Lately, having found more artists I like in my collection than I can adequately remember by artist name alone, I have been working on filling in the genre tags. This way, even if I can't recall the Codex Huelgas specifically, I can easily find it under its genre tag, Ars Subtilior. This is unfortunate for any music whose genre can, accurately or inaccurately, best be described as "rock", a genre which ranges from Aaron Neville to the 90 Day Men, but works fairly well for music which falls into the genre "Art Punk" (Contents: Brainiac's "Bonsai Superstar", New Fries' "More", and the Urinals' "Another EP"). Here are some of the more marginally represented genres in my collection.
Acid House (68 songs, 7:55:17 total time): For a long time this genre was represented solely by Tom Dissevelt and Kid Baltan's song "Syncopation" from their EP "Electronic Movements". Starting in late 2019, though, I started exploring acid house made _after_ 1962. Tracks now include Choice's classic "Acid Eiffel", the remastered soundtrack to the Amiga demo "Jesus on E's", and Legowelt's "Sark Island Acid" EP.
Acid Jazz (13 songs, 56:22 Total Time): For a long time this genre was populated solely by Robert Wyatt songs - the short version of "Venceremos/We Will Win" by Working Week and "Another Great Victory" by Jo Bogaert's Millennium. I have since broadened the records available to me by adding Korean acid jazz group Roller Coaster's 2002 album "Absolute".
Afrobeats: As distinct from "Afrobeat", this contains just one song: Skeleton Move by Master KG feat. Zanda Zakusa.
Analog Drum & Bass: I don't know what this genre is supposed to be. The genre contains one album, "I Think I See Myself on CCTV" by Disciplina Kitschme. I see no particular reason to retag the genre on this.
Argentinian Punk/HC: Again only one album here, Soberania Personal's "Benditos Sean Munecos Que Pegan". I have other Argentinian records in my collection, and other punk/hardcore records, but no punk/hardcore records by Argentinian groups.
Auvergnat Folk Music: Represented only by three songs from Gentiane's 1977 album "Musique d'Auvergne". Not sure it's particularly worth differentiating Auvergnat Folk Music from Breton Folk Music, but the tags came that way and they're not wrong.
Avant-Oompah: Just one track, Noodband's "Sono Koubaly" from the 1985 compilation "Dutch Difficult Music". Noodband's other music does not fall into this genre. I would gladly have more than one song with this genre tag, however, I do not believe there has ever been more than one song recorded in this genre.
Bellydance: Only nine songs here, one of which is "Dark Fire" by Douglas Adams (not that Douglas Adams) and Light Rain, which I ripped from a the soundtrack from a bellydance video on Vimeo. I've been looking for the rest of this record but it is nowhere to be found.
Bhangra: This is just Daler Mehndi's "Bolo Ta Ra Ra". I might one day explore Bhangra further but I haven't yet.
Big Band: Most music in this genre is just tagged with "Jazz". What's left is one of several duplicate MP3s of Fletcher Henderson's "Sugar Foot Stomp", this one tagged as being by "Louis Armstrong With Fletcher Henderson", a fairly avant-garde university piece called Codify by North Texas State University's "Lab '68", and the full five-part "Indian Suite" by Ray Noble, famous for containing "Cherokee".
Blackened Crust: Just "Masters of War" by Iskra.
Bloody Weird: "The Fire-Ant Said to the Cockroach", by Arthur Brown. Came tagged this way, and having heard it I am unable to conceive of a more appropriate tag for it.
Bongo Flava?: Distinct from the "Bongo Flava" genre (which contains nothing more than Ndege ya Mabua Peku Peku Mitaani Mitaani by the Micky Sound) because I have heard it claimed on the Internet that the X Plastaz album Maasai Hip Hop is _not_ Bongo Flava and only stupid idiots would believe it is. Therefore I have placed a question mark after the genre and am leaving it there until I can make a more definitive ascertation.
Boom Bap: Contains the S/T LP by Company Flow offshots The Juggaknots, the 1996 album The "Deep" by Japanese hip-hop crew Soul Scream, and "Put It On" by Big L from 1995's "Lifestylez Ov Da Poor And Dangerous".
Brass Rock: A genre that mostly exists so I can easily locate "Kure v Hodenach" by Flamengo, a record I remember mostly as "that really amazingly good brass rock record from somewhere in Eastern Europe, sometime int he '70s". Tower of Power's set closing out the Fillmore East in 1971 is also present.
Britpop: Contains only "Battle" from the special edition of Blur's "13". This is probably not the first song to come to mind when most people think of Britpop as a genre.
OK, there's another low-effort blog post for you - I'll try to keep them coming on a semi-regular basis!
Tuesday 31 March 2020
Sunday 29 March 2020
The Curious Case of Ed Wood, "Transvestite"
I was watching a surprisingly well-made 1980s film about a vampire motorcycle when my thoughts turned, once again, to the godfather of bad movies, Ed Wood.
Wood casts a long shadow over the cult of bad films. He is their patron saint, their avatar, the shining exemplar of the "outsider artist". His work combines profound sincerity and profound artistic incompetence, and he is therefore equally praised and mocked, a mythic figure. When I was young, Tim Burton made a hagiographic biopic.
I am not certain if I have seen Wood's first feature film, 1953's "Glen or Glenda?" all the way through. I remember it mostly through the way it is represented in Burton's film. Burton represents an artist who took an assignment to make a schlock exploitation film and turned it into a deeply personal apologia. "Glen or Glenda?" is therefore an incredibly significant film, a film in which someone who is someone we might now call "gender non-conforming" speaks for himself, tells his own story.
It's not, though, Wood's entire story. It's not a complete chronicle of his experiences with being gender nonconforming. It was his first film, directed when he was less than 30 years old. He lived 25 difficult years after making it, years that might possibly lead us to revise his hypothesis.
There is no reason to assume that Wood did not sincerely believe, in 1953, that he was a healthy, red-blooded American male who just happened to enjoy wearing women's clothing, just as there is no reason to believe that Wood did not believe, in 1960 when he directed "The Sinister Urge", that pornography is a shameful and predatory blight.
Wood's last decade was not a happy one. He was, sources tell us, alcoholic. He abused his wife. He made hardcore pornography. Even people who celebrate Wood's life seem to find little to celebrate in his last decade, and so the temptation is to sweep it under the rug. To ignore it.
The 1970s is also the decade where he may have come to identify more and more closely as a transgender woman. I say "may have" because I can't even give you a cite on this. I can't point to documentary evidence, to any modern analysis of Wood's relationship to gender norms, to how his self-identification may have changed over time. His relation to gender has been frozen in time as it was in 1953, reinforced (with, as far as I can tell, the best of intentions) by Burton's big-budget hagiography. We remember Wood as a man who enjoyed wearing women's clothing.
I wonder, sometimes, how his experience tracks with my own. I recall the struggle, the pain, of being gender non-conforming and of not having any socially accepted or healthy way of expressing it, all of the things I said about myself that weren't quite true. I am marked indelibly by those decades of suffering. It does not surprise me or strike me as unusual that a gender non-conforming person in a non-accepting culture should deal with that stress by drinking to excess, that his last life was not a happy one, that he treated the people closest to him inexcusably poorly.
What I remember of Burton's film is the image of Ed Wood as a sort of transvestite Elroy Jetson, an irrepressible, happy-go-lucky, boundlessly enthusiastic young man. I think this is probably genuinely part of who he was. I am not sure Wood would have been suited, in 1994, by another in the endless stream of tortured-artist biopics.
Cinema lies, and Burton's lies - I think they were well-intentioned, just like Wood's own lies were well-intentioned. I wouldn't say it's their _fault_, either of them, that I carried the burden of those lies, took them inside me as part of who I was. I made my own compromises, told my own half-truths, chose the ways in which I would hurt, just like Wood did before me. I'm trying to do better now. I'm trying to tell my own story, as honestly and fairly as I can.
I think maybe it's time we revisit Ed Wood's story. I suspect there are things about his life and experiences that we can understand better now than anyone could in 1994 or in 1953. I believe that Ed deserves that privilege, that all of us who grew up in his shadow deserve that privilege.
Wood casts a long shadow over the cult of bad films. He is their patron saint, their avatar, the shining exemplar of the "outsider artist". His work combines profound sincerity and profound artistic incompetence, and he is therefore equally praised and mocked, a mythic figure. When I was young, Tim Burton made a hagiographic biopic.
I am not certain if I have seen Wood's first feature film, 1953's "Glen or Glenda?" all the way through. I remember it mostly through the way it is represented in Burton's film. Burton represents an artist who took an assignment to make a schlock exploitation film and turned it into a deeply personal apologia. "Glen or Glenda?" is therefore an incredibly significant film, a film in which someone who is someone we might now call "gender non-conforming" speaks for himself, tells his own story.
It's not, though, Wood's entire story. It's not a complete chronicle of his experiences with being gender nonconforming. It was his first film, directed when he was less than 30 years old. He lived 25 difficult years after making it, years that might possibly lead us to revise his hypothesis.
There is no reason to assume that Wood did not sincerely believe, in 1953, that he was a healthy, red-blooded American male who just happened to enjoy wearing women's clothing, just as there is no reason to believe that Wood did not believe, in 1960 when he directed "The Sinister Urge", that pornography is a shameful and predatory blight.
Wood's last decade was not a happy one. He was, sources tell us, alcoholic. He abused his wife. He made hardcore pornography. Even people who celebrate Wood's life seem to find little to celebrate in his last decade, and so the temptation is to sweep it under the rug. To ignore it.
The 1970s is also the decade where he may have come to identify more and more closely as a transgender woman. I say "may have" because I can't even give you a cite on this. I can't point to documentary evidence, to any modern analysis of Wood's relationship to gender norms, to how his self-identification may have changed over time. His relation to gender has been frozen in time as it was in 1953, reinforced (with, as far as I can tell, the best of intentions) by Burton's big-budget hagiography. We remember Wood as a man who enjoyed wearing women's clothing.
I wonder, sometimes, how his experience tracks with my own. I recall the struggle, the pain, of being gender non-conforming and of not having any socially accepted or healthy way of expressing it, all of the things I said about myself that weren't quite true. I am marked indelibly by those decades of suffering. It does not surprise me or strike me as unusual that a gender non-conforming person in a non-accepting culture should deal with that stress by drinking to excess, that his last life was not a happy one, that he treated the people closest to him inexcusably poorly.
What I remember of Burton's film is the image of Ed Wood as a sort of transvestite Elroy Jetson, an irrepressible, happy-go-lucky, boundlessly enthusiastic young man. I think this is probably genuinely part of who he was. I am not sure Wood would have been suited, in 1994, by another in the endless stream of tortured-artist biopics.
Cinema lies, and Burton's lies - I think they were well-intentioned, just like Wood's own lies were well-intentioned. I wouldn't say it's their _fault_, either of them, that I carried the burden of those lies, took them inside me as part of who I was. I made my own compromises, told my own half-truths, chose the ways in which I would hurt, just like Wood did before me. I'm trying to do better now. I'm trying to tell my own story, as honestly and fairly as I can.
I think maybe it's time we revisit Ed Wood's story. I suspect there are things about his life and experiences that we can understand better now than anyone could in 1994 or in 1953. I believe that Ed deserves that privilege, that all of us who grew up in his shadow deserve that privilege.
Thursday 26 March 2020
Lucia and the Prisoners
Today's dawdle - a blog I read mentioned the Cornish sheep-counting rubric. (I had to spend five minutes staring at my bookmarks list, which is not extensive, to try and recall the name of the blog.) This had me searching the rubric to see what videos appeared. In it I found an unrelated but brief list of uncommon videos (of which four have been deleted). It turns out that this is a playlist put together by the official Youtube account of the band British Sea Power, who I have not heard.
We've all tried these things - curation, right? You have something and you want to organize it, put together lists of your favorites, and share that way. But that's not the way Youtube works. Youtube doesn't care what you like. It works under its own inscrutable logic, logic that brings you inexorably to the same places. Typically this involves Joe Rogan. I don't know why. I hate Youtube because of this.
But the curators still exist, and if you try really hard (for some reason it seems to be easier when I browse Youtube in Porn Mode, when you force it to forget your past) you can find things that way. This is why I am watching a video from 2014 called "Lucia and the Prisoners". It uses words like "entheogenic" and "transcendental", which means that some people who call themselves doctors are conducting experiments to try and get prisoners high. The video itself is extremely striking and compelling. It reminds one of A Clockwork Orange, certainly, and of orgone, and of, and here is something that in fact has a sound and credible empirical basis, my own experiences with transcranial magnetic stimulation. Except that while I was getting TMS I watched nature documentaries and "The Last Jedi" on Netflix.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcSQ-RldqG4&list=PL5wNIzQH-MF-fmB7pBZQvPooElwMnCuZD&index=4
This video racked up 1,376 views between April 19, 2014 and March 26, 2020.
Here's another video I found while searching. This is fantastic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_Lhuw2ukvQ
It has that fantastic quality of being technologically mediated. The poster plays an old tape they got from their relatives, many years ago, on a cheap transistor Walkman. Then they holds his camera in front of the walkman and films it, through what pirates like to call the "analog hole". The camera shakes for the whole video. The filmer is trying to be quiet but makes noise anyway. Halfway through they reach down and fiddle with the volume.
As far as I can tell this is the only circulating digital copy of this obscure children's cassette. The song is fantastic. I'm not really into children's records but this is just an amazing top-quality bit of folk music.
We've all tried these things - curation, right? You have something and you want to organize it, put together lists of your favorites, and share that way. But that's not the way Youtube works. Youtube doesn't care what you like. It works under its own inscrutable logic, logic that brings you inexorably to the same places. Typically this involves Joe Rogan. I don't know why. I hate Youtube because of this.
But the curators still exist, and if you try really hard (for some reason it seems to be easier when I browse Youtube in Porn Mode, when you force it to forget your past) you can find things that way. This is why I am watching a video from 2014 called "Lucia and the Prisoners". It uses words like "entheogenic" and "transcendental", which means that some people who call themselves doctors are conducting experiments to try and get prisoners high. The video itself is extremely striking and compelling. It reminds one of A Clockwork Orange, certainly, and of orgone, and of, and here is something that in fact has a sound and credible empirical basis, my own experiences with transcranial magnetic stimulation. Except that while I was getting TMS I watched nature documentaries and "The Last Jedi" on Netflix.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcSQ-RldqG4&list=PL5wNIzQH-MF-fmB7pBZQvPooElwMnCuZD&index=4
This video racked up 1,376 views between April 19, 2014 and March 26, 2020.
Here's another video I found while searching. This is fantastic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_Lhuw2ukvQ
It has that fantastic quality of being technologically mediated. The poster plays an old tape they got from their relatives, many years ago, on a cheap transistor Walkman. Then they holds his camera in front of the walkman and films it, through what pirates like to call the "analog hole". The camera shakes for the whole video. The filmer is trying to be quiet but makes noise anyway. Halfway through they reach down and fiddle with the volume.
As far as I can tell this is the only circulating digital copy of this obscure children's cassette. The song is fantastic. I'm not really into children's records but this is just an amazing top-quality bit of folk music.
Wednesday 25 March 2020
Eco on Pornography
CW: Sexual assault
http://non-compos-mentis.blogspot.com/2006/11/umberto-eco-how-to-recognize-porn-movie.html
I ran across this little essay from deep in the mists of the Blog Era, perhaps while killing time on TVTropes. I found it a fascinating read, in large part because it has so little overlap with my experience of pornography. I get where it comes from. The stigma against discussing pornography, except in the coarsest of terms, means that people's relationship to it can be intensely personal and self-revelatory.
I had to look up when it was written. 1994. His writing also says much not only about Eco as a person but about the times he lived in, his experiences with pornography. Over the past few years, as the economic center of Western porn has shifted from Hollywood to Quebec, it has increasingly seemed to me that much pornography represents not the unspoken desires of the masses, but the values and beliefs of a few. This was as true of the porn industry in 1994 as it is of the Pornhub-based status quo in 2020.
It is not enough for me to speak of a cinema of transgression. Not all transgression is equal. Smashing the state cannot be equated to sister-fucking. The question to which I return over and over again is Cicero's, the question at the center of all conspiracy thinking: Cui bono? Who transgresses, and why do they transgress?
This is not, I would argue, a sound basis for judgement. This is the realm of unverified secrets, of malicious lies, of religious ecstacy and terror. Aaaaand I think i am overwriting a little bit here.
Getting back to Eco. His "obvious reasons" are, we can say now, neither obvious or necessary to anyone but him. He postulates a movie consisting of nothing but violation as "intolerable", but my feeling is that humans can tolerate, and even desire, rather more than we are comfortable imagining. Eco argues that the essence of porn is to arouse by transgressing, and that in order to transgress it has to establish a mundane reality first.
I disagree. For me, the mundane reality is lived reality. Establishing a fictional mundane reality serves no true narrative purpose; it is just swindling, or if you prefer cock-teasing. Because men do, it seems, come astonishingly quickly. The pornographic film is a useless medium, because the purpose of porn is not a purpose that takes the typical man 75 minutes. Hence, freed from the rather arbitrary technological strictures of film, we see visual pornography taking a shorter, more concentrated form. Much of the audience for pornography, from what I can tell, just wants to see the fucking, and thanks to the miracles of technology, they can, without any anticipation or delay.
For the fetishist, well, perhaps it may work differently. What if, say, your concept of sex is not built around penetration building to orgasm? What role does time play in relation to sexual stimuli? I recall a novel I read once, decades ago, by a person by the name of Nicholson Baker, called The Fermata. It was a fetish novel about a young man who chanced upon the power to stop time, and used this power to sexually assault unsuspecting women. Nasty business, that, but the idea of fetishizing time itself... I suspect I might sometimes do that, if to say so doesn't abstract desire, doesn't abstract sexual stimulus/response, too terribly much.
http://non-compos-mentis.blogspot.com/2006/11/umberto-eco-how-to-recognize-porn-movie.html
I ran across this little essay from deep in the mists of the Blog Era, perhaps while killing time on TVTropes. I found it a fascinating read, in large part because it has so little overlap with my experience of pornography. I get where it comes from. The stigma against discussing pornography, except in the coarsest of terms, means that people's relationship to it can be intensely personal and self-revelatory.
I had to look up when it was written. 1994. His writing also says much not only about Eco as a person but about the times he lived in, his experiences with pornography. Over the past few years, as the economic center of Western porn has shifted from Hollywood to Quebec, it has increasingly seemed to me that much pornography represents not the unspoken desires of the masses, but the values and beliefs of a few. This was as true of the porn industry in 1994 as it is of the Pornhub-based status quo in 2020.
