New South Wales, 1898

Wailwan Boree 1898

Images are of Wailwan Aborigines from photographs made in 1898. All drawings are in pen on a note pad, 6" x 4", 2010. I made about 60 of them today. I'll post a bunch more later. Good night everybody, sleep tight. Snaveltjes toe en oogjes dicht.

You know what my favorite concert has been so far this year? It was an ensemble of Chinese-Americans performing traditional Chinese music in a neighborhood park in Chinatown, Manhattan on a sunny Saturday afternoon. And why? Because I intuited, maybe for the first time, why music exists and what its function is. I'm a musical tourist.
My favorite finds when I shop for music are books, academic ones, with a research music cd tucked into it. The newest of such finds is a book by Henry Sapoznik called Klezmer! Jewish Music from Old World to Our World. The 30th Top 10 of the Top 100 2010 is as follows:

1. The Wailwan Boree 1898 with Wadimir. (hence the little drawings)
   
2. Joseph Moskowitz - Doina (from Klezmer!)
3. Diakari Dia Diakite dit Dia - Sadjona (latest entry from a blog I follow: Awesome Tapes from Africa)
4. Bejing Opera: Edison cylinder 1902 (just like the music in Chinatown)
5. Italy: Sardinia:: Ballo Tondo (Traditional music recorded in the 1950's by Alan Lomax)
6. (Cantor) Yoselle Rosenblatt - Ato Yozarto (both Klezmer recordings in this list recorded around 1914)
7. Unidentified record printed in Hong Kong (2nd hand store: decorated sleeve by previous owner, Chinese characters only, both record and sleeve are heartwarming and beautiful)
8. Italy: Calabro:: Balletto (sung by a group of young women)
9. Miriam Makeba - Umquokozo (I just bought my ninth record of her: Makeba!, it's a good one)
10. Torres Strait Island Aborigines: Adud Leluti (as #1 recorded in 1898, but from a different expedition. This recording is from the very first British field recoding session. The first field recording ever was made by the American J. Walter Fewkes, who recorded the Passamaquoddy Indians in the US in 1890)
    

Heart of Soul

Beth Orton
10.5" x 8"
oil on wood. 2010

Heart of Soul is the second Beth Orton song to enter the list of 100. It's the other song, besides Heartlandtruckstop (see the July post with that title), from the CD Comfort of Strangers in the list to start with the word 'heart'. Thus it is also the second painting of Beth Orton, and I have to say they make a nice pair. The two paintings are the same size, the ratio background/portrait is similar, and are each other's opposite in terms of light: dark figure on light (yellow) background vs. light figure on purple ground. They also look opposite ways: when placed next to each other they 'look' at each other. None of the above was planned out. The painting, from a black and white photograph, looks like it's done rather quickly. This is an illusion. I worked all week on it. Little by little the nuances on the photograph made themselves known, each important to the way they were rendered. The black form on the left made itself known to me to be a bird, once I figured that out I had to change the blob in the painting into a bird-like form, it also altered the dynamics of the pose. Most nuances were within the figure though: I found out (very late in the process) that she was pregnant, and that she had a tattoo. Which lines belonged to her hair, to her back, or to the tattoo, was instrumental for successfully painting her shoulders and back. Unlike the photograph in which every line is taken equally, and for granted, the painting chooses the importance of certain lines and shapes above others, and omits ones not essential or confusing. Heart of Soul is more upbeat than the rest of Comfort of Strangers and has this sing-a-long hit quality to it. I started to sing-a-long the first time I heard it, so much so that I thought I've heard it before. But it's not the Yardbirds' Heart Full of Soul, and not Stevie Ray Vaughan's Heart and Soul. It is not, although I thought it was for little while, Put a Little Love in Your Heart by Jackie deShannon. It's nothing but a great Beth Orton song.

1898

I used to have this record celebrating the 100th anniversary of the gramophone. The record opened with Mary Had a Little Lamb, assumed to be the first sound recording (acoustical, the history of mechanical sound recordings goes back much further). The voice on it is the voice of the inventor Thomas Edison himself, as he recites the nursery rhyme to demonstrate his invention in 1877.

