DEATH LETTER BLUES

Son House was one of the greatest blues singers. Some people don't like the blues, or feel it's too rough and down-home for their sophisticated tastes, but these people are insensitive swine. The blues is feeling, pure and simple, and unless you plan on being an inanimate object like a chair or endtable you'd better start feeling, and the blues is a good place to start. Son House had a hell of a life--spent time in Parchman Farm prison in the 1920s, had serious illnesses, and five wives--at different times, of course. All that bad luck and hard times--all that feeling--went into his music. Listen to Death Letter Blues. Can you feel that?



I got a letter this mornin, how do you reckon it read?
It said, "Hurry, hurry, yeah, your love is dead."
I got a letter this mornin, I say how do you reckon it read?
You know, it said, "Hurry, hurry, how come the gal you love is dead?"

So, I grabbed up my suitcase, and took off down the road.
When I got there she was layin on a coolin board.
I grabbed up my suitcase, and I said and I took off down the road.
I said, but when I got there she was already layin on a coolin board.

Well, I walked up right close, looked down in her face.
Said, the good ole gal got to lay here til the Judgment Day.
I walked up right close, and I said I looked down in her face.
I said the good ole gal, she got to lay here til the Judgment Day.

Looked like there was 10,000 people standin round the buryin ground.
I didn't know I loved her til they laid her down.
Looked like 10,000 were standin round the buryin ground.
You know I didn't know I loved her til they damn laid her down.

Lord, have mercy on my wicked soul.
I wouldn't mistreat you baby, for my weight in gold.
I said, Lord, have mercy on my wicked soul.
You know I wouldn't mistreat nobody, baby, not for my weight in gold.

Well, I folded up my arms and I slowly walked away.
I said, "Farewell honey, I'll see you on Judgment Day."
Ah, yeah, oh, yes, I slowly walked away.
I said, "Farewell, farewell, I'll see you on the Judgment Day."

You know I went in my room, I bowed down to pray.
The blues came along and drove my spirit away.
I went in my room, I said I bowed down to pray.
I said the blues came along and drove my spirit away.

You know I didn't feel so bad, til the good ole sun went down.
I didn't have a soul to throw my arms around...

SITA SINGS THE BLUES

Sita Sings the Blues is a beautiful animated feature film written, directed, produced and animated entirely by American artist Nina Paley.

The film weaves together events from the Ramayana, illustrated conversation between Indian shadow puppets, musical interludes voiced with tracks by Annette Hanshaw and scenes from the artist's own life. The ancient mythological and modern biographical plot are parallel tales, sharing numerous themes.

a note from the artist, Nina Paley.

I AM AN ARTIST!

Most artists don't know anything about the business side of art. I AM AN ARTIST: Professional Development Weekend for Artists is a workshop designed to fill that void, and provide essential resources, funding opportunities, peer-to peer evaluation, networking and hands-on feedback for artists.

So you make art? Now what? How do you showcase your work? How do you present your portfolio? How do you write a successful grant proposal? How do you most effectively write an artist's statement? Do galleries still require slides or has everything gone digital? How big are your jpegs? How does your resume look? Sure you know Cadmium red and your Cobalt blue, but what about fiscal sponsorship? Taxes? What about money?

Artists are comfortable making art--that's what we do--but less comfortable conducting the business of art which we've often learned by trial and error, willy nilly, haphazardly. "That's left brain stuff," we joke, burrowing into our work. The business of art is rarely touched upon in art school, which many artists don't attend anyway, and once you're "out in the world" you improvise and play catch as catch can, hoping for the best and trying to make art with your fingers crossed. Other professions have vast support networks and encourage (if not require) continuing education, but artists tend to fumble along alone.

I'm just halfway through this workshop but I've already stuffed my brain (both sides) with valuable information about grant writing and portfolio presentation and galleries and resumes and the labyrinth of taxes and 501c3s and fiscal sponsorship. Lots of good tips. All that, and sharing notes with fellow artists from various backgrounds and experiences. I highly recommend I Am an Artist.

The workshop is offered by Artist Trust, a non-profit organization dedicated to serving the needs of the arts community in Washington state. Artist Trust was founded in 1987 by a group of arts patrons and artists who were concerned about the lack of support for individual artists. Artist Trust is guided by the leadership of a Board of Trustees and a professional staff.

"Artist Trust provides artists the time and resources necessary to prosper. We deliver vital professional development information to thousands of artists each year, and have distributed over $3.4 million in direct support to more than 1,675 of Washington State’s most promising and respected artists of all disciplines."

