I was a junior in high school when I discovered absurdity. I understood absurdity immediately because it reflected my life so perfectly. Absurdity kicked me down the road of being a creative artsy type and it continues to have a strong pull on me to this day. Thanks, absurdity, old buddy.
My first encounter with absurdity took the form of The Bald Soprano, the play by Eugene Ionesco, presented as a particularly arresting picture book. Today, I guess we'd call it a graphic novel. Here's the cover:
That's Ionesco himself substituting both tragically and comically for the O's in his name. The full cast can be seen as well, left to right: Mrs. Martin, Mr. Smith, Mary the maid, the Fire Chief, Mrs. Smith and Mr. Martin. The whole book is rendered in black and white. Each couple's lines are rendered in a different type face, the women in italic. Pictures, stark high contrast black and white, show who is speaking and give a sense of the action. Here's the back cover:
I'm pretty sure I liked this play before I even opened the book the first time. Here's the text of the cover:
ionesco THE BALD SOPRANO followed by an unpublished scene. Translated by Donald M. Allen. Typographical interpretations by Massin and photographic interpretations by Henry Cohen. Based on the Niccolas Bataille Paris production. Grove Press, Inc. New York
I found The Bald Soprano in the library - I don't remember now whether that would have been my high school library or the public library. A couple of years later, in college, when I had an extra ten bucks, I ordered my own copy which I still have today. When it arrived I signed and dated it: October 3, 1970. This play, in this particular format, became one of my artistic touchstones. Eventually I saw a live performance - which disappointed me greatly.
The scene is a middle-class English interior. The plot is pretty simple, I guess. Mr. and Mrs. Smith tell some stories. Mr. and Mrs. Martin arrive and reintroduce themselves to each other. The Smiths and Martins tell more stories, occasionally interrupted by the Maid and the Fireman who, unsurprisingly, tell stories. Everything devolves into a screaming frenzy. And then it ends by beginning again at the beginning - except that the Martins and Smiths have switched places.
Nothing makes any real sense, of course. The lines make sense in only the smallest bits. Responses have tenuous relationship to what has preceded. I guess that's what makes it Theater of the Absurd. It's definitely that aspect which seemed to me to correspond exactly with what passed for conversation in my family - although for completely different reasons. My family came to its absurd interactions through a combo of age disparity, English as second language and hardness of hearing. None of that has anything to do with Ionesco. The resulting effects, however, were strikingly similar in my mind.
Here's a sample from the awkward conversation as the two couples are settling down for their social evening together:
Mr. Smith: Hm. [Silence] Mrs. Smith: Hm, hm. [Silence] Mrs. Martin: Hm, hm, hm. [Silence] Mr. Martin: Hm, hm, hm, hm. [Silence] Mrs. Martin: Oh, but definitely. [Silence] Mr. Martin: We all have colds. [Silence] Mr. Smith: Nevertheless, it's not chilly. [Silence] Mrs. Smith: There's no draft. [Silence] Mr. Martin: Oh no, fortunately. [Silence] Mr. Smith: Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. [Silence] Mr. Martin: Don't you feel well? [Silence] Mrs. Smith: No, he's wet his pants [Silence] Mrs. Martin: Oh, sir, at your age, you shouldn't. [Silence] Mr. Smith: The heart is ageless [Silence] Mr. Martin: That's true. [Silence] Mrs. Smith: So they say. [Silence] Mrs. Martin: They also say the opposite. [Silence] Mr. Smith: The truth lies somewhere between the two. [Silence] Mr. Martin: That's true. [Silence]
In the book each of those lines gets two facing pages. All the space represents the long silences. The particular line "The truth lies somewhere between the two." has given me comfort many times in many different situations over the 45 years since I first read it.
Here's a pair of pages showing the (much more lively) responses to Mrs. Martin's story about seeing a man on the street who had bent over to tie his shoe:
Notice that "fantastic" is divided up among three actors. (Click on any picture for enlargements.) Later in the play:
Mrs. Martin: Thanks to you, we have passed a truly Cartesian quarter of an hour. Fire Chief: [moving towards the door, then stopping]: Speaking of that - the bald soprano? [General silence, embarrassment] Mrs. Smith: She always wears her hair in the same style.
One more page for good measure. Here the Fire Chief is encouraged to tell a story The Dog and the Cow - which I actually set to music sometime during my college years. (That, along with the only other song I ever wrote, has since been lost.)
