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reasoningdaily · 6 months

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So far we have given little or no attention to the evidence of comparative religion. The study of ancient religious history is important, for religion, like philosophy, changes but slowly. Institutional religion, being conservative and static in its outlook, has preserved much ancient lore that would have otherwise been lost to the modern student.

The Greek philosopher Xenophanes (572â€“480 B.C.), pointed out a profound truth when he observed that the gods men worship very closely resemble the worshippers. In the words of this ancient sage: “Each man represents the gods as he himself is. The Ethiopian as black and flat-nosed the Thracian as red-haired and blue-eyed; and if horses and oxen could paint, they would no doubt depict the gods as horses and oxen.” This being the case; when we find the great nations of the world, both past and present, worshipping black gods, then we logically conclude that these peoples are either members of the black race, or that they originally received their religion in toto or in part from black people. The proofs are abundant.

The ancient gods of India are shown with Ethiopian crowns on their heads. According to the Old Testament, Moses first met Jehovah during his sojourn among the Midianites, who were an Ethiopian tribe. We learn from Hellenic tradition that Zeus, king of the Grecian gods, so cherished the friendship of the Ethiopians that he traveled to their country twice a year to attend banquets. “All the gods and goddesses of Greece were black,” asserts Sir Godfrey Higgins, “at least this was the case with Jupiter, Baccus, Hercules, Apollo, Ammon. The goddesses Benum, Isis, Hecate, Diana, Juno, Metis, Ceres, Cybele were black.” (Anacalypsis, Vol. I, Book IV, Chap. I.)

Even the Romans, who received their religion mainly from the Greeks, admitted their debt to Egypt and Ethiopia. This may be well illustrated by the following passage from The Golden Ass or Metamorphosis, by Apuleius. The author, as an initiate of the Isis cult is represented as being addressed by that goddess: “I am present; I who am Nature, the parent of things, queen of all the elements â€¦ the primitive Phrygians called me Pressimunitica, the mother or the gods; the native Athenians, Ceropian Minerva; the floating Cyprians, Paphian Venus â€¦ the inhabitants of Eleusis, the ancient goddess Ceres. Some again have invoked me as Juno, others as Bellona, others as Hecate, and others Rhamnusia; and those who are enlightened by the emerging rays of the rising sun, the Ethiopians, Ariians and Egyptians, powerful in ancient learning, who reverence by divinity with ceremonies perfectly proper, call me by my true appellation, Queen Isis.” (Doane’s Bible Myths, Note, p. 478.)

A study of the images of ancient deities of both the Old and New Worlds reveal their Ethiopic origin. This is noted by Kenneth R. H. Mackezie in T. A. Buckley’s Cities of the Ancient World, p. 180: “From the wooly texture of the hair, I am inclined to assign to the Buddha of India, the Fuhi of China, the Sommonacom of the Siamese, the Zaha of the Japanese, and the Quetzalcoatl of the Mexicans, the same, and indeed an African, or rather Nubian, origin.” Most of these black gods were regarded as crucified saviors who died to save mankind by being nailed to a cross, or tied to a tree with arms outstretched as if on a cross, or slain violently in some other manner.

Of these crucified saviors, the most prominent were Osiris and Horus of Egypt, Krishna of India, Mithra of Persia, Quetazlcoatl of Mexico, Adonis of Babylonia and Attis of Phrygia. Nearly all of these slain savior-gods have the following stories related about them: They are born of a virgin, on or near Dec. 25th (Christmas); their births are heralded by a star; they are born either in a cave or stable; they are slain, commonly by crucifixion; they descend into hell, and rise from the dead at the beginning of Spring (Easter), and finally ascend into heaven. The parallels between the legendary lives of these pagan messiahs and the life of Jesus Christ as recorded in the Bible are so similar that progressive Bible scholars now admit that stories of these heathen Christs have been woven into the life-story of Jesus. (These remarkable parallels are discussed and interpreted in a pamphlet, Christianity Before Christ, by John G. Jackson, New York, 1938.)

The late Mr. Maynard Shipley, President of The Science League of America, made a very scholarly study of the various mythologies and religions of the world, and in the concluding passage of a brilliant essay, Christian Doctrines in Pre-Christian America, he offers a profoundly thought-provoking statement:

That the ancient pagan creeds, legends and mythsâ€”part of the universal mythosâ€”should be found embodied in the religion of the ancient Mexicans, and that all these again are found to be but the original sources of the modern orthodox Christian religion, is by no means inexplicable, and need not be attribute to the subtlety of the Ubiquitous Devil. The explanation is that all religions and all languages of the civilized races of men had a common origin in an older seat of civilization.

Where that original center of culture was is another story.

The evidence seems to show that the “original center of culture,” referred to by Mr. Shipley, was that vast domain known to the classical geographers and historians as Ethiopia. A study of religious images throws much light on this early civilization. The tau (T-shaped) cross is thought by many Christians to be a unique emblem of their faith. The fact is that this cross is of ancient Ethiopian origin. In the words of an outstanding student of symbolism: “The Ethiopic form of the tau is an exact prototype of the conventional Christian cross; or, to state the fact in its chronological relation, the Christian cross is made in the exact image of the Ethiopian tau.” (Sex Symbolism. P. 9, by William J, Fielding, Little Blue Book No. 904.) The cross was known to all the great ancient nations, and was sometimes shown with the image of a man upon it. The Church Father, Minucius Felix, writing in the early part of the third century, severely rebukes the Pagans for their adoration of crosses: “I must tell you that we neither adore crosses nor desire them; you it is ye Pagans â€¦ for what else are your ensigns, flags and standards, but crosses gilt and beautiful. Your victorious trophies not only represent a cross, but a cross with a man upon it.” Commenting on the preceding extract, the American scholar, T. W. Doane, notes that:

It is very evident that this celebrated Christian Father alludes to some Gentle mystery, of which the prudence of his successors has deprived us. When we compare this with the fact that for centuries after the time assigned for the birth of Jesus Christ, he was not represented as a man on a cross, and that the Christians did not have such a thing as a crucifix, we are inclined to think that the effigies of a black or dark-skinned crucified man, which were to be seen in many places in Italy even during the last century, may have had something to do with it. (Bible Myths, p. 197, 7th Edition.)

The same writer also refers to “the Mexican crucified god being sometimes represented as black,” and that “crosses were also found in Yucatan, as well as Mexico, with a man upon them.” (Ibid., p. 201.)

The numerous black madonnas and infants in European cathedrals are discussed in detail by Sir Godfrey Higgins in The Anacalypsis, Vol. I, Book IV, Chap. I, to which the interested student is referred. However, the remarks of Mr. Shipley on this point are worthy of our attention:

Very suggestive is the fact that representations of the virgin mother and infant savior are often black. This is true in the case of the paintings and images of Isis and Horus, of Devaki and Krishna, and in many cases of Mary and Jesus. The most ancient pictures and statues in Italy and other parts of Europe, which are adored by the faithful as representations of the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus, reveal the infant draped in white, but with face black and in the arms of a black mother. â€¦ How does it happen that the Virgin Mother of the Mexican Savior-God so closely resembled the Black Virgins of Egypt and Europe? Had they not all a common origin?” (Sex and The Garden of Eden Myth, pp. 50â€“51, by Maynard Shipley, Little Blue Book No.1188.)

Mr. A. H. Verrill, an American archaeologist, visited an Indian shrine in a small town in Guatemala a few years ago, and found that on a special festival day Indians traveled to this little church to bow down to the image of a Black Christ. From the attendant ceremonies, Verrill judged the rite to be of Mayan origin. (see Verrill’s Old Civilizations of the New World, New York, 1938.) The Mayas possessed knowledge of the arts and sciences equivalent to that of the ancients of the Old World, but upon that we cannot dwell, since limitations of space forbid it. The reader is referred to Professor Paul Radin’s fine book on the American Indians, where after surveying the marvelous scientific achievements of the Mayas of Yucatan and Central America , Dr. Radin admits that: “No excavations have ever revealed to us any civilization of a simpler nature from which this very elaborate culture could possibly have been developed.” (The Story of the American Indian, p. 77, Garden City, 1937.)

Egypt and Western Asia tell the same story. “In each case we have a standard or measuring-rod of authentic historical record,” declares Samuel Laing, “of certainly not less than 8,000 and more probably 9,000 or 10,000 years, from the present time; and in each case we find ourselves at this remote date, in the presence, not of rude beginnings, but of a civilization already ancient and far advanced. We have populous cities, celebrated temples, an organized priesthood, an advanced state of agriculture and of the industrial and fine arts; writing and books so long known that their origin is lost in myth; religions in which advanced philosophical and moral ideas are already developed; astronomical systems which imply a long course of accurate observations. How long this prehistoric age may have lasted, and how many centuries it may have taken to develop such a civilization, from the primitive beginnings of Neolithic and Paleolithic origins, is a matter of conjecture. All we can infer is, that it must have required an immense time, much longer than that embraced by the subsequent period of historical record.” (Human Origins, by Samuel Laing, p. 30, London, 1913.)

