D escriptions of an I maginary U niverse 27.2 7/4/95 Anniversary Issue! NIGHT IN TUNISIA "I will not make that break again." --Charlie Parker 1) I will not make that break (any break) again. I will not be back in Tunisia that night. The music moves because I move towards it in Tunisia, as a whispered shimmer. The music, the music does not make that break again: time is the trait of things and flows, of breath and mind, music in Tunisia, an indication leaking through itself to be itself, be... be... beyond itself to be itself. It is going nowhere. It. It... it... it stutters, utters, vibrating, Is there any thing here to notice but time? 2) The be-bop revolution continues, not because Winton Marsalis has copped everyones chops, because Dizzy Gillespie's trumpet could speak English-- Salt PEAnuts Salt PEAnuts-- not because this savvy second generation rings the cash register or because a computer chip plays 16th notes at a rate that would confound Charlie Parker. It's Epistrophy--knowledge turning. --Thus, Albert or Hubert July 4, 1995 Long live the bebop Revolution! beware false prophets (fwd) Fellow prophets and judges, Imagine the village when the guild of story-tellers got together to discuss the new-fangled technology sweeping the scene: writing. "They will never get a good story out of marks on a clay tablet, there is no presence, no way to keep the story coherent; no tone of voice, no pace, no drama, no way to respond to the listener's reactions, no 'real time interaction' no communal glue to hold it all together. In short, an inhuman, barren and hopeless medium for story!" And they were right, until generations and generations of experiment found way to substitute authorial presence for real presence, verbal equivalents for the drama of the speaking voice, mood and tone for the comfortable huddle around the fire. Art forms have no pre-set Platonic form and limits; they are created on the go by people who use the limits of the medium to discover new modes of expression - hopefully. There is no way to judge IF before it has happened; we need to wait and see what people will make of it. And my guess is we should not underestimate the power of a really difficult problem to inspire outrageous and wonderful solutions. So let us get to work. --LF, VCA _Going Postal_ The recent "Unabom" or postal bomber, "dedicated to destruction of the worldwide industrial system" (NY Times) threatens terrorism if his manifesto is not published. "Going Postal" is the newly popular term for irrational rage. The gun stashed in the mail bag: we know the dangers of the postal employee. The exteriority of the post office produces psychosis, an exteriority consisting in the distribution of documents as literalities (as letters), texts entirely materialized by government stamp, without meaning outside of the network of postal relays. There are many repetitive jobs, but it is here that the subjective investment in private writing is explicitly converted into the subjection of institutional forms and meanings. The post office is a paranoid structure. To mail a letter is to accept that it will be handled. From 1500 on, the British post office maintained a Secret or Inner Office for the opening, deciphering, and reading of letters; anyone was subject to this police action, and its abolishment in 1844 merely meant that the activity was more covert. (The coincidence of the end of the Secret Office and the rise of the telegraph is keyed to the ability of the postal telegraph operator to have know the coding of all messages passed along the line.) The American post office has always had this ability. As alternatives arise, so the institutional saturation of physical space increases, the space of the letter descreasing as the structure of the address is formalized. The history of street addresses: it allows the post to find us. The NSA now keys the encoding of all telecommunication space. As our e-mail address correlates with our existence in this space, so the institutionally-sanctioned metaphor of the "interior" of our epistles becomes even slimmer. As with the Clipper chip debate, in acceding to stage our communications in an already encrypted domain, our interiors become a question of computation time, that is, we communicate through metaphors of speed and connectivity. Our syntax is determined (every possible message is already encoded) and it is the rate of our (re)combination that (post)marks us. We are all postal workers. --Maxwell's Demon I'd like to mention a few recordings received too late in the season to program as often as I'd like. They'll