Interpolation/Cross-Pollination - John Lennon/Arthur Alexander

As is well known, the first few Beatles records were blends of original Lennon/McCartney compositions padded out with cover versions of songs mostly taken from the American R&B catalog. A particular favorite cover version of mine is "Anna (Go To Him)", an Arthur Alexander original covered on "Please Please Me," with John Lennon taking the lead vocal.
What your hearing is John Lennon coming into his own as a vocalist. This is a 22-year-old man emerging as one of the best singers to ever live. Listening to this song on headphones via the 2009 remastered edition of "Please Please Me," (which retains the original mono mix, so the vocals are all in the right channel), is a wondrous thing - you can hear every nuance of Lennon's phrasing, every tear in his vocal cords when he really belts it out, and the ebb and flow of emotion in the performance is displayed with perfect clarity. In short; it's fucking great. Now a funny thing happens when you listen to Arthur Alexander's original and compare:
In general, Alexander's vocal is much more restrained than Lennon's, his delivery smoother, he lays just a bit behind the beat, taking his time enunciating the lyrics (it should be pointed out that, a rarity in early 60s R&B, Arthur Alexander wrote his own songs - he's singing his own words here).

But pay particular attention to the choruses in the two versions, beginning with the lines "All of my life.." Lennon really lets it rip here. Alexander hold back. Why do I point out this difference? Well, I think it demonstrates something interesting about musical cross-pollination and the influences are absorbed and interpreted across cultural, generational, national, and racial boundaries.

John Lennon, as a white boy from a broken home in a hardscrabble dockworker's town, takes his source of influence, Arthur Alexander (always cited by Lennon, throughout his life, as one of his all-time favorite artists), and uses it to channel desperation. His chorus is the sound of a pained man transmuting the pain of another man, a pain in which he finds shared emotional resonance, and emerging with something new, namely Pop Music, or Rock, or whatever you want to call the global phenomenon that the Beatles kicked off.

But there's another thing at play here. This is the short story of the birth of Rock/Pop: white British, obsessed with black American music, adapt (not to say "steal") the stylistic underpinnings of black American music, and come out with something new that conquers the world. But these kids, these Brits, the Jaggers, the Richards, the Lennons and McCartneys, were completely, naively sincere in their love of black American music. They wanted to be just like their heroes. Lennon desperately wants to be as good as Arthur Alexander, and you can hear it, loud and clear. Lennon's chorus on "Anna" is the sound of a man trying to live up to an idol. In the process he created something new, and kicked a pop-cultural dialogue into motion, a motion that continues to this day.

How I Won The War

How I Won The War is a curious movie. Any lasting notoriety it has most likely stems from John Lennon's presence in the cast. It was his only non-Beatles film role, and the story goes that he composed "Strawberry Fields Forever" on set in Spain, in between takes. Roger Ebert gave it a fairly vicious negative review upon its release in 1968 and apparently never felt it was worth revisiting at any time since.

Ebert's review is typically attentive and well-reasoned, and some parts I find hard to disagree with, but I think the film is worth much more than he gives it credit for.

Two immediate touchstones came to mind upon first viewing - Catch-22 and Gravity's Rainbow. Mike Nichols' 1971 film version of Catch-22 can't quite nail the nifty, daring leaps between comedy and tragedy that epitomize Joseph Heller's novel. Nichols' plays his film as slapstick which suddenly gives way to nightmarish horror in its final third, and while that structure offers its own rewards (and that final third is truly brutal), How I Won The War is far more nimble in it's melding of absurdity and carnage, and thus in a strange way watching it evokes the same feeling of displacement one gets from reading the Heller novel.

