The wish List

[Globaltruth]

Find of the day

I wish that there Opika Pende album was on Spotify.


guess I'll have to buy it, - this particular label is really worth supporting. If you follow the link and look at the catalog I think you'll agree...

However I have found this Africa 78's album

http://open.spotify.com/album/7yMVDdHc3mEf7QM0RcMQ4f

but not listened to it yet...

However reading about Jonathan Ward, the guy who put the Opika Pende collection together then led me to his blog
Excavated Shellac
where it transpires not only can you read about his current work but also download the tracks .
For free.
Some ethnomusicologists are great...

[PatrickOD]

Global, to return to #1, you might find this of interest too.

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/features/2012/0113/1224310187041.htm

I have to admire the breadth of interest and knowledge you all demonstrate. I find myself struggling to keep up with O Lionaird's changing profile. I had thought that he was doing a fine job of bringing sean nos up to date at the traditional level, but I now feel a bit left behind. Is it a birth, or a death? Or, is that just life?

[Globaltruth]

Global, to return to #1, you might find this of interest too.

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/features/2012/0113/1224310187041.htm

I have to admire the breadth of interest and knowledge you all demonstrate. I find myself struggling to keep up with O Lionaird's changing profile. I had thought that he was doing a fine job of bringing sean nos up to date at the traditional level, but I now feel a bit left behind. Is it a birth, or a death? Or, is that just life?

Hi Patrick - on behalf of everyone thanks so much for your post and kind words. I couldn't make this link work, but I think this is the article...

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/features/2012/0113/1224310187041.html

and what an article it is too - i don't think you would find such great flowing, thoughtful use of language in a review in the English papers.

In answer to your question - I would very much welcome Mary Ann Kennedy's thoughts on him (see, I'm dodging the answer there...) she has sung with him, and a feature on him is long overdue (or did I perhaps say that earlier...).

Whatever the answer, this is a significant, world-class singer of our times and one who will I believe keep evolving, challenging his listeners and rewarding them with some wonderful pure sounds. Which, I understand he has been doing since the age of 5 when he began singing with Coir Cuil Aodha.

Anyway, at some point I am definitely going to see him perform...

On an etymological point, I wonder if there is a root similarity between 'sean nos' and 'nostalgia'? some r3 BigBrain out there will know...





(and, for those of you with Spotify, there isn't so much of this work on there now, mainly Foxlight http://open.spotify.com/artist/3zfwMucEg6tKF4IR1zrHHk )

[PatrickOD]

Yes, your link works, mine does not. That *is* the article.

I think you might be near the mark with 'nostalgia' - BigBrain notwithstanding.

With WOMAD and the Fleadh Cheoil(?) coming to Derry in 2013, we might see him perform there. Must look into that.

[Globaltruth]

Be careful what you wish for...

Courtesy of http://www.oldhandbills.com/bill_graham_postcards.htm (and courtesy of WFMU for telling me about the site in the first place), these original posters are for sale.



The question I want to share is

Is this really something I want to live with? Or just a nostalgia trip?

[Lateralthinking1]

An interesting question Global and a useful distraction from the day. I am a snow hater. Don't think that is too strong a word for it. It feels like constraint, not that I ever tend to leave my self-allocated couch.



The moulding of responsible accumulations

Postcard 1 - Jonathan Meades again. In the latest series, he describes at one point his lifelong fascination with typeface. His examples illustrate well how important that "flag" is to a sense of nationhood. You can then acknowledge it as well as feel it. Nationalism, he implies, is as leftist as it is rightist, subsuming individuality in a sense of manufactured togetherness. He is correct but I am less sneering. I like communal objectives, be they cultural or counter-cultural. After all, I was born in the suburbs where such things faded first. And the kind of “flag” you have given us here is the one I once preferred. Oddly, it didn't seem as bogus as national ones - but then it was one for a room inside a castle, just as home is often a box in a very big town. Cool.



