NOTES TO =pvk7xmut FOLLOW ===============================================================0 (n1) { And AG said PVK once said, something like: : I prefer a Movement without Order to an Order without Movement ] (n2) { I think PVK once said something like, he would rather have led music that taught meditation -- anyhow, I used to crash the rehearsals of the Bach B Minor at Zenith, and watch him conduct -- someone said, he conducts by his glance -- like, this is why it's very important to preserve all the available videos of him conducting the Bach B-Minor -- or I suppose, conducting anything, even the singalongs in the Universal Worship or CC's or whatever that close each Camp ] (n3) { I think here one might as well go back to the passage in the Biography: PVK's retelling does not seem to tap into thte original, nor to add anything but a bit of an evocation of Indian high socitey -- I mean, folks who editted PVK's 70s teachings would sometimes point out that he was attributing remarks to Bach which could not be confirmed in the presently available scholarly archives -- but shucks, if, as a Master -- Sarah Nechama Padborny once remakred to me, in a passing conversation, that of ocurse he was that -- PVK was "united with all the illuminated souls" -- then surely he might have had a few off-the-record chats with Bach -- like, it's a melting false-spring day here in Campra, 12 Feb, 3 Adar I, davka Shabat but nobody's perfect } (n4) {I don't know if PVK kept up with music after maybe the time of Stravinsky -- well, he does cite some recent composers, eg Arvo Part -- tho they're more conservative than iconoclastic -- but shucks, that's truth for you -- like St. Paul or one of those dudes said, if you want something new, go to Athens } (n5) { So ok: 'aquired taste' means, like, you have to keep tasting it and tasting it, even though you don't at first like it, to begin to appreciate the differentia. I mean like, it's like learning to drink beer -- any normal person would much prefer Orange Crush -- like, sweet is much easier than bitter -- Ag fed me sauerkraut -- I said, but it's souer, couldn't you maybe add some chocolate sauce -- she said, it's good for the liver, especially after eating all those french-fried onion rings -- Well, perhaps I paraphrase, it's a low afternoon -- So seriously for a minute -- a proper snob will built his record collection only of name-brand performers -- I mean, for Bach its Landowska or Richter (shucks, anything that any of them recorded you should get, they bring out the universality in whatever they take on ) -- and not (yuck) Glenn Gould (tho PVK would sometimes play him, as I recall) -- for late Beethoven it's the Budapest String Quartet -- for Beethoven piano of course it's Schnabel -- I mean, if you don't know music, then if you listen to someone playing it who also doesn't know what they're working with, you won't get the point -- or Dennis Brain on the Mozart horn concertos -- One summer I listed all the tapes in PVK's Zenith trailer, because I thought, these will be the performances that PVK recognizes as the best in the world, and some of the old Indian recordings I'm sure were, but also, most of PVK's tapes were I think just teachings aids -- stuff to get the customers in the right mood to comprehened whatever plane he was teaching that day -- I mean, PVK seemed to say, Arvo Part is music to chill out by -- If you can't get past my sense of irony, you'll thinking I'm doing nothing more than telling bad jokes -- But I digress.} (n6) { Shucks, rock is classical. I mean, that run of 5 just after the Beattles sing in 'I want to hold your hand' -- "Well you have -- got that something" (12345) -- Like, it was because of that classicism that rock and roll caught on, hooked hoi polloi -- (hoi polloi -- oy, police) -- other examples slip my mind just now -- it's not that I forget things as I get older, it's just that the little demons who fetch memories start to obey me less and less, like the schoolkids when a substitute teacher is put in charge ] (n7) {So again -- Ed Brewer, who later made the harpichord for Lincoln Center, says to me, our class assignment is to cmpose in the style of Bach, and I says, that must he easy, and he says back, Only superficially. } (n8) [ I forget who's Couperin and who's Lully, but some of that old French court stuff is really nice and refreshing for its sense of orderliness -- I mean, you don't have to set on the edge of your chair worrying that you'll blink and won't see where the rabbit ruins and hides next -- Bach does it, triumphantly and in Technicolor, at the conclusions of some of his suites, bests I recollect] (n9) {I think this is true of the intellectual/vcultural history of England, but not the USA. England emerged from World War II impoverished