So why am I dragging this subject up now - beyond the need for basic blog padding, of course. There's a story about that:
Leslie and I were having dinner in a local restaurant last month, one of those new-style buffets with the old-style trick of showing you the desserts while you're standing in line still hungry. We didn't have much to talk about. At the next table was a family - mother, father, grandmother and three tweens, two with smart phones. They had a lot to talk about, most of which didn't seem too important. There was an amusing lack of communication and several crises concerning the food. Leslie and I found ourselves watching them as carefully as we could without being obvious. They might have been somewhat embarrassed had they been able to watch themselves. Maybe not. On our way home, Leslie and I discussed various unresolved questions (like which parent was the child of the grandmother and the color of the mother's panties). I was reminded of my encounter with The Bald Soprano and I explained to Leslie why this literature was important to me. When I got home I re-read it for the first time in a very long time. It felt good to experience The Bald Soprano again. It brought back a lot of memories, although you can be very certain that none of them involved my mother letting anyone in a restaurant see the color of her panties.
Used copies of The Bald Soprano are available on Amazon.
Can you use the human body as a percussion instrument? Sure - hit it and it will make a little sound. The body is just a big sack of meat and fluid plus a couple air chambers for resonance. Anyone (not just tenors as Anna Russell quipped) can have "resonance where their brains ought to be."
When it comes to slapping people it matters who you hit and how. The act of hitting another person, especially if you're hitting a woman, can lead to unintended results. You could end up looking like a jerk.
Chapter One: Hitting Yourself
Our story starts with hambone. That's where the performer slaps his own body, a musical style associated with black slaves in the Old South who, the story goes, were not allowed instruments lest they use them to secretly plan rebellion. (Their masters must have feared talking drums).
Here's a video introduction to hambone:
Here's another hambone video, this one from the famous American cultural institution Hee Haw. Here one-handed hambone is combined with an even more esoteric human-body percussion, rhythmic hand squeezing. (The marvelous vocals are called eefin.)
Chapter Two: Hitting Other People
Now watch this video:
Three formally dressed, but shoeless, musical sadists slap a resonant masochist. All in good fun, no doubt.
Although stylistically far removed from hambone, this video also shows the human body being used as a percussion instrument. With obvious differences...
Most importantly, these three performers are not hitting themselves. They are wailing on a fat man. Let's call him Drum Man. We know this is not their first take because Drum Man's drum head (i.e. his skin) is already quite red. And Drum Man starts the clip with a big sigh.
We can see his face the whole time. This gives us clues to his personality. Our hero seems to be taking his beat down with a sense of equanimity. Or maybe it's just detachment. "Okay," I imagine him saying "Let's get this over with."
Maybe he's got something to prove. "Do your worst," he might say, "I can take whatever you can give. I'm a real man." It's like watching the losing fighter being pummeled in a boxing match.
Drum Man's eyes are fixed on the camera, on us viewers. Maybe he's defying us. Is he saying "Who you lookin' at? You lookin' at me?"
Secondly, the players are getting a variety of musical sounds out of their "drum". Hitting his belly, his arms, his back and later his (facial) cheeks create different tones. There's enough timbral variety and humor to sustain interest for a quick minute.
I wonder if this video was made as a television commercial. I can't find the term "Equipo Elite Mundial" online. A sporting goods company perhaps?
Try imagining variations to this video:
Instead of three male percussionists, how about three sexy women hitting Drum Man?
Imagine the three sexy female drummers hitting a large, nearly naked woman who, like Drum Man, was just standing there, taking the hits with a blank expression on her face.
Imagine these three male percussionists hitting the large woman instead of Drum Man.
Finally, what if these guys were hitting on an extremely sexy woman? But only musically, of course. This post IS about music.
Chapter Three: Duke Ellington's A Drum Is A Woman
Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn's A Drum Is A Woman is a large scale work from the late fifties - a suite of pieces that tell a story. You could think of it as an oratorio or even a short opera. It was used as a soundtrack for a television show and released as an album.
When I was in my twenties I first heard two songs from A Drum Is A Woman played as musical interludes in certain episodes of the BBC's Goon Show, originally broadcast in the fifties. The singer was Ray Ellington, an English son of a Black American entertainer and a Russian Jew. Ellington was his stage name. He was not related to Duke.
These two songs, You Better Know It and What Else Can You Do With A Drum, stood out because they contain references to hitting women. This struck me as strange content for a pop song. At the time I had no idea who had written them or why. (Another tune Ray Ellington sang, Bloodshot Eyes by Wynonie Harris, fell into the same category.)
Here are recordings of these tunes, clipped from Goon Show airchecks, plus some of the lyrics.
It was only within the last 10 years or so that I finally heard the entire A Drum Is A Woman. To me it still seems like a strange metaphor on which to base an extended musical work, especially one which is essentially about the history of jazz. I suppose the Fifties were different times.
