A GUIDE to IANNIS XENAKIS’S MUSIC: “When you hear Xenakis’s music – any piece of what we recognise as his mature work, starting with 1954’s Metastasis, onwards – you’re confronted with an aesthetic that seems unprecedented according to any of the frames of reference that musical works usually relate to. You won’t hear vestiges of things…
Tag: God
Blood Meridian
I haven’t had the pleasure of reading Blood Meridian yet, but every single Blood Meridian quote I’ve mined from the internet is extraordinary. To wit: They rode on and the sun in the east flushed pale streaks of light and then a deeper run of color like blood seeping up in sudden reaches flaring planewise…
Pandemic Inventory
Seems like a lot of people are taking inventory of their pandemic experiences, so I will too. (As someone on Twitter recently joked, citing Garrison Keillor: Nothing happened to me, and now I’m going to tell you about it.) Like millions of others, I spend a lot of time alone these days. Don’t my lonely…
Numinosum
New Paul Levy post: Instead of cursing our brokenness (or our abusers), we can recognize it as a numinous event, an archetypal creative and potentially redemptive moment that seeks to make us participants in a divine, eternal happening. The Biblical Jacob suffering for the rest of his life from a wounded hip as a…
INTERVIEW: Daniel Kalder (Anti-Tourism)
ANTI-TOURISM Q: Which foreign land that you’ve visited so far was the most impenetrable in your travels — the one that had the most barriers to entry e.g. physical distance, bureaucracy, cost, etc. ? A: Turkmenistan. I visited during the imperial-hallucinatory phase of the Turkmenbashi dictatorship. It took me over a year to get in,…