and devestated, obliged to divest its Empire. The USA emerged untouched, and enriched by the wartime acceleration of industry. (n10) {Well, that's simplistic. The early music is surely affirmative, but the lyrics -- one can see that Lennon's sophmoric cynicism would be a dead end -- he says little -- but in writing of the emotional dynamics of love affairs -- "She wakes up -- she makes up -- ... A love that should have lasted years " -- and so much of the neo-classical orchestration -- that was George Somebody who did it -- Sir George Somebody maybe -- And a genuine spirituality -- "Would I wait a lonely lifetime -- If you ask me to I will." "This long and winding road -- you left me standing here, a long long time ago." Well, if you want to take all that as spiritual parables, you can find analogue if you want to in Song of Songs. (Shir haShirim, not Toni Morrison's book. I mean, even Plato, that fop, said, love of a woman is just the first step toward love of the divine. (Ok ok, maybe Plato was a Pouf, but maybe Sokrates married a shrew -- hey Sokrates, get a job picking olives or something, all the time hanging out at the agora with that rich boy Plato you'll die a nobody, and anyhow people are starting to talk -- ) (n11) { Like I've said, Marilyn Strauss, zl'b, who later married David Lidov and died young, of a genetic ailment had manifested while she was still a student at Juliard if I guess right: And like I've said, Joe Sunhawk's uncle got killed in a car crash at Rancho de Taos, and I tried to offer my condolences when Sunhawk came by New Buffalo, and he said, 'Yes, he is dead now, but once he was an itty-bitty baby' -- meaning, death is no more definitive of one's life than is any other phase of it, for the soul lives eternally - - "or something like that" ) -- So anyhoww, back as a student at Oberlin Marilyn once remarked to me, She thought maybe music could only be described in its own terms.} (n12) { No, I think not 'kitchs' -- kitsch is ptit bourgeois ornemnentation -- I would of said, rococoo, but that ain't it neither -- I mean, you cannot call those gargoyles 'kitsch' -- kitsch is always cute, never grim -- You know, in the Navjo rugs there is always a black line, to let the evil spirit or evil spirits. I don't recollect which they said it was, get out } (n13) {one doesn't say it in English, since we have no need to -- not in proper (American) English anyhow, I don't know what the bloody blimeys say when they're not too potted on port or rum to talk } (n14) {Ok, let's see what we got us here. I don't know what we got us for modern architecture -- most of it maybe looks good on paper, but it ain't no fun to live in. Penn Station was great, like a Gothic Cathedral, but they tore it town. It was much better than the Milano Centrale. The Empire State Building looks nice from the outside. The United Nations Building, which was Frank Lloyd Wright if I recall, is nice to be in the lobby of anyhow. They used to say that Memorial Hall at Harvard was an abdomination, but I don't see it so: Memorial Hall is very nice and warm to sit it, all those curved wooden benches. The Segram's building is nice to look at from the outside. As for clothing -- in the 40s, when I grew up, women wore the most preposterous collection of unnecessary undergarments -- stockings and garter belt and corset and petticoat -- and laquered their hair -- and such a quantity of cosmetics -- lipstick, and rouge for the cheecks, and eyebrow pencil -- Men dressed more functionally, as they must occasionally fight tigers on the way to work, but still -- even today men wear neckties, a yoke of bondage to an unkown oppressor, and those cutaway sports jackets, a garmet that should be worn for warmth but is then cut away down from the neck, to show that one is so rich one doesn't even need to keep warm -- and then shaving the face but not head of hair every day, before going out into society -- as if there was no need to keep off the icicles in winter nor mosquitos in summer -- "our servants can do that for us " -- So we moderns are not entirely done with frills -- ] { I wonder what Carl Shorske made of all this. I heard him lecture on intellectual history at UC Berkeley ca. 1962, and he was great then, so I wonder what he became as years went on -- he eventually was attacked by old age, and some vindictive fool remarks on his walking around witha colostomy bag, and if that "indignity of old age" as Karl Meyer (Fortes) put it, in a remark to his mother, Dr. Doris Yankauer Meyer Fortes, zl'b, would somehow discredit all his insights. ] (*n15) { I think it's mostly that Bach is much more complex than --anyone else I know of. I mean, only Shakespeare is analogous, Shakespeare being much more complex than any other English writer, tho James Joyce