Sunday, October 27, 2013

Recently noted on Moon Traveller Herald

DERACINATION


FEEDBACK


BOSTON


MUSIC


News you can use -A guy reading a paper at a bar today is a slug from prehistory. But give that same guy a cell phone to read this paper and he melts into the crowd.


Pres. Obama called Ted: “The Soul of the Democratic Party.” I hung out for the funeral procession that was in my neighborhood.

Some memory serves well - A couple of years ago we had a discussion, trying to remember encounter with Ginsberg and Dylan. We each remembered differently.

Elmore - Reading recently,  I found it remarkable to learn that Elmore worked in his brother's Radio repair shop after getting out of the Navy. Did this inform his feedback loop?

The Fractalist - Born in 1924 from a family of noted European mathematicians, Benoit Mandelbrot had an early interest in maps, and began early on to study nature's rough terrains.

Wurlitzer Electric Piano Being an homage to the electric piano, yknow? Like  "What I say" and "I'm just a Prisoner"?

Monbouquette at Mission Hill Little League Dinner - I was able to attend the annual Mission Hill Little League Trophy Award Ceremony and Dinner & see Red Sox pitching great Bill Monbo

Take me out to the morass!
Sox are in ALC at time of this posting.Now is the time: Let's look back to the year of Valentine 2012, when a strange ennui settled on the Fens and near environs.

The Boston Jazz Chronicles
Storyville, Lenny’s on the Turnpike, the Hi-Hat, Wally’s Paradise (still active) .. these were Boston jazz night clubs - stops along the way for musicians, jazz fans, others.

Albert Collins had a long recording career. There are a couple or three of albums that really stick out for me.

Keith Richard's biography ("Life", 2010) was a surprising success commercial literary terms. His bits on music R clarifying.

Roland Kirk: Up there somewhere
I would say this is Roland playing a Stylophone, [a vid was pulled at YouTube. Sigh.]

Odd harmonics - the Theremin






Judith Charles Gallery is pleased to present Odd Harmonics, a collaborative exhibition with Butterscotch Records and Moog Music featuring work by Franรงois Chambard, Cassandra C. Jones and Tomory Dodge. Odd Harmonics is a month-long contemporary art show and performance series curated by label head Allen Farmelo.

Meanwhile, CBS :Sunday morning had a nice piece on Theremins. Their tale of Leon was different than the one I'd known..having him as a more complicit KBGer and not necessarily kidnapped back to the USSR. Web site had some good links (below)

Tuesday, October 22, 2013

From the vaults - Mobile Wolfram

From the vaults - Mobile Wolfram

16 Mar 2011 It is still too early to gauge the ultimate effects mobile device development will have on overall development practices. But a big rethinking of applications is going on in terms of input and location capabilities, with other changes likely to follow. One of those changes may be a lessening of the pervasive influence of search technology, and an increase in 'question answering' technology, according to mathematical software pioneer Stephen Wolfram. (- Jack Vaughan)

http://searchsoa.techtarget.com/news/2240033430/Wolfram-sees-mobile-apps-driving-programming-changes

Sunday, October 20, 2013

From the vaults - Cathode Ray

From the vaults - Cathode Ray

- On Crookes' demonstration that cathode rays travel in straight lines and produce phosphorescence -

Ultimate realities Crookes saw
in the maltese cross of mica
inside a vacuum tube
inside a vacuum tube and facing a silver cathode.

induction coil. energized.
and then, phophorescense!

a light casting the shadow
of the cross. the
matter radiant in 1879.

- Jack Vaughan, November 05, 2003

Friday, October 11, 2013

Blues for Blue Hill Ave.

Stuffed Bud Light Year
Hanging on light pole
Blue Hill Ave.
Another child gone down.

           -Jack Vaughan, Oct. 2013

Sunday, October 06, 2013

Sunday in Surreal Time: A.J. Langguth's "Jesus Christs"

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Sunday in Surreal Time: A.J. Langguth's "Jesus Christs" - A.J. Langguth's "Jesus Christs" came to me as a drug store paperback (1969) in the time and the place when that was how you found most books.  It was unexpected, a different take on the story of Christ than I'd really ever seen.

I'd probably have heard Lenny Bruce's routine depicting Christ with Moses driving through Spanish Harlem, dropping into St Patrick's Cathedral, encountering Cardinal Spellman and Bishop Sheen, so there was some semblance of familiarity to this version of Christ who walked among us.  And, there was some similarity in the imaginings – asking what if the son of god was around the corner.  "Jesus Christs" was a mindbender.

In vignettes short and long it showed Jesus wandering through different eras, in various human incarnations. "Jesus Christs" took a black out comedy skit approach of in some of its vignettes - Vaudeville's Olson and Johnson were being rediscovered at the Time).  Maybe it was somewhat informed by Joseph Heller's Catch-22. It had the ring of The Twilight Zone. That style approached ones also used by  Donald Barthelme.

Applying those techniques to Jesus, this was pretty adventurous stuff in those days, but the breadcrumbs were spread ahead by such as the recently unearthed Dead Sea Scrolls – open to more than the usual interpretation, because they were so fragmentary.

I got my hands on a copy recently. How had it weathered the years? Pretty well, really. The theatre of the absurd it betokens had its day admittedly. But it is in the way it looks back and forward prophetically, off-beat and oddly inspirational, that this little light shines. On another level, it is a buried gem: It is like REM or the Pogues before they hit - It is something I know that is not widely known. Oooh...Illuminativille!

In these pages, Jesus confuses his apostles. They don’t necessarily understand him. The parables mean different things to different people. Like me and many others, I think the author Langguth sit through many a service. Every Sunday the Gospel from the pulpit proclaimed-reproclaimed until the snippets resonate and bounce, and interact with one another. The bits from the Jesus journey. Some of it from after his resurrection making a new season: Sunday in Surreal Time.

Clever, weird, the book tells the basic story: Jesus was everybody's friend He had to be dealing with the devil. He had to lead his troops to a certain oblivion, preaching love.

Did this book get lost in the general clamor? Perhaps. Also pub'd that year: Tom Wolf's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Gore Vidal's Myra Breckenridge, John Updike's Couples, Donald Barthelme's Unspeakable Practices, Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night, John Le Carre's A Small Town in Germany, Carlos Castaneda' The Teachings of Don Juan, Alexsandr Solzhenitzen's Cancer Ward  all came out the year of 1968 when A.J. Langguth's Jesus Christs was released in hard cover. It is a pity. I think everyone should read it. What about the author?

A.J. Langguth's career was mostly that of a journalist - and journalism teacher ( a little funny cause, in one of his Jesus's to-do lists one item is "last resort, teach in academia"). He was for a time the New York Times' Saigon burearu chief during the Viet Nam War. Earlier he'd covered such events as Jack Ruby's trial. He taught at USC. Wrote a couple of other novels, but mostly stuck more with history, including a history of Viet Nam War.

                                                                                                - Jack Vaughan, Oct 2013





















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"Jesus in the Garden"