Fwd: interview of Joe Rowe by Jon Lebowski on Howard Rheingold's dot.com

[Pepi Plowman]

Thanks for the review.  I recorded it on Houston's
Nakamichi.  In the notes, apparently Catherine
composed most of the music, aside from singing it in a
beautiful natural voice.  Very impressive.

pep
--- telebob x <telebob@hotmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ----Original Message Follows----
> From: Michael Eisenstadt <michaele@ando.pair.com>
> To: austin-ghetto-list@pairlist.net
> Subject: interview of Joe Rowe by Jon Lebowski on
> Howard Rheingold's dot.com
> Date: Tue, 07 Jan 2003 10:28:22 -0600
> 
> reproduced in violation of copywrite (bite me Jon
> Lebowski)
> 
> for your convenience this is the interview Harry
> Edwards
> referenced this morning
> 
> some context: Howard Rheingold is an Internet early
> adopter
> pioneer from the days of the WELL which was a kind
> of pre-
> Internet BBS (bulletin board systems) in the Bay
> Area. he
> has many published books on the big implications of
> this new
> technology. Jon Lebowski is an Austinite/WELL early
> adopter
> who has long had a blogging type maillist which
> follows
> the hip Austin scene and does culture diagnostics --
> this
> kind of maillist is subscribed to but generally only
> Lebkowsky posts to it.
> 
> austin - jon lebkowsky
> A Parisian Spring in Austin
> 
> It's a hell of a commute, Paris to Austin to Paris.
> Joseph Rowe's been
> making it for the last six years. He spends most of
> his time in Paris,
> but he still hangs out in Austin, where he was born
> and raised.
> 
> Joseph first traveled to France in 1968, opting for
> the asylum President
> Charles De Gaulle offered to Vietnam-era draft
> resisters: "De Gaulle
> wanted to show his independence from American
> policy," says Joseph, "and
> to irritate the Americans." But once in France, the
> radical Americans he
> sheltered proved a constant irritant to the
> patriarchal De Gaulle.
> Joseph joined the national revolutionary movement
> led by Daniel "Danny
> theRed" Cohn-Bendit, which for a time paralyzed
> France with nationwide
> strikes and fighting in the streets.
> 
> Fortunately, Joseph wasn't tossed out of the country
> on his ear. In
> Paris, he hooked up with some Argentinean musicians
> and toured parts of
> Africa as their percussionist before returning to
> the US. More luck: his
> local draft board never moved to prosecute draft
> resisters, so Joseph
> got on with his life, earning his living in radio
> and by doing
> translations.
> 
> Six years ago he returned to France, and there met
> vocalist Catherine
> Braslavsky through a mutual friend, David Hykes of
> the Harmonic Choir.
> They eventually married during a short trip to the
> US. In 1995, they
> recorded a CD, " Alma Anima: towards a new Gregorian
> Chant," and they're
> currently working on another.
> 
> Their subtly powerful music is a blend of Gregorian
> chant and African,
> Asian, and Indian rhythms. Says Joseph, "I
> discovered that Afro-Arabic
> rhythms, added to ethereal Gregorian chant, bring
> sensuality and even
> sexuality back into this austere medieval music. The
> great wound of
> Christianity is its rejection of sensuality -- a
> full-bodied sexual
> Christianity really inspires me."
> 
> Joseph is a practicing Buddhist, with the Buddhist's
> appreciation for
> paradox -- especially useful given the paradoxical
> qualities of his
> Austin/Paris bilocation. He was eager to discuss the
> different energies
> he finds in the United States and Texas vs. France.
> 
> "It's a love-hate affair," he says, "an
> attraction-repulsion of the two
> very different cultures. Paris is intense: nervous
> rhythm, very high
> energy. In Paris people are alert, very present --
> sometimes in a
> narrow, overly focused way. Whereas Austin is
> slackertown; people are
> laid back, easygoing. They really are opposites."
> 
> But isn't the slacker thing a myth? Austin is not
> without its enclaves
> of intensity, if not downright craziness.
> 
> "I don't think the slacker thing is incompatible
> with a certain kind of
> intensity. Slacker doesn't mean weak and
> milquetoast. Folks here are
> just as relaxed about their intensity as they are
> about everything else.
> The good thing about the slacker ethos is that it's
> very tolerant and
> noncombative. Its negative aspect is that there's
> often a lack of
> initiative, an inability to see anything through --
> some things just
> don't get done."
> 
> Isn't that kind of behavior actually in line with
> the thinking of
> twentieth-century French intellectuals?
> 
> "That's a good point. Though the attitude is
> different, they share a
> common nihilistic base. I witnessed an interview
> once of Michel Foucault
> by Noam Chomsky, during which Foucault openly smoked
> marijuana. In the
> course of it, he let fly with a disgusting
> nihilistic rant. I had never
> seen such darkness. The more Chomsky would say
> things like 'surely there
> are human values; after all, we have many different
> cultures, many
> different systems of thought, still there is a
> fundamental human value,'
> the more Foucault would insist: 'No, there is no
> fundamental value.'
> 
> "This kind of intransigence appears in both the
> postmodern and the
> slacker stance. It's a disease that we have to
> oppose in ourselves and
> others, a rejection of any kind of meaningful
> values. Whether you find
> it in the laid-back slacker style or the intense
> Parisian style, it's
> still nihilism."
> 
> Yet, both the Austin and the Paris sensibilities
> have positive aspects:
> "On the slacker side are tolerance, relaxation,
> openness. On the French
> side, there's conservatism in the pure philosophic
> sense of the word,
> not in the modern political sense. They conserve
> ways of doing things,
> traditions, a sense of history."
> 
> Though Joseph occasionally finds himself profoundly
> contradicting
> traditional approaches, both he and Catherine value
> the concept of
> tradition as an essential component of community.
> Both agree that
> traditions are formed neither through abstract
> communication nor through
> books or other media. It is in the face-to-face
> transmission of
> experience that profound changes are instigated.
> This sense of
> one-on-one passing on of knowledge is diminishing in
> both the US and
> France. Joseph and Catherine are creating CDs of
> their music and
> performing regularly, but their primary focus now is
> on workshops and
> retreats, and on helping to build new traditions of
> human understanding.
> 
> FIN
> 
> 
>
_________________________________________________________________
> MSN 8 with e-mail virus protection service: 2 months
> FREE* 
=== message truncated ===


__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now.
http://mailplus.yahoo.com