It is not enough for me to speak of a cinema of transgression. Not all transgression is equal. Smashing the state cannot be equated to sister-fucking. The question to which I return over and over again is Cicero's, the question at the center of all conspiracy thinking: Cui bono? Who transgresses, and why do they transgress?
This is not, I would argue, a sound basis for judgement. This is the realm of unverified secrets, of malicious lies, of religious ecstacy and terror. Aaaaand I think i am overwriting a little bit here.
Getting back to Eco. His "obvious reasons" are, we can say now, neither obvious or necessary to anyone but him. He postulates a movie consisting of nothing but violation as "intolerable", but my feeling is that humans can tolerate, and even desire, rather more than we are comfortable imagining. Eco argues that the essence of porn is to arouse by transgressing, and that in order to transgress it has to establish a mundane reality first.
I disagree. For me, the mundane reality is lived reality. Establishing a fictional mundane reality serves no true narrative purpose; it is just swindling, or if you prefer cock-teasing. Because men do, it seems, come astonishingly quickly. The pornographic film is a useless medium, because the purpose of porn is not a purpose that takes the typical man 75 minutes. Hence, freed from the rather arbitrary technological strictures of film, we see visual pornography taking a shorter, more concentrated form. Much of the audience for pornography, from what I can tell, just wants to see the fucking, and thanks to the miracles of technology, they can, without any anticipation or delay.
For the fetishist, well, perhaps it may work differently. What if, say, your concept of sex is not built around penetration building to orgasm? What role does time play in relation to sexual stimuli? I recall a novel I read once, decades ago, by a person by the name of Nicholson Baker, called The Fermata. It was a fetish novel about a young man who chanced upon the power to stop time, and used this power to sexually assault unsuspecting women. Nasty business, that, but the idea of fetishizing time itself... I suspect I might sometimes do that, if to say so doesn't abstract desire, doesn't abstract sexual stimulus/response, too terribly much.
Tuesday 24 March 2020
unverified "fact" #123944
"The June 8, 1936 Lux Radio Theatre production of The Thin Man featured a random interview with silent screen star Theda Bara, who just happened to be in the audience. It is the only surviving recording of Bara's voice."
Who knows if it's true? People say all sorts of shit on TV Tropes.
Who knows if it's true? People say all sorts of shit on TV Tropes.
Monday 23 March 2020
Outfakes
This topic does kind of interests me - the sort of people who counterfeit "rare" recordings. One runs across this sort of thing occasionally.
Just ran across this supposed "live" version of Van Der Graaf Generator's take on the Song of Roland, "Roncevaux". Supposedly played on their last Italian tour, of which no recordings exist, though there is a tape from a rehearsal for their last tour.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pL4l2g4j66w
So here's this 2013 upload of a "MEGA RARE!" live version. Despite being an audience recording from 1972 with a fairly talky crowd, the sound quality is not bad. Distant, but not bad. Sounds, really, almost as good as the rehearsal recording.
Probably because it _is_ the rehearsal recording. Well, I can't say that for sure. Maybe they decided, on this night, to play the song the exact same way they played the rehearsal, the flute flourishes, Hammill's stresses and enunciation, the drum fills. It's... not the way they usually worked as a band. God knows, I love the song, I don't know why, and I've heard it enough times that I recognize the recording, even with additional warts added to obfuscate the existing warts.
I guess somebody else loved it enough to make their own fake live version. That's kind of cool. Some of the fakes, really, I love. Like, there's a fake alleged version of "Watcher of the Skies" by Yes with Peter Gabriel. Why Peter Gabriel? Because they couldn't find someone who could sing like Jon Anderson, probably! Not even remotely convincing, and it doesn't try very hard - an obviously bogus shortwave introduction and a fade into some other random song at the end is about the extent of it. I love listening to it, though. It's a fun, creative piece of work. God knows where you would even find a copy, these days.
I probably got more to say on the subject, but I think I've done enough writing for the day!
Just ran across this supposed "live" version of Van Der Graaf Generator's take on the Song of Roland, "Roncevaux". Supposedly played on their last Italian tour, of which no recordings exist, though there is a tape from a rehearsal for their last tour.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pL4l2g4j66w
So here's this 2013 upload of a "MEGA RARE!" live version. Despite being an audience recording from 1972 with a fairly talky crowd, the sound quality is not bad. Distant, but not bad. Sounds, really, almost as good as the rehearsal recording.
Probably because it _is_ the rehearsal recording. Well, I can't say that for sure. Maybe they decided, on this night, to play the song the exact same way they played the rehearsal, the flute flourishes, Hammill's stresses and enunciation, the drum fills. It's... not the way they usually worked as a band. God knows, I love the song, I don't know why, and I've heard it enough times that I recognize the recording, even with additional warts added to obfuscate the existing warts.
I guess somebody else loved it enough to make their own fake live version. That's kind of cool. Some of the fakes, really, I love. Like, there's a fake alleged version of "Watcher of the Skies" by Yes with Peter Gabriel. Why Peter Gabriel? Because they couldn't find someone who could sing like Jon Anderson, probably! Not even remotely convincing, and it doesn't try very hard - an obviously bogus shortwave introduction and a fade into some other random song at the end is about the extent of it. I love listening to it, though. It's a fun, creative piece of work. God knows where you would even find a copy, these days.
I probably got more to say on the subject, but I think I've done enough writing for the day!
Video Mixtape #1
Discord just added support for streaming video into their app. It comes, really, at the perfect time, being as none of us are particularly allowed to leave the house right now. I'm on a Discord server that has started up a streaming schedule and I put in for an hour of videos.
This stage of media technology, what I call the "Man with the Flower In His Mouth" stage - this is the only stage where I feel like I have any opportunity. Because nobody knows how it's supposed to work, which opens up space for weirdos like me who actively want to do things "wrong".
It's a great excuse for me to delve into what I refer to as "the crap mines" - a vast, poorly organized "archive" of strange and interesting stuff - and try to engage with it. The temptation of hoarding is to bury stuff, not by intention but because you're picking up so much new stuff you never get back around to the old. Making mixes, blogging, all of these things are, in large part, pretexts to motivate me to get around to processing those things I already knows, things I have in some cases forgotten. It also ties the two main threads of this blog neatly together, because here we have weird music _and_ strange visual artifacts!
As new as it is, I started with what was off the top of my head. When there's enough stuff putting together a guiding principle, a theme, is helpful to me, but most of this is terra incognita to me, a lot of if things I didn't know I had and don't know where I got them from.
Brainiac - Vincent Come On Down (Promo VHS): In 1974, the Residents followed up their first LP by recording a record they intended to never release, called "Not Available". Ths intent was to explore what art would sound like knowing it would never be heard by anyone else. Things being as they are the record company wound up releasing it over their objections only a couple years later, but since then I have thought of invisible art.
The '90s, I feel, were kind of a golden age for unseen video art. There was basically no commercial market for buying music videos, but MTV was still a popular broadcast medium. So if you were a band signed to a label, and after Nirvana lots of bands got signed to labels, there was a budget for videos. Except that MTV was moving towards reality television already at this point, and even if it was showing videos, the days when they would show any old crap that was sent them for want of material, the days when some bit of zolo-qua-zolo like "Dog Police" could get airplay, were long past.
So I don't think anybody ever saw the video for "Vincent Come On Down". I lived in Dayton, I was a Brainiac fan at the time, and I had no idea there was a video. I wonder what happened to Marcelle Karp, Rosanna Herrick, and Michael Perillo, who worked on the video.
Nowadays there are plenty of bands nobody has heard of, it's cheap and easy for anyone to make a video, but the difference is that all of this stuff is now immediately streaming. Something like Megumi Wata's "Catastrophic" is unknown in the sense that nobody has seen it, but it is as available as damn near anything else, and was from day one. The central question - and I will get back to this in the context of Dead boots - I ask myself when looking at history is Woodward and Bernstein's central question: What did the President know, and when did he know it? Except for "the President" substitute out "people", because I'm interested in social history, not Great Man history. I'm as interested, if not more interested, in the things I could have seen, half-remembered, forgotten, as I am in things that have been "lost".
I'm told they're making a documentary on Brainiac. I'm told Mark Hamill is a fan. I got some bootleg DVDs of Brainiac from years ago, ripped somewhere. I'm not super in touch with that scene.
Lizzy Mercier Descloux - Fire: No theme, no, but the next song reminded me of this. A brief shot of Gainsbourg, sleeves unbuttoned, while a laughing woman in a bowl haircut holds the mic near his face and then we are over to Lizzy and her _attitude_. Descloux was previously known as Rosa Yemen, a no-wave provocateur perhaps inspired by Rosa Luxemburg (and I see that Teen Vogue has a primer on Rosa Luxemburg running in a recent issue - that's certainly extremely on-brand for them). She went solo with a disco cover of "Fire". This particular "Fire" was a 1968 single put out by one of the great weirdos of rock music, Arthur Brown, who figured, correctly, that he would be able to score a huge chart hit if he just went on stage and lit his head on fire at every opportunity. Refreshingly, this was probably the least interesting thing he ever did, but it's true that his other stuff, while fascinatingly esoteric, may perhaps have lacked the immediate visual impact of his breakthrough hit.
Descloux represents a particularly Gallic strain of young woman - something about her that I don't recognize in the young women of any other culture but I see in many young French women. A certain insouciance in her attitude, the sort that one typically sees only in men in other Western countries. Short hair, but she still needs to keep pushing it out of her face; it rapidly becomes disheveled. I will take this over a man with his head on fire most days of the week.
Ruins - Fire: This song was original to Ruins, one of the stranger of the Italo Disco projects. Ruins, you see, took their name from the song by the avant-garde leftist prog band Henry Cow, and there is therefore a certain apocalyptic Brechtian element to this video as well. The singer wears a garishly striped suit, though fortunately for him not garishly striped in a manner that messes with the camera. The transfer is clean and high quality. The effects employed in the video include some overlaid illustrative images (including, for anyone concerned about NSFW content, brief female nudity) and, during the chorus portions, the same sort of visual effects used in the Film Ventures International versions of films like "Pod People" and "Cave Dwellers" that appeared on Mystery Science Theater 3000. The other member of the band first appears in this segment, wearing a bright yellow DEVO jumpsuit and riding an exercise bicycle. This evokes for me the "lost" cut scene from the final episode of The Prisoner, in which Number Six passes through a room full of men in wetsuits riding stationary bicycles. The image maintains a vivid hold on my memory even though I have never seen the sequence in question (and can no longer, indeed, find an Internet cite to confirm that this sequence ever existed!)
Eggroll Performs "No Satisfaction" 1987 on NY Public Access: The phrase "public access" evokes certain associations in US viewers of a certain age. Public access television came about as a trade-off cable companies made in the "public interest". In fact, I'm not sure that the "public interest" was necessarily a signficant concern over the battle for "pay TV" - on a propaganda level, messages like the one heard at the beginning of Negativland's "You Must Choose" from on their "Live at the Knitting Factory" appearance seem to my cynical ears to be more driven towards protecting the rights of their networks and their advertisers to profits than the best interests of the public.
But maybe the public interest did have a voice at this time. I personally would argue that the institution of "public access" did in fact serve the public interest, in providing diverse voices with the opportunity to be heard without having to go through commercial gatekeepers, in providing education and training in video production techniques. The stereotype of "public access" was that it was amateurish, strange, and done on pitifully low budgets. This video defies these stereotypes.
A lot of this is down, I think, to where it was made - New York was one of the most important and influential cities in the world when this was made, perhaps _the_ most important and influential city in the world, and the quality of even its cultural ephemera is accordingly on that much higher a level. This video, "public access" or no, has at least as high production standards as, say, a circa 1987 episode of Doctor Who, and far above the embarrassing "psychedelic" style of '70s Beat Club videos. There is an unfortunate tendency towards effects that today would be avoided as inducing epilepsy, but certain effects, for instance the double exposure where the guitar is seen to duet with herself, are extremely well done. The transfer, done by someone whose email address is embedded in the video, is high quality as well, though my copy is 480p and obviously from a VHS.
So I do find this video, which I have no idea where I got, by a band I never heard of, inspirational. I am particularly taken with the fashion aesthetic evident in the video. It strikes me as very queer. I don't know whether it is or whether it isn't, but I'm inspired by it. The guitarist comes across as a forebear of fellow Berklee grad St. Vincent. I am also very much taken with the ways in which gender was performed in the '80s. A lot of that style is most strongly associated with Madonna, but there are a lot of queer people will tell you it wasn't Madonna who was doing it first. The guitarist is wearing prominent makeup, wearing a skirt and big earrings, but the way she's put together emphasizes the hard lines in her face, her androgyny. My wife walked into the room while I was watching the video and asked if I was watching Boy George.
The music is definitely extremely high quality as well. There's a temptation to see someone with a Jheri curl playing a keytar and laugh, but you know what, these people are still cool, cooler than I have ever been.
Magic Sam's Boogie 1969 (live): Some footage of the legendary cult Chicago bluesman Magic Sam from the year of his death, about the only known footage that exists of him performing. High quality transfer of some well-known footage. Sort of speaks for itself!
Betty Hutton - "Murder" He Says: Despite being primarily an actor and not a singer, Hutton is probably the singer most associated with this '40s musical number. It's not hard to see why. She tears into it with complete gusto, and if the emcee's summary of her performance is kind of sexist in its phrasing, the sentiment itself is pretty on-target. These days the song is probably best known by hipsters and Tori Amos fans. I like it because here's some evidence that there was life before Elvis! Women were allowed to have personality traits other than "fuckable"! (although "fuckable" apparently remained a prerequisite.)
Megumi Wata - Catastrophic: I just sort of liked the contrast here. And I didn't want to leave the "present day" (or near enough) out of this entirely. So we cut from a black and white film of a very animated, boisterous lady to, some seventy years later, a somewhat washed-out black and white closeup of a young woman wearing a hoodie in a bar, staring blankly at the camera. We don't necessarily think of the visual style of the present day as being quiet or low-key, but this video is the most understated part of the hour. Maybe that's why nobody has apparently seen it. I came across it randomly on a message board in 2015. I don't know from J-pop. For all I knew it was enormously popular. It wasn't, apparently. Haven't heard of Wata since. Song's been stuck in my head, video's been stuck in my head, all this time. A quiet, low-key young woman in combat boots and a T-shirt dress reading "BIG WOOD". A young man doing the robot in jeans, a Yankees cap, and a T-shirt advertising a vintage sneaker store. Musette and marimba sounds, maybe the actual instruments, maybe keyboard patches. Lots of text I can't read.
And then at the key change at the end it shifts into color, and this somehow makes the overall vibe more downbeat. Instead of smiling and dancing on the street she's back in the hazy, dimly lit bar from the beginning, looking extremely sad. Cut to hiss and record company logo.
Brian Eno - Seven Deadly Finns: I can't remember where this is from - Dutch television perhaps? Eno shot here with an aerial zoom, quietly fabulous, tastefully catty, lip-syncing his double-entendres and overdubbed yodeling. It's definitely got that colour separation overlay look to it, just like the Beat Club used, but it's so much more tasteful; just him on a blue screen floor, through which we see dozens of copies of Eno honeycombed through a fly's eye. Not terribly unique except that it's a song that's easy to forget, not being on an album, and because Eno solo didn't do a lot of pop TV shows.
The Bee Gees - Indian Gin and Whisky Dry: Right, now we can get back to the WEIRD STUFF. In this case a clip from a German TV special from about 1968 the Bee Gees made for their "Idea" LP. I did a deep dive through the Bee Gees' catalog, accompanied by a song-by-song message board thread, last year, and this bit stuck with me. First off the very charming song, but most definitely the utterly absurd video as well. This is very much in the style of '60s promo videos, which tended to be on the "whimsical", not to say "wacky" side. Third-generation duplicates of "A Hard Day's Night", designed to show pop stars as fun-loving young lads with puckish senses of humour... but somehow turning out weirder than the Beatles. The Beatles, mind, were plenty weird, but there's something to be said for a hastily shot video from some Belgian TV studios of Roger Waters, shot from an extremely unflattering angle, terribly lip-syncing the insane flop single that was the most recent thing their erstwhile frontman released with the band, or even the band in happier times denuding a mannequin (the sort which is difficult to look at without imagining their fingers falling off to reveal a gun - PENG!) in reverse.
And the Bee Gees were the perfect band for this particular sort of tuneful, unforced absurdity. One never gets the sense that they were _trying_ to be surrealists, not like the Monkees cavorting around in Victor Mature's hair, just that they weren't particularly adept at writing tunes that made any logical sense whatsoever. Indian Gin and Whisky Dry isn't even one of their weirder lyrics, but the video, which shows the five members of the band popping up and down out of cocktail glasses for two minutes - if I were to see a bootleg edit of Un Chien Andalou with this sequence edited in I'd probably like the Un Chien Andalou even more than I do!
On top of that the film transfer I have is not particularly good, having the look of something done on decent enough (probably 16 mm) film though with clumsy sfx, very abrupt and visible edits, then transferred up to 50 FPS video for television broadcast, then knocked back down to 24 FPS for online streaming, and with some identifying chyrons stuck on top of the image to boot. What's left is blurry, indistinct and indistinguishable little model men, colour drained to the point where one isn't sure if all of them are wearing trousers. And then there's the poor guy second from right standing with his arms folded, without even an instrument to mime playing badly. The video could possibly stand to accrete more artifacts, but then you'd have a hard time passing it off as "hi def".
Lazarus Sin - "Blood For Mercy" on Midnight Metal with Al Scott: This is the sort of thing one more expects from public access TV. Having said that this particular video isn't, in fact, public access... it is, however, definitely, unquestionably, late-night local television, brought to you from the heart of the Willamette Valley. This is the sort of show "Wayne's World" was made to parody. Fortunately, though, this is actually pretty funny!
Anyway, the video, although I believe that it is as close as one gets to an "official" transfer, is clearly a multi-generation videotape. I don't have an exact year, but it's apparently sometime in the late '80s - the "Intracranial Mass" (see? these guys were FUNNY for metalheads!) tape is said to have been released in '88, so this probably isn't much later than '89. The ad for Record Garden prominently features metal CDs, so probably not too much earlier either!
What I love about this video is that it gives you a real taste of Eugene, and of the unglamorous realities of being a working metal band in the '80s. Lead singer Joseph Tierney is a true metalhead, but he's also, you know, working out of Eugene, perhaps the old hippie capital of the Pacific Northwest, and therefore he is, in fact, wearing yoga pants in the video for "Blood For Mercy", for the same reason all the bands from farther north in the Pac NW wore flannel - it was available and cheap! He pairs the look with a cutoff T-shirt reading "HONK IF YOU ARE JESUS" in a Fraktur typeface. He doesn't have the body to wear a cutoff T-shirt (not body shaming; most of us don't), but he also knows this and isn't showing off any midriff. Shots of them performing (clearly from two sessions, as Tierney is wearing different clothes and no mirror shades in the close-up shots) are intercut with various crude animations of barely recognizable '80s political figures... this might be what accounts for Tierney's claim (to which Al Scott (a champion manspreader, incidentally; I'd hate to sit next to him on public transit) can't suppress an incredulous laugh) that editing the video took "30 hours".
