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Utopian Turtletop. Monsieur Croche's BĂȘte Noire. Contact: turtletop [at] hotmail [dot] com

Thursday, July 26, 2007


. . . not been getting enough sleep . . . such that sleep sounds delicious, and yet, always, perpetually drawn toward the bright electric lights and a house full of words, sounds, and pictures.

earlier this evening on the radio, the college jazz station, jaunty stride piano sounded fine, but I wasn't drawn -- it was finely done, but not drawing me into its inner circle of communion. I remained without, thinking of the disjunctive nature of art history, and how Charlie Parker descended, at some remove, from stride, but the stylistic changes that intervened between stride and bop might have gone in other directions -- I rarely hear the stride roots of bop; nor do I hear bop implied in stride. if innovations were predictable, they wouldn't seem so innovative.

the next tune on the radio immediately enveloped me in its gorgeous melancholy and I melted, I communed. it was a voice-and-piano cover of the '70s hit "Alone Again, Naturally," with piquantly dissonant chords in the piano and an impetuous, lovely, dramatic, sweetly swooping vocal. of course I had forgotten the last verse, in which the singer tells of the deaths of his parents. brought tears to my eyes.


why one recording melded with me, and the other did not -- it's a mystery.



image: Black Square by Kasimir Malevich, 1913

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