The Little Mermaid - Ariel has a fascination with the human world and often goes off to find human artifacts that she displays in a secret grotto.

Postcard 2 - A five year old in 1968. One of the reasons why your item doesn't feel nostalgic to me, but instantly conjurs some affection, is my age. The 1960s I acquired vaguely through fleeting imagery is mystical to its roots. I had a child's view of young adults attempting to retain a child's view of their world. Not in an obviously bewildering way but more that the images could only be taken at face value. They looked pretty good to me. A lot of bright colour accompanied by peculiar noises. People being happy and friendly in the countryside. Sex, drugs, violence, protest, power games, trivial squabbling, difficulties with parking the car and minor food poisoning were completely absent in my head. I did the era pure.



Martin K. Speckter - As the head of an advertising agency, he conceptualized the interrobang in Palatino, believing that advertisements would look better if copywriters conveyed surprised rhetorical questions using a single mark.

PALATINO IS ARABIC, ISN'T IT



Postcard 3 - Goats. I was in my twenties when I first heard of Haight-Ashbury. Then I got the concept via a signpost. Only much later did I learn how to pronounce it. The people with long hair and electric guitars had originally lived in the woods around Croydon. That was obvious. They were scruffy, not that this was my owned condemnation. In fact, I probably tried to copy the way they did words. But when I saw the image today, it showed me what it always showed me. A house in trees or is it a half-baked farm? There is a burnt out Ford Anglia and a caravan beside it. Dogs are barking, litter is being blown around and there are two people I can't see, themselves making weird sounds. And there are always two goats. They never pass away.



The 1500s - If this was a gothic century, the term gothic architecture came to be used as early as the 1530s by Giorgio Vasari to describe culture that was considered rude and barbaric. And no one ever agrees on what is gothic survival and revival.



(This picture has been sampled from another perspective)

Poseur 4 - Royal Festival Hall. Actually, the 1998 punk art retrospective. I was there along with six others looking at an old movement now made static in establishment frames. Something there about feeling overwhelmed by an absence of feeling. A sense of not quite having mentally ordered or grasped a phenomenon so hugely significant and involving that it had reduced itself to irrelevance. Art seemed no longer a sideline of lifestyle. It was just art. “Just art” was possibly bigger than representation but only in the sense of having sidelined itself. Meanwhile lifestyle had become “just life” and where the hell had that gone? Some had climbed thinking they had increased in size, a fact believed by many, but only the terminally uncool.



Camille Paglia - "A serious problem in America is the gap between academe and the mass media, which is our culture. Professors of humanities, with all their leftist fantasies, have little direct knowledge of American life and no impact whatever on public policy".




Postcard 5 - Get it via Paypal. Is it only on sale in postcard form? No Che Guevara style poster to cover up the cracks in the walls? I can think of worse commodities. A shame though that this is all so domesticated and lacks any sense of locking horns. One might almost think that the sixties had all been about peace, love and vehicles. Vehicles for individual artists to stand out so that their names were known and they could afford to inhabit muse attics. Their elegant pronouncements when arranged in interesting colourful patterns could even have been a unique worldview. Read their fonts. Oh the loss of such alternative individuality that for a while it seemed like collectivity. Where has the latter gone? Well, here actually.



The Guardian - "Ikea is changing its font to Verdana – causing outrage among typomaniacs. Should the rest of us care? Absolutely".




The distillation limits of constituents

We are now joined by the contemplation of buying. Flag it up. Art represents lifestyle again. Not what I would choose but isn’t it all really a circle? Once the steps have been swept, we just vary the jog around the block.

[Globaltruth]

I liked this post.
It has helped.
There is too much stuff in the world.


I have spent the day uploading my mp3's into the cloud in an attempt to keep my music stuff with me as I move around.

This is the audio equivalent of putting your records in someone else's house, someone else's invisible house where they claim to be able to look after them.

We shall see.

During this time though I have rediscovered some music I haven't listened to for a long time.

Here's one

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycFykGhEs9I