Elephant Pattern Cashmere Cardigan

Editors' Notes

The Elder Statesman

Revel in the exquisite softness of this elongated, loose fit cashmere cardigan by The Elder Statesman with an elephant pattern design. Made from material that is hand-woven in Mongolia and crafted on machines that are over a century old, this knit is a truly exceptional style choice.

 Bring luxury into every day and wear it with rugged denim and a simple T-shirt. ....





 

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The Elder Statesman

Striped Cashmere Cardigan

$2,865
 

 






Source:  http://www.mrporter.com/Shop/Designers/The_Elder_Statesman

Reverend Davis

‘Harlem Street Singer: The Reverend Gary Davis Story’ 





Harlem Street Singer – The Reverend Gary Davis Story is a new documentary that tells the story of Gary Davis, one of the most underrated musicians of our time. Though Davis has had a huge influence on many well known musicians including Bob Weir and Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead, Jorma Kaukonen of Jefferson Airplane, David Bromberg, Bob Dylan, Woody Mann, Dave Van Ronk, and Townes van Zandt, his story has gone virtually unknown until now.

The first official screening of the film will take place this Friday, January 25, 2013, at 6:30pm at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, MA. The screening will be followed by a live performance by Woody Mann, Paul Rishell, and Annie Raines.

Davis, who became blind as an infant, was born in South Carolina and worked his way up to Harlem in New York City where he was ordained as a Baptist minister and began preaching and playing on street corners. He was a master guitar player with a unique fingerpicking style and was a blues, ragtime, and gospel music virtuoso. His guitar playing was complemented by a soulful voice that defined feeling.

Harlem Street Singer is co-produced by guitar extraordinaire Woody Mann, who was a student of the late Davis. The film includes audio recordings from Woody Mann’s guitar lessons with Davis, as well as interviews, archival footage, rediscovered photographs, and concert and informal musical sequences by Davis and contemporary artists who have been influenced by him.

Having seen an earlier draft of the film last year, I feel that Harlem Street Singer will appeal not only to music lovers of all kinds, but to anyone who can appreciate a true American story with a rare glimpse into the life of a unique and talented man.

Visit the Institute of Contemporary Art website for more information, including ticket sales.

Official film sites: Aoustic Traditions | Facebook






Topics: Documentary, Movies, Music, News

 

Posted by The EnviroGeek | January 23rd, 2013 

 Source:  http://www.geeksofdoom.com/2013/01/23/harlem-street-singer-the-reverend-gary-davis-story-debuts-in-boston-this-weekend


 

The ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER, the biography of Thomas De Quincey (1785 -1859)

Author of the famous and semi-scandalous CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER, Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) has long lacked a fully fledged biography. 

His friendships with leading poets and men of letters in the Romantic and Victorian periods - including William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle - have long placed him at the centre of 19th-century literary studies. 

De Quincey also stands at the meeting point in the culture wars between Edinburgh and London; between high art and popular taste; and between the devotees of the Romantic imagination and those of hack journalism. 

He was a man who engaged with nearly every facet of literary culture, including the roles played by publishers, booksellers and journalists in literary production, dissemination and evaluation. 

His writing was a tremendous influence on Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, William Burroughs and Peter Ackroyd.   

De Quincey is a fascinating (and topical) figure for other reasons too: a self-mythologizing autobiographer whose attitudes to drug-induced creativity and addiction strike highly resonant chords for a contemporary readership. 

Robert Morrison's biography passionately argues for the critical importance and enduring value of this neglected essayist, critic and biographer. 

The Addicted Life of Thomas De Quincey

To eat.  Begin with that verb: not “opium-addict,” nor “smoker” or “drinker”—though this last was most appropriate, since for most of his life Thomas De Quincey preferred laudanum, opium dissolved in an alcohol solution. 

No, none of these; he called it
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, the “eating” being an oblique reference, most likely, to Turkish addicts who were known to eat bitter cakes of solid opium.  

De Quincey sought to align himself with these mysterious (at least to English audiences) figures of the “Orient,” all the better to heighten the exoticism of the dreams and visions that make up the Confessions.  

The term “English opium-eater” may be a contradiction in terms, but it’s a hallmark of De Quincey’s style: baroque but lucid, layering meaning and allusion through an unexpected turn of phrase.
No one before had written (in English) so frankly about opium addiction, as De Quincey was himself well aware: 

“I am bound to confess that I have indulged in it to an excess, not yet recorded of any other man.” 