Much more could be said on this subject, but since this essay is addressed mainly to readers who have little time for the study of history, it must be made as concise as possible. The numerous citations from standard scientific and historical works, it is hoped, will be of some benefit to students who are out of reach of large public libraries, or who lack the leisure time necessary for reading and research along these lines.

#The Black Gods: Ethiopia and the Origin of Civilization Part 4 – By John G. Jackson (1939)#Ethiopia #Black Gods

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jpbjazz · 22 days

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LÉGENDES DU JAZZ

PETE JOHNSON, ROI DU BOOGIE WOOGIE

"Johnson shared with the other members of the 'Boogie Woogie Trio' the technical virtuosity and melodic fertility that can make this the most exciting of all piano music styles, but he was more comfortable than Meade Lux Lewis in a band setting; and as an accompanist, unlike Lewis or Albert Ammons, he could sparkle but not outshine his singing partner".

- Tony Russell

Né le 25 mars 1904 à Kansas City, au Missouri, Kermit H. ‘’Pete’’ Johnson a été élevé par sa mère après son père ait abandonné sa famille. Sa mère éprouvant des difficultés financières, Johnson avait été placé dans un orphelinat à l’âge de trois ans. Mais Johnson s’ennuyait de sa famille et n’avait pas tardé à s’enfuir et à retourner chez lui. À partir de l’âge de douze ans, Johnson avait occupé différents petits emplois afin de contribuer à la subsistance de sa famille: dans une usine, une imprimerie et même comme cireur de chaussures. Johnson avait d’ailleurs abandonné l’école en cinquième année afin de gagner un peu d’argent.

DÉBUTS DE CARRIÈRE

Johnson, qui avait amorcé sa carrière musicale en 1922 comme batteur à Kansas City, avait commencé à jouer du piano à la même époque où il avait appris à jouer de la batterie. Johnson travaillait comme ‘’water boy’’ pour une compagnie de construction lorsqu’il avait commencé à jouer du piano.

De 1926 à 1938, Johnson avait obtenu ses premiers contrats comme pianiste, souvent aux côtés du légendaire Big Joe Turner, le futur chanteur de l’orchestre de Count Basie. Après avoir été remarqué par le producteur John Hammond en 1936, Johnson avait décroché un contrat au club Famous Door de New York. Johnson avait obtenu une des plus grandes chances de sa carrière lorsqu’il avait participé avec Turner au concert From Spirituals to Swing à Carnegie Hall les Le 23 et 24 décembre 1938. Outre Johnson et Turner, le concert mettait également en vedette Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Helen Humes, Meade Lux Lewis, Albert Ammons, les Mitchell's Christian Singers, the Golden Gate Quartet, James P. Johnson, Big Bill Broonzy et Sonny Terry. Organisé par Hammond, le concert n’avait pas été facile à financer, car il était composé entièrement de musiciens de couleur et était destiné à un auditoire multiracial. Le concert avait finalement été commandité par The New Masses, le journal du Parti communiste américain. On lisait dans les notes de pochette de l’album:

"[i]n 1938... {Hammond} conceived a concert at Carnegie Hall in New York City to showcase African-American music from its raw beginnings to the most current jazz. Hammond... was one of the most influential talent scouts and record producers in history, having 'discovered' artists from Billie Holiday and Count Basie to [much later - Varlet] Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. The concert, which would be titled 'From Spirituals To Swing', would depict the common themes that existed in Black music from its origins in Africa, through gospel and blues, dixieland and eventually to swing."

Tentant de capitaliser sur la nouvelle popularité du boogie woogie après le concert, Johnson avait travaillé et voyagé en tournée avec Turner, Meade Lux Lewis et Albert Ammons. Avec Ammons, Johnson avait également participé au tournage du court-métrage Boogie-Woogie Dream en 1913. La chanson de 1938 "Roll 'Em Pete" composée par Johnson et Turner est aujourd’hui considérée comme une des premières pièces de rock n’ roll jamais enregistrée. La chanson mettait en vedette Johnson au piano et Turner au chant. Un autre titre qui se passait de présentation était "Johnson and Turner Blues." En 1949, Johnson avait également écrit et enregistré la pièce "Rocket 88 Boogie", qui avait plus tard servi d’inspiration à Ike Turner pour son succès de 1951 "Rocket 88".

Dans le cadre de trois sessions tenues en janvier 1946, Johnson avait enregistré un des premiers albums-concept de l’histoire. Intitulé Housewarmin’, l’album débutait avec Johnson seul au piano, avant d’être rejoint par d’autres musiciens de Kansas City comme J. C. Higginbotham et J. C. Heard. L’album mettait également à contribution de grands noms du jazz comme Albert Nicholas, Oran ‘’Hot Lips'' Page, Clyde Bernhardt, Budd Johnson et une jeune chanteuse alors peu connue, Etta Jones. Tous ces musiciens exécutaient chacun un solo avant de participer à une jam session avec le groupe. Sur l’album, Johnson avait démontré sa remarquable maîtrise du piano stride ainsi que son habileté à travailler avec un groupe. L’album avait été réédité plus tard sous le titre de Pete's Blues.

DERNIÈRES ANNÉES

Après avoir connu différents problèmes financiers et de santé, Johnson s’était installé à Buffalo en 1950. Après avoir perdu l’usage d’un de ses doigts dans un accident, Johnson avait été victime d’une attaque qui l’avait laissé partiellement paralysé, ce qui ne l’avait pas empêché de continuer d’enregistrer et de voyager en tournée avec des musiciens comme Turner et Jimmy Rushing et de participer aux tournées de Jazz at the Philharmonic.

Mais les plus beaux jours de la carrière de Johnson étaient désormais derrière lui. Parvenant de plus en plus difficilement à se trouver du travail, Johnson avait été employé de janvier à octobre 1953 par une compagnie de crème glacée comme laveur de camions. Comme complément de revenus, Johnson se produisait durant les weekends avec un trio qui se produisait au club Bamboo Room de Buffalo. L’année suivante, Johnson avait nettoyé des corbillards pour une entreprise de pompes funèbres au salaire de 25$ par semaine. En juillet de la même année, Johnson avait finalement obtenu un contrat de six mois pour jouer comme pianiste-résident au Circus Snack Bar du St. Louis Forest Park Hotel. Certains concerts de Johnson avaient éventuellement été restransmis le samedi après-midi dans le cadre d’une émission de radio appelée Saturday at the Chase. Deux concerts privés de Johnson avaient également été enregistrés à la résidence de son ami Bill Atkinson.

La carrière de Johnson avait été plutôt calme au cours des quatre années suivantes, à l’exception de trois apparitions en 1955 à la Berkshire Music Barn de Lenox, au Massachusetts. Malgré tout, Johnson avait continué d’enregistrer. Il avait même fait une tournée en Europe en 1958 avec le Jazz at the Philharmonic, et ce, en dépit de sa mauvaise santé. Durant son séjour en Europe, Johnson avait reçu une invitation pour se produire au Festival de jazz de Newport, ce qui lui avait permis de se jouer aux côtés de Big Joe Turner, Chuck Berry et Big Maybelle.

Lors d’un examen médical en août, on avait diagnostiqué à Johnson des problèmes cardiaques ainsi qu’une forme de diabète. Après avoir été victime de plusieurs attaques, Johnson avait éventuellement été paralysé des deux mains. Toujours paralysé quatre ans plus tard, Johnson avait même commencé à perdre la vue. Le magazine Jazz Report avait d’ailleurs lancé une série de campagnes de souscription afin de venir en aide financièrement à Johnson. En 1964, un ami de longue date de Johnson appelé Hans Maurer avait publié The Pete Johnson Story. Les sommes résultant de la vente du livre avaient été entièrement versées à Johnson. La même année, un article paru dans le magazine Blues Unlimited ayant exposé les difficultés éprouvées par Johnson concernant le paiement de ses ‘’royalties’’ auprès de certaines compagnies de disques autres que Blue Note et Victor, il avait été admis comme membre de l’American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) ce qui avait lui permis de recevoir ses droits d’auteur sur une base régulière.

Sa paralysie ayant grandement altéré ses capacités de jouer du piano, Johnson avait livré sa dernière performance dans le cadre d’une apparition au festival de jazz de Newport en janvier 1967. Lors du concert, l’alter ego de Johnson, l’incontournable Joe Turner, l’avait qualifié de meilleur pianiste de boogie woogie de tous les temps. Turner avait enchaîné en interprétant pour son vieil ami la chanson “Roll ‘Em Pete” qu’il avait composée conjointement avec lui en 1938.

