Hello again. A few days ago, I realized that my staunch and steadfast old blog, initiated back in 1999 when the term “blog” had not yet been coined, shuffled back and forth between html texts loaded to geocities to blogger, to self-hosted wordpress and now wordpress.com had proved somewhat the worse for wear. Many of the photos would no longer load, facebook had changed its access codes and those photos and embeds would no longer load. It had also suffered from a fairly irritating self-inflicted bout of IFTTT automatic posts from facebook, which resulted in blog posts that were just titles with no other content.
Now, I have pored through the back pages of my life, sifting and reconstructing over 650 entries, hoping some purpose is served, wondering if other bloggers feel like this. What a strange thing, to keep a meticulous record on one’s days on earth and serve it up to an uncertain readership. To what end? I am reminded of Greg Bear’s Jarts.
InĀ Eternity, the character Olmy Ap Sennon comes face to face and mind-to-mind with a captured Jart and comes to learn their motivations. They are in a sense a sort of Borg, though instead of assimilation, their goal is to archive and preserve records of all places and species to present to Descendant Command, a supreme being at the apex of their rigidly hierarchical society. This preservation is in the form of being recorded and frozen into enormous memory banks, with all records essentially unchanging in the ultimate great library. The Jarts consider the very purpose of their existence to capture and record everything possible in order to present it as a sort of offering to Descendant Command at the time of the ultimate end of the universe…
So, I will serve this chunk of experience up to Descendant Command, here you go, Descendants. I am your Jart correspondent. Do with this what you will.
Wounds and Blessings is a brand new studio double album by Blaine L. Reininger, the Colorado-born composer and founder member of avant-garde music group Tuxedomoon.
Wounds and Blessings is a collection of 28 new tracks organised into 4 distinct suites. While all the music is performed and produced by Reininger, featured guests include his Tuxedomoon colleagues Steven Brown, Luc van Lieshout and Paul Zahl, as well as former Indoor Life member Bob Hoffnar and Reininger’s Greek guitarist, Tile-machos Moussas.
On this expansive double set Reininger employs all the tools in his current arsenal, from AI-assisted lyrics to sampler bricolage, to violin and guitar virtuosity, a vast array of computer plug-ins and effects, and a trompe l’oeil assortment of 20th century avant-garde compositional methods.
“When I’m working,” explains Blaine, “and a piece begins to reveal itself to me, I always follow where it leads. It becomes clear that it requires a violin, or a guitar, or lyrics. Whether it should be harsh or serene, orchestral, or entirely electronic. So it is with this new collection. Also, in the vocal songs, the subject of mortality has surfaced time and time again, albeit in a lucid manner and without becoming morbid, or fearful. I’m pleased with the results, and grateful to have the means to write every day and present my music to you.’
The album is produced by Reininger, with mixing and mastering by long-time collaborator Coti K. Cover portrait and booklet photography by George Geranios.
Tracklist:
Disc 1:
1. 100 Sad Fingers 2. I Inhabit the Dunes 3. Je Retournerai 4. Magnetic Flux 5. Chemise Grise 6. Trials and Tribulations 7. I Am An Old Poem 8. Goby Life 9. The Days Gone By 10. Roll Off the Edge 11. Duello 12. Silver Pants 13. Occult Simplicities 14. Pleyel Harvest
Disc 2:
1. One of Those Things 2. Begin Your Day, Winny 3. You’re Lucky 4. Slipstream 5. Newbs Descending a Staircase 6. Lockdown Blues 7. Indra’s Dream 8. Die Ferne Klang 9. Sun Package 10. Unbirthday 11. Quarter Teen 12. Cahiers Noirs 13. Harvest Moon 14. Push
CD album | gg350Blaine L. Reininger needs no special introduction. He is an American post-punk, new-wave and alternative pop singer, songwriter, musician, multi-instrumentalist (particularly violin), writer and performer. He is known for being a member of the group Tuxedomoon since 1977 after co-founding it with Steven Brown and, latterly, for a notable music and theatre career, both as a soloist and contributor to other artists’ recordings, including The Durutti Column, Snakefinger, Anna Domino, Savage Republic or Paul Haig. After learning the violin and guitar during childhood and studying music theory in San Francisco, Reininger formed the band Tuxedomoon with composer, singer, musician and college-mate Steven Brown and appeared on early albums such as Half Mute, Desire and Suite En Sous-Sol before departing early in 1983 to pursue a solo career. He permanently rejoined Tuxedomoon in 1988 and has subsequently appeared on more recent recordings such as Vapour Trails, issued in 2007 by independent label Crammed Discs. Songs From The Rain Palace was released in 1990 by Les Disques Du Crepuscule in Belgium on CD and cassette. It features amongst other guests Tuxedomoon’s Peter Principle. For this re-issue, the album was remastered by Martin Bowes and features 5 bonus tracks – two off compilations that came out at the time and three from Blaine’s archive. Full tracklist: 1. My TV 2. Song For J.J. 3. One Way Man 4. Justice 5. Zeb And Lulu 6. Between K-Mart And Paradise 7. Voice Of The Hive 8. Winter In Wien 9. La Tombee De La Nuit 10. Pere Lachaise 11. Spaziergang 12. Grapelli Hook 13. Japanese Dream (Early) 14. Visions In Fire 15. Where Are You 16. Nocturne In 7. Price: ā¬ 17,-/copy incl. worldwide shipping.