Rodion GA - Stele si lumini: Ah, yes. Who doesn't know the Romanian synth wizard Rodion GA?
Well, yes, most of us, this is true. Nevertheless, here they are performing on Romanian television at some nebulous, ill-defined '70s-'80s juncture. From what I've heard of the Conducator - much of which is strongly related to the Christmas spirit - I'm not certain how these guys got on television in Ceaucescu's Romania, but clearly whoever was responsible for this performance took to heart the principle of control what you can control and let the rest go. So yes, Rodion GA are playing a fairly wild synth-based rock number, but here's the important thing, the entire band are wearing nice professional suits, and so are the entire audience of clean-cut young men and women, who have come dressed for a night of good old fashioned ballroom dancing.
They're not, mind you. I mean, don't get me wrong, I wouldn't say they're cavorting in a psychedelic frenzy, but they're having a rather more unstructured time of it than ballroom dancing would allow for. Yes, the decor of the hall is pretty disco, but this being an Iron Curtain regime the design is Brutalist Disco, a disco as if it had been designed by Le Corbusier ("If Le Corbusier Designed Discos" is one of my favorite Minutemen songs). Pulsing lights, wavy jagged lines, stark black and white... I could think of worse places for a heavy synth-rock group to be playing. And always the same transition between shots, the cameraman being even more fond of the snaking squares fade than Lucas was of the wipe. This being from a digital rebroadcast (so many stations just love to shove a colour logo on top of a B&W picture, and I hate it so much) there's a fantastic total digital breakdown/collapse right at the end of the piece. Completely serendipitous. Fits the mood perfectly!
Angel Witch - "rund" TV show, DDR, 1981: Let's dawdle a while behind the Iron Curtain while we can, shall we? Communism in East Germany had particular challenges, especially relating to the media. The problem here was that the East German people could, and did, watch West German media on a regular basis. This was officially banned, but Honecker had no way of enforcing this regulation, and laws one can't enforce are worse than useless - they undermine the legitimacy of the regime. All of Germany came to mock the far corners of East Germany where West German broadcasts didn't reach - "Tal der Ahnungslosen", they called the regions. Valley of the Clueless.
So at some point apparently someone in the DDR decided to try the "if you can't beat 'em join 'em" approach and lure Western rock bands over to play. What they got was the second-tier (though still, mind, extremely good) NWOBHM group Angel Witch. I'm not sure what the desired effect was, but if they were trying to draw out potential "subversives" by trying to convince any such people that literally half their neighbors weren't on the payroll of the fucking Stasi, I'm guessing it didn't work.
In any event, we're left with this document, which is a prime example of the sort of degraded, multiple-generation copies that we used to content ourselves with back in the '80s and '90s. How many generations? At a guess I'd say at least seven - that's about the point at which you lose all colour from the signal. This was originally broadcast in colour, yes, and possibly the master still exists, but who even knows where the DDR television archives are? Who wants to watch decades of dull Communist propaganda just to try and find Angel Witch lip-syncing on TV? I know "Ostalgie" was a thing for a while, but let's be real, most Communist propaganda was dull, dull, dull!
No, better to remember it this way, occasional (but no more) failures of tracking, the studio lights regularly causing blinding flashes of light to ricochet off the guitars, little discernable of the band beyond their truly beautifully coiffed hair.
Look at that list of crew at the end of the video. How many of them do you think worked for the Stasi?
Emilia - Satan in Love: I'm not sure if this is the original version of "Satan in Love" or a Finnish-language cover version. I know I have two versions of this tune sitting around. This is again clearly from a rebroadcast - superimposed logo again - and the artifacts here are really all digital. This bears all the particular hallmarks of overcompression - dodgy brightness gradients and pixellation on things like the flickering flames - and I imagine in a few decades I'll be nostalgic for this sort of thing rather than just annoyed.
Instead let's focus on Emilia. I don't know Finnish, but I know the title of the song and I can get pretty well the message Emilia is trying to convey, smoldering in gold lame culottes (Gold lame culottes? You know what, fine, we'll go with it) over a steady pulse of flatulent analog synths and sinuous bass. Pure sex, particularly when the camera switches to show her in silhouette like a James Bond movie title or something. And then the lighting that makes it look like there's a fast food heat lamp directed at her inner thighs. Well, that's one way to get hot, I guess.
During the second verse she tries to vamp her way down the stairs, but after nearly tripping and falling on her face decides to just crawl around instead. Good plan. Being sexy isn't worth a faceplant.
The Moments - Be Sure My Love: Is this dodgy? I don't know if it's dodgy. The Moments are part of the Japanese scene which really admires the sound of the doo-wop groups of the '50s, which fair enough, it's a great sound and they do a great job recreating it. Of course, this being video, they're also enamored with the look. See, one of the artifacts from when, precisely, Japan picked up on American culture is that a lot of American culture was pretty fucking racist. These guys clearly love doo-wop, the harmonies, the finger-snaps, the quality old mikes (I don't know if they work or if they're just there for show, because in the video we're hearing them through a regular old crappy room mike), the wide orange lapels that make you look kind of like Dracula, the impeccably shined shoes, the ridiculously oversized suits, the pompadour, the conk... when does this start becoming racial stereotyping? I don't know. It's not my place to say. Great musical performance, though.
This stage of media technology, what I call the "Man with the Flower In His Mouth" stage - this is the only stage where I feel like I have any opportunity. Because nobody knows how it's supposed to work, which opens up space for weirdos like me who actively want to do things "wrong".
It's a great excuse for me to delve into what I refer to as "the crap mines" - a vast, poorly organized "archive" of strange and interesting stuff - and try to engage with it. The temptation of hoarding is to bury stuff, not by intention but because you're picking up so much new stuff you never get back around to the old. Making mixes, blogging, all of these things are, in large part, pretexts to motivate me to get around to processing those things I already knows, things I have in some cases forgotten. It also ties the two main threads of this blog neatly together, because here we have weird music _and_ strange visual artifacts!
As new as it is, I started with what was off the top of my head. When there's enough stuff putting together a guiding principle, a theme, is helpful to me, but most of this is terra incognita to me, a lot of if things I didn't know I had and don't know where I got them from.
Brainiac - Vincent Come On Down (Promo VHS): In 1974, the Residents followed up their first LP by recording a record they intended to never release, called "Not Available". Ths intent was to explore what art would sound like knowing it would never be heard by anyone else. Things being as they are the record company wound up releasing it over their objections only a couple years later, but since then I have thought of invisible art.
The '90s, I feel, were kind of a golden age for unseen video art. There was basically no commercial market for buying music videos, but MTV was still a popular broadcast medium. So if you were a band signed to a label, and after Nirvana lots of bands got signed to labels, there was a budget for videos. Except that MTV was moving towards reality television already at this point, and even if it was showing videos, the days when they would show any old crap that was sent them for want of material, the days when some bit of zolo-qua-zolo like "Dog Police" could get airplay, were long past.
So I don't think anybody ever saw the video for "Vincent Come On Down". I lived in Dayton, I was a Brainiac fan at the time, and I had no idea there was a video. I wonder what happened to Marcelle Karp, Rosanna Herrick, and Michael Perillo, who worked on the video.
Nowadays there are plenty of bands nobody has heard of, it's cheap and easy for anyone to make a video, but the difference is that all of this stuff is now immediately streaming. Something like Megumi Wata's "Catastrophic" is unknown in the sense that nobody has seen it, but it is as available as damn near anything else, and was from day one. The central question - and I will get back to this in the context of Dead boots - I ask myself when looking at history is Woodward and Bernstein's central question: What did the President know, and when did he know it? Except for "the President" substitute out "people", because I'm interested in social history, not Great Man history. I'm as interested, if not more interested, in the things I could have seen, half-remembered, forgotten, as I am in things that have been "lost".
I'm told they're making a documentary on Brainiac. I'm told Mark Hamill is a fan. I got some bootleg DVDs of Brainiac from years ago, ripped somewhere. I'm not super in touch with that scene.
Lizzy Mercier Descloux - Fire: No theme, no, but the next song reminded me of this. A brief shot of Gainsbourg, sleeves unbuttoned, while a laughing woman in a bowl haircut holds the mic near his face and then we are over to Lizzy and her _attitude_. Descloux was previously known as Rosa Yemen, a no-wave provocateur perhaps inspired by Rosa Luxemburg (and I see that Teen Vogue has a primer on Rosa Luxemburg running in a recent issue - that's certainly extremely on-brand for them). She went solo with a disco cover of "Fire". This particular "Fire" was a 1968 single put out by one of the great weirdos of rock music, Arthur Brown, who figured, correctly, that he would be able to score a huge chart hit if he just went on stage and lit his head on fire at every opportunity. Refreshingly, this was probably the least interesting thing he ever did, but it's true that his other stuff, while fascinatingly esoteric, may perhaps have lacked the immediate visual impact of his breakthrough hit.
Descloux represents a particularly Gallic strain of young woman - something about her that I don't recognize in the young women of any other culture but I see in many young French women. A certain insouciance in her attitude, the sort that one typically sees only in men in other Western countries. Short hair, but she still needs to keep pushing it out of her face; it rapidly becomes disheveled. I will take this over a man with his head on fire most days of the week.
Ruins - Fire: This song was original to Ruins, one of the stranger of the Italo Disco projects. Ruins, you see, took their name from the song by the avant-garde leftist prog band Henry Cow, and there is therefore a certain apocalyptic Brechtian element to this video as well. The singer wears a garishly striped suit, though fortunately for him not garishly striped in a manner that messes with the camera. The transfer is clean and high quality. The effects employed in the video include some overlaid illustrative images (including, for anyone concerned about NSFW content, brief female nudity) and, during the chorus portions, the same sort of visual effects used in the Film Ventures International versions of films like "Pod People" and "Cave Dwellers" that appeared on Mystery Science Theater 3000. The other member of the band first appears in this segment, wearing a bright yellow DEVO jumpsuit and riding an exercise bicycle. This evokes for me the "lost" cut scene from the final episode of The Prisoner, in which Number Six passes through a room full of men in wetsuits riding stationary bicycles. The image maintains a vivid hold on my memory even though I have never seen the sequence in question (and can no longer, indeed, find an Internet cite to confirm that this sequence ever existed!)
Eggroll Performs "No Satisfaction" 1987 on NY Public Access: The phrase "public access" evokes certain associations in US viewers of a certain age. Public access television came about as a trade-off cable companies made in the "public interest". In fact, I'm not sure that the "public interest" was necessarily a signficant concern over the battle for "pay TV" - on a propaganda level, messages like the one heard at the beginning of Negativland's "You Must Choose" from on their "Live at the Knitting Factory" appearance seem to my cynical ears to be more driven towards protecting the rights of their networks and their advertisers to profits than the best interests of the public.
But maybe the public interest did have a voice at this time. I personally would argue that the institution of "public access" did in fact serve the public interest, in providing diverse voices with the opportunity to be heard without having to go through commercial gatekeepers, in providing education and training in video production techniques. The stereotype of "public access" was that it was amateurish, strange, and done on pitifully low budgets. This video defies these stereotypes.
A lot of this is down, I think, to where it was made - New York was one of the most important and influential cities in the world when this was made, perhaps _the_ most important and influential city in the world, and the quality of even its cultural ephemera is accordingly on that much higher a level. This video, "public access" or no, has at least as high production standards as, say, a circa 1987 episode of Doctor Who, and far above the embarrassing "psychedelic" style of '70s Beat Club videos. There is an unfortunate tendency towards effects that today would be avoided as inducing epilepsy, but certain effects, for instance the double exposure where the guitar is seen to duet with herself, are extremely well done. The transfer, done by someone whose email address is embedded in the video, is high quality as well, though my copy is 480p and obviously from a VHS.
So I do find this video, which I have no idea where I got, by a band I never heard of, inspirational. I am particularly taken with the fashion aesthetic evident in the video. It strikes me as very queer. I don't know whether it is or whether it isn't, but I'm inspired by it. The guitarist comes across as a forebear of fellow Berklee grad St. Vincent. I am also very much taken with the ways in which gender was performed in the '80s. A lot of that style is most strongly associated with Madonna, but there are a lot of queer people will tell you it wasn't Madonna who was doing it first. The guitarist is wearing prominent makeup, wearing a skirt and big earrings, but the way she's put together emphasizes the hard lines in her face, her androgyny. My wife walked into the room while I was watching the video and asked if I was watching Boy George.
The music is definitely extremely high quality as well. There's a temptation to see someone with a Jheri curl playing a keytar and laugh, but you know what, these people are still cool, cooler than I have ever been.
Magic Sam's Boogie 1969 (live): Some footage of the legendary cult Chicago bluesman Magic Sam from the year of his death, about the only known footage that exists of him performing. High quality transfer of some well-known footage. Sort of speaks for itself!
Betty Hutton - "Murder" He Says: Despite being primarily an actor and not a singer, Hutton is probably the singer most associated with this '40s musical number. It's not hard to see why. She tears into it with complete gusto, and if the emcee's summary of her performance is kind of sexist in its phrasing, the sentiment itself is pretty on-target. These days the song is probably best known by hipsters and Tori Amos fans. I like it because here's some evidence that there was life before Elvis! Women were allowed to have personality traits other than "fuckable"! (although "fuckable" apparently remained a prerequisite.)
Megumi Wata - Catastrophic: I just sort of liked the contrast here. And I didn't want to leave the "present day" (or near enough) out of this entirely. So we cut from a black and white film of a very animated, boisterous lady to, some seventy years later, a somewhat washed-out black and white closeup of a young woman wearing a hoodie in a bar, staring blankly at the camera. We don't necessarily think of the visual style of the present day as being quiet or low-key, but this video is the most understated part of the hour. Maybe that's why nobody has apparently seen it. I came across it randomly on a message board in 2015. I don't know from J-pop. For all I knew it was enormously popular. It wasn't, apparently. Haven't heard of Wata since. Song's been stuck in my head, video's been stuck in my head, all this time. A quiet, low-key young woman in combat boots and a T-shirt dress reading "BIG WOOD". A young man doing the robot in jeans, a Yankees cap, and a T-shirt advertising a vintage sneaker store. Musette and marimba sounds, maybe the actual instruments, maybe keyboard patches. Lots of text I can't read.
And then at the key change at the end it shifts into color, and this somehow makes the overall vibe more downbeat. Instead of smiling and dancing on the street she's back in the hazy, dimly lit bar from the beginning, looking extremely sad. Cut to hiss and record company logo.
Brian Eno - Seven Deadly Finns: I can't remember where this is from - Dutch television perhaps? Eno shot here with an aerial zoom, quietly fabulous, tastefully catty, lip-syncing his double-entendres and overdubbed yodeling. It's definitely got that colour separation overlay look to it, just like the Beat Club used, but it's so much more tasteful; just him on a blue screen floor, through which we see dozens of copies of Eno honeycombed through a fly's eye. Not terribly unique except that it's a song that's easy to forget, not being on an album, and because Eno solo didn't do a lot of pop TV shows.
The Bee Gees - Indian Gin and Whisky Dry: Right, now we can get back to the WEIRD STUFF. In this case a clip from a German TV special from about 1968 the Bee Gees made for their "Idea" LP. I did a deep dive through the Bee Gees' catalog, accompanied by a song-by-song message board thread, last year, and this bit stuck with me. First off the very charming song, but most definitely the utterly absurd video as well. This is very much in the style of '60s promo videos, which tended to be on the "whimsical", not to say "wacky" side. Third-generation duplicates of "A Hard Day's Night", designed to show pop stars as fun-loving young lads with puckish senses of humour... but somehow turning out weirder than the Beatles. The Beatles, mind, were plenty weird, but there's something to be said for a hastily shot video from some Belgian TV studios of Roger Waters, shot from an extremely unflattering angle, terribly lip-syncing the insane flop single that was the most recent thing their erstwhile frontman released with the band, or even the band in happier times denuding a mannequin (the sort which is difficult to look at without imagining their fingers falling off to reveal a gun - PENG!) in reverse.
And the Bee Gees were the perfect band for this particular sort of tuneful, unforced absurdity. One never gets the sense that they were _trying_ to be surrealists, not like the Monkees cavorting around in Victor Mature's hair, just that they weren't particularly adept at writing tunes that made any logical sense whatsoever. Indian Gin and Whisky Dry isn't even one of their weirder lyrics, but the video, which shows the five members of the band popping up and down out of cocktail glasses for two minutes - if I were to see a bootleg edit of Un Chien Andalou with this sequence edited in I'd probably like the Un Chien Andalou even more than I do!
On top of that the film transfer I have is not particularly good, having the look of something done on decent enough (probably 16 mm) film though with clumsy sfx, very abrupt and visible edits, then transferred up to 50 FPS video for television broadcast, then knocked back down to 24 FPS for online streaming, and with some identifying chyrons stuck on top of the image to boot. What's left is blurry, indistinct and indistinguishable little model men, colour drained to the point where one isn't sure if all of them are wearing trousers. And then there's the poor guy second from right standing with his arms folded, without even an instrument to mime playing badly. The video could possibly stand to accrete more artifacts, but then you'd have a hard time passing it off as "hi def".
Lazarus Sin - "Blood For Mercy" on Midnight Metal with Al Scott: This is the sort of thing one more expects from public access TV. Having said that this particular video isn't, in fact, public access... it is, however, definitely, unquestionably, late-night local television, brought to you from the heart of the Willamette Valley. This is the sort of show "Wayne's World" was made to parody. Fortunately, though, this is actually pretty funny!
Anyway, the video, although I believe that it is as close as one gets to an "official" transfer, is clearly a multi-generation videotape. I don't have an exact year, but it's apparently sometime in the late '80s - the "Intracranial Mass" (see? these guys were FUNNY for metalheads!) tape is said to have been released in '88, so this probably isn't much later than '89. The ad for Record Garden prominently features metal CDs, so probably not too much earlier either!
What I love about this video is that it gives you a real taste of Eugene, and of the unglamorous realities of being a working metal band in the '80s. Lead singer Joseph Tierney is a true metalhead, but he's also, you know, working out of Eugene, perhaps the old hippie capital of the Pacific Northwest, and therefore he is, in fact, wearing yoga pants in the video for "Blood For Mercy", for the same reason all the bands from farther north in the Pac NW wore flannel - it was available and cheap! He pairs the look with a cutoff T-shirt reading "HONK IF YOU ARE JESUS" in a Fraktur typeface. He doesn't have the body to wear a cutoff T-shirt (not body shaming; most of us don't), but he also knows this and isn't showing off any midriff. Shots of them performing (clearly from two sessions, as Tierney is wearing different clothes and no mirror shades in the close-up shots) are intercut with various crude animations of barely recognizable '80s political figures... this might be what accounts for Tierney's claim (to which Al Scott (a champion manspreader, incidentally; I'd hate to sit next to him on public transit) can't suppress an incredulous laugh) that editing the video took "30 hours".
