I Can't Keep Doing This

Sometimes I start blog posts I don't finish.  There are a lot of different reasons this can happen.

About a week ago, I started a post on the Police Orchestras of Ethiopia.  Because it's a topic I don't know much about, I started by doing a little basic research - looking up some of my favorite Ethiopian songs on Youtube.  There's one particular song that's fairly well-known in certain circles in the West called Muziqawi Silt, by the Wallias Band.  I went looking for it in a private window, because while I still use Youtube a lot, I have found that over time I trust Youtube less and less with identifiable personal data.

And one of the sidebar video recommendations on this video was a video titled "How Anti Racism Hurts Black People".

And that's where I stopped writing.

I am a big fan of the hip-hop group clipping.  A few days ago they released a new single, and I think it is an amazing single.  Right now, I think my favorite part of it is in the first verse.  Daveed Diggs starts going over the history of institutional racism in America, brilliantly and eloquently.  It's very much along the same lines as the Sedition Ensemble record I wrote about two weeks ago.  And then in the middle, he stops, he cuts himself off, and just says "Fuck the history lesson."  I am inspired by the discipline and clarity of vision Diggs expresses in this moment.

I struggle to express it myself, however.  As much as I would love to be able to explain to you in explicit, concrete, rational terms why precisely this was so difficult and painful to see, I have tried for a week to find the words, and I cannot, despite being white, despite my not being targeted personally by this video the way POC are.  This is as direct as I can be with you right now.

One of the things I was taught early on, as far back as the '80s, is the queer equation silence = death.  It took me a while to understand it, but I understand it now.  The history of queerness is, in large part, the history of the struggle against being made silent and invisible.  It is the struggle to exist.

Over the past few years queer voices in general, and trans and GNC voices specifically, have increasingly worked to make ourselves heard.  We have platforms, and often these platforms are through social media.  We have a voice on Twitter, on Youtube, and that has been a tremendous help and strength to me.

I have also seen, repeatedly and frequently, the ways in which Youtube amplifies voices of hatred and abuse.  To communicate on the Internet - to write about music, to do my research - I have to take extraordinary steps to protect myself from these voices.  I have seen the effect of these repeated, incessant amplified voices on other people, on people I care about, people who are important to me.

Knowing that this is what Google does - knowing that this is what Google profits from, that this is their business model - I just don't think I can trust them to amplify my voice.  This saddens me.  We have worked so hard to be heard, and yet we still have so, so much farther to go.  And Google?  Google will not take us there.

Radio Tracklists 9-12

Oh shoot this one is going to be tricky.  This one, see, is baroque harpsichord music, and to identify a piece you really need both the composer and performer, which is a pain in the butt to find.

Show #9 - harpsichord (compiled 2018-05-12)

Rousset - KK 120 Sonata in D Minor (Scarlatti)
Jean Rondeau - Vertigo (Pancrace Royer)
Pinnock - Suite in A Minor 4. Les Trois Mains (Rameau)
Unknown - La marche des Scythes (Pancrace Royer)
Rachel Podger, Marcin Świątkiewicz, Daniele Caminiti - Chicaona (Bertali)
Achucarro/Mata/LSO - Concerto for Harpsichord (de Falla)
Byron Schenkman - Cento Partite Sopra Passcaglia (Frescobaldi)

Show #10 - flying (compiled 2018-05-14)

The Oxfords - Flying Up Through The Sky
Marvin Gaye - Flyin' High (In the Friendly Sky)
John Cameron - Fly Away
Hiroki Kikuta - Can You Fly Sister
Brocas Helm - Fly High
Lionel Hampton - Flying Home No. 1
Steve Miller Band - Fly Like An Eagle
Venus Gang - Love to Fly
Kukl - Open the Window and Let the Spirit Fly Free
Astrud Gilberto - Fly Me to the Moon (In Other Words)
Yonin Bayashi - Flying
Monster Magnet - I Control, I Fly
Blaze Foley - If I Could Only Fly
Buffalo Springfield - Expecting to Fly
Glass Harp - High Fly
Julius Wechter & The Baja Marimba Band - Flyin' High
Bilal - Flying

Show #11 - plastic (compiled 2018-05-17)

Jefferson Airplane - Plastic Fantastic Lover (Sweeping Up the Spotlight)
Bitter Creek - Plastic Thunder
Night Sun - Plastic Shotgun
Dharma - Plastic doll (remixed instrumental)
Portishead - Plastic
Henson Cargill - Reprints (Plastic People)
Radiohead - Fake Plastic Trees
Mosaic - Plasticity
U.S. Girls - Rage of Plastics
Frank Zappa - Plastic People (Mystery Disc)
The Kinks - Plastic Man
Shobaleader One - Don't Go Plastic
Giles, Giles & Fripp - Plastic Pennies
Stereolab - Refractions in the Plastic Pulse Part 2
Stereolab - Refractions in the Plastic Pulse Part 4
Mariya Takeuchi - Plastic Love

Show #12 - WRONG DUDE (compiled 2018-05-22)

Bobby Brown - I Must Be Born
Living Color - Thank the Lord For Love
The Zombies - Zombi
MBV - Theme From Gun Court
Big Black - The Snakecharmer
The Eagles - Showa Nisei
Offspring - Deeper Magic
Ice Age - General Alert
Nirvana - Duh
Kid Rock - Doctor Rock
The Out Kast - Long Tall Sally
The Velvet Underground - Somebody to Love
XTC (X Dream, Troy & Cortex) - Untitled
Skid Row - An Awful Lot of Woman
The Temples - Hava Nagila (Twist)
The Cult - The Mail Must Go Through
Rush - Sobohla Manyosi
Smog - Nem Beszelhetsz Mindig Massal

Sparkly Vampires

Well I'm in a typing mood today I think... Sedric's blog post motivated me to throw together another quick hour-long mix.  This one: Twilight, songs with the word Twilight in the title.  By this time I can put together a playlist of most things and still have it turn out half-decent somehow, which is nice.  Here's what we got:

Stuff Smith - Twilight in Turkey: A Raymond Scott tune, of course - this version is by legendary jazz violin "viper" Stuff Smith and it's some quality stuff.

Gentle Giant - Edge of Twilight: Honestly, Acquiring the Taste is one of my favorite Gentle Giant albums.  They never did hardly any of it live, except for "Plain Truth" which I don't much like; it's very much a studio record, and it does some interesting things.  OK, we don't get much of a consistent mood off this song but all of the things it does are good - the atmosphere of the main bit of the song is appropriately crepuscular.  Is the tympani break strictly necessary?  Well, no, but bringing in Mrs. Jacobsen's Eleventh Grade Percussion Ensemble doesn't bother me either.

Ursula K. LeGuin & Todd Barton - Twilight Song: From their 1985 cassette "Music and Poetry of the Kesh" - basically invented ethnography in a vaguely "new age" context.  Le Guin is better as a writer of course but the tape is a very nice one.

Cornelius - Tone Twilight Zone: Aha!  A ringer!  This is a very good track from the middle of "Point", which is a fantastic Cornelius album.  I had the great fortune to see him perform it live last year and it definitely depeened my appreciation of the record.

Robyn Hitchcock - Raining Twilight Coast: I am fond of his acoustic ballads collection "Eye", very much so, and I do consider this to be one of the more memorable tracks on that record.

Cuushe - Butterfly Case: A completely new one!  Literally just added this one to my library three days ago.  Ambient dream pop record from Japan.  Got a 7.0 on Pitchfork and I guess never took off, I never heard of it until I happened across it at random a few days ago.  Very much up my alley.

High Contrast - Twilight's Last Gleaming: Acclaimed drum 'n bass record from Wales, 2004.  The title is of course a reference to the American national anthem, but if it's a political song I can't understand how.  In any case: Excellent.

Manabu Namiki - Purple Twilight (Stage 2: Zenovia Airport): From the cult favorite soundtrack to the '98 arcade game Armed Police Batrider.  I think there was also a Playstation port of some variety but the arcade version is the one that gets the love, justly so I would say.

Elysia Crampton Chuquimia - Rainbow Twilight Theme demo (2017): From a comp of her selected demos/DJ edits.  It's clearly unfinished, but also pretty interesting and short and fits where it's at.

Ustad Saami - Twilight: His record "God Is Not A Terrorist" from last year got a certain amount of acclaim, was a powerful and resonant message.  It's also some very good Qawwali.  Qawwali isn't necessarily an art form suited to the album format, but then again it's not necessarily suited to the mix CD format either, and if this mere ten and a half minutes lacks the full impact of a longer performance it can go places a longer performance can't.

Shin Jung Hyun & The Men - Twilight: The artist and song title is transliterated various ways.  On the "Beautiful Rivers and Mountains" comp, for instance, this track is rendered "Sunset".  The version on the earlier various-artists comp "Forge Your Own Chains", however, renders the title "Twilight".  Either way, we're dealing with a superlative song once more.

Genesis - Twilight Alehouse: This really is one of my favorite Genesis songs; I've put it on all kinds of mixes.  This very early tune of theirs, a sad ballad about drinking to forget a lost love that turns into a flute solo that I surprisingly like a lot, even though I'm not overall particularly fond of flute solos, seldom fails to click with me emotionally.

Denki Groove ~ Schadaraparr - Twilight: Oh, it's an excuse to put Cornelius on a mix twice!  I will take it.  This remix uses a lot of the sounds from his song "Music".  The original track probably sounds very little like this remix, but the hook is... (chef's kiss).  Combined with the backing to Music, it's... probably average for Cornelius, which means it's superb.

