Released 45 years ago. Original Rolling Stone review.
It was partly Harold’s idea, a few years ago, for the former New Orleans session musician, Mac Rebennack, to assume the persona of a mysterious voodoo character Dr. John, and it was Harold who collected the musicians together to concoct the gris-gris sound.
The word boredom did not enter the language until the eighteenth century. No one knows its etymology. One guess is that bore may derive from the French verb bourrer, to stuff.
Question: Why was there no such word before the eighteenth century?
(a) Was it because people were not bored before the eighteenth century? (But wasn’t Caligula bored?)
(b) Was it because people were bored but didn’t have a word for it?
(c) Was it because people were too busy trying to stay alive to get bored? (But what about the idle English royalty and noblemen?)
(d) Is it because there is a special sense in which for the past two or three hundred years the self has perceived itself as a leftover which cannot be accounted for by its own objective view of the world and that in spite of an ever heightened self-consciousness, increased leisure, ever more access to cultural and recreational facilities, ever more instruction on self-help, self-growth, self-enrichment, the self feels ever more imprisoned in itself—no, worse than imprisoned because a prisoner at least knows he is imprisoned and sets store by the freedom awaiting him and the world to be open, when in fact the self is not and it is not—a state of affairs which has to be called something besides imprisonment—e.g., boredom. Boredom is the self being stuffed with itself.
(e) Is it because of a loss of sovereignty in which the self yields up plenary claims to every sector of the world to the respective experts and claimants of these sectors, and that such a surrender leads to an impoverishment which must be called by some other name, e.g., boredom?
(f) Is it because the self first had the means of understanding itself through myth, albeit incorrectly, later understood itself through religion as a creature of God, and now has the means of understanding the Cosmos through positive science but not itself because the self cannot be grasped by positive science, and that therefore the self can perceive itself only as a ghost in a machine? How else can a ghost feel otherwise toward a machine than bored?
(CHECK ONE OR MORE)
Here’s an article in Motivation and Emotion.
Mary Murphy offers an overview of some of the good stuff, a world away from the nasty salt that most people are exposed to. I am familiar with A, a version of C, E, F, and H. For A, E, and H we purchased large sacks in Guérandeto to encrust a fish on a BBQ. The Canadian version of C I tried was way too pricey and though one can’t ever go wrong with truffle, the quality of the salt used was crap. I think that a truffled version of F could be an interesting experiment. Speaking of F (Maldon) it is probably the easiest to acquire and is well-priced. The test: put a few flakes on the yolk of a sunny side up fried egg and all will temporarily be right with the world. I’ll be on the lookout for some of those on her list that I’m unfamiliar with.
This Sunday get your butt down to D.B.A. for some fan firkin tastic music from the superb Deltaphonic. If you appreciate the sweet spot that is the confluence of all that is good about gritty “outlaw” Americana peppered with many a poetic moment, then this band is for you. I’ve listened to “See Red” a good 20 times now and I’m pleased to report that it’s a worthy follow-up to their brilliant debut “Texas, Texas”. And when you are back home with your copy of “See Red” and “Texas, Texas”, crank up the volume, crack open a bottle and light up. The next morning or whenever you re-enter orbit, crank it up again with your coffee to blow away the lingering fog induced from the previous night’s indulgence. Repeat prescription as and when your soul requires.
Well-worth listening to Cynthia what with the significance of today and recent events in Egypt. Now you don’t need to be an observant Christian to appreciate what she’s on about. But of course, if you are a regressive, despite your proclaimed universalist humanism, you will be oblivious to the fact that Islam does not have a Golden Rule — there is no such thing as humanity! You are still a Kafir and by keeping your head firmly up your own arse, that ain’t gonna afford you any protection — unless of course you SUBMIT. Yes, the duplicitous “religion of peace” self-evidently requires absolute submission. Right now you are a complicitous “useful idiot” in The Grand Deception, led by asinine Pied Pipers such as Trudeau and Khalid.
To commemorate the birth of Cosimo Matassa here is a newly launched website with everything you wanted to know about the legend and much more. Very nicely done indeed. Unsurprisingly, there is a vital UK connection in cracking the cataloging code and reconstituting the library of recordings, i.e. the obsessive need to track down obscure US records as per Northern Soul.
Christopher Hitchens, born on this day. See Christopher Buckley’s memoir in The New Yorker and Graydon Carter’s in Vanity Fair. While the virtue-signaling, cowardly and intellectually dishonest academic fetishizes white supremacy, they perversely ignore the infinitely larger and more pressing issue, that of Islamofacism. These regressive academics (many of them Jews) fulfill the role of “useful idiots”, functional to cultural Jihad. Whereas Mein Kampf has 7% of its text devoted to Jew hatred, across the Koran (Meccan and Medinan), the Sira and the Hadith, an average of 9.3% of the text is dedicated to Jew hatred, not to mention a total of 31% devoted to Jihad and the practical implementation thereof. Most of these apologists are oblivious (ignorant) to the fact that in the eyes of Islam they are Kafirs (كفّار) and as such are subject to being mocked (Koran 83:34), beheaded (Koran 47:4), plotted against (Koran 86:15), terrorized (Koran 8:12), disgraced (Koran 37:18) and more besides (Koran 3:28, 23:97, 33:61).
His journalism, in which he championed the victims of tyranny and stupidity and “Islamofascism” (his coinage), takes its rightful place on the shelf along with that of his paradigm, Orwell.
