Posts Tagged ‘records’
“Just remember: Abraham Lincoln didn’t die in vain, he died in Washington D.C.”*…
Ken Goffman (better known as R. U. Sirius, the co-founder and first editor of the seminal Mondo 2000) on an equally-seminal comedy group…
If you were a college student or Western counterculture person in the late 1960s-70s, the albums of Firesign Theatre occupied more space on your shelf and in your hippocampus than even The Beatles or Pink Floyd. If you were an incipient techno-geek or hacker, this was even more the case. Firesign was the premier comedy recording act of the very first media-saturated technofreak tribe.
In his tremendously informative and enjoyable history of Firesign Theatre titled Firesign: The Electromagnetic History of Everything as told in Nine Comedy Albums, author Jeremy Braddock starts by giving us the roots of a band of satirists that started out (to varying degrees) as social activists with a sense of humor. He shows them slowly coming together in Los Angeles while infiltrating, first, the alternative Pacifica radio stations like KPFK in Los Angeles, and eventually, briefly, hosting programs in the newly thriving hip commercial rock radio stations of the times, before they lost that audience share to corporatization.
Braddock takes us through the entire Firesign career and doesn’t stint on media theory and the sociopolitics of America in the 20th century that were a part of the Firesign oeuvre.
For those of us out in the wilds of the youth counterculture of the time, without access to their radio programs, it was Columbia Records albums that captured our ears and minds, starting with Waiting For the Electrician or Someone Like Him in early 1968. Their third album, Don’t Crush That Dwarf Hand Me the Pliers sold 300,000 right out of the gate and, in the words of an article written for the National Registry in 2005, “breaking into the charts, continually stamped, pressed and available by Columbia Records in the US and Canada, hammering its way through all of the multiple commercial formats over the years: LPs, EPs, 8-Track and Cassette tapes, and numerous reissues on CD, licensed to various companies here and abroad, continuing up to this day.” As covered toward the end of the book, they have been frequently sampled in recent years by hip-hop artists.
My introduction to Firesign came as the result of seeing the cover of their second album How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You’re Not Anywhere At All in the record section of a department store in upstate New York. It was the cover, with pictures of Groucho Marx and John Lennon and the words “All Hail Marx and Lennon” that caught my eye.
It was the mind-breaking trip of Babe, as he enters a new car purchased from a then-stereotypical, obnoxiously friendly car salesman, and finds himself transitioning from one mediated space to another, eventually landing in a Turkish prison and witnessing the spread of plague, as an element of a TV quiz show.
The album ends with a chanteuse named Lurlene singing “We’re Bringing the War Back Home.” This was all during the militant opposition to the US war in Vietnam. Probably few listeners would have recognized “Bring The War Home” as the slogan of The Weatherman faction of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), but Braddock gets it, like he gets the seriousness of Firesign’s satire. Indeed, Braddock notes that several reviewers, writing with appreciation about one of their albums, averred that its dystopia was “not funny.”
Most fans would agree with me that the peak of the Firesign run on Columbia Records was the exceedingly multivalent Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers and the futuristic, AI-saturated I Think We’re All Bozos on this Bus, which I note in this interview predicted the future better than any of the self-described futurists of the 1970s. But to apprehend the richness of those two psychedelic assaults on the senses and on the idiocracy of its times, you will need to read the book and listen to the recordings or at least read this interview…
Read on for his conversation with Jeremy Braddock: “Firesign Theatre: The Greatest Satirists of 20th Century Media Culture and its Techno-romanticism were… Not Insane!” from @rusirius.bsky.social and @jbraddock.bsky.social
* Firesign Theatre, How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You’re Not Anywhere At All
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As we cherish canny comedy, we might recall that it was on this date in 1932 that Walk a Little Faster opened on Broadway at the St. James Theatre. A “musical review with sketches,” it featured “April in Paris” (by E. Y “Yip” Harburg, who seven years later provided all of the songs– including “Over the Rainbow— for the film The Wizard of Oz) and writing by S. J. Perelman (who had just scripted the Marx Brothers films Monkey Business and Horse Feathers).