Visit Artist Trust

BEFORE THE MUSIC DIES

Do you like music?

Do you really like music, or is it just incidental background noise, the audio equivalent of wallpaper? Does music really matter? If you catch yourself singing in the shower, playing an instrument, or just tapping your feet to a tune on the radio you must watch this riveting documentary.



"Before the Music Dies" zeroes in on the current state of American music at a time when fewer and fewer companies control the music industry. Turn on the radio, and you're likely to hear bland, homogeneous Velveeta oozing from your speakers. Overproduced, pitch-corrected, unimaginative product dominates the airwaves--but down the block, just out of earshot, diverse and creative independent music plays its heart out and struggles to survive. What's the deal?

"Before the Music Dies" isn't simply an anti-corporate screed. Filmmakers Andrew Shapter and Joel Rasmussen have made a thoughtful film that asks why mainstream music seems so packaged and repetitive, and whether corporations really have the power to silence creativity. They examined all the angles, and interviewed dozens of musicians, critics, industry insiders and fans to find out. The film that will make you think--especially if you love music.

RADIOHEAD: HOUSE OF CARDS

Radiohead made this video without cameras or lights. Instead, they used 3D technologies to collect information about the shapes and relative distances of objects. I don't know what that means, either, but the result is a unique, compelling video. Welcome to the future.

SAID THE JOKER TO THE THIEF

The late Heath Ledger--who died from an accidental overdose of prescription drugs--has been posthumously nominated for Actor in a Supporting Role for his portrayal of the Joker in The Dark Knight, the latest film in the Batman franchise. Ledger stole the show with his evil antics, but no less of a performance was his turn as singer Bob Dylan in the arty, experimental film from 2007, "I'm Not There."

Heath Ledger as the Joker, posthumously nominated for an Oscar

In the Todd Haynes film, six actors portray various sides of the mercurial songwriter, and Ledger plays Robbie Clark, an actor in Greenwich Village struggling with his career and his marriage to Claire (a fictional character based on Sara Dylan, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg).

Like Dylan, the film isn't for everyone--and those seeking formulaic entertainment or a standard bio-pic should look elsewhere--but it brims with excellent performances and a thought-provoking montage of styles that mirror the phases of the shape-shifting singer. Ledger's performance is dark and complex, as you can see from this clip.


Heath Ledger and Charlotte Gainsbourg in "I'm Not There" (2007)

Listen to the song, "I'm Not There," by Bob Dylan, one of the unfinished basement tapes recorded with The Band at Big Pink. Just push the button to play.

WHY ART?

Who needs Art? We're in a recession, right? During tough economic times we've always slashed health care, education, environmental protection, and programs designed to help the hungry and the homeless--critical social services--so why worry about something as ephemeral as "the arts?" Surely, we can jettison a few poems and paintings in favor of more pressing concerns...right? After all, who really needs painting, music, and literature?

The novelist E. L. Doctorow gave this speech before a subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee in the fall of 1981. It remains a timely statement on the value of art to the human spirit.

For the Artist's Sake

I have always disliked the phrase "the arts." It connotes to me furs and black ties and cocktail receptions, the patronage by the wealthy of work that is tangential to their lives, or that fills them not with dread or awe or visionary joy but with self-satisfaction.

"The arts" have nothing to do with the loneliness of writers or painters working in their rooms year after year, or with actors putting together plays in lofts, or with dancers tearing up their bodies to make spatial descriptions of the hope of beauty or transcendent myth.

So as a working writer I distinguish myself from the arts community. I am confirmed in this when I look at the National Endowment for the Arts' board and program structure. In the past, a very small percentage of the arts budget has been given over to literature, to the grants made to young writers or dramatists or poets of promise. In all the time since its founding, the N.E.A. has found only four writers worthy to sit on its immense board. Instead, the heavy emphasis has been on museums, opera companies, symphony orchestras: just those entities that happen to cater to patrons of "the arts."

I suppose I would have to confess, if asked, that I feel about opera, for instance, that it is not a living art in this country, that we do not naturally write and produce operas from ourselves as a matter of course as, for example, Italy did in the nineteenth century, and that, therefore, as wonderful and exciting as opera production may be, it is essentially the work of conservation of European culture; opera companies are conservators of the past, like museums, and their support by the National Endowment reflects this strong bias or belief in the arts as something from the past rather than the present.

