Monday, July 29, 2013
Don't hesitate to scroll down to the CD which I reviewed more recently than the DVD
GEORGE GERSCHWINN –
IRA GERSCHWINN – PORGY AND BESS – 1935-1959 - DVD
The story is entirely enclosed in a black community that lives on the
coast of South Carolina
next to a fishing harbor. They are fishermen and they till some land for cotton.
They live in some kind of a fort that is closed by a metal and monumental gate
and that is entirely turned inward onto its own courtyard. The only outside
people are the police that comes when a crime is discovered and that is only to
make a token arrest since they never get any testimony about who committed the
crime. There will be two murders in the “fort”. The other visitors are
peddlers. The strawberry lady, the honey man or the crab man do not represent a
danger in any way. But the drug peddler known as Sporting Life is another can
of worms. He is dangerous and his role will be dramatic in the story.
The story is simple. A woman who is more or less an easy woman is the
unmarried woman of a violent man. They are Bess and Crown. She provides her man
with the money he needs to buy alcohol and drugs and to gamble. She is entirely
mesmerized and dominated by the drug, Happy Dust, and her man. The drama starts
with Crown killing another man, Robbins. He runs. The cops want to arrest some
bystander, Peter, but he will be eventually released after some time in prison.
The main witness that testifies no one has seen anything is a cripple and
beggar, Porgy. He appears as being the one who defends the waterproof character
of the community. Do not deal with the white police. He is also the one who is
going to take care of Bess, left behind by Crown who is on the run.
The rest is the story of the fight of this woman between two men, Porgy
and Crown, a battle that is lost from the very start but not by the fault of
anyone in the community but because of the outside “invaders” the police and
the drug peddler are.
The drug peddler has it right when he says that two men for one woman
always end up with one man dead and the other in prison, and the woman having
no one at all. Porgy kills Crown, is arrested with no testimony against him but
under the pretext that he is supposed to identify Crown’s dead body, which he
refuses to do, even when in front of the body. He is sent to prison for
contempt of court. Hence Bess ends up alone, an easy prey to Sportin’ Life who
manages her so that she goes back to drugs and then goes away with him to New York. When Porgy
comes back with presents for everyone, since he played dice in prison and made
a little fortune, the community is friendly with him but does not want to tell
him where Bess is. He finally gets it out of them and he decides to drop his
two crutches and go to New York
after Bess.
That kind of rivalry between the protector of an easy woman and someone
who falls in love with her is not so uncommon, even in the opera world. The new
element is the fact that the man ho falls in love with the woman is a cripple
and the protector turns criminal. The rivalry between two men for one woman is
not uncommon in all spheres of literature and music and the fact that one kills
the other is banal, except that here it is the cripple who kills the super
strong and powerful protector. The end is purely opportunistic. The woman is
totally unable to live without the authority of a man: she is helpless without
a man and she finds herself alone. She cannot choose the community as a
substitute or at least she cannot resist the suggestion from a third man, the
drug peddler who proposes her to go back to easy life in the big city up north.
But this opera is a lot more interesting than this dramatic love affair
and this surprisingly effective love quartet, one woman and three men. As long
as the black community lives closed up on itself it can survive more or less
decently though poor but proud of what they can make on the very edge of the
white society outside, the society of the buckras. When you get out of this
cocoon, you run all kinds of dangers: fishermen are killed by hurricanes when
they go fishing. Women are exploited into selling themselves to anyone, into
drug addiction and even slavery of some kind when they get out and follow a man
out of their community. And it is from outside that the drug peddler comes to
bring into the community what may destroy that community. And yet this
community is totally pervaded by gambling with dice, alcoholism with whisky and
moonshine alcohol, and even common brutality among the members. What saves them
is their solidarity in front of the outside white society. They even have a
fringe of black exploiters like the undertaker, the divorce dealer, the drug
peddler and some others that ransom their own black community for any mostly
illegal reason.
Solidarity cannot do anything against that kind of easy exploitation.
The opera was composed in 1935 and represented a revolution in itself.
The action concerned a black community that was depicted as containing normal
human feelings and passions and that was under the perversion imposed onto them
by the white society outside that both victimized the community with systematic
suspicion and made that community close up onto itself into some autarchic
functioning that made them accept to be exploited by some black crooks and
accept the violence of some of their members even when it became criminal. In
other words their minds are totally colonized, under the domination from an
outside, surrounding and seen and felt as superior group that dominates them.
In 1935 there was yet no way out of this colonized situation except hard work
to make a better living in that system but that did not change it, no matter
whether they were fishing or growing cotton. Their lot was to be fishermen or
sharecroppers. We were at the time still a long way from the education and then
civil rights transformation, the main two ways for these communities to open up
on the world, for the individuals in these communities to find their way up in
society by conquering an equal, or at least as equal as possible position in
the surrounding white society. But this opera showed that the situation was
becoming highly explosive inside and in the relations with the outside world.
It could not last very long indeed because presents, beautiful dresses, new
hats were wanted and there would come a time when these people would say: we
want them and they will finally do what they can to get them without selling
their bodies, drugs or fake divorces, not to speak of coffins and funerals.
And yet the composer is not black which means the Blacks are not in
1935, though they are some of the greatest musicians in America already
at the time, accepted on Broadway yet. It will take a long time before the
Blacks are accepted as equal in showbiz as composers, authors and artists. But
this quasi-all-black opera is a very important precursor of “Guess who’s coming
to dinner” that was only to come out in 1967, thirty two years and one World
War later.
But the music is surprisingly modern and avant-garde for its time and
even today. It is both melodious with some sentences coming back both with
words and notes, but also disruptive of standard harmony and melody, working on
slight variations from major to minor tones, and working tremendously on half
tones and other intervals that are often taken downward when we expect upward
movements or vice versa. It is not jazz but it integrates some of the innovations
of jazz in the music and particularly the polyrhythmic aspect of African and
African-American music by playing on the chorus as opposed to the leading
voice, or on some more distant rhythm that has its autonomy behind the voice,
on on gospel technique of a chorus calling for attention every so often in the
rhetoric of some songs and introducing a different tempo articulated on the
main tempo. Hallelujah! We are like entering a musical forest in which each
tree is revealing the whole forest and all the other trees of it.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
SHORTER VERSION
The story is entirely enclosed in a black community that lives on the
coast of South Carolina
next to a fishing harbour. They are fishermen and they till some land for
cotton. They live in some kind of a fort that is closed by a metal and
monumental gate and that is entirely turned inward onto its own courtyard. The
only outside people are the police that comes when a crime is discovered and
that is only to make a token arrest since they never get any testimony about
who committed the crime. There will be two murders in the “fort”. The other
visitors are peddlers. The strawberry lady, the honey man or the crab man do
not represent a danger in any way. But the drug peddler known as Sportin’ Life
is another can of worms. He is dangerous and his role will be dramatic in the
story.
The drug peddler has it right when he says that two men for one woman
always end up with one man dead and the other in prison, and the woman having
no one at all. Porgy kills Crown, is arrested with no testimony against him but
under the pretext that he is supposed to identify Crown’s dead body, which he
refuses to do, even when in front of the body. He is sent to prison for
contempt of court. Hence Bess ends up alone, an easy prey to Sportin’ Life who
manages her so that she goes back to drugs and then goes away with him to New York. When Porgy
comes back with presents for everyone, since he played dice in prison and made
a little fortune, the community is friendly with him but does not want to tell
him where Bess is. He finally gets it out of them and he decides to drop his
two crutches and go to New York
after Bess.