He stressed “recorded” because, as he writes in a footnote, “there is one celebrated man of the present day who, if all be true which is reported of him, has greatly exceeded me in quantity.” 

This was Samuel Taylor Coleridge, of course, but while Coleridge may have written under the influence of opium, he never took the drug as his explicit subject.

It fell, then, to De Quincey to chase the dragon into an entirely new literary realm. 

De Quincey became part of the golden age of the English essay that included writers like William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb, but his work was unlike the controlled form of those other essayists.

“Nothing, indeed,” De Quincey writes in the opening of the Confessions, “is more revolting to English feelings, than the spectacle of a human being obtruding on our notice his moral ulcers or scars,” before plunging into a style both ecstatic and erudite, that roams from obscure classical references to impressionistic nightmares to carefully reasoned observations of early nineteenth century England. 

As The Scotsman would write of De Quincey in their obituary of him:
 
“He is the absolute creator of a species of ‘impassioned prose’ which he seemed born to introduce, and in which he has no prototype, no rival no successor.”

He adopted the “confessional” form from St. Augustine and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but his essay is not a traditional autobiography: it relates only those early instances of his life which relate to his opium addiction—if anything, it is an autobiography of opium, not the writer himself. 

And while it’s also true that De Quincey had nothing like a “rival,” as The Scotsman put it, it’s clear that De Quincey did have his successors, chiefly in the evolution of the urban peripatetic. 

His friend J. R. Findlay later recalled that De Quincey “confessed to occasional accesses to an almost irresistible impulse to flee to the labyrinthine shelter of some great city like London or Paris—there to dwell solitary amid a multitude, buried by day in the cloister-like recesses of mighty libraries, and stealing away by night to some obscure lodging.” 

Walking through a nightmare city recording his observations with a dispassionate but empathetic eye, De Quincey found kinship with Irish refugees and prostitutes:

“Being myself, at that time of necessity a peripatetic, or a walker of the streets, I naturally fell in more frequently with those female peripatetics who are technically called street-walkers.” 

De Quincey is the first modern flâneur, and his influence can be felt from Edgar Allan Poe to Charles Baudelaire, from the French Surrealists and Walter Benjamin to W. G. Sebald.


The Confessions’ subtitle is as important as its title: 

“Being an Extract from the Life of a Scholar.” 

De Quincey is no illiterate junkie or uneducated hustler. The vision of opium addiction he presents is from the vantage point of someone who has the education and reflection to understand what he’s done to himself, and to place it in a larger literary and cultural context. 

The young De Quincey had managed to impress both William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, despite being more than a decade younger. 

He gradually inserted himself into Wordsworth’s circle, living with them at Grasmere for several years (Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy wrote to a friend at one point, “We feel often as if he were one of the Family—he is loving, gentle and happy—a very good scholar, and an acute Logician.”), but the elder poet himself never came to treat De Quincey as an equal—after they’d been friends for five years Wordsworth still condescended to him.

This blow to his self-worth may account for De Quincey’s early inability to capitalize on his latent talent.

His collision course with drug addiction lay in two halves of De Quincey that had been with him since childhood:

First, his capacity for intense and lucid dreams; he would later recall one of his earliest memories of a “remarkable dream of terrific grandeur” when he was less than two years old. 

The second was his constitution; throughout his life De Quincey was plagued by illness, shooting pains in his stomach that made it difficult to eat or lie down. 

He was sickly throughout his life, and it was this unrelenting illnesses that led a friend, when De Quincey was nineteen years old, to suggest opium. 

“Opium!,” De Quincey later recalled. “I had heard of it as I had heard of manna or ambrosia, but no further: 

"how unmeaning a sound it was at that time! what solemn chords does it now strike upon my heart! what heart-quaking vibrations of sad and happy remembrances!”




Opium addiction was poorly understood in Britain in the early nineteenth century. The drug was in widespread use and unlicensed—it was used to treat everything from diabetes to syphilis to constipation—and the mechanism of its addictive properties was so poorly understood (and would be so for decades) that withdrawal symptoms were often mistaken for consumption, the remedy being to take more opium. 

But it deleterious effects weren’t entirely unknown; among those who claimed to have tried to dissuade De Quincey from taking the drug was none other than Coleridge himself, who later stated he “pleaded with flowing tears, and with an agony of forewarning.” Even if true, Coleridge’s entreaties had little effect.

