in philosophy
Søren Kierkegaard: Fear and Trembling — Abraham as more than the knight of infinite resignation, as the knight of faith, facing down the absurd, and furthermore willing it

in philosophy / philology
Crispin Sartwell: End of Story: Toward an Annihilation of Language and History — references Job and Abraham (à la Kierkegaard) as examples of loss of telos / loss of plot / loss of a “sense of narrative coherence” (18)

in sociology
Stanley Milgram: Obedience to Authority — cites the Abraham story as an example of the age-old “dilemma” of obedience (preface)

in song
Bob Dylan: “Highway 61 Revisited” — “God said to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son.’ Abe said, ‘Man, you must be puttin’ me on.’”

in fiction
Neil Simon: God’s Favorite — Job modernized and made comical

in philosophy / anthropology
René Girard: Job the Victim of his People — Job as scapegoat (not yet read)

in psychology
C.G. Jung: Answer to Job and Edward F. Edinger: Transformation of the God-Image: An Elucidation of Jung’s Answer to Job (not yet read)

other disturbing lessons:
Cain and Abel (in fiction: East of Eden by John Steinbeck)

David and Bathsheba and Uriah (in fiction: God Knows by Joseph Heller)

the prodigal son (As a child I objected to the prodigal son getting a feast while the “good” son gets no reward. As an adult I’m frustrated that my brain is stuck believing “prodigal” means someone who has gone away and now returned. I always have to concentrate to land on the right definition.)

Notes:

Crawford
-Hitler wanted to “cleanse” music too; wanted to get rid of the culture of chaos in the Weimar Republic

-book covers 31 of the musicians who immigrated to L.A. during the Nazi era including composers and all kinds of performers, especially focused on those with paper “legacy” for research — letters etc.

-utilized Gladys Caldwell’s collection of newspaper articles about live music reviews starting from the ’20s from LAPL

-writers came to L.A. too and some of these people knew each other (Mann, Brecht); émigré circles

-chapter about film composers — how they saved themselves as “composers” (didn’t want to be looked down on as film composers only); composer for Errol Flynn movies

-in those days in Hollywood every studio had a full orchestra

-LACC opera workshop, first of its kind (i.e. at public school); but no opera in L.A. until 1986 which was tough for many of the composers who came from opera-rich Europe, so singers trained in L.A. had to go to Europe

-why did so many of these artists end up in L.A.? tried other European cities first but the Great Depression meant quotas had been set up to save jobs for locals, whereas the film industry had a lot of jobs to go around. +, of course, the weather

-Ojai Festival

-people saving their money to bring people out of Europe

Kraft
-after the wars arts take on a new dimension: after WWI experimentation (Schoenberg 12-tone), after WWII trying to make order from the chaos; in these cases didn’t draw on the past so much

-Tom Mix westerns uncredited composers

-”no minor chords” (Sam Goldwyn)

-L.A. Music Festival (Waxman)

-playing “donuts” = whole notes

Lessons learned:
1. I always doubt my friends’ pronunciations, apparently just to be difficult.
2. I always forget movie titles and never give adequate descriptions but still manage to sound pretentious.
3. I always get songs my friends don’t like stuck in their heads.

yes, i’m the difficult friend.

Quick history lesson: Built in 1928, The Dunbar Hotel, at 4225 S. Central Ave. in Los Angeles, hosted the first NAACP national convention and soon became known as “the hub of Los Angeles black culture.” In the 1930s and ’40s its nightclub hosted some of the most well known jazz figures of the time, including Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Lena Horne, Ella Fitzgerald, and Billie Holiday. The neighborhood around the Dunbar was home to other famous jazz clubs (Club Alabam, the DownBeat, and Ivie’s Chicken Shack, etc.). The Dunbar and surrounding area began to deteriorate in the 1950s for various reasons, but Central Avenue is part of jazz and Los Angeles history.

The annual Central Avenue Jazz Festival is held in front of the Dunbar Hotel on Central Avenue and 42nd Street. There are a few blocks of street vendors, culminating in a tent where a live jazz band is playing.

The Dunbar Hotel now houses The Museum in Black, a collection of historical items related to “Black” culture from throughout history and around the world.—clothes, albums, photos, books, etc. The museum’s owner has apparently been collecting items for about 50 years.

There’s always some nice about community-oriented street fairs, especially in a city as diverse as L.A. The problem with this one is that the Jazz Festival does a good job of bringing people to this historic part of L.A., but does a good job of blocking the historic parts with canopies and consumerism.

