Marvin, Stevie & Jimi
Sure What Goes On was on Stevie’s mind during Inner Visions, what with all the social commentary and the like, but look at the differences in the musicality: the casual introduction of moog lines, freshly conceived in Talking Book I believe; but also in the way the music recorded: intimate and clean, funky and immediate, as opposed to WGO’s wide open strings and sublime atmospherics and even more sublime bass grooves, with the drums way down in the back of the mix: which on top of the gospel layerings draw a listener to ask Is the rhythm in Marvin’s voice or in the sheer spirituality of the music? (-— the Gospel Artifice). WGO is a unified social album— concerned and affected: all its notions of love are a communal outreach, a love of people. IV views the world through a lover’s eyes, through a single aware soul (conscious, reincarnate), moving toward a personal higher ground. Marvin’s album statement is a group dynamic. In the two and occasionally three backing vocal overdubs that Marvin layers behind his own lead, there is the same love and relation as between Marvin and the bass of James Jamerson, between the motive and soul of his lyrics and the flying idea of the strings. It’s a unification of word intent and cadence: the biblical primality of the gospel choir, the sharing of suffering and bearing your brother; everyone’s going to make it this time. But between these two albums...
As in Hendrix, the electric organic: to return from the absolute frontier of feedback and noise or pure energy, return again to melody and rhythm, mimics the primality of becoming: something from nothing, art from an inchoate chaos. A precise pinpoint of what I mean: from about 6:40 on track six of the Woodstock performance there is a conditional space/noise leading to a return of figure at exactly 7:29 — that is wonder, that is the spirituality of music. I really don’t think there has been as radical a musician since. His layering of the riff, now in one register, then another, is a very jazz trick: yer not playing chords composed of notes, but doubled chords of melody/riffs, Coltrane.
Sunday
David Foster Wallace
If I had to bookend the 20th Century from a literary point of view I'd be inclined to put Ulysses on one end and Infinite Jest at the other. The former opened up the way for writerly experimentation and media integration, and the latter seems to close these off. At least in the sense that DFW is attempting to resuscitate the shuddering PostModernist hulk of contemporary writing that Ulysses triggered in the first place. Which is not to say there's some weird narrative closure between the two like a horse and cart across history, or that each are typical products of their respective age — which are both somewhat true — or even that complementary readings can be made. I mean DFW is reanimating the vibrancy of prose with intelligence and verve, making the novel seem a worthy investment again, a medium that rewards patient effort and involvement. And doing so in a way that is strikingly contemporary and ironic and critical without all the wet-newspaperisms of PoMo flogging and sass-less reference. Here come the cliches: refreshing, young, invigorating, smart, impish, delightful, satirical, dry & sophisticated, witty, urbane and media-savvy cool. All true in their own blazon but commentless in the face of his acute powers of novelisation, of interpreting the novel for hyper- or post-mediated times...
If I had to bookend the 20th Century from a literary point of view I'd be inclined to put Ulysses on one end and Infinite Jest at the other. The former opened up the way for writerly experimentation and media integration, and the latter seems to close these off. At least in the sense that DFW is attempting to resuscitate the shuddering PostModernist hulk of contemporary writing that Ulysses triggered in the first place. Which is not to say there's some weird narrative closure between the two like a horse and cart across history, or that each are typical products of their respective age — which are both somewhat true — or even that complementary readings can be made. I mean DFW is reanimating the vibrancy of prose with intelligence and verve, making the novel seem a worthy investment again, a medium that rewards patient effort and involvement. And doing so in a way that is strikingly contemporary and ironic and critical without all the wet-newspaperisms of PoMo flogging and sass-less reference. Here come the cliches: refreshing, young, invigorating, smart, impish, delightful, satirical, dry & sophisticated, witty, urbane and media-savvy cool. All true in their own blazon but commentless in the face of his acute powers of novelisation, of interpreting the novel for hyper- or post-mediated times...
DH Lawrence
Funny, but only in reading do i not get the impatient feeling that film, bands, and often cds give me, the feeling of yeah, fine, that's great, I'm sick of merely participating, i wanna be doing, making it. It's an immersion.
