|k| clippings: 2015-03-02 — the opposite of loneliness

A short issue today, buttressed by a long comment I couldn’t bring myself to shorten or synopsize…it’s just too good (and true).

WORK

“The piano ain’t got no wrong notes.”

—Thelonious Monk
—from Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original

WORD(S)

lalochezia /lay-loh-KEE-zee-ə/. noun. The emotional relief and release gained from swearing and using other obscenities. From Greek lalia (speech) + chezo (to relieve or ease oneself; to defecate).

“In this dictionary [Mrs. Byrne’s Dictionary of Unusual, Obscure, and Preposterous Words], you’ll discover the meaning of words like lalochezia (‘talking dirty to relieve tension’)…” (Larry Andrews, from Language Exploration and Awareness)

WEB

1. I’m not a fan of Sam Smith’s “Stay With Me” but this takes the song to a whole different, better place. → “Stay With Me” by Kevin ‘K.O.’ Olusola [via Reader G.]

2. “Among web-pub­lish­ing tools, I see Medium as the equiv­a­lent of a frozen pizza: not as whole­some as a meal you could make your­self, but for those with­out the time or mo­ti­va­tion to cook, a po­ten­tially bet­ter op­tion than just eat­ing peanut but­ter straight from the jar.” → Matthew Butterick says much about Medium I’ve felt but never expressed so well. And it’s not (just) about typography.

3. I knew Kim Gordon (founding member of the band Sonic Youth) had a memoir coming out. Noodling around the various reviews led me to a solid piece about Gordon, Kurt Cobain and her Rock & Roll Hall of Fame performance (if you don’t get it, I can’t explain it) → “Kim Gordon, Kurt Cobain, and the Mythology of Punk”

4. “The History of 13 Countries in 15 Words or Less. This Nails the U.S.”

5. Today in 1904, Theodore Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss) is born in Springfield, Massachusetts. Geisel published more than 40 illustrated children’s books including The Cat in the Hat, How the Grinch Stole Christmas and Green Eggs and Ham and won a Pulitzer Prize, a Peabody Award, and multiple Emmy and Academy awards. A bit of trivia: Geisel adopted the pen name “Seuss” (his middle name) after being caught with a girl in his dorm room at Dartmouth and forced to resign from his role as editor of the college’s humor magazine. Also: Seuss didn’t much care for children, saying at one point, “You have ’em; I’ll amuse ’em.” Geisel was certainly versatile: he not only coined the word “nerd” in If I Ran the Zoo but managed to bring Hitler to children in the form of Yertle the Turtle. Incidentally, the Geisel Library is one of the most interesting libraries I’ve ever been in. In his honor, today has been named Read Across America Day.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader J. on Clark Terry (and more): “Thanks for posting the Clark Terry pieces. I’d already made that nostalgic trip through the Youtube archives (and my own collection) after he died, but it’s good to see the selections that pop up when someone else is doing the picking. Here are three I’d add that reflect his comprehensive mastery of the instrument and the idiom. ¶ The first, from 1977, brings him together with Dizzy Gillespie and sax player Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis. The chase choruses towards the end (the three starting and completing each other’s phrases) shows the quickness and elegance of his mind as well as anything I could find. ¶ The second, from 1959, shows him in a Parisian club performance with Bud Powell and Kenny Clarke (and Barney Wilen, though he’s no great shakes). The music here is dense, concentrated, even intellectual—certainly focused around the minute interactions of the group in ways that big concert jazz (practically) never touches. ¶ The third, from 1958, brings together Duke Ellington’s great trumpet section of that period, Shorty Baker, Ray Nance, Cat Anderson, and Terry. It’s a show-off’s delight (when you’re this good, sometimes you just have to pour it on and out; but it’s also worth watching Terry’s playful choreography as Anderson—inevitably—hits his high notes), especially in the differences of texture and interpretation the four bring to bear (one of Ellington’s great gifts was finding the musicians who could do this while maintaining his ensemble sound). But anyone who loves music on this end of the spectrum should take the time to play around the archives–see his wonderful duets, hear him with Joe Pass, Oscar Peterson, the Tonight Show orchestra, with his many trios and quartets, with his Big B-A-D Band, and in his various magisterial interview moments. ¶ I’ve been trying to think of a literary figure who brought the same virtuosity, variety, intelligence, and generosity to his or her work, but I can’t. Pound and Frost, whom I do think of, were both too invested in their own power. Adrienne Rich, maybe? But no, not really. The problem, I suspect, is that most writers are stuck (or stick themselves) in isolated circumstances that jazz musicians don’t have to deal with ordinarily, and the great teachers and mentors of other writers have often had to sacrifice something of themselves in ways that great teaching musicians like Terry haven’t had to do. There’s something about the social engagement in jazz that I much envy—having to play with others different from oneself forces a kind of openness in the art. Listen to Terry in his various environments. Especially hearing him with Dizzy Gillespie it’s clear that he was capable of bringing both cool and warmth to a bop idiom that could be (though not in Gillespie’s hands) mechanical; meanwhile, in mellow contexts his innate playfulness and inventiveness could at any moment elevate mellow to serene or plunge it into great, full-hearted emotion. ¶ And here’s one last piece that might stand as well as anything as a memorial to his tone and grace. It might pass for an exercise in nostalgic formalism—even jazz for chumps—here and there, but be ready: in the coda, when Terry pulls it back out of double-time into some time of his own making, he doesn’t just change the ”atmosphere“ or the ”mood“: he pulls you into the heart of the jazz ballad, the intersection where deeply felt words turn themselves into pure sound. Ezra Pound liked to emphasize a continuity between poetry, dance, and music. It’s easy to hear this wonderful possibility opening out here at the end of ‘God Bless the Child.’”

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