I love the historic buildings, but couldn’t get a clear shot or good look. This one was interesting because the top part of the building seems like an add-on—not sure if it is or not, but, you can see in the photo, there’s the brick part then the newer-looking stucco part above. They seem to be in two different styles.

Rip It Up and Start Again is the first book-length exploration of the wildly adventurous music created in the years after punk. Renowned music journalist Simon Reynolds celebrates the futurist spirit of such bands as Joy Division, Gang of Four, Talking Heads, and Devo, which resulted in endless innovations in music, lyrics, performance, and style and continued into the early eighties with the video-savvy synth-pop of groups such as Human League, Depeche Mode, and Soft Cell, whose success coincided with the rise of MTV. Full of insight and anecdote and populated by charismatic characters, Rip It Up re-creates the idealism, urgency, and excitement of one of the most important and challenging periods in the history of popular music.

Panel Discussion

Feb 28 2006. To promote the release of the USA edition of his book ‘Rip It Up & Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984′ author Simon Reynolds held a panel discussion at Mo Pitkin’s on NYC’s Lower East Side.

Contort Yourself: No Wave New York [i was probably searching the internet for James Chance/James White]

(a review by Simon Reynolds of some James Chance reissues/live album for Mojo probably 1995)
Sick muthafunker James White was a key player in all this miscegenated mayhem. Swiftly following up the 1979 debut Buy, White changed his band’s name from the Contortions to the Blacks, and released Off White on the ultra-hip Ze label. The opener Contort Yourself encapsulates White’s sonic and lyrical shtick. Over brittle funk guitar, neurotic bass and a hissing hi-hat disco beat, James spurted the infantile squall of his bebop sax and rapped nihilistic nursery rhymes: “now is the time/to lose all control/distort your body/and twist your soul”. Next came the vile misogny of Stained Sheets, a duet juxtaposing Stella Rico’s needy, orgasmic whimpers with White’s sadistic contempt. A blankly ironic cover of Irving Berlin’s (Tropical) Heatwave segues into Almost Black, the most dubious homage to blackness-as-primitivism since Norman Mailer’s 1957 essay The White Negro. That said, Off White’s febrile funk remains queerly compelling, even if you’re left feeling so soiled you have to take a bath afterwards.

songs mentioned but not in soundtrack:

• “Little Latin Lupe Lu”, Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels / The Righteous Brothers
• “I Just Called To Say I Love You”, Stevie Wonder
• “Leader of the Pack”, The Shangri-Las
• “Dead Man’s Curve”, Jan & Dean
• “Tell Laura I Love Her”, Ray Peterson
• “One Step Beyond”, Madness
• “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”, The Rolling Stones
• “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”, Gordon Lightfoot
• “Many Rivers To Cross”, Jimmy Cliff
• “Angel”, Aretha Franklin
• “You’re the Best Thing That Ever Happened To Me”, Gladys Knight

Introduction: Young Riddle (director of the Nimbus Institute, created to investigate the deeper aspects of music performed by the Nimbus Ensemble)

• picture of palimpsest—first erased, but traces remain, second written at perpendicular
• Archimedes text written over by Christian text

Wim De Wit (curator of architectural collections at the Getty Research Institute)
“The Surface Scratched, or Traces Exposed: The Built Environment as a Palimpsest”

• palimpsest in architecture is NOT graffiti or signs painted/pasted over
• Union Station (1929-1939): idea for centralized rail location, but railroads did not want to pay and no one could decide where to locate it; battle for 15 years; built where original Chinatown was—in 1934 bulldozed over, seemingly completely erased; built in the CA/mission style with some French style inside, with no reference to what had been there before; (Julius Schumann—architectural photographer); in 1985 and 86 when excavation started for Metro rail, they found thousands of pieces of china and other artifacts, so the erasure was not complete

• Peter Eisenman (New York): art museum project for Cal State Long Beach (1985-86); “artificial excavations”; figure and ground; endow the site with a history that wasn’t there to begin with—layers of history; Eisenman found out certain things about history of CA and the University and put them into the architectural plans, such as shape of Rancho Los Alamitos (1849), shape of Long Beach campus (founded 1949), future shapes (2049), (1989)
• Frank Gehry house in Santa Monica (1978 began, built 1987): structure and surfaces; said “building under construction looks better” and that sentiment defined some of his style in the ’80s; he built the expansion of the house over the old house without changing the facade of the old; plywood, redwood, glass on top, see through to old
• Piazza Navona, Rome: layers of history; on top of ruins of a race track/circus; and the fountain itself is palimpsest—Egyptian obelisk on top of sculpture by Vernini

Marjorie Luesebrink, aka M.D. Coverley (director and past president of the Electronic Literature Organization, hypertext fiction author)
“The Palimpsest in Electronic Literature: Refreshing Modalities”

