture, concurrent with watching my expenses, not to mention savings dwindling in the stock market lately!
Links:
1. John Coltrane: Full NPR Music Archive
2. Coltrane via Last.fm
Update: Just realized I had already put up a post about Coltrane earlier this month (title-ing it very similarly too -- Music Supreme, instead of A Love Supreme, which is, of course, the title of a very famous Coltrane album & track. Now that I saw the post, I did remember posting about it but while I wrote up the above, I remembered I had posted Miles Davis earlier this month but did not recall a post about Coltrane too! Phew...I blog too much AND my memory is going to hell! In any case, luckily I did not repeat any videos here as I had embedded only 1 video of Coltrane (his popular 'My Favorite Things' track) in that post.
Thelonious Monk and his team play Blue Monk in Baden-Baden in 1963
* Thelonious Monk - piano
* Charlie Rouse - tenor sax
* John Ore - bass
* Frankie Dunlop - drums
Miles Davis and his amazing team of whos-who of jazz play All Blues in LA in Sep 1964
* Miles Davis - trumpet
* Wayne Shorter - tenor sax
* Herbie Hancock - piano
* Ron Carter - bass
* Tony Williams - drums
Hmm...
The Proust Questionnaire has its origins in a parlor game popularized (though not devised) by Marcel Proust, the French essayist and novelist, who believed that, in answering these questions, an individual reveals his or her true nature. Here is the basic Proust Questionnaire.
Too late in the night to answer these questions but sure are interesting questions!
1.What is your idea of perfect happiness?
2.What is your greatest fear?
3.What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
4.What is the trait you most deplore in others?
5.Which living person do you most admire?
6.What is your greatest extravagance?
7.What is your current state of mind?
8.What do you consider the most overrated virtue?
9.On what occasion do you lie?
10.What do you most dislike about your appearance?
11.Which living person do you most despise?
12.What is the quality you most like in a man?
13.What is the quality you most like in a woman?
14.Which words or phrases do you most overuse?
15.What or who is the greatest love of your life?
16.When and where were you happiest?
17.Which talent would you most like to have?
18.If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
19.What do you consider your greatest achievement?
20.If you were to die and come back as a person or a thing, what would it be?
21.Where would you most like to live?
22.What is your most treasured possession?
23.What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
24.What is your favorite occupation?
25.What is your most marked characteristic?
26.What do you most value in your friends?
27.Who are your favorite writers?
28.Who is your hero of fiction?
29.Which historical figure do you most identify with?
30.Who are your heroes in real life?
31.What are your favorite names?
32.What is it that you most dislike?
33.What is your greatest regret?
34.How would you like to die?
35.What is your motto?
I am pissed off!!!! On the way back from getting milk, I drove past Somerville theater (which is less than a mile from here!) and saw that Vieux Farka Toure is playing today at 8pm. It was past 9pm and I cannot put into words what I felt when I realized I had missed a golden opportunity.
Back home, reading previous posts on Vieux (1, 2) and his legendary father (1, 2, 3), I noted that I had written I have to catch Vieux when he is in town the next time. I even remember seeing couple months back that he is on tour in the US again this year, though he was here last year.
I am pissed off!!!! On the way back from getting milk, I drove past Somerville theater (which is less than a mile from here!) and saw that Vieux Farka Toure is playing today at 8pm. It was past 9pm and I cannot put into words what I felt when I realized I had missed a golden opportunity.
Back home, reading previous posts on Vieux (1, 2) and his legendary father (1, 2, 3), I noted that I had written I have to catch Vieux when he is in town the next time. I even remember seeing couple months back that he is on tour in the US again this year, though he was here last year.
But somehow, it either slipped my mind or I had no idea that he was going to be in Boston this weekend. If I did, I would have been there... NO QUESTIONS ABOUT IT!
Sadly now, I have to wait for some future opportunity.... when, given his rising popularity*, I fear will be when tickets will have become 2-3x as expensive as today; not to mention it may not be in the small auditorium setting of the Somerville Theater that I love so much more thanbigger concert halls.
* Earlier this year, he won the BBC World Music Awards award for Best Newcomer.
