Tony Shafrazi
Moogambo
24×26cm, 1976, Edition of 1000
From the Arabist
Download crappy quality PDF here
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Yes, this is exactly what you think it is—the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayam penned from the point of view of a kitten. It was written and illustrated by America’s foremost Kitten humourist of the time, Oliver Herford, whom you may recognize from his other titles such as A Kitten’s Garden of Verses and More Animals.
Quatrain from Khayyam’s Rubaiyat:
And fear not lest Existence closing your
Account, and mine, should know the like no more;
The Eternal Saki from that Bowl has pour’d
Millions of Bubbles like us, and will pour.
Quatrain from Herford’s Rubaiyat:
And fear not lest Existence shut the Door
On You and Me, to open it no more.
The Cream of Life from out your Bowl shall pour
Nine times—ere it lie broken on the floor.
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Download e-book from Project Gutenberg
(For some reason the woman in this “miniature” is showin’ her boobies…)Persian Love is a single off of Holger Czukay’s first post-CAN solo recording, Movies. The song has sort of been canonized as a milestone in the evolution of sampling technique/application and it is often suggested that it is directly from Czukay, perhaps even specifically Persian Love, that Brian Eno picked up his tape splicing/”third world” sampling ideas from (although it’s often suggest that Brian Eno stole all of his ideas), most evident in his collaboration with David Byrne on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, an equally clumsy early attempt at mysterioso ethnic sampling (typical: Neither Eno nor Byrne ever read the album’s namesake novel).
Persian Love uses several samples Czukay recorded off of a short-wave radio tuned to Iran, the first of which I am pretty sure is Iraj, who performed regularly on the radio. Unfortunately I don’t recognize any of the others (typical: the credits were never published or probably even known by Czukay). Can anyone help me identify them?
I have mixed feelings about this song…Czukay ignorantly interprets the absence of guiding percussion in traditional Persian music as an invitation to apply any tempo he pleases (typical), and save for a few moments scattered throughout the track I think he misses the mark pretty hard. And although I admit those few moments are sort of magical (in that German new-agey kind of way) I find an equal number of moments in the song pretty painful to listen to.
Holger Czukay - Persian Love:
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Iraj: Avazeh Segah (sample from a radio performance sometime in the early 70s):
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