Iain Cameron's Diary
"Click here to access the Fruitful Album" - Click here to visit Music for the Highveld Project


The Highveld Project

Get your own
 diary at DiaryLand.com! contact me older entries

2002-09-22 - 6:52 a.m.

When we went to NYC last February I just managed to fit in a visit to the Whitney which is a few blocks away from the Guggenheim. (There was a Whitney who was a sculptress and part of the art avant-garde between the wars.) It wasn�t the best time to see the gallery but there were some real hits in the bookshop � the book about the New York School in Art and Music plus some Knitting Factory CDs. The KF was on my list of visits but I didn�t managed to fit it into the time we had. But I have just come across an article about it by Gene Santoro who was jazz critic for the Nation:

�When 25 year old Michael Dorf arrived in New York from Wisconsin in 1985 he wanted to open a club that would mesh performance art, poetry readings, and music with his interest in Flaming Pie Recors which he ran with bassist Bob Appel. They found a funky second-storey streetfront space with a bay window overlooking Houston Street, put a small stage and sound system next to the window, clustered folding chairs and homemade tables around, tucked a small bar and some basic kitchen facilities in a back corner, hung art-for-sale all over, and dubbed the results the Knitting Factory.

What followed illustrates the diverse vitality of the New York music scene � and illustrates how younger audiences are willing to take at least an occaisional chance on what they might hear. Axel became the club�s engineer and Jerry Liebowitz formulated the college radio series Live at the Knitting Factory to create the support systems for the eclectic overlapping scenes around the Apple����

Jazz is an increasingly misleading tag for up and comers and none of the stablished venues round town booked emerging artists unless they were sidemen to older artists. �I think its important to show that these kinds of music are viable in a commercial setting�, says Dorf�� The KF has become a nexus where the distinct strands of non-mainstream music in New York can twine in unusual and rewarding ways.�

I purloined a couple of articles from the Guardian Review and stuck them in the News section of www.kwase-kwaza.org. They were a review of Terry Eagleton�s new book about Tragedy. As a Marxist he has a very sure grasp of other minority belief systems such as Christianity. The other posting was by a the only Bishop I know who believes that you cannot justify moral principles on religious beliefs � Robin Holloway. He is writing about J Sachs new book about coexistence between different traditions. Kierkegaard, I think, was fairly certain that there wasn�t a link between the love of God and morality � focusing on the story of Abraham and Isaac. This story is clearly not logically contradictory. It follows that we can think of a situation where God commands an immoral act. It follows that �right� cannot mean �commanded by God�.

I started work on an Advent project � which is scheduled for the first Wednesday of December. Its about �expectation� and the sources I am using besides the obvious ones include the Philosophical Investigations, the Blue and Brown Books and 10 rules for interpreting texts from the Very Short Introduction to Theology.. Wittgenstein asks at one point � can a dog hope that his master will come tomorrow and if he can�t what is it that we are able to do that makes it possible for us?

I cut a couple of big spars off the pear tree.

I went to a party across the road � maybe I set up a sale for Serious Music with someone who lives across the road and once saw me walking the dog first thing one morning with my headphones on walk into a tree.

I really enjoyed listening to Robin�s circa 1966 version of Been Smoking too Long � enough to make any dog walker collide with a tree. I bet Jake keeps hoping that will happen again.

previous - next