For now, I'm listening to the blues this evening (Thankfully, WGBH has great blues every Saturday night from 9pm to 1am.
Leave you with just couple of reference links to music from Africa.
Listening to WGBH Jazz this Friday evening, I heard Jazz from Studio Four host Steve Schwartz and
today's guest host Daniel Ian Smith raving about Jimmy Giuffre, a name I was not unfamiliar with. When they mentioned him as being of similar legendary status as Miles Davis, I had to find out more about Giuffre. Sadly, I learned, he died earlier this year in April, just 2 days short of his 87th birthday.
Fortunately, thanks to youtube and other online resources and of course his music CDs, he lives on for those of us who are finding him only now.
Ran into a poem by Aimee Nezhukumatathil through a post at Robert Lee Brewer's website: Poetic Asides.
Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia
The fear of long wordsOn the first day of classes, I secretly beg
my students, Don't be afraid of me. I know
my last name on your semester scheduleis chopped off or probably misspelled--
or both. I can't help it. I know the panic
of too many consonants rubbed up
against each other, no room for vowels...
Simple and clever ...unlike many less accessible poems I run across. The above post also has an interview with the poet, who is an associate professor of English at SUNY-Fredonia.
Ran into a poem by Aimee Nezhukumatathil through a post at Robert Lee Brewer's website: Poetic Asides.
Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia
The fear of long wordsOn the first day of classes, I secretly beg
my students, Don't be afraid of me. I know
my last name on your semester scheduleis chopped off or probably misspelled--
or both. I can't help it. I know the panic
of too many consonants rubbed up
against each other, no room for vowels...
Simple and clever ...unlike many less accessible poems I run across. The above post also has an interview with the poet, who is an associate professor of English at SUNY-Fredonia.
Different jazz musicians playing a beautiful piece called Autumn Leaves
--
Were it not for music, we might in these days say, the Beautiful is dead. ~Benjamin Disraeli
So, what is a writer's job when he puts pen to paper? Phillip Roth said it best in an interview with Paris Review in Fall 1984
The idea is to perceive your invention as a reality that can be understood as a dream. The idea is to turn flesh and blood into literary characters and literary characters; into flesh and blood.But sometimes, like Roth himself wrote in a 1961 essay, Writing American Fiction, literature falls short.
The American writer in the middle of the twentieth century has his hands full in trying to understand, describe, and then make credible much of American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one's meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.Indeed! I have lost count of the number of times I have wondered in recent days if some news item was satire from The Onion or real news! Reality makes satire and parody almost redundant. Life itself is a parody, no?
So, what is a writer's job when he puts pen to paper? Phillip Roth said it best in an interview with Paris Review in Fall 1984
The idea is to perceive your invention as a reality that can be understood as a dream. The idea is to turn flesh and blood into literary characters and literary characters; into flesh and blood.But sometimes, like Roth himself wrote in a 1961 essay, Writing American Fiction, literature falls short.
The American writer in the middle of the twentieth century has his hands full in trying to understand, describe, and then make credible much of American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one's meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.Indeed! I have lost count of the number of times I have wondered in recent days if some news item was satire from The Onion or real news! Reality makes satire and parody almost redundant. Life itself is a parody, no?
as if what exists, exists
so that it can be lost
and become precious
Beautiful lines from a poem "In Passing" by winner of the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, Lisel Mueller. I found it in the preface to a book of short stories, Rear View, by Peter Duval. (Raving intro to the book by poet, writer, biographer, critic, anthologist (and literary executor for Gore Vidal), Jay Parini, btw.)
Here's the entire poem. Short and sweet but so poetic and packs a punch. This is what poetry is all about!
In Passing
How swiftly the strained honey
of afternoon light
flows into darkness
and the closed bud shrugs off
its special mystery
in order to break into blossom:
as if what exists, exists
so that it can be lost
and become precious
~ Lisel Mueller ~
from her book of poems, Alive Together
More poems by Lisel Mueller in a Book Review of Alive Together.
Leave you with this beautiful prose from famous poets:
A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasure of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause. Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void forever craves fresh food. Poetry strengthens the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb. A poet therefore would do ill to embody his own conceptions of right and wrong, which are usually those of his place and time, in his poetical creations, which participate in neither. - Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defense of Poetry.
