<<World Cafeteria>>MS Found On Vinyl
“She has the gaze / Of the gods / In her voice / Her song is / The wind / Set free.”-Joyce Carol Thomas
What happened in Texas yesterday is beyond heartbreaking. Warrior’s coach Steve Kerr said it well before last night’s game: things need to change; this should be way beyond politics. I try not to comment in this space on the news you read everywhere else, but just cannot get over the tragedy that happened in a school filled with innocent children…just a week after the horrific mass shooting in Buffalo. Gun control now.
Mississippi Records was (is) the label that brought the vinyl-driven reissue back into vogue. Yes, there was (is) Four Men With Beards, Numero Group, Light in the Attic…to name a few other prominent modern labels of the like…but Mississippi, with their impeccable curation provided by Eric Isaacson (who owns the record store of the same name in Portland, OR) and the artful home-made covers, also overseen by Isaacson…Mississippi has a look, feel and sound like no other and puts out the greatest music in the world: and that is not a hyperbole. Nope.
For me, it started with the fantastic blues comps they started releasing early on like 2006’s Last Kind Words (named after the Geeshie Wiley song…one of my favorites) and Life Is A Problem…a low fi garage gospel salute: these stayed on my turntable for weeks. But Mississippi was so so so very much more than a blues label, and after meeting Eric and agreeing to work on some projects with him, he sent me one of the crown jewels of my collection: The African Guitar Box…a homemade wooden box that contained 5 records saluting the greatest guitar players on the African continent, some I knew, some I had heard of, many coming to me fresh. It was just one of many times that I wondered how someone like Eric could know so damn much about music and have such an impeccable ear to to display awesomeness after awesomeness, track after track, time after time.
Eric is like a modern Harry Smith, using music to tell the stories of the people behind it, the history of the world, of culture, of far-off lands and of out-there minds. On any given month there might be a release by Theremin legend Clara Rockmore, folksinger Michael Hurley, the Orchestre Régional De Mopti of Mali, the mind-numbing drones of Gurdjieff, the Ethiopian pianist extraordinaire Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru or the outsider sounds of the Spacelady herself, Susan Dietrich (or Moondog or Dead Moon or The Eureka Brass Band or…). Eric even reissued the complete Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music…the holy grail of early American recordings…reissued as the original in ultra-thick cardboard gatefold sleeves shelved in a beautifully simple wooden box. I am looking at it as I write these lines, a centerpiece of the home stereo corner.
But to outdo himself, this modern version of Smith is undergoing maybe his greatest project yet: an anthology of Soul Music that will be ten (ish) 2-3LP sets in all, providing an incredible overview of the golden age of sweet soul music, from the 50s to the 70s, all with fabulous foil-embossed covers surrounding iconic black and white photographs. I recently got a few of the most recent of the releases, The World Is A Cafeteria and Do You Believe It (which I believe are Volumes 6 & 7 respectfully). The former starts with the Toussaint McCall’s incredible Nothing Takes The Place Of You into Allen Toussaint’s Go Back Home (double Toussaint shot…ayeeee!!!) and continues to feature incredible number after incredible number including Irma Thomas’ Here I Am Take Me and a Percy Mayfield demo of Hit The Road Jack. The World Is A Cafeteria is a double album…I cannot stop listening to the first side. And yet, I cannot wait to get all of the releases in the set.
You could have an entire record collection just made up of Mississippi releases, and you would be having a good time all the time listening to them. Or just get one great compilation of theirs and listen to it over and over and over, opening up your mind to a whole new world anew every play. Oh yeah.
Siobhan MacGowan: ‘Shane has liked to walk on the wild side – but I get a high out of just life’
I have no idea of what kind of a writer Siobhan MacGowan is…but if talent…if writing goodness…is congenital, this should be a great book.
It’s A Family Affair - Henry Spaulding
Document Records was (is?) the label that single handedly chronicled as many blues recordings as they could….releasing LP after LP for decades. Their work, albeit somewhat bootleggish, is so important given that the idiom was not well documented or catalogued during the period the releases were actually coming out. I just realized that Document has a blog on their website. Good News: they publish pretty incredible posts around great blues musicians. Bad news: they only publish posts 2-3 times a year. Last month they published this one where the family of Henry Spaulding had reached out with some quandaries…shedding a little light on the bluesman behind the great Cairo Blues.
New Mural in Clatskanie Celebrates Writer Raymond Carver
“I've crossed some kind of invisible line. I feel as if I've come to a place I never thought I'd have to come to. And I don't know how I got here. It's a strange place. It's a place where a little harmless dreaming and then some sleepy, early-morning talk has led me into considerations of death and annihilation.”