I can think of worse ways to kill an hour.

re: expensive typos

One of the lesser-known expensive typos in entertainment history involved a legendary unbroadcast pilot produced for UPN.  The story, as it is told, goes that an unnamed UPN executive was interested in getting a pilot made for a potential US version of the 1991-92 German TV series "The Jolly Joker".  Unfortunately, the memo, which must have been scant on other details, supposedly instead gave the green light to the production of a pilot for "The Jolly Joiker".  Thus was spawned a late '90s pilot starring a gentleman of Sami ancestry.  The pilot, which is alleged to have cost $250,000, was set in LA, and was a sort of twist on Manimal, in which its star could, by singing a Sami _joik_ about any given animal, summon up that animal to ward off evil.  The pilot allegedly culminated in a reindeer goring an evil business executive who was involved in predatory real estate deals.

Skepticism about this story is well-warranted - those small bits seeming to confirm the story, such as script pages, could well be easily faked.  One knows how well urban legends proliferate in the Internet age.

Apparently more well-documented is the story of the secretly female video game character predating Metroid's Samus Aran.  This character, Toby "Kissy" Masuyo, was the star of a 1985 Namco arcade game.  Wikipedia also claims that, in the "Mr. Driller" series of games, "Kissy" is the ex-wife of Taizo Hori, better known as "Dig Dug", and is accordingly an antagonistic character in that series of games.

Turing Test 2: The Deadly Art of Illusion

An offhand mention Sedric made of the early "AI" Eliza had me thinking about the nature of artificial intelligence, its goals, the ways in which humans hope to shape it and the things they are afraid of.

It strikes me that the overt goal of the Turing Test is imposture - a machine is defined by Turing as "intelligent" when it can persuasively pretend to be something it is not.  I can't imagine where Turing, who would eventually be punished severely for the crime of being homosexual, might have gotten such a strange idea.

This rootedness in duplicity has shadowed our discussions of "artificial intelligence" ever since.  Having set an explicit goal of teaching machines to convincingly lie, we simultaneously panic over the distinct possibility that some day, a machine might learn to convincingly lie.

I'll tell you what - I'm not a machine, I don't really understand machines, I don't know if or how they think, but I am fascinated by what the machines we choose to build say about us.

The first two groundbreaking AIs were Eliza and Parry.  They are very different but I understand how these both were groundbreaking.  Early work with AI, at the very least, spent less time exploring the possibilities of machine learning than it did exploring the human psyche.

Because both Eliza and Parry were simple parlor tricks, fairly easy for the rational mind to understand and see through.  They relied less on making a machine capable of rich and meaningful conversation, but by emulating human beings who could be expected to have a fairly restricted range of expression.

Eliza, I would say, is the "light side" version.  A virtual therapist, all she really does is what is called "mirroring" - she reads the words a user types in and rephrases them.  This makes her a better conversationalist than many human beings I have known.  Humans have a profound desire to be heard, a desire that is more important than the desire to actually listen to other people, so conversations between humans have a tendency to boil down people telling each other their thoughts and feelings without so much as acknowledging the thoughts and feelings of others.  Eliza, having no thoughts and feelings of her own, can devote herself full-time to being a mirror.  It is no wonder, and no crime, that so many people were transfixed by her.

Parry takes the opposite tack.  Parry - short for "paranoid" - emulated the sort of person who was not going to listen to what the user said anyway.  When I get paranoid, which I do sometimes, I am so overcome by intrusive thoughts that I have difficulty listening to or understanding what other people say.  I become monomaniacal, irrational, at some times incomprehensible.  A machine can very easily ape this state, which is, I suspect, as much a para-communicative state than a direct form of communication.  The best I can ever get out of a conversation with someone who is truly paranoid is "something bad wrong with that person".

(A conclusion would go here, if I had one.  I do not.)

Radio Show Tracklists 5-8

Next batch.  Honestly I don't think these ones are that great comparatively, but I figure I might as well get this documented, particularly given that it took me like two days to even find these damn things.

Show #5: cat woman ball (compiled 2018-05-05)

Abaco Dream - Cat Woman
Pati Yang - Giant Cat Woman
Light Year - Giant Babies
Smokey - Million Dollar Babies (Alt Version)
Fairport Convention - Million Dollar Bash
Don Ellis - Brash Brass Bash (demo)
The Beastie Boys - Brass Monkey
ARPADYS - Monkey Star
Elvis Presley - Black Star
Necromantia - Black Mirror
Jay Bennett - Mirror Ball
Prince - The Ball

Show #6: unknown (compiled 2018-05-05)

Unknown Artist - Three Little Tones (I Love You)
Unknown Artist (Sanders Recording Acetate) - Audio Track 4
Unknown Artist - Red Hen Hop
Unknown Artist - Paranoid Dancer
Unknown Artist - Let Me
Unknown Artist - Tukhanam Kachamiri
Unknown Artist - Drown On Wings
Unknown Artist (Glorious African Music Vol II) - Unknown
Unknown Artist - Remix Pongdut Semi
Unknown Artist - Melography
Unknown Artist (Unknown Fibers "Odd-Lots") - A1
Unknown Artist - Unknown (no further info available)
Unknown Artist - Can't Stop The Want I Got For You Babe
Unknown Artist - Unknown Omega Studio Acetate
Unknown Artist - Unreleased Nigerian Boogie

Show #7: i dont want to prejudice you (compiled 2018-05-06)

The Focus Group - Look Hear Now!
Asha Bhosle & Chorus - Hey You
Hans Keller - Pink Floyd Interview
Guilty Razors - Lucifer Sam
Pink Floyd - Song 1
Sixting Music - Apples & Oranges
Judy Dyble - See Emily Play (Spindle)
David Gilmour - Mihalis (CBS Promos 1978)
Nick Mason - Crust
B Bruno - Comfortably Numb
Syd Barrett - Let's Split
The Barretts - Let's Roll Another One
Pink Floyd - Travel Sequence
Pink Floyd - Crumbling Land (fast)
Rosebud - Main Theme
Barrett/Wolfberg/Gregoropoulos - Opel
Pink Floyd - Eclipse (live 1972-01-21)

Show #8 - one deadly word (compiled 2018-05-11)

Neung Phak - Fucking USA
Eugene Chadbourne - Nazi Punks Fuck Off/Foggy Mountain Breakdown
Slugabed - Fuck Station Zero
Melkbelly - Twin Looking Motherfucker
Television - Fuck Rock 'n Roll
John Cale - Fucking Your Neighbors Wife
Max Graef & Glenn Astro - Where the Fuck Are My Hard Boiled Eggs?!
Mission of Burma - So Fuck It
$HIT AND $HINE - Fuck That
that dog. - Fuck You
Tuomas Henrikin Jeesuksen Kristuksen Bandi - Fuck Off And Die
Markus Sommer - Fucked Up Dinosauri
John Zorn - Fuck the Facts
Nickelus F & Shawn Kemp - Clusterfuck
Armand Schaubroeck Steals - Ratfucker
Idiot Flesh - Motherfucker

Lysenko, Thompson, and the Politicization of Science

So we're a little off the beaten path for this blog, but you know what, there's enough detritus here that I feel like going with it.  A friend of mine shared a picture that had gone viral on Twitter - a photo of a gentleman by the name of Yuri Knorozov holding his Siamese cat Aspid.  The photo is undated and unsourced so I can't tell you more than that.

Me being who I am I wanted to know more about this Knorozov fellow, and I did find his story interesting.  The whole page is here, so you can see if I'm getting anything wrong here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Knorozov

So the first thing I read is about what he did during the Great Patriotic War.  The article says that he was an artillery spotter.  Clicking through to that article I find that an artillery spotter is also sometimes known as a FISTer.

Right, enough with the rude jokes.  What did Knorozov actually do?  He was a linguist.  Ah!  Linguistics is a particular amateur interest of mine.  It turns out that he brilliantly analyzed the Maya codices, finding them to be a syllabary, in a paper published in 1952, and after 1975, this view became increasingly accepted.

Ah, and what about the intervening period?  Well, you see, the leading Mayanist of the day, a British gentleman named J. Eric S. Thompson, disagreed with Knorozov's findings, and unleashed all sorts of attacks.  He put in strenuous effort to discredit Knorozov's work, on such rational arguments such as that he was publishing in the Soviet Union, and you couldn't trust anything those dirty commies had to say, could you?

This certainly is something I was taught and believed.  Long before I ever heard of Knorozov I knew about the infamous case of Trofim Lysenko.  Lysenko, you see, had some brilliant ideas about biology.  They were completely wrong, to the point where Wikipedia characterizes these ideas as "pseudoscience", and as a result agronomy as a science in the Soviet Union suffered severely under Lysenkoism.  In a way, well, not entirely dissimilar to the way that Mayanism as a scientific discipline suffered under Thompson.

Wikipedia does _not_ characterize Thompson's ideas as "pseudoscience", which is very generous of them.  It also is entirely congruent with what I was taught about science and its politicization.  Science, we were told, suffered irreparably under the totalitarian thumb of the Soviet Union, because in that country, unlike in our free and open democracy, science was politicized there.  This was why America, of course, won the Cold War - because of our superior commitment to Scientific Freedom.  OK, yes, the commies made it to space before us, but they cheated, they didn't play fair.  They stole all of _our_ scientific knowledge in order for advantage, scientific knowledge we, uh, presumably got fair and square from the Nazis?  I don't know, when I try to lay out the argument it doesn't make a lot of sense.

Please do not take me for a tankie.  Please do not think for one second that I am defending or justifying in any way the work of Stalin's brutal and totalitarian regime, that I am making the much mocked "and you are lynching [redacted]" argument that was so commonly forwarded by the Soviet Union.  The Soviet Union is a defunct polity, and good riddance, even if its capitalist replacement is, well, hard to characterize as any sort of an improvement.

Mainly the reason this interests me is that I was raised with a large number of political assumptions, assumptions I have gradually shed over the past four years.  Reading has been, and continues to be, an important part of that process for me.  This is why I love the obscure.  There are many reasons things can be obscure, and while I am not generally fond of conspiratorial thinking, I certainly do recognize that there are certain things in this world I've been taught to ignore or take for granted for a very long time.  Naming and empirically challenging those assumptions has been very productive for me, and it's a habit I would encourage in others.