made a nice try at faking it in Finnegan's Wake. So like, everyone prefers simple to complex, sodapaop to Bordeaux, unless the boss is coming to dinner and you have to fake sophistication. } (n16) { I wonder -- Beethoven wrote his greatest music -- tho the great use of tone colour is in the earlier symphonies -- while deaf. No big deal, if you can sing by sight-reading, why not compose without hearing it except in imagination -- and also, you don't get much of Bach playing it one-handed -- the difficult stuff is the multi-voice counterpoint -- } (n17) { Well first of all, it must be darned hard to make an enlightened person drunk -- I mean even I can often carry on under circumstances that most would find quite disruptive -- eg }derangement, not to mention alcoholic intoxication -- or for that matter, most of us learned quite young to take it while under psychedelics -- tho on the other hand, HIK would go to the dentist without using anesthetic -- Now I recall PVK speaking of this in Abode Camp seminars -- or maybe just one Abode Camp seminar, but I think more than one -- as if somehow it was the forces of darkness that brought about that cateract operation on Bach -- and PVK remarking in almost astonishment that they were able to "break Bach" -- well, it's no secret that any man can be broken, and that the bad guys will try to break the good guys -- I mean, the Bushies, who have no sense of honour, much less chivalry, try to it on a regular basis now -- but in later years, PVK would not speak of the dark side this Crusade we're on -- a bit of a Children's Crusade maybe -- in the purification breaths tape, which I have as input, he does at the start remark most casuaully that one must "risk everything" -- well, like Nietzche almost said, a rope-dancer, that means a slack-wire walker, should not look down -- I mean that's maybe what "beginner's luck" is -- I always say, once you realize that what you're doing is dangerous -- like picking apples, or hitch- hiking -- then it's time to quit . Well, look at Noor Inayat Khan, zl'b, that innocent young girl going out as a spy -- and PVK has remarked somewhere, and I suppose it's historically true, that at onc point she was the last Allied link with the French Resistance -- once at an Abode Camp lecture he seemed to hint that she was a re-incarnation of Joan of Arc -- and of course in the introduction to the First Edition of 'Toward the One' -- the edition I helped assemble one Sunday at Lama Foundation, about 1970 or 1971 -- he dedicates the work, which was his first published work, to her, as "the first Sufi saint" -- and well, we have often regretted that she did not live to advise him as he took on his vocation -- and of course her last words , to the man who was beating her to death, in Auchwitz, were, "one day you will know the truth" -- and it seems from Zenith lectures et al. that PVK did forgive that man, as merely a psycopath, tho it seems from the same that he did not forgive the woman who betrayed her to the Gestapo -- } (n18) {Well, HIK said, "the message is a lullaby to those whose time it is to sleep, and a call to those whose time it is to awaken", and Durrell remarks in the Alexander Quartets, through Pursewarden I suppose, that the gives his readers the choice to "sink or skim" (a play on the saying, "sink or swim") -- and also, one could just above doze through PVK's lectures, tho if one listened more attentively it could be a darned long hour-and-a-half, and a darned long week -- and I anyhow was always darned glad to get -- well, over the summit in the old days, and then back to base camp by Friday afternoon -- maybe that's why PVK always made a point of leaving Camp immediately after his last lecture -- so we could get back to normal -- ZR once remarked, at the start of the following week, that one might see that the atmophere was now more "heimlich" -- } (n19) { We're driving along a highway and I says to Samuel Gessler, the crucifix is rather an odd symbol for a religion, tho it does have a lot of power, forgetting its misuse as something to nail people to of course -- I mean, I'm sitting in this Rodos hospital flipped out etc. and this priest comes by and makes the sign of the cross over me -- well, why be fussy -- and I reckon that's what saved my chest from getting the flu that winder -- So anyhow, Samuel Gessler says, the crucifix is the symbol of the (Catholic) Church, not of Christianity. I sure do hope someone can be talked into talking him into teaching something in Zenith - - otherwise one would have to learn Schwuutyer--Deutsch to hear his occasional sermons } (*n20) {Someone once told me that on Easter the Russians greet each other saying 'Christ is risen' and the response is, 'in our hearts'] (n21) {Mark that phrase -- "the suffering