But this opera is a lot more interesting than this dramatic love affair
and this surprisingly effective love quartet, one woman and three men. As long
as the black community lives closed up on itself it can survive more or less
decently though poor but proud of what they can make on the very edge of the
white society outside, the society of the buckras. When you get out of this
cocoon, you run all kinds of dangers: fishermen are killed by hurricanes when
they go fishing. Women are exploited into selling themselves to anyone, into
drug addiction and even slavery of some kind when they get out and follow a man
out of their community. And it is from outside that the drug peddler comes to
bring into the community what may destroy that community. And yet this
community is totally pervaded by gambling with dice, alcoholism with whisky and
moonshine alcohol, and even common brutality among the members. What saves them
is their solidarity in front of the outside white society. They even have a
fringe of black exploiters like the undertaker, the divorce dealer, the drug
peddler and some others that ransom their own black community for any mostly
illegal reason.
Solidarity cannot do anything against that kind of easy exploitation.
The opera was composed in 1935 and represented a revolution in itself.
The action concerned a black community that was depicted as containing normal
human feelings and passions and that was under the perversion imposed onto them
by the white society outside that both victimized the community with systematic
suspicion and made that community close up onto itself into some autarchic
functioning that made them accept to be exploited by some black crooks and
accept the violence of some of their members even when it became criminal. In
other words their minds are totally colonized, under the domination from an
outside, surrounding and seen and felt as superior group that dominates them.
In 1935 there was yet no way out of this colonized situation except hard work
to make a better living in that system but that did not change it, no matter
whether they were fishing or growing cotton. Their lot was to be fishermen or
sharecroppers. We were at the time still a long way from the education and then
civil rights transformation, the main two ways for these communities to open up
on the world, for the individuals in these communities to find their way up in society
by conquering an equal, or at least as equal as possible position in the
surrounding white society. But this opera showed that the situation was
becoming highly explosive inside and in the relations with the outside world.
It could not last very long indeed because presents, beautiful dresses, new
hats were wanted and there would come a time when these people would say: we
want them and they will finally do what they can to get them without selling
their bodies, drugs or fake divorces, not to speak of coffins and funerals.
And yet the composer is not black which means the Blacks are not in
1935, though they are some of the greatest musicians in America already
at the time, accepted on Broadway yet. It will take a long time before the
Blacks are accepted as equal in showbiz as composers, authors and artists. But
this quasi-all-black opera is a very important precursor of “Guess who’s coming
to dinner” that was only to come out in 1967, thirty two years and one World
War later.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
GEORGE GERSCHWINN –
IRA GERSCHWINN – PORGY AND BESS – 1935-1959 – SIMON RATTLE – CD
The first act of this opera sets up the drama in a fully self-contained
Black community working as fishermen for some and cotton sharecroppers for the
rest. We are inside their living quarters that are devised as a fort with all
rooms opening only onto the inside yard where everything happens. The community
is shown as pretty idle though we understand we are on Saturday night and the
activities are alcohol, a crap game, drugs (happy dust) and women. The drug
dealer is Sporting Life. This situational composition leads to Robbins playing
against Crown. Robbins is a plain member of the community, married to Serena,
whereas Crown is more or less the local pimp who is dragging Bess around as his
woman. Robbins wins and Crown refuses to lose and starts a fight and he kills
Robbins, and runs with the money that had been given to him by Bess. Bess
refuses the proposition from Sporting Life to go to New York with him and he goes away too. The scene turns into a dirge dedicated to the
dead man.
Then the people are confronted to the police who want to arrest one man,
no matter who and order the body to be buried by tomorrow or it will be taken
to the medical school to be dissected by the students there. The community has
to collect fifteen dollars to pay for the funeral. The undertaker is there to
collect.
This act shows how this community is poor, cut off from the rest of
society, form the whites, a sort of shared exclusion: the Blacks don’t want to
share anything with the whites and the whites don’t want to have anything to do
with the Blacks. But life is cruel in many ways. The Blacks have anyway
directly or indirectly to work for the whites and every single event in the
Black community may bring the white police in and that means trouble, though
and since the Blacks refuse to tell anything to the police who are obliged to
be blind and arrest the first man they want. And this one is Peter who accuses
Crown, hence breaks the silence law of the Blacks toward the white police.
Porgy, the crippled beggar of the community, refuses to confirm. Peter has
doomed himself for the Blacks: they will not help. He is arrested as a material
witness.
Then the act can proceed to the funeral, led by Bess.
The act so far shows how blocked in their alienation the Blacks are.
Locked up in a closed community that depends on the whites outside for work and
for all types of regulations, the rare businesses they can control are selling
alcohol, selling drugs, providing women, and women are in a dependent state be
they married or not, and undertaker (we will see later various peddlers:
strawberries, crabs, etc.). But they suffer from their alienation to themselves
as a community. Within their community there is a strict order and that order
has to be respected and all Blacks have to be protected against the whites. So Crown
has to be protected since he is Black though the murderer of a Black man, and he is considered as the top or
strong man of the community and as such he has the right to kill if someone
dares to win a crap game against him. The only positive point this opera shows
is that the Blacks are able to sing their fate and dramas in swinging music.
They are born “entertainers,” musicians. They can transform any event into a
musical evocation that is generally collective. They all take part in it, be it
a religious occasion, or a plain everyday life occasion.
This situation is what will be called sixty-five years later or so Post
Traumatic Slavery Syndrome by the Blacks themselves who are trying to get over
this alienated situation that has obviously pushed roots into the Blacks so
deep that these roots have to be pulled out before ever even thinking of
solving other problems. The Gershwins as well as the Heywards could not know
the concept but they definitely are the pioneers of this concept on Broadway.
Note Black authors at the very same time are starting to write about such
situation, Richard Wright for example, but in the same way they are not able
yet to identify the problem. They stay at the level of behaviorism: the
environment of the Blacks produces the behaviors of the Blacks, and this
approach is a progress on the social Darwinism of the end of the 19th
century that considered such behaviors were hereditary: Blacks were born like
that. In the 1920s-1930s they were made like by their social and cultural
environment.
This opera is trying to show that the negative sides are not the only
sides to be considered, but so far we have only been shown the negative sides,
except the solidarity that appears during the funeral since the community
collects the money for the undertaker: the widow cannot pay.
The second act starts with an essential dimension of the Blacks that
gives them some freedom from this behaviorism of theirs. They believe in God,
which is banal, but they project onto themselves the story of Moses taking the
people of Israel out of Egypt and into
the Promised Land. They believe in this Promised Land. The theme had appeared
during the funeral but it could have been seen then as life after death. Now it
is quite different because Jake is hitting the road to go to the Promised Land,
meaning two things. It has to be undertaken by every single individuals. It is
a land that has been promised to any one of them but it is not necessarily the
same land. Each one has to go to his or her promised land. Jake in other words
is going to discover the promised land he is looking for. This gives hope to
the Blacks, but once again this hope is shared by all but has to be reached by
every single individual among them on their own individual initiative, and
within America.
We can think the Gerschwins and the Heywards are answering the idea that was
common in these years under the name of African Nationalism or Black
Nationalism that wanted Black communities to be made entirely autonomous, some
along with Marcus Garvey going as far as asking for a Black state in the USA. One of the
hypothesis was for the USA
to give the Blacks (or for the Blacks to take) what is called the Dust Bowl (The drought and erosion of the Dust
Bowl affected 100,000,000
acres (400,000 km2), centered on the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, and adjacent sections of New
Mexico, Colorado, and Kansas.)
The first business exchange is the buying of a divorce for Bess for one
dollar fifty cents from a divorce peddler who pretends to be a lawyer, and
later when a white man from the court comes to get the bail money for Peter
from Porgy, Porgy sends him away telling him things have changed and calling
these “peddlers” nothing but buzzards. Porgy’s consciousness is changing: he
becomes able to step back and look at himself and the situation he is inn
though it confirms the fact that Peter cannot count on support from the Blacks.
