Reviews for Basic adolescent psychiatry

The average rating for Basic adolescent psychiatry based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-06-18 00:00:00 Donna Wood A quick glance at my reading list of late and you can pretty much figure out my current project. After years of arguing for the aesthetic autonomy of political movements, I decided to invert that formation. The project has turned into something of a reassessment of modernism where the terms of autonomy are located not in the aesthetic, but in the political. Of course, autonomy itself is being detourned here; thinking of autonomy in the Italian Marxist sense. Thus, I have reviewing key moments in modernist aesthetics; Russian constructivism, Brechtian aesthetics, Third Cinema in Latin America, Feminist aesthetics and avant-garde jazz in America. It's an admittedly idiosyncratic history. One of the guiding questions for me in this assessment of radical aesthetics stems from the age-old problem of abstraction. In the story told by bourgeois art history, abstraction is placed in opposition to realism and seen as the whimsy of a desire for novelty - a desire totally ready for co-optation by capitalism. Hence, abstraction as a strategy of "making things new" becomes a strategy for capitalist expansion. While this may be ONE of the stories we can tell, it is by no means the only story. Even if we accept the notion that Cold War (i.e. U.S. hegemonic) cultural politics equated modernist abstraction with a slight of hand that sutured together bourgeois democracy and market liberalism, it remains to be explained how abstraction went from the privileged strategy of anticapitalist cultural radicals to capitalist hegemony. Even after the strong hand of Uncle Joe smothered the Soviet avant-garde under Social Realist kitsch, modernist abstraction continued to mark a space of anticapitalist dissent. It was this very tendency that fueled the formal experimentations championed in Europe by Brecht and Benjamin as well as by their progeny in radical cinema from France to Brazil. It was also the modernist impulse that made jazz the music of choice for much of the political avant-garde in North America. At the moment when the Civil Rights movement enters its most militant, internationalist, and anti-imperialist phase, avant-garde jazz becomes the sound track of that moment. In 1965, a group of musicians living in the African American neighborhoods of South Chicago joined forces to found a collective. Adopting a bold nine-point manifesto promoting original music (over the connoisseurship of traditional standards), experimentation, collectivity and composition, this group of musicians launched the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, or AACM. Bound up in its founding charter was an implicit but clear politics around intentional organization, collective self-reliance, control over the means of production and distribution, and cultural practice situated within the everyday life desires and aspirations of the community. The strength and clarity of purpose of that mission statement is evidenced by the fact that the AACM continues to this day with active chapters in Chicago and New York. Part of the second generation within AACM, the trombone player, computer musicians and composer George Lewis joined the collective in the early 1970s. Drawing on nearly forty years of experience and relationships, he has composed what has to be one of the most remarkable studies of any cultural movement. With his native-informant status, Lewis assembled interviews with all of the key players from the numerous generations of AACM members as well as a scholarly survey of the literature on the AACM and surrounding post-bop jazz in general. The resulting book is a combination history of jazz in Chicago beginning in the late 1950s, ethnographic study of a community of cultural practitioners and, just as importantly, a valuable critical polemic on the politics of race and class in American discussions around experimental art. I can honestly say that I have never read so thorough and thoroughly illuminating a study of collective cultural practice in any field. Anyone interested in collective cultural production should read this book. I cannot stress enough how absolutely important it is that Lewis himself is not just a working musician but an insider to the AACM community and history. His position as both makes it possible for him to offer the kind of critical reflections and deep historical analyses that one rarely if ever finds in a study of art history or musicology. Absent are the sort of pithy convenient comparisons that require the critic to construct false dichotomies and comparisons only for the sake of an (blatantly ideological) illusory objective assessment. Perhaps one of the most thrilling and original contributions Lewis makes in the book are his reflections on the condition of migration in the experience of creative musicians and in the articulation of their aesthetic. Lewis describes how all too often, detractors and promoters of jazz will cite the history of the great migration of blacks from the south in the years of Jim Crow as formative for the practice of improvisation. However, when examined closely, what critics tend to mean by that is a coded political analysis of migration as individualized, spontaneous, and cavalier. WIth these terms in place, the resulting analysis of improvisation not only fails to understand the practice but actually effaces the intelligence of the aesthetic and its practitioners. Based on personal and historical accounts, however, we know migration to be something entirely different; a deeply communal experience, organized around social and familial networks, involving a range of ethical and affective exchanges, deliberate and collective. The implications of the autonomy of migration (to borrow a phrase invented by the Kanak Attak movement in Germany), leads to an understanding of improvisation and, by association, the black radical aesthetic, that is profoundly distinct from contemporary avant-garde traditions such as the Cagean aesthetic. This is an argument that Lewis has been developing for many years in his essays. But it is in A POWER STRONGER THAN ITSELF, that he has the epic canvas of the history of the AACM to really tell the story behind that argument. One of the only criticisms I would make of Lewis's book is his dependence upon the French theorist and economist Jacques Attali. I can appreciate the value of Attali's book NOISE given that it is one of the few theoretical statements on avant-garde music that takes free jazz seriously - not merely as an example but as a subversion of our normative categories. The fact that Attali would give such crucial importance to the free jazz movement while simultaneously inventing a critical discourse around sound rarely gets mentioned by the armies of sound theorists who draw on Attali for their own ruminations. That said, however, at the end of the day, Attali has a very clear political position that privileges the very bourgeois politics being countered by artists with clear working class politics such as those in the AACM. That criticism aside, the book remains an enormously important intervention at so many levels. In addition to the challenge to rethink the relationship between a radical aesthetic and migration histories, Lewis also problematizes the too-easy opposition between modernist specificity and post-modernist eclecticism. Here the strategies of abstraction sit within a logic of eclecticism that is at once an aesthetic commitment to "hearing all the sounds as having musical importance" and a political commitment to the totality of everyday life. One could argue that such is the generosity of the founding AACM mission statement that never uses the words jazz, experimental music or avant-garde. Rather, its aesthetics balance a clear cultural politics with a non-authoritarian and non-prescriptive understanding of art (and improvisation) as a practice as something that one does to perfect one's life in the community. For this and for so many other reasons, I simply cannot recommend this book enough. We will all be learning from its riches for years to come.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-07-07 00:00:00 Jim Rideon A superbly well written and thorough account of the coming into being of The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, a co-operative which formed on the South Side of Chicago in the 1960s and which brought together a group of open-minded and creative young people who would go on to establish themselves as some of the most innovative musicians in late 20th century America.Most prominent among those who guided the AACM was Muhal Richard Abrams, and George Lewis - who was himself a member and is now a well established trombonist and composer - has done a wonderful job in making the many achievements of this great man known to all those who care to listen. For those, like me, who have enjoyed and admired the music of the first generation of AACM musicians, such as The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Anthony Braxton, Henry Threadgill, Amina Claudine Myers, and those of the more recent generation e.g. Nicole Mitchell, this is an invaluable book. I found the opening chapter which tells of the Great Migration of African-Americans from the southern states to cities in the north, such as Chicago, especially interesting, as all of the first-generation AACM founders were children of parents who had made that journey. In this chapter, and throughout the book, Lewis draws on theoretical writing to establish frameworks within which he can then examine the social, cultural and political circumstances of the lives of his subjects. It is typical of the book that his use of this theoretical writing is always apposite, lucid and illuminating. Lewis is also able to use a huge amount of material from interviews with all of the principal participants and material from the AACM archive. The story of the AACM is astonishing in many ways, not least in how so much adversity was overcome, and in how, as in many significant artistic movements, time and conditions coincided to bring together a hugely talented group of people who improvised into being a revolution in music.