of the crucified half of G_d" -- for that's one to pause on, and documeent from the teachintgs of PVK -- in discussing it, PVK often does not use Christian imagry - - in passing, this is the answer to the ssophmoric so-called "problem of evil" -- if the Supreme Being is good, how can 'He' allow suffering in the world -- some sometimes pose this as a sort of theologic problem of the Shoah -- which is misleadingly termed a 'Holocaust' -- the Jewish people were victims, not martyrs, much less a free-will sacrifice to Heagen -- I mean, that would be blasphemy, darned near Satanistic -- I mean, even the Akedah is problematic, despite the facile remarks in the Siddur -- What I want to say is -- you don't blame G_d for the Shoah, you blame the Germans -- and the Allies who did nothing to stop it -- and it was not that "for our sins the Temple was destroyed", it was because of the sins of the Babylonians, not our sins -- tho our sins did weaken the walls a bit -- but I mean, a drought or two would have been divine retribution enough, a bit of a slap on the wrist and then we put away all the fertility-orgy idols for a while -- no need to destroy the whole nation just becuase a few of the youngsters got a bit wild now and then -- like 'Give us a break Jake'} (n22) {'Dark Night' is of course a play on a phrase by St. John of the Cross, 'the dark night of the soul' -- but I don't see how one can extrapolate from an individual spiritual 'pilgrim's progress' to hsitorical intellectual/cultural history -- I mean what were the 'Dark Ages' but the cultural childhood of the pig-eating Germans and snail-sucking frog-gulping French and blue-bellied Brits -- like, those goyim never had a light age before their dark ages, dark ages for them was progresss -- oy, goyim -- and now they have the chutzpah to call Islam a threat to astrology -- that was refining algebra and alchemy and astrology and calligraphy while they were eating live pigs legs and calling it Carnivale -- ] (n23) { Yup -- some clown made a movie called the Crucifixtion -- I says, I ain't gonna go see it, I can't even get past the first chord in the Bach Passion According to St. Mathew } (n24) {Yup -- I listened to PVK conducting that at Disentis in '99 I think it was -- and it seemed that in the break between those two movements he went through the whole 4 days -- so then I looked at the video, and all he seems to be doing is turning the pages on the Conductor's score on the lectern -- well yes, and when PVK gives you a blessing or even an initiation it doesn't seem that he does much -- no bells and whistles and like then -- then slowly slowly it starts to sink in, and Gvalt -- this is why it's so very important not only that initiations be conducted in a quiet atmosphere -- I'd tried to hold back the Zenith work-camp staff, and stop folks from smoking -- I mean, gvalt -- but also, that the initiates then be accorded a quiet space, free of demands and distractions, in which to consciously absorb it -- that means, no workcamp staff boogies just because the week has ended, no dancing on the meditation tent platform, no 'garage parties' with folks renting rooms overhead } (n25) {I once read read somewhere that T.S. Eliot, l'havdil, once said that all that could inspire him as the years as had gone on was a High Mass -- Anglican, I assume } (n26) { To belabour the obvious, Bach seems to have been a Master, a member of the 'Spiritual Hierarchy', whatever that is. } (n27) { Whatever that is 'The Passion of Christ' -- I mean, everyone dies, many painfully, many too young, many not quick enough. Mel Gibson, that refugee from a rough-trade wash-room, seems to have taken an idolatrous, rather prurient attitude toward it. Like Jesus said, "let the dead bury the dead" -- it is only those who have not learned to live who make a big deal of death. Today, dressed in coonskin caps with all-wood bows and arrows and quivers of arrows with plastic feathers, a group will walk for 15 minutes toward our Camprground -- which is sacred space, believe me -- all those pilgrims who have trod it, and all their servants who are the work-camp and are also pilgrims -- and believe me, to be year-in year-out work-camper is a higher level than to be yuppie sitting lotus with a car in the parking lot -- let them shoot Bushies, not wolves. The Swiss have every virtue except morality. When it comes to money, they are religiously amoral -- with the best of manners.