Catch-22 the novel was long-published when How I Won The War was made, but Gravity's Rainbow was pretty far in the future. I'm not one to blithely assign influence where it's not readily apparent, but it did occur to me watching How I Won The War that director Richard Lester might be Thomas Pynchon's closest corollary in the film world. The relentlessly tangential structure of the film's narrative, and the near-constant diversions into the back stories of its minor characters are devices Pynchon utilizes frequently, and nowhere more luminously than in Gravity's Rainbow. Aside from a World War II setting, the two works also share certain meta-textual preoccupations, and both can sometimes come off as a barrage of meta-narrative techniques, something with which Ebert certainly takes umbrage in his review. His main gripe is that How I Won The War is too flashy with it's storytelling devices and in his view this focus on fractured narrative makes the film's dips into pathos ring hollow. I tend to disagree, as I do think the meta-structures align for a singular meta-purpose - the framing device of the film is a bunch of English blokes reminiscing about their wartime days over a pint, and this idea of a story being told by people all too aware of their own (often inconsequential) place within the story is what lends the film it's deeper sense of tragedy. The players know their parts, and they know how it ends, and they follow through on their destinies, some with resignation, some with lunacy, some with bitterness and rage. But there's a helplessness, an inability, in the end, to change anything at all, that ultimately evokes a remarkable feeling of desolation.

Ebert makes on point that is irrefutable. How I Won The War is a resolutely British film, and I too had trouble at times even understanding what was being said, and the British cultural references and lapses into vaudeville were way over my head. Ebert's reaction to this is so violent as to almost come off as bigoted. I, for one, think that despite the insularity of the film's cultural landscape, the meaning of these references and vaudevillian asides is quite clear - it's all about what they mean to the characters, and in that regard they serve to reinforce the theme of stories told by self-aware storytellers, who despite their awareness are powerless before the arc of the story, and end up crushed by the march of history.

From These Flames No Light

From These Flames No Light

Against the U.S. Election Spectacle

Consumption of industrially produced commodities is no necessary adjunct to or true ornament of life, in advanced capitalist societies especially, but rather the invention of a barbarous age, used to obscure wretched matters.  Neutered antagonisms – of Pepsi vs. Coca-Cola or Romney vs. Obama – likewise are manufactured consumer commodities, blessed as they are by the powerful, the famous, the holy.

That few people, in the United States or elsewhere, believe that these antagonisms actually accomplish much less change anything more substantial than the window dressing of power is a banality as obvious as it is wearying.

Nonetheless the people’s consumption continues, carried out as if some ancient custom, a vain, futile holocaust the flames of which produce no light.  The practitioners of this rite are granted nothing but vexation, hindrance, and constraint for their efforts. 

Not without cause then, do Republicans and Democrats alike urge the populace to vote.  Participation in the ritual, even if only by blind habit, grants legitimacy to the system of modern bondage that both parties preside over in tandem.

Though expressing this obvious fact is deemed vulgar and troublesome, a few judicious ears have long since rejected the trivial pleasures of eloquent oratory and the jingling sound of false victories.  We recognize there is no true musical delight here, just the hollow thunder of order applauding itself.

Zero Sum

October 2012

In all am I scattered

I stood on a lofty mountain and saw a gigantic man, and another, a dwarf; and I heard as it were a voice of thunder, and drew nigh for to hear; and He spake unto me and said: I am thou, and thou art I; and wheresoever thou mayest be I am there. In all am I scattered, and whencesoever thou willest, thou gatherest Me; and gathering Me, thou gatherest Thyself.

—From the Gospel of Eve, quoted by Epiphanius, Hæres., xxvi. 3

And all of this...

The black dog (Churchill), the heaviness (Dangerfield).  To be always clawing out or sinking in.  The only real feeling involved is exhaustion, that and boredom, which is not really a feeling at all but rather the negative space around feeling, or the drapes that shut tight around a window and can't, for some reason, be opened.  It becomes difficult: to live, to work, to love, to be loved.  Thoughts slip away.  The mind lacks incisiveness.  In the trench with slight dementia, amnesia, synaesthesia, whatever.  And all I ask is: what to do?

The Waiting Room

The Waiting Room

100 99 98 97 96 95 94 93 92 91 90 89 88 87 86 85 84 83 82 81 80 79 78 77 76 75 74 73 72 71 70 69 68 67 66 65 64 63 62 61 60 59 58 57 56 55 54 53 52 51 50 49 48 47 46 45 44 43 42 41 40 39 38 37 36 35 34 33 32 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0

It’s strange to be in an ER in the daytime.  They seem like such nighttime places.

