"The phoenix showed the poet a scroll which was burning to ashes. 'Do not be dismayed!' it said, 'it is your work. It does not have the spirit of the age and even less the spirit of those who are against the age: consequently it must be burned. But this is a good sign. There are many kinds of daybreaks.'"
06 February 2011
Übersonntag
"The phoenix showed the poet a scroll which was burning to ashes. 'Do not be dismayed!' it said, 'it is your work. It does not have the spirit of the age and even less the spirit of those who are against the age: consequently it must be burned. But this is a good sign. There are many kinds of daybreaks.'"
04 February 2011
Fisk made an interesting point about the architecture of Tahrir Square:"The truth is as symbolic as it is important. It was Haussmann, brought to Egypt by Ismail under notional Ottoman rule, who built the square as an Etoile modelled on its French equivalent, laid over the swamps of the regularly flooded Nile plain. Each road radiated like a star (much to the chagrin, of course, of the present-day Egyptian army). And it was on the Nile side of 'Ismailia' square – where the old Hilton is currently under repair – that the British later built their vast military Qasr el-Nil barracks. Across the road still stands the pseudo-Baroque pile in which King Farouk maintained his foreign ministry – an institution which faithfully followed British orders."
I can't verify that Haussmann "built" the square but for all practical purposes he did, even if he didn't come to Egypt. Isma'il Pasha attended school in Paris and upon becoming Viceroy set about to Haussmannize Cairo after visiting Baron Haussmann during the Universal Exposition of 1867. Although historical Mamluk architecture was razed, Isma'il's plan wasn't so much to replace the existing streetscape but to expand Cairo westward to the Nile. Urban planner Pierre Grand was brought in and Bois de Boulogne designer Jean-Pierre Barrilet-Deschamps designed the Al-Azbakiyyah Gardens, but the project was supervised, ironically, by one Ali Pasha Mubarak. This coincided with the construction of the Suez Canal, a time when European diplomats and businessmen became more interested in Egypt and Isma'il sought to accommodate them. Though tourism hadn't become an industry, the preservation of Islamic Cairo was justified for religious reasons and, like the Latin Quarter in Paris, the pre-Haussmann Khan el-Khalili in the Islamic quarter, memorialized in Naguib Mahfouz' Midaq Alley, has became a focal point for tourism. Borrowing money from Europe to make Europeans feel at home resulted in Britain and France being granted the demands of large tracks of Cairo land and all of Egypt's shares in the Suez Canal in exchange for its debts.
The grand boulevard's suitability to modern military control and the debt and surrender of the Canal caused by Tahrir (Liberation) Square's construction make the current public revolt, facilitated also by the central plaza of Twitter and Facebook, somewhat of an urban planning boomerang. Mahfouz, a critic of Mubarak and his predecessors, would look out at Tahrir Square from his breakfast table at the Ali Baba Café.
27 January 2011
Blogs: most often, diaries of consumerism. It hadn't occurred to me, for instance, when I had decided to announce here my selection of The Duchess of Langeais as the only film I would watch in the theater in 2007 that "Balzac's story was nearly filmed, tantalizingly, by Max Ophüls in 1948 as Greta Garbo's comeback vehicle.." When Ophüls died in 1957, Cahiers du Cinema published an interview he conducted with Rivette (dir. of 2007's Duchess) and Truffaut, in which Ophüls lets fly this:
"I’ve long been an admirer of Balzac. Before, when I read La Duchesse de Langeais, I loved the way he had the people subjected to the pressure of political events: his characters are always splendidly indecisive. When they’re flung about from one side to the other like that, they always give us the impression that they’re helpless victims. In Balzac, men often put on a poorer show than women in the face of political events. The women still carry on conviction probably because they’re not so closely linked to politics: they have the courage to form an opinion. The men are just opportunists."
.. and then this...
"I read an article… I can’t remember where, an article by Hitchcock about the refrigerator-public -- a very good piece. It’s unbelievable, the public scarcely exists any more. They’re a mass of consumers, that’s all. The danger is that you see too many films… In America, you start at twelve years old, you watch films then ‘till you’re twenty and that is how you become a consumer. Consumers watch films the way they stick a cigarette in their mouths: they’re no longer aware that they are smoking, they keep it in their mouth while they talk.
"As a result of this continuous mass production of dramas, with people to consume them who see six or eight such works every month, it’s impossible to appreciate a really ‘dynamic’ film. It’s like newspapers: they can’t publish poems; and people read maybe three or four newspapers a day."
Eric Rohmer also cited Balzac as a primary influence, saying to Barbet Schroeder that he got from him the idea for what he called "Moral Tales," meaning not parables as some may think but tales of the constant conflict between people's differing moral principles: another possible explanation of the blogosphere.
"I’ve long been an admirer of Balzac. Before, when I read La Duchesse de Langeais, I loved the way he had the people subjected to the pressure of political events: his characters are always splendidly indecisive. When they’re flung about from one side to the other like that, they always give us the impression that they’re helpless victims. In Balzac, men often put on a poorer show than women in the face of political events. The women still carry on conviction probably because they’re not so closely linked to politics: they have the courage to form an opinion. The men are just opportunists."