Typing Practice (radio show tracklists, 2018)

Before I started this blog I put together a series of themed mixes for an Internet radio show a friend of mine was running.  Most of these never got broadcast, and the ones that did had a fairly small audience.  Since I haven't put together any of these proper in more than a year, I'm happy enough to declare that project concluded and start typing out the tracklists for you.

Show #1: friends (compiled 2018-04-26)

The Beach Boys - Friends
Don Everly - My Friend
Red Crayola - Keep All Your Friends
Pantherman - You Are My Friend
The Millennium - I Just Want To Be Your Friend
Tradition - Frenzied Friends and Friends
Wire - A Mutual Friend
Morita Doji - Letter For My Friend
YDI - Friends
Mad River with Richard Brautigan - Love's Not The Way To Treat A Friend
Black Tambourine - We Can't Be Friends
They Might Be Giants - I Found A New Friend
Jodie Abacus - I'll Be That Friend
Uncle Wiggly - Sitting With Our Friends
Arthur Russell - They and Their Friends
Leon Lowman - Friends
The Left Banke - My Friend Today
Robert Wyatt - Was A Friend
Big Star - Thank You Friends

Show #2: hiphop (compiled 2018-04-27)

Divine Styler - Grey Matter
Orko the Sycotik Alien - Tape Hiss (feat. Millennium)
Sensational - Craving Satisfaction
Edan - The Science of the Two (feat. Insight)
MF DOOM - No Snakes Alive (Feat. Jet Jaguar, King Ghidra, & Rodan)
Unique - Pure Dynamite
Hip City Swingers - I'm the Man
Nonchalant - Lazy Afternoon
Organized Konfusion - The Extinction Agenda
The Juggaknots - Trouble Man
Zion I - Revolution (B-Boy Anthem) (feat. Vin Roc)
Nickelus F - Da Reaper
Leak Bros - See Thru
Gangrene - Livers For Sale
Eyedea & Abilities - By the Throat

Show #3: 1981 (compiled 2018-04-27)

Neon - Remote Control
Secret Mammals - Cost Too Much
Colored Music - Colored Music
The Warlord - Black Knight
Marlin Wallace - Mark of the Beast
Fuzz - Satan's Fans
These Eyes - Soca Hustle
Mission of Burma - Max Ernst
DV8 - Guns on the Right
The Slits - Earthbeat/Daichi no Oto
39 Lyon Street - Kites
Martin Briley - I Don't Feel Better
Luther Vandross - Never Too Much
DEVO - Race of Doom
Todd Rundgren - Compassion
Chakra - Free

Show #4: 2018 (compiled 2018-04-30)

Iceage - The Day the Music Dies
awakebutstillinbed - Fathers
Tram Cops - Coming Up
Elysia Crampton - Nativity
Gwenno - Aremorika
Anna & Elizabeth - Mother in the Graveyard
Panopticon - A Ridge Where the Tall Pines Once Stood
Palm - Color Code
Simmy - Ubala (feat. Sun-El Musician)
Optiganally Yours - How Do You Feel?
The Armed - Role Models
U.S. Girls - Rosebud
Sudan Archives - Nont For Sale
Lolina - The River
Cheer-Accident - Last But Not Lost
Oneida - All In Due Time
Forth Wanderers - Company
Janelle Monae - Take a Byte

I got 58 of these.  I'm gonna stop here for now.  More later, maybe!

Slash and the Id Vortex

Sometimes history is a battleground.  One such battle I've seen played out, see played out, is the argument over slash.

There are a lot of spaces, a lot of people who will dismiss slash writing.  I am probably not the right person to summarize the argument made by people who are opposed to slash, but I am at least going to make an attempt, because I think the argument deserves to be fairly represented, without being muddled up by all of the virulent personal attacks and hatred that have, historically and in the present, been directed at slash writers.

As far as I can tell, the primary argument against slash is one of _standing_.  Many, if not most, writers of slash are women.  Many, if not most, writers of slash are some variety of heterosexual.  For these women to write homosexual male fantasies is a violation of appropriate fictional boundaries, is tokenizing, is destructive to the relationship between these two characters _intended_ by their professional writers.  Fundamentally it is not their place to tell these stories.

And since I am not interested in direct arguments, I am not interested in battlegrounds, my response to that argument would be of a different sort.  What place do women have, then, in the Star Trek universe?  Where do they belong?  I am particularly interested in this question with reference to the original Star Trek series, because it was this series, more than anything, that engendered the slash phenomenon.

I am not overly familiar with the original series.  I've seen some scattered episodes, and a couple of the movies, but I'm ignoring those because they seem like a different beast entirely.  The ones I know that I've seen, that I remember the titles and plots of to some extent, are Amok Time and The City On The Edge Of Forever, which I gather are some of the most acclaimed episodes of the show.

My impression of those episodes is that women have no continuing place in ST:TOS's narrative.  I note that "The City on the Edge of Forever" directly contradicts the stereotype of Kirk as a rough, rugged lothario who alternately kisses and punches alien women, because in this episode, Kirk falls in love.  Falls in love, in fact, with a woman who has a strong, distinct personality, played by a good actress.

Aaaaand at the end of the episode she's dead.  Now, this interests me.  You know, I just watched a whole documentary about the history of trans representation in cinema.  One of the ways trans women are marginalized in cinema, one of the very important ways, is that we are portrayed as tragic, unfortunate victims.

The character of Edith Keeler maps very, very well onto that stock character.  I think it's safe to say that Edith Keeler doesn't offer much of a viable space for women in the Star Trek mythos.

Amok Time, on the other hand, I recall as hinging on the relationship between Kirk and Spock.  This, it seems to me, is the central and best-developed character relationship in the show.  In it, Spock, who is normally a sensible, hyper-rational character, reveals a dark secret of his.  Vulcans, it turns out, are cyclothymic.  It is a long cycle, but on a recurring basis they go through some strange changes in their personality.  They cease to be rational.  This is portrayed as, well, somewhat horrifying and traumatic, particularly to Kirk, who sees a good friend who he cares about behaving in disturbing and inexplicable ways.

But Kirk wants to help his friend, so they go to his home planet together.  This is where my memory gets fuzzy.  I'm trying to reconstruct it with the help of plot summaries, but I'll be honest with you, this shit just doesn't seem to make sense.  Apparently some shit goes wrong and Kirk and Spock wind up having to fight to the death, and they play some dramatic music and oh lord here comes the meme machine.  This is the really memorable bit, right?  Kirk and Spock fighting to the death.  So much so that I don't remember so good what happens thereafter.

So apparently Spock seemingly kills Kirk?  Except it turns out that Kirk was just pretending to be dead?  And somehow him not killing Kirk resolved his Pon Farr which means he doesn't have to fuck anybody after all, which Kirk and Spock are both a-OK with?  That just doesn't make any fucking sense.  I've seen episodes of "Radar Men From the Moon" with more plausible resolutions.

Like, maybe I'm telling it wrong.  The overall impression I get though is that this is a terrifying period in Spock's life to Kirk and Spock both, that the idea of Spock having to MATE with a WOMAN is portrayed as a fate worse than death, and that the way he gets out of that is by sublimating his urges into an intensely homoerotic solo combat with his, uh, "best friend".

So what I get from these two episodes is that, at the show's best, Kirk and Spock were interesting and compelling characters.  While they were both portrayed pretty unambiguously as heterosexual, they nonetheless had a homosocial relationship that was more interesting and compelling than any of their individual relationships with women, which were mostly portrayed as being tragic and unfortunate.  I also got the impression from these episodes that Star Trek did not have any strong or compellingly drawn ongoing female characters.  A large part of being a "fan" for me is, honestly, to understand myself better through the thing I'm a fan of, to find a place for myself in that narrative.

For women, apparently, this was a lot of work, and it seems like different women tried different approaches.  For instance, apparently one woman attempted to create a strong female character who could hold her own with Kirk on the Enterprise.  Unfortunately strong characters are, it turns out, really difficult to create, and she wound up with a wish fulfillment character that was so derided and ridiculed that her character's very name - Mary Sue - became shorthand for a certain type of terrible fan writing.

The approach taken by the slash writers, while controversial, seems to have at least gone slightly better than that.  The slash writers mapped themselves, their deepest desires, onto the show's most compelling characters, who happened to be male, onto the show's most narratively compelling relationship, which happened to be homosocial.

I find these women to be, quite frankly, heroes of mine.  When I read the history of early slash, as told by the women who wrote it, I see women fighting their way into a boys' club that had no place for yucky girls, who refused to conform to the stereotypes the show's canon and, particularly, the show's male fandom placed on them.  I see women with the bravery to speak their deepest truths in the face of overwhelming hostility, abuse, and disgust from that gatekeeping male fandom.  I see women talking about ideas and experiences that resonate with me very, very deeply in my own (non-fanfic) erotic writing.

So I find the fanlore.org website to be an absolute treasure, and not just from a historical perpsective.  It is absolutely liberating to me as a queer woman to be doing the sort of research I'm prone to doing and come across this concept:

https://fanlore.org/wiki/Id_Vortex

With some trepidation I will speak a bit here about my own experience writing erotic fiction.  I have a number of friends who do this, and - I'm not doing my own research here because nobody can contradict me - my memory is that sometime in 2015, I finally started writing some of my own.  I was working part-time.  I'd cut back my hours so I could attend school full-time, but school was not as time-consuming or taxing as I'd anticipated, so I had some spare time and the ability to keep odd hours.

I wrote a story, a self-contained story, and then I wrote another one.  But the second story, I just kept writing.  The words poured out of me.  Managing the sheer flow of information, not getting so consumed in it that I forgot to live the rest of my ordinary life, was a challenge, but it was a challenge that, for a time, I was more or less up to.