Before I started to write this blog entry I spent a few hours researching the numerous facts I intend to use. Since publishing all the written commentaries for the Top 100 (by means of this blog, but also the catalog for the Top 100 2009 —see previous blog entry), I try to make it a habit to check all facts. A good habit I believe :), as I did make numerous silly mistakes in the past. My memory may make for an interesting story but not necessarily a true one. Some years ago I had Van Morrison, for example, incorrectly born in Dublin in stead of Belfast :( . I'm glad too, I had checked my sources in a recent blog entry on Nina Simone, when the author of an article I quoted from checked in on me. Saved myself an embarrassment there :D.

Anyhoo, I was checking the facts on this recording by Edison and it turns out that sound had been recorded seventeen years earlier by the French inventor Edouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. His recording was of a female voice singing Au Clair de la Lune. But honor to whom it deserves: The French recording was never audible until American researchers managed to transcribe the data (and cleaned it up in the process), while Edison's instantly played back. But I do like Au Clair de la Lune a whole lot better than Mary Had a Little Lamb. The song -now audible and accessible-, as a matter of fact, scored a few points in my last top 10. That happening truly reinforced my claim that the music in the Top 100 is an account from the history of recorded sound.

Why was I checking the facts on Edison? Because I was preparing a written commentary on a recording of aborigines wailing made by Prof. A.C. Haddon of the 1898 Cambridge Anthropological Expedition. The recording, aptly titled The 1898 Torres Strait Death Wail, is the oldest to feature in a Top 100. It did so last year and returns this year. The oldest recording used to be a recording of Swift Flying Feather performing a love song made in Minnesota in 1899. The death wail is an absolute gorgeous recording. It is eerie (upon first hearing one may think it's an under water recording of the sounds of humpback whales), unhuman sounding, but so human and musical too. It was recorded on a wax cylinder only 21 years after Edison's first but 11 years after Emile Berliner's invention of the (flat) phonograph record. While recordings were being made, using this crisp sounding technology, of opera singers and folk ensembles on both sides of the Atlantic, the Torres Strait recordings sound gritty at best.

Veteran Minnasie Chief and Daughter-in-law, Marrakai Plains, Northern Teritory
14" x 8"
oil on wood, 2010 (from an original 1915 photograph)

Top 100 2009 Revisited

The Top 100 2009, cover
9.75" x 7.5"
artist book, edition of 100, signed
Iconoclast, Published on the occasion of the exhibit The Top 100 2009


The Top 100 2009 is up an running in Cincinnati's Country Club gallery, they have the catalog available for $60. It contains reproductions of all 100 paintings and their accompanying texts. Maybe it's worth a field trip to look at (and listen to, on request) the Top 100. The Top 100 2009 is shown together with Morning Star, a brand new project/series of works by Mark Harris. Both exhibits will be on view at Country Club Projects until October 23.


I'm more than halfway into the Top 100 2010 and the influence of last year's list considerable. A third (8) of the 24 songs were in the list last year as well. I'm not keeping any surprises behind so the following list is an overview of the music that will be in the Top 100 2010, voila!

1. Vampyre Corpse - Dogs of War
2. Blooddawn - Nailed Fist
3. Time and Temperature - Havana
4. Sung Poetry of North Vietnam (Hat Do) - Ty-Ba
5. M.I.A. - Born Free
6. Tsjuder - Blasphemy
7. Torres Strait Islanders 1898 Death Wail
8. Roberto Carlos Lange - Amazonian Pacific
9. Darkthrone - Transylvanian Hunger
10. Sekouba Traore - Walinyumadon
11. Clarinetes de Linares - El Gallito Giro
12. Smodern (?) - Miss Smodern
    
13. Louise and Joseph Spence - Won't That Be a Happy Time
14. Mother of Fire - The Beast and I
15. Joni Mitchell - All I Want
16. Trelldom - Sonar Dreyri
17. Beth Orton - Heartland Truckstop
18. Bob Marley - Put it on
19. Nina Simone - I Ain't Got No—I Got Life
20. Edward Kamau Brathwaite - Wings of a Dove
21. Helado Negro - Dahum
22. Ustad Vilyat Khan - Arrival in Benares
23. The Gits - Twisting, Breathing
24. John Jacob Niles - Go 'Way from My Window
    

Nina Simone (2)