The National Endowment programs I value most are just those likely to be proscribed: first, the programs of individual grants to individual artists in whatever medium — the programs endowing directly the work of living artists; and, second, those programs that do not separate the arts from life, from our own life and times but emphasize the connection — the artists-in-education program, the poets who go into schools, for example, and help children to light the spark in themselves. I cannot imagine anything more responsible than the work persuading a schoolchild to express his or her anguished or joyful observations — and to be self-rewarded with a poem or a painting. Whole lives ride on moments like that.

Or the inter-arts programs, the folk arts, the expansion arts — all bureaucratic terms for encouraging experiment and risk-taking on the part of artists, and for bringing artists in contact with people everywhere in the country, connecting people with the impulses inside themselves. Programs that encourage participation rather than the passive receipt of official art of the past are the ones I think most important: all the programs that suggest to people that they have their own voices, that they can sing and write of their own past — people in their churches, students in their classes or prisoners in their cells. These programs — just the ones branded so vilely by the Heritage Foundation Report as instruments of social policy or public therapy and slated for extinction by our new budgeteers — are the ones I value. And not from any vague idealistic sentiment either: I know as an artist where art comes from. I know there is a ground-song from which every writer lifts his voice, that literature comes out of a common chorus and that our recognition of the genius of a writer — Mark Twain, for example — cannot exclude the people he speaks for.

Art will rise where it is least expected and usually not wanted. You can't generate it with gala entertainments and $200-a-plate dinners. You can, if you're an enlightened legislative body, see to it that you don't ipso facto create an official state art by concentrating your funding on arts establishments. Other people may talk of how many billions of dollars of business is produced from the arts, but to me that is beside the point.

But saying even this, I cannot avoid the feeling that it is senseless for me to testify here today. People everywhere have been put in the position of fighting piecemeal for this or that social program while the assault against all of them proceeds across a broad front. The truth is, if you're going to take away the lunches of schoolchildren, the pensions of miners who've contracted black lung, the storefront legal services of the poor who are otherwise stunned into insensibility by the magnitude of their troubles, you might as well get rid of poets, artists and musicians. If you're planning to scrap medical care for the indigent, scholarships for students, day-care centers for the children of working mothers, transportation for the elderly and handicapped — if you're going to eliminate people's public service training jobs and then reduce their unemployment benefits after you've put them on the unemployment rolls, taking away their food stamps in the bargain, then I say the loss of a few poems and arias cannot matter. If you're going to close down the mental therapy centers for the veterans of Vietnam, what does it matter if the theaters go dark or our libraries close their doors?

And so in my testimony for this small social program I am aware of the larger picture and, really, it stuns me. What I see in this picture is a kind of sovietizing of American life, guns before butter, the plating of this nation with armaments, the sacrifice of everything in our search for ultimate security. We shall become an immense armory. But inside the armory there will be nothing, not a people but an emptiness; we shall be an armory around nothingness, and our true strength and security and envy of the world — the passion and independent striving of a busy working and dreaming population committed to fair play and the struggle for some sort of real justice and community — will be no more. If this happens, maybe in the vast repository of bombs, deep in the subterranean chambers of our missile fields, someone in that cavernous silence will remember a poem and recite it. Maybe some young soldier will hum a tune, maybe another will be able to speak the language well enough to tell a story, maybe two people will get up and dance to the rhythm of the doomsday clock ticking us all to extinction.

--E. L. Doctorow

"For the Artist's Sake." E. L. Doctorow: Essays and Conversations. Ed. Richard Trenner. Princeton, NJ: Ontario Review P, 1983: 13-15.

GLITTER AND DOOM

Chocolate Jesus

Tom Waits is touring the Deep South with songs about guns and Jesus. I picture a tent show revival with snake handlers and sweet tea, and preacher Tom speaking in tongues. I'd love to see this old geezer and his ramshackle music machine. Oh, yeah. Let's get real gone.


To hear a stunning two and a half show from Atlanta, Georgia, aired on NPR: click HERE.


Jockey Full of Bourbon

COOL CARTOON FOR THE CHINESE OLYMPICS

Cartoonist Jamie Hewlett and musician Damon Albarn, the creative duo that brought us Gorillaz, have produced this wonderful animated short for the BBC's sports marketing campaign on the Chinese Olympics.

We love the short, and the Gorillaz (I posted a song of theirs just last week) but have mixed feelings about the Chinese Olympics. It's all about money, isn't it? I mean sports?