Madame Zajj is the main character ("zajj" = "jazz", get it?). She is created out of a drum. She changes back into a drum. She is the drum and the drum is her. I guess, really, she is the rhythm itself, the rhythm which drives men wild.
Her love interest in this story is named Caribee Joe.
Once there was a boy named Caribee Joe.
Spoke with the animals in their jungle slang.
His heartbeat was like bongos
And he sang every song they sang.
One day he found an elaborately fabricated drum
And when he touched it, it actually spoke to him, saying,
"I am not a drum, I am a woman.
Know me as Madame Zajj, African chantress.
I can make you rich and famous.
Together we can travel
and make beautiful rhythm for the world."
But Joe was in love with the jungle, the virgin jungle,
God-made and untouched,
and with the jungle he had to stay.
The drum beat up a storm, screeching,
"I am the one and only Madame Zajj.
But there are many Joes,
and one Joe can make rhythm as well as another."
So she hopped a trade wind
And away she went to Barbados
in search of another Joe.
Zajj appears in scene after scene. She dances seductively at Mardi Gras. She's a snappy dresser. She drives a big car (one with 88 cylinders that goes 440 miles per hour - but she gets a ticket for stopping at a green light). Later she makes an entrance from inside one of those flying saucers.
Duke's narration is sly and well modulated. His prose often turns flowery and surreal.
And we know it is about time now for the Mississippi River
To look like a puddle of pecan blue pudding,
Pistachio and indigo, and the sun and the neon-rose lollipop
Is being drawn up over the horizon into a fizzy bunch of grape colored clouds.
Zajj turns out to be too much woman - or too much rhythm - for Joe. After travelling to New York, where he learns about be-bop in the jazz clubs, he seems happy to return to his jungle. There he teaches other drums to tell this story.
Ahhh Hah! Madame Zajj.
She's from way back, as far back as way back goes.
She's been way out, as far out as far out goes.
Enjoyed triumph on triumph, as the fanciest and the most famous.
Wealth and good looks. She has everything but Joe.
She draws on all the resources of sorcery,
Trying to steal Joe from the jungle.
Joe too has had a fair amount of success giving drums lessons.
And in the evening he sits by the fire
With his fabulous collection of drums around him.
And Joe likes to tell them about his trip to New York
And Madame Zajj's dream.
When Joe gets sleepy he takes his favorite
New shiny drum on his knee and says
"Now you tell me a story."
And the new drum clears her throat and starts to recite
"Once there was a boy named Caribee Joe.
One day he found an elaborately fabricated drum.
And when he touched it, it actually spoke to him,
Saying 'I am not a drum. I am a woman'."
A Drum Is A Woman is really a story in which love of musical rhythm is metaphorically compared to the love for a woman. An allegory. Madame Zajj represents the essential rhythmic feel of jazz.
Duke makes his essential analogy at the top. Here are the very first lines of A Drum Is A Woman:
A drum is a woman
Who won't stay out of your blood.
A drum is a woman
It's beat is like the quickening of a heart in love.
Metaphor or not, regardless of the quality of his music, we suspect that Ellington understood that he might be misunderstood - even back in the Fifties. I suppose that's why he feels the need to tell us "it isn't civilized to beat women".
If Duke Ellington's A Drum Is A Woman is a delicate dance metaphorically combining love of music with love of women, then Jorge Perez Gonzalez's recent video Bottom Percussion PATAX shows just how low the art of metaphor has fallen.
Perez lines up four pairs of hairless naked be-thonged butt cheeks, arranges them so that's all we can see and then he spanks them with his hands, synching with a (prerecorded) instrumental track. He occasionally hits a suspended cymbal.
He tells us that this is music. I think he needs to be told that it isn't civilized to beat women. Or anyone. After all, it's not the Fifties any more.
Previously JPG's most watched video had about 30,000 hits in ten months. Bottom Percussion got hit over seven million times in just two weeks. Since Bottom Percussion is no more interesting musically than those other tracks (actually less interesting), it's not hard to figure that this popularity results from the particular "instrument" he uses and how he plays it.
People (meaning, in this case, mostly males, according to YouTube statistics) must want to see musicians hit women. With such a large viewership, Perez has almost certainly opened up a new You Tube revenue stream for himself. Sequels and copycats can't be far behind.
In an attempt to excuse himself from well-deserved accusations of musical misogyny, after two weeks Perez revealed that only two of the butts were female. The others were not female, they just appeared to be. He released another video showing these four people standing up afterwards with blurred faces. I guess the Butt Cheek People don't want their identities known. Maybe they are afraid that their mothers would find out.
At least Drum Man looked us straight in the eyes. And he only got hit above the waist.