Nina Simone
14" x 8"
oil on wood, 2010

It's finished, the second Simone painting of the year. It's a strange one. I sort of like the top part, the bottom part too, but together... It's just strange. Thus comes the second writing of the year about Nina Simone... But I'm at a loss, confused, confused by the painting, confused by my previous post (on Simone's diary), confused by her nakedness (I'd so vowed not to paint nudes anymore!) For inspiration on what to write I looked at comments made by viewers on YouTube. I viewed some videos of my favorite Simone songs and read hundreds of comments. Most of these comments, as one could expect, are not worth being published... I take that back: everything is worthy, as a matter of fact I'd wish some people would comment on mine. anything, even a :) or a :(, better yet an xoxo, or an lol. The painting... Clearly more about me than about Nina Simone. The writing too then, should be an exercise in auto-psycho-analysis 101, doing the patient part as well as the therapist's... But confusion prevails; the comments—no matter how sincerely—from my fellow-Nina-Simone-YouTube-watchers didn't help, and my own typed words lead to no particular conclusion...

Nina Simone

Nina Simone
20" x 6"
oil behind plexiglass, 2010

Nina Simone has been in and out of my top 100 lists since the beginning in 1983. I own ten LPs, two CDs, and eight singles with her recordings, and this year year a whole score of her songs have been listed in various top 10 lists. Through gossip columns of music magazines I've been aware of her troubled mind, the difficult circumstances of her life, and her eccentric character, but what I knew of her was anecdotal at best. An article by Joe Hagan in The 2010 Music Issue of the Believer I've read recently, is different from the scandalous fodder usually associated with Simone, as it is a humanistic character sketch based on a newly discovered 'secret' diary of hers. The ten-page article deals with Simone's private and public life, and her sexual and racial identity. Simone herself is quoted at length through her lyrics and texts, passages from her diary are reproduced and used as illustrations, and a newly published song is tucked on a CD inside the magazine. It's a cover of an Alice Cooper song called I Never Cry, and illustrates an epitaph at the closing of the article, that was also on the last page of Simone's diary: "I learned that my pain, no matter how great, is a private matter (my hell is my own) and I must not tell it to any one else—there are no people who can help me."

Mia Zapata (2)

Mia Zapata (the Gits)
17.25" x 8.5"
oil on wood, 2010

Good weekend (in the studio.) I made one of my better paintings of the year so far. Painting is a mysterious business, its criteria elusive. What I do know about painting is that in order to achieve a quality that's fresh and new, you need to spent hours and hours in the studio, until the differentiation between the thinking mind, the painting, and the unconscious mind cedes to exist. I managed to do just that this weekend, I really painted, and the painting above of Mia Zapata is really a painting. Unlike most illustrations, a painting doesn't reproduce well. You really gotta see this one for real, the spirit of the person portrayed, the spirit of the painting, Joie de vivre! A few weeks ago (see Zapata post of July) I promised a brand new painting depicting Mia Zapata, the singer of the Gits. The painting, like last year's, illustrates the song While You're Twisting, I'm Still Breathing by the Gits. The song is found on the record Frenching the Bully (1992). The painting of Mia Zapata reminded me of a painting I did in 2004 of Ari Up, singer of the Slits. It was my favorite painting for the Top 100 2003 for the same reasons as this one of the Gits. To the right is a small reproduction of that Ari Up painting, it's about 16 inches tall, also done in oils.

The painting of Mia Zapata is based on a photograph by Lucy Hanna. More about this artist you can find on the following link. Check it out!
www.luhanna.com/photography

Good Weekend

Art Brut
12" x 12"
oil on wood, 2007

So I've been doing a fair amount of reading lately, music literature as usual. A very enlighting activity indeed but frustrating in the sense that it shows my shortcomings as a writer. It wouldn't be so bad if I had no writers' ambition, if I kept it to myself, diary-style. But no: I publish, blog-style and beyond. I want to be a writer.
I've been writing seriously since graduate school starting in 1995. My thesis paper was my first publication, followed by Perfect Solution, a hand-made artist book in an edition of 185. The thesis paper is alright but Perfect Solution has many flaws. My main output as a writer are the Top 100 commentaries such as in this blog. I've written about a thousand of them. They are short, don't require much depth, and don't need to be consistent. When I attempt to write a longer piece I fail hopelessly. Some day I will write a full length novel even though this day writing a novel seems to be the hardest thing to do. In 1998 I started to write a novel, a love story, an erotic story really, but I didn't get further than three pages. The only thing I liked from those pages is the first line: "The first time I saw her naked". So I thought, when I tried again a few years later, to use the same opening line. I didn't get further than a page and a half that time. I forgot about the opening line until the band Art Brut had a song in the Top 100 2006 called Good Weekend. My love story pages are rubbish compared to the lyrics of that song: "First time I saw her/I wanted to do more than just hold her/I wanted to bend her and fold her/So I lent over and told her... We came home from the cinema/We went through the front door/Up the stairs/Through the bedroom door/Onto the bedroom floor/I've seen her naked twice."