The USA makes such a fuss about democracy--when it's convenient--but all the wonderful talk about "freedom" conveniently disappears when the big bucks are at stake. Compare how the US has defiantly blockaded Cuba, say, a tiny country 90 miles from Florida (for being communist and for violating human rights), and how it warmly welcomes China (read: communist, un-democratic, violator of human rights) because it's jammed with a billion and a half potential customers. That's a lot of Coke and cigarettes. I know, I'm cranky. It's just sports, after all. Get me a beer and a bowl of chips and I'll gladly shut up.



"The Chinese government should show the global Olympic audience it’s serious about human rights by releasing the Tiananmen detainees. Beijing’s use of Tiananmen Square as a macabre prop for China’s Olympic ‘coming-out-party’ adds insult to injury. "

--Sophie Richardson, Asia advocacy director at Human Rights Watch.

Along with freeing the imprisoned Tienanmen Square protesters, Human Rights Watch urges China to:

• overturn the 1989 official pronouncement labeling the student movement a “counterrevolutionary rebellion;”
  
  
• publicly recognize that the June 1989 massacre is a deeply divisive source of pain and frustration even within the ranks of the ruling Chinese Communist Party, by providing redress to the victims;

• cease the harassment, arrest and imprisonment of survivors, family members, and scholars who demand state accountability for Tiananmen abuses; and
  
  
• issue a complete list of those who died or were injured, and those who were imprisoned, as no such lists are publicly available.

SUMMERTIME JUKEBOX COUNTDOWN

Summertime is music time.

The song of the summer. Santogold live on Jools. "L.E.S. Artistes"

"I can say I hope it will be worth what I give up..."




"Dig Yourself, Lazarus Dig!"

"...But what do we really know of the dead And who actually cares?"

He may look like a 1970s used car salesman in a highly flammable leisure suit, but Nick Cave writes some catchy songs. Here's one about sex, death, drug addiction, success, and resurrection.

"Poor Larry!"

GOGOL BORDELLO

Gogol Bordello is a fiery stew of gypsy music, punk rock, bawdy cabaret, Slavic dirges, and three-penny Brechtian opera for the common man. Rough and tumble and surreal, these artful dodgers are debauched yet somehow innocent as ragamuffin pickpockets. Take their leader, Eugene Hütz. A mystical outsider, a far-flung scatterling from the post-Soviet diaspora, Hütz is originally from the Ukraine and has lived as a refugee in Poland, Hungary, Austria and Italy. He is a patchwork effigy of all these places, a crazy quilt flag of many flags, and he leads the band with the ragged determination of a survivor. Gogol Bordello would be great for a party or a revolution, but you probably wouldn't want them moving in upstairs.

Eugene Hütz of Gogol Bordello

RODRIGO AND GABRIELA

Rodrigo Sanchez and Gabriela Quintero met as teenagers at La Casa de Cultura (House of Culture) in Mexico City. For a long time they played rough clubs at night, and worked day jobs -- Gabriela taught Metallica licks to kids, and Rodrigo worked at a TV station -- and somehow found time to rehearse five hours a day. They finally traveled to Europe and busked for change in Copenhagen, Barcelona, and sub-zero Denmark. They didn't really take off until Dublin, where the fast-picking Mexicans squeezed aside the usual pop music warhorses and topped the charts, earning a well-deserved international following. According to a friend who saw them a couple days ago, they were the best musicians at Sasquatch Music Festival on the Columbia Gorge.

This song is called "Diablo Rojo" (Red Devil).

DRUM BATTLE ROYALE!

Drum solos may be out of fashion (I think of the drunk yelling out "Caravan with a drum solo!") but here are two great drummers from the old school, Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich, battling it out like the wizards in Lord of the Rings. These guys have been practicing their rudiments and paraddidles, as our school bandleader Mr. Fitzimmons used to say.

Go, man, Go!

DAVID RIESMAN ON BEATLEMANIA

David Riesman (1909-2002) Sociologist and Educator

If you've read any sociology at all, you've probably read David Riesman. In his important book The Lonely Crowd, he wrote of 'inner-directed' and 'other-directed' personalities. Riesman made a case that the character of post WWII American society pushed individuals to "other-directedness", the classic example being modern suburbia "where individuals seek their neighbors approval and fear being outcast from their community." Conformity was key, and the individual was being homogenized.


The Beatles in Germany, 1966

As a non-conformist of sorts, I always liked Riesman. Still, I think the good doctor missed the boat on Beatlemania. Riesman himself would admit he's the product of his own cultural time and place, his own social conditioning, his zeitgeist. In this 1964 interview he took the Fab Four for a passing fad. Of course, at the time of the interview the Beatles were a recent phenomenon, and we can't expect Riesman to enjoy our 20-20 hindsight. Still, it makes a fascinating read.