When struck, the Butt Cheek People all make pretty much the same sound. Perez seems to carefully choose which cheek he will hit. But maybe he's just hitting randomly. There seems little musical point for changing cheeks. It's easy to imagine him thinking "I enjoy spanking one butt. Four butts will be four times more fun."
If Perez had chosen a wide variety of body sizes to beat on presumably there would be aural distinctions between them. A butt of a morbidly obese person might serve as the "bass butt". A little girl or boy butt might serve as the "soprano butt" (that's a disgusting thought because Perez ought to know that it isn't civilized to hit children. He could use a petite adult instead).
Maybe Perez only knows beautiful, hairless, tight-assed people with insufficient bodily resonance. I think it's more likely that he just likes to hit on butts.
Because Perez has posed his instruments so the camera can only see one section of their bodies and because he chose to portray them as identical and interchangeable, he can be validly accused of sexual objectification. Male or female, he has turned people into things. Thank goodness he only used his hands to hit them.
Watching videos of spanking turns some people on sexually. Some like to spank, others like being spanked. As long as the relationship is consensual there's no problem. Bottom Percussion really should be labelled as soft porn. Keeping music and porn as two separate categories would be the civilized thing to do.
Seven million hits can't all be wrong, can they? Everyone is free to draw the line between music and porn where they see fit. There are more than ten likes for every dislike.
You might want to compare Bottom Percussion with this definitely NSFW video which shows a man "performing" on a young girl's behind. Like Bottom Percussion you can't see the spankee's face. Unlike Bottom Percussion there is no pretense of musicality. It really is soft porn.
Others have called for Bottom Percussion to be removed from You Tube. That's never gonna happen.
Instead, I hope that Jorge Perez Gonzalez does many more videos and lives an extra long life - long enough to someday understand what is so objectionable about this performance. He has sunk to great depths without even knowing he's in a hole. Getting out of his hole is going to require an awful lot of time and effort.
Who knows - this video might make his career, lead him to fame and fortune, the way Kim Kardashian's sex tape benefitted her.
To "honor" Jorge Perez Gonzalez's musical travesty and maybe give hs career a little extra boost I've decided to dust off the long dormant Mixed Meters awards program called The Dockers. After all, this is awards season; the Oscars are this weekend.
The envelope please.
And the Docker For Setting A New All Time Artistic Low By Pretending That A Soft Porn Video Is Really Music goes to ... Jorge Perez Gonzalez for his video Bottom Percussion. Take a bow, Jorge.
Chapter Five: Jayne Cortez's If The Drum Is A Woman
I was happy to discover other, more civilized opinions which employ the metaphor of women and drums.
Jayne Cortez, who passed away recently, was a poet. She performed her work with a band called The Firespitters. Beyond her own successful career, she came of a high jazz pedigree as the mother of Denardo Coleman. She was once married to Ornette.
Her poem If the Drum Is A Woman speaks to the issue of domestic violence against women. The poem uses Duke's woman/drum metaphor. This seems like an appropriate way to conclude this post.
Here's a video of Jayne Cortez reciting If the Drum Is A Woman with accompaniment by The Firespitters. Appropriately they play a lot of drums in the background. Read the whole poem here. I include a short excerpt below.
If the drum is a woman
then understand your drum
your drum is not docile
your drum is not invisible
your drum is not inferior to you
your drum is a woman
so don't reject your drum
don't try to dominate your drum
It has been almost three years since I awarded the last Docker. This is a link to all the awards.
Mixed Meters has never discussed spanking before. But the subject of penises has come up a few times. Some of those posts even have musical connections.
Here are videos by Tim Minchin. I had never heard of him until yesterday.
He's an Australian living in Britain. He has unkempt red hair and uses lots of eye-liner. He writes songs which he sings while playing the piano. He's a very talented guy. Also very funny. Very uninhibited when it comes to discussing sex. Prudes and Republicans will not approve.
More importantly, his music shows a strong political sense. If you believe in things like religion, alternative medicine or the paranormal, Tim Minchin is not going to amuse you.
Some of his songs are definitely NOT SAFE FOR WORK since he often deals with sexual topics. The first video at least makes the effort at a G rating. It was written especially for television broadcast in the UK. It's clean - if you ignore the double entendres.
I like self-reflexive art like this: songs about songs. Here he performs at the Proms, with full symphonic accompaniment. It's a song about singing the pitch F-sharp while playing in the key of F.
Tim does not mince words about controversial subjects. The Pope Song, for example, deals with priestly pedophilia - a hot button topic. He clothes this delicate subject with countless repetitions of the f-word Reminds me of Frank Zappa in that sense.
