s pistol facsimilisations

Lovely to hear from you; and many thanks for sharing the Stravinsky stuff with me, and for taking the time to type it all out. Hope you saved it or sent to others in order to maximise efforts! Glad it touched you deeply. Very important to remain moved and passionate. Hence, the following lengthy email! I'm nothing if not a f****** tryer, mate! Never lost that get-up-and-go! From my old fine art/art historian ears, the determinations in and the impetus for Stravinsky's words are classic, high Modernism - as one would expect, him being a high Modernist! One can find the same stuff coming out of visual artists of the same period like, say, Wassily Kandinsky, in order to theoretically franchise a move toward Abstraction in visual art; whilst retaining a toe or two in something spooky, immutable, eternal, spiritual, human, grand. So, it's Strav being mindful of progress and retention of deep strains of human endeavour - remaining faithful in so doing to Baudellaire's Modernism as a conflation of the strident/transient and the eternal. IE: good to be cutting edge, but better if one is that with a convincing attachment to past glories. Picasso and Duchamp in art; Cage - I would argue - in music fulfill this criteria. For me, it's Cage; though his music, in and of itself, leaves me for the most part cold. It's what he said that was so rich and life-affirming, forward-thinking, liberating. A great book - though visual art-based in essence - is the Charles Harrison and Paul Wood edited tome, Art in Theory. I have it titled as Art in Theory: 1900-1990, but I think it's just been updated and reissued. St. Helens Central Library reference will carry it most likely. This is mostly visual artists and those commentating upon visual art, but the stuff inside goes way beyond that, in mapping in fantastic detail the concerns and drives of the time period covered. It's composed of hundreds of essays and fragments and the editorial intros are wonderful. Harrison is our best art historian, in my opinion; and he works in an art group which was early into Conceptual Art called Art and Language, so his knowledge is tactile, participant-observational. It's that methodology which gives what he says so much resonance and power. Strav will most likely be in there; and an anthology of this kind helps to put stuff into perspective. Modernism was very rich; it still believed in progress; unlike now's collapse into irony and top-sheeting pastiche (I like my inclusion of top-sheeting!). Modernism is my bag; but gotta live in the here and now...or else: mental illness! I'm really glad you read as well as play, create. It's important to be doing research via both methods. I believe in that. The alternative is sophistry, autism - the ideology of our times! That's why I've always craved working in a group, as opposed to alone. I like the dialectical approach. Improv is eminantly dialectical; it has to be. And by a series of personal refinements, I'm getting to think more and more that it is a lifestyle choice, a politics, a wholesale method of perception. Had a jam with local types last week - and it was, to make an important distinction, a jam, not improv! Too loud. Too rock-tinged BeBop. I was invited back, but declined. I am looking for something brain-driven rather than bollox-derived. My days of competing with other people for aural opportunities by buying ever-louder amplification are way gone! And these guys are older than me! They thought what they were doing - because it was plug in, see what happens stuff - was avant, experimental. To me, it was f******* Hawkwind! What kind of laboratory is that?! Experimental! - more like ill-conceived, amorphous, lazy bullshit - lots of effects-laden din, no listening. So many solipsisms in a big stone barn! Individuated together! (You can see I'm having fun with my polemic; but it's all true!)