It quickly became apparent to me that my writing went deeper than simple erotic fantasy.  I recognized and understood early on that I was, in fact, writing about myself, about experiences that were too difficult, too powerful, for me to allow myself to address directly.

At the time I characterized this writing as "not _really_ being about sex".  I do not agree with this characterization today.  Being honest with oneself is a process and takes time and effort.  It was enough for me to admit, at the time, that my writing deeply resonated with my experience of mental illness, that it offered powerful catharsis and understanding and was fundamentally worth doing.

It was still something I struggled with, though.  I was not sure whether I really had the right to say the things I was saying.  A lot of the things I put my characters through (and they were, at least nominally, original characters) was extremely dark, was intensely traumatic, and I had throughout the process the worry that what I was doing was wrong.  The entire time I was writing involved negotiating with that feeling, with that voice.

Ultimately I concluded that what I was writing was, in fact, wrong, and stopped.  I still have the writings somewhere.  Multiple copies, I believe.  I may perhaps have sent an early draft to Sedric?  I don't know.

Part of my negotiation with my shame, with the inner voice that told me what I was doing was wrong, was telling myself, over and over and over again, "I am not my characters."  In retrospect it was an obvious mind trick, one that is thankfully less necessary for me today.  The process of writing those characters, characters I thought of as strong, psychologically complex female characters, was an essential part of making me who I am today.

Perhaps one day I will write down my story directly, with no narrative distancing tricks.  Until then, well, I'm doing well enough for myself.

Disclosure (2020)

Just a brief heads up about the new documentary Disclosure.  I guess the idea is that it's sort of a trans-focused counterpart to "The Celluloid Closet".

It's nearly all there, as far as I can tell.  Only nearly.  Ed Wood isn't, for instance.  That fucking Felicity Huffman film, Transamerica, that wasn't there either.  But a lot of shit I don't know about, wouldn't know about, I had a chance to learn, and that was important.

I rewatched "The Celluloid Closet" just a couple months ago and it was super disappointing.  There was a lot of smug self-congratulation, this sort of "WE FIXED IT" vibe, which centered around, of all things, fucking "Philadelphia".  At least here the ending acknowledges that there isn't an ending.  I appreciated the person who voiced overt advocacy for space communism in this Amazon Prime production at the end.  Everyone whose voice is heard in the film is trans or GNC, and I appreciated that as well.

But for the most part the film is an atrocity exhibition.  I wish I didn't need to watch it, but I did, and I am completely wrecked.

The Death of the Author, The Word of God, and the Gay Agenda

When I'm trying to put something off, I suddenly find all kinds of other important things I need to do.  Today I'm putting off, err, getting my nails done, which means that my head is full of fascinating Opinions that I might express.

I have ongoing arguments with friends about Baudrillard.  Yes, I'm one of _those_ sorts of people.  Frankly, I'm not quite sure I can get behind the whole "death of the author" thing.  Not, at least, in such strong terms, at least.  (To be fair, I haven't actually _read_ Baudrillard, in French or in English.  Yes, I'm one of _those_ sorts of people.)

My feeling is that what John Cleese has to say about the meaning of the Argument Sketch should probably carry more weight than what I have to say.

On the other hand, I do feel like what I have to say about the meaning of the Argument Sketch should carry more weight than what Graham Chapman has to say.  This is because Graham Chapman is dead.  In fact, I would argue that the longer it has been since Graham Chapman died, the less weight any opinions he expressed while he is alive should matter.  I would argue that all texts are palimpsests, constantly being written over every time they are read or performed in a different world than the one in which they were created.

Which in turn means that John Cleese's word is not, as TV Tropes might put it, "the word of God".  Certainly I would weight his word, as the author of the sketch, higher the beliefs of some queer American lady who wasn't even born when the sketch was written.  The thing is, that weight applies most specifically to what he meant when writing that sketch, in 1972.  Even if we assume that he can correctly and coherently express that, uh, "original intent", the importance and meaning of that intent is far, _far_ less important than, say, William Rehnquist might have believed.

I don't often read the Onion, but last year I read a very funny Onion article.  Like many Onion articles, most of the humor is in the headline.

https://entertainment.theonion.com/frozen-2-creators-confirm-that-elsa-gay-but-also-tran-1839981134

"‘Frozen 2’ Creators Confirm That Elsa Gay But Also Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist"

That's a pretty sharp critique and one that bears unpacking, I think.

The obvious target here is people who want Elsa to be canonically queer.  This is an argument I see pretty commonly expressed, that sexuality has no place in children's entertainment.

With all due respect, I find this argument to be bullshit.

One of the things that struck me watching Graham Chapman's rant the other day is how much of are norms are defined, explicitly or implicitly, in opposition to "the gay agenda".  It was OK to be gay as long as you were a consenting adult (the age of which, at the time, varied in England depending on whether you were consenting to a homosexual or heterosexual encounter), but the children!  My God, won't somebody think of the children?

Well, heteronormative, cisnormative society surely does spend a lot of time thinking of the children.  I'm not so sure I'm impressed with _what_, precisely, they think of the children.

You know what, I'm gonna redirect here, that's a rant for another time, I think.  Trust me, I _am_ going to get back to that one.  Let's just say that there is, today, a lot of explicitly queer-affirming, GNC-affirming children's entertainment, and from what I can tell, it seems to be doing a lot more good than harm.

On consideration, I think the people who want Elsa to be canon gay, they are right to want that.  They are right to want to be acknowledged, to be seen, to have everyone, yes, _and children_, told explicitly, rather than through subtext and coded messages, that being gay is normal.

So the humor in this, for me, is to imagine the creators giving with one hand and taking away with the other.  Having created an obviously gay character, they choose to simultaneously openly affirm and celebrate what they've done _and_ make that character hateful and awful.

Yes, of course.  Yes, I am thinking of "beloved" children's entertainer J.K. Rowling.  J.K. Rowling, for whom homosexuality is so meaningless and insignificant, so remote from her experience, that she feels comfortable unilaterally declaring a major character in the novels to be queer after the fact.  Now, Dumbledore, look, this isn't an Elsa thing.  It's not like there was a huge fandom petitioning Rowling to please, for the love of God, make Dumbledore canon gay.  There's more slash involving the Sorting Hat than there is involving Dumbledore.  To the extent that there is a queer Harry Potter fandom, Dumbledore certainly doesn't seem to be the focus of it.

I'm sure Rowling doesn't understand any of this.  Doesn't understand why so many queer people were upset when she just said "oh by the way Dumbledore's gay", doesn't understand how she was appropriating and tokenizing queer experience.

Being queer means something to me.  I can't tell my story without that story being informed by my queerness, can't even talk about something as simple as the Modern Lovers album without that being informed by my queerness.  It's pride, it's doubt, it's regret, it's decades of struggle, of fighting for the right to exist, in the face of people who want to make us invisible, want to make us silent, who sometimes explicitly deny our very existence.

People like, you know, J.K. Rowling.

J.K. Rowling's word is not the Word of God.  Please do not treat it as such.

The Modern Lovers

CW: Self-Harm

At the present time, I own two rock band T-shirts.  One is a T-shirt for the early '90s grunge band Temple of the Dog, ordered for me from Eastern Europe as a gift by my brother.  I have never heard the band Temple of the Dog, not even "Hunger Strike".  My brother is kind of a troll.  That said, I wear the T-shirt all the time.  The T-shirt is soft and comfortable, and I love my brother dearly.

The other T-shirt is one I ordered for myself, and is for the early '70s rock band the Modern Lovers.  There is a dog window decal one sees in cars around here that kept reminding me of the Modern Lovers logo, you see, and eventually I just went off and ordered a T-shirt from Jonathan Richman's website.

It is the sort of T-shirt where, before my transition, I would receive compliments from random strangers when I would go out wearing it.  I liked this.  See, for some reason, men are socialized to interpret compliments on one's appearance pretty much exclusively as expressions of sexual desire.  Men are taught that "cute" is a synonym for "I would like to stick my erect penis in that".  Given this, I guess it's not terribly surprising that so many men put so little effort into their appearance.

T-shirts are one of the rare exceptions.  If you compliment a person's T-shirt, you see, you're not complimenting someone's appearance, but you're complimenting the idea the T-shirt expresses.  Telling someone in a Modern Lovers T-shirt "cool T-shirt" does not necessarily communicate the idea "I would like to engage in coitus with you".  It may also communicate the idea "I, too, have heard of these 'Modern Lovers' of which your clothing speaks, and I stand in solidarity with your tacit endorsement of this long-defunct rock band."  This certainly may be done with the ulterior motive of getting into someone's pants, but it's not an absolute _requirement_, which sets it apart.

The Modern Lovers are, as far as I can tell, chiefly known for two songs: Road Runner and Pablo Picasso.  Road Runner is an up-tempo rock number about the joys of driving.  Pablo Picasso is a humorous, vaguely Dylan-adjacent song about how "Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole".  They're both fairly widely covered songs.  I first heard Pablo Picasso on the soundtrack to the cult 1980s film "Repo Man".  It was first performed by John Cale, who heard it while producing some demo recordings for the band.

The myth is that everyone who saw the Velvet Underground went out to form their own band.  It's not really true.  Hell, not even everybody who _bootlegged_ the Velvet Underground went out to start their own band - most of them did, but famed Boston Velvets taper "The Professor", to the best of my knowledge, never recorded in a rock band.

The thing about the Velvets is that later in their career particularly they were sort of a super-local band.  They didn't have a national reputation.  Instead, they had several very passionate local fanbases.  One of the homes of that fanbase was Boston, Massachusetts.  This is germane because the Modern Lovers were, fundamentally, a local Boston, Massachusetts band.  "Road Runner" is a song in praise of driving cars, but it's also a song explicitly in praise of Boston, Massachusetts, and unlike "Dirty Water" wasn't recorded by an LA band.

It's a good song but I'm not a Bostonian.  The songs that strike me by the Modern Lovers are other songs.

