Today, October 16th is Oscar Wilde's birthday,
as well as Marie Antoinette's.
Here's what the former said of the latter:
"To the thinker, the most tragic fact in the whole of the French Revolution is not that Marie Antoinette was killed for being a queen, but that the starved peasant of the Vendée voluntarily went out to die for the hideous cause of feudalism."
On this show we take a closer look at the ideas of Oscar Wilde, with excerpts from a presentation of the Workers Solidarity Movement in his native Ireland. The link to this is found below in the Resources section.
We also consider the concept of Homeplace and the contributions of Jack Ely--who sang Louie Louie not so long ago and in doing so launched Portland into a new musical trajectory;
John Brown--who on this day launched his famous raid on Harper's Ferry, fighting violence with violence to free his equals and setting the still toddling settler-colony firmly on the road to civil war;
Jack Reed--Portland's prodigal poet and perhaps the very first Gonzo journalist--who wrote dispatches from the saddle as he adventurously rode beside Pancho Villa during the Mexican Revolution and is now buried in the Kremlin;
as well as considering the contributions made by many others. Including all of the artists whose music features tonight!
We've got some very talented Portlanders in the mix like the aforementioned Jack Ely and the emotive Michael White as well as meditative singer-songwriter Anandi singing about Oregon and multi instrumentalist Ryan Fox gazing down his laces.
From shoes to boots we keep the gaze going with Japancakes and their barefoot version of Only Shallow as well as the heavier tread of Kentucky's S.G Goodman who expertly conveys with a simmering might the suffering plight of the working poor. From Bootgaze proper we travel the margins to appreciate Jade Jackson's range of earthy, airy and sometimes fiery vocals.
The flames are turned even higher when Old Crow Medicine Show delivers John Brown's Dream but we take it down to a simmer again as Country Teasers stir 'round their genre reduction.
We travel then with the Crimean Tatars as they are unjustly expelled from their homeplace and for generations kept away, but finally some survivors return to the place they belong in a Jamala song called 1944.
Then we join Caryn Lin and her electric violin on a song for Jack Reed, the famous Portland journalist who was born in a mansion that no longer stands on the cedar shrouded hill behind the Zupans. We travel with him as he grew up and left his privileged position in the owner class to stand shoulder to shoulder as an equal with the workers of the world. The violin plays its own echo and takes us to the last days of John Silas Reed who lived by a higher ethic and for that he was buried beside Lenin in the wall of the Kremlin.
We honor some of the many changes that this moment accompanies with a halfmoon bag stuffed full of metaphors and mystery by Dutch duo Feng Suave before confronting an avante snooze button from Bongwater and the beautiful blendings of Os Mutantes--who are playing Aladdin Theater November 13th--also hearing Curt Cobain's early impressions of the band after being introduced to them by Bill Bartell in 1993.
Then we get nostalgic for playing musical tones on public payphones with tracks by Poi Dog Pondering, Kraftwerk, and Magazine 60 before finishing out with tracks by Cortex and Slightly Stoopid (first introduced to me by the kindly Kane Bachelor)
And we kick the whole thing off with a great track from La Féline, a project of Agnes Gayraud--pop music philosopher and professor of Aesthetics at Villa Arson and the Sorbonne.
Check it on out!
Resources
WSMIE. (2014, October 16). Did You Know Oscar Wilde Was An Anarchist? Workers Solidarity Movement. Retrieved October 16, 2022, from https://www.wsm.ie/c/did-you-know-oscar-wilde-was-anarchist
John Brown's Raid on Harper's Ferry. Wikipedia. (2022, October 16). Retrieved from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Brown%27s_raid_on_Harpers_Ferry
Munk, M. (n.d.). The Portland Years of John Reed & Louise Bryant. Marxists dot org. Retrieved October 16, 2022, from https://www.marxists.org/archive/reed/bio/portland.htm
- KBOO