Today we had Ali and Sofi over. Visiting Antonio, of course. But it’s lovely for us to see them as well.
Ali, Sofi and Teresa.
We drove them back to mums’, afterwards, arriving in Northstowe at 5 pm. Had a tea and a catch up with Hannah. Tim was in Rumburgh. Meanwhile Antonio is off to Suffolk with a new lady friend!
Beautiful skies this evening.
The sunset was amazing today. Once back home we had a delish’ roast, chicken courtesy of Antonio, cooking by Teresa. I’m a lucky guy.
Teresa did a fab’ roast.
We rounded off a lovely Sunday with a bath and The Pink Panther. Teresa’s still downstairs, watching the end of the movie. As usual, I’m up in bed!
I’ve never really like the whole French (& NW European?) Postmodernist ‘school’.
I was subjected to three years of it at Goldsmiths College, at what was a nadir of my own life, as I exited my teens and embarked on ‘adult life’.
Baudrillard was a big part of it, along with Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, et al. I found it all profoundly depressing and unhelpful. And, by and large, I still do.
Courting controversy?
Ok, they did/do have some insights. We’ll come to some of those in dew coarse. But it’s frequently attached to a lot of extremely foetid ‘thinking’, which I’ve always reacted against, and still do.
The solipsistic primacy of language in postmodernism has always been an issue for me. It’s a kind of academics disappearing up their own arse line of ‘philosophy’, as far as I’m concerned.
Perhaps Baudrillard is dead right? But in a very specific way/context? If by ‘we are all Buster Keaton’s’ he’s referring to all humanity, I think he’s fundamentally and profoundly wrong in his conclusion. But I’ll come back to this.
If, on the other hand, he means a certain type of professional intellectual, such as writers, or particularly a certain quite specific type of academics? Well, he might be on to something there.
I had this edition of Barthes’ Mythologies.
I’ve never liked the language of postmodernism, with its signs, signifiers, tropes, simulacra, and whatnot. It can all – or some of it – be read and understood, or decoded. But there’s an awful lot of wordy guff that tends toward confusion and opacity.
I have, in truth, no idea whatsoever, what the impact of what we currently call AI will actually evolve into. Most of the discussion around it I find so vexing I simply don’t want to get embroiled.
I’ll give a couple of examples from my own personal human interaction side of life. First, there’s a guy I know who works in music education who boasts that AI is a great tool for all sorts of reasons, but most often/loudly, the marking of students work.
Second, there’s a family member, of sorts, who uses AI, mostly covertly, but also openly, to create poetry. I have what I believe are fundamental issues with both of these scenarios.
Maybe in time my position on all this will change? I’m a firm believer in Evolution! Both as a process that shapes the development of biological life, and as a way to develop personally.
But, at present, I believe that marking essays and writing poetry are skills to be acquired, practiced and developed. Delegating these activities to computers running AI is something else.
Buster Keaton.
Returning to a line of thought broached earlier; if Baudrillard means we’re all clowns, or fools? Well, surely that is as true before AI (whatever that is) as after. But he clearly doesn’t mean that.
It’s my view that Baudrillard and his ilk are – or aspire to be, in certain respects – Punk. Enfant Terribles. But armed with a library of polysyllabic thesaurarii, as opposed to snot and distorted guitars.
His series of essays on the Gulf War – written before during and after, and called Won’t/Isn’t/Didn’t – are titled like high-fallutin’ click-bait. He can’t possibly mean that, can he?
And of course he thereby cleverly draws the potential reader in, before – like a punk magician – stunning us with his intellectual sleight of word. And here we come to what these folk might be getting right.
In the modern world, especially the online world – saturated as it is with imagery and words, reality (or at least certain views on reality) gets harder and harder to discern.
Baudrillard argued that the Gulf War wasn’t a war – not in the old-fashioned Battle of Waterloo vein – but an atrocity, falsely sold to the domestic audience (and the rest of the world) as ‘war’.
All of this is actually generally and genuinely interesting. Why did/do we really go to war? What actually constitutes war? And so on.
This kind of AI ‘content’ is flooding the web.
My own gut feeling, in relation to AI and the future of human thought (be it generally, or as an academic profession) is that as AI evolves – and certainly in light of developments so far – it is already adding to our difficulties in discerning what is real.
Will or should AI replace human thinking? It shouldn’t, in my view. But that doesn’t mean it won’t. We’ve already seen numerous human inventions overtake and virtually enslave us. Agriculture, for starters. And more recently/perniciously, money, for example.
