==pla|\|ing lakes==

Friday, June 13, 2003

Young 'prefer texting to calls'

Me too, for the most part. Though for me that means email from my desktop.

4:05 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Two composers/musicians I'm looking into lately I found out about through a couple fine blogs

graywyvern propped Q Reed Ghazala, whose Threnody for the Victims of The New Hiroshima is pretty damn challenging but fascinating. Here's one place that you can get it.

Ghazala makes his own instruments (see 2nd link above) and is much more than just a musician, as you can see form his site (third link).

Valentin Silvestrov is a Ukrainian composer who works in a classical vein, sort of. Not generally my line, but Giornale Nuovo makes an intriguing case.

Probably Silvestrov's best-known work is his fifth symphony (1980-82), a grand ruin of music in a single, slow-moving, forty-five-minute arch, somewhat reminiscent of Mahler, or so I gather - I have yet to get into Mahler's work myself - and redolent for the most part of mournful elegy, with the occasional flash of menace and malice eventually giving way, in a prolonged coda, to an air of resignation and lassitude. It is the most ambitious example of Silvestrov's 'postludes': a series of compositions of his which strive to exist as echoes and encores of the entire classical tradition, like something that might issue weakly from failing loudspeakers across some post-human wasteland

I can't get a sense of it from the short samples I've found, and Silvestrov isn't available on any of the networks I frequent. But I'll track him down.

Since I'm in a Ballardian mood lately, this might just be an appropriate background for reading The Drought (aka The Burning World).



1:54 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

The section of Tom Phillips' website about his relationship with Brian Eno -- including the painting After Raphael, a detail of which graced the cover of Another Green World

Old post on Phillips.


12:55 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

R.I.P. Gregory Peck & David Brinkley

12:37 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Sunday, June 08, 2003

That's right

Magazine article on plagiarism accused of plagiarism [Undernews]

1:03 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Entertaining and apparently well-informed tell-all about the NYC occult bookstore Magickal Childe, the notorious "Necronomicon", and so forth [orlin grabbe]

Herman had vigorously encouraged and supported the creation of the Schlangekraft Necronomicon, edited by "Simon." No doubt he'd grown weary of explaining to customers that H.P. Lovecraft's fabled forbidden tome was a fiction, a plot device for great horror stories and nothing more. He was savvy enough to sell leftover chicken bones as human finger bones to wannabe necromancers, so he surely knew that the market for a "genuine" Necronomicon could be huge -- with the right packaging. In 1977, the book made its debut in the window of Herman's little shop of horrors in Chelsea. It generated a scene of its own, a scene bursting with mad, unfocused creativity and slapstick mayhem.

Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea had just published their Illuminatus trilogy, and interest in secret societies and occult lore was sweeping through counterculture circuits. Grady McMurtry was attempting to jumpstart the long-dormant OTO in California and had just succeeded in having Aleister Crowley's Thoth tarot deck published. Punks and proto-goth/industrial types searched out obscure Satanic treatises and rare tracts from the seemingly defunct Process Church of the Final Judgement. Unrepentant hippies and uber-feminists found common ground in the gentle, woodsy eco-cult of the wicca, available in enough variant "traditions" to suit any palate with an appetite for sweets.

None of the wiccan "traditions" were any older than the electric light bulb, and the OTO had its origins in a very dubious Masonic lineage of no greater antiquity than aniline dyes, but that didn?t stop any of us from having a good time. The Necronomicon was not merely the icing on the cake: It was the hideous formless mass that squatted gibbering and piping where the bride and groom should be.

I visited the store once in the mid-80s and the energy was heavy and off-putting, at that point, anyway.

The fellow most responsible for the text, Peter Levenda ("Simon"), wrote the recently reissued and expanded Unholy Alliance: History of the Nazi Involvement With the Occult, which I thought was pretty good, though he's got his opinions and doesn't hesitate to promote them.

Along similar lines -- and in the spirit of blatant self-promotion -- here's a link to my old epinions review of "John Carter's" Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons, which is also a fun read (the book I mean, though I like my review too).

1:41 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

The 80s Tarot [STARE]

For 80s aficionados only. Not screamingly funny (nor trying to be apparently), but they put a lot of work into it.

1:13 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

On the real Bob Hope [Destiny-land]

Reporter Margy Rochlin documents how, beginning in 1954, Hope started selling the shows to NBC, and that he had to have been the sole moneymaker on them, since the guest-stars almost always worked for free, and the Pentagon (read: taxpayers) picked up all the travel and lodging expenses.

[...]

The entire [American Life] piece is great, but the best parts are excerpts from a taped interview Rochlin did with Hope in 1986. As she says, it started with Bob's dog biting her and went downhill from there. He does horrible political jokes for her, and you really feel her pain as she tries to laugh. When the talk turns to Viet Nam and how he was perceived by some of the public, Bob mentions that a couple people once called him a "warmonger" and he sicced the local cops and the FBI on 'em! ("They chased 'em out of the town-- they were some bums that were, you know, probably guys that were defectors or something.")

12:26 AM - [Link] - Comments ()