You could compare Minchin to Victor Borge, as a comedian pianist - only with sex. Or to Tom Lehrer, as a comedian, pianist, social commentator - only with sex added. Minchin's use of clever wordplay can be really remarkable - I'd compare that aspect of his work to someone as good as Cole Porter - just with lots of explicit sex.
In this last video, an animation of a Minchin monologue, you might sense a resemblance to Ken Nordine. You might get the impression that Tim is a really smart guy who does not suffer fools one little bit. Someone who's pretty confident that his way of understanding of the world is the proper one and isn't afraid to get into your face to tell you just how wrong you are.
There's a lot more Minchin on YouTube. What the heck - here's one more: Some People Have It Worse than Me - which contains this great existentialist line:
But the total non-existence
of colonic animation
Seems to me
the perfect metaphor
for the utter constipation
of my soul.
This just in: Tim Minchin here in Los Angeles on April 10 at Amoeba Records in darkest Hollywood. He's got a lot of work to do before he cracks the U.S. market.
I know it's a pale comparison to Minchin's songs, but you could listen to my own piece which overuses the word fuck: Frustration Etude No. 1.
Banksy is the name of an anonymous artist. At this moment this little essay about advertising, attributed to him and probably from his book Wall and Piece, gets 4500 hits on Google. I found it here first.
His point of view will not make capitalists happy - and I think that is a good thing.
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
- Banksy
These images come from Banksy's website. (I'd like to have this one on my office wall, especially if turning the handle actually produced some sort of liquid.)
Here's another Banksy quote:
We can't do anything to change the world until capitalism crumbles. In the meantime we should all go shopping to console ourselves.
Not a Star Wars fan? I suggest that you skip this post.
This is about Star Wars Uncut, Director's Cut. It's a remake of Star Wars, A New Hope, which (chronologically, at least) was the first Star Wars movie. Star Wars, of course, is the saga that made George Lucas into a billionaire, made Harrison Ford into such a big star he never had to learn another part, and ended the career of Mark Hamill.
This version was produced by crowdsourcing. Someone split the original movie into 15-second long segments. Then they let just anyone pick a segment and film it again, using any style, any technique, any actors, any props, any reference, anything they could think of. All the segments were then reassembled into the full movie. And you can watch it on the web.
The final result probably won't make a lick of sense if you aren't familiar with the original. But if you are a fan and you enjoy pop culture mashups which are so intensely mashed that they border on chaos, then you will love watching this. I did. I even burned it onto a DVD and inflicted it on Leslie. (Sadly, she was not impressed.)
In this era of SOPA and PIPA (along with other past and future attempts by a few big corporations to own all of popular culture for the purpose of maximizing their own profits), this movie is an object lesson of how the widely available inexpensive technologies (like video and Internet which have transformed our lives since Star Wars appeared in 1977) let people take their favorite stories and make them grow. Okay, maybe "grow" is not the right word. "Mutate" would a better description.
Lots of people spent a lot of time doing this because they love this story. Star Wars owes a large part of its popularity to the fact that it deals human-scale themes like adventure, honor, religion and love. It paints these onto a vast galaxy-sized canvas of space travel, alien cultures and high technology. Throw in revolution and politics, pitting a few good people against evil corporate governments. Like Lord of the Rings, it is a Ring Cycle of our times, one with actual inspiration for living humans.
John William's music is in evidence throughout this movie. In fact, it forms a familiar touchpoint that glues this mess together. Only few sections parody the music one way or another.
To give you a flavor of just how diverse the art direction of this movie is, I've assembled a few random screen grabs of the two droids - R2D2 and C3PO - into this photomontage. It's a small sampling of the vast visual variation to which every character is subjected.
(click the picture for an enlargement)
To reference another science fiction classic (that would be The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy) when watching this you should Expect the Unexpected. Check out variety of methods used to recreate Princess Leia's hair buns. Or Obiwon's beard.
Here's a picture of the initial entrance of Darth Vader with her four sexy storm troopers as they strut and pose high fashion style onto the captured rebel vessel. (Notice that their blasters are really hair dryers.)
(don't waste your time clicking this one)
That's enough movie review for now. Go ahead - watch it!
If you have ever considered recreating the Star Wars movie using animated ASCII characters ... Sorry, someone has beaten you to it. Visit ASCIIMATION. (Only half the movie, but still an impressive waste of time.)
I was in downtown Los Angeles several times this week and I happened to walk past the Occupy Los Angeles encampment - our local version of Occupy Wall Street, still going strong after nearly two months.
Naturally I took a bunch of pictures. The first one shows a few forlorn tents up against the massive north edifice of Los Angeles City Hall. The main camp is on the south side.