Dans son compte rendu du concert, le critique Dan Morgenstern du magazine Down Beat écrivait:

"Then for the concert's most moving moment, Lieberson (the MC) escorted Pete Johnson on stage and introduced him as one of the participants in the original Spirituals to Swing and the greatest boogie-woogie pianist. Johnson had suffered a series of paralytic strokes and had not played piano for many years. His old buddy, Turner, took him by the hand, and for a moment the two middle-aged men looked touchingly like little boys. Turner dedicated 'Roll 'Em Pete' to his old friend, as Lieberson and Johnson were about to leave the stage. Instead, they stopped and the pianist seated himself next to [Ray] Bryant at the piano and began to play the treble part of his old showpiece, Bryant handling the bass. Johnson was a bit shaky but game, gaining in confidence as the number built in intensity."

Pete Johnson est mort le 23 mars 1967 au Meyer Hospital de Buffalo dans l’État de New York, deux jours avant son 63e anniversaire de naissance. Principal représentant du "Kansas City boogie woogie style", Johnson, contrairement à ses collègues du Boogie Woogie Trio, Albert Ammons et Meade Lux Lewis, qui étaient originaires de Chicago et étaient principalement influencés par le jeu de Jimmy Yancey, Pinetop Smith, Hersal Thomas, Clarence Lofton et Jimmy Blythe, avait toujours eu un style très distinctif. Contrairement à Ammons qui utilisait un système harmonique et rythmique qui lui était propre, et à Lewis qui avait une sonorité puissante très inspirée de Fats Waller, Johnson avait une connaissance approfondie des harmonies, des structures, du rythme et du swing.

Tony Russell avait écrit au sujet de Johnson dans son ouvrage The Blues – From Robert Johnson to Robert Cray publié en 1998: "Johnson shared with the other members of the 'Boogie Woogie Trio' the technical virtuosity and melodic fertility that can make this the most exciting of all piano music styles, but he was more comfortable than Meade Lux Lewis in a band setting; and as an accompanist, unlike Lewis or Albert Ammons, he could sparkle but not outshine his singing partner".

SOURCES:

‘’Pete Johnson.’’ Wikipedia, 2023.

‘’Pete Johnson.’’ All About Jazz, 2023.

#jazz

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kiyblackmoon · 3 years

Text

Witches Herbal Code

Heart- Bud or Seed

Beak, Bill or Nose- Seed, Bud or Bloom

Tongue or Teeth- Petal or Leaf

Head- Blossom

Tail- Stem

Hair- Dried Herbs or Stringy Parts Of Herbs

Privates, Genitals Or Semen- Seeds Or Sap

Blood- Sap

Guts- Roots or Stalk

Paw, Foot, Leg, Wing or Toe- Leaves

Adder’s Tongue: Dogstooth Violet; Plantain

Ass’s Foot: Coltsfoot

Bat’s Wing : Holly Leaf

Bat’s Wool : Moss

Bear’s Foot: Lady’s Mantle

Bird’s Eye: Germander, Speedwell

Blood: Elder sap or another tree sap

Blood from a Head: Lupine

Blood from a Shoulder: Bear’s Breeches

Blood of a Goose: Mulberry tree’s sap

Blood of a Hamadryas Baboon: Blood of a spotted gecko

Blood of a Snake: Hematite

Blood of an Eye: Tamarisk Gall

Blood of Ares: Purslane

Blood of Hephaistos: Wormwood

Blood of Hestia: Chamomile

Bloody Fingers: Foxglove

Blue Jay: Bay laurel

Bone of an Ibis: Buckthorn

Brains: Cherry tree gum [this phrase usually designates any fruit tree gum]

Bull’s Blood or Seed of Horus: Horehound

Bull’s Foot: Coltsfoot

Bull’s Semen: Eggs of the blister beetle

Calf’s Snout: Snapdragon

Capon’s Tail: Valerian.

Cat: Catnip

Cat’s Foot: Canada Snake Root and/or Ground Ivy

Clot: Great Mullein

Corpse Candles: Mullein

Cuddy’s Lungs: Great Mullein

Crocodile Dung: Ethiopian Earth

Crow Foot: Cranesbill, wild geranium, buttercup

Devil’s Dung: Asafoetida

Dog: Couch grass

Dog’s Mouth: Snapdragon

Dog’s Tongue: Hounds Tongue

Dove’s Foot: Wild Geranium

Dragon’s Blood: Resin of Draco palm

Dragon’s Scales: Bistort leaves

Eagle: Wild Garlic of Fenugreek

Ear of an Ass: Comfrey

Ears of a Goat: St. John’s Wort

Englishman’s Foot: Common Plantain

Eye of Christ: Germander, speedwell

Eye of the Day: Common daisy

Eye of the Star: Horehound

Eyes: Inner part of a blossom; Aster, Daisy, Eyebright

Fat from a Head: Spurge

Fingers: Cinquefoil

Five Fingers: Cinquefoil

Foot: Leaf

Frog: Cinquefoil

Frog’s Foot: Bulbous buttercup

From the Belly: Earth-apple

From the Foot: Houseleek

From the Loins: Chamomile

Goat’s Foot: Ash Weed

God’s Hair: Hart’s Tongue Fern

Gosling Wing: Goosegrass

Graveyard Dust: Mullein

Great Ox-eye: Ox-eye daisy

Guts: The roots and stalk of a plant

Hair: Dried stringy herbs; ripe male fern

Hair of a Hamadryas Baboon: Dill Seed

Hair of Venus: Maidenhair fern

Hare’s Beard: Great mullein

Hawk: Hawkweed

Hawk’s Heart: Wormwood seed or wormwood crown

Head: Flower of a plant

Heart: Walnut; bud, seed, or nut

Hind’s Tongue: Hart’s Tongue Fern

Horse Hoof: Coltsfoot

Horse Tongue: Hart’s Tongue Fern

Jacob’s Staff: Great Mullein

Jupiter’s Staff: Great Mullein

King’s Crown: Black Haw

Kronos’ Blood: Cedar

Lamb: Lettuce

Lamb’s Ears: Betony

Leg: Leaf

Lion’s Hair: Tongue of a Turnip [i.e., the leaves of the taproot]

Lion’s Tooth: Dandelion aka Priest’s Crown

Lion Semen: Human Semen

Man’s Bile: Turnip sap

Nightingale: Hops

Paw: Leaf

Physician’s Bone: Sandstone

Pig’s Tail: Leopard’s Bane

Privates: Seed

Ram’s Head: American Valerian

Rat: Valerian

Red Cockscomb: Amaranth

Seed of Horus: Horehound

Semen of Ammon: Houseleek

Semen of Ares: Clover

Semen of Helios: White Hellebore

Semen of Hephaistos: Fleabane

Semen of Herakles: Mustard-rocket

Semen of Hermes: Dill

Shepherd’s Heart: Shepherd’s Purse

Skin of Man: Fern

Skull: Skullcap Mushroom

Snake: Bistort

Snake’s Ball of Thread: Soapstone

Snake’s Head: Leech

Sparrow’s Tongue: Knotweed

Swine’s Snout: Dandelion leaves

Tail: Stem

Tears of a Hamadryas Baboon: Dill Juice

Teeth: Pine Cones

Titan’s Blood: Wild Lettuce

Toad: Toadflax; Sage

Toe: Leaf

Tongue: Petal

Unicorn’s Horn: False Unicorn Root; True Unicorn Root

Urine: Dandelion

Weasel: Rue

Weasel Snout: Yellow Dead Nettles/Yellow Archangel

White Man’s Foot: Common Plantain

Wing: Leaf

Wolf Claw: Club Moss

Wolf Foot: Bugle Weed

Wolf’s Milk: Euphorbia

Woodpecker: Peony

Worms: Thin Roots

#book of shadows #wicca #grimoire #spellwork #witches #pagans of tumblr #witch blog #witchery #wiccan #blackwiccans #witch herbs #herbcode #witches herbal code

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bluewatsons · 5 years

Conversation

Paladin of Literary Agon: A Conversation with Harold Bloom, Los Angeles Review of Books (May 12, 2019)

William Giraldi: One of the abiding pleasures of Possessed by Memory is the dual meaning of the title: not only to possess literature by memory, but to be possessed, demon-like, by one’s own history, by a memory that will not stop. You’ll be 89 this year; you’ve had a most fertile and fulfilling life, one enriched enormously by friendships with the poets and critics you most admired. I think of Angus Fletcher, M. H. Abrams, Kenneth Burke, A. R. Ammons, John Hollander, John Ashbery: hauntings by them help mold this book into a glimmering threnody. Did you start out to memorialize your friends in such a way?