Rodion GA - Stele si lumini: Ah, yes. Who doesn't know the Romanian synth wizard Rodion GA?
Well, yes, most of us, this is true. Nevertheless, here they are performing on Romanian television at some nebulous, ill-defined '70s-'80s juncture. From what I've heard of the Conducator - much of which is strongly related to the Christmas spirit - I'm not certain how these guys got on television in Ceaucescu's Romania, but clearly whoever was responsible for this performance took to heart the principle of control what you can control and let the rest go. So yes, Rodion GA are playing a fairly wild synth-based rock number, but here's the important thing, the entire band are wearing nice professional suits, and so are the entire audience of clean-cut young men and women, who have come dressed for a night of good old fashioned ballroom dancing.
They're not, mind you. I mean, don't get me wrong, I wouldn't say they're cavorting in a psychedelic frenzy, but they're having a rather more unstructured time of it than ballroom dancing would allow for. Yes, the decor of the hall is pretty disco, but this being an Iron Curtain regime the design is Brutalist Disco, a disco as if it had been designed by Le Corbusier ("If Le Corbusier Designed Discos" is one of my favorite Minutemen songs). Pulsing lights, wavy jagged lines, stark black and white... I could think of worse places for a heavy synth-rock group to be playing. And always the same transition between shots, the cameraman being even more fond of the snaking squares fade than Lucas was of the wipe. This being from a digital rebroadcast (so many stations just love to shove a colour logo on top of a B&W picture, and I hate it so much) there's a fantastic total digital breakdown/collapse right at the end of the piece. Completely serendipitous. Fits the mood perfectly!
Angel Witch - "rund" TV show, DDR, 1981: Let's dawdle a while behind the Iron Curtain while we can, shall we? Communism in East Germany had particular challenges, especially relating to the media. The problem here was that the East German people could, and did, watch West German media on a regular basis. This was officially banned, but Honecker had no way of enforcing this regulation, and laws one can't enforce are worse than useless - they undermine the legitimacy of the regime. All of Germany came to mock the far corners of East Germany where West German broadcasts didn't reach - "Tal der Ahnungslosen", they called the regions. Valley of the Clueless.
So at some point apparently someone in the DDR decided to try the "if you can't beat 'em join 'em" approach and lure Western rock bands over to play. What they got was the second-tier (though still, mind, extremely good) NWOBHM group Angel Witch. I'm not sure what the desired effect was, but if they were trying to draw out potential "subversives" by trying to convince any such people that literally half their neighbors weren't on the payroll of the fucking Stasi, I'm guessing it didn't work.
In any event, we're left with this document, which is a prime example of the sort of degraded, multiple-generation copies that we used to content ourselves with back in the '80s and '90s. How many generations? At a guess I'd say at least seven - that's about the point at which you lose all colour from the signal. This was originally broadcast in colour, yes, and possibly the master still exists, but who even knows where the DDR television archives are? Who wants to watch decades of dull Communist propaganda just to try and find Angel Witch lip-syncing on TV? I know "Ostalgie" was a thing for a while, but let's be real, most Communist propaganda was dull, dull, dull!
No, better to remember it this way, occasional (but no more) failures of tracking, the studio lights regularly causing blinding flashes of light to ricochet off the guitars, little discernable of the band beyond their truly beautifully coiffed hair.
Look at that list of crew at the end of the video. How many of them do you think worked for the Stasi?
Emilia - Satan in Love: I'm not sure if this is the original version of "Satan in Love" or a Finnish-language cover version. I know I have two versions of this tune sitting around. This is again clearly from a rebroadcast - superimposed logo again - and the artifacts here are really all digital. This bears all the particular hallmarks of overcompression - dodgy brightness gradients and pixellation on things like the flickering flames - and I imagine in a few decades I'll be nostalgic for this sort of thing rather than just annoyed.
Instead let's focus on Emilia. I don't know Finnish, but I know the title of the song and I can get pretty well the message Emilia is trying to convey, smoldering in gold lame culottes (Gold lame culottes? You know what, fine, we'll go with it) over a steady pulse of flatulent analog synths and sinuous bass. Pure sex, particularly when the camera switches to show her in silhouette like a James Bond movie title or something. And then the lighting that makes it look like there's a fast food heat lamp directed at her inner thighs. Well, that's one way to get hot, I guess.
During the second verse she tries to vamp her way down the stairs, but after nearly tripping and falling on her face decides to just crawl around instead. Good plan. Being sexy isn't worth a faceplant.
The Moments - Be Sure My Love: Is this dodgy? I don't know if it's dodgy. The Moments are part of the Japanese scene which really admires the sound of the doo-wop groups of the '50s, which fair enough, it's a great sound and they do a great job recreating it. Of course, this being video, they're also enamored with the look. See, one of the artifacts from when, precisely, Japan picked up on American culture is that a lot of American culture was pretty fucking racist. These guys clearly love doo-wop, the harmonies, the finger-snaps, the quality old mikes (I don't know if they work or if they're just there for show, because in the video we're hearing them through a regular old crappy room mike), the wide orange lapels that make you look kind of like Dracula, the impeccably shined shoes, the ridiculously oversized suits, the pompadour, the conk... when does this start becoming racial stereotyping? I don't know. It's not my place to say. Great musical performance, though.
Sunday 22 March 2020
Grateful Dead Unconcert: Set One
The Dead absorption comes in waves, comes when I'm in certain moods. Seasonal, perhaps. Something I do every couple of months. I'm probably(?) about done with my latest wave, and figured I would wrap it up by making a mix. I make lots of mixes. It's how I make sense of the world, contextualizing things. So that's what I'm doing here, contextualizing my history with the Dead, which goes back... as far as 2012, apparently, longer than I thought. I hit the hard stuff sometime before 2016 - the 1970-05-08 Dark Star is from before the Great Timestamp Reset of 2016-03-03. Of the 223 tracks in my live Dead playlist, though, only 33 of them are before the reset.
So this isn't a mix, then, of a decade in the touring life of the Grateful Dead - it's an excavation of a decade's worth of change in my life.
Here's how I did this. There's eight sets, each about an hour long, not really any repeated songs once you allow for room for interpretation. The intent is not to recreate an idealized "Dead concert", which isn't a place I ever really would have been, but to break down a growing mass of tracks into comprehensible chunks, each with their own sense of flow to them, within a larger whole.
Mountains of the Moon -> China Cat Sunflower (1969-04-26, added 2019-06-09): Starting with a pretty rarely played acoustic-ish (the keys are electric) track. This combo is from a set in Chicago where they shared the bill with the Velvet Underground. I'd love to hear the Velvets' set. Apparently the Velvets got them pretty uptight, because the Dead's set concluded in their playing a long "feedback" section incorporating a tape playback of their unpopular experimental song "What's Become of the Baby?" This is sort of the opposite of that. Here we're opening with a couple of the best songs off Aoxomoxoa, which was generally a fussy and overlabored shambles of a recording. Here, actually, I'm gonna quote from a memo the Dead's record company sent to their manager... this is possibly, I believe, taken from the recording of their previous album, but the difficulties didn't ease up any when it came time to record their _next_ album.
"Lack of preparation, direction and cooperation from the very beginning have made this album the most unreasonable project with which we have ever involved ourselves. Your group has many problems, it would appear, and Hassinger has no futher interest or desire to work with them under conditions similar to this last fiasco. It's apparent that no one in your organization has enough influence over Phil Lesh to evoke anything resembling normal behavior. You are now branded an undesirable group in almost every recording studio in Los Angeles."
All I can say to that is, if things are bad enough that you are singling out _Phil Lesh_ as being unruly, things must have been pretty profoundly fucked up in that studio.
Live, things were different. Their biggest problems here were curfew and, on this particular night, the especially big, loud, and hairy group they were sharing the bill with. Enough opportunity, at least, to play a nice gentle renfaire ballad straight.
For those of you who are familiar with the Dead's live staples, yes, the inclusion of "China Cat Sunflower" in this unfamiliar context means that there will be no China Cat -> Rider later on. This isn't meant a comprehensive overview, only a way of hearing. Probably the biggest downside of this early "China Cat" is the presence of the guiro, which is an instrument I absolutely fucking despise and is for some reason common in their '69 sets.
Clementine (1969-04-26, added 2018-04-20): First things first: The date added is JUST A COINCIDENCE. I don't smoke pot. I know this isn't a particularly credible statement given the context, but to be perfectly frank I live in Portland, Oregon, where there's no particular stigma around smoking marijuana. I have no reason whatsoever to claim I don't smoke marijuana when I do.
The song itself... this was a song written for possible inclusion on "Anthem of the Sun" but didn't make it there, probably because they couldn't quite get it right. Here's where a certain strange habit of the Dead rears its head - their tendency to do a good, solid version of a particular song, and then apparently say "OK, nailed that," and never play it again. Obviously this doesn't happen with all songs, but there will be a couple more tracks here that are last performances of songs that didn't become long-term staples.
I do still think Clementine is more interesting than great, a bit overwritten and tentatively played, a band eager to prove their Serious Musicianship... but there's enough here to make it worth keeping around for me, enough here to throw it in the mix in this oddball early set. I feel they'd have done better versions still if they'd kept it around.
Cream Puff War (1966-12-01, added 2019-06-01): Our first of many instances of anachronism. Here we have a "primal dead" song, one which I became familiar with through Oneida's redoubtable cover version, and one which was gone from the set very very early, '67 at the latest, not to reappear. Jerry was acutely embarrassed about these early efforts at songwriting, but then he was embarrassed about a lot of the stuff he did. Doesn't necessarily mean it's bad. This one I like because it's one of the only Dead recordings that fits in the mold I expect from SF psych bands - it's full of the sort of rave-up acid guitar Garcia tended to avoid for most of his career in favor of the sort of oblique, ruminative approach that drove me bonkers for years. I kept waiting for him to shred and instead he would unleash these endless torrents of agitated three-note figures. Well, here: He shreds.
Cosmic Charlie (1969-03-01, added 2020-03-21): OK, break over, back to '69 Dead. This is another Dead song that vexed me. You use the word "cosmic" in a song title and I'm expecting some Ash Ra Tempel shit. Nope. It's a blues song. For this performance, though, I can get behind it - Garcia spends much of the song riffing on the intro to Pee Wee Crayton's "Do Unto Others", though at least the immediate impetus is probably more likely to be the single version of the Beatles' "Revolution", which uses the same intro riff. In any event, we've gone from rave-up to rave-up.
St. Stephen -> The Eleven (1970-04-24, added 2020-03-21): Nominally we're still on our Aoxomoxoa trip at the beginning, but heads will know this sequence better from its presence as side B of "Live/Dead". (So even though we have dipped our toe into 1970, this material is still completely and totally "'69 Dead".) "St. Stephen" is honestly a longtime favorite of Deadheads, but it's not one I'm much taken with. Its stop-start nature just makes it sound like a bad Mothers of Invention song to me. The main riff has grown on me at least.
Here, in the first perverse choice, just as we start heading into the truly popular material the sound quality dips precipitiously. Yes, this is our first foray into the world of audience tapes, and not really a particularly good audience tape either. On top of that, they did in fact play the entire first LP of "Live/Dead" here, and the Side A track, "Dark Star", is an exceptionally good performance. I've left it off, though, because honestly? Really good Dark Star performances are kind of a dime a dozen, and I didn't want the spectre hanging over this whole set. In the end, I'm just going to spoil this here, I throw in a pretty decent but fairly brief Dark Star just to get it represented.
What we don't have a lot of is versions of St. Stephen -> The Eleven I can get behind, and this is one of them. In fact (so soon?), this is the last time they would play The Eleven. Guess they got it right. We can't tell for sure, because the tape goes into a brief drum break (I have left these in for breathing room where they are short, and this one is, just over a minute; you need not worry that you will find yourself in an interminable stretch of drums) and then into a jam which abruptly cuts. End of set! That's how we do things around Chez Kate. Get used to it. I mean, see you after the break. Don't forget to tip your waitstaff.
So this isn't a mix, then, of a decade in the touring life of the Grateful Dead - it's an excavation of a decade's worth of change in my life.
Here's how I did this. There's eight sets, each about an hour long, not really any repeated songs once you allow for room for interpretation. The intent is not to recreate an idealized "Dead concert", which isn't a place I ever really would have been, but to break down a growing mass of tracks into comprehensible chunks, each with their own sense of flow to them, within a larger whole.
Mountains of the Moon -> China Cat Sunflower (1969-04-26, added 2019-06-09): Starting with a pretty rarely played acoustic-ish (the keys are electric) track. This combo is from a set in Chicago where they shared the bill with the Velvet Underground. I'd love to hear the Velvets' set. Apparently the Velvets got them pretty uptight, because the Dead's set concluded in their playing a long "feedback" section incorporating a tape playback of their unpopular experimental song "What's Become of the Baby?" This is sort of the opposite of that. Here we're opening with a couple of the best songs off Aoxomoxoa, which was generally a fussy and overlabored shambles of a recording. Here, actually, I'm gonna quote from a memo the Dead's record company sent to their manager... this is possibly, I believe, taken from the recording of their previous album, but the difficulties didn't ease up any when it came time to record their _next_ album.
"Lack of preparation, direction and cooperation from the very beginning have made this album the most unreasonable project with which we have ever involved ourselves. Your group has many problems, it would appear, and Hassinger has no futher interest or desire to work with them under conditions similar to this last fiasco. It's apparent that no one in your organization has enough influence over Phil Lesh to evoke anything resembling normal behavior. You are now branded an undesirable group in almost every recording studio in Los Angeles."
All I can say to that is, if things are bad enough that you are singling out _Phil Lesh_ as being unruly, things must have been pretty profoundly fucked up in that studio.
Live, things were different. Their biggest problems here were curfew and, on this particular night, the especially big, loud, and hairy group they were sharing the bill with. Enough opportunity, at least, to play a nice gentle renfaire ballad straight.
For those of you who are familiar with the Dead's live staples, yes, the inclusion of "China Cat Sunflower" in this unfamiliar context means that there will be no China Cat -> Rider later on. This isn't meant a comprehensive overview, only a way of hearing. Probably the biggest downside of this early "China Cat" is the presence of the guiro, which is an instrument I absolutely fucking despise and is for some reason common in their '69 sets.
Clementine (1969-04-26, added 2018-04-20): First things first: The date added is JUST A COINCIDENCE. I don't smoke pot. I know this isn't a particularly credible statement given the context, but to be perfectly frank I live in Portland, Oregon, where there's no particular stigma around smoking marijuana. I have no reason whatsoever to claim I don't smoke marijuana when I do.
The song itself... this was a song written for possible inclusion on "Anthem of the Sun" but didn't make it there, probably because they couldn't quite get it right. Here's where a certain strange habit of the Dead rears its head - their tendency to do a good, solid version of a particular song, and then apparently say "OK, nailed that," and never play it again. Obviously this doesn't happen with all songs, but there will be a couple more tracks here that are last performances of songs that didn't become long-term staples.
I do still think Clementine is more interesting than great, a bit overwritten and tentatively played, a band eager to prove their Serious Musicianship... but there's enough here to make it worth keeping around for me, enough here to throw it in the mix in this oddball early set. I feel they'd have done better versions still if they'd kept it around.
Cream Puff War (1966-12-01, added 2019-06-01): Our first of many instances of anachronism. Here we have a "primal dead" song, one which I became familiar with through Oneida's redoubtable cover version, and one which was gone from the set very very early, '67 at the latest, not to reappear. Jerry was acutely embarrassed about these early efforts at songwriting, but then he was embarrassed about a lot of the stuff he did. Doesn't necessarily mean it's bad. This one I like because it's one of the only Dead recordings that fits in the mold I expect from SF psych bands - it's full of the sort of rave-up acid guitar Garcia tended to avoid for most of his career in favor of the sort of oblique, ruminative approach that drove me bonkers for years. I kept waiting for him to shred and instead he would unleash these endless torrents of agitated three-note figures. Well, here: He shreds.
Cosmic Charlie (1969-03-01, added 2020-03-21): OK, break over, back to '69 Dead. This is another Dead song that vexed me. You use the word "cosmic" in a song title and I'm expecting some Ash Ra Tempel shit. Nope. It's a blues song. For this performance, though, I can get behind it - Garcia spends much of the song riffing on the intro to Pee Wee Crayton's "Do Unto Others", though at least the immediate impetus is probably more likely to be the single version of the Beatles' "Revolution", which uses the same intro riff. In any event, we've gone from rave-up to rave-up.
St. Stephen -> The Eleven (1970-04-24, added 2020-03-21): Nominally we're still on our Aoxomoxoa trip at the beginning, but heads will know this sequence better from its presence as side B of "Live/Dead". (So even though we have dipped our toe into 1970, this material is still completely and totally "'69 Dead".) "St. Stephen" is honestly a longtime favorite of Deadheads, but it's not one I'm much taken with. Its stop-start nature just makes it sound like a bad Mothers of Invention song to me. The main riff has grown on me at least.
Here, in the first perverse choice, just as we start heading into the truly popular material the sound quality dips precipitiously. Yes, this is our first foray into the world of audience tapes, and not really a particularly good audience tape either. On top of that, they did in fact play the entire first LP of "Live/Dead" here, and the Side A track, "Dark Star", is an exceptionally good performance. I've left it off, though, because honestly? Really good Dark Star performances are kind of a dime a dozen, and I didn't want the spectre hanging over this whole set. In the end, I'm just going to spoil this here, I throw in a pretty decent but fairly brief Dark Star just to get it represented.
What we don't have a lot of is versions of St. Stephen -> The Eleven I can get behind, and this is one of them. In fact (so soon?), this is the last time they would play The Eleven. Guess they got it right. We can't tell for sure, because the tape goes into a brief drum break (I have left these in for breathing room where they are short, and this one is, just over a minute; you need not worry that you will find yourself in an interminable stretch of drums) and then into a jam which abruptly cuts. End of set! That's how we do things around Chez Kate. Get used to it. I mean, see you after the break. Don't forget to tip your waitstaff.