De Quincey’s description of discovering opium remains one of the literary masterpieces in the history of drug experiences:

I was necessarily ignorant of the whole art and mystery of opium-taking, and what I took I took under every disadvantage. But I took it—and in an hour—oh, heavens! what a revulsion! what an upheaving, from its lowest depths, of inner spirit! what an apocalypse of the world within me! That my pains had vanished was now a trifle in my eyes: this negative effect was swallowed up in the immensity of those positive effects which had opened before me—in the abyss of divine enjoyment thus suddenly revealed.

De Quincey continued, throughout the 1810’s, to build his reputation as a friend and colleague of Wordsworth and Coleridge with an astute and encyclopedic mind—all the while managing not to produce any actual writing. 

And he continued to self-medicate his various ailments with increasing doses of laudanum. Even watching Coleridge deteriorate wasn’t enough to keep De Quincey from following in his footsteps: with a junkie’s logic De Quincey maintained he was in control of the drug for much of his life. 

Whatever else opium was, it was not an intoxicant; he saw it strongly opposed to wine, in that it didn’t dull one’s senses but heighten them. 

“Whereas wine disorders the mental faculties, opium, on the contrary (if taken in a proper manner), introduces amongst them the most exquisite order, legislation, and harmony. 
 Wine robs a man of his self-possession; opium greatly invigorates it.” 

 In reality, it gradually consumed him, and every time he tried to cut back he suffered severe withdrawal. 

He still held much literary promise, and editors like William Blackwood of Blackwood’s continued to believe in him (“Whatever you choose to send,” Blackwood wrote to De Quincey in 1820, “be it long or short—will always be acceptable.”), but he was alienating these professional connections one by one with his procrastination and unreliability.

He finally turned his fortunes around in 1820 through an act of mental jiu-jitsu: if opium was what prevented him from writing, he would turn the tables and write about it.

 “Opium has reduced me for the last six years to one general discourtesy of silence. But this I shall think of with not so much pain, if this same opium enables me (as I think it will) to send you an article.” 

Long his artistic nemesis, it had now become his subject. For all its drawbacks, opium had one beneficial effect for De Quincey, that of acting as the ice-axe to free the frozen sea within him. 

Opium, as it happens, does not enhance one’s dreams, it suppresses them, so that it’s really as one gradually comes off of the drug that those dreams come flooding back with heightened urgency and intensity. 

It also seems to have freed him from the need to produce a grand, unified and cohesive philosophical treatise; part of what would come to define De Quincey’s style are his fragmentary tangents, his proto-stream of consciousness style that allowed him to move rapidly between dream, memory, and philosophy.
Though De Quincey had promised the “opium article” initially to Blackwood’s, a strained relationship led him instead to their rival, The London Magazine, who brought out the first part of the Confessions in September of 1821.  
Signed anonymously and buried midway down the table of contents; it was an instant success, and the next month the second part was prominently featured in the magazine.


The young De Quincey had wanted to be Wordsworth, but the Confessions is in many ways the complete antithesis of Wordsworth’s writing: prose, not poetry; urban, not rural; eschewing transcendence in favor of the darker side of English society. 

Most significantly, its approach to time was radically different. 

For Wordsworth, in poems like “Tintern Abbey” and “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” the moment of epiphany came through recollection, and pleasure came from those moments, “In vacant or in pensive mood,” when memories flashed “upon that inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude.” 

There was a magical frisson in a memory recollected at leisure over the space of years, and that gap of time was necessary to an ability to process the beauty of those past moments.

De Quincey found in opium a completely different relationship to the world around him. 

Speaking of the impact of music while on the drug, he writes: 

“Now opium, by greatly increasing the activity of the mind generally, increases, of necessity, that particular mode of its activity by which we are able to construct out of the raw material of organic sound an elaborate intellectual pleasure.” 

Opium, in other words, could render the same kind of epiphany Wordsworth sought in recollection, but could do so in real time. 

Under opium, according to De Quincey,

“Space also it amplifies by degrees that are sometimes terrific. But time it is upon which the exact and multiplying power of opium chiefly spends its operation. 

Time becomes infinitely elastic, stretching out to such immeasurable and vanishing termini, that it seems ridiculous to compute the sense of it on waking by expressions commensurate to human life.” 

In these passages, De Quincey is closer to Virginia Woolf than Wordsworth, and particularly that modernist conception of time as bifurcated between, as Virginia Woolf put it in Orlando, the “time of the clock” and the “time of the mind.”

