Now I am watching this 1940’s propaganda film for the internment camps in which we placed Japanese-Americans. I recommend it, as contains a great deal of information about camp conditions, which are quite gulag-esque despite all attempts at positive spin.
It seems that the modern concentration camp was invented in the 1890’s. Spain had them in [...]
For the next few days, I will be located (when not in class) primarily at the New Orleans Jazzfest and the Festival International de Louisiane. For an approximate idea of what it will be like, I refer everyone to the videos on my entries in songs.
In the meantime we will contemplate Velázquez’ Old Woman Frying [...]
More poetically than I, Anne Waldman asks whether it is illuminating to think of poetry as a career, or in relation to careers. The connection to institutions. To commerce. The origin of the word career in chariot races.
I would rather think of trajectories than races. Freeing the work from both competition and from establishmentarian connotations. [...]
These are some earlier notes on Anne Waldman’s Outrider and a few of my reasons for reading it. Continuing, I will excerpt from the second and third pieces in the book, and bold the phrases which most strike me. This reading is turning me slightly Buddhist.
The term “OUTRIDER,” says Waldman, was adopted in part to [...]
We lived, I and Lucie, in a devastated world; and because we did not know how to commiserate with the devastated things, we turned away from them and so injured them, and ourselves as well. (313)
“If the mountains were paper and the oceans ink, / If the stars were scribes, and all the world could [...]
Here are some fragments from the first section of Anne Waldman’s Outrider (Albuquerque: La Alameda Press, 2006). I love poetic manifestos, and I have just discovered an entire web archive of them. And someone at Western Michigan has excerpted portions of Olson’s 1950 manifesto Projective Verse for the sake of contemplation. I am engaged in [...]
1. This is the Whoppin’ Blues with band leader Dr. Michael white on clarinet, Bob Wilder on sax, Mark Braud on trumpet, Fred Lonzo on trombone, Steve Blaylock on guitar, Steve Pistorius on bass, and Shannon Powell on drums. Dr. Michael White is a professor at Xavier University in New Orleans. It is my understanding [...]
This is Louis Armstrong on West End Blues, also a clip from Ken Burns’ PBS series Jazz, with beautiful images of the town which has slipped away.
This is a very famous song, and that should be Earl Hines on piano. I am not a great jazz expert, but I did write a paper on jazz [...]
In the fifth part of Early Years of Jazz, we learn about the legendary Buddy Bolden, who never recorded. At least one band has worked to reconstruct of the Buddy Bolden sound, which included swinging ‘hot’ music with wicked lyrics.
Bolden’s career was cut short because he developed a form of dementia and was confined to [...]
Here in the fourth part of Early Years of Jazz, we see how Jim Crow turned Creoles Black. The music of these new mixed bands would, of course, be New Orleans jazz.
Axé.