The whole affair had the feel of a homeless tent city - but from the sixties. I saw guys playing hackie-sack. Men were drumming. Flyers were handed out - the one I got denounced the Fed. There was a meditation tent, an art school tent, a library. There seemed to be some sort of communal kitchen. I heard talk about drugs - and, once, I smelled marijuana.
But mostly I saw signs.
Some signs were organizational, like the one advertising a protest at the upcoming Rose Parade. Others signs (e.g. "Fuck the Lakers") had uncertain relevance.
The face of Anonymous (i.e. the Guy Fawkes mask) was in evidence. Remember people - this is a copyrighted image of Time Warner Inc. If you buy a mask, the corporation gets royalties. And copyrights are what big corporations use to control our culture.
There were many people, like myself, taking pictures. These people, like myself, were obviously not protesters. Some were newsmen. Others, like myself, may have sympathy for the causes of the Occupy movement - if for no other reason than these protests have managed to eclipse the Tea Party from our national news. And the Occupy movement has managed to get the message that corporations are not people into the corporate-controlled media. That's a huge success.
I do wonder why they set up shop in front of a government building instead of a bank headquarters. I do believe that their in-your-face protest will do more good for left wing values than anything else could do at this moment. The one percent will make concessions only when they become afraid the situation will get out of their control otherwise.
As I walked through the encampment I heard a man with a bullhorn telling a helicopter several blocks away to leave. He made some other cracks. He had been corrupted by his little bit of power: control of the P.A. system. Power had gone to his head. I took some pictures of him.
He called to me through the bull horn saying "How you doin' cameraman?" I responded. He kept questioning me about my motives, asking who I was working for and whether I had sworn an oath to the Constitution. After a while I started video recording. His compatriots begin chanting "Who the fuck are you?" apparently to him, not to me. A good time was had by all, I guess. Fortunately the other protesters of Occupy L.A. were not allowing absolute power to corrupt anyone absolutely, especially this guy.
Watch for yourself:
Today the Mayor of Los Angeles announced that protesters must be gone by Monday. Stay tuned to your local news media to find out if there will be pepper spray in the future of Occupy Los Angeles.
I don't make a habit of taking pictures of people and I post those very infrequently. This post is apparently an exception. Click any picture to see an enlargement.
This was going to be part of Kenton Wagner, the previous post. Then I decided that, when speaking of Wagner, brevity is a virtue. So this became a separate entry.
1. WAGNER INSPIRES PUNK
The Los Angeles Times has been sending various performing arts critics to L.A. Opera's Ring performances. The current pop music critic is named Ann Powers (a name I had never noticed previously.) She wrote this about the third opera in the cycle, Siegfried.
The blond hair of the title character reminded her of a certain punk rock figure.
Yet the mad twinkle in heldentenor John Treleaven's eyes -- not to mention his neon-yellow wig -- brought Johnny Rotten to mind, as Achim Freyer's reinterpretation of this classic hero's journey did something really unexpected, establishing a link between Richard Wagner and punk.
Her argument is that visual aspects of this particular production of Wagner reminds her of comic book heroes. And comics were inspiring to the punk generation. And so I guess she is implying that Wagner must have had this in mind all along. Or maybe that all punk tunes are based on Wagnerian harmonies and Norse mythology?
Or maybe she just needed to fill out her review with familiar references.
Did you know that Cab Calloway was a great admirer of Wagner's Ring?
2. WAGNER INSPIRES HIP HOP
Ring Festival L.A. has its own original popular music arrangement of Wagner's scores on tap this coming Saturday, a concert by the deKah Hip Hop Orchestra.
This was originally advertised, before the Antonovich resolution, as "a new work inspired by the revolutionary spirit of Wagner". Now the attitude has apparently been recast with Wagner as less of a hero. Here's the current description (from the Ring Festival LA brochure):
Double G (daKAH’s co-founder/conductor/composer, Geoff Gallegos) is creating a new sound track, one that acknowledges a more sinister side of the Ring and marries it to distinctly LA flavors. Derived from source material within the Ring, Double G envisions his music will speak, in the most visceral of ways, of contemporary atrocities in LA. If Wagner was alive and writing a score for this city’s brand of “warfare,” this is how it would sound, adrenaline-pumping, fear-inducing and gut-wrenching. Double G’s work will reflect the intensity of both Wagner’s Ring cycle and, appropriately, the West Coast brand of Gangsta Rap.
Edgy.
I found this video of Double G himself. Some clues as to what he's going to do to Wagner.
3. WAGNER INSPIRES HIP HOP AGAIN
In this short video clip Robin Williams, noted social commentator, speaks to the issues of Wagner and Hip Hop.
Leela, Peela!!