“A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots”*…
From Chris Freeland the Internet Archive, an important new report…
In today’s digital landscape, corporate interests, shifting distribution models, and malicious cyber attacks are threatening public access to our shared cultural history.
• The rise of streaming platforms and temporary licensing agreements means that sound recordings, books, films, and other cultural artifacts that used to be owned in physical form, are now at risk—in digital form—of disappearing from public view without ever being archived.
• Cyber attacks, like those against the Internet Archive, British Library, Seattle Public Library, Toronto Public Library and Calgary Public Library, are a new threat to digital culture, disrupting the infrastructure that secures our digital heritage and impeding access to information at community scale.
When digital materials are vulnerable to sudden removal—whether by design or by attack—our collective memory is compromised, and the public’s ability to access its own history is at risk.
Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record (download) aims to raise awareness of these growing issues. The report details recent instances of cultural loss, highlights the underlying causes, and emphasizes the critical role that public-serving libraries and archives must play in preserving these materials for future generations. By empowering libraries and archives legally, culturally, and financially, we can safeguard the public’s ability to maintain access to our cultural history and our digital future…
“Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record,” from @chrisfreeland and @internetarchive. Do read the full report.
* Marcus Garvey
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As we husband our heritage, we might recall that it was on this date in 1665 that the oldest continuously-published newspaper in English, the Oxford Gazette, was first published. The following year, its name was changed to (it’s current title) the London Gazette, currently shortened to just “the Gazette.”
No longer a conventional newspaper (covering general news), the Gazette is one of the official journals of record or government gazettes of the Government of the United Kingdom, and the most important among such official journals in the United Kingdom, in which certain statutory notices are required to be published. It has become a crucial British archive.
His Majesty’s Stationery Office took over the publication of the Gazette in 1889. Publication of the Gazette was transferred to the private sector in 2006, under government supervision, when HMSO was sold and renamed The Stationery Office. You can read the Gazette here.
“Can one desire too much of a good thing?”*…
In his wonderful newsletter, The Convivial Society, L. M. Sacasas wonders if the success, and thus proliferation, of language in the world around us has undermined its effectiveness…
Close to the start of the year, I reflected on the plight of language under digital conditions. I was motivated by the sense that “something of consequence is happening to ordinary language, the lifeblood of human thought and action, under digital conditions.” More specifically, I proposed the following thesis: “that having built our political structures on the assumption that human experience and human society can be ordered by human language and speech, we may now be suffering through the discovery that the world we have built is no longer responsive to either.”
To put this in parlance that has grown increasingly familiar in the intervening months, the human-built world is already unaligned to human values and well-being because it operates at a scale and according to a logic that elude our comprehension and confound our agency. And this is so largely because it exists beyond the reach of ordinary language. The realm of speech, specifically its public and thus political quarters, increasingly becomes the realm of exasperating and maddening futility. And we may all be forgiven for feeling as if we are the idiots whose words, however full of sound and fury, finally signify nothing, and, more to the point, effect no change in the world.
Just as in the modern West faith was deemed too irrational and volatile for the public sphere and thus relegated to the relative obscurity of private life, so now it seems that language itself is being likewise banished to the realm of the private, which is to say that, whatever pretenses to the contrary, real power no longer resides in ordinary human speech. We are not ruled by words but by formulas and algorithms and those who wield them…
… now, nearly a year later and after an unplanned hiatus, I find myself serendipitously drawn back to the theme of language but from a different angle: from the perspective of silence. The specific occasion has been my reading of The World of Silence, by the Swiss philosopher Max Picard.
Silence, like darkness, tends to be conceived chiefly as an absence, as nothing in itself. Darkness is merely the absence of light and, likewise, silence is merely the absence of sound. Considered this way, it’s tempting to imagine darkness and silence both as negations of some more positive reality. Light is to be preferred to darkness, and sound to silence. We bear this out when, if darkness or silence threaten, we instinctively flood our living spaces with both light and sound.
Not surprisingly, I suppose, it is hard to describe in words what I have chiefly learned from Picard. But if I were to try, it is this idea—which became more than idea, something sensible to me—that silence is what Picard called an autonomous reality, it is something of itself and not merely a negation, and, critically, that it is part of the nature of silence to be a vital, renewing force from whose absence we suffer more than we know.