I drew this picture here in my sketchbook the other day and it made me think of this project again. "The first time I saw her naked": The text will be an illustration of the drawing rather than the other way 'round. I'll keep you posted if anything happens with it.

John Jacob Niles

John Jacob Niles
10.75" x 8.3"
oil on wood. 2010

For three weeks now –I'm a slow reader– I'm working on this book, a birthday present (thank you Anne), And They All Sang by Studs Terkel. The book is a compilation, a transcript of interviews Terkel conducted for the Chicago Public Radio over the course of roughly half a century. More than half the book deals with classical music, and if we learn anything from it is how great Caruso was and how well respected the maestro Arturo Toscanini. One can also not escape the idea that the older generation is skeptical about the younger. The rest of the book deals with popular styles such as jazz and folk. The preface of the book is an interview with John Jacob Niles, it bridges the two worlds of classical and popular, and is for me one of the highlights of the book. Niles came from a musical family and had a 'classical' training. He was sort of a musical 'wunderkind', wrote music when he was 13 years old. Niles has the most amazing falsetto (at least since the last castrato, and the only one to make records, Alessandro Moreschi died in 1922) I have ever heard. The name John Jacob Niles has always been a familiar one to me but I never had payed much attention. He was never in a Top 100 until this year, even though some of his songs like Black is the Color, I Wonder as I Wander, and Go 'Way From My Window have been standard Top 100 fare when performed by others.
John Jacob Niles is an amazingly strange character. A writer as well as a singer, a scholar, a musical anthropologist, an instrument maker, folklorist and aristocrat, Niles, with so many talents, was a true renaissance man. I'm certainly envious. My talents are limited and my pitch is far from perfect. I had to give up my musical career at a very early stage, I would have stuck with music if I had it in me. I love music and with this project I think I've found a niche to be something like a musician, a musicians' painter. It's a relatively new development as I used to be an artists' artist. Painting big ideas on a large scale. I didn't have the bigness in my character to sustain those big ideas, the ego, the confidence, the discipline, the ambition. I did all right but it just wasn't mine to sustain. With the Top 100 I have found a sustainable project. Based on hobby rather than intellect, I've been doing it practically all my life.

M.I.A.

M.I.A.
24" x 16"
oil behind plexiglass, 2010

After Mia Zapata (see previous...) M.I.A. is the next singer to re-appear in the Top 100. I used the same image as I painted last year but it illustrates a different song. Born Free, built around a sample of Suicide's Ghost Rider (the original track appeared twice in previous Top 100 lists), is from her brand new CD Maya but I found it on a compilation CD tucked in the Believer: 2010 Music Issue magazine. Born Free, according to the editors of Believer, is "a way of acknowledging her growing hipster audience", of which I am apparently one. The commentary in the magazine is a political one, be it not about Tamil liberation, but about cultural identity. My head is spinning trying to convey the message. In my notes to last year's painting I commented on my inability to take a political stance and now, after reading, and listening to, so many more opinions about M.I.A. (everybody seems to have one), I'm even less opinionated. I stick to my little "I believe in her integrity" disclaimer I used last year. Being engaged in a discussion on M.I.A. recently, people questioned this integrity. I could not defend her well theoretically, but when I asked if Born Free wasn't the most exciting new music around, they had to admit it was.
The painting, reverse on glass, is an experiment. I've seen my wife Maria have wonderful results with the technique, and it seemed a good way to not have to sacrifice the original sketch, the under painting. Maria often tries to stop me from continuing to paint on certain paintings because the under painting is so lively. As it turns out she liked the back of the painting very much, one can never win...

...I can't resist to mention (again) that Maya Arulpragasam (her real name) shares July 18 as a birthday with me as well as with the Norwegian extreme right-wing politician Vidkun Quisling (for him I would like to refer you to an April entry on Varg Vikernes: Varg and Me).

One last thing: If you spotted that M.I.A.'s legs in the painting are proportionally a little short —good eyes. This time it is not because of my shortcomings as a painter but it is due to my lousy photography skills (or a shitty camera).