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Free on the Inside: Jazz Fest eat your heart out
I’m astonished that the music press, especially the Southern-based press, haven’t given this concert any mention — at least so far as I can determine. It has the most distinguished of lineups one can imagine and is exquisitely performed — Jamie Davis, Scotty Barnhart, Dennis Wilson, Ken Miller, Greg Errico (drummer with The Family Stone!!!!), Wycliffe Gordon, Lady Bianca, Charles McNeal, Roger Glenn, Arnett Hayes, and Topsy Chapman (misspelt as Tracy on the album) and the Angola Inmate Choir. A lineup such as this would be a dream ticket at Jazz Fest. There is no youtube footage of the show but if you are a fan of that wonderful and powerful mix of big band, jazz, gospel and funk, this album won’t disappoint. Inferring from Governor Burl Cain’s brief remarks, there was a cockup on the organizational front: the Rodeo Arena could have been filled. This said, the controlled space of the Chapel has made for an exceptionally good recording. And by the way, if like me you think that Lou Rawls was an infinitely more talented vocalist than Sinatra (controversial I know), then Jamie Davis really is your man. (To Sinatra’s credit he said that Rawls had “the classiest singing and silkiest chops in the singing game”). Please support this small musician run independent label.
The Mangy Parrot 4
The silliest thing some parents do is to make their son become a lawyer or a priest by brute force, even when he has no vocation for such a career, nor any talent for letters: a baneful process, whose pernicious effects are daily bemoaned when we see all these paper-pushing lawyers, murderous doctors, and ignorant, dissolute priests.
*****
This Supreme Being is certainly the one and only true omniscient, for He is the one and only one who truly knows everything that can be known; and in this sense, admitting another man to be omniscient would be to admit another God, an absurdity far from the minds of even those who honor the profound Leibniz with this pompous title.
*****
Donkeys enter the colleges and universities every day to deliver loads of coal or stone, and when they leave, they are still the same dumb brutes they were when they entered.
*****
Right was Terence to say that mothers abet their children’s wickedness and obstruct the fathers who would correct them.
*****
From the way I began, you will see that I was completely depraved. And so I went on to study philosophy.
From The Sciences of the Artificial to Cognitive History
The fourth in a series of excerpts from Minds, Models and Milieux: Commemorating the Centennial of the Birth of Herbert Simon.
Subrata Dasgupta
It is well known that Herbert Simon was a 20th century scientific polymath who made seminal contributions to the social sciences, behavioral sciences, design theory, computer science, and the philosophy of science (Dasgupta, 2003a, 2003b). My interest in Simon in this essay, however, lies in his remarkable and highly original book, The Sciences of the Artificial (Simon, 1996). In this work (henceforth referred to as Sciences), which in a sense unifies his multidisciplinary contributions, Simon dwells on the concept and nature of the human-made or artificial world, the things that populate it – artifacts – and in what sense and how the making of the artificial yields to scientific investigation.
In this chapter I wish to explore a particular consequence of the ideas put forth in Sciences. I wish to show how some of the key concepts advanced in it affords a conceptual framework for a (relatively) new historical discipline for the study of human creativity, the creative tradition, and the intellectual tradition. This discipline is called cognitive history.
Happy Birthday Fats
Fats is 88! American Masters is presenting the broadcast premiere of the recent Fats Domino documentary on February 26, his 88th birthday. Fats’ comeback album is really worth a listen, short but very sweet.
Disclosing the World: Intentionality and 4E Cognition
The very excellent Mark Rowlands. I’m very much looking forward to the handbook.
Tintin and I – Hergé
Why do the comic-strip Adventures of Tintin, about an intrepid boy reporter, continue to fascinate decades after their publication? “Tintin and I” highlights the potent social and political underpinnings that give Tintin’s world such depth, and delve into the mind of Hergé, Tintin’s work-obsessed Belgian creator, to reveal the creation and development of Tintin. Rare and surprisingly candid 1970s interviews reveal the profound insecurities and anxieties that drove Hergé to produce stories that have not only entertained millions of children (and adults) but also helped to satisfy a personal longing for self-expression. Herge is taped in a rare interview by journalist Numa Sadoul along with an interview with Tintin expert, the late Harry Thompson.
