The Crow's Eye: Satie on Sunday for She who excels me

"...it's not the training to be mean but the training to be kind that is used to keep us leashed best." ~ Black Dog Red

"In case you haven't recognized the trend: it proceeds action, dissent, speech." ~ davidly, on how wars get done

"...What sort of meager, unerotic existence must a man live to find himself moved to such ecstatic heights by the mundane sniping of a congressional budget fight. The fate of human existence does not hang in the balance. The gods are not arrayed on either side. Poseiden, earth-shaker, has regrettably set his sights on the poor fishermen of northern Japan and not on Washington, D.C. where his ire might do some good--I can think of no better spot for a little wetland reclamation project, if you know what I mean. The fight is neither revolution nor apocalypse; it is hardly even a fight. A lot of apparatchiks are moving a lot of phony numbers with more zeros than a century of soccer scores around, weaving a brittle chrysalis around a gross worm that, some time hence, will emerge, untransformed, still a worm." ~ IOZ

Dec 19, 2010

Satie on Sunday for She who excels me

Erik Satie, Gnossiene #1, Andreas Wolter and Romy Nagy:

Gnossiene #1, Farid Farjah:

Gmynopedie #1, pianist unknown:

Gnossiene #1, Claude Chalhoub:

7 comments:

BDR said...: Thanks!

I just recently badgered Planet's piano teacher last Wednesday into assigning Planet all three Gmynopedies. I love her teacher, but getting her out of the 19th century is a bitch.; December 19, 2010 at 11:04 AM
Jack Crow said...: De rien, mon ami.; December 19, 2010 at 11:36 AM
Ethan said...: Ooh, Satie, very nice. Have you read the "interview" between him and John Cage? Very cool stuff; Cage took Satie's writings and turned them into an interview between the two of them that starts out hostile and ends up much less so; very, I guess, Cageyan.; December 19, 2010 at 12:16 PM
Jack Crow said...: I'd not even heard of it, Ethan. I had a peripheral sort of relationship to the composer (Chalhoub, Chocolat) until my wife expressed a real affection and I learned, again, that she has far better tastes and instincts than me.

I will try to find the Cage "interview."

Thank you, again.; December 19, 2010 at 12:30 PM
C-Nihilist said...: this is new to me. sooo good. thanks!; December 19, 2010 at 1:06 PM
fwoan said...: Beautiful.; December 20, 2010 at 1:41 PM
Randal Graves said...: Satie's a guaranteed A+ post.; December 21, 2010 at 10:40 AM

Post a Comment

This one took a while to put into words.

I don't kid myself that I've stumbled upon a unique insight and I have little doubt that someone has already written or said this better than I. Five minutes after I hit the "publish" button, I'll probably regret the choice of words more than I already do now - because it's difficult to get my head outside of English language usage, to comment on a problem with that usage, whilst using the English language to do so.

In the interest of not making more of an ass of myself than necessary, I've pared a very long thesis down to a paragraph:

I find it troubling that, using English, I have very limited choice in expressing how I relate to people with whom I have ongoing interaction. If I want to reference the nature of my relations with the woman who has challenged me to grow in ways I never imagined possible, the woman who howled with a primal, gorgeous, earth shattering, mother bear of a refrain, transcending pain and pleasure in act of creation to which I will never be immediate party, who has with her defiant and proud womanhood still intact forged a family out of disparate parts - I have to write "my wife." I have to reduce her to property. That really pisses me off. I don't own her. I don't fucking want the title or the claim. I don't want to express possession, simply to refer to her (without writing a discursive dissertation). I don't like one bit that the short hand for "association" in English is expressed in the possessive. I don't own my wife or my children. They're not mine.

So, fuck you Latin and Germanic branches of the Indo-European language group.

That is all.