But then it is picnic day, a big day of celebration for this Black
community. They go spend the day on an island. Bess does not want to go and
wants to stay with Porgy since Porgy cannot go, I guess because he is a cripple,
but he more or less send Bess to the boat and she goes; The picnic is a day of
liberation and it starts with Sporting Life and some other men making fun of
religion by showing how things are not always what they seem to be or should be
according to the Bible. But the day is to take a bad turn when Bess discovers
Crown is here and the latter forces her to stay with him and to promise she
will go with him when cotton is in. Note the other Black people went on the
boat not even caring for what was happening to Bess and why she was missing.
The shift back to the community’s base finds Bess, one week later, sick
and having been absent two days. She is brought back to consciousness by some
women singing Gospels. She tells Porgy she has been forced to say yes to Crown
but she does not want to go. Porgy then takes over the responsibility and tells
her he will deal with Crown when he comes.
This change in Porgy is extremely interesting. He is the one who is
totally alienated in his social position, since he is a beggar; in his physical
condition since he is a cripple; and in his ethnic position since he is Black.
And it is this threefold-alienated man who only has three things in his life, “Got
my gal, got my Lawd, got my song!” who saves Bess and welcomes and shelters her
when Crown runs away after his crime. He is the one who refuses to say what
happens after the fatal crap game because that’s the rule when dealing with the
whites. And now, little by little he is the one who stands by a woman, her free
will, her right to choose her life and her partner in life. He is the one who
is developing a new sense of responsibility by caring for others and for their
freedom. He is reconstructing a human mind in himself.
It is at this moment the woman, whose husband has got out to sea to fish
comes up with the bad news of a hurricane that hits the community. The
rendering of this storm and the tremendous anxiety for those out at sea is
rendered musically by the second soprano, the tenor, the first soprano, the
alto, the first bass and the second bass singing different solos one on top of
the other, plus some more shorter interventions from other characters. This is
not the best musical idea since then we cannot follow the words of any one of
them. And yet the six solo pieces contain interesting elements to describe the
situation and to define the various references to god. In order these
references are “Doctor Jesus,” “Lawd above,” “Hev’nly Father,” “Professor
Jesus,” “Captain Jesus,” “Father.” It is impossible to enter the richness of
these six visions and the result is nothing but linguistic havoc. That is
supposed to render the violence of the hurricane, but it crushes down the
meaning of the solo parts.
It is in the heart of this hurricane that some knocking is heard at the
door. Crown comes in to take Bess. She refuses, and Porgy tells him to keep
off. At this moment Clara who is fearing for Jake who has gone fishing in the
hurricane asks for some man to help her check if Jake’s boat is back. Only
Crown responds and rushes out. And then the six soloists of the beginning of
the scene sing again their six solos one on top of the other. It is still
impossible to differentiate the words and meanings.
This ending of the second act is very dramatic but extremely ambiguous.
Bess and Porgy are slowly capturing their independence in front of their
community and Crown. But in the danger of this hurricane only Crown was out and
came in and he is also the only one who responded to a call for help. He does
not lack courage and yet he is a murderer who killed for the innings of a crap
game and he is a male chauvinist who refuses to give his woman any freedom: she
is his possession. On the other hand it is quite obvious Porgy cannot compete
since he is a cripple. Maybe he would be courageous if he had the necessary
body.
The third act starts after the storm with a chorus in honor of the
absent men, Jake and Crown. Maria and Sporting Life are considering what was
lost in the hurricane and Bess is taking care of Selena’s baby. Crown comes in
to claim his woman but he is killed by Porgy with a knife in his back twice
while he was trying to crawl on all fours under Porgy’s window. In a way this
end is not very heroic.
The detective and coroner come for some investigation and take Porgy
along as a witness to certify the identity of the victim, Crown. They suspect
Serena, the wife of Crown’s victim, Robbins but can’t prove anything and they
go with Porgy. Then Sporting Life is alone with Bess and he tries to convince
her to come with him to New York
by tempting her with his drugs. It does not seem to work and he leaves. But
Bess comes back for the dope and goes.
The last scene is the return of Porgy after his stint in prison for
contempt of court because he refused to identify Crown. He has presents for a
few people, including a red dress for Bess. But Bess is not there and no one
dares tell him where she is. Finally Maria and Serena tell him the truth. He is
told Bess has left for New York.
So he gets his cart and his goat and leaves. He is on his way to a Heavenly Land.
This ending is surprising since it amplifies the love story between two
people who had nothing in common, but at the same time it makes that love story
impossible. We all know that finding Bess in New York,
or even only Harlem;, will be like finding a
pin in a haystack, if not even worse. This ending is definitely liberating
Porgy from his alienation. He can cut off his mooring and go. He is on his way
to the Promised Land. He has jumped over the obstacle and he is moving again
away from his unbearable situation; All that is the name of love and symbolical
of a real liberation of that Black man.
But Bess is the bad one in that tale. She goes away from the man who had
bought her a divorce, who had killed her ex-husband, who had liberated her from
all enslavement, and yet she falls for some dope, the promise of being a
“woman” in New York,
hence a prostitute in the hands of a pimp and drug dealer.
It is of course, once again a rewriting of Romeo and Juliet, but a
tremendous number of obstacles are piled up in front of them: an age
difference, a social difference, a physical handicap on one side, the fact that
the woman was attached to an authoritarian man, the use of dope and the
practice of prostitution. The worst obstacle is that she cannot live alone one
single minute. And after Porgy’s being taken away and detained by the police she
had to stay alone for a few days. She did not even wait five minutes. And yet
Porgy abandons everything and goes after her. His love is so strong that he can
take the road to New York, no matter how physically challenged he may be, with
no resources, no income, no money, nothing at all, except a goat which is not
going to be very helpful on the road.
The opera sure tells something about the persistence of a Black man when
he is in love: he can fight, kill, serve, find full freedom in this new
dependence. But it also says a lot about the Black woman who is dependent by “nature,”
weak and in great need of protection which is close to possession. She is not
able to see her real interest in love and prefers the evanescent pleasure and
thrill of dope and street walking under the proprietary control of one man.
This is a beautiful story but how does it help the Blacks to step into
their future? It did in 1936 by producing a musical on Broadway that had a
tremendous success and that was showing a nearly entirely Black cast. It also
showed the real triple alienation of a black man like Porgy, the double
alienation of all Black people, the similar double alienation of all Black
women and an alienation that cannot be numbered at all for the Black woman
Bess: she is nothing but a possession and she is the property of the man who
has the strongest and last word. That’s no longer alienation. This is self-fetishization:
Bess transforms herself into a toy in the hands of the latest man who takes
control of her: she is both a sex toy, an economic toy, a social toy, but she
will also be a boxing toy of some type sooner or later, and she will accept it
. . . of course.
This picture of the Black woman is amazing in 1936, not because Black
prostitutes did not exist. They did. But because she is made the central
character of the opera. That’s pathetic and tragic at the same time. She really
sounds like a Black Lulu (composed though not completed in 1935 on the model
written by Frank Wedekind in 1895 and 1904).
Dr Jacques COIULARDEAU
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 3:19 PM
0 comments
Sunday, July 28, 2013
More incongruously entertaining than them I die
PIERRE BOULEZ –
FRANK ZAPPA – BOULEZ CONDUCTS ZAPPA – ENSEMBLE INTERCONTEMPORAIN – BARKING
PUMPKIN DIGITAL GRATIFICATION CONSORT – 1984
You must not believe what Frank
Zappa tells you what the music signifies, expresses or even means. It might be
what he had in mind at the time of his starting the composition, but notes do
not work like words and music like language. So it cannot mean all the
gibberish English he uses to manipulate us into believing music is an
articulated language like English Arabic or Chinese. It is of course not.
So what meaning can we find in
this music?
A tremendous amount.