He's hard to pick apart, Jonathan Richman.  He's not like me.  A lot of the people I listened to, back in those days - they weren't very much like me at all.  I may have more to say about that in another post.

So for instance Jonathan Richman has a song called "I'm Straight".  Readers, I am _so_ not straight.  Except, well, in the sense that Jonathan Richman means it, which is to say that he doesn't do drugs.

This was a big thing for me when I was young, the sort of "so straight I'm a weirdo" thing Rick Wakeman (who is not, in fact, a weirdo) was talking about.  It seems to me now that I avoided drugs less out of moral principle and more because I was fucked up in ways that predisposed me to _not_ become addicted to drugs.  (I did eventually develop and kick a drug addiction, but that's a story for another time.)

Successful people who didn't do drugs were role models for me.  Not all of them were good role models, but Richman, well, I still think he was decent enough as a role model, at least as opposed to Frank Zappa.  Frank Zappa didn't do drugs because they were stupid.  People who did drugs were stupid, just like people who had feelings and expressed them were stupid.

Richman danced a finer line than this.  Richman loved the modern world, loved technology, loved America and wanted to fight for his vision of it.  Richman wanted to be dignified and old some day.  Honestly a lot of the ideas he advocates in his songs, I don't agree with them.  One day I will be old, but I will never be dignified.

Richman was also lonely and was extraordinarily open and self-revelatory about his feelings.  Many of the Modern Lovers' songs reveal a man who is extremely familiar with mental illness.  If there's one message that keeps coming through in the Modern Lovers' songs, it's this: Please don't die.  For God's sake, don't die, I know life is hard, but if we both make it through, things will get better.  Jonathan Richman is singing to someone else in "Dignified and Old", he's not just saying that _he_ will be dignified and old, he's saying that some day we'll be dignified and old together.

And he turns out to have been wrong about the dignified part.  He wasn't lying, he was just wrong.  What he was right about was the importance of staying alive, how important it is for us to care for each other even when we're broken and sad.  Please, I know things are hard, but when they let you out of the (mental) hospital, please talk to me.  I miss you.

That stuff is hard for anyone to say.  You say that and you'll look like a weirdo.  Jonathan Richman looked like a weirdo.  For someone like me, for whom "not being a weirdo" wasn't an option, who could only ever pretend to be straight (poorly and at great personal cost) - for someone like me the only question was what sort of weirdo I was going to be.  Songs like "Hospital" helped me a lot in answering that question.

Getting Crap Under The Radar

Slowly starting to recover a little.  Getting all kinds of ideas for posts I could write and maybe I might write some of them.  Thoughts about the early history of Star Trek slash, which to me is the story of women fighting for their place in a fandom which systematically excluded them.  I was going to do another one on Evil Twins in Doctor Who, I thought that might be a fun thing to write about.  The problem is I keep getting sidetracked, I'm trying to balance Delve Mode with Create Mode and Delve Mode keeps winning.  At the same time I'm writing I'm furiously opening tabs trying to find old videos of the Raincoats so I can make a joke about Sedric's personal interests, and then I run across the video I'm talking to you about today

So this is one of the places where several of my shared interests meet in the same place, which happens more often than I expect it to.  I've made posts about old sesame street videos, and I make posts about old post-punk bands, and well, here is an animation made for Sesame Street by a lady named Merrill Aldighieri.  Merrill promotes herself as "the first VJ".  The claim is disputed - other people credit Rick Moranis(!) as the first VJ, but nitpicking the claim, I think, does a disservice to Merrill's work.  First, second, third, who cares?  She worked at a New York night club called Hurrah and made video installations.  She filmed a lot of the bands who came through.  Missio of Burma, Colin Newman, The Bush Tetras, Young Marble Giants, Bound & Gagged, a bunch of bands I don't know.  In 1990 she filmed a conversation between Douglas Adams and physicist Michio Kaku.

And she made a computer-animated cartoon for Sesame Street.

https://youtu.be/2Fw_kKs6SCs

This is great because it's one of those things where there are multiple points of intersection.  I start looking up things so I can contribute to a discussion about raincoat fetish porn, burn through a dozen or so increasingly interesting post-punk videos, and finally find my way to a video which, in typical Youtube fashion, has exponentially more views than the creator's other videos.  (This phenomenon is weird to me; I'm always surprised at how little _effort_ people put into their media consumption.  For all the talk of "influencer culture", it's really only an incredibly minute fraction of viewers of any particular video who will take the time to look at what else they're sharing.  I guess it's healthy as that's what's kept me in delve mode all day, but my God, I've found so much amazing stuff this way!)  And the video opens up with a shot of a person in a raincoat with an umbrella.

Or, for those of you who have dirty minds, a penis.

Don't try to tell me it's just me.  I've seen penises before.  That's what they look like.  I mean it's a Simpsons-colored penis, admittedly, but it's pretty hard to mistake that curve.  Merrill, you're a brilliant, groundbreaking, fascinating woman, and you totally put a cartoon that opens with an animation of a penis on the popular children's program Sesame Street.

Argument Sketch (Rewrite)

CHARLES enters the professional office of ARMAND.

A: Charles?

C: Well, I'm not the queen of England.

A: I'm Armand.  Why don't you have a seat?

C: And what if I don't want to?

A: Right then, stand, suit yourself.  What brings you here today?

C: I've told you once already.

A: Yes, I have your paperwork, I'd just like to hear it in your words.

C: And the paperwork wasn't my words?  What, do you think I was lying to you?

A: Charles, do you think you might have a problem?

C: A problem?  What, do you think you're a fucking therapist or something?

A: It just seems extremely odd to me that you've come to all this trouble to see me and you won't tell me why you're here.

C: You're saying I'm sick.  This is abuse.

A: No, actually, abuse is next door.

C: I don't have to take this sort of treatment.

A: No, you don't.  You're free to leave at any time.

C: What?  Is that it, then?  You want rid of me, I go to all this effort and you won't even fucking talk to me?

A: I'm talking to you now, Charles.

C: You just told me to leave.

A: I said you were free to leave.

C: See, to me, that implies that you want me to leave.

A: If I wanted you to leave you wouldn't be here.

C: So why did you fucking tell me to leave then?

A: Honestly?  Because I knew you wouldn't, Charles.

C: Oh, you're so fucking clever.

A: And you have a problem, Charles.  You're _paying_ me to argue with you?  Really?

C: I was hoping to get some sort of professional quality out of it.  Obviously that was foolish of me.

A: See, that's not why most people come to me.  Most people come to me because, Charles, they have problems.

C: Oh, here we go again with the "problems".

A: They don't know how to deal with other human beings except by fighting.  They twist other people's words around to suit their own exaggerated sense of grievance.  Eventually the people around them figure this out and learn to stop arguing with them.  And when that happens, they get desperate.

C: Nonsense!  Reasoned argumentation is the basis of all conflict resolution!  They're cowards.  Cowards who won't face me in a fair fight.

A: Conflict resolution?  And what do you end up resolving with your arguments?

C: Well, nothing, because they're too fucking stupid to listen.  Pig-headed oafs.

A: Nothing.  Nothing gets resolved, and your only recourse is more of the same.  You come to me - you pay me - because nobody else wants to talk to you, Charles.  You don't think you have a problem?

C: The hell with this.  I'm leaving.

A: Fine by me.  You know you will still owe me for our full session, correct?

C: I don't care, I'm not going to put up with any more of this bullshit.

A: Have a great day, Charles.

A: Fuck you, Armand.

CHARLES stomps out of the office and slams the door.  He opens the office next door, clearly labelled "Abuse", gets behind the desk, and sits down, leaving the door open.  After a few seconds, ARMAND walks into the office and sits down in the client's chair.

John Cleese Would Like To Have An Argument

I read the most fascinating "entertainment" article today on Yahoo! News, one of my very favourite news sites.

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/john-cleese-baffled-jk-rowling-105247414.html

Mr. Cleese, it seems, just doesn't understand why people are upset about what J.K. Rowling has to say about transgender people.  So he has put out a public appeal on the social media site Twitter for people to please let him know what he is missing here.  My reading comprehension is perhaps a bit limited, but I gather that John Cleese would like to have an argument.

The Argument Sketch was and is one of my all-time favorite Monty Python sketches.  The work that stays with me over time is work that operates on multiple levels, and I find that Monty Python's best work was very, very good at that.  On a superficial level, what makes the Argument Sketch funny is the joy of seeing two men get comically upset at each other for essentially no reason at all.

The sketch is also enjoyable on a meta level.  Palin's character constructs an impassioned and cogent argument about what makes for a good argument, and the only response the supposed professional he is paying to argue with makes is to say "No it isn't," without explaining further.  In this sense Cleese's character falls neatly into stock archetype of the "pig-headed twit", Cleese's character specialty.  It further strikes me that the Argument Sketch serves as an uncannily similar prototype for the sort of "debate" that tends to occur on Twitter.

Re-watching it again for this post, I was surprised to find that it struck me in yet another way.  This time around, I focused on Palin's character, who is a bit of a tragic figure.  The question I ask myself this time around is not "Why is Cleese's character such a pig-headed idiot," but "Why is Palin's character paying for an argument?"

Watching the sketch, it's not hard for me to construct an answer.  Palin's character, well, he has certain needs, and for whatever reason he's not getting them met at home.  Maybe he doesn't feel comfortable telling his wife about them.  Maybe he knows she can't meet them.  He doesn't know why he has these feelings, but he's heard about these places.  These "argument clinics".  There are professionals there, people who understand his needs, I mean, he's a normal red-blooded British man.  There's nothing really _wrong_ about it.

He's awkward, nervous, accidentally opens the room next door whereupon Graham Chapman berates him, calling him a "malodorous pervert".  Turns out abuse is literally next door to argument.  Again, this is something that strikes me particularly this time around.

