Do me a favor and get rid of that dignity of yours! Go and run in the fields, gallop across the plains like a horse; jump rope, and when you’re six years old, you won’t know anything any more, and you’ll see mad things.
— Arthur Cravan, from Arthur Cravan & Roberto Bolano
Here’s a mix my friend Leah and I put together for her wedding — R&B classics with some more recent funk and soul mixed in. Enjoy. (M3U stream.)
… a row of parking meters that had witnessed a panicked flight all acquired the opaque and dreadful importance that innocent objects acquire in nightmares.
Protest is transformative precisely because people emerge, encounter one another face-to-face, and, in re-learning the habits of freedom, build new institutions, relationships and organisations.
(Source: oscillateswildly, via ohhaitommywiseau)
Coltrane, for me, is a—a culminating figure in a very rich tradition of blues and jazz. A blues that injects a blue note into Western history, into Western musical harmony, a note of dissonance, disturbance, defiance, wrestling with darkness, but always sustaining a sense of endurance and stamina, rooted in a deep love of self and a love of others. And be it a Ma Rainey, be it a Billie Holiday, a Sarah Vaughan, a Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk or John Coltrane, you have this story of a people, who up against institutional terrorisms — slavery, Jim Crow, lynching, police brutality — still forge a sense of self with integrity and dignity. That’s what I hear in John Coltrane.
— Cornel West
In 1979, we had concerts in Europe, and a truly magical performance of “Homage” took place with this quartet and flutist Wallace McMillan at the Moers Festival in Germany in 1979. The rain stopped, the clouds parted, and the sun came out when the “afterlife” section was played.
— George Lewis talks Charlie Parker | destination-out.com | Readability. People have said this about a My Morning Jacket concert one year at Bonnaroo.
Describe your ideal taxicab. ¶It would be a Checker driven by a sane person. Driven not slowly, but sedately. You would be allowed to smoke, which you used to be able to do, in cabs. It wouldn’t have that TV or whatever it is that you always have to keep pressing to shut it off. It would be luxurious, I mean, relative to other forms of transportation. I don’t mean, like, Michael-Bloomberg-travels-in-a-private-jet, but when I was young, it was a luxury to take a cab. If you would see a friend of yours in a cab, you would think, like, “What, you strike oil?” It was a small luxury, and it hasn’t been for a long time.
— Nothing Gets Between Fran Lebowitz and Her Checker - NYTimes.com via those great folks at The Awl
The single peaked at #2 in the UK, losing the number one spot to Chuck Berry’s single My Ding-A-Ling.
