Michael Szpakowski
Since the beginning
Works in Harlow United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

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DISCUSSION

Final Post for the Genius 2000 Conference 2008


...although I bet it's the first time anyone has posted 1500 lines of iambic pentameters to Rhizome. The conceptualists amongst us might say that's enough.. but it depends upon how you want it to be read. I suspect you want people to *read* it rather than simply relish each handwritten fragment as a kind of art-fetish, though there is a loveliness about those fragments, as there is about your watercolours...

DISCUSSION

Final Post for the Genius 2000 Conference 2008


Hi Max
The Blue Cup would be easier to follow if there was a link forward from each page to the next...
best
michael

DISCUSSION

Novelist David Foster Wallace dead at 46


http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-et-wallace15-2008sep15,0,111607.story
I can't say how sad this makes me. He was an extraordinary writer & a model of the best kind of artistic mindfulness & integrity. Even when he wrote something that made you want to smack him round the head you couldn't help warming to, admiring and being somewhat dumbfounded by him.
What a terrible and shocking loss.

DISCUSSION

storm


At the outdoor camp-meeting services in Redding all the farmers, their families, field hands and friends for miles around would come afoot or in their farm wagons. I remember how the great waves of sound used to come through the trees when things like ‘Beulah Land’, ‘Woodworth’, ‘Nearer My God to Thee’, ‘The Shining Shore’, ‘Nettleton’, ‘In the Sweet Bye-and-Bye’, and the like , were sung by thousands of ‘let-out’ souls. The music notes and words on paper are about as much like what they were at those moments as the monogram on a man’s necktie may be like his face. Father, who led the singing, sometimes with his cornet or his voice, sometimes with both voice and arms, and sometimes in the quieter hymns with a violin or French horn, would always encourage the people to sing their own way. Most of them knew the words and music (their version) by heart and sang it that way. If they threw the poet or composer around a bit, so much the better for the poetry or the music. There was power and exaltation in these great conclaves of sound from humanity.
Once when father was asked: “How can you stand it to hear old John Bell ( who was the best stonemason in town) bellow off key the way he does at camp-meetings?” his answer was “Old John is a supreme musician. Look into his face and hear the music of the ages. Don’t pay too much attention to the sounds. If you do you may miss the music. You won’t get a heroic ride to Heaven on pretty little sounds!”


Charles Ives, quoted in Henry and Sidney Cowell : ‘Charles Ives and his music’ OUP 1955

DISCUSSION

storm


These are great! I love the collective conducting, and the way the whole thing lends itself to participation by all. A bit like stuff built on loops, the repetitive structure, either strophic or those tremendous canonic sheets of sound means that any "mistakes" or "mistunings" are simply subsumed into the overall glorious sound. It seems to be a tradition not unlike the village carols of my native South Yorkshire:
http://www.folk-network.com/info/carols.html