Corona-wise, things are opening up around here. I have a haircut appointment for tomorrow. We have had a blessedly small attack of the furies, sustaining a little over 150 deaths in total. People are being a bit too lax in their social distancing, though. I hope it doesn’t accelerate. Certain shops are open, others and restaurants and cafes and bars remain closed. Funnily enough, there is a cafe in the platia I now frequent on my bike rides, Platia Agias Thomas, where the tables and chairs were left out, though the place remains closed. People just buy coffees from the still-open takeout places and sit there yakking and smoking.
Thankfully, we are spared the insane death wish politics infesting America now. First, the right wing propaganda convinced people that they didn’t want health insurance, now they are convinced that it is their constitutional right to die gasping on a ventilator. In fact, wanting the government to supply that ventilator is itself an act of treason. They will defend that right with their cold dead hands wrapped around their AR 15’s.
Greetings all, welcome to the mediocre 1970’s TV movie about an escaped virus that we are all now living.
When you see those kinds of films or read such books, you often wonder how it would be to live through such an event. Now we are all finding out.
I am grateful for social media in these times. I find that people online are maintaining calm and equanimity, at least the ones that get through to my feed.Ā
We will certainly emerge from this situation, though we can’t now be sure of what kind of shape we will all be in. I don’t have anything wise or even all that comforting to say about this, except to re-assert that all of this is illusory, staged to teach us some damn lesson or other. It’s the figuring out what that lesson is supposed to be that is maddening.
This has been quite a year, my friends. All of the political horrorshow notwithstanding, of course. We get enough of that every bloody where we look every day all the goddam time. So no more of that. Just a smiling, bodhisattva-like wish of radiant compassion, the sincere hope that we all prosper in the coming spin around our star. That is all.
Dat Tuxedomoon-kopstuk Blaine L. Reininger wel meer op zijn strijkstok heeft dan de Tuxedomoonnummers, weten we al langer. Zo schrijft hij ook muziek voor theater- en dansproducties. Op zijn nieuwe album Commissions 2 krijgen we dat deeltje van zijn oeuvre te horen, dat hij tussen 2015 en 2019 produceerde. Eerder werk uit dat genre kregen we in 2014 op de eerste Comissions.
āSince 2015,ā legt Blaine zelf uit, āI have played a ukulele-weilding Satan in The Master and Margarita, been a one-man band to accompany Caligluaās evil antics six times a week, and ā most recently ā played and sung at sunset with a ten-piece choir before the very wall of the Mauthause*-n concentration camp in Austria.ā
Yes, today, in spite of the many hazards posed by the Greek postal system, my new double CD of theatre music is here in my hand. It may be acquired at these co-ordinates
Now the process has started. Packing to move. Our building has been sold out from under us for hotel conversion and we have to move by the end of November. Here we go.
Luckily, we have somewhere to go, unlike many. But I, moon child in the extreme fear having to move, even to the extent that I hate having to change hotel rooms once I have opened my suitcase and will tolerate a substandard room because of it.
We must vacate this building which has been our home for over 15 years. This building with its Acropolis and mountain view, 5th floor penthouse, housing the best studio facilities I have ever had, helping usher in one of the most productive periods in my creative life. This house which has been home to our love, this sustaining boon, my best, my final love.
This Air BnB gentrification has taken off in Athens in a big and depressing way, as it has, I guess, in many cities around the world. With the current tourist boom, groups and consortia and other slime mold type organisms have banded together to buy up all of the rental properties in central Athens and convert them to lofts, studio apartments, hotels, to serve those tourists.
The streets of the center are now choked, as never before, with hoards of white people, wearing shorts and flip-flops well into winter, zipping around on the electric scooters that now litter the landscape, chowing down in one of the countless new restaurants, snack bars, grills, boozing up in one of the countless new bars and clubs
This is the fundamental injustice of the landlord/tenant relationship, the knowledge that one is not the owner of one’s shelter and that access may one day be suddenly revoked in the service of material gain not one’s own. Fie, fie on thee. No wonder Marx called property theft.
This recording captures the early stages of an important transition in the band: the classic repertoire matured and consolidated, with new pieces tentatively brought in, performed live before their studio counterparts have been recorded.
Recorded live at The Venue, London, 9 March 1982
This recording captures the early stages of an important transition in the band: the classic repertoire matured and consolidated, with new pieces tentatively brought in, performed live before their studio counterparts have been recorded.
