Favorite Street: Jon Raskin

This is a list of movies, books and recordings that really grabbed me last year. They are not necessarily new works or releases but things that really gave me food for thought, kept in rotation for long periods, or provided a needed distraction.

Books:

Bird Sounds (How and Why Birds Sing, Call Chatter and Screech) Barry Kent MacKay
A wonderful book that explains the science but keeps the magic of how birds sing.

Blindness   Jose Saramango
Portuguese Nobel Prize winning author writes of an epidemic where everyone in the town becomes blind and describes the ensuing response to the calamity.

Collapse   Jared Diamond
A look at why cultures and civilizations collapse in history. The author starts with the Bitterroot Mountains in Montana, because of his first hand knowledge of the problems in the area, and uses this framework to look at other places in history.

Europe Central   William T. Vollmann
This is a series of stories just prior and during World War II about Germany and the Soviet Union. The stories are of artists, poets, generals and weaves a narrative that gives shape to a conflict that isn’t given much attention in typical depictions of the war. If you love Shostakovich this is a must read.

Late Victorian Holocausts   (El Niño Famine and the Making of the Third World) Mike Davis
The massive famines in the late 19 th century and early 20 th century in China, India and Africa were completely unknown to me before I read this book. Besides describing these, Mike Davis tracks the science that led to our understanding of El Niños, and how the world economy brought about by European imperialism disrupted the historic responses to this weather pattern in many places in the world, thus causing famine.

Sicilian Uncles  Leonardo Sciascia
By one of my favorite writers, this is 4 novellas set in Sicily in the mid 20 th century. The stories describe social and political corruption, illusions about history, ideology and innocence.

The Baroque Cycle   (Quicksilver, the Confusion, The System of the World) Neal Stephenson
Somehow this swashbuckling tale taught me a great deal about western history, economics and politics.

The Long Tail   Chris Anderson
This description of the economics of the Internet is essential for anyone whose lives are affected by the change in distribution of goods and information.

The Transparent Society:  Will Technology Force us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?   David Brin
This book shows many of the issues and facets concerning privacy in modern life. Brin is primarily known as a science fiction writer but this deals with technology in the private and public spheres.

Movies

Playtime   Jacques Tati
This recent re-release is the great French comedic filmmaker’s last work and his most ambitious. He constructed an entire modern city to film the clash of old and new France. The physical humor is sublime with little or no dialogue.

Mondo Vino  Jonathan Nossiter
An engrossing movie about the state of wine making around the world.

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul Rainer Fassbinder
A great movie about love, ageism, racism and so much more.

Saraband   Ingmar Bergman
An updating of Scenes of a Marriage.

Nobody Knows   Hirkazu Koreeda
The struggle of 3 children abandoned by their mother in Tokyo and how they survive.

Grizzly Man   Werner Herzog
A interesting film on many levels, not the least of which is the local musicians that contributed to the music.

Downfall   Oliver Hirschbiegel
A Film about Hitler’s last days told through the story of his personal secretary. It is based on her memoirs.

RECORDINGS

Amestoy Trio   le fil
Accordian, guitar and French horn from Toulouse, France

Brian Eno & David Byrne   My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
This 1981 recording has be reissued with additional tracks and a great booklet. It casts a shadow over much of popular music today.

Congotronics   Congotronics2
Music and DVD of country music of the Congo being amplified and creating a captivating blend of traditional music becoming urbanized.

Gangbe Brass Band  Togbe or Whendo
I have a weak spot for Band Music and this really struck me as great fun.

John ColtraneThe Complete 1961 Vanguard Recordings
Essential music, period.

Louis Armstrong   The Hot Fives and Hot Sevens
Back in rotation after Katrina, this amazing music never ceases to inspire and move me.

Melingo   Santa Milonga
Wonderful recording by the great Tango Artist, Melingo.

Nathan & Zydeco Cha Chas   Hang it High, Hang it Low
Great Zydeco infused with delta blues vocal style.

Oberosterrich-Salzburg: Volkmusic   Rare Shellacks 1910-1949 on Trikont
The track by Hohla/Biereder “Innviertler Tanzin” completely changed my concept of Alpine music.

Aaron Novik Kipple: Flases of Irrational Happiness
My favorite local recording this year.

Pietra Montecorvino  Napoli Mediterranera
A Neopolitan singer that brings a fresh sound to the music of Naples and the Mediterranean forms.

Otomo Yoshihide   Otomo Yoshide’s New Jazz Quintet Live in Lisbon (featuring Mats Gustafsson)
This is some of the most interesting Jazz that I heard this year. Tsugami Kenta alto playing is just plain scary—and that is saying something with a group that includes Mats Gustafsson.

Will Holshouser Trio   Singing to a Bee
Accordion, bass and trumpet, playing wonderful compositions.