The Dead
If I'm going to write about music I should probably write about what I've been actually listening to. This weekend that's been the Grateful Dead. I have spent hours trying to explain, to justify - primarily to myself, but also to my friends, many of whom, in their younger years, hated the Dead as loudly and openly as I did - why this change. Of all the changes in my life - and there have been many - this, more than all of them, defies my explanation, my rational understanding. I'm afraid, really, afraid of becoming a terrible person, and the way to become a terrible person is to have no standards at all, no core beliefs. Hating the Dead was as close to a musical core belief as I had.
Reminder to self: Whether one is a "good" or "bad" person has no correlation whatsoever with what records one listens to. That five-point scale tracks "openness to experience", and I'm pretty high on that scale, but there is no betrayal of any meaningful principles implied by listening to the Dead.
So what's left is my trying to explain why it is I listen to them and exploring some of the deeper corners of their music. Rather than write about why I like them from scratch I believe I will append, at the end of this post, a couple message board posts I wrote a couple weeks ago talking about what I hear in the Dead. My thinking constantly changes and what I wrote a couple years ago doesn't necessarily represent what I feel today, but a couple weeks ago? Close enough.
What has struck me this weekend... this weekend I've been, as is my wont, delving into the duskier corners of the Dead's music. The past few decades - since '95 at least - have involved the collective building of a shared canon, one that is often explicitly at odds with attempts to make the music commercially available. The cornerstones of this canon, as of 2020, seem to be the show from 1977-05-08 and 1972-08-27, both of which only saw commercial release relatively recently.
Which meant that a lot of my exploration thus far has actually involved reaching out to commercially released shows, the old Dick's Picks, many of which were criticized on their release because all the heads had their own favorite shows and were miffed when shows that weren't those shows got released. I run into them by chance, browsing headyversion for the most-loved version of this song or that.
And half the time I wind up disappointed. I can appreciate a lot of the acclaimed stuff, even love some of it, but coming to them late I've got a well-developed taste for grungy bootlegs. You don't get that with Dick's Picks. The closest you will find is, say, an early '68 tape from a grungy bowling alley somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, which is a little rough around the edges but still sounds disappointingly clean and well-mannered compared to, say, early '70s tapes of Earth and Fire or Arthur Brown's Kingdom Come, which is the sort of stuff that's my typical bread and butter.
Turns out you need say only two words to get into territory most Deadheads still won't touch: "audience tape". Fair enough. For most people, you have all these hours of top-notch playing in pristine sound quality - why go furthur? Unless, like me, you're interested in the way the sound is mediated by the technology. That's the heart of the bootlegs for me - the shows, even the soundboards, can often have radically different mixes, with different members of the band present, absent, inaudible. What would Hendrix's Woodstock set be like if you could hear the conga players? What's the difference between the Velvets' "Legendary Guitar Amp Tape" and the other tape of the show made by someone who _wasn't_ sitting in front of Lou's guitar amp - and which one would you rather listen to?
Fortunately the people who go for this thing tend to be pretty vocal. Also fortunately there are people who will listen to fucking _anything_ the Dead did as long as it's called "Dark Star". This was how I found my way to the 1970-05-08 tape. This tape! This is the bootleg sound I crave. With the Velvets, at least, one of the weird things about them was that the worse the sound quality is, the better they sound. Certain of the Grateful Dead's recordings share that tendency. If people prefer "Dark Star" not sound like Les Rallizes Denudes, I can understand that, but me, I am not among those people.
Here's my earlier writing from a couple weeks ago on Why I Like The Dead:
My personal starting point is that I like terrible music. There are a lot of ways people come up with euphemisms for different sorts of awfulness but there is a lot of music that I like while acknowledging that it is, on some level, completely awful. "White Light/White Heat", for instance, that is an absolutely terrible sounding record, or if that doesn't go far enough for you, we can talk, I don't know, Metal Machine Music, or "Flames of Ice" by Les Rallizes Denudes. These are records I like. I also like a lot of the later work of Brian Wilson, who after 1967 wrote a great deal of songs that are, really, just terrible songs. I'm talking about songs like "Games Two Can Play" from "Adult/Child", an extremely belated riff on Joe South's "Games People Play" where he in the middle of the song out of nowhere exclaims "I'm fat as a cow, how'd I ever get this waaaay?"
I don't like these songs _because_ they are terrible. I feel like it's a common misconception people get, that just because I listen to and enjoy terrible music that I have no standards. I like this music because its brilliance and awfulness is inseparable, because as I get older I find that my greatest strengths and my greatest weaknesses are two sides of the same coin. Because nobody but Brian Wilson could ever possibly write a song like "Games Two Can Play".
Well, the Grateful Dead's music is probably more explicable and comprehensible than "Games Two Can Play" is, if only because of that fucking bridge. But it is, for me, definitely a matter of absence rather than presence, it's lacking in what I had thought and assumed were essential elements in making music listenable.
I'm just putting on right now a random track of theirs... them doing "Not Fade Away" at Boston Music Hall on 1971-12-01. And it is just so frankly bizarre. The audience just starts screaming and going wild and right out of the gate it's clear to me that this is an absolutely, unquestionably, terrible version of "Not Fade Away". I listen to other versions of it I have sitting around and this is... this is kind of a hard song to fuck up? It's got this incredibly basic and rock-solid beat, this propulsive energy to it, and if you fuck it up you're usually left with a snoozefest or something lethargic but here, there's this just implicit fuck-you in the way they're playing it. It's not necessarily the vocals - I mean there are honestly a lot of bands that have kind of ragged harmony vocals, that's a rock thing - but the musicianship is just as "ragged", which is to say there's no groove, there's no pocket, they're the exact opposite of "locked in". The term "professionally incompetent" comes to mind, but not in the sense that they're shit at their jobs, but in the sense that being this shitty _is_ their job, a job they take very seriously and are very, very good at.
[re: lack of forward propulsion in their music]
i think that's another good point about forward propulsion! most people when they play are, you know, going somewhere, you get the sense that they have a destination in mind, and that's what frustrated me so much about the grateful dead - the phrase "aimless jamming" came to mind a lot. and it's something i just had to learn to accept, that their aimlessness is an essential part of their appeal. for me, the dead at their best don't do crescendos, don't do build and release, every moment exists for its own sake. maybe they just had no short-term memory, i don't know, but it's something i appreciate about them. everything is fucked, there's no consolation in the past or the future, the only joy possible is to live in the now. and that's on some level a bleak, nihilistic way to live, but it's also liberating. it fits with my personal philosophy as i live it, of being the best me i can be in any given moment, of not being afraid to make mistakes, and of asking nothing more of myself.
Reminder to self: Whether one is a "good" or "bad" person has no correlation whatsoever with what records one listens to. That five-point scale tracks "openness to experience", and I'm pretty high on that scale, but there is no betrayal of any meaningful principles implied by listening to the Dead.
So what's left is my trying to explain why it is I listen to them and exploring some of the deeper corners of their music. Rather than write about why I like them from scratch I believe I will append, at the end of this post, a couple message board posts I wrote a couple weeks ago talking about what I hear in the Dead. My thinking constantly changes and what I wrote a couple years ago doesn't necessarily represent what I feel today, but a couple weeks ago? Close enough.
What has struck me this weekend... this weekend I've been, as is my wont, delving into the duskier corners of the Dead's music. The past few decades - since '95 at least - have involved the collective building of a shared canon, one that is often explicitly at odds with attempts to make the music commercially available. The cornerstones of this canon, as of 2020, seem to be the show from 1977-05-08 and 1972-08-27, both of which only saw commercial release relatively recently.
Which meant that a lot of my exploration thus far has actually involved reaching out to commercially released shows, the old Dick's Picks, many of which were criticized on their release because all the heads had their own favorite shows and were miffed when shows that weren't those shows got released. I run into them by chance, browsing headyversion for the most-loved version of this song or that.
And half the time I wind up disappointed. I can appreciate a lot of the acclaimed stuff, even love some of it, but coming to them late I've got a well-developed taste for grungy bootlegs. You don't get that with Dick's Picks. The closest you will find is, say, an early '68 tape from a grungy bowling alley somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, which is a little rough around the edges but still sounds disappointingly clean and well-mannered compared to, say, early '70s tapes of Earth and Fire or Arthur Brown's Kingdom Come, which is the sort of stuff that's my typical bread and butter.
Turns out you need say only two words to get into territory most Deadheads still won't touch: "audience tape". Fair enough. For most people, you have all these hours of top-notch playing in pristine sound quality - why go furthur? Unless, like me, you're interested in the way the sound is mediated by the technology. That's the heart of the bootlegs for me - the shows, even the soundboards, can often have radically different mixes, with different members of the band present, absent, inaudible. What would Hendrix's Woodstock set be like if you could hear the conga players? What's the difference between the Velvets' "Legendary Guitar Amp Tape" and the other tape of the show made by someone who _wasn't_ sitting in front of Lou's guitar amp - and which one would you rather listen to?
Fortunately the people who go for this thing tend to be pretty vocal. Also fortunately there are people who will listen to fucking _anything_ the Dead did as long as it's called "Dark Star". This was how I found my way to the 1970-05-08 tape. This tape! This is the bootleg sound I crave. With the Velvets, at least, one of the weird things about them was that the worse the sound quality is, the better they sound. Certain of the Grateful Dead's recordings share that tendency. If people prefer "Dark Star" not sound like Les Rallizes Denudes, I can understand that, but me, I am not among those people.
Here's my earlier writing from a couple weeks ago on Why I Like The Dead:
My personal starting point is that I like terrible music. There are a lot of ways people come up with euphemisms for different sorts of awfulness but there is a lot of music that I like while acknowledging that it is, on some level, completely awful. "White Light/White Heat", for instance, that is an absolutely terrible sounding record, or if that doesn't go far enough for you, we can talk, I don't know, Metal Machine Music, or "Flames of Ice" by Les Rallizes Denudes. These are records I like. I also like a lot of the later work of Brian Wilson, who after 1967 wrote a great deal of songs that are, really, just terrible songs. I'm talking about songs like "Games Two Can Play" from "Adult/Child", an extremely belated riff on Joe South's "Games People Play" where he in the middle of the song out of nowhere exclaims "I'm fat as a cow, how'd I ever get this waaaay?"
I don't like these songs _because_ they are terrible. I feel like it's a common misconception people get, that just because I listen to and enjoy terrible music that I have no standards. I like this music because its brilliance and awfulness is inseparable, because as I get older I find that my greatest strengths and my greatest weaknesses are two sides of the same coin. Because nobody but Brian Wilson could ever possibly write a song like "Games Two Can Play".
Well, the Grateful Dead's music is probably more explicable and comprehensible than "Games Two Can Play" is, if only because of that fucking bridge. But it is, for me, definitely a matter of absence rather than presence, it's lacking in what I had thought and assumed were essential elements in making music listenable.
I'm just putting on right now a random track of theirs... them doing "Not Fade Away" at Boston Music Hall on 1971-12-01. And it is just so frankly bizarre. The audience just starts screaming and going wild and right out of the gate it's clear to me that this is an absolutely, unquestionably, terrible version of "Not Fade Away". I listen to other versions of it I have sitting around and this is... this is kind of a hard song to fuck up? It's got this incredibly basic and rock-solid beat, this propulsive energy to it, and if you fuck it up you're usually left with a snoozefest or something lethargic but here, there's this just implicit fuck-you in the way they're playing it. It's not necessarily the vocals - I mean there are honestly a lot of bands that have kind of ragged harmony vocals, that's a rock thing - but the musicianship is just as "ragged", which is to say there's no groove, there's no pocket, they're the exact opposite of "locked in". The term "professionally incompetent" comes to mind, but not in the sense that they're shit at their jobs, but in the sense that being this shitty _is_ their job, a job they take very seriously and are very, very good at.
[re: lack of forward propulsion in their music]
i think that's another good point about forward propulsion! most people when they play are, you know, going somewhere, you get the sense that they have a destination in mind, and that's what frustrated me so much about the grateful dead - the phrase "aimless jamming" came to mind a lot. and it's something i just had to learn to accept, that their aimlessness is an essential part of their appeal. for me, the dead at their best don't do crescendos, don't do build and release, every moment exists for its own sake. maybe they just had no short-term memory, i don't know, but it's something i appreciate about them. everything is fucked, there's no consolation in the past or the future, the only joy possible is to live in the now. and that's on some level a bleak, nihilistic way to live, but it's also liberating. it fits with my personal philosophy as i live it, of being the best me i can be in any given moment, of not being afraid to make mistakes, and of asking nothing more of myself.
Most Wanted
Like Sedric I have heard the Most Wanted and Most Unwanted music both. For both of them, really, I think of "good" or "bad" as beside the point. The thing that this project is revelatory of to me is the limits of how people describe their likes and dislikes. Avant-gardists tend to dismiss pop music but if anybody could write a successful pop song just by following a simple formula the charts would look extremely different. I know the KLF claim differently about hits, but IDK, maybe they were wrong. Maybe they got lucky and attributed their success to their Foolproof Plan. Maybe, you know, they just KNEW THE RIGHT PEOPLE.
This is the part of success that gets ignored a lot by fans, that art is a social medium, it doesn't succeed or fail on its own merits. The Most Wanted and Most Unwanted music were made by people who, I think, have a particular audience of people who are more generally interested in "Unwanted" music, the music that people don't like. Because I often listen to weird music, the assumption people make about me is that I have no standards at all, and it's just not true. My standards are weird and arbitrary and don't necessarily map well onto other people's standards, but I am an extremely judgemental person who has listened to a lot of music. I can pretty quickly tell the difference between music I like and music I don't.
The Most Unwanted Music, honestly, the main thing to say about is that it's "overkill". Not really that much different from any "prog epic", in truth, as it's a bunch of different things that people individually dislike, often for cultural reasons, combined in various permutations.
So we have, then, a rapping cowboy soprano. It's not good rapping, but Dina Emerson is a pretty good soprano; it's not like she's Florence Foster-Jenkins or anything. I'm not huge on opera music, but under the right circumstances I can take it. Emerson sells it, and it's suitably absurd that I'm taken by it. The presence of bagpipes and accordion is also actively appealing to me. This is one of the limitations - all of the things people hate must be liked by somebody, probably a significant number of people. I've heard some really great Midwestern polka music from the '50s, and for cultural reasons this music has been put down for a while now but if you go back far enough you will hear music that is fresh and vital. The music here, as well, is fresh and vital and played with gusto.
Other parts, on the other hand? Not so much. Someone yelling political slogans at me at length. A children's chorus, one of the sorts where being in tune is a secondary consideration, sings holiday songs ending with exhortations to shop at Wal-Mart. I skip these parts. I should probably do an edit of the Most Unwanted Song to cut it down to the bits I actually like - the patchwork nature of the song makes this pretty darn possible. I'm sort of envisioning a sea of versions, everybody's individual Least Unwanted Song.
The Most Wanted Song, I'm more uncomfortable with that. The style of music has strong cultural associations for me. Specifically it evokes being home from school sick and listening to the radio and "Captain of Her Heart" by the Swiss quartet "Double" was riding the charts that week. So I heard it a lot, because I was too sick to do anything else, and I know there are a lot of minor key songs but for some reason this particular chord sequence, this particular implementation of the '80s pop ethos, has left me with a lasting hangover. Hell, maybe if I heard the song today I'd like it. I know I didn't like "Heroes and Villains" the first time I heard it either. I do think it is definitely a strange piece, that the musicians set out to create a deliberately off-putting piece of music that still worked within the constraints of what people said they wanted. What do people want out of music? I mean in psychological terms, not in what instruments they like or don't like. From what I can tell, a lot of what people want is to not be _offended_. Honestly, I'm not sure that "The Most Wanted Song" fulfills that brief.
Ultimately projects like "The Most Unwanted Song" and "The Most Wanted Song" show, for me, the limits of data. You want good data, you have to ask the right questions, and as far as I can tell there's nothing, nothing whatsoever, to support the idea that the questions Komar and Melamid asked people about music are in any way useful or valuable as a blueprint for creative work. Garbage in, garbage out! Same as it ever was.
This is the part of success that gets ignored a lot by fans, that art is a social medium, it doesn't succeed or fail on its own merits. The Most Wanted and Most Unwanted music were made by people who, I think, have a particular audience of people who are more generally interested in "Unwanted" music, the music that people don't like. Because I often listen to weird music, the assumption people make about me is that I have no standards at all, and it's just not true. My standards are weird and arbitrary and don't necessarily map well onto other people's standards, but I am an extremely judgemental person who has listened to a lot of music. I can pretty quickly tell the difference between music I like and music I don't.
The Most Unwanted Music, honestly, the main thing to say about is that it's "overkill". Not really that much different from any "prog epic", in truth, as it's a bunch of different things that people individually dislike, often for cultural reasons, combined in various permutations.
So we have, then, a rapping cowboy soprano. It's not good rapping, but Dina Emerson is a pretty good soprano; it's not like she's Florence Foster-Jenkins or anything. I'm not huge on opera music, but under the right circumstances I can take it. Emerson sells it, and it's suitably absurd that I'm taken by it. The presence of bagpipes and accordion is also actively appealing to me. This is one of the limitations - all of the things people hate must be liked by somebody, probably a significant number of people. I've heard some really great Midwestern polka music from the '50s, and for cultural reasons this music has been put down for a while now but if you go back far enough you will hear music that is fresh and vital. The music here, as well, is fresh and vital and played with gusto.
Other parts, on the other hand? Not so much. Someone yelling political slogans at me at length. A children's chorus, one of the sorts where being in tune is a secondary consideration, sings holiday songs ending with exhortations to shop at Wal-Mart. I skip these parts. I should probably do an edit of the Most Unwanted Song to cut it down to the bits I actually like - the patchwork nature of the song makes this pretty darn possible. I'm sort of envisioning a sea of versions, everybody's individual Least Unwanted Song.
The Most Wanted Song, I'm more uncomfortable with that. The style of music has strong cultural associations for me. Specifically it evokes being home from school sick and listening to the radio and "Captain of Her Heart" by the Swiss quartet "Double" was riding the charts that week. So I heard it a lot, because I was too sick to do anything else, and I know there are a lot of minor key songs but for some reason this particular chord sequence, this particular implementation of the '80s pop ethos, has left me with a lasting hangover. Hell, maybe if I heard the song today I'd like it. I know I didn't like "Heroes and Villains" the first time I heard it either. I do think it is definitely a strange piece, that the musicians set out to create a deliberately off-putting piece of music that still worked within the constraints of what people said they wanted. What do people want out of music? I mean in psychological terms, not in what instruments they like or don't like. From what I can tell, a lot of what people want is to not be _offended_. Honestly, I'm not sure that "The Most Wanted Song" fulfills that brief.
Ultimately projects like "The Most Unwanted Song" and "The Most Wanted Song" show, for me, the limits of data. You want good data, you have to ask the right questions, and as far as I can tell there's nothing, nothing whatsoever, to support the idea that the questions Komar and Melamid asked people about music are in any way useful or valuable as a blueprint for creative work. Garbage in, garbage out! Same as it ever was.