.. and then this...
"I read an article… I can’t remember where, an article by Hitchcock about the refrigerator-public -- a very good piece. It’s unbelievable, the public scarcely exists any more. They’re a mass of consumers, that’s all. The danger is that you see too many films… In America, you start at twelve years old, you watch films then ‘till you’re twenty and that is how you become a consumer. Consumers watch films the way they stick a cigarette in their mouths: they’re no longer aware that they are smoking, they keep it in their mouth while they talk.
"As a result of this continuous mass production of dramas, with people to consume them who see six or eight such works every month, it’s impossible to appreciate a really ‘dynamic’ film. It’s like newspapers: they can’t publish poems; and people read maybe three or four newspapers a day."
Eric Rohmer also cited Balzac as a primary influence, saying to Barbet Schroeder that he got from him the idea for what he called "Moral Tales," meaning not parables as some may think but tales of the constant conflict between people's differing moral principles: another possible explanation of the blogosphere.
21 December 2010
No beams to weave the linen
For chlorotic laundry maids
The earth has plucked them all
The moon is not its glow
But the thing seen
All the gloomy black moths
Have massacred the sun
Pierrot checks his frock coat
Floating on a water lily
Without the glowing rudder
(after Giraud, pdf)
31 October 2010
Autumn songs
I found a translation of the 8th Century T'ang era poem by Zhang Ji that Mahler's second song Der Einsame im Herbst ("Autumn Loneliness") of Das Lied Von Der Erde is based on:
Autumn sky, jade-like frost drifting
Northerly wind carries lotus fragrance
With love, weaving till the lonely lamp fades
Wipe tears, fond memory, long cold night
Eaves edge, blue clouds pure like water
Rising moon, roosting birds caw; geese soar.
Whose young wife is weaving love birds on her loom?
Deeply concealed by silk curtain and inlaid screen
Listening to falling leaves by the white jade window
Pity the woman, chilled and alone without company.
The fashion for Chinese poetry in Paris that prompted Pound to invent Imagism and get parataxis into Anglo poetry had spread to Vienna by 1907, where Hans Bethge had popularized reworkings of translations that had previously been published in German, which were, in turn, based on two translations into French. All the Europeanized versions of Zhang Ji's Long Autumn Night seemed to be somewhat similar, beginning with Judith Gautier's French version, but they all differed significantly from the original Chinese version in two ways:
1. The original T'ang version makes reference to scent (line 2), sight (line 3), tears and memory (line 4), hearing (line 9), and the body's reaction to cold (lines 4 and 7). Gautier's version and the subsequent French and German versions notes only tears (les larmes) and all sensory provocations have expired or been covered by frost, wind, or darkness.
2. Zhang Ji is thinking about a "young wife" "chilled and alone" while all references to such an object of thought are struck from the European versions.
T'ang poets were highly attentive and deliberate about line arrangements, and Long Autumn Night features 1. Nature (lines one and two), 3. a visual representation of love relating to the visual experience of night, 4. tears and memory coupled with the experience of cold, 5. Nature again, lines 5 and 6, both the visual and aural experience of birds, Line 7, the "love birds on her loom," 8. the image of line 7 "concealed," 9. her aural experience of nature, 10. commentary on subject of poem. Zhang Ji doesn't note the action of his own senses but rather what is perceived, while the woman's perception of the leaves listened to, the temperature, and the birds on the loom is stated. As Taoism has used the image of weaving to demonstrate the unification of life and death, the exact same symbol recurring in the Upanishads and Plato, "love" weaves in line 3 and is woven in line 7.
The parataxic structure of Chinese poetry was conducive to Mahler's creation of the first-ever symphony composed entirely of separate songs. Mahler never heard it performed and much has been written about his having just been diagnosed with heart disease after his daughter had died in accordance with his earlier premonitions and he had been forced out as the music director in Vienna due, in part, to anti-Semitism, an event which marked the decline of the artistic golden age of Vienna. Adorno attributed the use of Chinese forms to Mahler's move to New York: "The inauthentic Chinese element, sketched with extreme discretion, plays a similar part to that of the folk song earlier: a pseudomorph that does not take itself literally but grows eloquent through inauthenticity. But by replacing the Austrian folk song by the remote, an Orient approved as a stylistic means, he divests himself of the hope for a collective cover for what is his own…Mahler’s exoticism was a prelude to emigration." (Mahler: a Musical Physiognomy) Where Debussy had recently been influenced by Javanese gamelan, Mahler uses a continuous, spiraling string melody onto which fragmentary motifs are added, including the vocals:
(Jessye Norman mezzo, Simon Rattle conductor)
While certain types of Hindustani raags are performed in autumn while others are for monsoon season to bring the rain, Tom Jobim's bossa nova classic Waters of March uses ascending and descending scales to depict the rainy season in the Southern Hemisphere's autumn. Jobim, quite the student of literature as many Brazilian songwriters are, endeavored to write an English language version which referenced Spring and didn't include any Latin roots, an Oulipoesque move which perhaps sought to give the song a North Pole free from Romance languages, although some of the words did have Latin roots. As with Mahler's Der Einsame im Herbst, the raga-like continuous motif supports fragmentary lyrics in which the "waters," the rains, unify the fragments of the season. Instead of Wallace Stevens thinking on a Sunday morning "Death is the mother of beauty," for Jobim all things like deaths, hopes, traps, voids, sunsets, emotions, sicknesses, body parts, animals, plants, mud, broken down cars, comprise the object being described simultaneously in a synesthesiatic pattern, making up one of the best lyrical pop songs ever. Supposedly Elis Regina disliked Jobim's intellectualism but decided she needed the song as much as the song needed her.
