I'm not so swift with 10 albums in 10 days... probably more like 10 albums in 100 days... my life (at 70ish) is packed from breakfast to past midnight... i have been scrambling these months and days to find money and clients for my archiving team of 7 people, and also maintaining my own work as a counselor--and that has left remarkably little time for reflection... perhaps things will slow down but i doubt it. the darkness is boiling out of the bone-pits under the malls and institutional halls of America and I doubt that it will "heal" or "come together" or any such thing.
It is one of three--maybe four or five--nations built on the blood and bones of the native population. As a result there are and cna be no roots here. Not. ever. No place on earth save a few islands has been unmolested and unconquered by its neighbors or conquered its neighbors and brought them home to breed... but in spite of this roiling complicated often insane and bizarre overlays of one tyrant upon the people of another - there yet remains mountains seen by ones' ancestors, food eaten for centuries, magicks and mists evoking the same beliefs and terrors for very truly time out of mind. America - a hissing bubble of European semen dropped on the iron skillet of ambition and greed... not even bothering to devour or assimilate the natives, simply negating them, 'because'...
Even India has fared better with the British Invasion - sure it has been contaminated and was cruelly cruelly crushed and then mesmerized by the false gods of Industry and Progress -- but there is still a core integrity - or a crore (thousand) - of integral identities... give them a century or two and like the invasions of the Mongols, Timor and the Turks (not in that order) the continent will boil, broil, transmute and infuse the Western Weirding Ways with their own endlessly great story - aka the Maha (great) Bharata (India)... And it is here that i introduce the third album = Improvisation and Theme from Pather Panchali by Ravi Shankar.
When i heard this, i was living on a gen-you-wine commune in the Finger Lakes of New York... but that is another story told somewhere else... but when i heard this, i had never heard a sitar or a tabla or any such thing, nor were there records of such things then... really! And when I heard this, oh... when I heard it I was homesick for the first and only time in my life. It called to me in a way nothing ever had, not even the beats or jazz, or new york city. Within a year I began my study of Sanskrit and its literature and became something of a success in cooking what few Indian dishes I could find in library books -- LIBRARY BOOKS! -- there was no curry take away, no youtubes on aloo gobi - it was all a search and a discovery - and when, eventually I arrived in India, it was indeed my home, or one of my three homes... which it remains to this day, as i continue to teach its doctrines and savor its many languages and sounds... Here is Ravi Shankar: not his best, but my first:
