Motley Kamuka

Joni Mitchell is amazing. From folk music to jazz, she's an amazing artist. I was reminded of that when I saw this article about her pre-debut work, a 5 disk compilation is coming out. ( NPR discusses. ) I first started listening to her with my first wife. Then I listened to Blue at my uncle's place, he said he got laid to Blue so many times. I later learned that the cover of Court and Spark was shot on the frozen Lake Mendota when she was in Madison. You can listen on Spotify . Here is a fascinating article of awesome music recommendations by Joni.

Quipu : an Incan kind of abacus.  Ceilidh : An Irish or Scottish social gathering, that can be a social call, or include music and dancing. Skiffle : is a genre of folk music with influences from blues, jazz, and American folk music, generally performed with a mixture of manufactured and homemade or improvised instruments.

This book is brilliant in all kinds of ways, including the prediction and the effects of a pandemic in 2010, but I found this extended passage quite descriptive of my eldest son (I lost paragraphs): "In fact, he’d never read a whole book all the way through, not even when he was supposed to for school. He would read only as much as he had to in order to do the assignment. Depending on the book, he might skim all the pages or he’d read a chapter or two from the beginning, middle, and end. Sometimes he’d just Google or SparkNote the book. He’d never once got into trouble for not reading a whole book—proof that reading every page could not be all that important. He wasn’t making any kind of statement. He was truly bored by most of the reading assigned at school—and he wasn’t the only one. Besides, he thought his parents were wrong. The kind of reading they did was something almost no one did anymore. Lots of successful people didn’t read books and the smartest kids at school weren’t ...

 "Oh God no, I never hope. Hope is pouting in advance. Hope is faith's richer, bitchier sister. Hope is the deformed addict bound incest monster of entitlement and fear." This is a quote from Frankie on Community.

Matthew Shipp is my favorite living pianist. You can watch his concert last night on YouTube at Roulette. you can see  Fujiwara/ Formanek/ Halvorson in Thumbscrew the night before. I like Halvorson . My daughter says she doesn't like the music and it's yucky, but then she can sit and look at it some. The cool move in this kind of jazz is to play a bunch of ear jarring stuff, build up your tolerance, and then they do a short riff of some sweet and simple. The contrast makes it amazing. Shipp came up playing with David Ware, the great Saxophonist and William Parker the great base player.  You can't really say what his music is like, but I think of Keith Jarrett in his unique performances on piano. Unfortunately Jarrett had 2 strokes . I guess you could call it avant garde because it's dissonant and unique, but every jazz performance is unique. I like Jason Moran too. And Ethan Iverson . And  Brad Mehldau . My favorite jazz pianist is Bill Evans . But I like Bud Powel...

My guilty little pleasure is Star Trek. Idealism and utopian future, confronting aggression. I don't have a TV so I haven't seen the new Picard series. I got a book called Picard , so I'll be reading it without seeing the show, my favorite way. I can create my own visualizations and then when I see the show I'll be a bit disappointed by how they visualize the story. I'm making my way through DS9 on Netflix, a show that deserved more of a following, and has probably gotten it in the post-TV world. I love not having to watch commercials, I would say that is the biggest quality of life issue that has happened in my lifetime. I was watching an DS9 episode where Jake wanted to buy his father something because he was down, but he had no money. The Federation exists in a post monetary world. I want to read Trekenomics , an economist examines the post-scarcity universe. I hope to read more into this subject. Reading Picard , I realized what the Romulans represent. They repr...

Sigrid Nunez's book Mitz is about Leonard Woolf 's marmoset. It includes a little biography about the couple. Leonard seemed to be quite a caretaker. I should like to read his novel of Ceylon . His stuff is free on Project Gutenberg .  It turns out I read her 2 great novels when I was in England in 88/9. I've read a biography of her, a short one. I've read The Hours too. I can't but help see her walking into the Thames.  Some recent articles: How Virginia Woolf’s work was shaped by music by Emma Sutton Why Do Fashion People Love Virginia Woolf So Much? Links Wikipedia Great Lives BBC Some of her photographs. Michael Cunningham on VW  (NY times)