First there is the project of
Pierre Boulez, a composer of symphonic music considered as classical, though he
is contemporary; Pierre Boulez a conductor that has conducted operas by Wagner,
Alban Berg, and many others, concerts of the best classical music, some of the
most famous orchestras and musicians, soloists or not; Pierre Boulez whose
music is performed in the best and most elegant if not most fashionable concert
halls all over the world; Pierre Boulez who conducts here Frank Zappa, that
Californian pop music composer and performer who is generally best served in
amplified music concert halls in front of audiences that would probably most of
them never go to an opera by Mozart or Richard Strauss, or a symphony by
Schoenberg or Haydn. This then is incongruous, surprising, astonishing. These
two people are so far apart and here they meet.
What is then interesting in this
adventure is the music which is typically American in many ways. First of all
it is expressive in such a way that you can recognize this or that sound from
real life, this or that situation in real life. It is impressionistic too and
it tries to impress you with emotions, sentiments. In many ways it is music for
a film but you only have the music and not the film, so that you have to invent
the pictures, imagine them. But Zappa is taking us for fools if he believes we
are going to accept his own stories. Each one of us is going to imagine their
own stories and there won’t be two that would be the same. And the vacuum-cleaner
peddler is definitely out, for a very simple reason: we do not have peddlers of
that type any more and people under 40 may never have seen one.
In fact this expressivity is
going to make us project into the music all kinds of situations and scenes
directly borrowed from all the series and films we are watching all the time on
TV. This music is turning us into exhibitionistic voyeurs. We project our
phantasms and we peep at them as if we were invisible, well hidden, as if we
were peeping toms looking at our own private crimes or sexual capers. This
music is turning us inside out because of this double dimension.
But this music is also extremely
modern in the fact that it gives every single sound, every single note, every
single interval a clarity and a distinctiveness so that we are like bombarded
by thousands of musical objects, many too fast to be identifiable and we are
assembling them live in our ears and eyes, because we see them as much as we
hear them. And there we reconstruct meaningful elements like a plodding heavy
and fat person going down a metal bridge with some kind of a band in the
distance and maybe a funfair on the left ands some merry-go-rounds. Joyland in one
word and an amusement park. We suddenly see a strange character coming down the
street and going directly at us, pulling a gun out and a brandishing a saber
and we feel the bullets going through our skulls and the saber cutting our legs
in one vast swerving movement.
But all that is in our head and
not in the music.
At another moment I feel the cold
air coming out of a dark tunnel whose door has just been opened behind me. I
turn around and I see a whole set of monsters with all kinds of scissors, shears,
cutters, chisels in their hands and they are coming toward me slowly at first,
each one with their menacing airs, each one with their lightness and particular
sounds, and I can really not see beyond their faces, if these are faces,
because beyond it is pitch black dark night and I can’t run because I am frozen
and behind me there is nothing except an enormous and uncrossable wall of night
and fear.
That’s what I feel, but I am
aware that anyone else will feel something completely different, except that
everyone should feel disturbed because the music has no continuous melody, no
continuous musical sentences, but many sentences that are intermittent and
crisscross one another into some kind of patchwork, coverlet or whatever you
may use at night in the winter to cover yourself. At every single corner of the
most winding road I have ever seen, a road that has many bumps and potholes,
you know these holes that look like the pots of some witches assembled for a
great Sabbath or Walpurgis night, you come across something unexpected, sound,
instrument, or rhythm or twist or twirl, and you have thus to let yourself be
transported down the chute into the municipal music collecting truck that is
taking you and the music to the municipal music dump or landfill. And you get
acquainted, and even addicted, to that feeling and you let yourself be taken
anywhere the two men want to take you. Submit, wait and see. You might even
learn how to swim in such a perilous sea. We should have more of these strange
meetings of artists from different planets. The result is generally
fascinating. Tonight the Pope meets Prophet Muhammad under a bodhi tree in
front of a Buddhist temple contiguous to a synagogue.
Imagine Philippe Jaroussky and
Bob Dylan being respectively Bess and Porgy in “Porgy and Bess” under the
direction of Steven Spielberg on a script written by Stephen King and Joe Hill.
And imagine this performance in the ruins of Crystal
Palace in London. Queen Victoria might even decide to take part in
the event.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 2:13 PM
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So sad, so beautiful, so amorous, so unearthly
JORDI SAVALL – ARMENIAN SPIRIT – HESPERION XXI – 2012
Armenian music is using three
traditional instruments. The duduk and the zurna, two wind instruments of the vast
family of the pipe, and the kamancha, a string instrument using a bow. These
give Armenian music a very special sonority both extremely cosmic with the
duduk, shrill with the zurna and bitter or sour with the kamancha. They add
other instruments more in the European line, a violin of course, an organ,
various violas da gamba and tambourines. As such many pieces, especially those
using a duduk that can be amplified by the organ or other instruments, sound at
times psychedelic, a music that can take you high into heaven and this remark
brings the next point. But many of the sounds and compositions could be
compared to the music produced in mountainous regions isolated in a way or
another, like for example Corsica or Sardinia.
The music of Armenia is
deeply articulated onto its national culture which is built on the language
that has resisted more than twenty centuries thanks to an original alphabet
invented in 405-406 by Mesrop Mashtots that devised 36 letters for his
language. The first task was to translate the Bible and the Fathers of the
Church, an objective which was quite common in those days. They did the same
thing in Ireland or in England. But
this language that was able to resist any attempt to destroy it found another
inspiration: their religion. Armenia
was the first state to convert to Christianity asq a state even before the Roman Empire and that story was long, and very
conflict-loaded, especially with the surrounding countries who were all “pagan”
at first, and then turned Muslim in a few centuries. During the crusade period
they managed to be integrated in the Christian states in the Middle East, but
that was only a short period of positive relations with the outside world and
it explains their impact in medieval Europe especially with one Troubadour,
Jaufré Rudel from Blaye, Aquitainia, France, who dedicated one of his eight
surviving song to the story of a Queen of Armenia.
During May, when the days are long,
I admire the song of the birds from far away
and when I have gone away from there
I remember a love far away.
I go scowling, with my head down
so much that songs and hawthorn flowers
aren't better, to me, than the frozen Winter.
[…]
He is true who calls me grasping
and longing for a faraway love
since no other merriment pleases me as much
as enjoying a faraway love.
But that which I want is denied to me
since my godfather made it so
that I love and am not loved.
Then up to the Soviet Revolution,
they were divided, integrated in various empires and negated in their
independence and culture, both language and religion. The Soviet Revolution actually
created an Armenian Republic within the USSR that could teach and use their
language and enjoy some religious freedom. This period of slightly more than 70
years came after the tragic genocide performed by the Turks in 1915 when the
whole world was fighting in France
against the Germans. This genocide is still not solved in Turkey nor the
world. Recognized by most it is far from being off the table and thus repaired
and forgiven.
But after the fall of the USSR
Armenia had to relearn its national fight especially against the surrounding Muslim
countries and particularly Azerbaijan with the tragic fate of the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh that is constantly under
pressure from surrounding Azerbaijan. Armenia nowadays is still isolated
though the international support it enjoys enables it to reconstruct itself and
live in peace. Turkey is slowly evolving towards acknowledging their
responsibility in the 1915 genocide and Azerbaijan, Syria and Iraq should
evolved positively, especially the Kurds who are also speaking an Indo-European
language, though they are Muslims but they also have a problem of national and
cultural recognition and independence.
But the most important element is the fact that their
cultural emergence was finally acknowledged in the world because of the great
efforts of the French linguist Arthur Meillet who published his first grammar
of the Armenian Language in 1903. This grammar remains a milestone on the road
to the description and understanding of the language. It classified it in the
Indo-European family and gave it the nobility it needed to find a new life.
Armenian is very close to Greek and we can think the Greek migration to the
Balkans, through Anatolia started there after
the moving down west from the Iranian plateau and separation from the other
branch of that family of languages, the Indo-Aryan subfamily that went down
east.
