Nearly a full year has gone by since I updated this blog. I lost control of it; now I have it back. Hope that those of you who used to read it haven't forgotten about it!
Pratt in A2A week ago today I went to Rackham to see a free concert with Awadagin Pratt, whose recordings I used to sell with some frequency at the Virgin Megastore - I well remember selling one to Molly Ringwald - very striking lady, seen up close...
The weather was just abysmal - not so much snow but the temp was well below zero. For such conditions, the turnout was pretty good, but when Pratt made his entrance he was visibly disappointed and kind of sniffed at us. Then he sat down and played his signature piece, the Franck Op. 18 Prelude Fugue and Variations in Harold Bauer's transcription. He started it off rather impatiently, like "let's get this over with" but settled into it as ot progressed. The Brahms Haydn Variations was MUCH better - the first variation almost boogied. After the break, Pratt treated us to the Liszt B minor - an what a B minor! He tore into the opening measures with such force and intensity I thought, "Good, at least we're not going to have a safe B minor here."
Pratt did not take an encore - the hall, though, filled out considerably after his first piece was done. He is teaching at Cincinnati, and I would have loved to have had a meet and greet with him. I would have enjoed asking him "Do you know my friend Chris Hill? How are you getting along with Joel? Be sure to stay away from the cops in that town..." But Awadagin Pratt is NOT a "meet and greet" kind of guy...
Bone Up On Your Historical TerroristsFound a very interesting site today -
http://www.baader-meinhof.com/ It's written by a book author who is finishing up a book, in English, on the Red Army Faction and their various offpring. It might be a dangerous thing to say so these days, but I think we can learn a lot about terrorism in general from the way these guys behaved. It made me very angry to hear President Bush say, right after 9/11, "We have borne the brunt of terrorism in the world." As bad as 9/11, that's simply not true - it's the Germans, Italians, Spanish and Israelis that bore it before us, on a smaller scale but just as deadly and wasteful.
Folks of my generation, back in the 70s-early 80s, were kind of fascinated by the RAF because they had an avant-garde cachet - Brian Eno and Cabaret Voltaire did songs about them. But there was very little information about them. A little later, not long after Fassbinder died, I saw "The Third Generation" which I still feel was his greatest film and based on the misadventures of the RAF and their minions. They were kind of middle-class people with consumer values who were carrying on a revolution of their own within revolutionary East Germany. In fact, when the Soviet bloc fell, so did they, although it took seven years for the RAF to admit it. They were kind of similar to the Manson Family except they were older, educated people, except that their leader, Andreas Baader, was a common criminal. I was amused to read that Jean-Paul Sarte called Baader an "asshole." The 'cachet' came from the fact that the ringleaders died in prison, apparent suicides all, except that the suspiscion was that the East German government sort of executed them without due process. That is still a very touchy spot in German politics.
At least the Taliban and other fractions within the Middle East have their religious principles to drive them - these people had principles of a kind, but did not essentially agree on what they were doing and why; sort of like Manson and like the Symbionese Liberation Organization in the U.S. in the 1970s. What I find significant is that the RAF functioned as an extremely left wing group within a left wing government - sort of as if the Religious Right overthrew the U. S. Constution and then small bands of very Right wing survivalist groups began to conduct terror operations against it. Indeed, the insurgents in Iraq are revolting against the revoltion which we created - Haven't we learned anything about terrorism from these past examples? I guess the RAF is not covered in "Terrorism for Dummies..."
Show Thursday Morning on www.wcbn.orgI do have something planned, although I didn't realize it's "fundraiser" time and didn't really plan anything special. I'm going to play a Don Gillis symphony, some Chico O'Farrill and some "sound-alike" rock records from the 1950s. Tune me from 6-9am and if you are of a mind to shower me in chump change that will be great! I generally don't earn very much for the station - most of the folks who listen to my program pledge to other shows on 'CBN. But I'll try.
Glad to be back,
Uncle Dave Lewis