Tag Archives: 20th Century

Calvin with a K

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 [...]

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Cocteau 21C

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 [...]

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From the Abyss

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 [...]

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Lucifer Rising

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 [...]

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The Beautiful Noise of Harry Partch

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). [...]

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