Harold Bloom: I did not intend Possessed by Memory to be so elegiac. But most of it was dictated to generous assistants during several years in which I spent much of my time in hospitals and in rehabilitation. It started to become a meditation upon mortality. Worst of all, almost my entire generation of critics and poets, so many of them my closest friends, died during those years. My prime mentors — Frederick A. Pottle, Hans Jonas, Gershom Scholem, Kenneth Burke — had departed earlier, all save for Mike Abrams, who lasted more than a hundred years. With the recent deaths of William Merwin and Richard Wilbur, and of John Ashbery before them, my loneliness increased. These days, whenever I read, teach, or write, I am haunted by friends who educated me--Richard Rorty, Angus Fletcher, Geoffrey Hartman, Paul de Man, John Hollander. I was very close to the poets A. R. Ammons, John Ashbery, William Merwin, and in quite a different way to James Merrill. They seem to be in the room with me. They also appear in my dreams. I have never written a poem. My only gift, as I understand it, is to have learned to listen: to students and to ghosts. I could wish the book were less somber than it is.

William Giraldi: Something occurred to me on my second reading of Possessed by Memory. Your essential friendships — those that were deeply reciprocal, that helped fertilize your work as you helped fertilize theirs — have been with poets and critics and not novelists or dramatists. You told me once about the ecstasy of being found by Hart Crane’s poems at the Bronx Library when you were a small child. The Pentateuch had always been a shimmering presence in your household, but it was Crane who opened the book your life would become, who put you in touch with the font of daemonic splendor, “the burning fountain,” as Shelley has it. I know what certain fiction writers mean to you — Cervantes, Kafka, Proust (and Possessed by Memory ends with a penetrating assessment of Proust) — but the poets (Shakespeare, Shelley, Blake, Keats, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats, Crane, Stevens) have clearly meant the most to you.

Harold Bloom: That is most of the story, yes. During the 1980s and 1990s, I spent a great deal of time with Philip Roth. There were also interchanges with Tony Kushner and the novelist Walter Abish. Hart Crane broke the vessels for me. I then read Shakespeare, Milton, Whitman, the Romantics and Victorians and 20th-century poetry in English with a kind of fury that Crane had put into me. Probably my essential reading experience comes down to the Hebrew Bible, Dante, Shakespeare. I continue to read Yeats, D. H. Lawrence, Hart Crane, and Stevens almost daily.

William Giraldi: Possessed by Memory begins with an epigraph by the divine Oscar Wilde from his essay “The Critic as Artist,” in which he speaks of “the highest criticism” being “a record of one’s soul” and “the spiritual moods and imaginative passions of the mind.” I think of how Wilde and Pater swerved from the prevailing critical ethos to make it new. In their departure from their predecessors, they honed their own aesthetic. You see these swervings and disruptions in English-language criticism--Coleridge moving away from Dryden and Johnson, Arnold from Coleridge, Eliot and Empson attempting to disrupt and correct Arnold while simultaneously taking from him. Your own critical program began with a focus on the Romantic poets, on making new paths from the likes of M. H. Abrams and Northrop Frye. Then you veered into the work that became your life’s mission, the elucidation of influence. To what extent were you conscious of needing to swerve from or to disrupt your own potent predecessors?

Harold Bloom: I had a bad nightmare on July 11, 1967, following my 37th birthday. I have written about this elsewhere. The next morning I came down to breakfast and began to scribble a long dithyramb that I called “The Covering Cherub or Poetic Influence.” I kept at it for another day or two, and it became, in time, much revised, the opening chapter in The Anxiety of Influence, published January 5, 1973. The original text was printed by John Hollander in his selection of my work called Poetics of Influence. I was sadly amused when Northrop Frye told mutual friends that he could not read the book because it was all about him. It is not. Nor is it about my humane mentors M. H. Abrams and Frederick A. Pottle. After years of meditation I have come to believe that the Covering Cherub, a figure out of Ezekiel and Blake, was smothering me with the massive heft of all the poems I had read, loved, remembered. If I have a potent precursor, it would have to be Dr. Samuel Johnson. I am a good schoolteacher--he is beyond me and beyond disruption. Had I followed family tradition, I would have become a rabbi. Instead, I am a secular rabbi like those celebrated by Wallace Stevens. I teach Shakespeare as scripture. When I teach Poetic Influence, in some ways I vanish, and in some modes I am exalted.

William Giraldi: I often try to impart to readers the Eucharistic component to the strongest literature, the necessity of its sacral communing. As a nonbelieving Catholic, I have no problem calling it a secular holiness, though I don’t, as you know, subscribe to the Arnoldian notion of poetry’s power to supplant religion, never mind to correct society. You’ve spent your life defending and explaining the pleasurable hardships in the strongest literature. I see this as the difference between the rare joy of aesthetic mastery in Dante and the mere enjoyment of a contemporary best seller, the difference between gravitas and gratification. In An Experiment in Criticism, C. S. Lewis differentiates between strong readers and weak readers. Strong readers experience an important book as a sacral event, their worldviews revamped. Weak readers read an important book and nothing at all happens to them. Near the start of the The Western Canon, you acknowledge that reading for aesthetic pleasure and necessary wisdom has gone the way of the plesiosaur. Twenty-five years later, as the internet perseveres in the strafing of our souls, I wonder how grim is your outlook.

Harold Bloom: I regret not sharing your admiration for C. S. Lewis. After a few amiable encounters in the autumn of 1954 at Cambridge University, the distinguished defender of the faith and I fell out while sharing drinks at the Anchor Bar. Gnosticism upset him gravely. We did not speak again after that. He attacked my book The Visionary Company and I responded gently enough by writing that his A Preface to Paradise Lost was pure theology. Sometime back I published a brief book, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? I concluded by relying upon Saint Augustine, who taught us all how to read strongly and how memory, time, and consciousness relate to imaginative literature, though of course the Bible was for him the truth. Oddly I begin to be less pessimistic than I was in The Western Canon. Partly that is inspired by my students, but also I receive endless emails, straight mails, phone calls, and visits from good readers throughout the world who have been kind enough to want to tell me that I have been their teacher. There is a saving remnant. Young women and men the world over read and hear the call of wisdom and the urgency of intelligence. I am pretty much a relic, yet I believe the future — if there is one — will depend upon deep readers all over the globe. Without reading Dante, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Cervantes, and their few peers, we cannot learn how to think. And if we cannot think, then the future belongs to the Trumps of the world — that is to say, to the apocalyptic beasts from the sea.

William Giraldi: Since we must endure now the daily mauling of morality from our capital, the smiting of tact and taste and truth by such tanninim, I sometimes ponder what the state of our culture and politics would be if we had a populace educated in beauty and wisdom by Dante and Dickinson. But such considerations get quaveringly close to the erroneous Arnoldian line that comprehends literature as social corrective. From the beginning, and again in Possessed by Memory, you’ve been adamant in insisting that literature enhances and enlarges individuals only through aesthetic pleasure it grants individuals the vital discourse they must have with themselves if they are to be whole, if they are to enjoy more life and prepare for life’s end. But of course a society made up of such individuals is something to smile on. I think of your old friend Northrop Frye, “We can’t speak or think or comprehend even our own experience except within the limits of our own power over words, and those limits have been established for us by our great writers.” Literature says with John Clare, “O take me from the busy crowd, / I cannot bear the noise!” and “Lord keep my love for quiet joys.” I’m a touch surprised you aren’t more morose about our noisome cyber lives.

Harold Bloom: It is true and perhaps sad that the highest literature teaches us how to speak to ourselves rather than to others. Reading Dante and Shakespeare may improve an individual but will not make him a better citizen. I do not have much of what you call a cyber life myself because I don’t watch television, do not have a cell phone, and have to dictate to someone at a computer in order to write. More than ever I am a dinosaur. But I have to reason outward from my students. Doubtless they are all involved in these technologies. But last week I taught Macbeth and “Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction.” Most of my students were delightfully agile in discussing both. I grant that I choose them from a possible group that is already elite. And yet they are as good as any students I have taught in my 63 years at Yale. As I discovered again this morning, I no longer can read The New York Times, once I have glanced at all the dreadful events. Cultural coverage is so remote from my aesthetic experience that clearly I will go on provoking tired readers. Still, if I have a public function, and I doubt it, it would have to be as a living relic of an age that could give us Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery.

William Giraldi: Your age has given us also a clutch of thrilling critical voices who helped establish American literary comment as a worthy art, just as your own work has demonstrated that art and has helped complete the imaginative literature it sets out to evaluate and appreciate. Each week I go back to Wilde to be sustained, and I’m remembering now his contention, with a nod to Pater and Arnold, that “[w]ithout the critical faculty, there is no artistic creation at all worthy of the name.” Wilde underscores the essential and thrumming reciprocity of literature and criticism. If critics are analysts of pleasure, in Chesterton’s phrase, then their work is responsible for instigating its own pleasure, for creating its own wisdom and beauty. Mary McCarthy once defined weak criticism as “a quivering jelly of uncritical emotion” — which I suspect is an allusion to T. S. Eliot-- “The general mess of imprecision of feeling / Undisciplined squads of emotion” — and I wonder if you ever fear that our new autocracy of emotion is going to butcher the essential reciprocity of literature and criticism. What becomes of a culture that does a lot of feeling about itself but no longer knows how to think about literature?