1000 999 998 997 996 995 994 993 992 991 990 989 [Ed.’s note – cut short in the interest of brevity]

                             Look at all these numbers!  #s!  #s!  #s!  Wonderful!  Counting backwards, it’s a helpful trick, they say.  And actually, it kind of works.

                             It’s all about control.  When I feel like I’m not in control – on a subway stopped between stations, in bed but kept awake by undue awareness of my heartbeat – that’s when I freak out.  But I also understand that letting go of control is a good and pleasurable sensation.  There have been glimpses of it; sex, drink, drugs, music etc.  Maybe it’s an ego thing.  Translation: how to adapt an enjoyment of loss on control into everyday life?  Also: how to learn to relax?

                             The hospital is boring, but surprisingly well-run.  Maybe they’ll give me some meds and I can get on with my day.  An admission of weakness – that’s the first step, isn’t it?

                             If I get home in time I’d really like to shave…

1939 1938 1937 1936 [Ed.’s note – ibid]

Trying to contain my contempt for humanity

I’ve got a letter to mail

General Hospital is up next on TV

Biting my nails

Counting backwards

Expert health care

Prone to infection

Slack-jawed yokels

Do it

Everybody make happy

“Anselmo doesn’t like to kill”

The only worthwhile revolution…

Waiting rooms can be Zen

(for the right frame of mind)

Hospital wristband

Dead letter office

Return to sender

Trip. Slip. Fall.

Undeliverable

Mailer-daemon

Horizon/Verizon

Angry Latinas

News brief

Diplomats, bureaucrats

Violence & tenderness

Short answer: YES

Wake up!

Count slow

Breathe deep

What is not released, returns

Don’t mix yr drinks

Distant relatives

Objective correlative

Gay cowboys

Satire

Be a good straight man

(make a good straight man?)

(play a good straight man?)

Hungry?  Not hungry?

2001 2000 1999 1998 1997 1996 1995 1994 1993 1992 1991 1990 1989 1987 1987 1986 1985 1984 1983 1982 1981 1980 1979 [Ed.’s note – ibid.]

“Risked his life to save a stranger”

Montell Williams: grand arbiter of truth

Doctor, doctor

Waiting waiting waiting

Counting backwards, breathing deep

Let it happen.

You can deal.

1521 1520 1519 1518 1517 1516 1515 1514 1513 1512 1511 1510 1509 1508 1507 1506 1505 1504 1503 1502 1501 1500 1499 1498 1497 1496 1495 1494 1493 1492 …

                             They just called my name.  Time to go.

khmerrouge.dk

Web presence.

Spirtualized, Live at Radio City Music Hall, 30th July 2010

Performing Ladies & Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space  in its entirety.  The video quality isn't great, but the audio is spot-on, and the songs, well, they're beyond amazing.

Khmer Rouge.VIOLENCE

Album out now as a digital LP, in pay-what-you-want format.
Find it here.

"The spectacle is the bad dream of enchained modern society,"

"which ultimately only expresses its desire to sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of this sleep."

I Could Tell You

I Could Tell You

Khmer Rouge. New Year EP.

New Year

Between the Rue du Four and the Rue du Buci, where our youth so completely went astray as a few glasses were drunk, one could feel certain that we would never do any better.
- Guy Debord, Panegyric

#endcommuniqueintotheblackhole 

2666; Interrupted

I've had to put down the book for a bit.  It feels a bit damaging to the psyche to be reading at this point.  I had a similar experience with Houellebecq at one point.  It's not a bad thing, it only speaks to how some material cuts so close to the bone, and is so truthful, that sometimes it is painful to face up to it.

All I Want To Need( )

All I Want To Need( )

A Slight Detour Into Hunter Thompson

Fear And Loathing In Gonzovision '78  is more a curiosity than anything else, a BBC mini-documentary shot in the late 70s.  If you've seen the posthumous Hunter S. Thompson doc Gonzo, then you've already seen a lot of this footage before.  But the original film is interesting on its own for a few simple reasons.  First, it happens to catch a formidable literary figure right on the cusp of a descent into self-parody and relative obscurity, and it depicts him fully aware of being on the cusp, grappling with what it,  trying to formulate some way out of the trap of his (self-constructed) public persona.  Also, it's just always interesting to see gritty, unvarnished footage of a legendary character in his element and in his own time.  It's just a nice reminder that the people you know through books and media, who exist mainly as avatars in your own mind, free-floating and near-god-like, were actual human beings, living flesh and blood in their own present, a concrete physical world that hemmed them in and defined them, no matter what sort of immortality their great creative works have achieved.