be on the playlists in the fall, you bet! Here they are: Fast Forward/Same Same/XI (Experimental Intermedia) -- intelligent, relentless, had a hard time getting it out of the CD player after it arrived. Oracular Editions #1 (spoken word cassette compilation produced by Eric Belgum) -- an fine collection of contemporary spoken word/sound art; future projects in the works. Frederic Rzewski (composer)/Anthony de Mare (piano/voice)/De Profundis and The Cotton Mill Blues/O.O. Discs -- the setting of Oscar Wilde's _De Profundis_ is difficult, wrenching listening, especially in these times; but it's a necessary work. The press release says Rzewski is "dangerously political" and "never backs down." Neither does O.O. Discs -- see also their earlier release by the performance group Relache, _Outcome Inevitable_. Playlist for "The Lime Works" WRUB - SUNY at Buffalo Contact: Charlotte Pressler, Experimental Music Assistant WRUB - SUNY at Buffalo 174 MFAC--Ellicott Complex Amherst, NY 14261 (716) 645-3370 v273fs6s@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu February 16, 1995 Kurt Schwitters/Die Sonate in Urlauten/Futurism and Dada Reviewed Nurse With Wound/Ostranenie and Dada X/Sisters of Pataphysics Christian Marclay/Black Stucco/Imaginary Landscapes Tod Dockstader/Part 3 from Apocalypse/(V/A) From A to Z Asmus Tietchens/Medienlandschaft 2/Dry Lungs II Joseph Kasinskas/The Rider (Dean Witten, percussion)/(V/A) From A to Z Hafler Trio/excerpts (trs. 5 and 6)/Ignotum per Ignotius David Dunn/Tabula Angelorum Bonorum 49 (nos. 1,2, 3, 4)/Angels and Insects Tenko/Ikue Mori/Hearse/Death Praxis P16.D4/Paris-Morgue/Kuehe in 1/2 Trauer Jin Hi Kim w/Adam Plack/from Komungo 'Round the World/ Korean Music Source cassette PBK/In His Throes (excerpts)/In His Throes Mario Rodrigue/Tilt/Alchemie/Diffusion i Media John Cage (real. David Tudor)/Cartridge Music/Music for Merce Cunningham Ben Johnston/Sonatas for Microtonal Piano, movement 1/Sound Forms for Piano (Robert Miller) Paul Dutton/from So'nets/Fugitive Forms/New Fire Tapes cassette Pauline Oliveros/excerpt from Alien Bog/Music from Mills/Mills College 3-LP Charles Amirkhanian/Church Car, Version 2/Mental Radio Arcane Device (David Myers)/from Improvisations in Feedback/From the Pages of Experimental Musical Instruments VI/Cassette Gary Barwin + Stuart Ross/These Are the Clams That I'm Breathing (excerpts)/Live at Recurring Irritations/Taproot Cassette Henry Cowell/Aeolian Harp/Sound Forms for Piano (Robert Miller) John M. Bennett + Jim Wiese/Wetting the Bed (excerpts)/Live at Recurring Irritations/Taproot Cassette East Buffalo Media Association/Referred To In the Text as the Mule Car/Enjambment/ Thomas Buckner/The Angle of Repose (comp. Annea Lockwood)/Sign of the Times Joseph Celli/S for J (comp. Joseph Celli)/Organic Oboe/O.O. Discs Ellen Fullman/Departure/Body Music ----------------------------------- The Last Days of the White Race Radiofree NorthAmerica, 4 July 1995 ----------------------------------- ** Warning: The polemical force of these questions has been measured at 8.4 on a scale of 1-10. Readers are advised. ** How do I just sort of skip past Amiri Baraka's repeated references to "faggots"? The same way I'm supposed not to notice Randy "Duke" Cunningham's reference to "homos"? The way Barney Frank's not supposed to mind if he's called "Barney Fag"? ("Oops, just a slip of the tongue.") Is it the way I shouldn't take it personally when gay elected officials invited to a White House meeting are frisked by Secret Service agents wearing latex gloves? (Lest one of the cops get AIDS from patting a gay man down, you know.) Nor should I mind when it takes Clinton (who ducked out of the meeting) a week to apologize for the incident. I suppose I shouldn't seem to notice the passages in Fanon's writings that inscribe homophobia in post-colonial discourse. And no doubt I should be much more understanding about the Cuban revolution's problems. If that hope of the poor still puts men in jail for having sex with each other, well, that just shows that a certain traditionalism in Cuban society has not yet been overcome. Sorry, but I do notice if a place/list/gathering/reading list/revolution is not dealing with its homophobia, and I've tended to stay away from such. I called it being apolitical. Others might have called it by other names. But this morning I feel more inclined to critique. Just about any contemporary political movement I could name treats lesbigay people as somehow expendable. Or, as a post-Clinton comment that's been making the rounds lately has it: "At least with Republicans, we know where we stand." I'm proposing that when homophobia is glossed over, it's a warning signal: "Danger -- Politics As Usual Ahead." Politics as usual means that we'll get the usual results. Me, I'd like to end up with something better than that, for once. And I'd suggest that people who are not lesbigay - identified could also have an interest in making that happen. --CP TEN SUGGESTIONS by Edgar Allen Poe 1. As far as I can understand the "loving our enemies," it implies the hating our friends. 