if charlie parker was a gunslinger,there'd be a whole lot of dead copycats: Nam Jun Paik Dead at 74

The Explanation
(for those who require one)

And, of course, that is what all of this is -- all of this: the one song, ever changing, ever reincarnated, that speaks somehow from and to and for that which is ineffable within us and without us, that is both prayer and deliverance, folly and wisdom, that inspires us to dance or smile or simply to go on, senselessly, incomprehensibly, beatifically, in the face of mortality and the truth that our lives are more ill-writ, ill-rhymed and fleeting than any song, except perhaps those songs -- that song, endlesly reincarnated -- born of that truth, be it the moon and June of that truth, or the wordless blue moan, or the rotgut or the elegant poetry of it. That nameless black-hulled ship of Ulysses, that long black train, that Terraplane, that mystery train, that Rocket '88', that Buick 6 -- same journey, same miracle, same end and endlessness."
-- Nick Tosches, Where Dead Voices Gather

It is with a heart more heavy than usual that we here at If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger . . . mark the passing of Nam Jun Paik. He was all manner of things . . . a perpetual student laboring in any number of disciplines, one of the leading lights of Maciunas' Fluxus movement, a fellow-traveller of John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen . . . but perhaps we might best remember him as the first artist to see the expressive potential in Video Art, and the only one whose work could convince others of such a thing.

He died in Miami, of all places, on January 29.

if charlie parker was a gunslinger,
there'd be a whole lot of dead copycats

The Explanation
(for those who require one)

Nam Jun Paik Dead at 74

1 comment:

The Explanation(for those who require one)

Nam Jun Paik Dead at 74

1 comment:

The Explanation
(for those who require one)