This recording captures the early stages of an important transition in the band: the classic repertoire matured and consolidated, with new pieces tentatively brought in, performed live before their studio counterparts have been recorded. Interestingly enough, various of these new pieces would end up on Blaineās solo albums, therefore presaging early signs of the temporary split to come. Worthy of note is the track āLumiĆØreā, which, although never recorded in this form, ended up providing the harmonics for Blaineās instrumental āEl Mensajero Divinoā, a little over a year later. Heitor Alvelos, 2019
credits
Recorded live at The Venue, London, 9 March 1982
Performers: Steven Brown Bruce Geduldig Peter Principle Blaine L. Reininger Winston Tong
Live sound by Gareth Jones
Mastered by Anselmo Canha, 2019
Originally traded online with Peter Principle
Cover based on a flyer for Sordide Sentimental, 1981
Here is a text I wrote in 2008 which I delivered as a monologue before our production of “The Bacchae” by Euripides. I was originally supposed to play Dionysus but the greek was too dense for me. The director had me play “Old Dionysus” like a retired rock star. I came out alone before the play and delivered this speech. Then I played a Phrygian tune (the mode associated with Dionysus) on a melodica and buggered off.
By Blaine L. Reininger
How can modern people understand āthe godsā? We tend to think about them in one of two ways. They are either familiar fictional heroes like Superman, or Spiderman, or even Bugs Bunny, or they represent some Jungian archetype or psychological metaphor. Almost no one today (with the exception of certain interesting and strange groups who like to wear hoods at night) believes that the ancient immortal gods are real beings who can and do enter human history to effect change. A god, or deity can be defined as āan immortal being believed to have more than natural attributes and powers requiring human worshipā By definition, a god would have to be so superior to a mortal human as to be almost impossible for him to conceive. Phillip K. Dick illustrated this point by saying that humanity was like a group of crabs living in a cloudy aquarium tended by an often neglectful human owner, almost completely unaware of the being or beings who tended their habitat, seeing that they were fed, regulating the temperature, etc. These crabs would find it utterly impossible to understand the motivations or desires of such advanced beings. Similarly, if the human owner wished to somehow manifest amongst these crabs, he would constantly be frustrated in his attempts to communicate, coming up against the wall of crab understanding. He would find himself required to translate complex information into terms of hunger, fear, threats of violence, and desire to reproduce. Imagine then, the distaste and frustration which must have been felt by a being like Dionysus, compelled to manifest among the ancient Mediterranean peoples. In my own research into world religion, I have increasingly come to harbor the notion that the gods and goddesses of mythology were and continue to be real beings. If only for reasons of entertainment, I believe that they were either
Highly advanced human or extraterrestrial beings, elevated to divine status by technology or profound spiritual achievement, whose activities were only dimly remembered by the less advanced peoples of their times and set down as stories passed on by word of mouth. Or
Transcendental beings who entered the world of phenomena only by means of a human medium, in the manner proposed by Aleister Crowley and practitioners of Voodoo.
In assuming the first case to be true, we find interesting parallels to the story of Dionysus in other religions, notably the story of Krishna in Hinduism. If, as Dionysus himself asserts, he came āfrom the Eastā then it would stand to reason that he would first visit India. In India, known as Krishna, he also enjoyed the company of many women (known as āGopisā) in natural surroundings where he would play music for them and they would dance for days. Other āsolarā gods whose stories are similar to that of Dionysus include, Attis of Phrygia, Osiris, Mithras, Balder and many others. In the second case, the godsā manifestation into the world of events through their āpossessionā of human worshippers, we can find one explanation for the longevity of the cult of Dionysus. The Bacchic cult lasted for at least 2000 years, a longevity not easily explained if it consisted only of wine-powered orgies out in the woods, like an endless series of Woodstocks. The direct experience of the divine through possession of a worshipperās mind and body would provide a tangible and powerful foundation through which to understand and survive the many shocks and exhilarations of living, one not easily provided by religions whose only understanding is cerebral, not visceral. Such a religion would be difficult to suppress, and, indeed, the similar cults of Santoria and Voodoo continue to prosper in spite of the historic efforts of the Catholic church to erase them.
In conclusion, I must admit that in attempting to understand the gods, I have embarked upon a futile quest. I will never know the gods by containing them within my understanding. I, like my other crab colleagues must content myself with what is possible for me to know, until such time as one of the gods sees fit to reveal himself in our midst again. I thank you for your kind attention.
Hello, wordpress. let’s see what happens here. yours. I want to breathe some life into this old chestnut. then I guess I’ll put the rss feed back on my site.
Ian is off to Sydney and his adult life. He will start school at the University in Sydney, Australia, aiming to study medicine and become a cardiac surgeon.
Hello, wordpress. let’s see what happens here. yours. I want to breathe some life into this old chestnut. then I guess I’ll put the rss feed back on my site.
Inside Mundoblaineo 