• Katherine Hayles
• much of critique and aesthetic of literary thought based on written page
• digitized art in museums?
• computer screen is palimpsest in continuation, constantly refreshing, changing images
• hypertext (note: I like to think of Choose Your Own Adventure books and forward-thinking, pre-html hypertexts)
• (note: programmers as writers? special breed)
• (note: need def. what kind of site is “electronic literature” and what is just information. some information sites very creative)

Dan Hosken (associate professor of music at Cal State Northridge, composer of acoustic and electronic music)
“Erasing Xenakis: Creating a Palimpsest of Palimpsest”

• Iannis Xanakis Palimpsest (1979)
• explains how he worked with this piece based on early overwriting procedures: unbind, erase, cut, turn, overwrite, rebind
• palimpsests reuse something of value (parchment/vellum). what is of value to musician is not the notes/recording, but the audience attention.
• to overwrite a document, must have hostile or at least indifferent attitude toward the text. this was difficult for Hoskin.
• erase progressively the music in various ways as he moved through the piece, and like the Archimedes, the original text breaks through sometimes
• Hoskin’s work, overwriting the orig., was “digitally born”

etc.:

“The traditional role of architecture has been not only to realize a sheltering function, but to represent and symbolize it as well. It is proposed in this project that while a museum must shelter art, it does not necessarily follow that it must symbolize its activity. Instead, it could represent the relationship of art to society, raise questions about the museum as a social institution, or it could propose a new representation of that institution.”—Peter Eisenman, read more

[event details]________________
Sat., March 24, 2pm, FREE

Hammer Museum
10899 Wilshire Blvd [map]
Los Angeles, CA 90024

The Nimbus Institute & Hammer Museum present:

“Building, Destroying or Ignoring: Examining Creative Relationships to a Past—Palimpsest as Metaphor”

“In tandem with the Nimbus Ensemble’s March 29 concert in Zipper Hall, the Nimbus Institute presents three renowned scholars exploring intriguing aspects of the past-present relationship. These stimulating lectures will examine how substrata from a past interacting with present surface features informs our understanding and aesthetic responses.”

reading:

• Joni Mitchell & Graham Nash, Stephen Stills, James Taylor
• while Joni was in Europe, wrote song “California”
• Judy Sill as the female Nick Drake

q&a:

• Who are the central figures of the book? David Geffen & Asylum records, Jackson Browne as a leader and the unofficial a&r for Asylum
• why choose this topic? I like the story of relationships between people. this is a “close-knit” “organic” group of people. Laurel Canyon scene. hung out at the bar at the Troubadour.
• why no Steely Dan? not really a part of this scene, they separated themselves, but they did write some of the best songs about Los Angeles
• Led Zeppelin obsessed w/ Southern California
• Linda Ronstadt—didn’t get respect because not a songwriter herself? but she was a great song picker and largely responsible for putting the Eagles together
• who didn’t you get to interview/talk to that you would have liked to? the Eagles, Neil Young, the people who aren’t alive anymore (Judy Sill etc.)
• is there such thing as modern singer/songwriters? is the genre lost? modern singer/songwriters who are good in L.A.: Beck, Elliott Smith

_______________________________________

[event details]

Monday, March 19, 7:00pm, FREE
Book Soup
8818 Sunset Blvd. [map]
W. Hollywood, CA 90069

Barney Hoskyns presents and signs Hotel California: The True-Life Adventures of Crosby, Stills, Nash, Young, Mitchell, Taylor, Browne, Ronstadt, Geffen, the Eagles, and Their Many Friends

“In the late sixties and early seventies, Los Angeles was a hotbed of musical creativity—the home base of Joni Mitchell, the Eagles, James Taylor, Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne, and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, among many others. Now, drawing on exclusive interviews with many of the leading players, music journalist Barney Hoskyns recreates the excitement, ferment, and energy of those years. We see the genesis of Crosby, Stills, and Nash at Joni Mitchell’s house in Laurel Canyon. We see the Eagles implode in backstage fistfights after the success of their huge hit album Hotel California. And we get the real story on David Geffen and the other money men who nurtured, bankrolled– and some say corrupted—the L.A. music scene. Filled with revealing anecdotes that chronicle the drug-fueled chaos, bed-hopping antics, and enduring musical achievements of the era, Hotel California is a must-read for classic rock fans everywhere.”

