White Magic just released New Egypt, an EP centered around trance-like, looping vocals that conjure up the ghost of Siouxsie and the Banshees circa 1980 (imagine the phrase “I can read your mind / I can read your mind” echoing and reverberating alongside some spaced out Middle-Eastern rhythms.) This Friday, they will be invoking their witchy/bewitching music alongside Glasser and Big Search in the heart of a redwood grove, as part of a showcase presented by folkyeah!. After the show, why not set yourself to sleep amongst the giants in the adjacent campground:
Fernwood’s campground is located in a majestic redwood grove along the Big Sur River. We have tent camping, RV sites with water and electric hookups, and tent cabins along the river. Hiking trails lead right from here into the state park.
Date & Time: Friday, March 27th, 9PM
Venue: Fernwood Resort, Big Sur
Location: 47200 Highway 1 / Big Sur, CA 93920
Price: $12.00 (For tickets and camping info, go here)
(UPDATE: “Hack Money, Hack Banking” by Douglas Rushkoff, the March 20 follow-up to “Let It Die,” is available here.)
LET IT DIE by Douglas Rushkoff
March 15, 2009
With any luck, the economy will never recover.
In a perfect world, the stock market would decline another 70 or 80 percent along with the shuttering of about that fraction of our nation’s banks. Yes, unemployment would rise as hundreds of thousands of formerly well-paid brokers and bankers lost their jobs; but at least they would no longer be extracting wealth at our expense. They would need to be fed, but that would be a lot cheaper than keeping them in the luxurious conditions they’re enjoying now. Even Bernie Madoff costs us less in jail than he does on Park Avenue.
Alas, I’m not being sarcastic. If you had spent the last decade, as I have, reviewing the way a centralized economic plan ravaged the real world over the past 500 years, you would appreciate the current financial meltdown for what it is: a comeuppance. This is the sound of the other shoe dropping; it’s what happens when the chickens come home to roost; it’s justice, equilibrium reasserting itself, and ultimately a good thing.
I started writing a book three years ago through which I hoped to help people see the artificial and ultimately dehumanizing landscape of corporatism on which we conduct so much of our lives. It’s not just that I saw the downturn coming—it’s that I feared it wouldn’t come quickly or clearly enough to help us wake up from the self-destructive fantasy of an eternally expanding economic frontier. The planet, and its people, were being taxed beyond their capacity to produce. Try arguing that to a banker whose livelihood is based on perpetuating that illusion, or to people whose retirement incomes depend on just one more generation falling for the scam. It’s like arguing to Brooklyn’s latest crop of brownstone buyers that they’ve invested in real estate at the very moment the whole market is about to tank. (I did; it wasn’t pretty.)
Also know we are alone together And will die the same
Alone
Madness: in the cooler of the mind, the elevators corridors and yes the sole stairwalker even now he whistles thinking fondly of eachother
A leaf drags along the ground for miles
(eachother)
A cricket intermittently makes an announcement
Eachother
What it is we share When we mow each our own
When we type for one
When we meet the mailman At the door it is in unison
Turn madness into roars Of joking with eachother Tears paper thin the walls of Anger at eachother like Birthday cakes and chicken With butter for eachother For this is all we are
—Bree
This poem is from Bree’s “Was Chicken Trax Amid Sparrows Tread,” available at abebooks.com, or send check/cash/MO for $10 per book plus $2 shipping & handling, to Green Panda Press 3174 Berkshire Road Cleveland Heights, OH 44118
Exhibition opening at Dabora, Brooklyn, NYC ( Map ) on Saturday, March 14th, 8pm-11pm. Complimentary absinthe so arrive early! Pam says “If you can’t make it to the opening, I will be at the gallery most weekends, so be sure to stop in and say hello. The artwork is stunning, and Dabora is a gallery like no other, with its opulent, gothic interior. Divine.”
Dabora Gallery and Phantasmaphile‘s Pam Grossman are proud to usher in the spring season with the group show “Fata Morgana: The New Female Fantasists,” on view from March 14th through April 12th, 2009.
In literal terms, a fata morgana is a mirage or illusion, a waking reverie, a shimmering of the mind. Named for the enchantress Morgan le Fay, these tricks of perception conjure up a sense of glimpsing into another world, whether it be the expanses of an ethereal terrain, or the twilit depths of the psyche. The artists of “Fata Morgana: The New Female Fantasists” deftly utilize the semiotics of mysticism, fantasy, and the subconscious in their work, thereby guiding the viewer through heretofore uncharted realms – alternately shadowy or luminous, but always inventive.
Yoko Ono recently said, “I think all women are witches, in the sense that a witch is a magical being.” Each artist in this show is a sorceress in her own right. Endowed with fecund imaginations and masterful craftsmanship, their work transforms the viewer: we become spellbound, bearing witness to their attempts to reconcile the desire for a diurnal beauty with the lure of a lush and riotous inner wilderness. The fantastical is counterpoint to the ferocious, the monstrous to the marvelous. Allusions to myth and metamorphosis abound, as these works channel their own heroine spirits and tell their own secret tales. Here, frame is magic threshold, bidding us to take a breath, and cross over.
Monday, March 16, 2009 at 8:00 p.m.
First Congregational Church of Los Angeles
Charlemagne Palestine – “Schlingen-Blängen”
Charlemagne Palestine, organ
A true “living legend,” maverick American composer Charlemagne Palestine emerged from the downtown New York music scene. In a rare return visit to Los Angeles, where he lived in the early 1970s, he’ll pull out all the stops on the world’s largest church pipe organ. Always accompanied by his family of stuffed animals, Palestine has gained worldwide notoriety for his transcendent and earth-shaking performances, which create the illusion of dozens of organists playing simultaneously. His pure and animistic music creates trance-like drones that must be heard live to be fully appreciated.
General Admission: $25
Students: $10
First Congregational Church of Los Angeles
540 S. Commonwealth Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90020
The First Congregational Church is located on Commonwealth Avenue (between Vermont Avenue and Alvarado Street) at Sixth Street. For free secured on-site parking, enter on Commonwealth Avenue.
The story of Harry Smith‘s mid-50s recordings of Rabbi Naftali Zvi Margolies Abulafia, a Kabbalist involved with word-permutations, made between the release of the Anthology of American Folk Music and the beginng of work on the Mirror Animations and Heaven and Earth Magic has been told and retold, but it’s nice to see these newly-posted clips, filmed a dozen years ago of Abulafia’s grandson, poet Lionel Ziprin explaining the story of an extraordinary recording, which the larger world has yet to hear. It’ll happen eventually. Maybe we’ll get a decent reissue of Smith’s Kiowa peyote song recordings, too…
Here’s the first of a gaggle of posts we’ll be doing of images from newsprint hippie publications from Baltimore, 1968-71.
These are from Harry, which to quote Joe Vaccarino’s Baltimore Sounds: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Baltimore Area Pop Musicians, Bands & Recordings 1950-1980, “was founded in 1969 by Michael Carliner… After a rocky start, when the original staff revolted and walked out on the eve of the first issue’s press run, Harry became the choice alternative free [sic] paper of the Baltimore political and musical communities. Early contributors included Art Levine, P.J. O’Rourke, Tom D’Antoni, Alan Rose and Jack Heyrman. Harry survived many raids, takeovers and other traumatic events to provide alternative and community news at the height of the Vietnam, hippie, yippie era.”
Arthur Magazine 