“During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours, our conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination. The sudden charm, which accidents of light and shade, which moon-light or sunset diffused over a known and familiar landscape, appeared to represent the practicability of combining both.” - S. T. Coleridge, Chapter XIV, Biographia Literaria (1817)
And, Wordsworth, of course, described poetry as the "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," and "emotions recollected in tranquility"; phrases that I heard first in 8th 0r 9th grade from my English teacher - Ramachandran Sir*, who was the one I should credit with me falling in love with the English language and for my literary interests, which have obviously developed and honed continually since then.
I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. - William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads.
* I have no idea if Ramachandran Sir is still around (he was probably in his early 60s in 1984-85) but perhaps appropriate then to dedicate this post to my memories of that which is lost but has became precious; not because I lost it but because I treasure the memories still. (I actually woke up today with memories of my father.... actually woke up with the words "the taste of memories on my tongue" somehow popping in my head! I have more or less given up writing poetry (an endeavor which never really developed further from being an attempt to seek catharsis through writing) but maybe that phrase needs to be developed into a short poem some day!
as if what exists, exists
so that it can be lost
and become precious
Beautiful lines from a poem "In Passing" by winner of the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, Lisel Mueller. I found it in the preface to a book of short stories, Rear View, by Peter Duval. (Raving intro to the book by poet, writer, biographer, critic, anthologist (and literary executor for Gore Vidal), Jay Parini, btw.)
Here's the entire poem. Short and sweet but so poetic and packs a punch. This is what poetry is all about!
In Passing
How swiftly the strained honey
of afternoon light
flows into darkness
and the closed bud shrugs off
its special mystery
in order to break into blossom:
as if what exists, exists
so that it can be lost
and become precious
~ Lisel Mueller ~
from her book of poems, Alive Together
More poems by Lisel Mueller in a Book Review of Alive Together.
Leave you with this beautiful prose from famous poets:
A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasure of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause. Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void forever craves fresh food. Poetry strengthens the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb. A poet therefore would do ill to embody his own conceptions of right and wrong, which are usually those of his place and time, in his poetical creations, which participate in neither. - Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defense of Poetry.
“During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours, our conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination. The sudden charm, which accidents of light and shade, which moon-light or sunset diffused over a known and familiar landscape, appeared to represent the practicability of combining both.” - S. T. Coleridge, Chapter XIV, Biographia Literaria (1817)
And, Wordsworth, of course, described poetry as the "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," and "emotions recollected in tranquility"; phrases that I heard first in 8th 0r 9th grade from my English teacher - Ramachandran Sir*, who was the one I should credit with me falling in love with the English language and for my literary interests, which have obviously developed and honed continually since then.
I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. - William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads.
* I have no idea if Ramachandran Sir is still around (he was probably in his early 60s in 1984-85) but perhaps appropriate then to dedicate this post to my memories of that which is lost but has became precious; not because I lost it but because I treasure the memories still. (I actually woke up today with memories of my father.... actually woke up with the words "the taste of memories on my tongue" somehow popping in my head! I have more or less given up writing poetry (an endeavor which never really developed further from being an attempt to seek catharsis through writing) but maybe that phrase needs to be developed into a short poem some day!
Via an article at the Bookslut on Charles Simic's poetry, I read this closing stanza of his poem, The Altar (which can be read in its entirety at Garrison Keillor's Writers Almanac)
An altar dignifying the god of chance.And let me add to that this quote from his essay "Notes on Poetry and Philosophy"
What is beautiful, it cautions,
Is found accidentally and not sought after.
What is beautiful is easily lost.
My poems (in the beginning) are like a table on which one places interesting things one has found on one's walks: a pebble, a rusty nail, a strangely shaped root, the corner of a tornphotograph, etc. ... where after months of looking at them and thinking about them daily, certain surprising relationships, which hint at meanings, begin to appear. These objets trouves of poetry are, of course, bits of language. The poem is the place where one hears what the language is really saying, where the full meaning of words begins to emerge.That's not quite right! It's not so much what the words mean that is crucial, but rather, what they show and reveal.That's what I hope to achieve through my posts under the Life label....not so much what these incidents, words, and stories mean but rather, "what they show and reveal" about life in all its joys, fragility, melancholy and absurdities.