Harold Bloom: High literature has three prime attributes-- cognitive power, originality, aesthetic splendor. Only by a disciplined harnessing of emotion can any of these three come forth. What you call our “new autocracy of emotion” is just stylized noise. It cannot touch the interdependence of criticism and literature because it is mindless. Culture is now cut off from fashion. Popular culture has become an oxymoron. Bad taste is not culture. There are still many valuable writers of imaginative works in our society. It seems to me that they prosper best when they take a stance apart from the immediate moment. Distraction is the enemy. I see no crisis in the reciprocity of literature and criticism because the culture industries are irrelevant to it.

William Giraldi: I’m reminded of your chapter in Possessed by Memory on Angus Fletcher and Whitman, in which you reference Fletcher’s Allegory and what he called “the crisis of scale.” You say that Fletcher “warned prophetically that any sense of sublime transcendence is going to vanish in our technological world. What is coming is the emptiness of allegory without ideas.” Fletcher died in 2016 and he seems to me to be a loving, guiding shade throughout this book. All along you have been not only continually in communion with poetic splendor, but continually in conversation, explicit or not, with those critics who helped cast you. Has your relationships with certain critics — Longinus, Lucretius, Pater, Hazlitt, et cetera — changed over your lifetime?

Harold Bloom: Samuel Johnson is always the rhinoceros in the room. Walter Pater taught me appreciation in all its senses. Kenneth Burke and I wandered around lower Manhattan while he taught me rhetoric and we both recited Whitman. But Angus Fletcher is the abiding presence. He is in the room as I teach, read, write. Our friendship was continuous from 1951 to 2016, and indeed he is my guiding shade. I think my relationships with mentors and friends changed only after they died. I am not an occultist nor a medium, but somehow they speak to me from the beyond. They are no different except perhaps a touch more urgent.

William Giraldi: My memory is all loops and lacunae. The poetry I have locked in me took lots of work to get there and takes lots of work to stay there. I once described your memory as a great bear trap, but let’s revise that, because I recently heard a cosmologist say that at the other end of every black hole is a white hole... nothing truly disappears but is born anew in another cosmos, at the other end. There’s poetic splendor in that, a Nietzschean eternal recurrence that pleases me. Your memory for poetry is a vortex birthing fresh light. I think of Robert Graves’s poem “On Portents,” in which he writes of “tourbillions in Time made / By the strong pulling of her bladed mind.” But I wonder if a pulling memory such as yours is ever a woe... it gives in verse but takes in tears. There must be morose moments before the bruising dawn when you wish you couldn’t remember with such vividness.

Harold Bloom: Memory can be a consuming fire or it can please like the taste of fresh fruit. From about 4 a.m. on, I am not happy about my memory though it keeps me going anyway. I surprised myself the other day by quoting swaths of Edmund Spenser to myself. At first I could not remember who it was, but that came soon. It is much easier to remember poems than to remember people. If I allowed myself to brood on all the people I loved who have departed, then I would never be able to go on reading, writing, teaching. In me memory has become cognition.

William Giraldi: Your combined work on Romanticism, influence, memory, Shakespeare, and religion amounts to a constant, branching dialogue--your books sing to each other under the light of literature. You long ago came into possession of your own influence, and I wonder what you ponder now when glancing back at your tremendous output, if you’d like to be remembered as the explicator of literary agon, as fervent Bardolator, as defender of the Canon, or if you see your different stages as I do, as a single stage that progresses as your thinking progressed, from your first book on Shelley to this latest on memory.

Harold Bloom: I have been publishing books and essays from 1957 until now in 2019. I continue to write and to teach. I can hardly remember what it was like to be 25 or 27. I would like to be remembered as a teacher. Essentially I am a schoolteacher. I do not know whether I have developed or just unfolded. It seems to me dubious that any of my writings will survive. They were extensions of my teaching. Insofar as they have taught strangers, they have done their work. The work of teaching is never over. It has taught me how to listen. When I was young and middle-aged, I was a bad listener. Now I listen very closely as my students discuss Shakespeare or Wallace Stevens with one another. I think when I depart that I will think of myself as a secular rabbi. One reads to the congregation yet also to oneself. Yahweh bewilders me. I cannot accept him. I cannot reject him. The God of my mother and my father cannot be just an old story. I do not trust in the Covenant, but I cannot deny the transcendental and extraordinary.

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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Why Clash Of The Titans Was The End Of An Era

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It was 40 years ago, in June 1981, that Clash of the Titans, the last film to feature the stop-motion animation effects of Ray Harryhausen, was released.

Starring a then-unknown Harry Hamlin, along with veteran stars like Laurence Olivier, Maggie Smith, Burgess Meredith, and Ursula Andress, the film was loosely based on the Greek myth of Perseus (Hamlin), weaving in strands of other mythologies and legends and putting its hero into conflict with creatures like the Kraken, Calibos, Medusa the Gorgon and a two-headed dog named Dioskilos.

“Greek and Roman myths contained characters and fantastic creatures that were ideal for cinematic adventures,” wrote Harryhausen in his memoir, Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life. “If some of the adventures were combined with 20th century storytelling, a timeless narrative could be constructed that would appeal to both young and old.”

Harryhausen was already a filmmaking legend by the time he began work on Clash of the Titans. Born in Los Angeles on June 29, 1920, a 13-year-old Harryhausen’s life was changed when he saw King Kong for the first time in 1933. Inspired by the groundbreaking stop-motion animation work in that film by Willis O’Brien, Harryhausen began experimenting with his own short films employing the same process.

He got to meet O’Brien at one point, with the visual effects pioneer encouraging the young Harryhausen to keep refining and improving his work. Some years later, after attending USC, doing a stint in the military during World War II and working at his first professional job on George Pal’s Puppetoons, Harryhausen landed a job as O’Brien’s assistant on Mighty Joe Young (1949).

It was on 1953’s The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, the first film on which Harryhausen was in charge of the visual effects, that he created the process known as “Dynamation,” which allowed for greater and more realistic interaction between his stop-motion creatures and live actors.

In 1955, Harryhausen met producer Charles H. Schneer and formed a partnership that would begin with Harryhausen’s next feature, It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955), and last all the way through their final collaboration on Clash of the Titans.

Their run of pictures included fantasy and sci-fi classics such as Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957), The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), Jason and the Argonauts (1963), One Million Years B.C.(1966), The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1974) and many others.

Unlike many visual effects artists even to this day, Harryhausen had an unusually high degree of creative control over his projects. He didn’t just animate the monsters; he was involved in the conceptual and story development, production design, and many other aspects, acting as a co-producer with Schneer and sometimes as a co-director — an agreement that any director of a Harryhausen film had to abide by.

Harryhausen even received co-producer credit on The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, a title he would also officially obtain on his and Schneer’s next and last two pictures, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977) and Clash of the Titans. “I felt he deserved it,” Schneer told Starlog magazine (#152) in March 1990. “It was a recognition that Ray contributed more than just the special FX. His input was added from day one.”

Clash of the Titans was an idea that Harryhausen had been kicking around since the late 1950s, with screenwriter Beverley Cross (who wrote the final script for Titans) penning a treatment called Perseus and the Gorgon’s Head in 1969. Although the plans were delayed by the next two Sinbad pictures, work on the project began in earnest as Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger neared completion.

“The original legend of Perseus is complex and convoluted,” wrote Harryhausen in An Animated Life. “So we had to manipulate events, stealing from one legend and putting it in another.” Harryhausen cited the creation of the winged horse Pegasus as one example: in the original story, Pegasus is born from the blood of Medusa’s severed head. But since her death would come near the end of the film, a different scene involving Perseus capturing and training Pegasus was conceived to bring him in earlier.

With a screenplay and production storyboards ready, Schneer presented the film to Columbia Pictures, where he and Harryhausen had a number of successes over the years. But the studio balked at the $15 million budget — more than all Harryhausen and Schneer’s previous films combined — so Schneer next brought it to Orion Pictures.

MGM/Warner Bros.

That company had one request: cast a then obscure but up-and-coming bodybuilder-turned-actor named Arnold Schwarzenegger as Perseus. This time Schneer and Harryhausen balked. “I told them he didn’t fit the part, because it had dialogue,” Schneer told Starlog. “But Orion considered his casting to be a deal breaker. They refused to accept another actor, so I walked out on them.” Eventually, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer showed great enthusiasm for the project, providing the full budget and even a bit more.

Schneer, Harryhausen and director Desmond Davis — whom Schneer had hired because of his work with Shakespearean actors on several BBC productions of the Bard’s plays — looked at Malcolm McDowell, Michael York and Richard Chamberlain for Perseus before choosing Hamlin. “Harry had only made one picture, but had considerable stage experience,” wrote Harryhausen. “Not only was it felt that he would be able to handle the role and the effects, but he also looked the part.”

Hamlin told Starlog (#46) in May 1981 that he was initially reluctant to take the role, thinking it would be strictly a monster picture, until he saw the rest of the cast that was involved. But he was also drawn to the idea of playing a hero in the classical sense.

