B12 Solipsism

Another edition of Songs That Randomly¹ Played While I Was In My Meditation Pod. I’m not good with “Best Of” lists, as my taste are too mercurial to lock down, so these meditations will have to suffice…

1. Calexico- Corona

   
   Convict Pool

   One of my favorite new(ish) discoveries, and not just because Calexico were chosen to be the house band for the Bob Dylan soundtrack album, I’m Not Here. This is a cover of a great Minutemen song, from their best album,

   
   Double Nickles on the Dime

   and just not any cover, but a conjunto-esque mariachi version with fiddle, horns, etc. that swings. Highly enjoyable.

2. The Dillards- Lemon Chimes
   Where The Action Is!: Los Angeles Nuggets 1965-1968
   I love garage rock, love these Rhino compilations, though this song has more of a bluegrass vibe. Written by Dewey Martin, later of Buffalo Springfield. 2:37 seconds only – must have been released as a 45 single.
3. Johann Sebastian Bach – Bach Edition, Vol. 4 – Cantatas, Vol. 1 [Disc 3]
   Bach: Cantata #72, BWV 72, “Alles Nur Nach Gottes Willen” – Alles Nur Nach Gottes Willen- Ruth Holton, Sytse Buwalda, Etc.; Piet Jan Leusink: Netherlands Bach Collegium, Holland Boys Choir
   I bought a lot of new-to-me classical music last year, not least of which was the set this piece came from, The Complete Bach²- 155 CDs worth. Still haven’t finished playing the entire thing, much less converting all the discs to MP3.
4. Green Day- Last Of The American Girls
   21st Century Breakdown
   Don’t understand why this band is so celebrated. Singer’s voice is irritatingly thin³, and the music seems very paint-by-numbers. Boring, in other words.
5. Nelson, Willie- Laying My Burdens Down

   
   Naked Willie

   One of my favorite purchases in 2009 is this Willie Nelson album. Naked is not quite accurate description, Willie Nelson and long-time harmonica player Mickey Raphael just removed the schmaltzy strings and slick backup vocalists, and left vocal, bass, drum, and slinky jazzy guitar, remixing from the original multitrack tapes. Awesome in fact. Get a copy if you don’t have one.

6. John Barry- Boom
   Boom! Soundtrack
   As much as I love Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, haven’t yet managed to sit through this film.
7. Jerry Jeff Walker- North Cumberland Blues
   Vanguard Visionaries – Jerry Jeff Walker
   Surprisingly good, funky blues-rock with a nicely insistent bass line. Let’s have another round…
8. Terry Hall & Mushtaq- Ten Eleven
   Music is your Radar
   part of an Uncut Magazine sampler put together by Damon Albarn celebrating Honest Jon’s Records. Terry Hall⁴ sings the chorus in English, Mushtaq⁵ sings the verse in Arabic⁶. Quite good in any case. I just ordered a copy of the album it came from, The Hour of Two Lights.
9. Johann Sebastian Bach – Toccata and Fugue in D Minor for Organ, BWV 565- Klemens Scnorr
   The 99 Most Essential Pieces of Classical Music
   thought this was the Ozzy Osbourne song, Mr. Crowley⁷at first, probably because I think it is nearly the same opening riff, plus lots of trills / triplets / whatever-they-are-called.
10. 13th Floor Elevators- The Kingdom Of Heaven (Is Within You) (stereo edition)

    
    The Psychedelic Sound of the 13th Floor Elevators

    My birthday splurge was the limited edition remastered version of all extant 13th Floor Elevators songs in a beautiful box set. Austin garage rock legends,⁸ this song has, as most do, some weird stuff going on in the background, and ends with a patented Roky Erickson scream.

11. K’naan- 15 Minutes Away

    
    Troubadour

    one of the weaker tracks on a pretty good album (blogged about here). Something about being broke, and getting money from Western Union, 15 minutes away. I prefer the more political-oriented songs, this song sounds like filler.

1. again using the iTunes smartplaylist, This Years Models; criteria – added to library this year, more than 4 plays, not played in last 19 days [↩]
2. blogged about it here [↩]
3. hey, I own every Bob Dylan album, and his voice is, shall we say, unique. So it isn’t just musicality that matters [↩]
4. of The Specials, et al [↩]
5. of Fun-Da-Mental [↩]
6. I think: album blurb says: In 2003, Hall collaborated with Mushtaq of Fun-Da-Mental on the album The Hour of Two Lights which contains contributions from a twelve-year-old Lebanese girl singer, a blind Algerian rapper, a Syrian flautist, Hebrew vocalists, a group of Polish gypsies and Damon Albarn. [↩]
7. a song about English occultist Aleister Crowley from Blizzard of Oz [↩]
8. influences include: LSD, Gurdjieff, the General Semantics of Alfred Korzybski, the psychedelic philosophy of Timothy Leary, Tantric meditation, you get the idea [↩]

Strangely, I had never heard of this before

Steve Jobs has never been shy about his use of psychedelics, famously calling his LSD experience “one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life.” So, toward the end of his life, LSD inventor Albert Hofmann decided to write to the iPhone creator to see if he’d be interested in putting some money where the tip of his tongue had been.

Hofmann penned a never-before-disclosed letter in 2007 to Jobs at the behest of his friend Rick Doblin, who runs an organization dedicated to studying the medical and psychiatric benefits of psychedelic drugs. Hofmann, a Swiss chemist, died in April 2008 at the age of 102.

See the letter here.

[From Ryan Grim: Read the Never-Before-Published Letter From LSD-Inventor Albert Hofmann to Apple CEO Steve Jobs]

and for lack of a better place: the Google Voice message left, presumedly by Google executives:

Some additional reading May 19th from 19:48 to 22:04:

• AND HE SHALL BE JUDGED: GQ Features on men.style.com – AND HE SHALL BE JUDGED Former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld has always answered his detractors by claiming that history will one day judge him kindly. But as he waits for that day, a new group of critics—his administration peers—are suddenly speaking out for the first time. What they’re saying? It isn’t pretty
• O Lucky Man! – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – As one of the film’s songs says: Smile while you’re makin’ it, Laugh while you’re takin’ it, Even though you’re fakin’ it, Nobody’s gonna know. In O Lucky Man!, Travis progresses from coffee salesman (working for Imperial Coffee in the North East of England and Scotland), a victim of torture in a government installation and a medical research subject, under the supervision of Dr Millar (Crowden).
• Donald Ewen Cameron – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – In addition to LSD, Cameron also experimented with various paralytic drugs, as well as electroconvulsive therapy at 30 to 40 times the normal power. His “driving” experiments consisted of putting subjects into drug-induced coma for months on end (up to three in one case) while playing tape loops of noise or simple repetitive statements. His experiments were typically carried out on patients who had entered the institute for minor problems such as anxiety disorders and post-partum depression, many of whom suffered permanently from his actions. It was during this era that Cameron became known worldwide, serving as the second President of the World Psychiatric Association, as well as president of the American and Canadian psychiatric associations. He was also a member of the Nuremberg medical tribunal a decade earlier, where he accused German medics of things he himself did between 1934–60 or later, though his scientific work during World War II for the OSS has never been a secret.