It is in that region that the mystery of the Indo-European
migrations to Europe can find its solution.
Another migration probably based on a slightly differentiated group (the
presence of the Kurdish linguistic area shows the Indo-Europeans were probably
not unified in only one “dialect” and the second, or more, “dialect” moved
across the Caucasus into the Russian plains and the n northern and western Europe.
Armenia is thus central in
the history of Europe, just as much as the
Kurds and the Turks. The Kurds because they are our linguistic family moving
down from the Iranian plateau, and the Turks because they are the modern
descendants of the Turkic people who were the first Homo Sapiens in Europe under the appellation of Cro-Magnon and
Gravettians.
The music itself is always sad, always mysterious, always
feeling as if in danger, under some menace. And yet the mythology of Armenia is rich
with dragons, a dragon killer, and that is so Indo-European since this dragon killer
is a distant ancestor of Germanic Siegfried. But since Armenia was the first
Christian State we may hope to get one day from some archaeological cache some
old documents from the early Christians that could widen the Nag Hammadi
library and the Dead Sea Scrolls, not to speak of the Hebrew Gospel of Matthew
and that could cast some light on how Christianity built its dogma in the third
and fourth centuries. At least Armenia
should be considered closely by Christian archaeologists.
But do not fall in any romanticism about the suffering of the
Armenian people. History is cruel and there is no exception. But I regret that
Armenian Christian music has not yet reached some essential sacred music
festivals in France, for example La Chaise-Dieu that seems be very reluctant at
integrating other Christian approaches that are not Catholic or Protestant,
with a recent evolution towards Russian Orthodox music, but African, Latin
American, Armenian, Asian Christian approaches are not at all considered, be
they Catholic, Protestant, Anglican or whatever.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 6:20 AM
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The presentation has to be widened tremendously.
JORDI SAVALL – BALKAN SPIRIT – HESPERION XXI – 2013
This collection of music from the
Balkans, from the Mediterranean to the Danube
is extremely important because it is one of the cribs from which European
culture emerged. But we have to be clear here. It was not the only crib. This
is how far the Greek migration from Anatolia
reached at the very most. Romania
was also the limit of the Roman Empire, or
Roman presence, hence their language surrounded by Slavonic languages.
There was another Indo-European migration
along another route, through the Caucasus and then in the vast plains of Russia,
Ukraine and then the Germanic northern half of Western Europe and the Celt
second half of Western Europe that the Romans tried to conquer but did not
really colonized, apart from the Iberian peninsula in depth and Gaul rather
deeply in the Occitan area of today’s France and superficially in the Oil
section of today’s France and in Walloon Belgium. We must also understand that
the Magyars arrived later from another migration from north-eastern Europe and the Finno-Ugric linguistic tradition. And we
have to keep in mind that the Indo-European penetration was not demographic
since only 25% of present day European DNA is from that origin several thousand
years after the ice-age, whereas 75% of the DNA of present day European
population (of European origin) is from the older stock that arrived in Europe
some 45,000 years ago and 25,000 years before the peak of the ice-age. These
older populations, Cro-Magnon, Gravettians, etc., were of Turkic descent and
language.
The Balkans were not different.
The Greeks were first to arrive and settle in the peninsula with the great
advantage they had over the local population since they were arriving with the
military organization of the Indo-Europeans, their agriculture and cattle
husbandry, their commercial practices and their metal work that gave them an
edge in weaponry and war. But they were a minority and they had to integrate in
their own culture the culture of the locals not to completely alienate them,
and eventually to bring them over to their life style, economic model and
language-culture. The basic and symbolical episode is that of the Golden
Fleece, Jason and Medea and how the Turkic culture of Georgia was
integrated, and at the same time brought down, demonized into the Greek
religious culture. I regret that Jordi Savall does not go that far in the
history of this region. It is tentative to start the history of this region in
330 and the founding of Constantinople, founded on the site of the old Greek
city of Byzantion, better known as Byzantium, founded by the Greeks in 657 BCE,
hence practically one thousand years before Constantinople and the Greeks
probably recuperated a site that was already occupied by the Turkic population
that were there before them.
Note too the presence of Islam in
Turkey and beyond did not
start with the Ottoman Empire. Islam arrived
in Anatolia, hence today’s Turkey
in the second half of the 11th century, that is to say before the
FIRST crusade was decided in 1095 and called for by Pope Urban II in Clermont Ferrand, Auvergne,
France. Or so
is the legend going on around this event, and that could only be then because
it is then that the Peace of God movement started in Aurillac, Auvergne, France
in 972 and then to be widened in the Charroux Abbey’s Synod in 989, was finally
endorsed as the Peace of the King in France and other kingdoms in Europe. The
Crusade was the only way to keep the military class fighting but out of the
Christian territories.
One of the leaders of the fourth
Crusade that was to reconquer Constantinople for a while was a certain Conon de
Béthune, a poet from Béthune, Pas de Calais, France, and he is buried in Anatolia.
He became the leader of this re-conquered Constantinople
after the death of Yolande of Hainaut, the Empress of Constantinople, in 1219,
but he died soon after.
I regret this important
shortcoming of the presentation of this region of Europe
and its present day musical culture. This region became at the end of the 15th
century a crossroads of many cultural traditions. First of all the old
traditions from before Christianization, then the Christian, both Orthodox and
Catholic traditions, and we must not forget that the orthodox tradition itself
is divided between the Slavonic tradition and the Greek tradition. We must also
speak of the presence of the Magyars who finally settled in present day Hungary in the
9th century over a period starting in the 5th century,
coming from the Urals and part of the Finno-Ugric linguistic and cultural
family. We must not forget that they are connected to the Hunnic Empire, and
the famous or infamous Attila the Hun, and older versions of the Siegfried
mythology marries Siegfried’s widow to that famous Hun. But apparently they
were pushed back and they settled in a small European territory.
Then at the end of the 15th
century they welcomed the Sephardic Jews expelled from the Iberian
Peninsula, and we must not forget that the Gypsies had been
present in this area for a very long period and we aren’t even sure about their
origin. Many connects them with India,
but there seems to be no real evidence of this connection, except of course
that their language or languages are connected to the Indo-Aryan branch of the
Indo-European family. But the terms are false. In fact the Indo-European and
the Indo-Aryan branches of this family of languages come from the same source,
the languages on the Iranian Plateau in older times even before Zarathustra and
the Zoroastrians and the two branches moved respectively west and east. They
thus are cousins and in no way father-son or mother-daughter. The linguistic
characterization of the Romani Gypsy languages seems to imply a later migration
back west of an Indo-Aryan group of people. But we have no evidence beyond
that, except legends and mythologies.
The final element we must keep in
mind is that the Ottoman Empire with Suleiman the Magnificent and his
successors was extremely open to European cultures and music and his court
counted a lot of artists end composers from Europe.
The presentation seems thus more
romantic about the people in this region than accurate enough about the
tremendous crisscrossed heritages there. Romanticism about the tremendous and
frightening wars of the last thirty years, the role of Europe and NATO in these
wars and their end and now the European integration of these countries into Europe. A particular point has to be taken into account.
These zones came down faster than expected, in spite of the horrors perpetrated
on BOTH sides because the USSR had been dismantled and the Russian president at
the time was a weakling at the international level because he was a highly
incompetent president in Russia itself that was more or less trying not to sink
in spite of the looting some oligarchic social climbers were carrying out on
the whole territory not to speak of the Chechen terroristic problem. In other
words Europe took advantage of this weakness of Russia to take over ex-Yugoslavia
that was crisscrossed by innumerable and absolutely hateful ethnic conflicts
based on ethnic and religious cleansing.