Autumn sky, jade-like frost drifting
Northerly wind carries lotus fragrance
With love, weaving till the lonely lamp fades
Wipe tears, fond memory, long cold night
Eaves edge, blue clouds pure like water
Rising moon, roosting birds caw; geese soar.
Whose young wife is weaving love birds on her loom?
Deeply concealed by silk curtain and inlaid screen
Listening to falling leaves by the white jade window
Pity the woman, chilled and alone without company.
The fashion for Chinese poetry in Paris that prompted Pound to invent Imagism and get parataxis into Anglo poetry had spread to Vienna by 1907, where Hans Bethge had popularized reworkings of translations that had previously been published in German, which were, in turn, based on two translations into French. All the Europeanized versions of Zhang Ji's Long Autumn Night seemed to be somewhat similar, beginning with Judith Gautier's French version, but they all differed significantly from the original Chinese version in two ways:
1. The original T'ang version makes reference to scent (line 2), sight (line 3), tears and memory (line 4), hearing (line 9), and the body's reaction to cold (lines 4 and 7). Gautier's version and the subsequent French and German versions notes only tears (les larmes) and all sensory provocations have expired or been covered by frost, wind, or darkness.
2. Zhang Ji is thinking about a "young wife" "chilled and alone" while all references to such an object of thought are struck from the European versions.
T'ang poets were highly attentive and deliberate about line arrangements, and Long Autumn Night features 1. Nature (lines one and two), 3. a visual representation of love relating to the visual experience of night, 4. tears and memory coupled with the experience of cold, 5. Nature again, lines 5 and 6, both the visual and aural experience of birds, Line 7, the "love birds on her loom," 8. the image of line 7 "concealed," 9. her aural experience of nature, 10. commentary on subject of poem. Zhang Ji doesn't note the action of his own senses but rather what is perceived, while the woman's perception of the leaves listened to, the temperature, and the birds on the loom is stated. As Taoism has used the image of weaving to demonstrate the unification of life and death, the exact same symbol recurring in the Upanishads and Plato, "love" weaves in line 3 and is woven in line 7.
The parataxic structure of Chinese poetry was conducive to Mahler's creation of the first-ever symphony composed entirely of separate songs. Mahler never heard it performed and much has been written about his having just been diagnosed with heart disease after his daughter had died in accordance with his earlier premonitions and he had been forced out as the music director in Vienna due, in part, to anti-Semitism, an event which marked the decline of the artistic golden age of Vienna. Adorno attributed the use of Chinese forms to Mahler's move to New York: "The inauthentic Chinese element, sketched with extreme discretion, plays a similar part to that of the folk song earlier: a pseudomorph that does not take itself literally but grows eloquent through inauthenticity. But by replacing the Austrian folk song by the remote, an Orient approved as a stylistic means, he divests himself of the hope for a collective cover for what is his own…Mahler’s exoticism was a prelude to emigration." (Mahler: a Musical Physiognomy) Where Debussy had recently been influenced by Javanese gamelan, Mahler uses a continuous, spiraling string melody onto which fragmentary motifs are added, including the vocals:
(Jessye Norman mezzo, Simon Rattle conductor)
While certain types of Hindustani raags are performed in autumn while others are for monsoon season to bring the rain, Tom Jobim's bossa nova classic Waters of March uses ascending and descending scales to depict the rainy season in the Southern Hemisphere's autumn. Jobim, quite the student of literature as many Brazilian songwriters are, endeavored to write an English language version which referenced Spring and didn't include any Latin roots, an Oulipoesque move which perhaps sought to give the song a North Pole free from Romance languages, although some of the words did have Latin roots. As with Mahler's Der Einsame im Herbst, the raga-like continuous motif supports fragmentary lyrics in which the "waters," the rains, unify the fragments of the season. Instead of Wallace Stevens thinking on a Sunday morning "Death is the mother of beauty," for Jobim all things like deaths, hopes, traps, voids, sunsets, emotions, sicknesses, body parts, animals, plants, mud, broken down cars, comprise the object being described simultaneously in a synesthesiatic pattern, making up one of the best lyrical pop songs ever. Supposedly Elis Regina disliked Jobim's intellectualism but decided she needed the song as much as the song needed her.
15 October 2010
Sampling duets
Andrea Parkins samples for Ches Smith
Ikue Mori samples for Zeena Parkins
DJ Oktopus samples for Dälek
Marty McCavitt samples for Darius Jones
Ikue Mori samples for Zeena Parkins
DJ Oktopus samples for Dälek
Marty McCavitt samples for Darius Jones
12 October 2010
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