Tuesday 17 March 2020
Meglos
DVD extras, of course, have an unusually important place in the Doctor Who mythos. One of the breakthrough episodes of the new series, "Blink", was based around the conceit that the Doctor, stranded in time, could only interact with the cast through a series of well-hidden DVD "easter eggs". The show actively incorporates ephemera and deuterocanonical material; while Star Wars wiped its extended universe when taken over by Disney, a side episode to the 50th anniversary special went out of its way to confirm as canon not only the failed 1996 attempt at reviving the series, but all of the books and audio plays featuring the lead actor in that attempt. Included in those audio plays is a one-episode story which is presented as DVD commentary, featuring the Fifth Doctor as a guest, on a low-budget 1970s cult film which may possibly have involved some actual supernatural occurrences...
(Sedric, I'm sorry to bring this up; I'm sure this was a story idea you must have had at one point, and it's probably a little demoralizing to learn that it's already been done. This is why I tend to shy away from writing Doctor Who fiction.)
So I have, honestly, been long overdue for purchasing the commercial releases of the old Doctor Who stories. Mostly this is a function of stubbornness. The approach taken with the old Who episodes was, in contrast to the shovelware approach of so many DVD releases of old TV shows, to take great care to restore the episodes to the best possible quality and to release individual stories, complemented by lavish DVD extras, at the price of a Hollywood film.
I love Doctor Who, and I love that it is once more considered to be a commercially viable show, but at the end of the day I have trouble spending money on individual episodes, no matter how much care and attention to detail is put into them.
So when whoever puts out the videos finally gave into the pressure and started putting out complete season box sets on Blu-Ray, I jumped on the opportunity, despite not actually owning, or planning to own, a Blu-Ray player at the time. I'm not sure I can explain why.
What I can say is that upon getting a Blu-Ray player, with box sets of four fairly good seasons of Doctor Who to choose from, the first episode I decided to put in is an episode called Meglos.
This is not a good Doctor Who story. No, no, that's overselling it. This is a _terrible_ Doctor Who story. It's really fucking bad. When fans of the new series talk about how intimidated they are by the old series, I don't know how to explain a story like Meglos to them. I don't watch it to gain insight into the character or the mythos. I don't watch it looking for good television. I don't even hate-watch it, really. I watch it because it's one of those episodes where all the different things Doctor Who was come crashing into each other, and what's left is something so ridiculous it defies parody.
This is the episode where an evil cactus impersonates Doctor Who in a fiendish plot to... well, I'm still not entirely sure what, exactly, the cactus was planning, and I just finished watching the story. Twice.
Doctor Who changes its nature sometimes more often than its lead character changes her face, but in the past this transition was not always smooth. Here, for instance, there had just been a pretty complete change-over of the behind the scenes production team. There was a new script editor (a position with unusual power in the show of that era), with Douglas Adams, whose taste tended towards the absurd and whimsical, being replaced by Christopher H. Bidmead, who wanted Doctor Who to be Serious Science Fiction, hired by the new show-runner, John Nathan-Turner, who wanted approximately the same, along with a lot of other things we may possibly get into later.
Before they could do that, though, they had to film what they had. Which was a script about an evil cactus impersonating Doctor Who. A very bad script, as it turned out, because Douglas Adams was briliant at throwing parties, an excellent observer of the human condition, but was, honestly, a fucking rotten script editor.
I couldn't excuse spending twenty dollars on a DVD release of this, but forty dollars on a Blu-Ray set containing this and every other episode from the season? I had to delve into the social history material.
This was not one of the first stories to be prepared for DVD. The story being an awful one which nobody particularly liked, and which was expected to be bought only by those hardcore fans who would buy literally anything with the Doctor Who name on it, probably had something to do with this. This is of no uncertain benefit. The commentary was put together by people who had a tremendous amount of experience with DVD commentaries, who knew the secret that eluded so many of the DVD commentary era: How to make a commentary actually worth listening to.
The first key is to make what you can out of what you have. The people providing this story's commentary were Lalla Ward, who played the Doctor's companion in the story, and who was an old hand to fandom and to commentaries by this point. She is also, it happens, the ex-wife of Tom Baker, who played the Doctor in the story. Joining her are one of the authors of the story, John Flanagan, who has a staggeringly inflated estimation of his skills as a writer, Peter Howell, who wrote the music for the show, and Christopher Owen, who played one of the minor characters in the story, who has no idea what Doctor Who even is, and who would much rather tell stories about his grandkids.
The results are, I would say, more interesting than the story itself, a work of absurdist drama and high psychological tension staged as a DVD commentary to a low-budget children's science fiction series. Flanagan starts by denouncing the script editor, not present here, for taking credit for introducing a "chronic hysteresis" into the story line. This was Bidmead's attempt to introduce serious sci-fi into a very silly script, or at least to disguise the fact that the writers had written another fucking time loop plotline into the story. Flanagan, on the other hand, seems to believe that he has invented the concept of the "Time Loop". He grouses about the film "Groundhog Day" having ripped them off. He talks about how it was his brilliant idea to trap the Doctor, who is a TIME Lord, in a TIME loop! Yes, John, pure genius.
Over the next few episodes things develop along these lines. Lalla complains about her costume for the episode, though she does grant that she did insist that she needed to be dressed like a late Victorian moppet in every story. She just wasn't much taken with this _particular_ model of late Victorian moppet. John talks about how his story is based on the tension between science and religion. Lalla, who is married to Richard Dawkins, one of the most strident of the New Atheists, commends his prescience. Peter Howell talks about his approach to composing, which at this point in his career is to use a vocoder everywhere and on everything, to the point where asking him what his approach to a particular bit of music was becomes a running joke.
Everyone points out that Christopher Owen doesn't do shit over the course of the story. Occasionally someone ventures an opinion on Tom Baker, a topic on which Lalla Ward has extensive personal experience and forty years' worth of arch putdowns. John Nathan-Turner's inability to notice that Howell had, as a joke, scored one supposedly dramatic scene as a tango is brought up. "Yes, well, he probably had other things on his mind." "Oh, yes, certainly." This is an allusion to the knowledge, common among fans, and certainly known to everyone involved with the show, but seldom stated as such, that Nathan-Turner spent much of his time and energy as show-runner procuring boys beneath the age of consent for what Craigslist would term "casual encounters". (To be clear, since this was the era of the dual standard in the age of consent that inspired Bronski Beat's landmark album "The Age of Consent", they would have been beneath of the age of consent even were Nathan-Turner seeking heterosexual liaisons.)
The episodic nature of the story likewise divides the conversation up into acts, and the concluding one is a doozy. It is mentioned that the fourth episode runs unusually short for a Doctor Who episode. "You'd think the episodes would have a standard running length," someone remarks. "A lot of people don't know this," responds John, clearly aware of the growing tenor of the room, the accumulation of unspoken judgements his companions, "but the writers aren't actually responsible for making sure the episode is long enough."
Lalla takes this as her cue for a lengthy series of artfully phrased questions about John and his absent partner's writing process, expressing her curiosity about what inspired their approach to this particular story. She points out, in ways more subtle than I can aptly summarize here, that a lot of the actors (who are, John agrees, fine actors, and he deeply regrets having named one of the characters as a hilarious anagram of "bad actor" as that actor is in fact an excellent actor, truly) seem to almost be playing their undoubtedly serious science fiction script as broad comedy. It is a delightful and much-deserved comeuppance. John desperately tries to save face during the closing credits by pointing out (after saying how genuinely sorry he is for misremembering her character's name) that Lalla's professional name is taken from the way she pronounced her given name, Sarah, as a toddler. It doesn't help him any.
Stuff like this goes a long way to explaining why I love Doctor Who so much.
(Sedric, I'm sorry to bring this up; I'm sure this was a story idea you must have had at one point, and it's probably a little demoralizing to learn that it's already been done. This is why I tend to shy away from writing Doctor Who fiction.)
So I have, honestly, been long overdue for purchasing the commercial releases of the old Doctor Who stories. Mostly this is a function of stubbornness. The approach taken with the old Who episodes was, in contrast to the shovelware approach of so many DVD releases of old TV shows, to take great care to restore the episodes to the best possible quality and to release individual stories, complemented by lavish DVD extras, at the price of a Hollywood film.
I love Doctor Who, and I love that it is once more considered to be a commercially viable show, but at the end of the day I have trouble spending money on individual episodes, no matter how much care and attention to detail is put into them.
So when whoever puts out the videos finally gave into the pressure and started putting out complete season box sets on Blu-Ray, I jumped on the opportunity, despite not actually owning, or planning to own, a Blu-Ray player at the time. I'm not sure I can explain why.
What I can say is that upon getting a Blu-Ray player, with box sets of four fairly good seasons of Doctor Who to choose from, the first episode I decided to put in is an episode called Meglos.
This is not a good Doctor Who story. No, no, that's overselling it. This is a _terrible_ Doctor Who story. It's really fucking bad. When fans of the new series talk about how intimidated they are by the old series, I don't know how to explain a story like Meglos to them. I don't watch it to gain insight into the character or the mythos. I don't watch it looking for good television. I don't even hate-watch it, really. I watch it because it's one of those episodes where all the different things Doctor Who was come crashing into each other, and what's left is something so ridiculous it defies parody.
This is the episode where an evil cactus impersonates Doctor Who in a fiendish plot to... well, I'm still not entirely sure what, exactly, the cactus was planning, and I just finished watching the story. Twice.
Doctor Who changes its nature sometimes more often than its lead character changes her face, but in the past this transition was not always smooth. Here, for instance, there had just been a pretty complete change-over of the behind the scenes production team. There was a new script editor (a position with unusual power in the show of that era), with Douglas Adams, whose taste tended towards the absurd and whimsical, being replaced by Christopher H. Bidmead, who wanted Doctor Who to be Serious Science Fiction, hired by the new show-runner, John Nathan-Turner, who wanted approximately the same, along with a lot of other things we may possibly get into later.
Before they could do that, though, they had to film what they had. Which was a script about an evil cactus impersonating Doctor Who. A very bad script, as it turned out, because Douglas Adams was briliant at throwing parties, an excellent observer of the human condition, but was, honestly, a fucking rotten script editor.
I couldn't excuse spending twenty dollars on a DVD release of this, but forty dollars on a Blu-Ray set containing this and every other episode from the season? I had to delve into the social history material.
This was not one of the first stories to be prepared for DVD. The story being an awful one which nobody particularly liked, and which was expected to be bought only by those hardcore fans who would buy literally anything with the Doctor Who name on it, probably had something to do with this. This is of no uncertain benefit. The commentary was put together by people who had a tremendous amount of experience with DVD commentaries, who knew the secret that eluded so many of the DVD commentary era: How to make a commentary actually worth listening to.
The first key is to make what you can out of what you have. The people providing this story's commentary were Lalla Ward, who played the Doctor's companion in the story, and who was an old hand to fandom and to commentaries by this point. She is also, it happens, the ex-wife of Tom Baker, who played the Doctor in the story. Joining her are one of the authors of the story, John Flanagan, who has a staggeringly inflated estimation of his skills as a writer, Peter Howell, who wrote the music for the show, and Christopher Owen, who played one of the minor characters in the story, who has no idea what Doctor Who even is, and who would much rather tell stories about his grandkids.
The results are, I would say, more interesting than the story itself, a work of absurdist drama and high psychological tension staged as a DVD commentary to a low-budget children's science fiction series. Flanagan starts by denouncing the script editor, not present here, for taking credit for introducing a "chronic hysteresis" into the story line. This was Bidmead's attempt to introduce serious sci-fi into a very silly script, or at least to disguise the fact that the writers had written another fucking time loop plotline into the story. Flanagan, on the other hand, seems to believe that he has invented the concept of the "Time Loop". He grouses about the film "Groundhog Day" having ripped them off. He talks about how it was his brilliant idea to trap the Doctor, who is a TIME Lord, in a TIME loop! Yes, John, pure genius.
Over the next few episodes things develop along these lines. Lalla complains about her costume for the episode, though she does grant that she did insist that she needed to be dressed like a late Victorian moppet in every story. She just wasn't much taken with this _particular_ model of late Victorian moppet. John talks about how his story is based on the tension between science and religion. Lalla, who is married to Richard Dawkins, one of the most strident of the New Atheists, commends his prescience. Peter Howell talks about his approach to composing, which at this point in his career is to use a vocoder everywhere and on everything, to the point where asking him what his approach to a particular bit of music was becomes a running joke.
Everyone points out that Christopher Owen doesn't do shit over the course of the story. Occasionally someone ventures an opinion on Tom Baker, a topic on which Lalla Ward has extensive personal experience and forty years' worth of arch putdowns. John Nathan-Turner's inability to notice that Howell had, as a joke, scored one supposedly dramatic scene as a tango is brought up. "Yes, well, he probably had other things on his mind." "Oh, yes, certainly." This is an allusion to the knowledge, common among fans, and certainly known to everyone involved with the show, but seldom stated as such, that Nathan-Turner spent much of his time and energy as show-runner procuring boys beneath the age of consent for what Craigslist would term "casual encounters". (To be clear, since this was the era of the dual standard in the age of consent that inspired Bronski Beat's landmark album "The Age of Consent", they would have been beneath of the age of consent even were Nathan-Turner seeking heterosexual liaisons.)
The episodic nature of the story likewise divides the conversation up into acts, and the concluding one is a doozy. It is mentioned that the fourth episode runs unusually short for a Doctor Who episode. "You'd think the episodes would have a standard running length," someone remarks. "A lot of people don't know this," responds John, clearly aware of the growing tenor of the room, the accumulation of unspoken judgements his companions, "but the writers aren't actually responsible for making sure the episode is long enough."
Lalla takes this as her cue for a lengthy series of artfully phrased questions about John and his absent partner's writing process, expressing her curiosity about what inspired their approach to this particular story. She points out, in ways more subtle than I can aptly summarize here, that a lot of the actors (who are, John agrees, fine actors, and he deeply regrets having named one of the characters as a hilarious anagram of "bad actor" as that actor is in fact an excellent actor, truly) seem to almost be playing their undoubtedly serious science fiction script as broad comedy. It is a delightful and much-deserved comeuppance. John desperately tries to save face during the closing credits by pointing out (after saying how genuinely sorry he is for misremembering her character's name) that Lalla's professional name is taken from the way she pronounced her given name, Sarah, as a toddler. It doesn't help him any.
Stuff like this goes a long way to explaining why I love Doctor Who so much.
Matrixing
When I went off on my little Doctor Who ramble earlier I didn't get around to finishing up my earlier topic. One of the interesting things people do - again, I mostly encounter this in the Zep and Dead boot communities - is matrixing. This, I think, says interesting things particularly about the Dead tape community. Back in the day, before widespread digital availability of everything, before the Internet Archive or Dick's Picks, the currency of the realm in Deadhead circles was "crispy" or "crunchy" soundboards. It's not a nomenclature I understand. I find it interesting the attributes attributed to sound, that what was desirable in those days was a sound that was hard and brittle, as opposed presumably to soft and yielding. It tracked with the tendency, in that early digital era, for noise reduction, the sterile narrative of "progress". Hiss was seen as inherently bad, and accordingly recordings were reprocessed to be dry, airless; space was interpreted as noise. Now it is different.
The centennial release of the recordings of Robert Johnson restores the hiss, and this is seen by many, including myself, to be an improvement. A similar change has occurred over time in the Dead community. An understanding of the differences between line sound and sound as heard by the audience, the ambience of the venue, has spread with greater availability of recordings. Certain sound configurations of the Dead, particularly their 1974 "Wall of Sound" getup, sound very different in audience captures than on soundboard recordings, on which the band's sound is not markedly different than it was in prior years.
Thesis and antithesis gives way to synthesis, in the best scholastic style. One can superimpose an audience recording, for the space, onto a line recording, for the clarity of sound, and get some significant measure of both, just like you can take the fuzzy colour signal of an off-air Doctor Who recording and superimpose it onto the crisp lines of a B&W film print to get a crisp colour picture.
This also comes about in commercial recordings, in various forms. I first encountered the concept through the discovery of some old Duke Ellington recordings from the early '30s. The tracks were recorded into two mono recorders at the same time, but these recorders were set up in different places in the room, with different acoustics. Recordings from both masters were commercially issued. This happens a lot too - when distributing recordings there is sometimes a mix-up about which recording is the master, and so the wrong recording gets used. You could write a very boring book about all the different versions of Bob Dylan's "Blonde on Blonde" that have been released.
This phenomenon actually accidentally redeemed one of Peter Bogdanovich's most notorious flops. In 1975, Bogdanovich, who was a very successful director at the time, resolved to revive the Hollywood musical with a slate of Cole Porter songs. Today, of course, we know that every time this is attempted it pretty much winds up a dismal and embarrassing failure, but at the time Bogdanovich may be excused for believing he had a shot, as the heyday of the musical wasn't that far behind.
There were a couple problems. First was that his star was Burt Reynolds. Since this was 1975, test audiences demanded more Burt Reynolds, which was not generally something that led to the improvement of the film. Second was that a lot of people in Hollywood really personally hated Bogdanovich. He has a reputation in many quarters of being a weasel and a snake. I don't know the man personally, and I am making no personal judgement on him, merely observing that a lot of people did, in fact, very much want to see him fail.
So he did. His response to this failure was to actually take out a full-page groveling apology in the trades, which doesn't necessarily do a lot to argue against his being sort of a sniveler that I can see, and then the film was buried.
The interesting thing is that a fairly anonymous film editor by the name of Jim Blakely decided that there was some value in the film Bogdanovich was trying to make, and so put together his own cut of the film based on Bogdanovich's script and first cut. At some point he quietly swapped out this version for the master, and subsequently died.
In 2011, Netflix was trying to make a name for themselves in the industry, and they were doing it by acquiring as much content as cheaply as they could, which meant acquiring the streaming rights to content that nobody in their right mind would possibly want to see. After this, the unthinkable happened: Somebody actually watched "At Long Last Love" and said "Hey, this is actually pretty good!"
People still hate Peter Bogdanovich, but I think they are OK with Jim Blakely.
Back to Duke Ellington. What was discovered was that combining these two commercial mono recordings resulted in a stereo recreation of the room ambience - that's basic matrixing for you! It's still a pretty heavy use of matrixing that I can tell - taking mono recordings and turning them into stereo. Of course, it is possible to have more than two audio channels on a recording, but anything over two channels has been and possibly always will be the province of rich, overwhelmingly male audiophile nerds, the acceptable uses of technology determined by cultural considerations. That's a rich topic for another time, probably.
