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Re: Radical Jewish Culture
by Herb Levy 08 Dec '02

08 Dec '02

Fritz Feger <mail(a)fritzfeger.de> wrote: >Thank you all for the illuminating discussion on this! I must say that it >leaves a slightly incoherent taste about the whole RJC thing. I second the >argument that, if you label something like that, it would be naive to >believe that it isn't read politically. Sorry if this seems redundant. Looking at the aggregate of the 70 or so discs released in the RJC series of Tzadik, I think it's at least equally naive to ONLY read the term politically. Many of the works presented as RJC have no possible overt political content, so theorizing that the term is being used strictly in its political sense is absurd. If the range of what has been presented under the rubric of RJC is incoherent based on your understanding of the phrase, the fault really may be with how you're interpreting the phrase. If you try to reconcile your theory with the actual practice you're supposedly analyzing, you'll find a lot of practice that this particular theory fails to take into account. As Wittgenstein wrote, Look to the use. -- Herb Levy P O Box 9369 Fort Worth, TX 76147 herb(a)eskimo.com

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Zorn CD covers
by Tosh 08 Dec '02

08 Dec '02

Her. It's her face. No, I am pretty sure it's a male. The image came from a Georges Bataille book : Tears of Eros. I think the photograph was taken in 1910 or 1909 (not sure about the date). Someone gave that photograph to Bataille, and it was the image that took him on his ecstasy=death=sexual trip. Right now there is a good biography that just came out on Bataille. It's on Verso. -- Tosh Berman TamTam Books http://www.tamtambooks.com

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RE: The English language -- a long, painful extrusion
by Perfect Sound Forever 08 Dec '02

08 Dec '02

>From: "Zachary Steiner" <zsteiner(a)butler.edu> >Date: Sat, 7 Dec 2002 15:13:40 -0500 > >One contributing factor to the decline of written English is all this >wonderful technology we have. The phone started the trend; we no longer >have to write letters. Television and cinema continued the trend reducing >the amount reading. The Internet is the nasty culprit >currently. Email--what seemed like a return to written >communication--turned out to amplify the laziness of spoken language. >Very few people pay attention to punctuation, capitalization, or >spelling, let alone more advanced grammatical concerns in their emails. >Most charge through the writing of an email and shoot it off as quickly >as possible. Is it really too difficult to use spell check? The Net is a great scapegoat. Religious nuts and newscasters love to say that it's destroying the youth of today, etc.. I don't believe that letters that were written with pens/pencils/typewriters were necessarily more thoughtful. It's actually easier to re-type and correct a letter on a computer (I find, at least). It always has to do with who's the author. As you point out, there's plenty of people on this list who have intelligent things to say. >The current American educational system, of which I am a part, is also >to blame. There's no question that it's a huge problem! Best, Jason Perfect Sound Forever online music magazine with warped perspectives perfect-sound(a)furious.com http://www.perfectsoundforever.com

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Re: Zorn CD covers (was Re: Radical Jewish Culture)
by Crowmeat Bob 08 Dec '02