This being said, this CD is a
marvelous compilation of various styles and traditions and this music is
fascinating. Jordi Savall is of course equal to himself and brings together the
best and most representative musicians from these traditions and his work and
rendition is absolutely convincing and trustworthy. This compilation might be
considered later on as a milestone in the rebirth of this vast area, but there
are still a lot of potential conflicts and hatred there. It will be a long
process to bring everyone to the proper understanding that respecting the
others is the basis of the future.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 2:05 AM
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Saturday, July 27, 2013
Musique d'Afrique et Musique mexicaine, deux bouts de la conquête transatlantique
MADOU DJEMBÉ –
PERCUSSIONS D’AFRIQUE
Les percussions africaines sont une planète sonore à part et un monde en
soi. Ce que la musique africaine a inventé et est presque la seule à avoir
inventé, c’est la polyrythmie. La musique africaine est fondée sur les
percussions comme aucune autre musique au monde et la seule diversité que cette
musique pouvait développer c’était la diversité des percussions à deux
niveaux : les sonorités de chaque instrument et les rythmiques que chaque
instrument ou chaque main sur chaque instrument ou chaque main ou paire de mains
des divers instrumentistes sur les divers instruments qu’ils utilisent
simultanément. Cela donne la polyrythmie africaine. Aujourd’hui cette
polyrythmie s’est développée du fait de la traite des noirs et de l’esclavage.
Les esclaves noirs ont conservés contre vents et marées, contre toute
persécution cette polyrythmie qui faisait partie de leur chair, de leur fibre
plus que toute autre chose.
Cela a donné deux grands types de musique aujourd’hui devenus universels.
D’une part la musique noire et depuis cinquante ans au moins blanche de
l’Amérique du Nord. Certains de ces genres musicaux ont parcouru le monde
entier et se sont installés pour toujours dans la planète musicale mondiale. Le
gospel, le jazz, le blues, la soul en général, le rock and roll et tout ce qui
s’en est suivi. D’autre part dans les Antilles et en Amérique du sud,
particulièrement le Brésil où l’influence noire à été plus profonde
qu’ailleurs, la musique latino américaine dont certains styles sont eux aussi
devenus universels : rumba, particulièrement et quelques autres, mais pas
le tango qui lui a une origine espagnole. La forme la plus novatrice et
toujours novatrice est bien sûr la musique jamaïcaine, et en particulier le
reggae et les autres formes de cette musique avant, autour et après le reggae,
qui d’ailleurs n’est pas fini.
Ceci étant dit il est nécessaire de revenir aux sources africaines pour
voir toute la richesse que ces percussions peuvent avoir dans le continent et
dans les cultures qui les ont produites. Et ce disque est une véritable
académie, une vitrine sans égale, presqu’une master classe. Bienvenue dans la
planète des percussions africaines. Demandez-vous comment vous pourriez danser,
comme le font les Africains, sur ces musiques. Vous pouvez choisir un des
rythmes modérés et danser une danse calme et qui ne prend ni vitesse ni excès.
Mais vous pouvez aussi suivre un des rythmes plus rapides et alors vous allez
pouvoir monter progressivement vers des rythmes de plus en plus rapides et qui
vous mèneront à la transe de ce que l’on appelle le vaudou, et que l’on devrait
appeler le vodun, musique, danse et religion d’origine traditionnelle africaine
et qui se fonde sur ces rythmiques. Le prêtre, l’officiant, voir les participants
en général se laissent aller à ces rythmes rapides et passent de l’autre côté
du miroir, avec ou sans l’aide de rhum ou d’alcool de palme.
L’alcool n’est en rien une obligation puisqu’il suffit de suivre une rythmique
rapide pour arriver à ce niveau de la transe où le corps tout entier se fond
dans cette rythmique et tous les rythmes vitaux du corps s’alignent sur cette
rythmique rapide, des pieds à la tête en passant par le cœur, le cerveau et les
autres organes à rythmique interne..
Ce disque est un excellent exemple de cette culture originale qui est
devenu une norme universelle dans toute la musique amplifiée et même au-delà.
Bonne écoute
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
LA HUASTECA –
DANSES ET HUANPANGOS – Mexique
Cette musique qui concerne un territoire et une population couvrant ou
occupant l’ancien domaine Maya n’est en rien une musique qui remonte aux formes
les plus anciennes de culture maya, pas le moins du monde. Il s’agit d’une
musique qui s’est construite sur plusieurs siècles après la conquête espagnole
mais on doit comprendre qu’un siècle après, à la fin du seizième siècle
quatre-vingt-dix à quatre-vingt-quinze pour cent de la population originelle
indienne avait disparu par massacre, par torture, par maladies ou simplement de
faim.
Cette culture est dont typiquement mexicaine, le Mexique ayant conquis son
indépendance de l’Espagne en 1810, déclaration d’indépendance, et effective en
1821. La culture mexicaine est une création originale qui mêle les traditions
chrétiennes, les traditions espagnoles ou ibériques, et quelques formes qui se
développent dans les Antilles, bien que l’influence noire sera très réduite
puisque le Mexique ne compte pas de vaste héritage démographique africain, les
esclaves noirs ayant été exclus très vite..
Vous reconnaîtrez des instruments typiquement européens, d’autres qui sont
d’origine locales ou bien des instruments qui ont été modifiés localement, mais
à la différence de la musique sous influence noire en Amérique du Nord il n’y a
pratiquement pas de polyrythmie, même si la ligne mélodique semble plus rapide,
en fait ce n’est qu’une illusion la rythmique de base en arrière et la
rythmique de la mélodie en avant sont strictement réglées sur les même temps
forts et donc sont équivalentes, au point devenu plutôt mécanique et lassant
comme dans les pistes cinq à huit, Danza de Moctezuma.
Le nom peut faire penser à l’empereur aztèque auquel il réfère, mais nous
n’avons aucun véritable élément pour dire que c’est un héritage direct et
fidèle de la musique des Aztèques d’avant la conquête. Il est sûr que c’est une
musique très répétitive. On notera la mention de Malintzin, plus connue comme
La Malinche, présentée dans la notice comme l’interprète indienne de Moctuzema
alors qu’elle était la concubine et interprète de Cortès lui-même, et mère de
son fils. On touche ici à un phénomène typique du Mexique, l’expulsion des
références à la conquête espagnole alors même que la source principale
de la culture mexicaine est la culture espagnole importée au Mexique du
temps de la conquête.
L’association du violon, de la guitare quinta huanpanguera et de la guitare
jaruna, qui ne sont que des guitares propres à la région, est typique des pistes
neuf et dix par exemple. On voit bien là que nous n’avons que des instruments
européens ou simplement modifiés localement. L’association du violon et des
guitares est fort intéressante, mais en quelque sorte fortement espagnole de
tradition. On reste donc dans les instruments à corde, frottées ou pincées.
Cette formation est la base du trio traditionnel utilisé dans de nombreux
morceaux de cette musique. Trio instrumental auquel s’ajoute des assemblages de
voix variant d’une voix de femme (assez rare) et d’une ou plusieurs voix
d’homme et de chœurs plus ou moins étoffés maos ne dépassant pas trois voix.. On
notera que ces voix ne se définissent pas selon les registres européens.
D’ailleurs quand Philippe Jaroussky a enregistré avec des chanteurs traditionnels
d’Amérique latine, ceux-ci n’ont jamais fait un duo avec lui car les
définitions de leurs voix n’étaient pas en accord avec celle de Jaroussky,
alors même qu’une des voix était de toute évidence une voix d’alto masculin.