Via an article at the Bookslut on Charles Simic's poetry, I read this closing stanza of his poem, The Altar (which can be read in its entirety at Garrison Keillor's Writers Almanac)
An altar dignifying the god of chance.And let me add to that this quote from his essay "Notes on Poetry and Philosophy"
What is beautiful, it cautions,
Is found accidentally and not sought after.
What is beautiful is easily lost.
My poems (in the beginning) are like a table on which one places interesting things one has found on one's walks: a pebble, a rusty nail, a strangely shaped root, the corner of a tornphotograph, etc. ... where after months of looking at them and thinking about them daily, certain surprising relationships, which hint at meanings, begin to appear. These objets trouves of poetry are, of course, bits of language. The poem is the place where one hears what the language is really saying, where the full meaning of words begins to emerge.That's not quite right! It's not so much what the words mean that is crucial, but rather, what they show and reveal.That's what I hope to achieve through my posts under the Life label....not so much what these incidents, words, and stories mean but rather, "what they show and reveal" about life in all its joys, fragility, melancholy and absurdities.
The only thing we have to fear is fear it'self - nameless, unreasoning, unjustified, terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. - FDR - First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1933
I just read that earlier this week Federico GarcÃa Lorca's family dropped their "longstanding objections to unearthing the mass grave where the poet's remains are believed to lie".
Lorca, widely considered one of Spain's greatest poets of the 20th century, was shot to death at age 38 by Nationalist militia at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War and thrown into an unmarked grave somewhere between VÃznar and Alfacar, near Granada.
More than half a million people are thought to have been killed during the civil war of 1936-39, triggered by Franco's armed uprising against the democratically elected Republican Government. After Franco's victory, historians say that 50,000 Republicans were executed by Franco's forces and tens of thousands locked up. His iron rule lasted until his death in 1975. More than 500,000 people were killed during the Spanish Civil WarAnd so, at this time a poem by Lorca (as translated by Robert Bly):
Although the Nationalist dead were honoured and given proper burials during Franco's rule, Republican victims have lain in unmarked mass graves for seven decades. After Franco's death, political parties agreed to put the past behind them, granting a blanket amnesty for crimes committed under the dictator's rule. For years, Spaniards subscribed to an unwritten “pact of silence” about the past in an attempt to let the country's new democracy take root.
Gacela of the Dark DeathI want to sleep the sleep of the apples,
I want to get far away from the busyness of the cemeteries.
I want to sleep the sleep of that child
who longed to cut his heart open far out at sea.
I don't want them to tell me again how the corpse keeps all its blood,
how the decaying mouth goes on begging for water.
I'd rather not hear about the torture sessions the grass arranges for
nor about how the moon does all its work before dawn
with its snakelike nose.
I want to sleep for half a second,
a second, a minute, a century,
but I want everyone to know that I am still alive,
that I have a golden manger inside my lips,
that I am the little friend of the west wind,
that I am the elephantine shadow of my own tears.
When it's dawn just throw some sort of cloth over me
because I know dawn will toss fistfuls of ants at me,
and pour a little hard water over my shoes
so that the scorpion claws of the dawn will slip off.
Because I want to sleep the sleep of the apples,
and learn a mournful song that will clean all earth away from me,
because I want to live with that shadowy child
who longed to cut his heart open far out at sea
There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats. - Albert Schweitzer
Inside the Actor’s Studio questions
What is your favorite word?
What is your least favorite word?
What turns you on (creatively, spiritually or emotionally)?
What turns you off (creatively, spiritually or emotionally)?
What sound or noise do you love?
What sound or noise do you hate?
What is your favorite curse word?
What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?
What profession would you not like to do?
If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?
"Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot." - Neil Gaiman, #19 in The Sandman series.Again...this reminds me of something I wrote recently! I really need to go rework that piece. Its good but good enough for others to read yet (outside of the workshop setting, where I shared it.) I need to polish it and maybe even re-write it in another way before I can share it here or on some other public forum.