08 Dec '02

it could be just too easy to read christian iconography into any old image, particularly involving martyrdom, because it seems to have formed a monopoly on the idea. Or mother and child, or armageddon, what-have-you. It's a system of religious capture that includes many aspects of previous religions, and in some modern forms, even adopts new ones to retain its control or continue its spread. but I doubt Zorn was trying to develop a specifically christian rhetoric of images in his choice of album covers. Some thoughts on the Jewishness of the radicle-izing root-pullers: When Zorn started on his Jewish identity trip, I was a little disappointed in him, not because of an anti-semitism on my part, but because I had already perceived his music as existing far beyond any such limited formulation of cultural identity. The beauty of his music for me was at least in part due to the fact that it held no particular culture above any other; it recognized the sphere of influence as being immanent and without hierarchy. But that doesn't mean I dislike the music or refuse to allow that it catalyzes radical becomings. And I'm really not too concerned with what the category explicitly ordains. I'll listen to it like any other music. We should all recognize that categories are at best a method of convenience for organizing music and hardly absolute. I think I would take issue with the use of the word 'purity' as well. I'd interrupt anybody using it to describe any music I hold dear. It should be a word reserved for chemistry, and even then only in relative terms. (e.g. "This acid is a hell of a lot more pure than that last batch. Let's do it tomorrow night, too.") --atomwrec >From: Joseph Zitt <jzitt(a)metatronpress.com> >To: zorn-list(a)mailman.xmission.com >Subject: Re: Zorn CD covers (was Re: Radical Jewish Culture) >Date: Sat, 7 Dec 2002 23:17:22 -0800 > >On Sun, 8 Dec 2002 01:10:33 -0600 >"Sanchez" <lupcato(a)flash.net> wrote: > > > > I find amusing the idea that the covers of albums by an artist who > > > is unmistakeably Jewish "can only bring to mind" Christian > > > iconography. > > > > > Sure, what with them not having any iconography in common... > >Hmm, this seems to conflict with the message to which I was responding, >in which you mapped the images to the crucifixion, John the Baptist, and >Madonna and Child. I think I can be correct in saying that these cannot >conceivably be considered Jewish images, no? > >-- >| jzitt(a)josephzitt.com http://www.josephzitt.com/ | >| GPG: A4224EFA http://www.mp3.com/josephzitt/ | >| == New book: Surprise Me with Beauty: the Music of Human Systems == | >| Comma / Gray Code / VoiceWAVE Silence: the John Cage Discussion List | > > >_______________________________________________ >zorn-list mailing list >zorn-list(a)mailman.xmission.com >To UNSUBSCRIBE or Change Your Subscription Options, go to the webpage below >http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/zorn-list _________________________________________________________________ STOP MORE SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail

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Re: The English language -- a long, painful extrusion
by Fritz Feger 08 Dec '02

08 Dec '02

William, the things you report from your wife's experience could also have happened in Germany, or rather happen over here every day. Seems to be a global development. (Or has it always been that way?) >If I were Dave Douglas, I'd be nervous and irritable at interviews too. If I >thought American interviewers were bad, I might be even more defensive and >precise when interviewed by someone for whom English is not their first >language. Most likely a foreign interviewer will work harder to be precise >than an American interviewer, but how can he know that going into the >interview? Just a proposal: let him complete his sentences, at least one sentence. I'd rather try to be more patient in correcting all those terrible, carreer-destroying misunderstandings and thereby avoid appearing rude to the interviewer with my paranoia which could, more paranoia!, annoy him and get him to misunderstand me on purpose! > > And to make my interviewer working harder after him saying not > > even a whole sentence: I beg your pardon. > >[...] Is the "I beg your pardon" part you begging >my pardon, or DD begging EdV's pardon, or EdV begging DD's pardon? Or >something else? (In this version, I provide the second point of perspective. >Which is better?) It was your pardon I was begging. I thought it to be an odd, 19th century-ish pedagogical method to try to make someone work harder by interrupting him after a couple of words. But I think I didn't get the whole point of your alternative responses, surely due to the language barrier. > > If DD had considered Efrén's > > English as dangerously weak (why should he?) there would have been many > > more polite / didactic / operational ways to tackle that. > >I agree. But in a world where John Zorn can get away with the rudeness he >gets away with, I found Dave Douglas' responses blunt, but not outright >rude. I think this is the ideal point to confess my deep admiration for Dave Douglas as a musician. And to confess my admiration for some outright rudenesses of Zorn I had the luck to witness. But nevertheless... Fritz ############################################## Fritz Feger mail(a)fritzfeger.de www.fritzfeger.com ##############################################

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Re: Radical Jewish Culture (lengthy)
by Fritz Feger 08 Dec '02

