Download: “By the Rippling Green” – The Assemble Head in Sunburst Sound
A warm, almost mournful slice of archetypal West Coast psychedelic guitar rock off When Sweet Sleep Returned, the new album by The Assemble Head in Sunburst Sound, which finds the now San Francisco-based quartet really stepping up their songcraft.
Purchase info at the Tee Pee Records website.
Download: “The Ballad of Charley Harper” – Six Organs of Admittance (mp3)
Who was Charley Harper? Ben says: “Charley Harper was this incredible artist from Cincinnati. He did all sorts of nature screen prints and basically took nature’s organic forms and made them into very basic geometric forms. He saw the complexity of nature and explained it in the simplest of forms. Charley did a lot of art in science books for elementary school children and you might even recognize his stuff from way back then. He also wrote some really beautiful thoughts on man and nature. In his book Birds and Words he has a whole chapter on birds that were either going extinct or were already. On the Eskimo Curlew, across from his beautiful depiction, he wrote:
In Autumn the Eskimo Curlew fueled up on berries and snails and flew the Atlantic non-stop, from the New England Coast to South America; in spring the breeding instinct drew him back to the Barren Grounds of Canada via the Mississippi Flyway, where he fueled on insect pests. Both ways he ran the gauntlet of a hunter army, which stalked him from state to state to provision meat counters by the wagonload. One hunter downed 28 Curlews with a single blast to become the 20th Century’s Man of Extinction.
“Charley Harper passed away on June 10, 2007.”
The Ballad of Charley Harper appears on Luminous Night, the new Six Organs of Admittance album out August 18 through the good people of Drag City — more info here.
Chasny has been featured in Arthur many times over the last five years, including a profile by Tony Rettman in Arthur No. 7, a cover feature in Arthur No. 15 and in a special dialogue with Al Cisneros (Om, Shrinebuilder, Sleep) in Arthur No. 27. All issues are available from the Arthur Magazine Store.
July 23– PAUL PATRICK
“Out” gay British educator, LGBT activist.
JULY 23, 2009 HOLIDAYS AND FESTIVALS
*Mayhem New Year: Ceremony for transfer of power to the god of the new year. Five-day festival. Pottery, furniture, mats, clothing and implements of worship are destroyed and replaced.
ALSO ON JULY 23 IN HISTORY…
1827 — First public swimming pool in U.S. opens, Boston.
1888 — Detective writer Raymond Chandler born, Chicago, Illinois.
1950 — “Out” gay British educator, LGBT activist Paul Patrick born, South Shields.
Excerpted from The 2009 Autonomedia Calendar of Jubilee Saints: Radical Heroes for the New Millennium by James Koehnline and the Autonomedia Collective
The Arthur editor got this lo-fi pic of a sign posted outside the screening of a set of recent Kenneth Anger films last Saturday night at New York’s Anthology Film Archives. Click on it to see at full size…
And, courtesy photojournalist R.A. Pleuger, here are a few scenes from the Hollywood Forever cemetery last Sunday night during Cinespia’s screening of vintage Kenneth Anger films. This first pic is of a huge, magnificently lit tomb, through which you can see a bit of the projection of “Rabbit’s Moon”…
July 22– ERRICO MALATESTA
An Italian communist-anarchist who promoted revolution through direct action, land seizure & the general strike. Born with great wealth, he spent all of it on radical causes until he was buried in a pauper’s grave. He organized numerous demonstrations, radical newspapers, & workers’ insurrections in Europe & Argentina despite constant exile & arrest. Frequently escaped execution & often traveled in disguise.
JULY 22, 2009 HOLIDAYS AND FESTIVALS
*Spoonerisms Day.
*Festival of Boredom and Reveries.
ALSO ON JULY 22 IN HISTORY…
1927 — Social theorist Albert Meister born, Basel, Switzerland.
1932 — Anarcho-communist theorist Errico Malatesta dies, Rome, Italy.
1934 — John Dillinger shot and killed outside Biograph theater, Chicago.
1946 —Irgun bombs King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 90 Brits.
Adapted from The 2009 Autonomedia Calendar of Jubilee Saints: Radical Heroes for the New Millennium by James Koehnline and the Autonomedia Collective
July 21– Hart Crane
Gay American modernist poet, cultural pariah.
JULY 21, 2009 HOLIDAYS AND FESTIVALS
*Cap Breton, Canada: Scottish Clans gather for festivities and the election of chieftains for the next year.
ALSO ON JULY 21 IN HISTORY…
1796 — Scottish national bard Robert Burns dies, Mill Hole Brae, Scotland.
1899 — American macho novelist Ernest Hemingway born, Oak Park, Illinois.
1899 — American modernist poet Hart Crane born, Garretsville, Ohio.
1911 — Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan born, Edmonton, Alberta.
1981 — Creationism law requiring equal teaching with evolution passed, Louisiana.
1983 — Martial law lifted in Poland as overthrow of Soviet dominion advances.
1983 — World’s coldest temperature (–127°F) recorded, Vostok, Antarctica.
2004 — Palestinian-American journalist Farouk Abdel-Muhti dies, Philadelphia.
Excerpted from The 2009 Autonomedia Calendar of Jubilee Saints: Radical Heroes for the New Millennium by James Koehnline and the Autonomedia Collective
Description from YouTbe of clip: “An instrumental piece used for a tv-programme on the evening of the first moonlanding July 20, 1969. uninterrupted.”
This clip was apparently made by a fan in an attempt to simulate what s/he’d seen. The footage here is from a 1972 landing, the audio is from a bootleg recording of the TV broadcast.
David Gilmour tells The Guardian:
“We were in a BBC TV studio jamming to the landing. It was a live broadcast, and there was a panel of scientists on one side of the studio, with us on the other. I was 23.
“The programming was a little looser in those days, and if a producer of a late-night programme felt like it, they would do something a bit off the wall. Funnily enough I’ve never really heard it since, but it is on YouTube. They were broadcasting the moon landing and they thought that to provide a bit of a break they would show us jamming. It was only about five minutes long. The song was called Moonhead — it’s a nice, atmospheric, spacey 12-bar blues.”
More from David Gilmour at The Guardian, here.
More coverage at the New York Times
untitled poem by Angela Jaeger
write with the tv on
building the houses
finance the education
save the nation
fraud the credit
use my number
file a claim
get a new card
find a new password
keep it a secret
forget about it
fall in the house of still
the tall frame no blame
listening to a voice within
the secret number
the subway train
the snow is god
and the snow is falling
Among the most elusive recordings in the realm of non-English language 78 rpm discs for Westerners are those of Iranian and/or Persian origin. But there are two websites with particularly amazing information and sounds. Pooyan Nassehpoor’s Iranian Library of Recorded Sounds includes a trove of nearly a dozen jewel-like performances of Persian music of the the first half of the twentieth century.
And Amir Mansour’s breathtaking Persian Discography gives an authoritative history of the early history of the recording of Persian music as well as the history of recordings of regional ethnic minorities and key later recordings.
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