― Raymond Carver
Watch the breath-taking trailer for David Bowie docufilm, Moonage Daydream
It IS a breathtaking trailer…fit for a legend like David Bowie…
On Kandinsky’s Spiritual Relationship With Music
Oh yeah: “(Arnold) Schoenberg and Kandinsky discovered over the next few years, as they corresponded and even vacationed together, that they shared a spiritual cosmology. They both believed that the purpose of art was to reveal a highly mystical inner truth.”
The Far Field
By: Theodore Rothke
I
I dream of journeys repeatedly:
Of flying like a bat deep into a narrowing tunnel
Of driving alone, without luggage, out a long peninsula,
The road lined with snow-laden second growth,
A fine dry snow ticking the windshield,
Alternate snow and sleet, no on-coming traffic,
And no lights behind, in the blurred side-mirror,
The road changing from glazed tarface to a rubble of stone,
Ending at last in a hopeless sand-rut,
Where the car stalls,
Churning in a snowdrift
Until the headlights darken.
II
At the field's end, in the corner missed by the mower,
Where the turf drops off into a grass-hidden culvert,
Haunt of the cat-bird, nesting-place of the field-mouse,
Not too far away from the ever-changing flower-dump,
Among the tin cans, tires, rusted pipes, broken machinery, --
One learned of the eternal;
And in the shrunken face of a dead rat, eaten by rain and ground-beetles
(I found in lying among the rubble of an old coal bin)
And the tom-cat, caught near the pheasant-run,
Its entrails strewn over the half-grown flowers,
Blasted to death by the night watchman.
I suffered for young birds, for young rabbits caught in the mower,
My grief was not excessive.
For to come upon warblers in early May
Was to forget time and death:
How they filled the oriole's elm, a twittering restless cloud, all one morning,
And I watched and watched till my eyes blurred from the bird shapes, --
Cape May, Blackburnian, Cerulean, --
Moving, elusive as fish, fearless,
Hanging, bunched like young fruit, bending the end branches,
Still for a moment,
Then pitching away in half-flight,
Lighter than finches,
While the wrens bickered and sang in the half-green hedgerows,
And the flicker drummed from his dead tree in the chicken-yard.
-- Or to lie naked in sand,
In the silted shallows of a slow river,
Fingering a shell,
Thinking:
Once I was something like this, mindless,
Or perhaps with another mind, less peculiar;
Or to sink down to the hips in a mossy quagmire;
Or, with skinny knees, to sit astride a wet log,
Believing:
I'll return again,
As a snake or a raucous bird,
Or, with luck, as a lion.
I learned not to fear infinity,
The far field, the windy cliffs of forever,
The dying of time in the white light of tomorrow,
The wheel turning away from itself,
The sprawl of the wave,
The on-coming water.
III
The river turns on itself,
The tree retreats into its own shadow.
I feel a weightless change, a moving forward
As of water quickening before a narrowing channel
When banks converge, and the wide river whitens;
Or when two rivers combine, the blue glacial torrent
And the yellowish-green from the mountainy upland, --
At first a swift rippling between rocks,
Then a long running over flat stones
Before descending to the alluvial plane,
To the clay banks, and the wild grapes hanging from the elmtrees.
The slightly trembling water
Dropping a fine yellow silt where the sun stays;
And the crabs bask near the edge,
The weedy edge, alive with small snakes and bloodsuckers, --
I have come to a still, but not a deep center,
A point outside the glittering current;
My eyes stare at the bottom of a river,
At the irregular stones, iridescent sandgrains,
My mind moves in more than one place,
In a country half-land, half-water.
I am renewed by death, thought of my death,
The dry scent of a dying garden in September,
The wind fanning the ash of a low fire.
What I love is near at hand,
Always, in earth and air.
IV
The lost self changes,
Turning toward the sea,
A sea-shape turning around, --
An old man with his feet before the fire,
In robes of green, in garments of adieu.
A man faced with his own immensity
Wakes all the waves, all their loose wandering fire.
The murmur of the absolute, the why
Of being born falls on his naked ears.
His spirit moves like monumental wind
That gentles on a sunny blue plateau.
He is the end of things, the final man.
All finite things reveal infinitude:
The mountain with its singular bright shade
Like the blue shine on freshly frozen snow,
The after-light upon ice-burdened pines;
Odor of basswood on a mountain-slope,
A scent beloved of bees;
Silence of water above a sunken tree :
The pure serene of memory in one man, --
A ripple widening from a single stone
Winding around the waters of the world.
***THIS NEWSLETTER IS DEDICATED to my grandmother Helen Quint who I spent hours with reading poetry aloud, practically shouting the words as her hearing began to fade in her 90s. She and I both loved Theodore Rothke. It is also dedicated to my friend and poet Josh Hurand, who passed away too young a year ago.