} (n28) { I dunno. Wailing is that first chord of Bach St. Mathew -- in the Bach B-Minor Crucifixis I might have termed it sighing -- and one can't imagine Jesus walling, wailing is for women -- I mean, machismo has its place too -- for the American Indians, one of the highest virtures was to suffer pain, even torture, with stoicism - - and that remains a USA ideal } (n29) { No, I don't think Jesus came near the depths of human suffering -- and Henry Miller wrote, "all my cruciffixtions were rosy crucifixtions" -- one enters the depths of human suffering when one suffers for reasons one cannot accept -- those who freely risked or even accepted their fate have, one hopes, the consolation of knowing that this is what they chose, for noble reason -- heck, Jesus was high on his cross almost the whole time -- there is only that one moment of truthh when his Master steps back and he has do do it all himself -- 'Eli Eli Lama etc.' -- and PVK gives that a different spin, saying it was a last sermon -- to the prefidious Jews could it be -- asking man, why hast thou forsaken divinity -- well, it is a quote from one of the Psalms, as someone pointed out in a letter to the Jerusalem Post, 2004 I think, on the cross Jesus, like any orthdodox Jew, was reciting the Psalms, in sequence, it was when he came to 'Eli Eli ... ' the "he gave up the ghost [geist, spirit] and died. } (n30) { I dunno. Maybe sometimes one overcomes suffering by holding onto something higher -- like riding a subway, or those hosids Reb S…lomo told of, walking down that icy cliff to the river for a mikveh and not falling -- that's not joy, is like a fierce dedication, like a stalker with a powerful bow-and-arrow in hand ] (n31) { Well, first of all we didn't know he was Christ, we thought he was just some chutypadike kid from Natzeret -- I mean, if he was really Christ we didn't he have the good manners to wear a lapel card saying Hi, I'm Christ -- I mean, if I guy walks into the Orchestra of the Opera and doesn't show his ticket, can you blame the ushers for throwing him out -- and anyhow, who says we were even there -- those 4 Disciples -- Nu, anyone can call themself a Disciple, that don't get you a B.A. in Early Church Historey -- and let's get one thing perfectly clear (as that relatively honest President said) -- Jews do not crucify. Romans do. And maybe the Bushies. We stone them, quick and clean, just like the Ayotollah's in Iran. And anyhow, what are you all doing running around praying to some tradesperson from the Galil. You think maybe he'll give you cut-rate on an olive-wood kitchen cabinet. I mean, we have been turning the other cheeck for 2000 years and you all have been spitting on it, and the next chamsin ain't for maybe 4 months, so maybe let us turn the other work-shoe. } (n32) {This is what Auden brings out with his lyric eloquence, in 'At the Musee des Beux Arts' -- reflectding on paintings by Breughel, if I rememger t he names I once read -- "About suffering they were never wrong, the Old Masters" -- "... the torturers horse innocently scratching his ass on a tree" (So ok, Auden didn't say quite that -- it's time for someone to write like Auden again, in the USA of course -- the British can't speak English any more ] (n33) {Nu, everything's a cosmic event "if you but had eyes to see" -- Like, be careful, the idolatrous apsect of Christianity rests on supposing that the Crucifixtion was a unique cosmic event -- I mean, here we are back to Richard Alpert xBaba Ram Dass, a rich Jewish kid from New Haven, in dialogue with his brother in a Loonewy Bin, from which may the heavens defend us all, for they impound the body and burn away the soul -- So: "You say you're Christ and they put you on the Reubber Chicken Lecture Circut, I say I'm Christ and they lock me up. " "That's because you don't also say that everyone is." (Heard, or maybe read, from Ram Dass, 1970s.} (n34) {Hmm. A 'hierarchy of the Masters' eh -- so some masters is higher masters than is other Masters, looks like. ] (n35) { Well, in Jewish religion we have a different portion of the Torah, and of the Prophets, each week, and also special portions for holidays and for new moon (the same portion for each new moon, but different portions for all the different holidays). So maybe Bach's church, whatever it was -- is it Catholic or Lutheran -- also required a different religious text for each week, set to different music -- I mean, gvalt, here are these peasants living on pigs tales and mouldy potatoes and continually new selections of the greatest music in the history of so-called Western Civilization, t he Bushies should all go to heaven and have no choice but to listen to it 24/7 for eternity, without even a plate of freedom fries Amen Chicken Eatcha } (n36) { A bit of a slip what; we first hear the French horn in Mozart's horn concertos, yes? ] (n37) {which would be harder for Bach than for anyone else, because Bach depended on counterpuntal harmony -- I mean, if Beethoven's choir all joined the Bendedictines, he could simply replace the Chorale finale of the 9th with an unfurled sign saying (in that atrocioous Gothic German script) "Don't worry, he happy" -- and so a few hundred years later they could say, Beethoven prophecied the advent of Meher Baba, so everyone who likes Beethoven sonatas is obligated to become a follower of Meher Baba -- But i digress.