Color-blind art lover, tone-deaf music fan. Author, Instant Karma (2002), H2O (2006), Summertime Jews (2018), The Music Never Died (2024). I live in Takoma Park, MD, and help organizations tell their stories. www.swartzmark.com
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Circlesongs - Bobby McFerrin feat. Joey Blake, Dave Worm + Jazzation & F...
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"After all, we were young. We were fourteen and fifteen, scornful of childhood, remote from the world of stern and ludicrous adults. We were bored, we were restless, we longed to be seized by any whim or passion and follow it to the farthest reaches of our natures. We wanted to live â to die â to burst into flame â to be transformed into angels or explosions. Only the mundane offended us, as if we secretly feared it was our destiny. By late afternoon our muscles ached, our eyelids grew heavy with obscure desires. And so we dreamed and did nothing, for what was there to do, played ping-pong and went to the beach, loafed in backyards, slept late into the morning â and always we craved adventures so extreme we could never imagine them. In the long dusks of summer we walked the suburban streets through scents of maple and cut grass, waiting for something to happen."Â
âSteven Millhauser, from "Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories" Photograph by Samuel Christopher, "Youth & Rebellion"
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"Jazz is just a reflection of lifeâŠ. Life is improvised, life is uncertain. It's not solid. It's not permanent. The art I choose disappears after it's played, it goes off into the ether. I love that." --Jerry Granelli
Photo: DL Media
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Andy Bey (1939-2025) with his sisters
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Triptych /Mixed media on canvas 1987 JuliaÌo Sarmento
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âAnd why donât you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it. I know why you havenât written. (And why I didnât write before the age of twenty-seven.) Because writing is at once too high, too great for you, itâs reserved for the great â that is for âgreat menâ; and itâs âsilly.â Besides, youâve written a little, but in secret. And it wasnât good, because it was in secret, and because you punished yourself for writing, because you didnât go all the way, or because you wrote, irresistibly, as when we would masturbate in secret, not to go further, but to attenuate the tension a bit, just enough to take the edge off. And then as soon as we come, we go and make ourselves feel guilty â so as to be forgiven; or to forget, to bury it until the next time.â
â HĂ©lĂšne Cixous, âThe Laugh of the Medusaâ
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âTo be Jewish is a permanent firework of enigmas.â --HĂ©lĂšne Cixous
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Do yourself a favor and listen to Max Porter reciting an excerpt from Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker (approx. 48:00-51:00)
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"He was thinking what a long and wide thing time is, to have so many happenings in it.â â Russell Hoban, Soonchild
Playing with leftovers of a recent project.
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Hilda Bernstein on 1960s South Africa, from her memoir The World That Was Ours
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Italian filmmaker Gianfranco Cabbidu was researching an entirely different project when he discovered lost footage of life in Sardinia in the 1930s, now vividly re-animated in this collaboration with the celebrated Italian trumpeter Paolo Fresu. Read more.
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"The history of amnesia is not only what has been written or created, but also what is present in us at every moment. Facing it, the mind is compelled--like an actor without script--to improvise, to feed the continuum of our existence.       "We cannot remember, so we create." --Nicomedes SuaĂĄrez-ArauĂșz, The Amnesia Manifesto
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