The other example of matrixing recordings in order to create stereo is the case of Good Vibrations. If one had to pick one song to be most identified with Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys, well, I'd pick Good Vibrations. A towering accomplishment as well as a bit of a pyrrhic victory - Brian logged 75 hours in the studio recording the single, which isn't particularly practical for a song that's going to spend a week at number one and then be replaced by some song that probably took ten minutes to record and five minutes to write.
All of the Beach Boys' early recordings were in mono even after most other bands had adopted stereo. A lot of this was a function of Brian's huge input into all aspects of the recording process. Since his dad had beaten him deaf in one ear, stereo wasn't a huge priority for him, even as the record company was pressuring him to adopt stereo recording (early cover slicks for "Smile" declared it to be a stereo recording, which it almost certainly wouldn't have been).
Over time the reputation of the Beach Boys' '60s recordings grew, and in 1996 a stereo version of their landmark "Pet Sounds" album was released, newly mixed from the original master tapes. This wasn't possible with "Good Vibrations", though, because at some point the complete vocal sessions for the single were lost. Beach Boys nerds bemoan this loss particularly. Three CDs worth of sessions for the backing tracks exist, and a stereo mix can be put together from this, but the vocals exist only on the released mono single.
Which means, in turn, that any stereo version, well, it's going to be "mixed" in a sense, but big chunks of the recording being taken from pre-mixed commercial recordings does make it an exercise in matrixing, even if these days it's extremely sophisticated and complex. Here's the recording I go to when I want to hear a stereo version of Good Vibrations:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfX-5Ok5pzo
I honestly wouldn't really know the vocals no longer exist in stereo from listening to this. It's quite convincing.
The centennial release of the recordings of Robert Johnson restores the hiss, and this is seen by many, including myself, to be an improvement. A similar change has occurred over time in the Dead community. An understanding of the differences between line sound and sound as heard by the audience, the ambience of the venue, has spread with greater availability of recordings. Certain sound configurations of the Dead, particularly their 1974 "Wall of Sound" getup, sound very different in audience captures than on soundboard recordings, on which the band's sound is not markedly different than it was in prior years.
Thesis and antithesis gives way to synthesis, in the best scholastic style. One can superimpose an audience recording, for the space, onto a line recording, for the clarity of sound, and get some significant measure of both, just like you can take the fuzzy colour signal of an off-air Doctor Who recording and superimpose it onto the crisp lines of a B&W film print to get a crisp colour picture.
This also comes about in commercial recordings, in various forms. I first encountered the concept through the discovery of some old Duke Ellington recordings from the early '30s. The tracks were recorded into two mono recorders at the same time, but these recorders were set up in different places in the room, with different acoustics. Recordings from both masters were commercially issued. This happens a lot too - when distributing recordings there is sometimes a mix-up about which recording is the master, and so the wrong recording gets used. You could write a very boring book about all the different versions of Bob Dylan's "Blonde on Blonde" that have been released.
This phenomenon actually accidentally redeemed one of Peter Bogdanovich's most notorious flops. In 1975, Bogdanovich, who was a very successful director at the time, resolved to revive the Hollywood musical with a slate of Cole Porter songs. Today, of course, we know that every time this is attempted it pretty much winds up a dismal and embarrassing failure, but at the time Bogdanovich may be excused for believing he had a shot, as the heyday of the musical wasn't that far behind.
There were a couple problems. First was that his star was Burt Reynolds. Since this was 1975, test audiences demanded more Burt Reynolds, which was not generally something that led to the improvement of the film. Second was that a lot of people in Hollywood really personally hated Bogdanovich. He has a reputation in many quarters of being a weasel and a snake. I don't know the man personally, and I am making no personal judgement on him, merely observing that a lot of people did, in fact, very much want to see him fail.
So he did. His response to this failure was to actually take out a full-page groveling apology in the trades, which doesn't necessarily do a lot to argue against his being sort of a sniveler that I can see, and then the film was buried.
The interesting thing is that a fairly anonymous film editor by the name of Jim Blakely decided that there was some value in the film Bogdanovich was trying to make, and so put together his own cut of the film based on Bogdanovich's script and first cut. At some point he quietly swapped out this version for the master, and subsequently died.
In 2011, Netflix was trying to make a name for themselves in the industry, and they were doing it by acquiring as much content as cheaply as they could, which meant acquiring the streaming rights to content that nobody in their right mind would possibly want to see. After this, the unthinkable happened: Somebody actually watched "At Long Last Love" and said "Hey, this is actually pretty good!"
People still hate Peter Bogdanovich, but I think they are OK with Jim Blakely.
Back to Duke Ellington. What was discovered was that combining these two commercial mono recordings resulted in a stereo recreation of the room ambience - that's basic matrixing for you! It's still a pretty heavy use of matrixing that I can tell - taking mono recordings and turning them into stereo. Of course, it is possible to have more than two audio channels on a recording, but anything over two channels has been and possibly always will be the province of rich, overwhelmingly male audiophile nerds, the acceptable uses of technology determined by cultural considerations. That's a rich topic for another time, probably.
The other example of matrixing recordings in order to create stereo is the case of Good Vibrations. If one had to pick one song to be most identified with Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys, well, I'd pick Good Vibrations. A towering accomplishment as well as a bit of a pyrrhic victory - Brian logged 75 hours in the studio recording the single, which isn't particularly practical for a song that's going to spend a week at number one and then be replaced by some song that probably took ten minutes to record and five minutes to write.
All of the Beach Boys' early recordings were in mono even after most other bands had adopted stereo. A lot of this was a function of Brian's huge input into all aspects of the recording process. Since his dad had beaten him deaf in one ear, stereo wasn't a huge priority for him, even as the record company was pressuring him to adopt stereo recording (early cover slicks for "Smile" declared it to be a stereo recording, which it almost certainly wouldn't have been).
Over time the reputation of the Beach Boys' '60s recordings grew, and in 1996 a stereo version of their landmark "Pet Sounds" album was released, newly mixed from the original master tapes. This wasn't possible with "Good Vibrations", though, because at some point the complete vocal sessions for the single were lost. Beach Boys nerds bemoan this loss particularly. Three CDs worth of sessions for the backing tracks exist, and a stereo mix can be put together from this, but the vocals exist only on the released mono single.
Which means, in turn, that any stereo version, well, it's going to be "mixed" in a sense, but big chunks of the recording being taken from pre-mixed commercial recordings does make it an exercise in matrixing, even if these days it's extremely sophisticated and complex. Here's the recording I go to when I want to hear a stereo version of Good Vibrations:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfX-5Ok5pzo
I honestly wouldn't really know the vocals no longer exist in stereo from listening to this. It's quite convincing.
Patchwork
In keeping with my interests, one of the things I like is media where you can "hear the join". One finds this a lot with bootlegs from a certain era. Obviously, if someone in the audience is surreptitiously taping a concert, the band is not going to stop so the audience member in question can change out his reels or cassettes. For that matter even professionally taped concerts aren't immune to this. The second King Crimson album I got was an official cassette of "Starless and Bible Black" that was for some reason for sale at the campus convenience store. This album, for those who don't know, was mainly made up of overdubbed live recordings, including one, at the end of side one, that ends abruptly when the tape runs out. When I heard it I assumed it was a manufacturing error, and was only persuaded otherwise with great difficulty.
These days the band has officially released the complete concert it came from, patched with an audience recording. Whoever prepared it for release made the creative choice to present the concert as performed, without overdubs, so the entire section of the performance that was on the "Starless and Bible Black" album is taken from an audience cassette. I'd actually been meaning for a while to edit in the overdubbed version and I guess this is my opportunity to do it!
That was a fun learning experience! Not perfect but I think it went OK. Anyway this will occasionally pop up on "official bootlegs" by bands of a certain era but mostly it's something that happens in the bootleg community. I'm most familiar with it through the Grateful Dead and Led Zeppelin. Usually what happens is that a "line" or "soundboard" recording is patched in the gaps with an audience tape, like in the King Crimson example, but sometimes it does happen the other way around. My favorite performance of "White Summer/Black Mountain Side", for instance, from Montreux 1970-03-07, is an exceptionally good audience recording patched with an exceptionally poor line recording.
And then there are the _really_ weird patchwork cases. I have a really enjoyable six minute performance of "Satisfaction" from a 1966 French radio performance. It's been rebroadcast a number of times edited in various ways - the recording I have stems from at least three different sources of dramatically varying quality.
It's not always live recordings, too. Numero Group put out, some years back, an archival disc of recordings of the group 24 Carat Black. One of the things they hoped to include was a 4-song acetate, but in the event they deemed the acetate to be too badly damaged with too many drop-outs to be widely releasable. They put one track, a fantastic performance of "What I Need" with amazing bass, up on their website; later the whole acetate was released in a very limited edition; I haven't heard the other three tracks. I'm a little obsessed with "What I Need" though - it's a first-rate performance but one that's inseparable from the irreparable damage and loss the physical recording has suffered.
As per usual this also links in with Doctor Who. One of the most fascinating parts of the "missing episodes" is the little fragments that are recoverable. A six minute chunk of "Four Hundred Dawns", the first episode of the terrible Season 3 serial "Galaxy Four", with a cut in the middle where a clip was taken out for the pro-Doctor Who propaganda documentary "Whose Doctor Who". Most famously, the regeneration sequence from the final episode of "The Tenth Planet", which exists as a short clip from a 1970s episode of "Blue Peter" and a longer off-air 8mm video taken by a fan from a rebroadcast. This tracks well how I think of Doctor Who; some scattered photos, a second here or there popping out of blind nothingness, a substantial stretch of poor-quality 8mm cine bursting into brilliant, pristine quality at the crucial moment, and then the fade back into oblivion - an accidentally captured partial trailer, more short cine clips - the new Doctor looking in a "mirror" at a photo of his old face. After that occasional clips of the Daleks from lighthearted arts & culture review shows of the era - one of them making a menacing threat undercut slightly by Dalek operator bumping right into the camera, three Daleks milling about in front of an army of obvious cardboard cutouts, an interminable (yes, one of the only surviving clips of an otherwise missing six episode serial, and it's still fucking interminable!) sequence of an "army" of Daleks - actually the same three, as is obvious from the long gap between the emergence of the third and fourth Daleks while the first Dalek finishes circling to the back of the set out of camera view - massing and preparing for conquest, which in typical Dalek fashion primarily involves shouting.
Plenty more in this vein. A home movie made by the effects crew on "Evil of the Daleks" showing the "final end" of the Daleks - since it's a home movie everything on screen is even more obviously a model than was typical for the show, but one gets some idea of how it might have looked. Fury From the Deep, one of the most fascinating episodes to me. A one minute sequence censored from the Australian broadcast - rightly so, if you ask me, because it is _terrifying_, but which also makes me more curious. There are plenty of attempts at fear in the show - it's part of the meta story engine - but most of them are, shall we say, less than fully effective. Most of the censor clips, like for instance the ones from the Macra Terror, it is hard to imagine anybody concluding that these are things that might unduly scar impressionable young minds. The uncanny effectiveness of this sequence is, IMO, entirely down to two things: The Radiophonic soundtrack, and the work of director Hugh David.
Directors tend to get short shrift in Who fandom. The fans focus on the writers first and foremost, on the actors, on the makers of the eerie electronic music, of the monster designers. It has been a long time coming for the role of the director in making a show a success or failure has been acknowledged. This is particularly true in the case of missing, or formerly missing, episodes. Before its recovery Tomb of the Cybermen was _the_ most coveted missing episode, the pinnacle of the show's black and white era. Fandom is still marked by the disappointment of actually being able to see it. Badly plotted, racist, and poorly directed, the whole of its power over fans' collective memory rested on one admittedly impressive special effects sequence (so impressive, in fact, that the whole thing was later repeated backwards). Few people pine for the recovery of "The Massacre", an early directorial effort by the uncommonly good director Paddy Russell. Nobody pines for the work of Hugh David, because none of his work for the show exists. He directed two serials, both missing in their entirety save for some brief clips.
The other bit of Fury From the Deep that sticks in my memory is the attack of the weed creature. Like the censor clip, this is something that exists because it was deemed unsuitable for public broadcast - in this case, it is because the existing footage is film trims, cast-offs and rejects from the sequence. It is hard enough to sell a cheap "seaweed monster" thrashing around in a bubble bath as dramatically convincing. That I find the sequence convincing in an edit made up entirely of the rejected bits and cast-offs from filming...
Me being who I am, it makes me think of Carl Theodor Dreyer. Dreyer went to his death believing the finished version his first film lost forever. He prepared, therefore, an alternate version, made up entirely of outtakes and rejected footage from the original cut. Since the recovery of his original version in - and this fact is one of the reasons I always bring up "The Passion of Joan of Arc" in relation to lost media - the janitor's closet of a Norwegian insane asylum, the second cut has been a footnote. I don't know if it's commercially available anywhere, though these days, possibly!
Sometimes these stories do get blown out of proportion, though. Perhaps the greatest locus for missing episode conspiracy theories involves the recovery of two episodes of the rarest (and, logically, the least likely to be recovered) Doctor Who story, The Daleks' Masterplan, in the basement of a Unitarian church in 1983. Or perhaps it was a Unification, or "Moonie" church. Nobody really knows for sure. You hear the story and you wonder: What on earth were those episodes doing there?
The short answer, the long answer, all the answer there is: We don't know. We won't ever know. Back in '83, if someone called and said they had some old Doctor Who episodes and would you like to take a look, the policy was to say "Yes, sure, thank you", and not ask too many questions. (Note that after the return of the original cut of the Passion of Joan of Arc, it sat around in a film archive for three years before anybody bothered to look at it to see if it might be interesting.)
It is interesting. The missing episode junkies all seem to want to know how those episodes of The Daleks' Masterplan survived, but nobody cares about the survival of "Invasion of the Dinosaurs". That story had its master tapes accidentally wiped almost immediately after broadcast, and it is honestly a fucking miracle that the entire story survives today, and these days in colour no less. I guess I understand why. It's an amazing story, but there's no mystique to it, no Pertwee episodes left to find... no hope for more! All we can do is appreciate what we have, which is to say a very entertaining Doctor Who episode with some truly awful special effects.
Well, that was quite a ramble. This post was a bit of a patchwork itself I suppose!
These days the band has officially released the complete concert it came from, patched with an audience recording. Whoever prepared it for release made the creative choice to present the concert as performed, without overdubs, so the entire section of the performance that was on the "Starless and Bible Black" album is taken from an audience cassette. I'd actually been meaning for a while to edit in the overdubbed version and I guess this is my opportunity to do it!
That was a fun learning experience! Not perfect but I think it went OK. Anyway this will occasionally pop up on "official bootlegs" by bands of a certain era but mostly it's something that happens in the bootleg community. I'm most familiar with it through the Grateful Dead and Led Zeppelin. Usually what happens is that a "line" or "soundboard" recording is patched in the gaps with an audience tape, like in the King Crimson example, but sometimes it does happen the other way around. My favorite performance of "White Summer/Black Mountain Side", for instance, from Montreux 1970-03-07, is an exceptionally good audience recording patched with an exceptionally poor line recording.
And then there are the _really_ weird patchwork cases. I have a really enjoyable six minute performance of "Satisfaction" from a 1966 French radio performance. It's been rebroadcast a number of times edited in various ways - the recording I have stems from at least three different sources of dramatically varying quality.
It's not always live recordings, too. Numero Group put out, some years back, an archival disc of recordings of the group 24 Carat Black. One of the things they hoped to include was a 4-song acetate, but in the event they deemed the acetate to be too badly damaged with too many drop-outs to be widely releasable. They put one track, a fantastic performance of "What I Need" with amazing bass, up on their website; later the whole acetate was released in a very limited edition; I haven't heard the other three tracks. I'm a little obsessed with "What I Need" though - it's a first-rate performance but one that's inseparable from the irreparable damage and loss the physical recording has suffered.
As per usual this also links in with Doctor Who. One of the most fascinating parts of the "missing episodes" is the little fragments that are recoverable. A six minute chunk of "Four Hundred Dawns", the first episode of the terrible Season 3 serial "Galaxy Four", with a cut in the middle where a clip was taken out for the pro-Doctor Who propaganda documentary "Whose Doctor Who". Most famously, the regeneration sequence from the final episode of "The Tenth Planet", which exists as a short clip from a 1970s episode of "Blue Peter" and a longer off-air 8mm video taken by a fan from a rebroadcast. This tracks well how I think of Doctor Who; some scattered photos, a second here or there popping out of blind nothingness, a substantial stretch of poor-quality 8mm cine bursting into brilliant, pristine quality at the crucial moment, and then the fade back into oblivion - an accidentally captured partial trailer, more short cine clips - the new Doctor looking in a "mirror" at a photo of his old face. After that occasional clips of the Daleks from lighthearted arts & culture review shows of the era - one of them making a menacing threat undercut slightly by Dalek operator bumping right into the camera, three Daleks milling about in front of an army of obvious cardboard cutouts, an interminable (yes, one of the only surviving clips of an otherwise missing six episode serial, and it's still fucking interminable!) sequence of an "army" of Daleks - actually the same three, as is obvious from the long gap between the emergence of the third and fourth Daleks while the first Dalek finishes circling to the back of the set out of camera view - massing and preparing for conquest, which in typical Dalek fashion primarily involves shouting.
Plenty more in this vein. A home movie made by the effects crew on "Evil of the Daleks" showing the "final end" of the Daleks - since it's a home movie everything on screen is even more obviously a model than was typical for the show, but one gets some idea of how it might have looked. Fury From the Deep, one of the most fascinating episodes to me. A one minute sequence censored from the Australian broadcast - rightly so, if you ask me, because it is _terrifying_, but which also makes me more curious. There are plenty of attempts at fear in the show - it's part of the meta story engine - but most of them are, shall we say, less than fully effective. Most of the censor clips, like for instance the ones from the Macra Terror, it is hard to imagine anybody concluding that these are things that might unduly scar impressionable young minds. The uncanny effectiveness of this sequence is, IMO, entirely down to two things: The Radiophonic soundtrack, and the work of director Hugh David.
Directors tend to get short shrift in Who fandom. The fans focus on the writers first and foremost, on the actors, on the makers of the eerie electronic music, of the monster designers. It has been a long time coming for the role of the director in making a show a success or failure has been acknowledged. This is particularly true in the case of missing, or formerly missing, episodes. Before its recovery Tomb of the Cybermen was _the_ most coveted missing episode, the pinnacle of the show's black and white era. Fandom is still marked by the disappointment of actually being able to see it. Badly plotted, racist, and poorly directed, the whole of its power over fans' collective memory rested on one admittedly impressive special effects sequence (so impressive, in fact, that the whole thing was later repeated backwards). Few people pine for the recovery of "The Massacre", an early directorial effort by the uncommonly good director Paddy Russell. Nobody pines for the work of Hugh David, because none of his work for the show exists. He directed two serials, both missing in their entirety save for some brief clips.