“I’m playing an across-the-board Greek hero type,” he explained. “Perseus has no superpowers himself. He has a few accoutrements, such as a sword and a helmet which makes him invisible. He has a magic shield. He’s a real hero in the classic sense. It’s a good role. I’ve always wanted to be a hero.”

Esteemed British actors like Olivier, Smith, Jack Gwillim, Claire Bloom and Sian Phillips embodied the constantly scheming, calculating gods Zeus, Thetis, Poseidon, Hera, and Cassiopeia, while Meredith — best known as the Penguin on the Batman TV series — was cast as the playwright Ammon. John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson and even Orson Welles were considered for Zeus until Olivier accepted the role.

“I told Ray that if he thought he was the star of our pictures, then I was going to upstage him once and for all,” Schneer jokingly told Starlog. “I was going to cast actors who were bigger names than he was, and whose work the world knew better than his. I wanted to see if he could survive.”

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By Ryan Lambie

The movie begins with an infant Perseus and his mother Danae being sealed in a box and cast into the sea by Danae’s father, King Acrisius, who is enraged that the god Zeus (Olivier) impregnated Danae with the child. Perseus is rescued and grows to become a young man, while a furious Zeus orders from Olympus that the Kraken — last of the Titans — be released to destroy Acrisius and his kingdom.

Sometime later, the adult Perseus wants to win the hand of the beautiful Andromeda (Judi Bowker), who was once betrothed to a prince named Calibos. But Calibos (played by both actor Neil McCarthy and a stop-motion model) was turned into a monster by Zeus after the former offended the gods, and any prospective new husband for Andromeda must now answer a riddle concocted by the man-monster.

Andromeda is eventually offered to the Kraken as a sacrifice even after Perseus successfully answers the riddle. The only way for the giant sea creature to be defeated is for Perseus to voyage to the island of Medusa, sever her head, and use her eyes to turn the Kraken into stone — unless Perseus succumbs first.

Clash was shot at England’s Pinewood Studios, with location filming in Spain, Malta, and southern Italy. Principal photography began in May 1979 and concluded in September of the same year. Harryhausen then began the arduous, 18-month process of creating all the Dynarama effects (Dynamation had been renamed) and animating all the film’s creatures, from Calibos to the Kraken to the eerie Medusa to the mechanical owl Bubo, which Harryhausen said was not a riff on R2-D2 from Star Wars.

To complete the post-production work in time for the film’s June 1981 release, Harryhausen — who usually worked completely alone — brought in additional animators Steve Archer and Jim Danforth.

MGM/Warner Bros.

“I enjoy working by myself,” Harryhausen said in Starlog #127 (February 1988). “I did all but one of my films entirely on my own. Clash of the Titans was the only picture on which I had assistants for the animation. I always liked to put my mark on the work because that’s the final imprint you see on the screen. I felt a personal attachment to my films.”

But Harryhausen admitted that the grueling work of sitting alone in a studio, doing the frame-by-frame movements and shots that are at the core of stop-motion animation, began getting to him as he raced to finish his work in January 1981.

“It is always a frame-by-frame process which takes time,” he told Fangoria magazine in June of that year. “One of the greatest problems in this field is that after everyone’s forgotten the picture you have to go on keeping excited and interested in what you are doing in order to go on for another year. Sometimes it gets a bit dismal but I survive.”

The film did meet its release date as MGM’s major release for the summer of 1981. Released on the same date as Raiders of the Lost Ark, it came in second to that film with a first weekend gross of $6.5 million. It finished 19th for the year at the domestic box office with total earnings of $30 million. Although some reports had it earning a total of $70 million worldwide, it actually topped out at $44.4 million — still a sizable hit against its $15 million budget and the equivalent of nearly $99 million today.

Critics and fans were mixed on the film, with the former giving it a 67% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes and the latter awarding it a slightly better 70% score. While Roger Ebert called it a “grand and glorious romantic adventure, giving it three-and-a-half out of four stars, Variety absolutely buried the film, calling it an “unbearable bore” and targeting Harryhausen’s “endless array of flat, outdated special effects.”

For Harryhausen, the Variety slam in particular seemed to flip a switch inside him. “When I came to read the Variety review…I became very disillusioned,” he wrote in An Animated Life. “I gave the film so much of myself that when it was vindictively and unconstructively torn apart, the passion of filmmaking seemed to die.”

Schneer told Starlog that he sensed a change in his longtime friend and partner after Clash was completed. “It was a gradual process,” he said. “It didn’t happen overnight. I saw it coming at the end of Clash. I could see that Ray was getting older….the trial of making a picture is so draining, that I don’t blame him for backing away from it.”

While Harryhausen’s work in the field of fantasy filmmaking is unparalleled in its imagination and influence — everyone from George Lucas to James Cameron to Guillermo Del Toro has cited the man’s work as an inspiration — it’s clear that Clash of the Titans did indeed mark the end of an era. The effects look dated now, which could certainly be expected 40 years later; but at the time of the movie’s release, the previous five years alone had seen a massive upheaval in cinematic visual effects.

Star Wars, Superman, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Alien and The Empire Strikes Back had all come out in the years immediately before Clash, with all of those movies revolutionizing the way in which visual effects were achieved to one degree or another.

The incredible new techniques used to create epic space battles, detailed and awe-inspiring starships and lifelike monsters and extra-terrestrials all left Harryhausen’s painstakingly handcrafted and impressive — if now undeniably quaint — methods in the dust (although stop-motion was still deployed in small doses in several films, most notably The Empire Strikes Back).

Computers were already being used to create the dazzling space dogfights shots in movies like Star Wars, and even more groundbreaking use of computers — the CG revolution — was on the way, with Tron giving the first glimpse of what was to come just a year after Clash of the Titans came out (Clash itself was remade in 2010, using many of the techniques fashioned in the last 30 years with disappointing results).

Harryhausen himself seemed to recognize what was coming. Although he and Schneer began preparing two more films — Sinbad Goes to Mars and Force of the Trojans — neither project got the necessary backing and Harryhausen decided to quit while he was ahead. “The decision to end my career at that point was absolutely right,” he recalled in An Animated Life. “I was forced to concede that it was time to stand aside for others and their new technology to take over.”

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For movie lovers and fantasy fans of a certain age, Clash of the Titans was their first exposure not just to the work of Ray Harryhausen (who died on May 7, 2013, at the age of 92), but to the magic of fantasy storytelling, the wonders of stop-motion animation and the resonance of Greek mythology.

All of Harryhausen’s films provided that kind of entertainment and enlightenment to different generations, and were the link between the work of Willis O’Brien on King Kong and the trailblazing era of effects defined by companies like Industrial Light and Magic, Digital Domain and Weta. Progress is necessary and change is inevitable; yet Clash of the Titans brought down the curtain on a career and a style of filmmaking that may be behind us, but will live on in the imaginations of all they touched.

The post Why Clash Of The Titans Was The End Of An Era appeared first on Den of Geek.

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blackkudos · 7 years

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Big Joe Turner

Joseph Vernon "Joe" Turner, Jr. (May 18, 1911 – November 24, 1985), best known as Big Joe Turner, was an American blues shouter from Kansas City, Missouri, United States. According to the songwriter Doc Pomus, "Rock and roll would have never happened without him." While he had his greatest fame during the 1950s with his rock and roll recordings, particularly "Shake, Rattle and Roll", Turner's career as a performer endured from the 1920s into the 1980s. Turner was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987, with the Hall lauding him as "the brawny voiced 'Boss of the Blues'".

Career

Early days

Known variously as The Boss of the Blues, and Big Joe Turner (due to his 6'2", 300+ lbs stature), Turner was born in Kansas City. His father was killed in a train accident when Joe was only four years old. He first discovered a love of music in his involvement at church. He began singing on street corners for money, quitting school at age fourteen to work in Kansas City's nightclubs, first as a cook, and later as a singing bartender. He became known eventually as The Singing Barman, and worked in such venues as The Kingfish Club and The Sunset, where he and his piano playing partner Pete Johnson became resident performers. The Sunset was managed by Piney Brown. It featured "separate but equal" facilities for caucasian patrons. Turner wrote "Piney Brown Blues" in his honor and sang it throughout his entire career.

At that time Kansas City nightclubs were subject to frequent raids by the police, but as Turner recounts, "The Boss man would have his bondsmen down at the police station before we got there. We'd walk in, sign our names and walk right out. Then we would cabaret until morning."

His partnership with boogie-woogie pianist Pete Johnson proved fruitful. Together they went to New York City in 1936, where they appeared on a playbill with Benny Goodman, but as Turner recounts, "After our show with Goodman, we auditioned at several places, but New York wasn't ready for us yet, so we headed back to K.C.". Eventually they were witnessed by the talent scout, John H. Hammond in 1938, who invited them back to New York to appear in one of his "From Spirituals to Swing" concerts at Carnegie Hall, which were instrumental in introducing jazz and blues to a wider American audience.

