Author Archives: d.perry
For the Empire
“The wild beasts that roam over Italy,” he would say, “have every one of them a cave or lair to lurk in; but the men who fight and die for Italy enjoy the common air and light, indeed, but nothing else; houseless and homeless they wander about with their wives and children. And it is with lying lips that their imperators exhort the soldiers in their battles to defend sepulchres and shrines from the enemy; for not a man of them has an hereditary altar, not one of all these many Romans an ancestral tomb, but they fight and die to support others in wealth and luxury, and though they are styled masters of the world, they have not a single clod of earth that is their own.”
– Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus via Plutarchs Parallel Lives
We tread upon their graves without emotion. With unconcern we build our streets and erect our edifices upon their sacred enclosures…with sacrilegious hands we scatter to the winds alike the bones.
– Isaac Goodwin (1820), referring to the callousness these American hands exert on the land and the history and the peoples
The haze of nostalgia covers their days…making those days into something different than they were. That’s the way today changes history. All contemporaries do not inhabit the same time. The past is always changing, but few realize it.
– The Stolen Journals of Leto II
Language Event
Navajo
Hold a conversation in which everything refers to water.
If somebody comes in the room, say: “Someone’s floating in.”
If somebody sits down, say: “It looks like someone just stopped floating.”
“Martyna Basta’s music is like time encapsulated as sound. The title of her last album evokes the idea of a semi-memory, one where it’s unclear whether it really happened or if it’s something we created. “For me, these reflections, these pranks of memory, found their place somewhere in my process, which involved rummaging through archives but also adding something from the present, going back to libraries and digging up things I didn’t remember ever creating,” Basta says. She creates something from the reality that is here and now; the sounds are natural, they are actual, they had their place and their time that she was there to experience. She translates that into music, giving them a fundamental meaning.”