My inner senses

I can "see" the pictures I want to paint, they are ready in my mind. Sometimes parts of them are ready and I adapt these parts to make a whole. Sketches of parts may be seen here, in my ThruOut The World blog. I only sketch what I want to remember, the theme, but not the colors. The colors come by themselves, practically in my dreams. I learned how to make these vision stay in my brain, aka remember. It took me years to acquire the ability to direct my dreams into a direction I wanted to explore, or not. I let dreams go, when I think, I should learn something about my subconscious. So the idea came up, I would want to paint my daddy in a very old manner, like Van Eyck did or the other painters from the Netherlands. I mean the technique, here. Then the picture changed: I will rather express what I feel about my dad and put a solid color construction under it. I do not really want to paint daddy in a naturalistic way, because there are many photos, videos and audio files available. What makes the picture essentially focussed on expression is what I understand from the movements of feelings and thoughts I have. The love, the thankfulness, the sorrow and grief.

Since I wrote about my inner eye, I would like to add my inner ear, too: These days and with an 8-track computer program, it is possible for me to materialize what I hear with my inner ear. This is how I composed the Song for John Lennon in October 2005. For his birthday, to thank the world and vibes and molecules never ending (and therefore have no beginning and end). It takes me some days to finish a song. Well, I thought this short text might help somebody´s inspiration. I will come up with another blog post about inspiration.

I discovered ...

... some old tapes! They show the Barrelhouse Jazzband of the 60ies in Vienna. Not suffice to say, they are great. This is the kind of music I like to hear. I like the interpretation and improvisation of Jazz songs composed, for instance, by Count Basie. I still start to cry, when I hear Lonesome World and my daddy´s horn. The interview preceding Lonesome World and I Got Rythm show Guenther Schifter asking first Horstl Bichler, then Otti Kitzler, Franz Bilik and Peter Hoffmann. Schifter tries to get out the most of them, well, musicians are people, who prefer to communicate in sounds. Courtesy of ORF Austria I added, but left everthing else unedited. However, the music is the message. The tapes I found must have been our mum´s, I copied them to DVD. These tapes are of Jazz historical value, I think.

© Sybille Amber: Intellectual Property 2005/2006/2007

Qualms

It is hard work to study Social and Cultural Anthropology and to a job. There are seminars to teach students the basics and academic levels of quantitative and qualitative research- they last one semster. Students have to learn how to write in scientific / academic style, plus there is a seminar about how to work scientifically. Professors insist, that students should acquire additional skills. Be it, as it may, studies are hard and lots of knowledge have to be compiled and managed by students, themselves, and I am not the type of person who is satisfied with good lecture notes and one must-read book. I got to delve into what I study to fully experience my interest and subject.

Each book is like a little universe opening the mind. It does good to have a comfortable couch, tea and a soft blanket. Listening to music, like Mozart´s piano concerts, or to Mahler´s romantic compositions, or some Jazz. By now, I mean music, that is not new to my ear, so that I do not have to listen closely, like The Beatles, or Jazz by Louis Armstrong or Errol Garner. Many Jazz musicians - from the beginnings on - have adpated classical music for instance by Bach. More and more I consider the functions of music in the world. Well, there are many, and the entertainment factor is only one. Music accompanies various situations, like birth(-days) or other rites. So it is with every piece of music - it opens a little universe.

I listen to the Approximately Infinite Universe music, over and over. Yoko Ono and the Plastic Ono Band present thoughts and critique on society with music. Yoko Ono writes about the Feminization of Society and what I think of nowadays society is written in this text, which was published in 1972: "This society is driven by neurotic speed and force accelerated by greed, and frustration of not being able to live up to the image of men and women we have created for ourselves: the image, which has nothing to do with the reality of people."

  

                                 

 

blackaustria

blackaustria announces its program on blackaustria.at: Black people in Austria still have lots of problems. Discrimination - see also: ENAR Fact Sheet on multiple, compound and intersectional discrimination (*.pdf, 119,62 KB) - is still a part of day-by-day life in Austria. blackaustria therefore started a so-called communication campaign to explain and train reductions of prejudices. Biased opinions, ignorance and partiality derive from little knowledge, stereotypes need enlightenment. Individuals may support community work by writing articles in their blogs, papers or reports. This is why I will implement this banner on Anthropologic Diary, I feel deeply moved by having been invited for a project presentation. I would like to direct you to these studies published, they are in German and relate to the impact of the communication campaign on a. elders, b. people without High School Diploma in Vienna and c. the Black Community.

This party has Leiberltausch as its motto, T - Shirts will be presented this evening in September.

This project won with the Sozialmarie 2007 in the category new and innovative social projects!

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© Sybille Amber U, A. L. J., Anthropo Logic. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 543 Howard Street, 5th Floor, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

 

Jazz: BHBJ

I edited and cut this video, then published it on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOdMfU3S0Zc . Thanks to the Austrian ORF I could copy an old VHS to DVD in best quality, possible - on my machine. This is the Barrelhouse Jazzband located in Vienna in the 1960s of the 20th century: Heinz Feix (b), Peter Hoffmann (p), Otti Kitzler (t), Horsti Bichler (dr), Alfons Wuerzl (cl) and Norbert Vas (tb) are the musicians. They perform three pieces of Jazz, which were very popular in the 1920s: 1 is called Where Am I?, the second is the Flat Foot Floogie, the third on the Shimmy Sha Wabble.

