That which colors the mind

This recording by Owsley Stanley of sarod master Ali Akbar Khan featured in a recent post here. My further reading came across the following unpublished epitaph to Owsley Stanley - popularly known as 'Bear' - by his daughter Rhoney Gissin Stanley. It provides a refreshing contrast to today's social media influenzas:

Bear was a man who walked his talk, who challenged the cult of personality and wanted the attention of others to focus on his work with sound, his art, and his philosophy, not on him.

Comments

Lyle Sanford, RMT said…
I just started reading his biography! Had heard of him but didn't realize just how much he'd done. Also, just finishing Robert Jourdain's "The Brain, Music & Ecstasy", which has been out a long time, but I'd somehow missed - highly recommended if you don't already know it.
1:06 pm
Pliable said…
Thanks for that Lyle. Owsley Stanley is a very interesting character. Today he would be cancelled by the popular media for political incorrectness. It may be my advanced years; but increasingly I feel that although there was a lot wrong in the 1960/70s, there is even more wrong today.

On another subject from the 1960s, it is worth noting that the authorised biography of Nick Drake is published in June - https://www.hachette.co.uk/titles/richard-morton-jack/nick-drake-the-life/9781529308082/
3:11 pm
Lyle Sanford, RMT said…
"It may be my advanced years; but increasingly I feel that although there was a lot wrong in the 1960/70s, there is even more wrong today." For years now, I've had the increasing sensation of living in one of those dystopian sci-fi novels of the 50's. Headlines read like parody. And back to the original subject - it dawned on me that I had the Owsley bio in the house because I ordered it back when you last mentioned him and just got around to it. It's sort of amazing that I thought I was paying attention back then, but that there was so much going on I missed so much. And now with the information explosion, I'm sure that's even more the case.
1:15 pm
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