Griotism

• 2012-01-25

  The Funny Or Die’d Revolution

  Matt Thompson describes five ideas from women in media. His last is whether journalism can intermingle with humor:

  There’s a reason journalists don’t typically do humor. When we try to be funny, it typically doesn’t go very well. But could we take a page from Rae and Ramsey and point the lens on ourselves, rather than the folks we cover? […] I dwell on this because I think we should be paying attention to the characteristics of funny memes, and how they get produced and spread. I think we can use this knowledge. Humor is a storytelling device as legitimate as any other, and it’s particularly useful for addressing uncomfortable societal territory. Given that we might end up with a presidential contest between the first black President and the first Mormon candidate from a major party, we oughta come prepared.

  I’m reminded of ProPublica and NYU’s Fracking Song.

• 2012-01-19

  When Communal Music Gets Performed

  Will Robin:

  [I]f you’re not singing the shapes and you’re performing the music for an audience (shape note music is inherently communal and participatory), at what point are you still doing shape note singing?

• 2012-01-07

  Live Philip Glass interview, right now

  Philip Glass, in a live interview being broadcast right now:

  Someone asked me what is music, and I said, music is a place. It’s a place like Ann Arbor or Minneapolis. It’s as real as any place.

  And I thought, did I say that?

• 2012-01-06

  Alex Ross’s Best Classical Performances of 2011

  Alex Ross details classical music’s intersection with politics this year, specifically in the Met’s production of Satyagraha:

  The contradictions seemingly inherent in the presentation of a Gandhi opera at Lincoln Center led activists to stage a protest after the final performance, with Glass in attendance; the theatrical force of the action only added to the uncanny aura of the work. I was elated by this constructive confluence of music and politics, and yet I wondered whether the demonstrators had selected too predictable—and too small—a target. Pop stars and their parent corporations are the true élites of the cultural sphere, reaping vast rewards from a winner-takes-all system.

  He lists site-hero John Luther Adams’s Inuksuit one of the most powerful performances of the year (which I wrote about last year in describing “the new digital localism”).

• 2011-12-28

  New Study Center & Exhibit to Expound Guthrie

  Patricia Cohen, the New York Times:

  [A]s places from California to the New York island get ready to celebrate the centennial of Guthrie’s birth, in 2012, Oklahoma is finally ready to welcome him home. The George Kaiser Family Foundation in Tulsa plans to announce this week that it is buying the Guthrie archives from his children and building an exhibition and study center to honor his legacy.

  Exciting news.

  I realize this site’s been quiet recently, but I hope to be putting the band back together in the new year. Hopefully around then, too, the thing that’s kept me away from the blog will be published.

• 2011-12-13

  A Question of Quality

  Becca Rosen, The Atlantic:

  [W]e end up trying trying to divine principles that can help us draw lines between journalists and everybody else. Well, what is their practice? we ask. Do they have sources? Do they have notebooks? Does this person look like a journalist?

  These questions are good proxies for the ones we mean to ask: Does this information aid us as citizens? Does it help us understand government, or help to right some wrong?

• 2011-12-02

  “When righteousness withers away…”

  If only I wrote a blog about public spaces, politics in art, changing journalistic mores and contemporary classical music—then a video recorded and uploaded in one night, of Philip Glass reading lines from the Bhagavad-Gita, at an Occupy rally in New York, held after a performance of his opera Satyagraha at the Met, would be perfect!

  This video is, if nothing else, a remarkable document of a moment in US cultural history. Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson were in attendance, as was critic Seth Colter Walls. The New Yorker’s Alex Ross is the videographer.

  Regardless of one’s politics, the poetry shimmers. Once Glass begins speaking, the scene takes on (to me, at least) the aura of grace.

• 2011-11-02

  1,000 Harmonicas, For Now

  A successfully-funded Kickstarter equips Occupy Wall Street protesters at Zucotti Park with harmonicas:

  By breathing slowly through these harmonicas, the historic instrument of the underclass in America, the audible qualities of both the individual and the whole will become a call used for marches, demonstrations, and sit-ins. As thousands of people step together and breathe together, the sound that we emit will be impossible to ignore or argue, because it lacks words that can be skewed or manipulated.

• 2011-11-01

  Happy November, all. Here’s something pointedly non-journalistic: my favorite work where season becomes music. Late autumn, the final brown leaves, the early evenings. That’s this, to me.

• 2011-10-23

  Peter Sellars, giggly 20 year-old

  At least for the time being, I’m a total sucker for stories of artists in college, frenetically doing work and trying to figure out who they are. Alex Ross relays a story of the “jolly” Harvard undergraduate Peter Sellars, whose little basement theater—funded with all of $25—became a campus sensation.

• 2011-10-21

  "Sleazeball Obbligato"

  Calvin Trillin, the Daily Show, October 18, 2011. A hero.

  Via Andrew Briggs.

• §

  Breeze, Trees Waving, Attention Flagging

  Jeremy Denk:

  I don’t think thought and music are enemies, obviously … but they are complicated friends.

• §

  "match-girls and broom-makers"

  E.H. in London, writing at the Economist, reports on a hopeful public poetry initiative tied to the 2012 Summer Olympic Games.

• 2011-10-20

  Greetings from West Long Branch, New Jersey

  The world’s largest collection of Bruce memorabilia—which includes “books, song books, tourbooks, magazines, fanzines, Internet articles, academic journals and papers, comic books, selected printed items, and newspaper articles”—has moved from its first home at the Asbury Park Public Library to Monmouth University’s library.

  Critically, Monmouth University is five miles from Asbury Park and, even more critically, a ten-minute’s bike ride to the beach. Legend has it that if the collection moves too far away from the Jersey shore, it crumbles into the night.

  (Added after publication: “Legend” should be read as “Legend I totally made up.”)

  The collection’s an example of how successful projects fundamentally about material (it’s made of paper, mostly) can be when married with the web. From the Asbury Park Library’s website (the emphasis is mine):

  The earliest donations to the Bruce Springsteen Special Collection were presented to the Library by the Springsteen fanzine Backstreets Magazine, as a demonstration of the fan community’s support for Asbury Park. Since then, the Collection has evolved into a joint project between the Library, the Friends of the Bruce Springsteen Special Collection, and Springsteen fans worldwide. The project’s organizers obtained the initial holdings by posting “want lists” of essential publications on the Backstreets website; they received those items, and many others, from our generous fan community.

  Bruce, in his way, says the collection has “more stuff than every place except my mother’s basement.”

• 2011-10-19

  Ghostbusters and Institutional Racism

  The Bad Plus’s Ethan Iverson:

  The greatest jazz was created and nourished by locally-based African-American folklore. Some of the many musicians involved in that community were also possessed with the desire to innovate. Since it is easier to write about, many jazz critics — especially white jazz critics — have made more of the innovation than the folklore.

  UPDATE: I posted this quickly yesterday; I should gloss it now. Iverson is notable among jazz musicians for his concern over the American avant-garde. In this piece, Iverson addresses a tricky issue: how to respond to the relationship between jazz’s birth as a fundamentally black American folkore and its subsequent growth as led by multiracial, multinational innovators. This kind of thing is fascinating to read about, to dissect and take sides over, but ultimately it’s solved in praxis, in individual works and in the decisions that characterize careers. That’s what Iverson addresses here. He’s concerned with the laboratory, perhaps even the economic laboratory, of the real.