But this wasn’t the only way opium’s effect on De Quincey’s memory manifested itself, for memories continued to intrude powerfully on him throughout his life and his writing. Not as pleasant interludes, as they had with Wordsworth, but as fantastical nightmares. 

Midway through the Confessions he describes a night time visit from a wandering, wordless Malay. Real or not, the Malay, De Quincey writes, “(partly from the picturesque exhibition he assisted to frame, partly from the anxiety,I connected with his image for some days) fastened afterwards upon my dreams, and brought other Malays with him, worse than himself, that ran ‘a-muck’ at me, and led me into a world of troubles.” 

The image of this nocturnal visitor, which continued to be “a fearful enemy for months,” haunted De Quincey as so many images haunted him—he could turn a news report of a crocodile attack in Egypt into a scene of nightmarish despair, just as he could take a near collision while riding on a mail-coach and 
spin from it a “dream fugue” on the theme of “sudden death,” in which “a vast necropolis rising upon the far-off horizon—a city of sepulchres” overwhelms De Quincey’s mind.

Ultimately, for all its shocking revelation, Confessions is bound by 
moral conventions of the time: it follows an arc of rise, fall and redemption. 


The highs are met with the lows and terrors and demons of the drug, and we are assured, by the essay’s end, that De Quincey has kicked the drug (this was never true). 

So while Confessions has remained the work he’s best known for, in many ways it was its 1845 sequel, Suspiria de Profundis, that fully captured the depth and range of De Quincey’s opium deliriums. 

Written not as an unknown youth but as an established author whose public was hungry for more, he could afford to take liberties. 

While Confessions follows an established narrative arc, Suspiria is wild, untamed (in part because of editing disagreements between De Quincey and his Blackwood’s editor), sprawling and hallucinatory, where De Quincey describes his vision of Levana, the goddess of the nursery, and the Three Graces: 
 
The Lady of Tears (“She it is that night and day raves and moans, calling for vanished faces.”), 

the Lady of Sighs (“And her eyes, if they were ever seen, would be neither sweet nor subtle; no man could read their story; they would be found filled with perishing dreams, and with wrecks of forgotten delirium.”), and 

a third, unnamed sister (“She is the defier of God.  She also is the mother of lunacies, and the suggestress of suicides… she can approach only those in whom a profound nature has been upheaved by central convulsions; in whom the heart trembles and the brain rocks under conspiracies of tempest from without and tempest from within.”).

De Quincey continued to write, gradually overcoming his habitual procrastination and inability to make good on promises.

He struggled throughout much of his life with both poverty and addiction, and did not achieve recognition or financial stability until late in his life, when his Collected Works began to appear. 

Bringing the Confessions back into popular imagination, and contextualizing it within a larger body of singular essay writing, the public could not buy them fast enough. (Henry Crabb Robinson spoke for many of his former friends when he wrote, “I long for the rest of De Quincey, and yet I neither love nor respect the man; I admire only the writer.”) 

Much of that work was dreck, including hack novels written primarily for money (“20 novels would not task me so heavily as one Opium Eater,” he wrote at one point), and some of his lesser essays. 

But those volumes also included a number of essays that have long been over-shadowed by the Confessions—his satirical masterpiece “On Murder As Considered One of the Fine Arts,” and his recollections (not always flattering) of Wordsworth and Coleridge. 

Erudite, engaging, and biting, these works help fill out the life of a long misunderstood scholar—one who changed the face of the essay and of our understanding of addiction. 

But, then as now, it’s not the scholar of the Confessions’ subtitle that attracts readers, but the Opium-Eater himself.








Tags:drugs,intoxication,opium,Thomas De Quincey,William Wordsworth


Blog
Roundtable
Colin Dickey
The Addicted Life of Thomas De Quincey

Source: http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/roundtable/a-pilgrims-drunken-progress.php

Words of the Drunk

That which the sober man keeps in his breast, the drunken man lets out at the lips. Astute people, when they want to ascertain a man’s true character, make him drunk.

—Martin Luther, 1569

Charlie Musselwhite - "Christo Redemptor"

 

"Stand Back!" is Charlie's debut

It has magic as it captured a real and lasting feel for the harp blues.
A killer album!!! 

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Ben Harper & Charlie Musselwhite - I'm In I'm Out And I'm Gone (01-29-2013)

Ben Harper & Charlie Musselwhite - I'm In I'm Out And I'm Gone, "Get Up!" CD Release Party, January 29, 2013, live at Irving Plaza in New York City.

http://youtu.be/jhTjX5PMd64

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Lee Morgan

loaded on Feb 11, 2010

"The Sidewinder" performed by Lee Morgan and band. Taken from the 1964 "The Sidewinder" Hard Bop album. Composed by Lee Morgan.