Due in part to their appearance at Carnegie Hall, Turner and Johnson had a major success with the song "Roll 'Em Pete". The track, basically a collection of traditional blues lyrics featured one of the earliest recorded examples of a back beat. It was a song that Turner recorded many times, with various combinations of musicians, over the ensuing years.

1939 to 1950

In 1939, along with boogie players Albert Ammons and Meade Lux Lewis, they began a residency at Café Society, a nightclub in New York City, where they appeared on the same playbill as Billie Holiday and Frank Newton's band. Besides "Roll 'Em, Pete", Turner's best-known recordings from this period are probably "Cherry Red", "I Want A Little Girl" and "Wee Baby Blues". "Cherry Red" was recorded in 1939 for the Vocalion label, with Hot Lips Page on trumpet and a full band in attendance. The next year Turner contracted with Decca and recorded "Piney Brown Blues", with Johnson on piano.

In 1941, he went to Los Angeles and performed in Duke Ellington's revue Jump for Joy in Hollywood. He appeared as a singing policeman in a comedy sketch called "He's on the Beat". Los Angeles was his home for a time, and during 1944 he worked in Meade Lux Lewis's Soundies musical movies. Although he sang on the soundtrack recordings, he was not present for filming, and his vocals were mouthed by comedian Dudley Dickerson for the camera. In 1945 Turner and Pete Johnson established their bar in Los Angeles, The Blue Moon Club.

That same year he contracted with National Records company, and recorded under Herb Abramson's supervision. His first hit single was a cover of Saunders King's "S.K. Blues" (1945). He recorded the songs "My Gal's A Jockey" and the risqué "Around The Clock" the same year, and the Aladdin company released "Battle of the Blues", a duet with Wynonie Harris. Turner stayed with National until 1947, but none of his recordings were great sellers. In 1950, he released the song "Still in the Dark" on Freedom Records.

Turner made many albums with Johnson, Art Tatum, Sammy Price, and other jazz groups. He recorded with several recording companies and also performed with the Count Basie Orchestra. During his career, Turner was part of the transition from big bands to jump blues to rhythm and blues, and finally to rock and roll. Turner was a master of traditional blues verses and at Kansas City jam sessions he could swap choruses with instrumental soloists for hours.

Success during the 1950s

In 1951, while performing with the Count Basie Orchestra at Harlem's Apollo Theater as a replacement for Jimmy Rushing, he was spotted by Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegün, who contracted him to their new recording company, Atlantic Records. Turner recorded a number of successes for them, including the blues standards, "Chains of Love" and "Sweet Sixteen". Many of his vocals are punctuated with shouts to the band members, as for the songs "Boogie Woogie Country Girl" ("That's a good rockin' band!", "Go ahead, man! Ow! That's just what I need!" ) and "Honey Hush" (he repeatedly sings "Hi-yo, Silver!", probably in reference to The Treniers singing the phrase for their Lone Ranger parody "Ride, Red, Ride"). Turner's records scored at the top of the rhythm-and-blues charts; although they were sometimes so risqué that some radio stations would not play them, the songs received much play on jukeboxes and records.

Turner had a great success during 1954 with "Shake, Rattle and Roll", which seriously enhanced his career, turning him into a teenage favorite, and also helped to transform popular music. During the song, Turner yells at his woman to "get outa that bed, wash yo' face an' hands" and comments that she's "wearin' those dresses, the sun comes shinin' through!, I can't believe my eyes, all that mess belongs to you." He sang the number on film for the 1955 theatrical feature Rhythm and Blues Revue.

Although the cover version of the song by Bill Haley & His Comets, with the risqué lyrics partially omitted, was a greater sales success, many listeners sought out Turner's version and were introduced thereby to rhythm and blues. Elvis Presley's version of "Shake, Rattle and Roll" combined Turner's lyrics with Haley's arrangement, but was not a successful single.

"The Chicken and the Hawk", "Flip, Flop and Fly", "Hide and Seek", "Morning, Noon and Night", and "Well All Right" were successful recordings from this period. He performed on the television program Showtime at the Apollo and in the movie Shake Rattle & Rock!(1956).

The song "Corrine, Corrina" was another great seller during 1956. In addition to the rock music songs, he released Boss of the Bluesalbum in 1956. "(I’m Gonna) Jump for Joy", his last hit, reached the US R&B record chart on May 26, 1958.

Returning to the blues

After a number of successes in this vein, Turner quit popular music and resumed singing with small jazz combos, recording numerous albums in that style during the 1960s and 1970s. During 1966, Bill Haley helped revive Turner's career by lending the Comets for a series of popular recordings in Mexico. In 1977 he recorded a cover version of Guitar Slim's song, "The Things That I Used to Do".

During the 1960s and 1970s he resumed performing jazz and blues music, performing at many music festivals and recording for Norman Granz's company Pablo Records. He also worked with Axel Zwingenberger. Turner also participated in a 'Battle of the Blues' with Wynonie Harris and T-Bone Walker.

During 1965 he toured in England with trumpeter Buck Clayton and trombonist Vic Dickenson, accompanied by Humphrey Lyttelton and his Band. Part of a studio concert was televised by the BBC and later issued on DVD. A sound recording of a club appearance made during this tour is not thought of sufficient sound quality to justify commercial issue. He also toured Europe with Count Basie and his Orchestra.

He won the Esquire magazine award for male vocalist in 1945, the Melody Maker award for best 'new' vocalist during 1956, and the British Jazz Journal award as top male singer during 1965. In 1977, Turner recorded "I'm Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter" for Spivey Records, featuring Lloyd Glenn on piano. Turner's career endured from the bar rooms of Kansas City in the 1920s (when at the age of twelve he performed with a pencilled moustache and his father's hat), to European jazz music festivals of the 1980s.

In 1983, only two years before his death, Turner was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame. That same year, the album Blues Train was released by Mute Records company; the album had Turner paired with the team Roomful of Blues. Turner received top billing with Count Basie in the Kansas City jazz reunion movie The Last of the Blue Devils (1979) featuring Jay McShann, Jimmy Forrest, and other players from the city.

Death

Big Joe Turner died in Inglewood, California, in November 1985, at the age of 74 of heart failure, having suffered the earlier effects of arthritis, a stroke and diabetes. He was buried at Roosevelt Memorial Park, in Gardena, California.

Big Joe Turner was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987.

Tributes

The New York Times music critic Robert Palmer said: "...his voice, pushing like a Count Basie solo, rich and grainy as a section of saxophones, which dominated the room with the sheer sumptuousness of its sound."

In announcing Turner's death in their December 1985 edition, the British music magazine, NME, described Turner as "the grandfather of rock and roll."

Bob Dylan referenced Turner in the song "High Water (For Charley Patton)", from his 2001 album Love and Theft. Songwriter Dave Alvin wrote a song about an evening he spent with Turner titled "Boss Of The Blues". It was on his 2009 release, Dave Alvin & The Guilty Women. Alvin discussed the song in Issue 59 of The Blasters Newsletter.

Dave Alvin would later collaborate on a second reunion album released in 2015 with his former Blaster's brother Phil Alvin featuring four Big Joe covers. Lost Time covers songs such as "Cherry Red", "Wee Baby Blues" and "Hide and Seek". The brothers met Big Joe Turner in Los Angeles while he was playing the clubs on Central Ave. and living in the Adams district between tours in the 1960s. Phil Alvin even opened for Turner a few times with his first band, Delta Pacific and Turner continued mentoring the Alvin brothers till his death in 1985. Big Joe Turner is pictured on the back cover of Lost Time.

The biographical film The Buddy Holly Story refers to Turner as well as contemporaries Little Richard and Fats Domino as major influences on Buddy Holly, with Holly collecting their vinyls.

Mississippi John Hurt wrote and recorded various versions of a song called "Joe Turner Blues." On a 1963 recording Hurt did for The Library of Congress, he is quoted as saying "best blues I ever heard was Joe Turner" before playing a version of the song.

Most famous recordings

"Roll 'Em Pete" (1938) (available in many versions over the years. Used for the million-dollar first scene in Spike Lee's film, Malcolm X)

"Chains of Love" (1951) * (this was Turner's first million seller. The song was written by Ahmet Ertegun using the pseudonym Nugetre, (words) and Van "Piano Man" Walls (music), and the disc reached the million sales mark by 1954.)

"Honey Hush" (1953) * (Turner's second million-seller; written by Turner, it was credited to Lou Willie Turner.)

"Shake, Rattle and Roll" (1954)

"Flip, Flop and Fly" (1955) * (Has sold a million over the years. The song was written by Charles Calhoun and Turner, but was credited to Lou Willie Turner.)

