A fool is one who goes on trusting; a fool is one who goes on trusting against all his experience. You deceive him, and he trusts you; and you deceive him again, and he trusts you; and you deceive him again, and he trusts you. Then you will say that he is a fool, he does not learn. His trust is tremendous; his trust is so pure that nobody can corrupt it.Be a fool in the Taoist sense, in the Zen sense. Don´t try to create a wall of knowledge around you. Whatsoever experience comes to you, let it happen, and then go on dropping it. Go on cleaning your mind continuously; go on dying to the past so you remain in the present, here now, as if just born, just a babe.In the beginning it is going to be very difficult. The world will start taking advantage of you...let them. They are poor fellows. Even if you are cheated and deceived and robbed, let it happen, because that which is really yours cannot be robbed from you, that which is really yours nobody can steal from you.And each time you don´t allow situations to corrupt you, that opportunity will become an integration inside. Your soul will become more crystallized.
The concept is irresistibly rich—young musician goes home to his parents' house, finds an empty cassette case for Black Flag's Damaged, and tries to remake the album from memory—but it would be a mistake to hear Rise Above as a mere conceptual exercise. For one thing, Dirty Projectors couldn't sound less beholden to the source material. Barely a note of "punk" rage plays out in songs as elaborately restructured and emotionally reconstituted as "No More," which laces cries of "I need action" with haunting harmonies and quasi-African guitars. Dirty Projectors leader Dave Longstreth clearly had more than a remake on his mind—a mind whose wandering ways will be worth following for years to come. A.V. Club Rating: B+
Paradise Lost Squabbling, bad management and development threaten to destroy Cassadaga, the one place in Central Florida that doesn't look like every other placeIn 1875, New Yorker George Colby and three spirit guides hiked through the brush and muck of Central Florida until they came across a serene place of rolling hills and ponds. Colby was a spiritualist – someone who communicates with the dead through mediums and séances – and he wanted to establish a spiritualist camp in the South. He found a property and, in 1880, filed a homestead for 74.4 acres with the state of Florida. About 15 years later (there is some confusion on the exact dates), Colby deeded 35 acres of his land to the newly formed Southern Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp Meeting Association.
By Deanna Sheffield/ORLANDO WEEKLY Thursday, September 6, 2007
Author, philanthropist and literary entrepreneur Dave Eggers has become the youngest person ever to win one of the annual $250,000 awards from the Heinz Family Foundation.Eggers, 37, used earnings from his autobiographical 2000 bestseller "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" to launch 826 Valencia, a nonprofit writing and tutoring center in San Francisco for children ages 6 to 18. Since then, the center has replicated itself in five other cities, with another branch scheduled to open this fall in Boston."I think of it as a validation of the work that 826 does," a grateful Eggers said in an interview. He said the $250,000 would be split evenly among the seven centers. By Bob Thompson/Washington Post, Wednesday, September 12, 2007
PJ Harvey: "The Mountain" (Live for Norwegian radio)
Polly Jean Harvey stopped in Oslo on Wednesday for a Norwegian radio interview and also played five songs from her forthcoming White Chalk. Luckily, the performance was filmed, and the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation has posted this performance of "The Mountain" from the session for all to see. If you've heard fellow White Chalk track "When Under Ether", you might not be surprised by the piano or the high vocal register. The shadowy lighting and the intense performance still make this riveting viewing, though, and there's no preparing yourself for when Harvey's voice leaps up for a Tim Buckley-esque flight of vocal fancy. "I feel nothing," she complains, describing dying trees and betrayal between lofty howls. It's still intriguing how quickly she can go back to an easygoing chuckle after this, too.
Keyboardist, songwriter, and jazz fusion pioneer Joe Zawinul passed away today, September 11, in his native Vienna, according to a Reuters report. The report cites local news agency APA as saying that Zawinul succumbed to a rare form of skin cancer at age 75.
If you've seen the cover of the National's Best New Music'd Boxer, then the latest video from that album might look familiar. Filmed in a Brooklyn church, the Banner Gwin-directed clip for "Apartment Story" shows well-dressed singles shyly introducing themselves to each other, tapping their fingers and their toes to the National's thrumming anthem. From a stage behind them, the band plays, and eventually the spiffy young folks start moving out to the dancefloor. "We wanted to capture the sweet but awkward vibe of a wedding reception or singles mixer," the National's Matt Berringer tells Spinner, which has the video. Funny, my wedding DJ thought it would be a good idea to get things going with some Kenny Rogers.
Black Lips can, to date, be depended on for raucousness, irresponsibility, occasionally pissing in their own mouths onstage, and sloppy garage tunes indebted to noise and punk as much as the band's Southern roots. Given all that, the idea of them hitting anything outside of a niche audience seemed slim. They're a go-to band for filth-rock puritans, even as their unhinged live shows have helped them slowly gain a larger audience with each album's release.
Local Projects is turning museums into places where people interact with information—and each other. Its latest commission will have the whole country joining the conversation. By Angela Starita
In March, Animal Collective's Panda Bear (aka Noah Lennox) had his breakout moment with the release of Person Pitch. It was his first solo album that didn't sound like what we'd previously heard from Animal Collective; sample-heavy and based on loops, the album's songwriting devices favored expansion and contraction over conventional chord changes. Person Pitch reflected Panda's interest in dance music-- even when it veered toward the angelic pop innocence forever associated with the harmony-drenched hits of the 1960s and 70s. Both the album and its transcendent centerpiece, "Bros", are deservedly being widely considered among the year's best.