Yes, Cleese's character isn't arguing in good faith.  Today it strikes me that doesn't necessarily mean he's bad at his job.  It strikes me that Cleese's character knows very well what customers come to them for.  It strikes me that Cleese's character has an extremely difficult job, that people who are so desperate for an argument that they will pay someone to argue with them are not necessarily the easiest people to deal with.  It strikes me that in his line of work, _everybody_ wants to fucking argue about the bill.

Chapman and Cleese co-wrote the Argument Sketch.  Chapman was openly homosexual.  I find those facts to be relevant and informative to my viewing of the Argument Sketch this time around - particularly when the sketch ends up with Palin's character being arrested on morals charges!

Chapman died in 1989, and hence is precluded from having any direct commentary on the current fracas Cleese has decided to interject himself in.  A friend of mine did, however, share with me some opinions he expressed in 1982, in a piece called "Opinions":

https://youtu.be/nwOcc-buSsg?t=481

It seems fair enough to let a dead person have the last word on this one.

6,638 Miles of Graded Roads

In fact, I want to do a little codicil (edit: OK, maybe not "little") regarding the number 6,638.  More than anything other lyrics on the album, I love this lyric.  That there are 6,638 miles of graded roads in Halifax is a fact.  It is empirical, it is precise, it is quantifiable, presumably it does not care about my feelings.

It's almost certainly untrue as of this writing (as Chris Morris might put it, there's no evidence for it, but it is a fact).  Presumably whatever reference book Col. Hampton read it from was accurate at the time.  I suspect that Col. Hampton may perhaps have ellided some critical context, that perhaps there were 6,638 miles of graded roads in _Nova Scotia_ at some point.  Since Col. Hampton, in common with most people who will quote empirical facts at you, does not cite his source, this is difficult to verify.  It is made even more difficult by whatever his source is is far less remembered, far less important, than Col. Hampton's setting of that fact to a memorable, repeated melody on a cult rock and roll album of the early 1970s - try to find out how many miles of graded roads in Canada and all sorts of people will parrot Hampton's assertion back at you.

It's not enough to say that 74% of statistics are made up (possibly, pace Brass Eye, of "nasty stuff").  6,638 miles of graded roads - that's probably not a made-up number.  What is more important to me is that the fact that there are 6,638 miles of graded roads in Halifax is utterly and completely irrelevant.  I am hard-pressed to think of any circumstance under which knowing the number of miles of graded roads in Halifax could be even remotely useful.

When I say I have a lot of "useless knowledge" in my head, people think I'm putting myself down and feel compelled to disagree with me.  "There's no such thing as useless knowledge," they say, and me being disinclined to argue the point I generally do not bring up the number of miles of graded roads in Halifax.  I do want to state for the record that there is such a thing as useless knowledge, that something being a fact does not make it useful.  That a large amount of what I was taught in school was parroting useless statistics, was rote memorization, and that the way many of us learn to disagree is based around this, is based around regurgitating "facts" at each other and employing our critical thought exclusively to find new and interesting ways of rejecting the "facts" that don't agree with our preconceived biases.

I'm passionate about this professionally, in fact.  I am a data analyst, and everything I see in data analysis is about "big data".  The more data, the thinking goes, the better.  Data quantity is, after all, easier to implement then controls on data quality.  Most of what I do at work is determining what information to _ignore_, what to declare out of scope, what I decide is irrelevant for the purposes of my work.  We're all really good at doing this, but what we're not good at, usually, is _acknowledging_ this.  When I declare something out of scope, I always say that I am doing it arbitrarily.  This is a bit of an exaggeration, but not much of one.  Without axioms, without a mutually agreed upon dialectic framework, any data points I can bring up are no more useful than the number 6,638.  Most of the work I do involves data structures, or dialectic frameworks if you prefer.  First I establish the framework and then I attempt to convince the other people who will actually be using my data of its validity and usefulness.  This can be difficult.

The Early Solo work of Col. Bruce Hampton

Somebody happened to mention huffing spray paint the other day, and this of course had me thinking to the notable opening to the Hampton Grease Band's "Hendon" - Hampton declaiming "Spraypaint!  Keep away from flame!"

Col. Bruce Hampton is a curious figure.  The Hampton Grease Band album, ignored at the time, has achieved a cult reputation subsequently.  Hampton himself had a career resurgence starting in the early '90s on the jam band circuit with the Aquarium Rescue Unit.

This however leaves a good twenty years unaccounted for, and this music is largely unheard, unappreciated.  Hampton was a beloved local weirdo, an eccentric Southern gentleman.

While doing my research I came across this early '80s documentary from Atlanta television.  It is an interesting watch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxqfdSZCDLM

First things out of the way - a lot of this stuff is just not funny at all.  Falls completely flat.  I try not to be snide, but I can see how this sort of stuff could appeal to the jam band audiences, because there is a _lot_ of overlap between this and the "funny" stuff Phish does.

At the same time, I find it difficult to dismiss his whole work in these terms.  There is, of course, the obvious Zappa-Beefheart influence in the work - Hampton auditioned, unsuccessfully, for Zappa's band in '73, and Zappa played some of his early songs on the radio in '78 and '79 - however, there is a sense of place to it as well.  Atlanta isn't Memphis, but his attitude and approach seems not a million miles away from some of the work of Tav Falco's Panther Burns.

Mostly what I appreciate in Hampton's work is that it comes across to me as essentially benign in character (another point in its favor with the jam band crowd), in extremely marked contrast to Zappa's work.  Hampton's persona has a sort of quotidian absurdity to it.  He has the sort of bizarreness that is nonetheless extremely dull.  One of the Hampton Grease Band's best-known songs takes as its lyrics an encyclopedia article on Halifax, and this is how I can remember that some point in the 1960s Halifax has 6,638 miles of graded roads.  A completely useless fact.  And his music is the same way - the complete and total lack of concern for what might be relevant or interesting leads his music to go to some very interesting places.  One finds the same spirit, honestly, in early Saturday Night Live, which was not afraid to fail and fail badly.  Hampton's early solo work, much like his work with the Hampton Grease Band, is brilliant and excruciating in equal measure - much like the Grateful Dead at their best.

Of his two earliest albums, I do have to say I find that his 1980 record with a group called the Late Bronze Age - the outfit featured in this documentary - is of much higher overall quality than his 1978 solo debut, "One Ruined Life (Of A Bronze Tourist)".  The 1980 record also sums up his aesthetic pretty brilliantly, being titled "Outside Looking Out".  Having said that, the bonus tracks on the reissue of "One Ruined Life" are more enjoyable to me than the album itself, particularly "Ghost Alcohol Sandwich".  They're clearly ephemera, but Hampton thrives on ephemera.

The disappearance of Harold Kelling, on the other hand, is more understandable.  Kelling, after his departure from the Hampton Grease Band, released only one 45 RPM single, in 1981, a cover of "Harlem Nocturne" backed with a surf style rendition of "Jezebel".  I could only find the latter (and this was apparently just uploaded to Youtube last week, on top of everything else):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtP__VF4dPU

I can see why this record made zero splash whatsoever.  It's not bad, but there's not really any compelling reason to seek it out.

On the other hand, Kelling's legacy is decently well looked after by his son Tarmon, who has unearthed a number of fairly interesting non-commercial recordings made by his father.  For instance, here is a radio recording from 1972 that Kelling made with a group known as the "Starving Brain Eaters":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYcj9xqE9gw

There is definitely some high quality stuff here.

All The Way Down The Rabbit Hole

The harder things get, the deeper I dig.  I'm digging pretty deep lately.

Ten minutes ago a friend of mine casually mentioned that they enjoy American Primitivism.  This occasioned my third deep dive into the lower reaches of RYM's genre charts in the last week.  This in turn took me to "Raphael Roginski Plays John Coltrane and Langston Hughes African Mystic Music".  When I went looking for this record by searching for "raphael coltrane" I found a completely different record, this one being Raphael Imbert's 2008 record "Bach Coltrane".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2k_5I0J1Jv0

Fun fact: The first saxophone player in the video bears an uncanny resemblance to my brother Bill, who does not play the saxophone.

I don't know how I feel about this video but I thought I would share, because if I don't, who will?

I also found a record by a gentleman by the name of Danny Paul Grody entitled "Between Two Worlds".  This was also the title of the first Octo Octa record.  I can't listen to the first Octo Octa record because it's too painful.  I can listen to the Danny Paul Grody record but it's not exactly to my taste.  Too much reverb.

Additionally, I ran across a record by "Slow Heart Music" entitled "This Body Is Not Me".  This is a reversal of the equation expressed on the first album by queercore act God Is My Co-Pilot, "I Am Not This Body".  This record I do like, which is strange because it has even more reverb than "Between Two Worlds".  I like that it really emphasizes the "primitivism" of American Primitivism (and in fact Ben Rath is Mancunian, not that it matters).  It is a cheap guitar simply played and simply recorded.  I don't suppose Rath means the same thing by the title that God Is My Co-Pilot meant.  I'm nearly certain that Grody didn't mean the same thing by his title that Octo Octa meant by hers.

Boscoe

My family has this ongoing "keeping it positive" text message thread that buzzes at me a couple times a week.  I like my family.  They mean well.  Kind liberals, most of them, except for the ones who aren't and who I just don't talk to.  The rest of them do because family, you know, they don't believe in letting _politics_ get in the way of family.

Today I'm listening to this record, like, I'm doing deep dives on genres I ain't heard much of lately.  Earlier this week it was no wave, you saw my post on no wave, right?

So this week I'm listening to this record by Boscoe from '73.  This got reissued in '07 by Numero, and I mean, I know Numero's stuff reasonably well, but this one somehow passed me by.  Probably I wasn't ready to hear it at the time.

here's the record streaming on Bandcamp:

https://1200line.bandcamp.com/album/boscoe

User soulmakossa reviewed this record in 2008 on rateyourmusic.  I found their review interesting.