For anyone who needs a break from the mundane routineness of life...
... though my personal preference would be some good Belgian or Swiss chocolate... not Kit-Kat! :)
"When an asmatic says "I love you," and when an asthmatic says "I love you madly," there's a difference. The difference of a word. A word's a lot. It could be stop, or inhaler. It could even be ambulance."That's from a short piece called in The Girl on the Fridge by Etgar Keret, (translated from the Hebrew by Miriam Shlesinger and Sondra Silverston). The book has many such short (1-3 pages usually) but clever and creatively written pieces, which serve as savory quick bites - full of the bitterness, sweetness, and the humor in the asynchronous absurdities and idiosyncrasies of life. His stories cleverly bring forth the surprises, disillusions and the disenchantments of life. Scrumptious! (No.. I am not hungry. Just extending the metaphor of quick bites too far, I suppose! :)) The blurbs from various reviews of his work excerpted at the beginning of the book claim his work as incisive, witty, insightful, joyful, moving, cynical, hopeful, wild, weird, exuding a life-changing and life affirming fire and zing, full of overarching sorrow, humorous and with a touch of the absurd, universal and yet utterly bizarre. Its all that and more... just like life.
Like most of Keret's work, "Fatso" will make you laugh, then wipe the smile off your face with its calculated manipulation of fear, desire and aggression, and its wistful paean to the insufficiency of human relationships.Or in his own words, also from the same review:
"Some people write from the brain or the heart. I write from the kishkes," he says cheerfully in accented but flowing English. "Telling a story is the easiest thing. The moment there is an emotion I can name, I can give you 20 stories to choose from. I always start from a sensation, an image, never a plot. For some writers, the act of writing is like construction or engineering, building consciously. For me, it's the exact opposite. The best metaphor is surfing. You go to the ocean, wait for some wave to hit you, and try to keep your balance. You don't have GPS or a map. It's like exploding, and you can't explode slowly."(kishkes = guts)
I have been strolling the internet and scrolling through a whole bunch of poetry and literature blogs tonight. Found a post with the poem Four Poems for Robin by Gary Snyder at one of them, from which I excerpt these lines that resonated with me!
I feel ancient, as though I hadAlso these beautiful lines from a Mark Strand poem called The Remains; posted here.
Lived many lives.
And may never now know
If I am a fool
Or have done what my
----- karma demands.
Time tells me what I am. I change and I am the same.How powerful those 2 lines. How beautiful. Reminds me of something I read earlier:
I empty myself of my life and my life remains.
"When language fails, poetry begins".Go read the entire piece where that gem of a sentence appears. (A succinct hurrah for poetry, if there ever was one!) It is something Andrew Joran (never heard of him before this!) wrote in a piece called “The Emergency”, which....
..... originally appeared as a limited-circulation chapbook from Velocities press (2002) and was subsequently published in Andrew Joron’s collection of poetry, Fathom (Black Square Editions, 2003), and in The Cry At Zero: Selected Prose (Counterpath Press, 2007).I found it at the Poetry-Poetic site, which is going to have daily political poetry news - from September 15th till the elections on November 4th, 2008.
“Pain is a detached thing…It’s like the bass in a good song. As first you don’t feel it, but in the end it’s what you’re dancing to.” - Julia Glass in I see you everywhere.Pain (and hurt) is probably what one is dancing to all along; we just realize it in the end. Btw, I love the bass, esp. in jazz music. (Ah hum, Mingus!)