The most famous citation from Hunter S. Thompson is the great elegaic passage from Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas where he describes the high water mark of the 60s and then the ineluctable breaking of the wave.  One can't help but think that Thompson, the greatest chronicler of that wave there ever was, was also tragically bound up in it, riding it and describing its every pitch and roll.   So that when it did finally break, and he was left wiped out on the shore, what else was there for him to do but let the tide carry him out again, into oblivion?

Unexpected Hanging

Description of the paradox

The paradox has been described as follows:^[4]

A judge tells a condemned prisoner that he will be hanged at noon on one weekday in the following week but that the execution will be a surprise to the prisoner. He will not know the day of the hanging until the executioner knocks on his cell door at noon that day. Having reflected on his sentence, the prisoner draws the conclusion that he will escape from the hanging. His reasoning is in several parts. He begins by concluding that the "surprise hanging" can't be on Friday, as if he hasn't been hanged by Thursday, there is only one day left - and so it won't be a surprise if he's hanged on Friday. Since the judge's sentence stipulated that the hanging would be a surprise to him, he concludes it cannot occur on Friday.
He then reasons that the surprise hanging cannot be on Thursday either, because Friday has already been eliminated and if he hasn't been hanged by Wednesday night, the hanging must occur on Thursday, making a Thursday hanging not a surprise either. By similar reasoning he concludes that the hanging can also not occur on Wednesday, Tuesday or Monday. Joyfully he retires to his cell confident that the hanging will not occur at all.
The next week, the executioner knocks on the prisoner's door at noon on Wednesday — which, despite all the above, was an utter surprise to him. Everything the judge said came true.

Other versions of the paradox replace the death sentence with a surprise fire drill, examination, or lion behind a door or when the bin will be emptied.^[1]
The informal nature of everyday language allows for multiple interpretations of the paradox. In the extreme case, a prisoner who is paranoid might feel certain in his knowledge that the executioner will arrive at noon on Monday, then certain that he will come on Tuesday and so forth, thus ensuring that every day really is a "surprise" to him. But even without adding this element to the story, the vagueness of the account prohibits one from being objectively clear about which formalization truly captures its essence. There has been considerable debate between the logical school, which uses mathematical language, and the epistemological school, which employs concepts such as knowledge, belief and memory, over which formulation is correct.

Third Go-Round: Roberto Bolaño’s "2666"

So everything lets us down, including curiosity and honesty and what we love best.  Yes, said the voice, but cheer up, it's fun in the end.
                                                 2666, pg. 209, "The Part About Amalfitano"

In a book full of bitter jokes, this is perhaps the most brutal.  It also bolsters the view of 2666 as the curdled and disconsolate mirror image of the vibrancy of The Savage Detectives, though upon a recent re-reading of the latter novel, there is a heavy sense of loss hanging in its margins.

I've been thinking lately that another ironic twist, though perhaps not a bitter one, is that 2666 may, strangely, come to be even more appreciated as a work of fiction than it already is.  This may sound grandiose, given that the novel was annointed as a masterpiece even before its English publication, but the publication of so many of Bolaño’s shorter works since his death has changed things a bit.  In these shorter works, especially Amulet and the short story collection Last Evenings On Earth, the author's mastery of his craft is so full-fledged and visible, that it throws the sprawl of his two major novels into a different light.  A common criticism of both 2666 and The Savage Detectives is that they indulge in literary "excess," but this misses the point I think.  The author's self-stated ambition (in both the essay collection Between Parentheses and as told anecdotally by friend and co-conspirator Rodrigo Fresán) was the Total Novel, something all-encompassing and reflective of life itself, in all its grandeur and squalor.

It's obvious in the shorter works that Bolaño could turn out tightly structured narratives of unified form.  But it's also obvious that he felt the need to stretch his legs a bit, and he was very aware of how risky that is.  He even has a character in 2666 rhapsodize about how readers prefer the smaller, perfect works to the more unwieldy and ambitious tomes (in the novel the comparison is between Melville's Bartelby The Scrivener and Moby-Dick).