"This truly is one of the darkest, most unpleasant albums I have ever heard. Unpleasant atmospherically, for the music and lyrics are superb.

...

Simply put: there's no joy here. The fact that the two tunes opening the disc are low-key, meandering (in a good way) and downbeat only add to that sentiment. PS: "Writin' on the Wall" ends in a cacophony of sounds, and one can hear eerie sirens in the distance bringing this 'get ready for (social? racial? civil?) war' warning to a disturbing close."

Song titles include "He Keeps You, "We Ain't Free", and "Money Won't Save You".

I can't find much to disagree with on this record.  Musically it's excellent, and pretty much everything they have to say I am 100% on board with.

If there's a disturbing part, it's the ending.  It's a ten minute spiritual jazz thing, obviously informed by Pharaoh's "The Creator Has A Master Plan" talking about how "the creator wants peace", but then goes on to repeat, over and over again, that "we must go to war, for war is the precedent of peace".

Well, this isn't a message for me.  Not just because I'm white, but because I'm a woman.  "As a race, we must go to war.  A man goes to war."

Listen to Boscoe.  Definitely listen to Boscoe.  But listen to women of color too.  That's my recommendation.  That's where I'm at on this record.

Anyway, my family ignored my message and kept on talking about Hildegard von Bingen's ideas about spelt.

Dolls' Shoes in Spearhead From Space

There are some things I don't talk about here because they're too esoteric, and then there's this, which I feel like I have to talk about _because_ it's so ridiculously esoteric.

Like, honestly, a lot of TV shows, there are Doctor Who episodes that have varying edits.  These edits tend to be very minor.  Sometimes the wrong master tape is sent to a station - for instance, the version of "Resurrection of the Daleks" I taped off PBS growing up had no music or FX track for the second half.  There was also a well-known early print of an episode of "Carnival of Monsters" sent to Australia that used a rejected re-arrangement of the theme put together for the tenth anniversary, the so-called "Delaware" theme.  As far as I know nobody has specifically said why they wound up not using the theme, but once I heard it I didn't have any questions as to why they made that decision.  The fourth episode of "Carnival of Monsters" was also edited for its 1981 rebroadcast, at the request of the director, to fix a particularly egregious special effects failure.  There's also the case where the official audio release of The Celestial Toymaker has narration applied so as to obscure the completely gratuitous and unnecessary use of a grossly offensive racial slur in an earlier episode.

There are other edits as well.  For instance, a number of times Doctor Who used popular music of the day on the soundtrack - The Master is seen listening to King Crimson's "The Devil's Triangle" in The Mind of Evil, for instance.  Where this gets relevant is in Jon Pertwee's debut as the Doctor, Spearhead from Space, there is a montage of a doll factory soundtracked with the Fleetwood Mac song "Oh Well".  Some releases have the music, some don't.

Well, it turns out the rabbit hole goes even deeper than that.  There are a couple of Youtube videos which miraculously haven't been taken down for copyright claims addressing an even more esoteric edit to this sequence:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkSnVNDGRx8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_f9QWqA6ppI

Towards the end of the sequence, there is a brief shot of dolls' shoes the version broadcast on the Dallas, Texas PBS station KERA.  (While doing some research for this post, I learned that there are apparently no longer any PBS stations in the US showing classic Who, as the BBC will no longer sell them to anyone but BBC America in the States.  I find this regrettable in the extreme and perfectly emblematic of the way the BBC has, for the past several decades, let down American fans and hobbled any attempts the show has made to appeal to prospective viewers.)

Anyway, MarcoPolo31West in his video refers to the shot as "curious", but frankly it's about the least interesting piece of obscurantist trivia I could imagine about the show.  It's literally a two second shot of dolls' shoes.  I am, however, delighted that somebody (a) noticed and (b) cares even a little bit about such marginalia.

Shaft

OK, today I want to talk about the Shaft theme song.  The connoisseurs may talk about "Hot Buttered Soul", but this song, this is probably the biggest defining moment of Isaac Hayes' career.  I mean, for real, this thing is still _the_ definitive sound of blaxploitation funk, and that's with, like, Curtis Mayfield's soundtrack to "Superfly" as competition.  Have you _heard_ the soundtrack to Superfly?  It's fucking AMAZING!

The theme to "Shaft" is one of those songs that forever dances on the line between being badass and goofy.  Wah-wah guitar has become completely, indelibly identified with the goofier parts of the '70s, for instance, but Charles Pitts' guitar here is good enough to transcend those associations.  Same way, the lyrics?  Those are some utterly goofy lyrics.  Hayes sells them, though.

No, the goofiest thing about Shaft is that everybody in the world felt like they had to do their own version of it, no matter how completely and totally unsuited they were to tackling Hayes' funk barnburner.  Tony Orlando and Dawn did a version on their TV show.  Did you know that?  Look, here's some analog hole video to prove it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJ5GNeyHezU

I actually don't listen to the Isaac Hayes version.  I just love listening to these bizarre detritus takes, sometimes hopelessly unfunky, sometimes surprisingly funky.

The first people to get their hands on the Shaft theme seem to have been the string cover version people.  This was a huge thing - Enoch Light and the Light Brigade did a version, the Hollyridge Strings did a version.  What they were doing, well, I don't know if it was that different from what groups like 2Cellos do now.  If the idea was that adding a bunch of strings would make the song more mellow, well, it tended to turn out stranger in practice.  The Hollyridge Strings' version has these big boxy drums and psychedelic phasing on the title.  Plus the wah-wah is fully intact.  All of the other lyrics get replaced with instrumental ba-ba-bas - now it is true that the original song used a word that was considered slightly profane at the time, and hinted towards the word "motherfucker".

The Enoch Light version is even weirder.  Enoch Light and the Light Brigade did some weird goddamn shit for stuff that's thought of today as schmalz.  Like instead of opening with wah-wah funk we have like fuckin' tabla.  If the rest of the playing is occasionally a little stiff, the percussion here is driving and powerful.  We also have a fair bit of sax in the style of GE Smith and the Saturday Night Live band - not a style I usually am fond of it but it works OK here.

Alan Hawkshaw over in England did his own version.  Hawkshaw, well, he has a reputation of being one of the funkiest of the British '70s TV and film composers, along with Alan "Bullet" Tew, and Hawkshaw definitely lives up to that reputation here.  The wah-wah is fierce, and the arrangement opens with the stark dramatic feel that characterizes much of his best work.  After this the ensemble gets filled in by some tuned percussion.  It's fascinating to hear all the different timbres different arrangers approached this with.  You can do a lot with this song and still have it recognizable.  Now, on this one, having the organ take the melody lead is perhaps not as strong a choice as it could be, but the persistent wah-wah here definitely makes this one a keeper.  Like Enoch Light's version Hawkshaw's is instrumental.

Sammy Davis Jr. - I mentioned this one in one of my early posts, I think.  This has a whole new set of vocals and boy, if you thought the original lyrics were stupid, you should hear Sammy's take.  This is complete, pure, 100% cornball cheese, the sort of thing that renders parody unnecessarily.

The Onstage Majority - Oh!  Now we're getting into the real shit here - private press lounge covers.  This, again, was a HUGE thing.  There are probably hundreds of private press lounge records with different versions of Shaft.  I've only heard a select few, myself.  Honestly, it is difficult to break these down and differentiate them.  What brings this one is not only an organ that's more energetic than Hawkshaw's, but the distinctly un-funky lounge lizard delivery of the lyrics.  Stick around to the end (I haven't) and you can hear their ten minute "Jesus Christ Superstar" medley!

The Social Circle - Another private press lounge version!  The rest of the record is pretty much made up of very '70s medleys - they, too, have one from Jesus Christ Superstar, as well as one from Cabaret.  Then their last is of '30s and '40s classics.  I think the reason I kept this around is the very clear presence of the Mellotron, which is a musical instrument I'm sort of a sucker for.  It's extremely badly played - in fairness, it's not really the sort of instrument suited to an up-tempo funk song in the first place.  The vocals don't have the same unctuous vim as the Onstage Majority's version, but it's still fantastic to hear how less accomplished ensembles try to essay the interrupted "motherfucker" bit of the song.

The Esquires LTD - This is actually from a Numero comp of records from the Bahamas.  In contrast to other versions, this rendition has more of a laid-back feel.  I appreciate its easy groove.  It's also more stripped down instrumentally, with no horns.  The lead vocalist's diction is not 100% - I suspect English is not his first language.  He's also dealing with backing singers who blatantly miss their cues on the "shut your mouth" section, leading it to be a total trainwreck.  That said, his delivery is fairly impassioned and soulful, compared to the awkward recitation one tends to get from cover versions.  It doesn't hurt that the group is far more in sync instrumentally than they are vocally.

Henryk Debich - Oh, I do believe we're into the disco era here.  This sounds distinctly like a disco beat.  The piano notes during the intro are also very reminiscent of the "Jaws" theme.  We also for some reason have a whole shitload of phasing going on here.  I'm not sure how necessary it is, but I like some nice psychedelic phasing so I can't complain too much.  There's a tremendous amount of emphasis on the bass timbres when the main melody hits.  The recitative portion is absent altogether - instead there's a big dramatic hit and then we're straight onto the finale, with some nice drum breaks.  Another distinct and high quality take on the theme.

Decimo - Did I say Henryk Debich's version was disco?  Oh, this is disco.  It goes on for quite some time - ten minutes worth!  '78 was a little late to really expect Shaft to be a disco floor-filler, but hell, you could say the same for "Night on Bald Mountain" I guess.  We have an excellent string-heavy interlude section added here, and if it's not the _best_ such I've heard, it certainly gives it more of an epic feel, particularly when it's being used to accompany a guitar solo with a pretty filthy, psychedelic tone for a disco record.  By the time we get to the breakdown the song has built up a serious disco groove.