4. WAGNER INSPIRES MILES AND SUN RA
Another Wagner/pop music event, last year in Slovenia, came to my attention via the Internet. It's called VolksWagner. Yes, that's Volks as in Volkswagen. It was created by someone/something called Laibach.
Here's part of the description:
the collaborating artists have decided to seek in Wagner the rudiments of modernism, which first through Mahler, Bruckner, and Debussy, and subsequently through Sch̦enberg, Berg, and Webern, developed into the core of the jazz music of the sonic experimentalists, such as Miles Davis and Sun Ra, and to upgrade them with the ambient electronic spectrum that has been developing over the last three decades. In addition, the suite will address the history of the 20th century Рmodernism crossbred with pop art.
Apparently, someone, somewhere thinks every popular musician in the whole world during the last 150 years somehow owes their musical style to Richard Wagner. What a sad world it would be if that were true.
Look, this picture proves that Louis Armstrong was a big fan of Wagner's Ring.
Why Jingle Bells? Because it's simple, everyone can identify it instantly and it has an unassailable association with our greatest annual holiday of corporate marketing and excess consumption.
Why Christmas? Because, as a non-Christian, every year Christmas music makes me feel isolated and this is my way of taking a bit of control over it. If you like traditional Christmas music, seriously, you won't like these pieces.
Why am I posting this in May? Because here at Mixed Meters time has no meaning and the new piece wasn't finished until the end of January anyway. Things happen when they happen.
What's with the title? The title A Combination of Jingle Bells and The Internationale directly reflects the structure of the music. These two familiar themes are presented prominently (but not lovingly) within the texture of the music, in combination.
Why two themes? By combining two famous themes, which I chose more for their cultural references than for their musical content, I hope to create some sort of meaningful dialogue expressed through music. It's an audacious attempt and not entirely successful except for the occasional listener who cares passionately about the themes themselves. Most often a composer who wants to convey meaning just adds text or lyrics.
Anything else besides the two themes? Yep. There's plenty of my original material as well. The most notable being a melodic fragment which reappears several times. You'll hear that first at 2 minutes 19 seconds.
What's The Internationale?The Internationale is a musical anthem of socialist and communist movements. At one time it was the national anthem of the Soviet Union. It is not as universally recognizable as Jingle Bells unless you happened to grow up in a Communist country. If you're not familiar with it, I suggest you listen to one or two of the mind-boggling number of recordings found at a website called Russian Anthems Museum.
Here are a few lines of lyrics, with which no real American could ever agree, from verse 3 of The Internationale:
The state oppresses and the law cheats The tax bleeds the miserable No duty is imposed on the rich 'Rights of the poor' is a hollow phrase
What other melody did The Internationale remind you of? As I was composing I couldn't help but notice similarity to a theme by Johannes Brahms. The Brahms will be familiar to ex-clarinetists everywhere. What the heck, I put that in too. (No idea what I'm talking about? Listen to the first 10 seconds of this and then listen to A Combination of Jingle Bells and The Internationale at 3'38".)
Why The Internationale? Because, as an anthem of godless communism, it seems like a good opposite to the anthem of godly capitalism, Jingle Bells. And having it be in the public domain helps me avoid any capitalist guilt.
What does Sergei Kuryokhin have to do with this piece? Kuryokhin was a Soviet pianist, composer and avant-gardist who passed away in 1996. Last December, when I was casting about for a theme to pair with Jingle Bells (and also planning to write my post Sergei Kuryokhin - Pianist of Anarchy) I heard The Internationale referenced in two of his large ensemble performances recorded in 1988. "Perfect," I thought. The words "A Combination..." in my title are a small homage to Kuryokhin's wonderful solo piano album Some Combinations of Fingers and Passion.
What does Che Guevara have to do with this piece? Nothing. But I needed pictures for this post and Che, an icon of communism, has become a potent icon of capitalism. That duality seems to reflect the two themes in my piece. I previously discussed Che-based marketing in my MM post Che's Brand.
The Rolex ad shows him wearing a watch that today would cost at least $5,000. (Anyone want to contribute a translation of the German?) It came from here. The Peter Griffin/Che Guevara drawing came from here. The Mad Magazine cover came from here. The woman wearing only carrot bandoleros is apparently Che Guevara's granddaughter in an ad for PETA. Read about it here. The Photoshopped Che Visa card came from here and the Che Santa from here.
As an encore here are two non-Jingle holiday related pieces of mine from the first Mixed Meters Christmas season. They were written in the same Christmas spirit as the others. (Yes, the first dozen seconds of these two pieces are identical. The titles are both apocryphal lyrics from the song Winter Wonderland.)
And Pretend That It's A Circus Clown (read or listen) 2005, 36 sec.
