Trout Mask Executive Mansion
“With no surroundings there can be no path, and with no path one cannot become free.”― Gary Snyder
Both my friends Josh Rosenthal and David Pescovitz sent me an incredible article this week about the record collection the White House has. It turns out there were two times in the history of the LP that the White House decided to start collecting. The first in the 60s when Johnny Mercer for some reason was given the collecting go-ahead—and created an easy listening collection that probably was a factor in the Vietnam War going on as long as it did. The second collection happened under Jimmy Carter’s presidency and included a mix of styles….from pop to Trout Mask Replica. The only problem: by the time the collection was delivered to the White House, the Carters were leaving, Ronnie was moving in…and proceeded to move the collection to deep storage, like so many of his generation did when the kids went off to school.
Carter’s grandson heard about the collection on a family trip and set out to learn more…maybe even make a documentary. He got into the White House and was given access to the boxed-up records. I love his description of what he found:
The LPs had been kept in their original sleeves, which were inserted into color-coded binders (light blue for pop, yellow for classical, etc.). Each was adorned with the presidential seal and a foil stamp that read WHITE HOUSE RECORD LIBRARY. The whole thing reeked of gravitas and respectability—except that inside a binder, rather than some speech delivered by FDR in the ’40s, you might find a mint-condition copy of Macho Man by the Village People.
The story is worth reading, and I am not simply trying to paraphrase it….but it has stuck with me ever since: what would I want to include in a White House Record Collection? Is it a similar conversation that Carl Sagan had as to what to put on the Golden Record (which Pescovitz helped to reissue in Grammy-winning style a few years back)? And if it they WERE kept in the White House (Biden gets negative points for still keeping them in storage) who would have access to them? Wouldn’t it be incredible if a trip to the Oval Office also featured some turn-table time with Kamasi Washington, The Flaming Lips or Tinariwen? Each president have his/her/their own curated grouping of platters? Maybe the room would be set up like the office in television’s Severance where with a flick of a switch the lights start changing as well as the mood. I think it is safe to say that the world would be a better place with a turntable in the executive suite.
What would you add to the White House record collection?
Shabbes!
New Orleans Or Else: A 1977 Jazz Fest Odyssey
My dear friend Bill Bentley went to the 7th Jazz Fest…and Walkin’ to New Orleans was never a more exciting tale. In honor of Jazz Fest Weekend, I present to you a fantastic read…an incredible journey…that could only be brought to you by one of the most soulful cats I know….
BANANA: AFTER 50 YEARS THE ULTIMATE WARHOL VELVET UNDERGROUND MYSTERY IS FINALLY (ALMOST) SOLVED!!
Andy Warhol Factory superstar Billy Name waxes profusely about the banana…the origins of the one on the first Velvet Underground record. What does he say? You think I am just going to give it away instead of sending you to this tease of a story that does get somewhere…somewhere enough to read it…but nowhere as far as where you really want to go. It is is the Great Banana Hoax?
Roman bust looted in WWII sold at Texas Goodwill store for $35
I guess that beats the Sing Along With Mitch record I passed up for $2.
Gregory Corso’s The Golden Dot: Last Poems, 1997–2000
“Gregory Corso died more than twenty years ago, but his meticulously composed final poems are presented here for the first time, thanks to the tireless efforts of Raymond Foye and George Scrivani in retrieving its manuscript and preparing it for publication.”
Ahhhhhhhh nature.
Visit to the Observatory
By: Harry Martinson
We viewed a nebula inside a tube.
To us a golden herd of mist it seemed.
In larger tubes it might have gleamed
as suns in thousands in their boundless space.
Our dizziness of mind imagined
that it rose, high up from war on earth,
from time and space—our life's naivety—
to new dimensions in their majesty.
There no law rules of this life's type.
There laws rule for the world where worlds abound.
There the suns roll out till they are ripe
and deep in the hearth of every sun resound.
Suns in plenitude are present there.
And there, to cosmic law, each sun pulsates
in larger suns' unfathomable blaze.
And there all is brightness and the daylight of all days.
****I will be djing this Saturday the 7th at the half shell in Golden Gate Park from noon to one during the Krakow Jewish Music Festival Pop-Up Concert put on by Adam Swig and Value Culture.
Man is best when he wishes good he cannot do
and stops breeding evil he finds easier to do.
He will still have a direction. It will have no end in view.
It is free from unsparing endeavor.-Harry Martinson