Favorite Street - Jon Raskin

FILM 

Noisy People by Tim Perkis 
http://www.noisypeople.com/ 

NOISY PEOPLE is a feature length video documentary (available on DVD) that opens a window into a tightly-knit group of unusual sound artists and musicians from the San Francisco Bay Area improvisational music community.

Filmmaker Tim Perkis, a well-respected player in the local experimental music scene, followed his subjects for a year, filming them in their homes and studios, rehearsals and performances. What emerges is a set of funny and lively portraits of some very creative and quirky people—and a portrait of a way of life outside the commercial musical mainstream of America.

They're not making a living at it, but these artists have pursued their work passionately and in the process have created a world-wide following and a supportive community at home. These are people, who, as composer John Shiurba put it, "aren't going somewhere, but who ARE somewhere."

FEATURING: George Cremaschi, Tom Djll, Greg Goodman, Phillip Greenlief, Cheryl Leonard, Dan Plonsey, Gino Robair, Damon Smith. Also appearing are dozens of other creative musicians, including Anthony Braxton, Fred Frith and Jack Wright.

BONUS MATERIAL on the DVD includes two short films about electronic sound artists K. Atchley and Laetitia Sonami, and the original theatrical and internet trailer.

WEB ARTICLE

Leroy Jenkins and the 20th Century
by George Lewis
http://www.chamber -music.org/pdf/magazine/2007/June2007CoverStory.pdf

Music scholar, composer and performer George Lewis marks the recent passing of his long time friend and associate, Leroy Jenkins, with reflections on late 20 th century innovations in music. Jenkins, along with Lewis and the entire AACM mounted an artistic revolution beginning in the 1960s, which still has resonnance in contemporary music.

BOOK

Snow – by Orhan Pamuk
Ka, an exiled poet named, travels to a remote city named Kars as a reporter. He and the city become isolated due to a snow storm and the ensuing story weaves religion, romance, revolution around a poetic narrative.

Favorite Street - Jon Raskin

Rova is performing with Liz Allbee, Mary Clare Brzytwa, Aurora Josephson, LaDonna Smith and Karen Stackpole this month, so I asked them to contribute some of their favorites and things that have had impact.

Liz Allbee:
Music:
One of my favorite albums ever is Ilhan Mimaroglu and Freddie Hubbard’s Sing Me A Song Of Songmy. I have really been enjoying the Bill Dixon box set. Nina Simone's “Sinnerman” and Leonard Cohen's “Famous Blue Raincoat” are two songs that I love.

Books:
I just read Truman Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms and couldn't put it down. Also recommended are Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook and Oryx and Crake by Maragret Atwood

Films:
Darwin's Nightmare by Hubert Sauper and Denise Vindevogel. Whew! Couple of older favs are Ali: Fear Eats The Soul, by Werner Fassbinder and When We Were Kings, Leon Gast’s documentary about the 1974 "Rumble in the Jungle" championship bout between boxers Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Kinshasa, Zaire.

MaryClare Brzytwa
Books:
The Decent of Alette (a narrative epic poem) by Alice Notely.
I was lucky enough to get a recording of the poet reading some of my favorite selections and her permission to set them to noise. It is a feminist epic about a women trapped in a never ending subway system, she has to find the "tyrant" and destroy him, also has to find the decapitated first mother and put her head back on her body…experimental poetry, with dark, bizarre and violent imagery. VERY imaginative and captivating.

Defiance (fiction) by Carol Maso
This one is about a respected professor of physics at Harvard who murders her top two students...post-coitally. Also very dark and disturbing...

Karen Stackpole
Music:
No suggestions of merit come to mind at the moment save for the new Ghost in the House CD that we released on Edgetone this past fall, and two recent releases by Wisconsin-based gongist, Michael Bettine, Microcosm and Meridian. I could also add a favorite of mine by Nebojsa Jovan Zivkovic, The Castle of the Mad King, which was released about 7 or 8 years ago. “Ultimatum II” is a great marimba track that leads off the album. I saw it performed live in Stockholm in 1998 and I've been a fan ever since.

Jon Raskin:
Music:
Tommy McMahon and Bernand O'Sullivan, Irish Traditional Concertina Music of County Clare on the Free Reed label. (I've been learning to play concertina and this has been an inspiration.)

Musicans of the National Dance Company of Cambodia Homrong on Real World. Wonderful, soulful music.

Charles Mingus Sextet Cornell 1964 with Eric Dolphy: These are really open ended versions of Mingus's music with many unaccompanied solos. The group was getting ready to tour Europe.

Books:
This may have been listed before but it so good:
The Grand Piano, An Experiment in Collective Autobiography is up to volume 5. It is an ongoing experiment in collective autobiography by ten writers identified with Language poetry in San Francisco. It takes its name from a coffeehouse at 1607 Haight Street, where from 1976-79 the authors took part in a reading and performance series. The writing project, begun in 1998, was undertaken as an online collaboration, first via an interactive web site and later through a listserv. When completed, THE GRAND PIANO will comprise ten parts, in which each of the ten authors will appear in a different sequence. These poets are Bob Perelman, Barrett Watten, Steve Benson, Carla Harryman, Tom Mandel, Ron Silliman, Kit Robinson, Lyn Hejinian, Rae Armantrout, and Ted Pearson.

