I have incomplete and evolving knowledge about the native peoples of the Pacific Northwest, so I am writing this post more to express my interest and ask questions, than to claim any expertise. From diverse sources I have encountered mention of song exchanges by Chinookan and other indigenous groups of the region. I have not learned the details of the process, or how they might have differed among different tribes or villages, but the general idea seems to be that songs are revered and not generally shared without permission, but they can be exchanged. If you know a song from […]
Journal
Our rich soil
Dead things fall into a million mouths, delicious material to tear apart and recycle, a heap of latent treasures for future shoots, flowers, boughs and antlers. I look at the remnants of art that have fallen, becoming our rich soil, these beautifully disintegrating attempts, brittle soul-leaves dropped from the skeletal limbs of decayed royalty, obsolete aristocracy. Nothing is lost here. The old gods, the great works, the dead dilettantes – their molecules are in your mouth.
Journal
Silent movies on the moon
Light travels through a vacuum; this is good news for art. We could watch a silent movie on the moon, or see a gallery opening on an asteroid, or read a book of poetry on a spacewalk. Assuming we don’t convert sound to electromagnetic transmission, to enjoy a concert we will still need air or some similar gang of molecules, bouncing the waves from the orchestra or loudspeakers into our ears. These materialist signal-transmission mechanisms omit the key element though. The physics of art can happen, theoretically, without the soul, but the medium is not the defining aspect. If we […]