I remember Syd Barrett passed away couple years ago and now another Pink Floyd founding member, Richard Wright has moved on. Just read this when I logged into my Yahoo! mail and happened to notice a post (at Yahoo! Music Blogs) that said: Richard Wright: Wish You Were Here
No one can replace Richard Wright. He was my musical partner and my friend. In the welter of arguments about who or what was Pink Floyd, Rick's enormous input was frequently forgotten. He was gentle, unassuming and private but his soulful voice and playing were vital, magical components of our most recognised Pink Floyd sound. I have never played with anyone quite like him. The blend of his and my voices and our musical telepathy reached their first major flowering in 1971 on 'Echoes'. In my view all the greatest PF moments are the ones where he is in full flow. After all, without 'Us and Them' and 'The Great Gig In The Sky', both of which he wrote, what would 'The Dark Side Of The Moon' have been? Without his quiet touch the Album 'Wish You Were Here' would not quite have worked. In our middle years, for many reasons he lost his way for a while, but in the early Nineties, with 'The Division Bell', his vitality, spark and humour returned to him and then the audience reaction to his appearances on my tour in 2006 was hugely uplifting and it's a mark of his modesty that those standing ovations came as a huge surprise to him, (though not to the rest of us). Like Rick, I don't find it easy to express my feelings in words, but I loved him and will miss him enormously.Roger Waters issued a statement:
I was very sad to hear of Rick's premature death, I knew he had been ill, but the end came suddenly and shockingly. My thoughts are with his family, particularly [his children] Jamie and Gala and their mum Juliet, who I knew very well in the old days, and always liked very much and greatly admired. As for the man and his work, it is hard to overstate the importance of his musical voice in the Pink Floyd of the '60s and '70s. The intriguing, jazz influenced, modulations and voicings so familiar in 'Us and Them' and 'Great Gig in the Sky,' which lent those compositions both their extraordinary humanity and their majesty, are omnipresent in all the collaborative work the four of us did in those times. Rick's ear for harmonic progression was our bedrock. I am very grateful for the opportunity that Live 8 afforded me to engage with him and David [Gilmour] and Nick [Mason] that one last time. I wish there had been more.Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason told Entertainment Weekly:
Like any band, you can never quite quantify who does what. But Pink Floyd wouldn’t have been Pink Floyd if [we] hadn’t had Rick. I think there’s a feeling now -- particularly after all the warfare that went on with Roger and David trying to make clear what their contribution was -- that perhaps Rick rather got pushed into the background. Because the sound of Pink Floyd is more than the guitar, bass, and drum thing. Rick was the sound that knitted it all together... He was by far the quietest of the band, right from day one. And, I think, probably harder to get to know than the rest of us... It's almost that George Harrison thing. You sort of forget that they did a lot more than perhaps they’re given credit for.RIP, Richard; coming back to us through your music.
...
Lost in thought and lost in time
While the seeds of life and the seeds of change were planted
Outside the rain fell dark and slow
While I pondered on this dangerous but irresistible pastime
I took a heavenly ride through our silence
I knew the moment had arrived
For killing the past and coming back to life
..
I am a great fan of the Post Secret blog (also now at Myspace and previously blogged about here; also these videos at youtube that capture some good posts from the past 3 years: 1, 2, 3)...
... and today, I found another such site - Common Ties - that captures all the tiny ironies, paradoxes, apprehensions, poignancy, trepidation, remorses, desires, fears, frailty & vulnerability, and the overriding melancholy of life. (Yes... joys too, but those are not as interesting and do not make it to the posts at these sites as often.)
But there is a hint of humor and elation in the way we see the world through all this (which prevents us from despairing and getting disconsolate) and that is what I most adore about many of these posts. There are many really good ones that I enjoyed; a few of which I am re-posting here, with all copyrights still assigned to the rightful owner.
What was the most meaningful "I love you" spoken to you? (- Common Ties post, 2008-08-21)
What is the most gracious act of kindness you have witnessed? (- Common Ties post, 2008-08-26)
And one which may be me some day.... (if there is a God and I get to see her, that is. For all you know, I may have an appointment with him, no? Or it!)
What is your most obsessive thought? (- Common Ties post, 2008-08-19)
Anyways...go enjoy the site. It is such a wonderful exposition of the disarray of life and the common ties that keep us glued together.
Almost everyone's seen this picture (cover picture again in National Geographic's 100 best pictures issue) from a NG article in1985 and some may have even read her story, 17 years after that famous picture was taken.
Today, I ran into this picture on Flickr, inspired by that famous picture.
Actually, Aaron achieves this effect through digital manipulation, as he explains and shows here; the link takes you to his blog, where he has many other examples of his work.
Creative stuff!