"Cherry Red" (1956)

"Corrine, Corrina" (1956) * (his fourth million seller; with adaption by J. Mayo Williams, Mitchell Parish and Bo Chatmon in 1932. This disc reached No. 41, and spent 10 weeks in the Billboard record chart)

"Wee Baby Blues" (1956) (a song Turner had been singing since his Kingfish Club days)

"Love Roller Coaster" (1956), with new lyrics to the Kansas City classic, "Morning Glory".

"Midnight Special" (1957)

Tracks marked as * were million selling discs.

Discography

SinglesStudio albums

The Boss of the Blues (1956)

Joe Turner (1958)

Rockin' The Blues (1958)

Big Joe is Here (1959)

Big Joe Rides Again (1960)

Singing The Blues (1967)

Texas Style (1971)

Life Ain't Easy (1974)

The Midnight Special (1976)

Things That I Used to Do (1977)

In the Evening (1977)

Kansas City Here I Come (1984)

Collaborations

The Bosses (1973, with Count Basie)

The Trumpet Kings Meet Joe Turner (1974, with Dizzy Gillespie, Roy Eldridge, Harry "Sweets" Edison and Clark Terry)

Everyday I Have the Blues (1975, with Pee Wee Crayton and Sonny Stitt)

Kansas City Shout (1980, with Count Basie)

Nobody in Mind (1982, with Milt Jackson and Roy Eldridge)

Blues Train (1983, with Roomful of Blues)

Shake, Rattle & Blues (2011, with Mike Bloomfield)

Compilations

Boogie Woogie (1941), Columbia Records C44

Rock & Roll (1957)

Have No Fear, Joe Turner is Here (1978)

Wikipedia

#Big Joe Turner #05-18 #11-24

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michigantoplawyers · 5 years

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Business Boot Camp I: Basic Training for Every Business Lawyer - Michigan Top Lawyers

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loosejournal · 5 years

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Dwight Garner’s favorite quotations

For nearly four decades I’ve kept what is known as a commonplace book – a bound notebook, and later a long computer file, passed from desktops (1990s) to laptops (2000s) to my cell phone, into which I’ve poured verbal delicacies, “blasts of a trumpet”, as Emerson put it, and bits of scavenged wisdom from my life as a reader. Yea, for I am an underliner, a destroyer of books, and maybe you are, too. Commonplace books are not so uncommon. John Locke kept one, as did Virginia Woolf. W. H. Auden published his, as did the poet J. D. McClatchy. E. M. Forster’s was issued after his death. The novelist David Markson wrote terse and enveloping novels that resembled commonplace books in many regards; they were bird’s nests of facts threaded with the author’s own subtle interjections. For fans of the commonplace book genre, many prize examples have come from lesser-known figures like Geoffrey Madan and Samuel Rogers, both English, who produced books that are notably witty and illuminating. These have become cult items. Christopher Ricks noted about Rogers that, although he may not have been an especially kind man, “he was very good at hearing what was said”.

I use my own commonplace book as an aide-mémoire, a kind of external hard drive. Reading it is a way of warding off what Christopher Hitchens, quoting a friend, called CRAFT (Can’t Remember a Fucking Thing) syndrome. I use my gleanings in my own writing. Like Montaigne, I quote others “in order to better express myself”. Montaignecompared quoting well to arranging other people’s flowers. Sometimes, I sense, I quote too often, swinging on them in my writing as if from vine to vine. It’s one of the curses of spending a lifetime as a word-eater, and of retaining, so far, a semi-reliable memory.

I am no special fan of most books of quotations. Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, the Yale Book of Quotations and the New Penguin Dictionary of Modern Quotations, to name three dependable reference books, have their uses, for sure. They are sturdy repositories of literary and verbal history. (Countless other books of quotations aren’t reliable at all.) But even the best contain a good deal of dead weight. They lean, sometimes necessarily, on canned and overused thought and, more grievously, are skewed to the upbeat. So many of the lines they contain seem to vie to be stitched on throw pillows or ladled, like chicken soup, on the credulous soul. “Almost all poetry is a failure”, Charles Bukowski contended, “because it sounds like somebody saying, Look, I have written a poem.” The same is true of quotations and aphorisms; too many have a taxidermied air, as if they were self-consciously aimed at posterity.

This small slice of the material I’ve hoarded is a sliver of a much larger book project, one that will break with the conventions of commonplace books and volumes of quotations by organizing quotes by feel rather than by category. There are few life lessons except by accident. I must add that I do not agree with everything that is said: retweet does not, as they say on Twitter, necessarily equal endorsement.

-----

(small selection)

“It’s only words, unless they’re true.” – David Mamet, Speed-the-Plow

“Why are you all reading? I don’t understand this reading business when there is so much fucking to be done.” – Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be?

“Better a good venereal disease than a moribund peace and quiet.” – Henry Miller, Quiet Days in Clichy

“Everything that is true is inappropriate.” – Oscar Wilde

“Everyone nodded, nobody agreed..” – Ian McEwan, Amsterdam

“Let’s, as if sore, grab a few things from the flood.” – A. R. Ammons, Complete Poems

“Fragments, indeed. As if there were anything to break.” – Don Paterson, Best Thought, Worst Thought

“He licked his lips. ‘Well, if you want my opinion–’ ‘I don’t,’ she said. ‘I have my own.’ –Toni Morrison, Beloved

“Love poems must be bounced back off a moon.” – Robert Graves, Paris Review interview

“See the moon? It hates us.” – Donald Barthelme, Sixty Stories

“You know where the Beatles got that shit from. You know that’s our shit they fucking up like that.” – Albert Murray, South to a Very Old Place

“How come the Beatles never got busted for statutory rape – because they’re white?” – Eve Babitz, Eve’s Hollywood

“I hope you don’t mind, I’m from the South. We’re touchers.” – Charlie Rose, attributed

“Mick Jagger should fold up his penis and go home.” – Robert Christgau, Village Voice

“Somehow he knew, based on very little experience, that this faux-casualshit spelled money.” – Tom Wolfe, Bonfire of the Vanities

“Being rich is about acting, too, isn’t it? A style, a pose, an interpretation that you force upon the world.” – Martin Amis, Money

“If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.” – Dorothy Parker

“Oh, fuck, not another elf.” – Hugo Dyson, as J.R.R. Tolkien read aloud an early draft of The Lord of the Rings

“I am putting a mental jigsaw together of what a hobbit looks like, based on a composite of every customer I have ever sold a copy to.” – Shaun Bythell, Diary of a Bookseller

“You put your finger in it, and go swish, swish, swish.” – Jane Jacobs, on how to make a West Village martini

“Wasn’t the whole 20th century a victory lap of collage, quotation, appropriation, from Picasso to Dada to Pop?” – Jonathan Lethem, The Ecstasy of Influence

“I suddenly began to realize that everybody in America is a natural-born thief.” – Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“The not paying for things is intoxicating.” – Philip Roth, American Pastoral

“I don’t trust anybody who hasn’t shoplifted.” – John Waters

“Cleanliness might not be next to godliness but it is certainly adjacent to horniness.” – Geoff Dyer, on hotels, in Otherwise Known as the Human Condition

“The assumptions a hotel makes about you! All those towels.” – Stanley Elkin, The Dick Gibson Show

“The meat around my skull can’t stop smiling.” – Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“Let’s have some new clichés.” – Sam Goldwyn

“I need some new attitudes, some new affirmations and denials.” – Lionel Trilling, letter

“Good-bye, and I don’t mean au revoir.” – Christopher Ricks

“Of course it’s all right for librarians to smell of drink.” – Barbara Pym, Less Than Angels

“Edward worried about his drinking. Would there be enough gin? Enough ice?” – Donald Barthelme, Flying to America

“I have no enemies. But my friends don’t like me.” – Philip Larkin

“There was obviously nothing to recommend me to anyone.” – Deborah Levy, Hot Milk

“I have always disliked myself at any given moment; the total of such moments is my life.” – Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise

“Talk into my bullet hole. Tell me I’m fine.” – Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son

“Every time he played a note he waved it goodbye. Some times he didn’t even wave.” – Geoff Dyer on Chet Baker, But Beautiful

“Let us reflect whether there be any living writer whose silence we would consider a literary disaster.” – Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave

“If we did get a writer worth reading, should we know him when we saw him, so choked as we are with trash?” – George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying

“Book publishing should be done by failed writers who recognize the real thing when they see it.” – Robert Giroux, Paris Review interview

“Books are, let’s face it, better than everything else.” – Nick Hornby, Ten Years in the Tub

“Revenge is the capitalism of the poor.” – Aravind Adiga, Selection Day

“It makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry, peanuts, compared to what the immigrant fears – dissolution, disappearance.” – Zadie Smith, White Teeth

“The face of ‘evil’ is always the face of total need.” – William S. Burroughs, preface to Naked Lunch

“In our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things.” – Edna O’Brien, The Love Object

“How desperate do you have to be to start doing push-ups to solve your problems?” – Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle: Book Two

“The primary object of a student of literature is to be delighted.” – Lord David Cecil

TLS, 2018

#quotes #dwight garner #commonplace book

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