On notera aussi au niveau des voix que les voix de femmes sont très basses
pour des voix de femme, au moins dans le registre des mezzo sopranos, sinon
même un peu plus bas. Les voix d’hommes ici sont aussi assez basses plutôt dans
le registre des barytons-ténors très proches en quelque sorte des voix de femme,
avec utilisation assez fréquente de la voix de tête des hommes, que certains
appellent voix de fausset, terme désagréablement péjoratif. La marque la plus indienne de ces musiques
sont certains titres qui sont en langues indiennes, par exempl la piste quinze
en Nahuatl et pourtant dédiée à la Santa Maria de Guadalupe, cette Vierge
locale qui a permis d’imposer la religion catholique et d’expulser toute
survivance des religions indiennes.
Les pistes seize à dix-neuf ont une autre formation musicale avec un
ensemble tamborcillo et akapitsali, donc instrument à vent local et tambourin
lui aussi original. On revient ensuite au trio traditionnel, le Trio Tamazunchale, qui a trois voix d’homme qui jouent l’une comme
l’autre sur un registre un peu plus élevé de quelques notes de fausset
Le trio suivant, Los Vaqueros de Temporal emprunte des
pratiques instrumentales à une autre tradition, celle des xochisoneros qui
donne une musique beaucoup plus répétitive de phrases musicales courtes.
Le style tamaulipeco classique donne une musique
sensiblement différente mais à nouveau répétitive, bien que moins que le trio
précédent, avec une utilisation systématique de la voix de fausset de l’homme
en fin de chaque phrase musicale.
Et pour finir un trio plus traditionnel, Herencia
Huasteca. Le voyage vaut le déplacement.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 3:16 PM
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UK science fiction poetry will give you tremendous nightmares of real hope
RUSSELL JONES – WHERE ROCKETS BURN THROUGH – CONTEMPORARY
SCIENCE FICTION POEMS FROM THE UK
– PENNED IN THE MARGINS, LONDON
– 2012
This is an anthology. So you do
not need to follow the pages and you can skip twenty pages forward then
twenty-five backward and then thirty-seven forward again. You can just use the
table of contents and read the poems that contain one particular word in their
titles, or those of names you know or think you recognize. You like or you
don’t like this or that and if a poem is not pleasant you wan zap over it.
Sipping is the rule in such reading and such a genre: sip here and sip there
and try to get the divine sap on which you can sup and even if you really like
it you can have your last supper of the day and then go digest it in your
be-dreamed mind during the night. I must say the little monkey who is
constantly sitting on my left shoulder, the heart shoulder mind you, is
constantly telling me what to feel, what to think, what to do, and I must admit
he was really active while I was reading this book. I must admit he told me a
couple of times I was an assh*** to read such stuff while the world was needing
so much action. Since he is my little monkey I have the right to tell him what
I told him, that action is fine and dandy but action without feelings and
inspiration is like a day without sunshine, and since the sun will collapse
only in four hundred billion years, or so, I told him I wanted as much sunshine
in my action as I could get for free.
That should make you understand at
what a loss I am in front of this book. I did not lose my mind or my virginity.
I lost something else that is quite different. I lost the tight feeling of
things, mental or material, I generally have. It loosened my grounding in my
intellectual firm lands and it sent me aloof and aghast in a sea of formless
and soundless ghosts I had managed to keep at a distance for long enough to
have nearly forgotten their existence. In no time, in a few pages, I was
haunted by shape-shifters, body-shifters, body-thieves and soul-catchers that
had decided I was a derelict thinker on legs and that I had to get off my legs
to start thinking more freely. And it got me off my legs indeed.
It took me beyond genetics and
the ranting and raving of H.G. Wells and his Morlocks and Eloi and his idea
that the human species was going to evolved into two different antagonistic
species setting the bourgeois capitalistic world upside down ass over teakettle,
ass over head or head over heels. In the same way we are beyond the white supremacist
scientific world H.G. Wells advocated in his film “Things to come.” That was
only the first step of modern apocalyptic science-fiction and that was a long
time before Ron L. Hubbard and his shift of science fiction from machines to
human beings. Ron Hubbard has always had the tendency to believe he was the
great changer of the world. H.G. Wells was a catastrophic science-fiction
writer for sure but he was quite in phase with Jules Verne who was a lot less
catastrophic or apocalyptic. But both men were centered on man, human
psychology, human potential future and inhuman potential dangers.
But we are beyond these writers and these at times dystopian utopias.
We have also stepped a long way
beyond the easy explanations of evil as being the result of social
organization, be it capitalism or market economy or whatever the fad of today,
yesterday and tomorrow will bring back from the 19th century or even
the 18th century if we consider Rousseau. We are beyond the vision
that evil is an integral part of the human individual because we know today
that this human individual is phylogenetically and psychogenetically produced
and thus that what may be seen inside is necessarily the result of at least
some influences from outside elements like education. It is obvious that this
science fiction has understood that our education system is cultivating evil in
every single one of our children for them to be normal adults, hence ready to
fight our wars and fight against aliens and foreigners to the death, to the
finish, to the bloody gladiator-like gritty fatal, lethal, deadly rape. And I
say rape because rape is part of the education we provide our children with.
This science fiction is beyond that and considers what this will produce in one
or two generations. Tastily sickening, but sickeningly salvational. Thanks God
we are saved, though God . . . And the wheel of Sarah Westcott’s “O” is that
wheel of salvation so often referred to and described in the Old Testament. But
being a turning wheel the human being has become a machine or the macine has
become a human being or both at once.
15 I then noticed that on the ground beside
each of the four living creatures was a wheel,16 shining like chrysolite. Each wheel was
exactly the same and had a second wheel that cut through the middle of it, 17 so that they could move in any direction
without turning.18 The rims of the wheels were large and had
eyes all the way around them.[k] 19-21 The creatures controlled when and where
the wheels moved—the wheels went wherever the four creatures went and stopped
whenever they stopped. Even when the creatures flew in the air, the wheels were
beside them.” (Ezekiel, 1:15-21)
We are definitely beyond Hubbard
but Hubbard is one of the mind-bogglers that have left a deep voyeuristic furrow
in our consciousness.
“Then he went down alone in the dark
vault.
When he was sitting on his chair in the shade,
And that was on his forehead closed underground
The eye was in the grave and looked at Cain.”
(Victor Hugo, The
Legend of the Centuries, “Consciousness,” 1859)
This unconscious scientologist eye in our own
consciousness is like Big Brother made anew and afar and totalitarian as if
this Big Brother was not a spying eye in a TV screen but a self-denouncing
confessing urge in our own head impressed there by manipulating and
pressurizing in the name of the engrams we have to bring out and reveal to the
clear people who govern our healing.
This collection of poems is vastly beyond
Extraterrestrials and other cosmic beings though when they are envisaged as
such the colonial spirit comes back but such Extraterrestrials are passé today
and the future cosmic beings are our descendants. Descendants you say? Hence in
Darwin’s line? Not really as we are going to see. The descent is beyond pure genes.
The chromosomes are eternal but mutate constantly and at any stage the
descending survivors continue those they left behind extinct
“. . . Those who won were left
The standing stones, the seed, the memories
Of people before the people they
Left dead.”
(Ken MacLeod, “Succession”)
This collection seems to have integrated the
post-Singularity thinking of people like Ray Kurzweil. In fact it is seriously
exploring what would happen if Kurzweil’s dream and desire were to become real.
If all our “minds” meaning brains were to be invaded by all kinds or nanobots
able to communicate together we would no longer be independent beings since our
nanobots would be in constant communication with all the nanobots of the world
and we would be each one of us one little transistor on and in a giant
motherboard. Then the computing concept of master-slave would become a reality,
a reality in our flesh, in our brains. Big Brother would really be Super-Big All-powerful
Almighty Super-Brother this time. No confession necessary; No clears necessary;
Just a giant cosmic computer to serve as the server of all these nanobots and
we would be nothing but the flesh-dressed dendrites of this giant cosmic
server. This collection of poems is seriously considering what may happen
beyond this point. And this time the eye of consciousness in Cain tomb has
become the constant leash, lashes and dashboard that command us from morning to
morning and through the whole day and night. The Extraterrestrials then are the
electric pulses, the digital commands and the viruses that come from the
central cosmic server into every single one of our integrated circuit via our
motherboards.