Baudrillard is widely regarded as a pessimist or nihilist. I don’t want to be either. But I fear I may be both. So might it be that whilst I really dislike Baudrillard and Postmodernism, I might have to concede that he might – as much as I want him to be wrong – actually be right?
I was out delivering this afternoon. In some lovely villages, like Barnack and Helpston.
On Bishops walk, Bainton, there’s a massive Sequoia, or Giant Redwood. More or less in someone’s front garden!
The picture above does it no justice whatsoever. It has a presence and impact that requires being there. The picture below, however, does a marginally better job…
Treeus Giganticus!
A bit later in the day another tree presented a different eye-catching look…
Strange!
I got home in the dark. I’m not massively keen on delivering in the dark. But at present I’m only getting depot shifts. Which are longer. And occasionally I can’t avoid doing evenings, if I’m to hit my earning targets.
Mozzer’s grocery store shifts have almost totally dried up. For me, at any rate. I wonder why? In the last three weeks I’ve only done two! And usually they account for 50% or more of my hours.
Once home, Teresa had a lovely curry ready. Antonio pitched in with a healthy salad. My contribution was cherry pie and extra-thick double cream!
Then it was bath, ‘n’ bed. Where I am now.
The plan was to read some more War of Wars, and then off to Snoozey-ville. Tomorrow is a blessed day off. Hallelujah!
This is coming…
I realised today that I don’t have Dan Hicks first studio album (pictured above). Nor his 1978 It Happened One Bite. I’ve remedied the former omission. And I look for’ard to bathing in that goodness soon.
Genius music from Syreeta, backed by her former husband, Stevie Wonder.
Wow!!!
Syreeta and Stevie take this Lennon/McCartney sing and totally own it.
Pure bliss!
We – well, I (to be fruitily blank) – requested ‘What Love Has Joined Together’ as our first dance, for our wedding.
My CD includes both of Syreeta’s first two albums, Syreeta, ‘72, and Stevie Wonder Presents Syreeta, ‘74.
This is the real deal. A sublime recording.
Syreeta and Stevie were married only 18 months. And separated in the summer of ‘72. Despite this Wonder helped his soon to be ex wife record and release her self-titled debut. And, my goodness, it’s an absolute corker.
The sheer magic of Wonder’s Midas touch – at this point in his career he’s literally sweating diamonds; Music of My Mind,Talking Book, etc. – elevates this collaborative effort to Olympian heights.
Good, but not great.
By 1974, the chemistry of their collaboration has changed, as has Stevie Wonder’s own musical vibe. The resulting Stevie Wonder Presents album is still very good. But it hasn’t got the same effortless magic of the ‘72 recordings.
Oh Life, where Art is Heaven, Tho’ hollow seems the game Yet days do come; And nights, as one; On Earth, are we yet in Heaven? Eat we, each day, our daily bread. And forgive our own mistakes, As we forgive the mistakes of others. May we forbear from Evil; And avoid foolish Council. For this is our World, Our Hour, and our Story, For these fleeting moments. Okay.
I wrote a first draft of the above a while back (buried deep in this old post). And said I’d prob’ revise it, and certainly print and recite it.
Well, today I’ve finally made good on the first part of that.
The revisions are all very minor. And certain bits still irk me a little. For example, ending on ‘Okay’, rather than ‘Amen’. But I like the basic idea.
And I think I’ll get it printed, a few times, in a bespoke font of my own creation (maybe hand lettered?). With some nice decorative elements; borders, perhaps? Or illuminations?
I’m ‘friends’ with Joni Mitchell ‘official’, on Facebook. A recent post from her concerns a re-release of Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter. I had the temerity to say, in a comment on the post, that I much prefer the original cover.
And, no surprise, some pious person has taken a potshot, referring to the original cover as a ‘racist caricature’. Oh dear, humanity may well be screwed, if we’re all really that dim witted.
The ‘safe’/neutered modern replacement.
The replacement cover image is taken from photo sessions for the Dog Eat Dog album cover, when Joni, by now with Larry Klein, was going all ‘80s: perm, power dressing suit style garb, and lyrics railing against the Reaganomic (or Thatcherite, here in the UK) cultural drift.
To use such an image is to Bowdlerise and misrepresent the people and the times that produced the wonderful music of Don Juan.
It is, ironically, a triumph for the kind of shallow lying pop culture Joni bemoans on Dog Eat Dog. It is populist simplicity airbrushing over messy history, to make it conform with modern ideas/ideals. And to make money, of course. That justifies all.
It’s a form of Capitalo-Stalinism, pretending to be morally sound.
Get Out Of The Kitchen, Joni Mitchell.
