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This book does a fabulous job of fleshing out Smith's life and work, for those who are unfamiliar with him, or who like myself, simply knew him as the compiler of the AAFM, a work that would inspire a host of folk music revivalists in the 1960's, not least of whom was Bob Dylan. Understanding Smith's obsessions with collecting and pattern-discovery shed some light on the origins and meaning of the AAFM. The story of the AAFM as it is described here is that Smith was commissioned by Moses Asch, the founder of Folkways Records to assemble a compilation of folk music. Smith, in essence became a deejay, selecting tracks from his massive library of 78's. The tracks he selected were from records produced "between 1927, when electronic recording made possible accurate music reproduction, and 1932 when the depression halted folk music sales" (30). His primary selection criteria were songs that were odd or exotic "in relation to what was considered to be the world culture of high class music" (30).
Smith, the authors included in this volume observe, was the quintessential modernist - living and working largely in isolation. Thus, Greil Marcus is led to characterize the AAFM as Smith "imposing his oddness, his own status as one who didn't belong and who may not even have wanted to, his own identity as someone unlike anyone else and someone who no one else would want to be, on the country itself" (184). This imposition, when added on top of the record companies' original commodification of folk music, was undoubtedly the death blow to folk music as a phenomena of local culture. Marcus describes it in this way:
In folk music, as it was conventionally understood when Smith did his work, the song sung the singer. The song embodies tradition; the singer's body was simply the vehicle that delivered the song. He or she could not intervene in the song, or in the story or predicament it described. The performance was not an event; when the song played, there was no history. But Smith's work is modernist: the singer sings the song (184).
It comes as little surprise, then, that the oddity embodied in the AAFM was embraced by the counterculture movement of the 1950's and 1960's. The peculiarity once representative of particular places and people became a commodity that could be sold and purchased as a sign of one's oddness. Robert Cantwell describes the ultimate conquest of the AAFM: "[Its] color blindness....is only an aspect of a more comprehensive effacement that yields up an imagined people of no-race, no-time, no-place" (199). This triad of "no-race, no-time, no-place" has, of course, become familiar to us today as a fundamental and oppressive falsehood of modern global consumerism.
“Photography is an art for lazy people.” So said Robert Frank, the celebrated Swiss photographer, to Allen Ginsberg, the celebrated New Jersey poet, as they gathered in a Lower East Side flat to make a movie. Frank was at the height of his fame after publishing his monumental collection of photographs, “The Americans,” but had newly re-imagined himself as a beatnik and filmmaker. Also assembled in that apartment were Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, and an ensemble cast of hangers-on, lovers, admirers, and jazzmen, ready to conceive another erratic self-portrait.
just south of easton right off the canal and delaware river. 36.5k (55 and over community) sattelite view
photomontage
the primacy of matter / rehabilitating mud
A grip needs to be gotten here.
For the first time in 55 years, Philip Johnson's first commissioned residential home is up for sale. The famed modern architect, known for his inventive use of glass, designed and built this Bedford, N.Y., property known as the Booth House in 1946.
The two-story home with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the surrounding woodlands was a precursor to Mr. Johnson's iconic Glass House in New Canaan, Conn., built in 1949.
(communist era) bone light
rip peter orlovsky
laurie and lou have a senior moment music idea, dog music.
stock tank
8' wide by 2' tall, 715 gallons, galvanized 20 gage steel bottom, 21 gage sides
container art studio
Gallery House by Ogrydziak Prillinger Architects
rolling huts
chicken point cabin
rainy mood
via things mag
stream the grateful dead hour / tapers section
via lb fb
amy wilson tote wednesdays
