I am not given over to commenting on politics [at least on-going discourses] with great frequency; I tend to prefer bigger picture issues, but I thought I would share a short piece on my reaction to John McCain and the rhetoric I’ve heard coming from the Republican party. This should not be seen as anti-Republicanism, as I am not a part line personality. Rather, it is a critique on what they are presenting to the American public, particularly as one coming from the Blackamerican population.

John McCain’s legitimacy, based on his service in the military, is a telling point. While it is certainly a terrible thing to be held in a POW camp, no one in the media has yet to look at the Vietnam war in terms of a) was this a beneficial war b) what did it accomplish for the United States and c) what has been done for all of the veterans who returned from the war, permanently scared [mentally and physically]. I find this whole legitimacy based on participation in an unjust war disgusting and misleading. It smacks of classic nativist ideologies. In fact, I was fully reminded of Marinetti, when listening to members of the Republican Party laud their support of McCain at the GOP convention:

“For twenty seven years we Futurists have rebelled aginst the the branding of war as antiaesthetic… Accordingly we state: … War is beautiful because it establishes man’s dominion over the subjugated machinery by means of gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame throwers, and small tanks. War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metalization of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns. War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the cease-fire, the scents, and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony. War is beautiful because it creates new architecture, like that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the smoke spirals from burning villages, and many others… Poets and artists of Futurism!… remember these principles of an aesthetics of war so that your struggle for a new literature and a new graphic art… may be illuminated by them!”

Some may find it an unduly harsh step to brand this kind of talk as facist/futurist but it does have many of the same talking points. Like Marinett’s Futurists, the GOP barked the very same anti-intellectualism that is present in Marinetti’s writings. That fact that the Republicans put forth war as an aesthetic, as something beautiful, is undeniable. The War On tError has certainly shown us plenty of burning villages and civilian casualties. And for what? What “evil criminal force” has been detained, dismantled or destroyed? Many a young man or woman returns home, their limbs replaced by that very same “dreamt-of metalization”. The poppy fields of Afghanistan are indeed ripe with “the fiery orchids of machine guns” and yet, drugs still pour into our country, not debilitated in the slightest. And as for the cannonades, we have our “shock and awe” and Missions Accomplished, yet do we have anything to show for it?

I cannot say with any certainty that Barack Obama will be able to bring about wide, social or economic changes, but given the doctrine that McCain and his party are spewing forth, given that someone as obviously unqualified as Palin has been championed over the accomplishments of the likes of Obama, we have to look and work for an auspicious outcome. The alternative seems grim indeed.

Autophysiopsychic Partnership

Yusef Lateef

Opus I

Selection I

Creative Power, Qualifications of the Genius

The artistic power was vested in Charles Parker, a genius of this century. He played alto saxophone with Jay McShan, a band from Kansas City, Mo. From 1937 to 1941. It was during this term through personal appearances and recordings, that the intellectual dimensions and multi-aesthetic properties of Parker’s music first charmed many hearts. He selected each note judiciously in order to communicate organic ideas. He legislated a lasting and lofty expertise imbued with intuition, academic and scientific comprehension. Empirically, his music is an aesthetic reality. In fact, this reality is independent of empirical investigation and no events can make it not so. It is a necessary truth.

The artistic rhythms that accompanied his spiritual enunciation were constructed of multilateral dimensions - symmetry, proportion, proportionality, balance, regularity, irregularity, uniformity, evenness, finish, congruity, consistency, dynamic symmetry, bilateral and trilateral properties.

His musical constructs served and serve as direction and inspiration to instrumentalists, composers, writers, artists, and people who are prone to cognitive thinking. His music enraptured the psyche and souls of humans on many continents through the power of its motion, electricity, systemicism, sensation, possessiveness, intellectuality, and its sympathetic and logistic wealth. The noble quality of tenderness that he projected so adeptly in his autophysiopsychic rendition of the song “Embraceable You” was and is therapeutic each time it is heard.