Until The Alligators Knock Him Down (read or listen) 2005, 40 sec.
Leslie and I work mostly on different schedules. There are many days when the only time we are together is spent watching evening television. Our viewing options are limited because we don't subscribe to cable and, of course, because so much television programming is awful crap. She always has a few favorites which I eventually learn to like. And I enjoy the Fox animation shows.
A couple months ago we saw two cop shows, just a few days apart, with identical plots. One was NCIS (which has an interesting ensemble cast) and the other was Castle (you never heard of it and it hasn't been canceled yet.)
Here's the plot: two separate crimes are being investigated. The prime suspects with motive have alibis while evidence points to other suspects with no connection to the victims. Eventually someone figures out that these apparently unrelated suspects secretly know one another because they commute every morning on the same train.
Both shows had a scene when they begin to figure it out. "It's just like that old Hitchcock movie where two strangers meet on a train and agree to commit each other's murder. What's it called?" "Strangers on a Train?"
Alfred Hitchcock's 1951 movie Strangers on a Train. The title itself tells quite a bit about the plot right upfront and, unlike the television shows, the movie goes on to explore the psychology and relationship of the conspirators - well beyond their merely getting caught.
What NCIS and Castle have done is crib a plot idea idea from a 60-year old film as a way to tie two unrelated shooting schedules into one supposedly coherent hour-long show.
At the end the bad guys go to jail because advertisers have paid the television networks to hire production companies to create the minimum amount of entertainment necessary to make you and me feel good enough to watch their commercials and consider buying their products. The writers earned their paychecks by stealing a little bit of cultural history. Capitalism has been served.
But why did they need to mention Hitchcock? The shows would be just as good (or bad) if they'd omitted the reference.
Or would they?
Does raiding the common cultural legacy change the legacy itself? Do quotes from earlier creations change our relationship to those very artworks? I think that when a two-bit police procedural cribs from a great film of the twentieth century, it is the film which take the hit. No one has done Hitchcock any favors. Some of his film's status has been taken away. It becomes fertilizer for the more modern media.
One particular television show has become famous for cribbing from popular culture. It stands head and shoulders above all the others in making references to movies, music, politics, religion, other television shows, even entire countries. It's a huge success and I love it. The Simpsons.
Sometimes I wonder "Are there any original ideas anywhere in The Simpsons?" Maybe everything in every episode is just stuff from other places and I don't get all of it. If I don't know what's going on I generally assume they're honoring some campy horror film or some unlistenable pop group - or both.
I figure there must be at least one person somewhere who knows what they're spoofing. Could anyone get every reference? And if someone did, would that person be able to hold a normal conversation?
Suppose The Simpsons wanted to do a parody of a movie which you had never seen or even heard of (like, in my case, this one). If you learned about this after watching the animated episode would you want to go watch the original? For me the answer is "Absolutely not". I think that's a pretty common response. After viewing an out-of-context comedy version, experiencing the original, in-context serious version would be kind of a downer where you giggle in inappropriate places.
I'm guessing that the references are not put there by the producers for people who have no clue. The references are for the people who immediately get it. These people, including myself sometimes, are rewarded with a little positive emotional response. "I'm so smart." we think. "I feel good because I'm in on the joke." And because we feel good we're more likely to watch the commercials and consider buying the products. Capitalism is served again.
So my goal from the very beginning was to invade pop culture. That was my goal as an underground cartoonist, [to] see how far I could carry this.
He carried it pretty damn far. Matt Groening has done more than invade. The Simpsons has conquered pop culture. If only the US invasion of Iraq could have been half as successful. Many of their little borrowings will, in the future, become better known by more people via the Simpsons than directly through the original esoteric thing, whatever it was.
It may be the show's central facet but the device of pop culture reference is by no means unique to The Simpsons. The idea of using other peoples earlier work - in smaller or greater chunks, largely recognizable but altered to a new context, often without attribution - is all around us these days. It started with hip-hop music. It has been made ubiquitous by the rise of cheap technology, over enthusiastic fans and a voracious media where a hundred cable channels seem puny in comparison to the entire Internet.
The result? We, as a culture, have found a new dominant paradigm for our time. It the dawning of the Age of Cultural Peculation. (What's Peculation?Another definition.)
Our entertainment industry rips off small bits of existing cultural flesh and consumes it without chewing too well. It then creates newer, more generic, less unique, less satisfying cultural product to use as it sees fit. It feeds us this stew, hoping a few chunks of old, good stuff will blind us to the thin, watery broth which is the principal ingredient.
If they can keep us happy consuming this crap, Capitalism will be served. But the more they do it the more our Culture will suffer irreparable harm. The more we let them do it, the more we deserve no better.
