The Quotidian (formerly the Diurnal Journal): Jefferson Airplane

Showing posts with label Jefferson Airplane. Show all posts

November 16, 2016

A Close Reading Always Bounces You Outside The Text

Chat of Dr. Strange and psychedelia brings to mind the Tribute to Dr. Strange, a dance concert at Longshoreman's Hall in San Francisco in October of 1965, featuring the pre-Grace Jefferson Airplane, the Charlatans (the archetypal hippie band), and the Great Society, the group Grace was in when she wrote White Rabbit and where she first sang her brother-in-law's song Somebody to Love. Hosted by KYA's all-night DJ, Russ "the Moose" Syracuse, and produced by the pre-Chet Helms Family Dog, it was quite the tribute, from all reports. This was all a few years before the cover of the Pink Floyd album A Saucerful of Secrets, which incorporates the nod to the good Dr. referred to in the Crooked Timber post, demonstrating perhaps that America was chewing through its cultural capital about two and a half years faster than Britain was at the time.

January 28, 2016

Paul Kantner, March 17, 1941-January 28, 2016

January 23, 2008

House at Pooneil Corners

I don't know if this bit of civic exuberance go the band in any serious long term trouble, but I do know that no one inhabited the glorious portentiousness of psychedelic music any better than Jefferson Airplane. From a rooftop in 1968:

[…]
Seas from clouds will wash off the ashes of violence
Left as the memory of men
There will be no survivors my friend.

Suddenly everyone will look surprised
Stars spinning wheels in the skies
Sun is scrambled in their eyes
While the moon circles like a vulture.

Someone stood at the window and cried
"One tear and I thought that would stop the war,
But someone is killing me. Killing me."
And that's the last hour to think anymore.
Jelly and juice and bubbles - bubbles on the floor.

Castles on cliffs vanish
Cliffs like heaps of rubbish
Seen from the stars hour by hour
As splintered scraps and black powder.

From here to heaven is a scar
Dead center - deep as death
All the idiots have left
[…]

For some years now I've travelled bumptiously about the internet commenting on other people's blogs under the pseudonym "peter ramus," pointedly and I regret to say at times heatedly disclosing the general shape my own intricately devised misapprehension of current events in contradistinction to the remarkable torrent of misapprehensions made known daily on that medium by everyone else.

Nominally I associate myself as much as possible with the views of those who seem to know what they're talking about, but often enough I find myself obliged, like so many others, to go on about things I'm not in the least qualified to address simply because it is my way when the opportunity presents itself. I find this shortcoming as personally irritating as it is to those I've favored it with over the years, an as yet irrepressible feature of my discourse. Thus the admittedly defensive assumption of the nom de blog, "peter ramus."

"peter ramus" isn't to be confused with Peter Ramus, another fellow entirely, who lived and died a long time ago around the sad times leading up to the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in France, an event which saw his own undoing in the chaotic days that followed.

He was a zeolot, Peter Ramus was. He had a particular bone to pick with Aristotle over the stuff and substance of rhetoric, which led him to propose revolutionary changes in the subject and manner of teaching which prevailed in higher education in those times. A quaestio was convened, a solemn gathering of all the branches of civil society, to see what was to be done about him. The King sent a man, and the Church sent a man, and of course the University of Paris couldn't help but send one, too. Unsurprisingly, they found overwhelmingly in favor of Aristotle and against Peter Ramus. In addition, it pleased the members of the assembled body to pronounce Peter Ramus personally disagreeable and notably ugly to boot. Strictly as an aside.

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The ideas expressed here, and the words used to express them here, are the ideas and words of the Quotidian (formerly the Diurnal Journal), which is to say "peter ramus," which is to say, me. Naturally, given their ultimate source, the ideas are half-formed at times, provisional always, and subject on mature reflection to substantial revision and, often enough, to outright repudiation by the Quotidian (formerly the Diurnal Journal), by "peter ramus," and by me.

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