The music of Parker has opened vistas of endearment, ardor, attachment, friendliness, concern, desire, closeness, kindness and devotion in the presence of humans with auditory facilities. Those who were privileged to hear him in person undoubtedly reveled and basked in the ethereal atmosphere of inventive refinement.

Obviously a huge quorum of notions, keen in import, should be employed for the princely purpose of alluding to Parker’s extraordinary music. The assets of his music are composed of the aesthetic elements which are present in au great works of art. He displayed a unique volitional subsistence in his music, through which he expressed his feelings of joy and sorrow, love and temper, penitence and praise. He expresses the fathomless fascination of the soul, the instrument that lifts mind to higher regions, the gateway into the realm of imagination. He caused the heart to ride in temperature, the eye to sparkle, the pulse to beat more quickly. He caused emotions to pass through our beings like gases dissolving in solution.

The molecular formula of conventional musical symbols became aggregates of scientific and musical profundity under his scrutiny. His pen gave birth to many melodic and harmonic structures of individuality and richness. His compositions gave the world melodic and harmonic contrafactions that may be described as charismatic musical mutants.

The impingement of the sound of his saxophone upon the tympanic membrane caused one to believe Charles Parker to be a master of acoustics as well as a musical genius. When listening to Parker’s recording of “Bird Of Paradise,” one’s Eustachian tube takes pride in allowing his ambrosial cadences to flow into one’s auditory canal.

Therefore it is logical to assume that Parker’s musical mind was capable of sensing sounds, of imagining these sounds in reproductive and creative vision, of being aroused by them emotionally, of being capable of sustained thinking in terms of these experiences, and of giving some form of expression to them in musical performance and in composition.

In this objective analysis, we must keep in view the fundamental fact that Parker’s musical mind did not consist of dissected parts but an integrated personality. In our evaluation we must always have regard for this total personality as functioning in a total situation.

The psychological attributes of sound (pitch, loudness, time, and timbre),Which depend on the physical characteristics of the sound wave: frequency, amplitude, duration and form were his submissive toys. In these terms, he accounted for almost every conceivable sound in nature and art-vocal or instrumental, musical or nonmusical.

Even though sound waves were the media used to convey his music to the listener, we should realize that as in good reading material we are not aware of letters or phonetic elements as such but read for meaning; so in Parker’s music we are generally not conscious of specific tonal elements or sound waves but rather of musical design or the total impression created.

It is clear that Charles Parker had insight and knowledge of the true nature of his music, and at the same time possessed the ability to communicate his music to a vast number of human beings upon earth-perhaps beyond…

Selection I

Aesthetic address

Two score and twelve years ago the supreme creator brought forth a genius, namely, Charles Parker, dedicated to the proliferation of aesthetic experience.

He was engaged in a great aesthetic attitude, a creative perception, a unity and meaning in experience, testing whether he could conceive the beauty that exists in nature. In doing so, he enduringly dedicated his existence. He was confronted with great internal predispositions and external task - orientation. He persevered in contributing a huge portion of musical acumen, as a masterful guide for those who were to follow, so that their music might live. It was altogether honorable and noble that he did so.

But we appreciate him in a larger sense. We dedicate the name “genius” to him - we cannot ignore the aesthetic education he gave us. The great men, living and dead, who have been sustaining the aesthetic experience here, have contemplated it far above our power to disregard or detract. The world may little note nor long remember

What we emblematically state here, but it can never forget what Parker did play here, rather it is for us the living to be admiringly cognizant of his compelling music which is a living force, an organic substance nobly advanced. It is for us to be dedicated here to the great aesthetic task which remains before us - that from his cogent musical science, we take increased devotion to that which is beautiful and sublime within nature and the soul - that he will not have died in vain - that the worlds under God shall have a new birth of souls - and that the souls of the people, by love, for God, shall not abstain from love.