“All the fearless orphans you incubate
In the heat of the humming motherboard.
Our guillotining legs and slicing through
Your interactive future towards you:
We are coming, we are coming for you.”
(Brian Mvcabe, “They Are Coming”)
Speaking of dystopia, I am afraid, in fact
frightened s***less, Ray Kurzweil is probably the best and most dangerous
peddler of such a man-made apocalypse, of such a satanic nightmare straight out
of the worst prophetic moments of the Old Testament, of the Torah even. The Leviticus
transformed into an integrated nano-circuit multiplied in millions of varied
types and modules and controlling our own material and mental life. Speaking of
fundamentalism, I am amazed that such an MIT thinker may produce something that
is billions of times more potent than the most stringent version of Islamic
shari’ah law since then no individual at all would be able to have any
individual initiative at all in anyway possible. I wonder what this other MIT
mad scientist, Noam Chomsky who stated the innateness of universal grammar,
think of this pushing his black box into becoming the black server of the
cosmos.
When I have said that, and my little monkey
helped me a lot yesterday while I was climbing a few hundred yards in the
mountain in the sunshine (he is like me, he is not afraid of the sunshine since
I retrieved him on his way back from South-East Asia some years ago), I could
maybe enter the anthology and look at each poem in great detail. I could write
hundred of pages, and each poem deserves such a full treatment. But that would
be out of proportion here. So I am going to do what all monkey do: jump around
from one tree to the next and scavenge what I can get here and there, a few
blossoms, a few fruit, or a flea from the back of some fellow monkey, and share
them with you.
Chris McCabe in his “The White Star Hotel” gives
us the most complete version of the post-Kurzweilian apocalyptic dystopia. The
“you” he is speaking of opposed to his “we” is clearly that master that
controls us all via our nanobots.
“You are the conscience
You are the blueprint
You are the mind
You are the stars
You are the mass
You are the zeitgeist
You are the mute
You are the script”
What is left then to “us”? Not much after the
great technical revolution:
“We devised our first strategies for waiting men
to be born by machines.”
But now that has happened “we” can go back to the
closet of obsolete objects, and machines are bearing and delivering the new
generation of what exactly?
“I knew the Fall was coming that night I woke,
cardiac throated:
The gulls went lit by modern lights.
Our hearts were splattered with poverty.
We could smell smoke in the library.
Our newspapers turned to papier mache.
White ferries taxied us homewards.
Panic made kiosks of our possessions.”
The reference to the Fall is of course a
reference to Adam and Eve and the Fall from the Garden of Eden after eating the
apple (ah! ah! a fig, man, or boy or whatever) when Eve played the fruit and
Adam tried to play the writhing snake of a penile reptile child-maker. But
after this second contact with the Tree of knowledge, the human species was out
of the picture:
“All our new babies looking up with eyes of
glazed chrisms. . .
The Fall
happened in a vacuum. . .
The fact to
remember about the Fall
Is that we
were prepared for the atomic.
What happened
was not atomic. . .”
Is there any hope in all that?
Boy, man or whatever you prefer, girl or b***h even if that’s your sex, gender
or taste, not much if we keep the dystopian tone in that tale. But The author
is a genius who discovers that we are governed in such a perspective by a
Priest, in this case let’s say Kurzweil or some other Hubbard, or a Steve
Andreas, a Pete Bissonette, a Jamie Smart resolving Post Traumatic Stress
Disorder in you on a public stage for everyone to see the miracle, initiating
you to fast reading or whatever personality change you may dream of, or even some
American Monk jumping quanta in his old age, and what (certainly not who) Chris
McCabe calls the Shadow which is this bodiless, fleshless, mindless entity
deprived of any humanity and that controls all things without being in any way
material, hence being entirely virtual. And the end of the poem following my
last quotation is:
“And we could
have pulled through somehow
We could have
pulled through
Until we knew
The Priest was
spending nights with the Shadow.”
You cannot stop the hormonal impulses,
even of a priest. He has to spend his night with something, if he can’t spend
them with someone, and you can imagine Kurzweil cajoling his Singularity, or
Burt Goldman caressing his quanta, between the silk sheets of his/their night, gamboling
and prancing in-between the Shadow legs or rather under the Shadow’s spear (the
Roman soldier), spike (for crucifixion or a hypodermic injection), carpenter’s
nail (also for crucifixion), or whatever a shadow can have as for a
Jack-out-of-the-box-hammer.
And yet the poem is not finished.
There is third section that pushes the theme even further and describes what
happened when we got off the white ferries on our last trip across the cosmic ocean.
I should quote the whole page but I can’t. It is too powerful, too cruel. I
feel like raped in my deepest and most intimate being and beliefs by this page
and I kind of feel I have to thank the author for his foresight The author is
raping us with a pneumatic drill of his own boring a Chunnel through our
brains. So let me give you the second half of this page, only:
“The future
pulling the souls from our bodies
Like the flesh
of razorclams sucked from their shells
We knew
As we looked
back for the final time
-- our
emptiness fluted by the wind of the beach --
-- our first
memories expiring into the blue –
-- a cot, a
curtain, a rail of stars –
We knew by the
lights in the mouths of our lovers
That everything
had changed forever.”
If we are dumb enough suckers to
believe this priest or these priests of the singularity or whatever it is they
peddle telling us the stars – if it is the stars – will eat our souls like we
eat oysters, discard our bodies as useless casings, and we will have been
transformed into fodder for the cosmos. A beautiful ending in a way but
somewhere it must leave you un-satiated as for the sexual pleasure this
intercourse should have brought you. You have become a virtual and totally
enslaved mucroprocessor in the motherboard of the singularity’s cosmos.
And that is Saint Kurzweil’s
gospel beaming his rays of supernatural virtual light onto the world in the
name of MIT, the last laboratory of mad scientists incorporated in Massachusetts no longer bridging anything, but for sure
being the CAM (Computer Aided Manufacturing)
camshaft or connecting rods of some devilish cosmic engine.
And to conclude this ranting
raving of a critique I will quote Steve Sneyd’s “Morning in June” that materializes
the virtual predator that the cosmos had turned into in the previous poem:
“No one sees
what is done
The planet’s
jaws gnash once
And swallow
the whole scene.”
I have to apologizes to all the
authors I have not quoted but I think the readers of this critique should be
titillated enough where they have an itch, I hope not too high between their
knees, to get to the volume and read some more pages. It is worth even more
than a very short while and in a way it is sickeningly funny (strange not ah! Ah!)
and instructive. Particularly Sue Guiney’s “What Can Be Taught” in which she
explains all that apocalyptic fantasy is only possible because the teachers of
our dear schools and universities are implementing the first of the ten most
unpredictable questions Harvard
Business School
asks in the interviews to select their MBA students:
“Explain
to me something you’re working on as if I were an eight-year-old?”
turning themselves into grown-up children and thus locking up
the children in their childish identity and personality.
And then we are surprised if the
grown-ups that come out of these children are big children who can fall for the
first priest available and speaking in the name of the unnamed first shadow
imaginable. All that because we did not listen to what the children had to say
and we did not care for it, we did not take care of it and answer their
questions. The education system of this planet produces the apocalyptic vision
at first and later the reality that will bring our civilization down like a
secular temple built with newspaper scraps and fragments (page 27, the well
numbered, 3x9, 999, the beast, Edwin Morgan’s “a piece of newspaper caught in
the traffic”, and page 67, a
prime number of its own 6+7=13, Edwin Morgan again and “a paper . . . caiught
on some swirling freeway”)
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 7:35 AM
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