Vienna - Barrelhouse Jazzband
This kind of Jazz focuses on entertainment, it was played in the cafés and bars, but also on the streets in the Deep South. The Barrelhouse Jazzband Vienna was honored for best classical Jazzband in the sixties, as were some of the musicians: Horsti Bichler, the drummer, and my daddy, Otti Kitzler playing trumpet and English horn. The BHBJ refers to the Chicago Style and Dixieland. They published several CDs, recently, and earlier a single and the famous Pferdeplatte.

Here I found something about the Flat Foot Floogie at Ethnopoetics including the lyrics. Jerome Rothenberg writes about lyrics:

"While the initial focus of ethnopoetics was on orality and performance, the discourse turned as well to the visible aspects of language — writing & inscription — both as a persistent contemporary concern & as an often unacknowledged kingpin of a revitalized & expanded ethnopoetics. In an age of cybernetic breakthroughs, the experimental tradition of modernist poetry & art has expanded our sense of language in all its forms, the written along with the oral. In doing this, it should also have sensitized us to the existence of a range of visual/verbal traditions and practices, not only in literate cultures but in those also that we have named "non"- or "pre"-literate — extending the meaning of literacy beyond a system of (phonetic) letters to the fact of writing itself." (Rothenberg: http://www.ubu.com/ethno/visuals.html).

Popularizing the Shimmy in America tells its story. The shimmy was a new kind of dancing dating back to 1910, and "One of the most talked-about dances of the time was `the shimmy`."(Bryant, Rebecca 2002 at JStor: American Music).

The best way to learn about Jazz is to listen to the music: Listen to the sounds and try to get the lyrics. There are lots of internet sites about Jazz. Here are related links:

All About Jazz: http://www.allaboutjazz.com/

Big Band Database: http://nfo.net/

Jazzology: http://www.jazzology.com/jazzology_records.php

Chicago Jazz Archive: http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/su/cja/

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© Sybille Amber U, A. L. J., Anthropo Logic. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 543 Howard Street, 5th Floor, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

Bid

This is my introduction for the bid of your vote. Not a political party, no: Just help me blog for a year. This means: You give me your vote, the more votes might make a winner.

I am Sybil Amber living in Vienna. I study Social and Cultural Anthropology. When I was small, I used to talk to my daddy as soon as he came home. He answered all my questions, that I collected the whole day. We talked about his music, which was Jazz. I learned about the when´s and why´s of Jazz music. I learned about slavery, despair, illness and death, things human beings did to human beings. I developed an interest for what human beings would do to each other, by asking for the reasons of their behavior. Thoughts, ideas and what human beings would do in the course of their lives to communicate with each other and what they would do to create their kind of societies, this was – and still is – what occupied my thoughts and reflections.

Yes, I thought about the reasons why I study Social and Cultural Anthropology. I remember having posed questions over and over, all day long. Whatever I heard or what was said, I commented. What stayed until today is for instance:

The Black people were stolen from Africa, they were made slaves and had to live in this metal huts in summer. Sixty degrees in the hut and fifty on the cotton field.

Well, do have to say more than this: I painted myself all Black. I used shoepaste or water color. I learned, that all the Jazz songs have a meaning, deeper than the ocean, that was left behind. Please read the Strange Fruit lyrics for it. Billie Holiday, the All-American Girl, sung about the

Strange fruit hanging on a poppy tree - ...

Poppy tree has a special meaning, most of the lyrics texts write poplar tree. People are discussing lots about where this word Jazz comes from. Thanks to my -our - daddy, always.

I´m going to research about this early Jazz: If you want to contribute your opinion and views, please feel free to mail me!

Ethnomusicology

What an incident! Joe Zawinul´s Syndicate is out and about again. I have collected some Jazz vids, old and new, like Weather Report´s music, and a short history about how Jazz evolved in America out of slavery, poverty, dispair, sickness, depression, and diaspora:



In Professor Kubik´s book Africa and the Blues the student learns:

"Historically oriented research on the blues embraces several disparate areas of inquiry:
1. The study of musical, literary, and social factors leading in the late nineteenth century to the grdual development of a new, distinct genre of accompanied solo song in rural areas of the South - a genre that would later be labeled `blues`.
2. The study of the remote history of this previously unnamed genre´s musicostructural and literary characteristics with regard to their origins in African and other cultures.
3. The study of the developments and changes that took place in the blues after the first publication of sheet music versions in 1912 and commercial gramophone records beginning in 1920.
4. The study of influences exerted by the blues and its contemporary rural and urban derivatives upon other types of American music and upon other musical cultures of the world from the 1920s to the present." (Kubik 1999: 3)

Kubik, Gerhard (1999) Africa and the Blues. U. S. A.: University Press of Mississippi

© Sybille Amber: Intellectual Property 2005/2006/2007

© Sybille Amber U, A. L. J., Anthropo Logic. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 543 Howard Street, 5th Floor, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.