[Landline] Baraka time
Positive psychic power sources left to us by our cultural ancestors
Hello friends,
Here’s ten to help you go, as we descend into World War 2.5 (or worse). Maybe one—or more—will catch a fire.
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Now, on with the hit parade…
1. AT HOME WITH ÉLIANE RADIGUE
As a follow-up to last week’s salute to the recently passed French composter Éliane Radigue (via the always excellent WFMU digital radio show, Explorers Room With Flash Strap), here’s a link to Éliane Radigue – Échos, a sublime 33-minute film of the great woman reflecting on her work made in 2021 by directors François Bonnet and Eléonore Huisse, who’ve made it available for free viewing right now on Vimeo. Remove distractions; make time and space for this, seriously. Highest recommendation. Click here to absorb. (You may need to sign in — I can’t tell.)
2. HOW TO GET SECOND SIGHT; OR, DINING OUT WITH DR. JOHN
From Robert Sietsema, describing a 2005 meal at A Fan Ti, a northern Chinese restaurant on a Flushing side street:
Read more:
3. ADVENTURING AROUND THE WORLD WITH MALCOLM MCLAREN
A genuinely ecstatic, generous, full-hearted 47-minute video document from 1983 of, as McLaren puts it, “the mood of the populace, rising up against the bland, boring, redundant sounds of the modern world.”
You probably won’t need anything more after that, but if you do, scroll on, sailor…
4. UP IN THE HOLLER WITH POPCORN SUTTON
Grab a jar of whiskey and sit back. Yes, there’s a bit too many earnest folk music interludes, but that’s what the fast forward and mute buttons are for. Popcorn Sutton! He did the lord’s other work.
5. AT HOME WITH ALEXANDER TROCCHI IN HIS TIMELESS APARTMENT
Four-minute clip from ‘Cain’s Film’ (1969) features a visual tour of his living space (gotta watch it on youtube, it won’t embed here)….
6. AT HOME WITH IASOS, IN OUTRAGEOUS BLISS-LOVE WITH THE UNIVERSE
Is it legal to be this happy on camera? The answer: Well, it was then. Too much!
7. IN L.A. JAIL WITH RICHARD PRYOR IN 1976
The Official Richard Pryor channel has recently started uploading his ‘70s stand-up records, which still…stand up. Okay, I haven’t examined the entirety of “L.A. Jail” yet during my early morning walks in the park, but I can definitely vouch for this other one. Solid gold genius. Even the audience laughter is funny.
8. AT WAR IN ITALY WITH BUNNY ROGER
From “Today There Are No Gentlemen: The Changes in Englishmen's Clothes Since the War” (1971) by Nik Cohn:
Here: Today There Are No Gentlemen: The Changes in Englishmen’s Clothes Since the War (archive.org)
Here: more on Bunny Roger
9. VERY FAR OUT WITH FAR EAST FAMILY BAND
Here: where to go for more on Far East Family Band
10. IN MOROCCO WITH BOB PALMER
From “Into the Mystic” by the music journalist Robert Palmer, originally published in the March 23, 1989 Rolling Stone and collected in Blues & Chaos, the Palmer omnibus (2009, Scribner):
From my hotel window, I hear the dogs—Tangier is known for having more, and louder, dogs than any other city—barking across the distances. The late Brion Gysin—painter, poet, visionary, patron of the Master Musicians who live in the mountain village of Jajouka, and influence on artists ranging from Burroughs to Paul Bowles, the Rolling Stones to David Bowie, Iggy Pop to Patti Smith—taught me to listen to the dogs when I lived here in the early seventies. He claimed he had cracked the dogs’ code and used to provide a running translation: “Everything okay there? Enough food? People good?” And from miles away in the suburbs the responses would come back: “Good food here, but people beat us.” “Out here we’re hungry.”
Now the enormous speakers of the Mosque Mohammed V crackles, and the honey-voiced muezzin’s cantillation of verses from the Koran ricochets off the white walls of the city, quieting the dogs. The chanting forms a sonic grid that focuses, or perhaps completes, the City as Ideal Form: The community of the faithful is being irradiated by harmonics of degree and distance. Tangier’s cunningly balanced architecture of surfaces, arches and crenelated towers servers as a kind of transformer for the spiritual electricity of the muezzin’s call. In Morocco there are different kinds of electricity. This kind is called baraka, a kind of psychic current that certain holy places, sounds and people absorb and hold like storage batteries. The receptive can plug into these power sources—without getting fried, one hopes.
Wishing you the best in plugging into all available positive psychic power sources left to us by our cultural ancestors,
Jay
Tucson/Patagonia, Arizona
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