As a sucker for enormous books, this is right in my wheelhouse, and I realize that a novel like this suits my literary biases quite well, and that this could color my interpretations.  But on this re-reading I'm noticing just how much of the craft and careful structure of the shorter novels finds its way into 2666.  When people say "excess" I take that to mean a work haphazardly arranged, fraught with tangents that lead nowhere and lacking a cohesive internal structure, and that is simply not the case with this novel.  In its own way it is as finely aligned as a solar system, and in fact when I visualize the structure I see an array of elliptical orbits in which the five individual parts of the novel and the myriad characters revolve around the inscrutable black hole which serves as their gravitational center - the city of Santa Teresa, and all the horror and violence contained within it.

This elliptical structure manifests itself a number of ways.  Its in the dreams that the four eponymous literary critics in "The Part About The Critics" wander in and out of, where details of their actual lives are warped and reorganized, only to reappear later in the waking world.  Its in the numerous stories-within-stories, where one character recounts meeting another character wherein the second character begins telling their own story which includes a third and fourth character, each with their own story.  And the structure fundamentally shapes the overall impact of the narrative as well; this is a novel where nearly every character, as well as the very narrative itself (and trying to explicate the narrative voice is worthy of its own essay), is constantly circling around some destination without ever quite arriving there.  The critics search for Benno von Archimboldi but never find him.  Professor Amalfitano seeks a remedy for his encroaching madness but fins only a web of reflexive self-doubt.  Oscar Fate wants to protect Rosa but can't quite get close enough to her to even understand what exactly it is that endangers her.  Lalo Cura aims to solve the mystery of the Santa Teresa murders but his logic and zeal is thwarted at every turn by corruption and indifference.  And finally, Archimboldi himself, nee Hans Reiter, seems to live his very life at a remove from himself and unable to grasp conclusively anyone or anything around him, whether lovers or family, and the tangled web of his life - which spans all the horror of the late-20th century - still draws him, in the end, inexplicably back to Mexico, and back to Santa Teresa.

Perhaps the most poignant detail I've noticed this time is just how close the critics come to locating their literary idol.  Norton leaves Santa Teresa to join Morini in Turin, the two of them convinced the quest was a fool's errand, while Espinoza and Pelletier are left to ruminate on their failure.  And they come to agree - against a backdrop of a tennis match reminiscent of Antonnioni's Blow-Out - that Archimboldi is indeed somewhere in Santa Teresa.  They've discovered his real name, his physical attributes, they've doggedly tracked down his previous locations, but still he eludes them.  They won't get any closer, and they'll never know just how close they did come.  The conclusion of "The Part About The Critics" serves as an apt summation of the tricky game that 2666 plays with meaning and interpretation:

"I believe you," he said, and he really did believe what his friend was saying.
"Archimboldi is here," said Pelletier, "and we're here, and this is the closest we'll ever be to him ."

Escape Velocity

Behind this crowd, however, hides the one true patron.  If you have patience enough to search, maybe you'll catch a glimpse of what you're looking for.  And when you find it, you'll probably be disappointed.  It isn't the devil.  It isn't the State.  It isn't a magical child.  It's the void.
                    - Roberto Bolaño, "An Attempt at an Exhaustive Catalog of Patrons" Between Parentheses.


"UVB-76, UVB-76 — 93 882 naimina 74 14 35 74 — 9 3 8 8 2 nikolai, anna, ivan, michail, ivan, nikolai, anna, 7, 4, 1, 4, 3, 5, 7, 4."
                     - Transmission from Russian shortwave radio station UBV-76, 23 August 2008 at 13:35UTC

  UVB-76 Aug.23.2010 9.32amPST by djoutcold

Breathing Isn't The Right Word

"Yes, one can wage war in this world, ape love, torture one's fellow man, or merely say evil of one's neighbor while knitting.  But, in certain cases, carrying on, merely continuing, is superhuman."
                                                                                    The Fall, Albert Camus.

A few small comforts in a hollow world;

The Rebel.

Explication of The Enemies.

Redemption. 

Continuing.....