Notes from the movie:

• How much does it take for lyrics to lose their meaning (to the audience and to the singer)? Watching the footage of some of these singers (the Germs, Black Flag) completely drunk and mumbling/stumbling through songs, the lyrics don’t seem important (or intelligible). Are the protest notes that supposedly define punk lost when the words can’t be understood or communicated?
• Bob Biggs (formed Slash Records in 1978 and worked on the fanzine Slash) saying something like “Punk is the last revolution” or the “only revolution for the ’80s.” As a “revolution” what did punk accomplish? Or was it, literally, “a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing”?
• Kickboy Face (worked at Slash and was in the band Catholic Discipline) saying something about how it feels like “everyone’s groovin on different planes.”
• why the homophobia and racism?… and is it class-ist too? is punk really the music for the lost, broke white kid? or was it/is it for the middle class white kid who just wants out of suburbia? (on that note, see Suburbia to see what else Spheeris has to say)
• I like the kid who talks about why people go to punk shows and get in fights—all that pent-up anger. He’s apparently a folk singer now. [Oh, and the singer for Fear is a lounge singer now. Spheeris says, stay tuned for the DVD for more where-are-they-now tidbits.]

Q&A

• The interviewer, probably in his late 50s, mentioned going to these shows in ‘79/’80 and looking for the protest because he’d heard this was protest music and he thought he could relate because he came from a generation of protest. He couldn’t find it. (he realized later the problem: he was looking for a different kind of protest.)
• Apparently one of the first times the movie screened, someone in the audience stood up during q&a and asked, “How dare you glorify these kids?” and Spheeris said she actually stood there and thought, “Did I do something wrong?”
• Decline III is mostly about survival, so not so much political protest
• I like the meta-moment when she stopped the man leading the q&a and said, “you’re such a good interviewer…asking the right questions”
• she talked about feelings of selling out (not in so many words, but that’s what it was) and how “Wayne’s World killed my career” because it brought success, but mainstream success and the things she wanted to do got lost/left behind.
• Q: “Now when you look at bands like Green Day and other ‘punk’ bands that have done so well. Was there any implication or allusion by the musicians then to an expectation or desire of future success?” A: No. they didn’t want to be part of the rest of the world.

etc.

• my brother recently wrote a paper on Dada and Punk rock. to summarize and simplify his thesis: They both failed in their attempts of revolution.
• Need to be defined: revolution & failure
• Revolution—what are they trying to revolutionize, society as a whole. just their parts of it? art and art only?
• Failure—did nothing change? Did they accomplish something just not what they wanted? when and why did punk fail? can we always find a “where it all went wrong” moment? (see also: Los Angeles Plays Itself)
• special note (quote from his paper): Members of punk culture spread news and ideas (musical or otherwise) through pervasive and sometimes anonymous fanzines. These “fanzines served as a forum for the exchange of philosophical ideas within the punk community.” They were filled with articles about the “punk aesthetic and its relationship to society as a whole” as well as punk humor, which served to foster cohesion to the punk counterculture. (Tricia Henry. Break All Rules! Punk Rock and the Making of a Style. London: UMI Research Press, 1989, p. 111) tell me more about this “punk humor”

and future reading (his bibliography in part):

• Anscombe, Isabelle and Blair, Dike. Punk. New York: Urizen Books, 1978.
• Hamelman, Steven L. But is it Garbage? On Rock and Trash. London: The University of Georgia Press, 2004.
• Laing, Dave. One Chord Wonders: Power and Meaning in Punk Rock. Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1985.
• Marcus, Greil. Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989.
• O’Hara, Craig. The Philosophy of Punk: More than Noise!. San Francisco: AK Press, 1999.
• Pegrum, Mark A. Challenging Modernity: Dada between Modern and Postmodern. New York: Berghahn Books, 2000.
• Richter, Hans. Dada: Art and Anti-Art. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2001.
• Sabin, Roger. Punk Rock: So What? The Cultural Legacy of Punk. New York: Routledge, 1999

[event details]_________________
Thursday, March 15, 7:30pm

FREE

Making It: The First Feature Series @
James Bridges Theater/Melnitz Hall [directions]
on the UCLA campus

* Q & A with Director Penelope Spheeris to follow screening

A documentary focusing on the American Punk movement of the 1970s and ’80s. This film features interviews with punk bands and offers unintentionally funny commentary on the underground movement. Accompanied by music, this quirky piece offers a glance at the roots of American punk. With Alice Bag Band, Black Flag, Catholic Discipline, Circle Jerks, Fear, Germs, and X.

“Intercuts remarkably candid and interesting interviews with concert footage of various Los Angeles punk bands. The material has been assembled with skill, wit and detachment, as it aims to depict the punk scene as even-handedly as possible…fresh and telling.” – Janet Maslin, New York Times