Rebecca Pawel's detective series set in Spain: Death of a Nationalist, Law of Return and Watcher in the Pine.

Favorite Street: Jon Raskin’s Picks

Excerpt from Chris Ware piece

I recently had the fortune to hear Ware discussing his work along with Art Speigelman at the JCC in SF. The Acme Novelty Company and Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth were written for the "second reading" as he mentioned that night. This quote has made me reflect about the way that I see sound and hear images.

From Chris Ware:
"I arrived at my way of "working" as a way of visually approximating what I feel the tone of fiction to be in prose versus the tone one might use to write biography; I would never do a biographical story using the deliberately synthetic way of cartooning I use to write fiction. I try to use the rules of typography to govern the way that I "draw", which keeps me at a sensible distance from the story as well as being a visual analog to the way we remember and conceptualize the world. I figured out this way of working by learning from and looking at artists I admired and whom I thought came closest to getting at what seemed to me to be the "essence" of comics, which is fundamentally the weird process of reading pictures, not just looking at them. I see the black outlines of cartoons as visual approximations of the way we remember general ideas, and I try to use naturalistic color underneath them to simultaneously suggest a perceptual experience, which I think is more or less the way we actually experience the world as adults; we don't really "see" anymore after a certain age, we spend our time naming and categorizing and identifying and figuring how everything all fits together. Unfortunately, as a result, I guess sometimes readers get a chilled or antiseptic sensation from it, which is certainly not intentional, and is something I admit as a failure, but is also something I can't completely change at the moment."

#2: Rising Up and Rising Down: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means
by William T. Vollmann

This is an abridgement of a seven volume work which attempts to map out a moral calculus for violence and to examine it from the personal through to the civic arena, and draws from the past and the present. He mingles a broad range of his experiences, including: fears for a woman friend; discussions with the chief medical examiner in SF; reporting from war torn Sarajevo; and research he conducted about Thailand's brothels. The work is particularly relevant considering the high level of violence in American life, and US moves to corporatize its unending ‘war on terror’.

#3: Decoding Ferran Adria
This film, produced and directed by Chris Collins and Lydia Tenaglia, and hosted by New York chef Anthony Bourdain, focuses on Ferran Adria, the leader of the Spanish Culinary Revolution. The Spanish chef owns and operates El Bulli, considered by many to be the best restaurant in the world. Ferran Adria and his team work for six months to create food that will be served over the following six months. The menu is created in a Barcelona laboratory where food is sensed and eaten in completely innovative ways. Decoding Ferran Adria makes fascinating connections between the joy of eating and the creative process. Watching the film may be as close as we come to actually eating at El Bulli.

Favorite Street: Jon Raskin

The Believer Magazine
www.believermag.com

This great collection of long essays, book reviews, columns and doodles from McSweeney’s Press usually has a theme per issue. I look forward to each one. I especially loved Nov/Dec 2008 where Lynda Barry is interviewed by Hillary Chute and where Chris Cobb writes about his experiences working on Sol Lewitt’s last major installation.

Spectacle with Elvis Costello
www.elviscostello.info

About his new TV Show on the Sundance Channel, Elvis says, "I'm not interested in extracting some dark secret. I'd rather hear about a bright secret, a deep love or a curiosity that might be otherwise obscured by fame. This is a wonderful opportunity to talk in complete thoughts about music, movies, art or even vaudeville, [and] then frame it with unique and illustrative performances." He hosts insightful interviews with a wide range of musicians and is really prepared and knowledgeable about their careers and music. There are first rate backup musicians that change from show to show. For video clips of the show: [watch the clips]

Shock Doctrine, the Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein
www.naomiklein.org

Konsallationen, 1971 by Roman Haubenstock-Ramati Roman Haubenstock-Ramati Scores www.ariadne.at

Klein begins by describing the work of Ewen Cameron and his use of electro-shock therapy to remake the human mind on patients that weren’t informed of the negative effects of the therapy. It was covered up and than deployed as a method of torture by the CIA. It is short step to Milton Friedman’s theories and a method to view the last 40 years of US economic strategies. Naomi Klein’s insightful analysis plays out every day in the machinations of the current fiscal crisis.

I’ve been working with visual scores for several years and recently discovered the graphic scores of Roman Haubenstock-Ramati. I was aware of his music but recently have been researching his work much more thoroughly.

Website

The Block Museum: Pictures of Music
www.blockmuseum.northwestern.edu

In keeping with my interest in visual musical scores, this site exhibits the scores, provides sound examples, and includes interviews. The site was pretty buggy at first but they seemed to have worked out most of the kinks. Make sure you get to the animated explanation of Cornielius Cardew’s Treatise. You can enlarge and navigate the scores using a box that at the bottom of the screen.

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