} (n38) { And meanwhile psychobabble and all its soupy groups -- I always say, there is the Sufi Order and the Soupy Order -- this is because in Hebrew, and I assume in Arabic, the same letter can be F or P -- like, PVK is Sufi Order, all those silly dances are Soupy Order, the Groups are Soupy Order, and the Circle -- more precisely, whatever I go to is Sufi Order, and whatever I stay away from, including washing dishes of course, or at least cutting vegetables into little bitty pieces, is Soupy Order -- Ag might not agree, which is why I look up to her -- so anyhow, there I was in the Looney Bin in 1970 -- Mass General, best money could buy -- and when I walked out the door but came back they were so miffed that were all set to truck me off to a Rest Home for the rest of my life, pumped up with thorazine and fed pablum with a chamber pot no doubt, but my father wouldn't let them -- so anyhow, before that moment of truth -- and there I was in an Albany looney bin and they said, we'll try such-and-such a regime on him, and maybe it will help him, and anyhow if it hurts him we'll at least know one of his breaking points, so it won't have been a waste of time -- and I walked out the door there too, thanks to a 20-dollar bill my brother had given me, and it was both erev Shabat and HIK's birthday, and I was darned if I was going to stay in and make kiddish over an anti-depressant pill that they were set to give me -- so anyhow, I got back to Campra last August after wasting 3 years on the town beach in Rodos, and ZR says, we were all worried about you, and I says, so why didn't you come get me, and he says something like, we prayed instead, and I says something like, well maybe you saved my life -- I said that twice, because I think it was maybe true -- but still you should have said your Amens and then bought a ticket or two and come and get me, even if I was playing hard-to-get Amd Sharif Graham once said, a guide is someone who will do anything for his mureed -- So anyhow, there I was in Bullfinch Lonney Bin ward of Mass General, at some sort of group, and they ask me, what are the feelings between you and your father, and I says, 'frustrated love' but this was a complex emotion, and they could only handle simple emotions, like the primary colours of Benneton -- red, yellow, blue and maybe green -- love, hate, anger and maybe sad or feelbad -- i can say, you make me feel bad -- but not miffed, piqued -- -- I mean, the philosphic groundwork is ppsychobabble is still back with the logical atomism of the 1920s -- the sort of stuff Wittgenstein tried and gave up on in Brown Book And anyhow, for new refinements, and maybe even new dimensions, of emotion, you go to Beethoven, and I don't think you go farther than that -- I don't know if there's anywhere fathter to go, even in Manhattan, which is probably the only place on earth where they understand Beethoven -- I mean, the first time we meet Beethoven, darned near, he is taking an emotion , something sweet and soppy, and then throwing it back in your face -- and Shrager said, he was maybe 20 then, the composer gets you to hold still long enough so that he can kick you in the cojones phonies - - I was channel surfing looking for illusstrated advertisements for telphonic copulaton, and there was someone called Barbara Bonney whoever she is giving a Master Class, mostly on Lieder, and she at least, and her singers, were surely perceiving subtlties of gentle emotions -- she says to one guy, you've got a great voice, don't let them put you into Opera like a trained lion -- I mean, if you met a chick who evinces the subtlties of emotion exemplified by Beethoven, you would tell her you live in Hackensack New Jersey and work for an Insurance firm and would she like to come with you to the Ice Hockey Semi-Finals next week and eat freedom fries] (n39) [ Aw shucks -- Rock and Roll -- incidentally the phrase describes the gyrations of copulation -- was, like procreation, socially conservative -- short lines, always returning to the tonic -- the simplest possible structure -- very symetric -- Then at least they sang of love, nowadays its mostly merely frustrated lust ] (n40) [ Saliq was one of the very promising figures in the 70s -- everyone wanted to hire him, even the hosids -- I saw him at an Abode Camp once -- he was miffed because no-one wanted to go shoot pool -- I mean, the SO , like all the frou-frou spiritualists they joke about in the biography of HIK -- like the Theosophists thought he was the Onc They Expected , but then