Tonight I got to see Calvin Johnson play a live show just down the road from my house at Fond Object. Johnson is an indie music pioneer based out of Olympia, Washington. More specifically, Johnson and his K Records label — along with the scene around The Evergreen State College — created a breeding ground for some of the best music at the end of the 20th century. And here’s the thing: no Olympia, no Nirvana.

If you don’t know who Calvin Johnson is, watch this video…

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55 years ago, in 1962, playwright, painter, poet, novelist, and film director Jean Cocteau recorded an address to the people of the world in the year 2000. The artist died the following year on October 11, 1963, and while these aren’t literally his last words they make a nice parting message from one of the greatest artists of the 20th century to all of us here in the 21st. Cocteau was a trixter who mixed media and messages from the silly to the sublime in novels like Les Enfants Terribles and masterpiece movies like Beauty and the Beast. Here, he’s funny and wise, but also humble and warm saying things like:

“One thinks that the word genius is not to be used and that genius only belongs to Goethe, to Victor Hugo, to Shakespeare, but no! Genius can be the way a woman steps out of her car…”

Here’s the maestro…

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Charles Stanfeld Jones was two men in one: On one hand Jones was a London accountant born in 1886. On the other, he was a brilliant ceremonial magician whom Aleister Crowley recognized as his “magical child” when Jones shared his brilliant insights into Crowley’s own The Book of the Law. Jones went on to found the first O.T.O. lodge in North America. Here’s the story of the man who took the name Frater Achad, and his pioneering work as one of the 20th century’s most important occultists and authors of the esoteric…

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Annie Besant was a rabble rousing labor activist, a religious non-conformist, and a proto-feminist during a time before and after the turn of the 20th century when none of these preoccupations was the province of a proper English lady. I found myself looking up a documentary about Besant after finding an online catalog of Lucifer magazines published in .pdf format, available for free download, and in facsimile editions through Amazon. The magazine was founded by Madame Blavatsky, but Besant was its godmother, shepherding the publication through its run from 1889 – 1895. Here’s a bit of history from the Wiki…

The journal was first published by Blavatsky. From 1889 until Blavatsky’s death in May 1891 Annie Besant was a co-editor. Besant then published the journal until September 1895, when George Robert Stowe Mead became a co-editor. The journal appeared twelve times a year and was 50 to 60 pages long. The last of twenty volumes was published in August 1897. More than 2800 articles were published in this journal between 1887 and 1897. Then the journal was renamed to The Theosophical Review.
The journal published articles on philosophical, theosophical, scientific and religious topics. There were also book reviews (e.g. of Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra).

This page links to both .pdf copies of Lucifer as well as print copies available through Amazon.

Here’s Annie Besant’s story…

Stay Awake!

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I first heard of Harry Partch while reading about Tom Waits. With 1980′s Heartattack and Vine, Waits hung up his fedora, turning his back on the piano-based, cabaret croaking of his early years for the strange territories of his breakthrough trilogy: Swordfishtrombones (1983), my favorite Waits’ album Rain Dogs (1985) and Frank’s Wild Years (1987). Some of the influences on this new music were plain to see: Waits Armstrong-esque crooning morphed into a Howlin’ Wolf-like growl and his increasingly abstract lyrics owed a big debt to the strange poetry of Captain Beefheart. Also, there was something else: The discordant tones on the record and the insistent presence of odd percussive rhythms might’ve seemed to have been Waits’ unique contributions, but he was actually standing on the shoulders of another American giant.

Harry Partch was born at the dawn on the 20th century in 1901. By the time he was 14 he was composing his own songs, but he dropped out of college after just six months of study, frustrated at the strictures of Western music, wanting to find a way to express himself in a manner that matched his restless, rebellious creativity.

In his mid-20′s Partch was trying to create a system of music that would adhere more closely to the sound of the human voice. He became inspired when he read On the Sensations of Tone by Hermann Helmholtz. The tome relates musical phenomena to physics and explains the physiology of hearing. With this bedrock understanding of how music actually behaved in the physical world, Partch had found his answers. He realized that the 12 note octave of Western music wasn’t a natural scale, but a constructed one and maybe even a repressive one.

“This thing began with truth and the truth does exist…truth always threatens the hierarchy or they think so,” said Partch.

Partch set about devising a system of pure tuning made up of microtones: small intervals between traditional notes that we aren’t used to hearing. In Partch’s music, a scale is made up of 43 notes. In order to play his compositions, Partch also became an instrument inventor; combining instrument parts or whipping new ones up from scratch.

This great documentary captures Parch’s cantankerous creativity while simultaneously filling-in the story of an outsider who seemed most comfortable at society’s fringes.

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Stay Awake!