Musicians:
Lee Morgan: Trumpet
Joe Henderson: Tenor saxophone
Billy Higgins: Drums
Barry Harris: Piano
Bob Cranshaw: Bass

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Lee Morgan - The Sidewinder

Lee Morgan - Hasaan´s Dream

Lee Morgan fue un trompetista estadounidense de jazz, representante del hard bop

 

Lee Morgan with Oscar Peterson, Ed Thigpen, Ray Brown - 1961

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Donald Byrd - "Cristo Redentor"

Donaldson Toussaint

“Donald Byrd”

 Donald Byrd Quintet at the Olympia ’58

William Claxton: Donald Byrd on the “A” Train, New York City, 1959

PHOTO William Claxton

Donald Byrd plays a pocket trumpet during the recording session for his Fuego album Oct 1959

Photo Francis Wolff

                                              Donald Byrd – Byrd In Paris – Vol. 1 (1958) 

 

 Donald Byrd – Byrd In Paris – Vol. 2 (1958)

Donald Byrd

Trumpeter

Donaldson Toussaint L'Ouverture Byrd II was an American jazz and rhythm and blues trumpeter. A sideman for many other jazz musicians of his generation, Byrd was best known as one of the only bebop jazz ... Wikipedia

Born: December 9, 1932, Detroit

Died: February 4, 2013

Music groups: The Blackbyrds, Johnny Griffin, Elmo Hope Sextet, Donald Byrd Quintet, Red Garland Quintet

Education: Manhattan School of Music, Wayne State University, Teachers College, Columbia University

Songs

Cristo Redentor	1963	A New Perspective
Dominoes	1975	Places and Spaces
Places and Spaces	1975	Places and Spaces
Love Has Come Around	1981	Love Byrd
Flight Time

Think Twice	1975	Stepping into Tomorrow
Wind Parade	1975	Places and Spaces
Black Byrd	1973	Black Byrd
Change	1975	Places and Spaces
You and the Music
Stepping into Tomorrow	1975	Stepping into Tomorrow
Stella by Starlight
Street Lady	1973	Street Lady
Lansana's Priestess
Curro's

Albums

Black Byrd

1972

Places and Spaces

1975

Stepping into Tomorrow

1974

Street Lady

1973

A New Perspective

1963


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 "Cristo Redentor" 

 

Donald Byrd - Cristo Redentor. Byrd (t), Mobley (ts), Best (vib), Burrrell (g), Hancock (p), Warren (b), Humphries (d), Perkinson (vcl).

Born in Detroit, Michigan, Byrd attended Cass Technical High School. He performed with Lionel Hampton before finishing high school. After playing in a military band during a term in the United States Air Force, he obtained a bachelor's degree in music from Wayne State University and a master's degree from Manhattan School of Music.

Playing career

While still at the Manhattan School he joined Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, replacing Clifford Brown. In 1955, he recorded with Jackie McLean and Mal Waldron. After leaving the Jazz Messengers in 1956 he performed with a wide variety of highly regarded jazz musicians, including John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Herbie Hancock, and Thelonious Monk. In June 1964, Byrd jammed with jazz legend Eric Dolphy in Paris just two weeks before Dolphy's tragic death from insulin shock.

In the 1970s, he moved away from his previous hard-bop jazz base and began to record jazz fusion, Jazz-funk, soul-Jazz, and rhythm and blues. Teaming up with the Mizell Brothers, they produced Black Byrd, which was enormously successful and became Blue Note Records' highest-ever selling album. The Mizell Brothers follow-up production albums for Byrd, Places and Spaces, Steppin' Into Tomorrow and Street Lady were also big sellers, and have subsequently provided a rich source of samples for acid jazz artists such as Us3.

In 1993, Byrd teamed up with Gang Starr MC Guru for the track "Loungin'" on the Jazzmatazz project.

As a music educator

He has taught music at Rutgers University, the Hampton Institute, New York University, Howard University, and Oberlin College. In 1974 he created the Blackbyrds, a fusion group consisting of his best students. They scored several major hits including "Rock Creek Park", "Walking In Rhythm" and "Blackbyrds Theme".

Byrd lives in Teaneck, New Jersey.

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  Donald Byrd