2. Coolidge's multitudinous poems seem to be written upon the plan of "the songs of the Bard of Schiraz," in which, we are assured by Fedladeen, "the same beautiful thought occurs again and again in every possible variety of phrase." 3. There surely can_not_ be "more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of" (oh, Cecil Taylor!) "in _your_ philosophy." 4. That poets (using the word comprehensively, as including writers in general) are a _genus irritabile_, is well understood; but the _why_, seems not to be commonly seen. A writer _is_ a writer only by dint of his or her exquisite sense of verbal Tact--a sense affording rapturous enjoyment, but at the same time implying, or involving, an equally exquisite sense of Insult or innuendo. Thus a wrong--an injustice--done a poet who is really a poet, excites him or her to a degree which, to ordinary apprehension, appears disproportionate with the wrong. Poets _see_ injustice--_never_ where it does not exist--but very often where the unpoetical see no injustice whatever. Thus the poetical irritability has no reference to "temper" in the vulgar sense, but merely to a more than usual clear-sightedness being nothing more than a corollary from the vivid perception of Rightness--of _la mot juste_--of proportion--in a word, of _to chalon_. But one thing is clear--that the man or woman who is _not_ "irritable," (to the ordinary apprehension,) is _no poet_. 5. The taste manifested by _apex of the M_, _is_ to be treated "reverentially," beyond doubt, as one of Mr. Daly's admirers suggests--for the fact is, it is Taste on her deathbed-- Taste kicking _in articulo mortis_. 6. The world is infested, just now, by a new sect of philosophers, who have not yet suspected themselves of forming a sect, and who, consequently, have adopted no name. They are the _Believers in every thing Odd_. Their High Priest in the East, is S--- --in the West, A---; and high priests they are to some purpose. The only common bond among the sect, is Credulity:--let us call it Insanity at once, and be done with it. Ask any of them _why_ they believe this or that, and,if they be conscientious, (ignorant people usually are,) they will make you very much a reply as Talleyrand made when asked why he believed in the Bible. "I believe in it first," said he, "because I am Bishop of Autun; and secondly, _because I know nothing about it at all_." What these philosophers call "argument," is a way they have _"de nier ce qui est et d'expliquer ce qui n'est pas."_ 7. J--- is frequently spoken of as "one of our most industrious poets;" and, in fact, when we consider how much he has written, we perceive, at once, that he _must_ have been industrious, or he could never (like an honest woman as he is) have so thoroughly succeeded in keeping himself from being "talked about." 8. S---, the publisher, trying to be critical, talks about books pretty much as a washerwoman would talk about Niagara falls or a poulterer about a phoenix. 9. With the exception of Duncan's _Bending the Bow_, I have never read a book combining so much of the fiercest passion with so much of the most delicate imagination, as the _School of Udhra_ of Mr. Mackey. I am forced to admit, however, that the latter work _is_ a palpable imitation of the former, which it surpasses in thesis as much as it falls below it in a certain calm energy, lustrous and indomitable--such as we might imagine in a broad river of molten gold. 10. "It is not fair to review my book without reading it," says B---, talking at the critics, and, as usual, expecting impossibilities. The man who has enough uncommon knowledge to _write_ such a work, is clever enough to read it, no doubt; but we should not look for so much talent in the world at large. B--- will not imagine that I mean to blame _him_. The book alone is in fault, after all. The fact is, that "_er lasst sich nicht lesen_"--it will not _permit_ itself to be read. Being a hobby of Prof. B---'s, and brimful of spirit, it will let nobody mount it but Prof. B---. *** diu circulating via thelogic o fireflies cf2785@albnyvms.bitnet