This article, about Joni and Don Alias, is interesting… And there’s a very interesting story about the painting shown above. Joni painted Don… with an erection!* He felt uncomfortable about this, and requested she remove it (not his actual willy, but the painted one… um, she hadn’t painted his…this could get weird). So she did.
It was Joni’s choice to ‘black up‘, as the character ‘Art Nouveau’, for the cover of Don Juan. More on this shortly.
But if the history re-writers want to be properly thorough, they should change Don Juan, in the title, as well, while they’re at it. He was, after all, probably a fiction, of Carlos Castaneda’s imagining. A ‘racist caricature’, by the terms of this genuine ‘PC gone mad’.
Art Nouveau, Henry Diltz, 1976.
The genesis of Art Nouveau may be revealed here, in an intriguing BBC News piece. That’s definitely worth a read.
Meanwhile, back to now; the madhouse that is America under Trump will be keen – ‘manifest density’, and all that – to export their moral superiority, no doubt. The kind that floods the world with porn, but won’t allow an erect penis to be seen in any other way than covertly, in furtive shame.
But violence? They’ll deregulate violence, both real and imaginary, such that this sort of thing (see below) becomes a laudable comic romp, sanctified by its economic success:
Terrifier, a gorenography franchise wet dream.
The virile member? No way. The pornography of violence, yes please!
One of the most grotesque ironies in this vomiting forth of simplicity, ignorance and subterfuge, is how the so-called ‘woke’ agenda has been embraced by the ultra-capitalist machinery of advertising. Such that we’re drowning in a tsunami of smiling mixed-race couples, or under/over-represented minorities.
The effect – driven not by a quest to improve the world, but the urge to create yet more sales/wealth – is often not to promote tolerance and understanding, but to stoke petty discontents into smouldering hatreds.
Art Nouveau at Lee Sklar’s Halloween party, 1976, Henry Diltz.
But back to Joni, and Don Juan. I think it’s tragic that her inspired cover artwork has been vandalised by the myopic execs of current times.
Unholy shit… what’s he/she saying?
This second image of Art Nouveau must be causing apoplexy across the whole spectrum. What’s that he/she is saying? Holy Baby Jesu with a Kalshnikov! Maybe the execs could rescue it all with an appeal to ‘trans-rights’?
To boil the whole debacle down into suitably facile contemporary parlance… FFS!
Fabulous art by Joni.
FOOTNOTE – Execs Censoring Artists!?
The sidewalk is a history book And a circus Dangerous clowns Balancing dreadful and wonderful perceptions They have been handed Day by day Generations on down
The above are a few lines from Joni’s lyrics to Charlie Mingus’ ‘Goodbye Pork Pie Hat’. Are the kind of folk who changed her record cover going to take a hatchet to her lyrics? Are penny-pinching dullards to censure/censor the poetic insights of artists!?
I want to design and print an Xmas or Yule card this year. And I want to pay homage to the design genius of Steinweiss, in doing so.
I thought about simply plagiarising one of his designs. But that just won’t do! Steal, yes. Borrow? Hmmm…
Anyway, today is the day to get started. Before I do, however, I’ll gather some influence type material here.
Another artist that springs to mind, as an influence, is Gene ‘The Cat’ Deitch. I did nick an image of his one Xmas, many moons ago.
I also just found a very interesting page on a blog, about Deitch and Father Christmas. Check that out here. I hadn’t realised Gene passed, aged 95, in 2020, in his beloved Prague.
Deitch is best known to me for his Jazz fan character ‘The Cat’. But he’s best known to the world at large for his work on Tom & Jerry and Popeye cartoons. RIP, maestro.
Carter McLean has one of these Heritage Green Luddies. And, boy, can he make them sing! I loves my greens, as those who know me, should know.
Gear lust mounts…
Most places listing these say they’re out of stock. And those claiming to have them say that they have a very long pre-order period.
But they’re out of my budget, as things stand.
And on top of all that, they cost an absolute bomb. $3-4 K, or more. Phew!!!
Tony Williams, looking super cool.
The above image has ‘owt to do with the Ludwig theme of the post. It’s just another nice thing to consider, as I feel my drummer mojo, possibly, returning?
Listened to all three whilst out and about today. I had Mr. Magic on vinyl, originally. Not sure if I’ve still got it or not? I’ve been selling quite a bit of vinyl in the last year or so.
He used to be that my favourite track was the title track. Written by percussionist Ralph MacDonald. But listening to the album today, it’s pretty damn good all the way through. And that cover!
Beyond the Missouri sky isn’t necessarily the best choice of CD for listening to whilst driving. I had to crank it up pretty loud, in order to hear the base clearly. And when it’s Charlie Haden… C’mon!