08 Dec '02

Herb, I'm sorry of being (co-)responsible for redundancies in your posting, and to contribute to talking issues to death. I did neither mean nor say that me or anyone else will read Zorn's use of the term "radical" ONLY politically, or that it has to be understood STRICTLY in its political sense. You are reading that into my remark that "it would be naive to believe that it isn't read politically". Why didn't you read it like: "by some and maybe among other readings"? That is how I meant it. (I'm tempted to quote Dave Douglas with his advanced interview technique, but I won't) My own (hypothetical) political reading of RJC's "radical", for example, resulted from my inability to figure out in which other e.g. musical or "cultural identity" or whatever sense it could be intended. In case that, as you "wrote earlier, the aesthetic radicality of any particular musical item is a matter of taste & prior knowledge more than anything else" (what one could well dispute, but I won't), then I can claim for me the right to find RJC music not overly radical, or at least less radical than certain non-RJC Zorn disks, can't I? To set that straight: I'm perfectly fine with Zorn calling a CD series RJC, and I'm aware that you cannot change such a label after a bunch of instances. I just had this unexplainable desire to learn what this is meant to tell me. Maybe I should rather be peacefully waiting until suddenly the, as you put it, "sort of self-defining" process occurs. >If you try to reconcile your theory with the actual practice you're >supposedly analyzing, you'll find a lot of practice that this particular >theory fails to take into account. >As Wittgenstein wrote, Look to the use. Are you trying to tell me that my use and understanding of "radical" is "theory", and yours is not only the same as Zorn's (inevitably so by the two of you being American?) but "actual practice", as if there were only one actual, i.e. right practice? If you like to rely on Wittgenstein on that matter, you'd better respect my "European" discourse (and Zorn, who has travelled Europe and sells I don't know how much of his records over here). But anyway I don't believe that there's so much of a difference in the use of the term in Europe and America as you imply: some Germans have a radical haircut too, and "radical animal rights activist" or "radical muslims" refers to the same kind of people/non-lingual practice on both sides of the Atlantic ocean. Just for the record. Even the latest Wittgenstein knows to tell adequate use from inadequate. To advocate an account where the meaning of a concept is determined by its use doesn't mean that I am free to use the word "radical" in some sense which I pick to my taste. On the contrary: a meaning theory of use demands that my use of "radical" is the same use as (one of the) uses other speakers fancy. You may not leave the game; there is no private language with Wittgenstein. If this is true, then you could simply teach us Europeans what the American Zorn means by "radical". Go ahead! >I also suspect that the definition of what Zorn includes in the series >may have drifted over the years: while he may have had some more strict >ideas early on, these ideas may have loosened, to the point where the >title is a quite effective marketing ploy which he'd be a fool to drop. That may well be the case. I don't mind. I'm simply curious what it was intended to transport some day. Fritz np: Naked City (still my all time favourite of Zorn's) ############################################## Fritz Feger mail(a)fritzfeger.de www.fritzfeger.com ##############################################

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Really Eerie Music (R.E.M.)
by Kris Visser 08 Dec '02

08 Dec '02

Hey folks, I would like to hear some more really eerie music. Music that brings you nightmares, as worse as possible. Can anyone give me some recommends of really eerie music that I haven't heard yet. Especially in the classical field there's a lot of music that I haven't heard yet. But any recommend is much appreciated. These are some records which I really love and I think that are really eerie: Naked City - Grand Guignol Painkiller - Execution Ground Kronos Quartet - Black Angels Keiji Haino - Watasi Dake Bernard Herrmann - Psycho OST Goblin - Suspiria OST Please, anyone, let me know of some more really eerie nightmarish music out there. Music you should not play at night. Any record I have not mentioned. I need help! Thanks, Kris

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Re: But is it stealing?
by Herb Levy 07 Dec '02

07 Dec '02

Nvinokur(a)aol.com wrote: >However, if one purchased an LP, thereby paying the mechanical rights, >shouldn't the record co. replace that LP for free with a CD, since the record >co. changed the listening format. Now if you want to replace the format, the >mechanical rights are paid twice for the same music. If your 1998 car came with a cassette player as standard equipment and the 2003 model comes with a CD player as standard, the manufacturer doesn't have any obligation to retrofit the earlier car for free. No publisher has an obligation to replace the hardcover book you own with the newly released paperback copy. Your choice to upgrade (if that's what it is) to CD is your choice, not the company's responsibility. -- Herb Levy P O Box 9369 Fort Worth, TX 76147 herb(a)eskimo.com

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The English language -- a long, painful extrusion
by William Crump 07 Dec '02