they found out that he sometmes ate meat, so they decided that they had been mistaken -- the SO can get too darned precious -- I was once flipping at SO Boston, and said, "too much 'sweetness and light'" -- which was taken by the faithful as a ssign of incipient derangement -- oy gvalt -- How many times must I say it -- I don't want anyone else to get lost again ] (n41) [ ie USA 1950's, but almost everything was practically unkown in the USA 1950's except of course in Manhattan, where they know everything ] (n42) [ That, like most of Roman Catholic ritual, seems to be a rather ham-handed imitation of Jewish ritual. In Judaism, the Tetragammaton -- the highest Divine Name -- was pronounced only by the High Priest, in the 'Holy of Holies' -- the innermost chamber in the Temple, into which only the High Priest could enter -- and only on Yom Kippur. But now I'm confused, for Josepheus speaks of the High Priest saying it in a courtyard -- remarking that in early years he would say it loud and clear, but that as the vulgar began attending, he would mingle his pronunciation with the murmurs of the crowd. } (n43) [Marilyn Strauss (Lidov) once said to me that Mozart once said that his only genius was that we was able to hear an entire piece of music -- I think she said, from start to finish, but I think maybe such gestalt perception transcends temporality and sequence- iation -- before the started to write it. Well, that is a criterion of genius -- a genius is not just a smark cracker, a genius can make new patterns -- like Einstein with his theory of relativity. } (n44) {I can't quite see how Handel had more brains than a well-cooked roast-beef -- and that's without subtracting for his liberetist -- "Oh ruddier than the cherry -- oh lovlier than the berry -- oh nymph as bright as the moonbeams light etc. } (n45) [Aw shucks -- neither do I -- "belong to our time any longer." Gvalt, who wants to. Now first of all, there's Beverly Sills. I mean, there is tragedy in opera, and she could evoke it. But I mean, comic opera is also great. So there I was surfing through 44 channels with practically nothing on -- me, the telephonic ladies I was looking for, and the content of all the other channels -- I mean, what is worth looking at but art and/or naked women -- when I hit Rossini's Barber of Seville -- almost made Italian worth listening to -- slamming doors, every sound but belches and farts given its musical place -- John Cage has not done half as well in directing our attention to the musicality, actual or idealized, of our environment. ] ------------------------------------------------------------------ =============================================================== NOTES TO SIDE B FOLLOW, AND WILL HAVE BEEN DEEP-SIX'D TO =pvn7xmuz or something like that =============================================================== I don't know now why >I was so impressed with this tape when I copied it to tape. There are only a few recommendations -- priceless no doubt: That the Bach St. John Passion is better even than the Bach St. Mathew, that Stravinsky's Symphony of Pslams is very good, that one shoiuld go see the St. Chapelle chapel in Paris. As for PVK's remarks on theory of music -- that music is in general an expression of its culture, with its value limited thereby -- well, that ain't much. He seems to give poor old Ludwig van Beetsinhisears more credit for heroism and spirituality, and Brahms less, than either merits. I mean, Beethoven never wrote the Brahms double concerto, even with help from Heifitz. As for my footnotes, the one smart thing I said was that Bach, analogous to Shakespeare, is an order of magnitude more complex that anyone else in his field.] (ny1) {Aw shucks -- pathetic is Andrew Llody Weber} (ny2) { Like I say, I once dropped some LSD, or maybe it was mescaline, and took a chick -- well, she was a woman, I was the male analogue of a chick that evening -- to the Santa Fe opera production of the Magic Flute -- shlock drama, shlock mysticism, nothing music, and dumb liberetto -- then determined to make what might have been a bit of love for her, but for me something more like taking another calculus exam -- nor was it quite the right time to have tried to do so, another useful lesson that I'd not yet learned, having grown up in American, ie USA, civilization if one must call it that -- I mean gvalt, if that's Masonism it seems like something to take home from a 3rd-rate kindergarten and then put in the kitchen garbage-can -- Queen of the Night and all that mishegas -- and clown with a basso profondo voice who seems to be the High Priest of Chocolate Sauce Sorcerer or whatever Mozart mistook for wisdom -- oy, fry me a herring. So like I've said, she said: LSD doesn't need The Magic Flute, and The Magic Flute doesn't need LSD.]