Daily Archives: October 4, 2012

broken harbors

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Stars of the Lid – “Broken Harbors” (Parts 1, 2 & 3) from The Tired Sounds Of Stars Of The Lid (Kranky, 2001)

Tom Jurek, writing for AllMusic, said of this recording:

Having always made records that exist at the margins of descriptive language, this project by Austin, Texas’ most spaced-out duo, Stars of the Lid, is their most ambitious to date, featuring 11 tracks parcelled over two CDs (or three LPs), four of which are multi-part suites. Taking a step further down the road they embarked upon with Avec Laudanum, the duo have expanded the pure space and black hole vistas they offered on Music for Nitrous Oxide and The Ballasted Orchestra to embrace small melodic fragments that seemingly endlessly repeat through minimally varying textures. The effect can either be soothing (“Requiem for Dying Mothers”), hypnotic (“Broken Harbors”), or unsettling (“Austin Texas Mental Hospital”). The trademark analogue guitar/tape cut ups are ever present; what would normally be considered the sound of a guitar is nowhere in aural earshot…

…There is a progression in all the music here, but it is so subtle, so quiet and unintrusive, the listener would have to pay very careful attention to everything that is happening. More realistic, however, is for those who take pleasure in SOTL’s music and inner space explorations — for this truly is a music of the inner terrain — to offer themselves little distraction other than a comfortable chair or resting place in order to let this music enter at will, naturally and expand until it takes you over the edge into something resembling sleep, but far more delicious. Despite its more song-like structures, More Tired Songs is actually for those who are tired of songs, period, and are looking for something less, something unspeakably beautiful and determinedly unmentionable in its vast and luxuriant erasure from any musical category.

anima rising

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Joni Mitchell – “Don’t Interrupt the Sorrow”, from The Hissing of Summer Lawns (1975)


“It takes a heart like Mary’s these days when your man gets weak.”

Acoustic guitars – Joni Mitchell
Electric guitars – Larry Carlton
Dobro – Robben Ford
Bass – Wilton Felder
Drums – John Guerin
Congas – Victor Feldman

kierkegaard on transcending despair

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The despairing man who is unconscious of being in despair is, in comparison with him who is conscious of it, merely a negative step further from the truth and from salvation. Despair itself is a negativity, unconsciousness of it is a new negativity. But to reach truth one must pierce through every negativity. For here applies what the fairy tale recounts about a certain enchantment: the piece of music must be played through backward; otherwise the enchantment is not broken.

~ Søren Kierkegaard (under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus) – from The Sickness Unto Death (1849)

lee miller

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Even during the scandalous Roaring 20s, when women were bobbing their hair and baring their arms, products for “that time of the month” were advertised only very discreetly in women’s magazines. And until 1928, those ads featured line drawings or pastel paintings of females, never real women. But that taboo ended when photographer Edward Steichen sold a photo he’d shot of model and Voguecover girl Lee Miller to the Kotex Company. Miller’s modeling career in the U.S. was essentially kaput thanks to the scandalous placement of her photograph, and she fled to Paris where she studied photography and eventually became a renowned photographer in her own right.

In 1929, Lee traveled to Paris with the intention of apprenticing herself to the surrealist artist and photographer Man Ray. Although, at first, he insisted that he did not take students, Miller soon became his photographic assistant, as well as his lover and muse. While she was in Paris, she began her own photographic studio, often taking over Man Ray’s fashion assignments to enable him to concentrate on his painting. In fact, many of the photographs taken during this period and credited to Man Ray were actually taken by Lee.
At the outbreak of World War II, Miller was living in Hampstead, London with Roland Penrose when the bombing of the city began. Ignoring pleas from friends and family to return to the US, Miller embarked on a new career in photojournalism as the official war photographer for Vogue, documenting the Blitz. Lee was accredited into the U.S. Army as a war correspondent for Condé Nast Publications from December 1942.
She teamed up with the American photographer David E. Scherman, a LIFE correspondent on many assignments. Miller traveled to France less than a month after D-Day and recorded the first use of napalm at the siege of St. Malo, the liberation of Paris, the battle for Alsace, and the horror of the Nazi concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau. One photograph by Scherman of Miller in the bathtub of Adolf Hitler’s apartment in Munich is one of the most iconic images from the Miller-Scherman partnership.
 Miller wrote to her Vogue editor Audrey Winters:

“I was living in Hitler’s private apartment when his death was announced, midnight of Mayday … Well, alright, he was dead. He’d never really been alive to me until today. He’d been an evil-machine-monster all these years, until I visited the places he made famous, talked to people who knew him, dug into backstairs gossip and ate and slept in his house. He became less fabulous and therefore more terrible, along with a little evidence of his having some almost human habits; like an ape who embarrasses and humbles you with his gestures, mirroring yourself in caricature. “There, but for the Grace of God, walks I.”

When the photo came out, it was considered an extremely poor judgement. For some, Miller posing nude in the tub of one of the most repulsive men in history was nothing more than a ill-timed reflection of the adage, “To the victor goes the spoils”. For others, it represents the power of life over death, “The living do what they can and the dead suffer what they must”. Lee Miller herself shied away from the controversies but reprouding the image very rarely and noted that she was merely trying to wash the odors of Dachau away.


 Lee Miller smiles in combat fatigues in Alsace 1944. It was said that no soldier could resist a photographer with a fashion model’s striking beauty. The photo was taken by her friend and colleague, Life magazine’s David E. Scherman.

adorno on beauty and the lie

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Even the tree which blooms, lies, the moment that one perceives its bloom without the shadow of horror; even the innocent “How beautiful” becomes an excuse for the ignominy of existence, which is otherwise, and there is no longer any beauty or any consolation, except in the gaze which goes straight to the horror, withstands it, and in the undiminished consciousness of negativity, holds fast to the possibility of that which is better.