07 Dec '02

The absolute first thing I want to do here is thank everyone for whom English is a second language and who works hard at reading and writing it, speaking it and understanding it spoken. As you probably learned after your first few interactions with Americans, you work harder at the language than we do -- we who allegedly grow up with it as our first language. My wife has stepped back and forth between the dual careers of doing journalism and teaching journalism at the college level, and the stories she tells drive me to the edge of despair. One student in particular seemed to embody the problems that exist in many young people working today in print and broadcast media. He was articulate -- glib, even -- but his written work was full of howlers like "for all intensive purposes" and "visa vee" (instead of vis-a-vis). Pique, peek and peak were all the same to him, spelled differently depending on the day of the week. What weak grasp he had of English he gained conversationally, not through study of the written word. He admitted that he had never read for pleasure and wasn't about to start. I'd like to say that this idiot washed out of the journalism program and went on to a great career in standup comedy, but in fact, he was working at a small daily as a staff writer before he finished school, despite all the bad grades my wife could throw at him. He was confident and personable, not phone-shy, and could turn a school board meeting into twenty inches of editable copy quickly. America's newspapers are full of him and his kind. He probably won't ever have trouble getting a job. But he could hold the written English language in one hand and a steaming pile of pigshit in the other and not know the difference. Now, to pull this all together. Dave Douglas is obviously an articulate guy. >From the few interviews with him that I've read, he chooses his words very carefully. Coincidentally, I'm the same way. I've had occasion to be interviewed for stories three times in my life, and I was a sweating, shaking mess afterwards each time, because I was so nervous about being misheard or misquoted. If I were Dave Douglas, a working professional in music, subject to being interviewed several times a year -- or if I were Skip Heller, Ellery Eskelin, Stephen Drury, David Slusser, you name it -- IF I was one of those people, AND I knew what William Crump knows about young working "journalists" -- I'd consider chucking it all and getting a job behind the counter at McDonalds, rather than risk any part of my career in their hands. The fact that they don't speaks highly of their commitment to their work. If I were Dave Douglas, I'd be nervous and irritable at interviews too. If I thought American interviewers were bad, I might be even more defensive and precise when interviewed by someone for whom English is not their first language. Most likely a foreign interviewer will work harder to be precise than an American interviewer, but how can he know that going into the interview? All he can do is use language as precisely as possible. Not wanting his words to be rephrased (and thereby possibly misinterpreted) may be an effort to maintain that precision on both sides of the Q/A divide. I don't blame Samuel Delany for insisting on written interviews over spoken ones. Now, some specific points: >From: Fritz Feger <mail(a)fritzfeger.de> > > If I want to know if someone understands what I say it doesn't make any > sense to let him repeat what I say. The only way to figure that > out--granted I am interested in the slightest--is to let him rephrase it, > isnt't it? It's true that depth is only achieved by two+ points of perspective. If I stand in front of a house and say it's a white house, and you're standing behind it and the back side is painted red, then you might think I'm sadly misinformed or dangerously delusional. (Thank you, Robert Heinlein!) Efren's rephrasing can be seen an effort to shed light and bring depth via two-point perspective. But the interviewee may be concerned, often rightly so, that the interviewer is only viewing the matter from their perspective and not coming over to look at the house from THEIR side. This is why an interviewee might conceivably bristle at rephrasing. > And to make my interviewer working harder after him saying not > even a whole sentence: I beg your pardon. Response A: I don't know you mean by this. We may be working with a partial language barrier here. (Please note that I'm going out of my way not to rephrase it for you. I'll simply announce my confusion and let you provide the rephrasing, and thus the second point of perspective.) Response B: I don't know what you mean by this. We may be working with a partial language barrier here. Is the "I beg your pardon" part you begging my pardon, or DD begging EdV's pardon, or EdV begging DD's pardon? Or something else? (In this version, I provide the second point of perspective. Which is better?) > If DD had considered Efrén's > English as dangerously weak (why should he?) there would have been many > more polite / didactic / operational ways to tackle that. I agree. But in a world where John Zorn can get away with the rudeness he gets away with, I found Dave Douglas' responses blunt, but not outright rude. Best, William Crump

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Townes Van Zandt (was Re: Really Eerie Music)
by thesubtlebody 07 Dec '02

07 Dec '02

> From: "Andrew" <ahorton(a)vt.edu> > Don't feel bad. I spent 30 minutes the other day > talking a friend's ear > off about (and recommending) "Townes Van Zandt" - > only to get home and > realize that I had actually been talking about Van > Dyke Parks. :) That's very funny, I've done worse than that...filibustering for an artist at length, then popping them on a week later and finding that I don''t enjoy said record anymore. (This actually happens often to me with films: recollection and impression and rumination can start to create some critical dissonance.) But if it's any consolation, I personally think you did your friend a favor; Van Dyke Parks is great, but Townes Van Zandt is absolutely great. I read somewhere that he briefly worked on an abortive collaboration with Sonic Youth. Where dd I read that? Could that be true? I think it didn't work out because he died prematurely. ------s np: John vanderslice, TIME TRAVEL IS LONELY nr: Donna Tartt, THE SECRET HISTORY __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com

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