} (ny3) {I dunno when they meant, but Beethoven started out as a pussycat -- I mean, who even listens to anything bbefore maybe Op. 25, whatever that was -- it's all music to take snuff by } (ny4) {Aw shucks , about all the emotion that Beethoven usually expresses is: Oh goody nice creamy porridge -- I won't eat it I won't I won't -- but see the nice creamy porridge -- No no no. } (ny5) { Such a philsopher as we can get on without, says I } (ny6) ${ mysterioso maybe, but mystical? -- well, what do I know -- but I mean, does poor old Ludvig von Poopoo the BorschtShlurper ever even get past his own astral -- eh -- well put that wot ] (ny7) {Ai, poor baby -- I mean, everyone goes through a kind of crisis, even a donkey who sees grass on both sides of the road } (ny8) {Now really, it would not call anything of Beethoven's but maybe some of the symphonies 'heroic' -- and those just something to shoot off cannons by -- I mean heroism is transcending one's weaknesses for the sake of that which one believes in -- like NIK, zl'b, as gentle a girl as walked the face of the earth, here with the Jataka Tales, and being an older sister to PVK after HIK died -- of cancer I bet, Cf. his remark in Colllected Sayings, "pain my constant companion" -- and then his mother took to being a recluse -- well, maybe her pappa was right to havve opposed the marriage, maybe better she had married some horse-and-carriage Christian Science businessman from Boston, who'd drag her out to the fresh air of Marblehead every summer -- walking out to face as despicable of bunch of tyrants as ever earned a career place in hell -- } (ny9) { I think it was at the Abode that I heard this: Someone said that someone once asked PVK, what he he thought of pre-maritial intercourse. He answered, somet hing like, well, that's a very old-fashioned notion. } (ny10) { I would say that Beethoven is intenely, repetitiously, really neurotically, personal, and Brahms never seemed to me personal -- the double concerto for 'cello and violin -- ] (ny11) {I've not had that sense. Rather the contrary, Brahms transmutes anger, really sublimates, to use Freud's concept. Like, I was walking up from Olivone on a cold snowy evening, no bus and no-one offering a ride, a few packs and a bad back from falling in a low-rim shower-stall, and I start singing from Big Pink, "Take a load off Fanny / take a load for free / take a load off Fanny / Fanny put the loard right back on me /" Now that's music for feeling sorry for yourself by. Also good enought to walk by. And it has the fringe benefit of freaking out the Swiss ptit bourgeoisis -- just wave an American flag and they're grossed out nowadays. The song beings "I walked into Nazareth / about feeling half-past dead / XXX / Is there somewhere in this town where a man can find a bed / He just smiled and shook my hand and 'No' was all he said. /] (ny12) {As whucks. Values are absolute. There's good and bad. In ethics and in aesthetics. And in religion too. Absolutism is true, relativism is out. And in sexual behavior too. There's good and bad sexual behavior. (A Harvard College Travel Guide once said Israel was a land for 'raw sex'. I said one should distintinguish raw, rare, well-done, and overdone. But I digress. ) I mean, some things are normal, and some things are just the acting-out of of preversions. Abdominations, like Jaques Prevert wrote about. (And R. Zalman, with a mind versatile and agile enough to articulate precision of phrase, once remark that Judaism 'disapproves of homosexual acting-out.') Of course for Judaism homosexuality, like almost everything else, applies only to men, nobody really cares what women do as long as don't have kids by anyone else but their husband, so nobody has civil wars over the goats. The ntoion of religion makes sense only under a presupposition of absolutisdm. 'Sexual preference' is a term with limited applicability. It makes sense only at a brothel, an orgy, or on the Upper East side of Manhattan. Some art is real, but most of modern art is not art, its just applied hucksterism. And most modern music ain't music. Oh well. It's a bright sunny windy day here at Campra. I think Mary Poppins just blue by, but I was looking at this computer screen. Whdre's Margritte now t hat we really need him } (n32a) Well, shucks, most, many anyhow, paintings of the Crucifixtion have a buch of plump little cherubs and a sunburst waiting on top to pick up the relay -- maybe that's a cosmic dimension, but pretty literalistically so -- the Roman Catholics ripped us off for so much, they should have taken too our prohibition about making images -- not any images, as I read it, but images of anything in the non-physical dimensions -- =================================================================