Under en promenad i området häromkvällen upptäckte jag att Puppet (numera AD i Stockholm, vad jag förstår) inte svikit sina rötter:
Intill en målning av Pasha:
Disparate! Flintlock the crabapple a butternut!
Take the serious side of Disney, the Confucian side of Disney. It's in having taken an ethos, as he does in Perri, that squirrel film, where you have the values of courage and tenderness asserted in a way that everybody can understand. You have got an absolute genius there. You have got a greater correlation of nature than you have had since the time of Alexander the Great. Alexander gave orders to the fisherman that if they found anything about fish that was interesting, a specific thing, they were to tell Aristotle. And with that correlation you got ichtyology to the scientific point where it stayed for two thousand years. And now one has got with the camera an enormous correlation of particulars. That capacity for making contact is a tremendous challenge to literature. It throws up the question of what needs to be done and what is superfluous.Pound var särskilt tagen av en scen i Perri - som han såg 1958 - där nötskrikor varnar ekorrarna för att hungriga mårdar är i antågande, en detalj som dyker upp när Cantos närmar sig sitt slut och Pound samlar de paradisiska ögonblicken:
How came beauty against this blackness,- två privata skönhetsupplevelser under almträden på gården utanför mentalsjukhuset St Elizabeths, där Pound satt inspärrad tolv år efter kriget, leder associationsbanan vidare till ekorrarna och blåskrikorna i Perri. Hur som helst finns denna idag närmast bortglömda naturfilm, som fick en gång den 73-årige Pound att tänka på såväl Aristoteles som myten om Ariadne, nu på DVD, läser jag på Pound-mailinglistan.
Twice beauty under the elms-
To be saved by squirrels and bluejays?
"plus j'aime le chien"
Ariadne.
Disney against the metaphysicals,"
and Laforgue more than they thought in him
[...] "journalism" has had an awful awful awful effect on [music] criticism, has developed rules and prejudices that are dysfunctional and anti-intellectual and that produce continual stupidity and shallowness. One example: that we're supposed to report the news, not make the news ourselves. Why? As it is, rock critics are forbidden to write about each other and about each other's work. [...] if you use music in your prose as you would in your life, and comment on how other people use it in their prose, then you're a wanker, either a weirdo rock-critic geek or a gonzo wild thing, a beatnik, a "personal journalist". Or a diarist, a blogwriter. And if what interests you in the life of the music doesn't match up with the standard idea of newsworthiness (e.g., doesn't tie n with some reportable trend or connect to some newly available commodity or recent disaster), then you're just plain off the map. [...] To me this is the subject matter (...) eight million stories in the naked city, sixteen million hands, everybody grasping the music and each using it in his or her own way (...) no one's experience duplicated by the next person's but each drawing on those sounds and the people in the immediate environment - EXCEPT IN MAGAZINES [...] My principle is this: We can't convey the romance and the adventure of music unless we're willing to convey our own romance and adventure. And if we are to continue on with the so-long-ago ideals of the music ("Don't follow leaders" someone once said) - if we want readers to be inspired by the music, not subordinate to it - then we must set the example and not be subordinate to it ourselves.Frank Kogan, Real Punks Don't Wear Black, s 217-218
The author’s ‘subjective’ viewpoint should not just be there to provide moral asides once a story has been told (like Robert McNamara looking glum about genocide in Vietnam); it is an essential moment in the unfolding of any objective account. What was Reynolds doing during this period? Which gigs did he attend? How did he earn a living? Did he meet anyone at gigs? Was he ever scared? How did punk and post-punk challenge his sense of identity, his view of the British class system? Without information about the storyteller, we can’t get critical purchase on their story.Dessvärre är det Reynolds som är normen, Kogan undantaget. Den senare är okänd i Sverige, men Reynolds - och hans vulgärt reduktionistiska argumentation mot Kogans påstådda "popism" - hyllas och citeras flitigt på svenska popkulturbloggar.