Into the Flame

Well Grey moth flew into the flame. Back on again, buzzing homeward to the red weed flowers, night moths, grey moths, all drinking deep the nectar of life. If you've ever seen Jimi Hendrix singing at Monterrey, you know what I mean. Or heard the UK single release of his Wild Thing- which is not on any of his albums and was never released in North America.

What's up with that anyway? They've never put Buddy Miles' double album LIVE on CD either. One of the best rock albums of all time and it's not even on CD. Shows how depraved the situation is. OK, a lot of people never heard it or know it exists- that doesn't make it any the worse- and that's mostly because Buddy Miles studio work is lousy and flat and he had only one so-so hit single and when he played with Hendrix it was only for his drums- which is not his great talent. What he was good at was putting on a live show and singing improvisationally, live, to a responsive audience - and the only time that was ever published was on his LIVE double album- which has an incredible 20-plus minute improv of Neil Young's Down By the River during a live concert in Seattle, which is one of my favorite cuts of music ever recorded. But you can get an edited version of it on You-tube,where it can be confirmed by the adulation of others there that I am not hallucinating here.


Great art languishes, threatened with extinction, but oh my god, a corporation, which hasn't contributed one cent to real culture or to anything worth remembering, and that no one will give a damn about 100 years from now, starts stumbling and it's hey, here's a 100 billion bucks to help you out. While art that makes you thankful that you lived- that that artist lived, so you could witness these incredible moments, that will be rippling out with that feeling for centuries, no, that kind of thing isn't worth a dime.

Speaking of which, you can't get the very good English translation of Carpentier's The Chase in the United States either-- one of the best novels of all time-- nor the last three books of the US edition of the great new translation of Proust's In Search of Lost Time.

Or as Scott Moncrieff would have us have it, Remembrance of Things Past - but then Moncrieff calls the fourth book (Sodome et Gomorrhe) Cities of the Plain instead of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the second book, Within a Budding Grove (A L'ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs) instead of something like In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower. A slight suppression of the poetry and sex there, Scotty boy? You can see why we need the new translation.

All because of some stupid corporate copyright shenigans, Americans will have to wait till the next decade to read Proust in a better translation. Wait. That is what they tried to do; but you and I know better- just order the UK cheaply bound Penguin version and you can have the UK version which is almost the same, as long as you're willing to put up with faded, near invisible, microscopic type ... it's so good to know we can get anything we want here in the US of A, land of the free, where we don't have any censorship (Carpentier is Cuban), or anything like that ...