The other bit of Fury From the Deep that sticks in my memory is the attack of the weed creature. Like the censor clip, this is something that exists because it was deemed unsuitable for public broadcast - in this case, it is because the existing footage is film trims, cast-offs and rejects from the sequence. It is hard enough to sell a cheap "seaweed monster" thrashing around in a bubble bath as dramatically convincing. That I find the sequence convincing in an edit made up entirely of the rejected bits and cast-offs from filming...
Me being who I am, it makes me think of Carl Theodor Dreyer. Dreyer went to his death believing the finished version his first film lost forever. He prepared, therefore, an alternate version, made up entirely of outtakes and rejected footage from the original cut. Since the recovery of his original version in - and this fact is one of the reasons I always bring up "The Passion of Joan of Arc" in relation to lost media - the janitor's closet of a Norwegian insane asylum, the second cut has been a footnote. I don't know if it's commercially available anywhere, though these days, possibly!
Sometimes these stories do get blown out of proportion, though. Perhaps the greatest locus for missing episode conspiracy theories involves the recovery of two episodes of the rarest (and, logically, the least likely to be recovered) Doctor Who story, The Daleks' Masterplan, in the basement of a Unitarian church in 1983. Or perhaps it was a Unification, or "Moonie" church. Nobody really knows for sure. You hear the story and you wonder: What on earth were those episodes doing there?
The short answer, the long answer, all the answer there is: We don't know. We won't ever know. Back in '83, if someone called and said they had some old Doctor Who episodes and would you like to take a look, the policy was to say "Yes, sure, thank you", and not ask too many questions. (Note that after the return of the original cut of the Passion of Joan of Arc, it sat around in a film archive for three years before anybody bothered to look at it to see if it might be interesting.)
It is interesting. The missing episode junkies all seem to want to know how those episodes of The Daleks' Masterplan survived, but nobody cares about the survival of "Invasion of the Dinosaurs". That story had its master tapes accidentally wiped almost immediately after broadcast, and it is honestly a fucking miracle that the entire story survives today, and these days in colour no less. I guess I understand why. It's an amazing story, but there's no mystique to it, no Pertwee episodes left to find... no hope for more! All we can do is appreciate what we have, which is to say a very entertaining Doctor Who episode with some truly awful special effects.
Well, that was quite a ramble. This post was a bit of a patchwork itself I suppose!
Monday 16 March 2020
The Land of Metafiction
Like Sedric, I am uncommonly interested in the metafictional aspects of the TV show Doctor Who. Pretty much every show with an audience has metafictional aspects to a greater or lesser degree. In particular there are really interesting metafictional aspects to both Star Trek and Star Wars that can be differentiated sharply from Doctor Who's approach to metafiction.
One of the unusual aspects of Doctor Who is that it has an extremely flexible central concept. The basic concept of the main character is that she can be anyone and go anywhere in time and space. That's not really a compelling or dramatic hook for a long-running TV series.
This means that most of what makes Doctor Who what it is has to be, necessarily, metafictional. Occasionally an attempt is made to "nerf" the story engine - for instance by confining the lead character to present-day earth - but these attempts never seem to last very long or to be deployed very consistently. When the Third Doctor was sent to earth he lasted for three stories, for instance, before being sent to a parallel universe. The next season a deus ex machina decided to send him to an alien planet. Occasionally, as at the end of the sixteenth season, an attempt is made to reduce his control over his time machine. Typically these attempts are so short-lived that it's easy to forget they happen.
What is essential, immutable, about the show? Well, the lead character is British. Probably that's unexceptional to British viewers, but it's always been a defining trait of the character for me. It's never been hard for me to accept the show as being alien, and it's not because we don't have rock quarries here in America. She travels around in a Police Box, which used to be a happenstance eccentric quirk, the first and most obvious accommodation to the budget. Wherever it goes it will look out of place. Its home is not some alien world where everyone wears silly hats, but a British junkyard in 1963.
And then, well, there's the name of the character. This is a matter of some dispute, of some tension. When I was first watching the show it was considered the mark of a neophyte to refer to the main character as "Doctor Who". It was a shibboleth. Acceptance of the internal ludic conventions was taken as a mark of inner knowledge.
To this day fans who come to the show through the new material are overwhelmed and intimidated by the show's vast history. They see it as a knowledge to be obtained the same way London cabbies obtain The Knowledge. Having obtained a greater-than-usual proportion of The Knowledge myself (though there are always people who know more than me), I don't see it that way.
I am delighted when new fans come to the show. I am delighted by the opportunities presented by Chibnall's run of the show. This is not a book with new chapters being written, but a playground, a playground that should be open to all. Ignorance is no barrier to be overcome but a gift to be celebrated. The bulk of "continuity" is there to be picked up, examined as a jeweler would with a loupe, and discarded as, after all, only paste.
It is partly in this spirit that I refer to the main character, whenever possible, as "Doctor Who". I also, however, do this because it reflects a different sort of knowledge, a knowledge no character in-universe has admitted to possessing, which is in-universe the deepest and most impenetrable of secrets, but which every viewer knows from the moment they turn it on.
Because what, possibly, could the Doctor's true name be other than "Doctor Who"? Theta Sigma? Some unpronounceable glyph? Nonsense. No other name could be acceptable, and the only reason it is such a closely-guarded secret is because of what we, the viewers, would lose if we knew it. We as viewers, as fans, know the Doctor's true name, and her true nature. We define that nature, in a million little deuterocanonical absurdities, year after year. The actual community of fans is often petty, small-minded, and dull, but the beacon of possibility represented by the character's narratively transcendent nature, by the disjunction between the character's in-universe name and her name in the show title, this is at the heart of so much of the best of what the show, and its fans, have accomplished.
One of the unusual aspects of Doctor Who is that it has an extremely flexible central concept. The basic concept of the main character is that she can be anyone and go anywhere in time and space. That's not really a compelling or dramatic hook for a long-running TV series.
This means that most of what makes Doctor Who what it is has to be, necessarily, metafictional. Occasionally an attempt is made to "nerf" the story engine - for instance by confining the lead character to present-day earth - but these attempts never seem to last very long or to be deployed very consistently. When the Third Doctor was sent to earth he lasted for three stories, for instance, before being sent to a parallel universe. The next season a deus ex machina decided to send him to an alien planet. Occasionally, as at the end of the sixteenth season, an attempt is made to reduce his control over his time machine. Typically these attempts are so short-lived that it's easy to forget they happen.
What is essential, immutable, about the show? Well, the lead character is British. Probably that's unexceptional to British viewers, but it's always been a defining trait of the character for me. It's never been hard for me to accept the show as being alien, and it's not because we don't have rock quarries here in America. She travels around in a Police Box, which used to be a happenstance eccentric quirk, the first and most obvious accommodation to the budget. Wherever it goes it will look out of place. Its home is not some alien world where everyone wears silly hats, but a British junkyard in 1963.
And then, well, there's the name of the character. This is a matter of some dispute, of some tension. When I was first watching the show it was considered the mark of a neophyte to refer to the main character as "Doctor Who". It was a shibboleth. Acceptance of the internal ludic conventions was taken as a mark of inner knowledge.
To this day fans who come to the show through the new material are overwhelmed and intimidated by the show's vast history. They see it as a knowledge to be obtained the same way London cabbies obtain The Knowledge. Having obtained a greater-than-usual proportion of The Knowledge myself (though there are always people who know more than me), I don't see it that way.
I am delighted when new fans come to the show. I am delighted by the opportunities presented by Chibnall's run of the show. This is not a book with new chapters being written, but a playground, a playground that should be open to all. Ignorance is no barrier to be overcome but a gift to be celebrated. The bulk of "continuity" is there to be picked up, examined as a jeweler would with a loupe, and discarded as, after all, only paste.
It is partly in this spirit that I refer to the main character, whenever possible, as "Doctor Who". I also, however, do this because it reflects a different sort of knowledge, a knowledge no character in-universe has admitted to possessing, which is in-universe the deepest and most impenetrable of secrets, but which every viewer knows from the moment they turn it on.
Because what, possibly, could the Doctor's true name be other than "Doctor Who"? Theta Sigma? Some unpronounceable glyph? Nonsense. No other name could be acceptable, and the only reason it is such a closely-guarded secret is because of what we, the viewers, would lose if we knew it. We as viewers, as fans, know the Doctor's true name, and her true nature. We define that nature, in a million little deuterocanonical absurdities, year after year. The actual community of fans is often petty, small-minded, and dull, but the beacon of possibility represented by the character's narratively transcendent nature, by the disjunction between the character's in-universe name and her name in the show title, this is at the heart of so much of the best of what the show, and its fans, have accomplished.
Saturday 14 March 2020
Eddy Grant
Feel like today's a good day to do something fairly basic and limited in scope, so here's everything I know about Eddy Grant.
In America Eddy Grant is a one-hit wonder, known for one thing and one thing only - the 1983 hit single "Electric Avenue", which sounded kind of like "1999" but wasn't. I remember hearing it and loving it in my youth - maybe it stuck around longer than '83, or maybe it was unusually memorable to my seven-year-old self. I didn't have any concept that there was a real street called "Electric Avenue"; I took it as a fictional boogie-funk paradise, with perhaps some faint link to Disneyland's Main Street Electrical Parade, an enormous band of computer people marching down the street. Well, shit, I didn't pick up on the apocalyptic implications of "1999" either.
When a song touches on a place that's real to the singer, but not somewhere I've ever been, or vice versa... there's an interesting gap in understandings there. Words may be open to interpretation, but places are _really_ open to interpretation. Slapp Happy sings about "hoboken", pronouncing it wrong, as some exotic land of spies, and I know it from D. Manus Pinkwater's book "The Hoboken Chicken Emergency" and from going with my dad every year to the Hoboken train festival - not somewhere mysterious and exotic, an ordinary suburb of New York City. Trains, because my dad loved them, they do have a certain resonance to me, a certain mystique, but then I hear Robyn Hitchcock sing "I often dream of trains" and Basingstoke and Reading are as unattainable and foreign as eternity, possibly moreso.
Lots of interpretation challenges between me and Robyn on that album. How am I supposed to interpret "Sometimes I wish I were a pretty girl"? How does my experience map on to his? How does my knowledge that his dad wrote the penis mutilation novel "Percy", a movie for which the Kinks' "Lola" appeared on the soundtrack, shape that understanding?
Scope, Kate. You were talking about Eddy Grant, not about the gender politics of the Pink Fairies' ten minute rock opus "I Wish I Were A Girl" (_Kings of Oblivion_, 1973).
My point is that I didn't know, and I'm not sure most of America knows to this day, about Grant's involvement in the pioneering racially integrated band "The Equals", didn't know that he wrote "Police On My Back" (still have a tendency to mix it up with Junior Murvin's "Police and Thieves"). I occasionally encounter him the way I encounter most music, sideways, through unpredictable paths. At some point I ran across the Equals' final album, 1977's "Mystic Syster". I'm not sure at all whether Grant had any involvement in this - he left the group due to health issues years prior. Whether or not he had anything to do with it, it's a fantastic album, fantastic in a way that's sui generis. I don't know any other records that sound like Mystic Syster, and I've heard a lot of records at this point. It's the synth sound that grabs me most, the parping-est synth work I've ever heard. Writing about music, even though I've done a lot of it, is still hard, because if a record is really good, what exactly it is is hard to put into words. All I can really get to is that I fucking love this record and you should listen to it.
As for Eddy, he was certainly doing solo shit around this time. There's a certain extremely small cult following among crate-diggers for the 12" version of his disco song "Everybody Dance". I like very short songs and very long songs, songs that defy our understanding of how time in music is supposed to work. The 12" "Everybody Dance" goes on for fucking ever, 17:44 to be precise, and if something goes on long enough the chances that it'll get weird rise. In the case of "Everybody Dance" it starts sounding like a disco take on Terry Riley's underrated "Shri Camel". I am particularly interested in the hypnotic, not to say hypnagogic, uses of the deep disco groove, either version of Dinosaur's "Kiss Me Again", either Patrick Cowley mix (the more common mix or the finished "True" mix) of "Hills of Katmandu", and the 12" of Everybody Dance deserves a place alongside those titans of the disco 12".
He's had a long career since, mostly unknown to me. He's a big name in the soca field, which is a genre I respect a lot and don't much know shit about. The only soca track of his I have is a track called "Ice Cream" by someone named "Duke" from 1994. (Compare and contrast: the amazing late-period hot blues track "Ice Cream" by Captain John Handy, not to be confused with the better known third stream jazz musician John Handy, whose two-track album I enjoy much better in the 7" edits; see also "Ice Cream To God" by the little-known early '80s post-punk band "Kitchen and the Plastic Spooons, note the three o's; the fantastic 2013 alt-R&B record "Ice Cream Everyday" by Amel Larrieux; "Ice Cream For Crow" by Captain Beefheart; John Baker's radiophonic jazz soundtrack to "The Ice Cream Man", a sadly now-lost episode of the 1960s British television series Vendetta; The Melvins covering the Butthole Surfers' "Graveyard" in Chicago for the AV Club next to a truck giving out free ice cream to the little ones; the Tornadoes' Joe Meek-goes-Bo-Diddley deep cut "The Ice Cream Man"; Nick Didkovsky's hour-long commissioned composition "Ice Cream Time"). Wikipedia's one-paragraph summary of Grant's life's work feels compelled to mention that he pioneered the genre "ringbang", which is a genre I have literally never heard of before now. This is either a testament to the ways in which the musical knowledge of even an obsessed autodidact like me can be limited, the infinite horizons of discovery stretching out in all directions, or possibly the equally infinite ability of humanity to invent genres no reasonable person could possibly actually give a shit about. I like Grant a lot, so I'll assume the former.
In America Eddy Grant is a one-hit wonder, known for one thing and one thing only - the 1983 hit single "Electric Avenue", which sounded kind of like "1999" but wasn't. I remember hearing it and loving it in my youth - maybe it stuck around longer than '83, or maybe it was unusually memorable to my seven-year-old self. I didn't have any concept that there was a real street called "Electric Avenue"; I took it as a fictional boogie-funk paradise, with perhaps some faint link to Disneyland's Main Street Electrical Parade, an enormous band of computer people marching down the street. Well, shit, I didn't pick up on the apocalyptic implications of "1999" either.
When a song touches on a place that's real to the singer, but not somewhere I've ever been, or vice versa... there's an interesting gap in understandings there. Words may be open to interpretation, but places are _really_ open to interpretation. Slapp Happy sings about "hoboken", pronouncing it wrong, as some exotic land of spies, and I know it from D. Manus Pinkwater's book "The Hoboken Chicken Emergency" and from going with my dad every year to the Hoboken train festival - not somewhere mysterious and exotic, an ordinary suburb of New York City. Trains, because my dad loved them, they do have a certain resonance to me, a certain mystique, but then I hear Robyn Hitchcock sing "I often dream of trains" and Basingstoke and Reading are as unattainable and foreign as eternity, possibly moreso.
Lots of interpretation challenges between me and Robyn on that album. How am I supposed to interpret "Sometimes I wish I were a pretty girl"? How does my experience map on to his? How does my knowledge that his dad wrote the penis mutilation novel "Percy", a movie for which the Kinks' "Lola" appeared on the soundtrack, shape that understanding?
Scope, Kate. You were talking about Eddy Grant, not about the gender politics of the Pink Fairies' ten minute rock opus "I Wish I Were A Girl" (_Kings of Oblivion_, 1973).
My point is that I didn't know, and I'm not sure most of America knows to this day, about Grant's involvement in the pioneering racially integrated band "The Equals", didn't know that he wrote "Police On My Back" (still have a tendency to mix it up with Junior Murvin's "Police and Thieves"). I occasionally encounter him the way I encounter most music, sideways, through unpredictable paths. At some point I ran across the Equals' final album, 1977's "Mystic Syster". I'm not sure at all whether Grant had any involvement in this - he left the group due to health issues years prior. Whether or not he had anything to do with it, it's a fantastic album, fantastic in a way that's sui generis. I don't know any other records that sound like Mystic Syster, and I've heard a lot of records at this point. It's the synth sound that grabs me most, the parping-est synth work I've ever heard. Writing about music, even though I've done a lot of it, is still hard, because if a record is really good, what exactly it is is hard to put into words. All I can really get to is that I fucking love this record and you should listen to it.
As for Eddy, he was certainly doing solo shit around this time. There's a certain extremely small cult following among crate-diggers for the 12" version of his disco song "Everybody Dance". I like very short songs and very long songs, songs that defy our understanding of how time in music is supposed to work. The 12" "Everybody Dance" goes on for fucking ever, 17:44 to be precise, and if something goes on long enough the chances that it'll get weird rise. In the case of "Everybody Dance" it starts sounding like a disco take on Terry Riley's underrated "Shri Camel". I am particularly interested in the hypnotic, not to say hypnagogic, uses of the deep disco groove, either version of Dinosaur's "Kiss Me Again", either Patrick Cowley mix (the more common mix or the finished "True" mix) of "Hills of Katmandu", and the 12" of Everybody Dance deserves a place alongside those titans of the disco 12".
He's had a long career since, mostly unknown to me. He's a big name in the soca field, which is a genre I respect a lot and don't much know shit about. The only soca track of his I have is a track called "Ice Cream" by someone named "Duke" from 1994. (Compare and contrast: the amazing late-period hot blues track "Ice Cream" by Captain John Handy, not to be confused with the better known third stream jazz musician John Handy, whose two-track album I enjoy much better in the 7" edits; see also "Ice Cream To God" by the little-known early '80s post-punk band "Kitchen and the Plastic Spooons, note the three o's; the fantastic 2013 alt-R&B record "Ice Cream Everyday" by Amel Larrieux; "Ice Cream For Crow" by Captain Beefheart; John Baker's radiophonic jazz soundtrack to "The Ice Cream Man", a sadly now-lost episode of the 1960s British television series Vendetta; The Melvins covering the Butthole Surfers' "Graveyard" in Chicago for the AV Club next to a truck giving out free ice cream to the little ones; the Tornadoes' Joe Meek-goes-Bo-Diddley deep cut "The Ice Cream Man"; Nick Didkovsky's hour-long commissioned composition "Ice Cream Time"). Wikipedia's one-paragraph summary of Grant's life's work feels compelled to mention that he pioneered the genre "ringbang", which is a genre I have literally never heard of before now. This is either a testament to the ways in which the musical knowledge of even an obsessed autodidact like me can be limited, the infinite horizons of discovery stretching out in all directions, or possibly the equally infinite ability of humanity to invent genres no reasonable person could possibly actually give a shit about. I like Grant a lot, so I'll assume the former.
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