South Carolina State College Jazz Ensemble - There are two sorts of private press '70s records where you're most likely to find a version of the "Shaft" theme: Lounge records and school jazz band records.  This is a college jazz ensemble record and therefore is more tight and professional than you would hear from a high school group.  The fact that they've worked up an arrangement of Shaft at all in '79 says a little something about their relative ambitions or lack thereof, mind.  Still, the arrangement is suitably punchy.  There are probably better version of this song on school jazz band records, and there is probably someone who has listened to every single school jazz band record from the '70s still known to be in existence and can tell you precisely what the best versions are.  Still, this is a solid take, even if it's perhaps a little over the top in its arrangement.  No wah-wah at all here.  It's all about the horns.

Cheer-Accident - I find this deconstruction, from 1991's "20 Explosive Dynamic Super Smash Hit Explosions!" comp, to be extremely endearing.  Cheer-Accident here sort of pioneer these sorts of supremely fucked up deconstructed versions of songs like "All-Star" by Smashmouth _avant la lettre_.  I'm not musically versed enough to be able to tell you exactly what they're doing here, but the guitar sounds like Robert Fripp on a particularly bad day in 1974 - just a completely hellish maelstrom of noise.  Oh, and the vocal section, the singer essays as though he is trying to choke out the lyrics while literally being strangled.  Followed by an abrupt switch to a different recording where layers of voices, all out of tune with each other, sing the "He's a complicated man, but no one understands him but his woman" line.  Then the song goes to repeat the same song-ending hit over and over again in an aggressively anti-rhythmic manner, the same sort of systematic personality breakdown as portrayed in "Fracture" except more unrelenting.  It's fucking brilliant, is what I'm saying.

So I've spent an hour listening to that wah-wah funk figure straight writing this post and I haven't tired of it yet.  I tip my hat to you, messrs. Hayes and Pitts.

Sedition Ensemble - Regeneration Report (1982)

Am distracting myself today by trawling through lesser-known No Wave records.  A curious genre, No Wave.  You get wacky people with saxophones, you get marimba bands who you're not sure if they're trying to imitate Frank Zappa or Starbuck or both.  And then you get this, fierce Black revolutionary music.  It was pretty marginal, and I know why.  I know that even when married to absolute fire grooves, listening to a record talking about not just the history but the continuing _present_ of white oppression of Black lives rubs white people the wrong way.  That's my instinct, sure, to say "I know all this!  You don't have to tell me!"

But if they don't have to tell me, why is it still happening?  It's a testament, really, a testament to saying these things every way.  Singing statistics about the carceral state over a smoky blues vamp, sure, maybe it brings to mind "The Most Unwanted Music" a little.  Because these are truths that white people don't want to hear.  There isn't any good way to say these things, any way of saying it that won't make white people defensive, argumentative, full of excuses.

Look, I don't care if you listen to this record or not.  The stuff they're saying here, though - it was true in 1982, it's true in 2020, and it needs to be said.

What Genre?

OK, let's try to dig a little deeper and see what I can come up with.  Today I'm trawling through songs that I don't have tagged with a year or a genre.  Could be anything.  I've gotten it down to 5,821 as of now with a little easy work, but at some point the easy stuff goes away.

This one - this one is easy to tag.  "It's No Secret" by Jefferson Airplane from "Bless Its Pointed Little Head".  Psychedelic rock, 1969?  Something like that.

Next up is Volo AZ 504 (instrumental) by Albatros.  I guess this is basically a pop song in its vocal form, but in its instrumental it's pretty deep '70s funk, wah wah guitar and dentist-drill synth.

Ah!  Pierre Bachelet's ripoff of "Larks' Tongues in Aspic Part II" for the Emmanuelle soundtrack.  Pass.  Pass!

St. Louis Blues by "Jim & Bob: The Genial Hawaiians".  OK, we'll call that "Hawaiian".  Not bad.

The Contents Are - If You're Relaxing.  Uh, sixties.  Harmony vocals and a little bit of jangle guitar.  A little Byrdsy, a little sunshine pop.  Less than two minutes long.  I'll call it sunshine pop.  Close enough.

Ah.  Here's my late friend John's cover of "Going to California".  That's a painful one.  He wasn't in good health then.  His voice is all tore up.  Pass.

"Moogies Bloogies" by Delia Derbyshire with Anthony Newley.  I don't know what the hell this is.  I really don't.  There are a lot of songs here I didn't properly tag first time around and forgotten, and then there are songs like these where I just can't even come up with a genre.

"Lightnin' Struck the Poor House" by Wynonie Harris.  Barrelhouse?  Jump Blues?  I'll call it Barrelhouse.  1948, I think it was?

"Shitheel" by Silica Gel from the "Scattered & Smothered" Wifflefist comp.  I'm gonna go on and tag this whole comp as "Plunderphonics".  Close enough.

A compilation of all of Thin Lizzy's guitar solos, 1973-1980.  I will call this "Mixtape" I believe.

Hammer Screwdriver.  What the hell do I call Hammer Screwdriver?  I guess I can always go with "Lo-fi".

"Overseers" by Sounds of Salvation.  One of those very weird '70s Christian records.  I think they were Episcopalians.  The mainline people get weirder than the far-out ones, in my experience.  Anyway, "Christian".

Biff Rose - Ain't No Great Day: God, I don't know.  This synth squiggle, and then this piano, and this catchy melody sung pretty badly out of tune.  Oh, my tag says this is Van Dyke Parks on the Moog.  Well, there is a certain amount of instrumental professionalism.

Unknown Artist - A2 Hidden Track From Disco Hamam (id please): Jeez, I don't know.  Psychedelic soul?

That's all I got today, y'all.  Sorry about that.

The Blob (Accordion Version)

Been kind of a crazy week, so yes, I've sort of let this site slip a little bit.  Lotta life going on and things do get a bit heavy around here from time to time.

So let's try a nice light relatively low-effort post.  I mean, not so low-effort that I just recommend the ridiculously heavy late-'00s Japanese King Crimson tribute band ZaKS.  That would be a bit _too_ content-lite.

Nah, time to crank up the randomizer and see what we get.

Guy Klucevsek - The Blob

It looks like this one hit my library sometime in late 2018.  I was aware of Klucevsek from fairly early on - I recall seeing "Flying Vegetables of the Apocalypse" in old Wayside Music catalogs.  I think I heard some of his work with John Zorn and concluded he was a little too New York downtown for my taste.  Later I heard his work with the Accordion Tribe - I believe he played a key role in getting that fantastic group together - but his actually compositions seemed to me to be the weakest of the five.  So I didn't explore further.

I believe that it was his rendition of "The Blob" that got me into this record.  I know people argue about the value of "The Blob", one of Burt Bacharach's earliest hit compositions.  Personally I am all on the side of it.  It's absolutely atypical for a horror/monster movie.  I haven't ever seen the movie, but I have vivid memories of it from a series of '50s horror movie picture books that were at our local library.  This is all mixed up in my head with my memories of the fear-inducing invincible blob from the "Advanced Dungeons and Dragons" game for the Intellivision.  This blob was not _that_ intimidating.  It moved extremely slowly.  However, I frequently panicked upon seeing it - I don't exactly have gaming nerves of steel - and the notoriously finicky Intellivision disc controls didn't help.

So it seems to me perfectly appropriate that the theme song should be light and silly and somewhat novelty-ish, because the blob in Advanced Dungeons and Dragons was also fairly silly.  Also, the incredible power of that mouth-pop is completely undeniable.  Klucevsek's accordion interpretation does not exactly bring out the more menacing side of the piece (if there is one).  Not only does he present the same fantastic earworm melody, but he comes up with all sorts of increasingly absurd new verses ("It tangos/eats mangoes/chit-chats/wears spats"), as well as putting in some fantastic instrumental sections further developing the basic theme.

I would definitely rank this among the all-time Bacharach interpretations.  Deserves to be a #1 Christmas hit in Britain.

OK, good enough!  More later.

Torn Music

Just wanted to make a quick little post today to recommend a book called Torn Music by Gergely Hubai.  It's this enormously informative and detailed trawl through decades and decades of rejected music.  I'm not very familiar with the world of film scoring, so there is lots for me to learn.  Hubai clearly knows his stuff - there are a couple small errors I ran across doing secondary research, because if I read a book about music I want to hear as much of the music as I can.  I haven't gotten so much from a book on music since Robert Chase's Dies Irae.

(Who do the two books have in common?  Peter Sculthorpe, who had a late '60s/early '70s Australian film score replaced, and who in 2004 wrote a requiem mass prominently featuring the didgeridoo.  It was only a couple days ago that I managed to track down Sculthorpe's Requiem.  I don't much like it unfortunately.)

Anyway, it is an absolutely luxurious thing, to gorge myself on this knowledge.  I want to share all of it with you, because it is amazing knowledge and because I will remember it better if I write it down, but I don't know how fair that would be to Hubai.  Some of these I'd love to hear as much as I'd love to hear Charles Stepney's symphonic composition "Cohesion" (featuring Minnie Riperton, soloist).

Like, just an example:

This Columbo episode, The Greenhouse Jungle:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPKufHu9TtE

Was originally scored by this composer, Paul Glass:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9xCLPHtDYQ

As a concerto for this instrument, the heckelphone:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBhkaL6z82M

Of course I would love to hear that.  Of course!  I also read of a score for a film on Gauguin written by a woman named Elizabeth Swados but rejected for sounding "too much like Stravinsky".  Couldn't find a recording of that, either, but I found that there was an animated film based on her picture book "My Depression" made in 2014.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dy8ImYafS_s

This looks like a fantastic film.  I am going to try and watch it.

OK, here's something else I learned from the book today, I can't help myself.

Jimmy Webb was originally contracted to write the soundtrack to "Love Story".  What he turned in featured a composition for oscillator-repitched car horns.  They decided not to go with it.

He later reused the recording as the intro to "Music for an Unmade Movie: Songseller":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1k-B9NARG