"Compared to the Elvis Presley craze, it is a very minor one. Presley created a definitely 'antiparent' outlook. His music—and he, himself—appeared somewhat insolent, slightly hoodlum."

Read the entire 1964 interview in the US News and World Report by clicking HERE.

SANTOGOLD INTROVERT EXCAVATOR

After singing for punk band, Stiffed, Brooklyn girl Santi White made a brilliant album as Santogold. She somehow combines Karen O and M.I.A., tribal, electro, and eighties dance music, and each track could come from a totally different album. This catchy cut makes me want to dance while it lambastes hipster art fakers on the Lower East Side, L.E.S. Artistes.

What I'm searching for
to tell it straight, I'm trying to build a wall
Walking by myself
down avenues that reek of time to kill
If you see me keep going
be a pass by waver
Build me up, bring me down
just leave me out you name dropper
Stop trying to catch my eye
I see you good you forced faker
Just make it easy
You're my enemy you fast talker

I can say I hope it will be worth what I give up
If I could stand up mean for the things that I believe

MAKING LOVE OR EXPECTING RAIN

Bob Dylan has worked with a wide range of artists, and one of my favorites is Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the sixteenth century Flemish Renaissance painter. The two collaborate in this amusing film by Roderick Smith, an interpretation of Dylan's "Desolation Row." And if that's not enough, there are also marionettes!

CAPTAIN BEEFHEART & HIS MAGIC BAND

This Saturday night is Music Movie Night, when we hang out with friends and screen classic and rare musical performances -- everything from old hophead blues to music from the distant future delivered by space aliens.

One such space alien is Captain Beefheart, recorded here at Cannes in 1968 (that year again!), playing some tripped-out avant blues from Alpha Centauri.

Although it appears as a single point to the naked eye, Alpha Centauri is actually a system of three stars, one of which is the fourth brightest star in the night sky.

The Captain and His Magic Band

SOMETHING NEW

Fuzzed-out, sleazy pop from the Raveonettes, recorded live at the Triple Door in Seattle. With a menacing, retro, low-fi vibe, they sound like they just crawled out of a David Lynch movie, but actually they are cool Scandinavians. This is "Aly, Walk with Me," from the album, "Lust, Lust, Lust."

DYLAN WINS PULITZER PRIZE

"Dylan, the most acclaimed and influential songwriter of the past half century, who more than anyone brought rock from the streets to the lecture hall, received an honorary Pulitzer Prize on Monday, cited for his 'profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power.'

"It was the first time Pulitzer judges, who have long favored classical music, and, more recently, jazz, awarded an art form once dismissed as barbaric, even subversive."

--From the AP story by Hillel Italie.

For this post, I picked "Forever Young" from 1977 and "Love Sick" from 1998. You could pick plenty of other songs that would showcase his talents -- he wrote so many. I could probably come up with a dozen from each different Dylan period. Let see, there's folk Dylan, finger-pointing Dylan, electric Dylan, Nashville Dylan, Rolling Thunder Dylan...not to mention Kate Blanchett. Nobody else comes close. Thanks for writing 'em, Bob. And congratulations!

For more of the Dylan Pulitzer story, click here.

For more about the other Prize-winners, click here.

GET YOUR KICKS ON ROUTE 66

All hail the Great American Highway! The Nat King Cole Trio plays "Route 66" in this wonderful clip. I used to sing this one standing on the shoulders of interstates and country roads -- making up the words in the middle -- while I tried to flag a ride.

Did you ever hit the road, Jack? Did you ever hitch-hike? I don't mean short stints -- did you ever thumb a cross country trip? I wouldn't do it now, but I had some great trips back in the day. I thumbed from Seattle to Mexico, up and down the West Coast a few times, around upstate New York when the leaves were changing, even did a run from Portland to Phoenix one hot July, which I don't recommend. I had great rides, and some bad ones. I slept under a bridge in Salt Lake City, got robbed, even got thrown in jail. In the hot Arizona desert, I was a tiny sunburned speck in a landscape out of a western movie, standing for hours in the booming sun, finally getting rescued by Navajos in a tricked-out Camaro on their way to an all-Indian rodeo in Tuba City.


Thumbing was a thrill, a journey, a way to see the country from the ground up. Maybe it was a little dangerous. Still, I wouldn't trade those adventures for anything in the world.

Did you ever get your kicks on Route 66?

To see my drawing of the trio, click here.