Walker Percy Wednesday 73
A poor man sets store by good boots.
******
For the world is broken, sundered, busted down the middle, self ripped from self and man pasted back together as mythical monster, half angel, half beast, but no man. Even now I can diagnose and shall one day cure: cure the new plague, the modern Black Death, the current hermaphroditism of the spirit, namely: More’s syndrome, or: chronic angelism-bestialism that rives soul from body and sets it orbiting the great world as the spirit of abstraction whence it takes the form of beasts, swans and bulls, werewolves, blood-suckers, Mr. Hydes, or just poor lonesome ghost locked in its own machinery.
******
Knowing, not women, said Sir Thomas, is man’s happiness.
******
Some stayed, mostly eccentrics who don’t fit in anywhere else. I stayed because it’s home and I like its easygoing ways, its religious confusion, racial hodgepodge, misty green woods, and sleepy bayous. People still stop and help strangers lying in ditches having been set upon by thieves or just plain drunk. Good nature usually prevails, even between enemies. As the saying goes in Louisiana: you may be a son of a bitch but you’re my son of a bitch.
*******
Past history: native of Nassau, graduate of U. of Conn. and Syracuse. He tells me it is his plan to “unite in his own life the objective truths of science with the universal spiritual insights of Eastern religion.”
******
“You want to know where it all began to go wrong?” Moon asks me, nodding toward a foursome of sepia golfers.
“Where?”
“It started when we abandoned the Latin mass.”
******
“I’m staggering with her, a noble, surprisingly heavy, Presbyterian armful.
“You’re drunk.”
“Yes.”
“Where do you think you’re going?”
“In here. Put the spoon down.”
She puts the spoon down and I put her down on her new $600 bed.
To bed we go for a long winter’s nap, twined about each other as the ivy twineth, not under a bush or in a car or on the floor or any such humbug as marked the past peculiar years of Christendom, but at home in bed where all good folk belong.
Luis Buñuel
Born on this day.
Memory may be omnipotent and indispensable, but it’s also terribly fragile. The menace is everywhere, not only from its traditional enemy, forgetfulness, but from false memories, like my often repeated story about Paul Nizan’s wedding in the 1930s. The Church of St.-Germain-des-Prés, where he was married, is crystal clear in my mind’s eye. I can see the congregation, myself among them, the altar, the priest~evenJe an-Paul Sartre, the best man. And then suddenly, one day last year, I said to myself-but that’s impossible! Nizan, a militant Marxist, and his wife, who came from a family of agnostics, would never have been married in a church! It was categorically unthinkable. Did I make it up? Confuse it with other weddings? Did I graft a church I know well onto a story that someone told me? Even today, I’ve no idea what the truth is, or what I did with it.
Our imagination, and our dreams, are forever invading our memories; and since we are all apt to believe in the reality of our fantasies, we end up transforming our lies into truths. Of course, fantasy and reality are equally personal, and equally felt, so their confusion is a matter of only relative importance.
In this semiautobiography, where I often wander from the subject like the wayfarer in a picaresque novel seduced by the charm of the unexpected intrusion, the unforeseen story, certain false memories have undoubtedly remained, despite my vigilance. But, as I said before, it doesn’t much matter. I am the sum of my errors and doubts as well as my certainties. Since I’m not a historian, I don’t have any notes or encyclopedias, yet the portrait I’ve drawn is wholly mine with my affirmations, my hesitations, my repetitions and lapses, my truths and my lies. Such is my memory.
(Italics added)
What’s it all about?
H/T to Jesse Norman and Nigel Warburton.
Julian Baggini on the meaning of life
What’s it all about, Alfie?
manwithoutqualities 