Realising that there is no artistry as such, let alone genius or romantic myths of voices and inspirations, or airs, but purely the cultivation of a sensibility, of an ear, an eye, of a knowledge of what works well and how affects are constructed realistically, of acquiring a perception that isn't the same but somehow akin to a perspective of art, a divine in-between, generative, neither wholly pragmatic nor purely accidental, ideal, coincidental. A sensibility that approaches a current of greatness on one hand and faux-religion on the other. Lawrence is canny and dated by all standards, but his conception, his yearning for a vital and importantly organic structure to literature, failed though it may be in the attempt (such obvious equation with spring buds and colliery black death, and the endless battle of the sexes), yet always radiated by opposition, conflict and flux... is immense. As opposed to Miller's constant concern for what writing is and how begun, with the fluid itself, Lawrence never mentions it, but is always insistent upon the pure creation, the merge and rebirth with the darkness... with the reach for organic relation. And he capped it all off with an ironic, smarmy and yet tender book about fucking... The mystery of it is large, and hence the criticism is doubly gorged with wild speculation, and diverse ranges, claimed privilege of perspectives, Freudian hacks and feminists, yet never complete, total, because DHL is in many ways the modern enigma, unexplainable: we can only do him justice by deepening the mystery. The conflict in him is never either/or, he is always above it in some way, proof of an abstract spirituality, somehow greater than what he presents, and yet cloying in his snarling, and picking at the 'dirty little secret' with insistent give em what they want insistency. Enlarging the drives, explicating them, attempting to do justice to them for a new way of life, aligned with nature yet not regressive, a whole new architecture; not filling them with theory, analysis; opening them to rot, if need be, out in the open... the terms of revival are desperate of course, of the need for a rebirth, of a new aristocracy which noone would want to follow. An yet steering clear of the whole Messiah bag... That he could alternate between feminine and masculine with such... alacrity, penetrative insight... immense (is there not in JC an immense effeminate aspect?). The meaning of Lawrence is greater than any single idea, theory, or set of theories. Only a greater enigma. Or rather, greater relation.
Funny, but only in reading do i not get the impatient feeling that film, bands, and often cds give me, the feeling of yeah, fine, that's great, I'm sick of merely participating, i wanna be doing, making it. It's an immersion.
Realising that there is no artistry as such, let alone genius or romantic myths of voices and inspirations, or airs, but purely the cultivation of a sensibility, of an ear, an eye, of a knowledge of what works well and how affects are constructed realistically, of acquiring a perception that isn't the same but somehow akin to a perspective of art, a divine in-between, generative, neither wholly pragmatic nor purely accidental, ideal, coincidental. A sensibility that approaches a current of greatness on one hand and faux-religion on the other. Lawrence is canny and dated by all standards, but his conception, his yearning for a vital and importantly organic structure to literature, failed though it may be in the attempt (such obvious equation with spring buds and colliery black death, and the endless battle of the sexes), yet always radiated by opposition, conflict and flux... is immense. As opposed to Miller's constant concern for what writing is and how begun, with the fluid itself, Lawrence never mentions it, but is always insistent upon the pure creation, the merge and rebirth with the darkness... with the reach for organic relation. And he capped it all off with an ironic, smarmy and yet tender book about fucking... The mystery of it is large, and hence the criticism is doubly gorged with wild speculation, and diverse ranges, claimed privilege of perspectives, Freudian hacks and feminists, yet never complete, total, because DHL is in many ways the modern enigma, unexplainable: we can only do him justice by deepening the mystery. The conflict in him is never either/or, he is always above it in some way, proof of an abstract spirituality, somehow greater than what he presents, and yet cloying in his snarling, and picking at the 'dirty little secret' with insistent give em what they want insistency. Enlarging the drives, explicating them, attempting to do justice to them for a new way of life, aligned with nature yet not regressive, a whole new architecture; not filling them with theory, analysis; opening them to rot, if need be, out in the open... the terms of revival are desperate of course, of the need for a rebirth, of a new aristocracy which noone would want to follow. An yet steering clear of the whole Messiah bag... That he could alternate between feminine and masculine with such... alacrity, penetrative insight... immense (is there not in JC an immense effeminate aspect?). The meaning of Lawrence is greater than any single idea, theory, or set of theories. Only a greater enigma. Or rather, greater relation.
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