Author: Matthew Westphal

Top Posts From AJBlogs 07.06.17

Janacek’s Vixen is re-thought and hunted down in the backstreets of London
The title, simply, is Vixen. It’s not The Cunning Little Vixen or Russ Meyer’s Vixen!, though it was closer to the former than the latter. And true to the foxiness of the title, you had to hunt it down. … read more
AJBlog: Condemned to Music Published 2017-07-06

Recent Listening: Kurt Rosenwinkel, Fanny Gunnarsson
Kurt Rosenwinkel, Caipi (RAZDAZ Records)
From his emergence in the 1990s, Rosenwinkel has been a relaxed guitar improviser even when negotiating the complex pieces that make him one of the most interesting … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2017-07-06

Great new jazz photography — Dee Kalea’s campaign
Dee Kalea of Creative Music Photography is old school, in that she’s created black and white images of jazz musicians in performance, closeup, usually one-to-a-frame. … read more
AJBlog: Jazz Beyond Jazz Published 2017-07-06

 

Transcendent Experiences – Who Was Right About Them, Freud Or James? And Are They Actually Good For You?

“Transcendence is a fundamental part of the human experience. Since the dawn of our species, people have been losing themselves in ritualistic prayer, song, and dance. Even so, for a long time, the prevailing consensus in psychology was that such experiences were pathological rather than natural. Freud believed that ‘oceanic feelings of oneness’ were neurotic memories of the womb and the signs of a deranged mind. … The person who got transcendence right, [research psychologist David] Yaden says, is William James.”

Learning Philosophy At The Movies

“Cinema can serve philosophy not in some ancillary role – for example, by providing ‘illustrations’ of philosophical problems in classroom settings – but in its own right, with its own means, and in a manner irreducible to the methods of traditional philosophy.” Exhibit A: Rashomon.

How Do You Choreograph A Dance With 10,000 Gestures, Every One Of Them Different?

“10000 Gestures … may be a one-line idea, but it’s an extremely complicated one. [Boris] Charmatz’s concept is that no gesture – a word he uses to refer to any single movement, be it a dance step or a shoulder shrug – is ever repeated; and that every dancer’s sequence is unique.” Says Charmatz, “If you don’t repeat, you are throwing your material away all the time. You cannot do ‘good’ choreography like this. … It takes the pressure away.”

Is Urban Dictionary ‘Really, Really Racist’ And ‘Insanely Sexist’?

“Started in 1999 by then-computer science student Aaron Peckham, the crowd-sourced online dictionary that The New York Times calls the ‘lexicon of instant argot’ has grown over the past two decades into an internet behemoth.” Problem is, the definitions are submitted by ordinary users. In other words, as Clio Chang argues, “it is a pure product of the internet hordes” – and the hordes have contributed some very ugly stuff to the site, stuff that Peckham seems uninterested in policing.