…
Picard asserts that “silence is the only phenomenon today that is ‘useless’.” “It does not fit into the world of profit and utility,” he continues, “it simply is. It seems to have no other purpose; it cannot be exploited.”
This uselessness is precisely what gives silence, in Picard’s view, its healing quality. Consider these words:
“Yet there is more help and healing in silence than in all the ‘useful things’. Purposeless, unexplainable silence suddenly appears at the side of the all-too-powerful, and frightens us by its very purposelessness. It interferes with the regular flow of the purposeful. It strengthens the untouchable, it lessens the damage inflicted by exploitation. It makes things whole again, by taking them back from the world of dissipation into the world of wholeness.”
This wholeness emerges from Picard’s metaphysical reflections on the nature of silence. At another point he speaks of silence as a substance that enters into us. That substance creates a buffer among the various, often conflicting realities within us. Our own contradictions must pass over the substance of silence before coming into contact with one another. In this way, silence is a substance protective of our inner life. Picard also suggests that “man is better able to endure things hostile to his own nature, things that use him up, if he has the silent substance within …. Technics in itself, life with machines, is not injurious unless the protective substance of silence is absent.”
These are not words to be analyzed. They are, I believe, simply to be contemplated, and their truth ascertained only in practice. But they struck me. They struck me for the promise Picard holds out of help and healing and wholeness. We live in a scattering time, to borrow a line from the poet Richard Wilbur. All the forces at play within us and without seem to be centrifugal forces, pulling us apart. I remain interested in understanding the nature of these forces. The critical conversation remains important. But I’m increasingly interested in how we might find and deploy alternative ways of being in the world. What are the practices that will sustain us? Silence may be just such a practice, and we may do well to experiment with whatever possibilities are afforded to us to enter into silence and to allow silence to enter into us…
Eminently worth reading in full: “The Thing That Is Silence.”
Bonus recommendation: Percival Everett‘s Dr. No, a “caper” novel about an “expert on nothing” (that’s to say, a brilliant mathematician who is an expert in his area of study: nothing) drawn into a plot to rob Fort Knox. As thought-provoking as it is entertaining– which is to say, tons.
[Image above: source]
* Rosalind, in Shakespeare’s As You Like It
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As we query quietness, we might recall that it was on this date in 1936 that Billboard magazine published the first pop music chart– the “Music Popularity Chart”– based on record sales. A listing of the ten most popular records, it became a weekly feature in 1940 (as pictured below). It fluctuated in size from ten to 30 records until 1955, when Billboard introduced its first Top 100 chart. The “Hot 100” chart, now recognized as the definitive singles chart in the US, was first published on August 4th, 1958.
“Old myths, old gods, old heroes have never died. They are only sleeping at the bottom of our mind, waiting for our call. We have need for them. They represent the wisdom of our race.”*…
The stories of oral societies, passed from generation to generation, are more than they seem, Patrick Nunn argues– they are scientific records…
In the 1880s, the American journalist William Gladstone Steel made several visits to a freshwater lake that filled the caldera of an extinct volcano in Oregon. For Steel, these visits were the fulfilment of a dream that began while he was just a schoolboy in Kansas. It was one day in 1870, while reading the newspaper wrapped around his school lunch, that he noticed an article about the ‘discovery’ of a spectacular body of freshwater named Crater Lake. ‘In all of my life,’ Steel would later recall, ‘I never read an article that took the intense hold on me that that one did…’ When he finally made it to the lake in 1885, he was so captivated that he determined to have the area designated as a National Park. But designation was not easily gained and required extensive documentation of the region.
To help with the reconnaissance, Steel engaged guides from the local Klamath peoples, who had occupied the area for countless generations. During their work together, Steel noted that they never once looked at the lake itself, instead ‘making all sorts of mysterious signs and staring directly at the ground’ – a sign that the Klamath regarded Crater Lake as a powerful place where a great cataclysm once happened and might happen again. For, as Klamath stories tell, buried deep beneath the lake waters is the spirit of Llao, a demon who lived within the volcano that once towered above Crater Lake. In a past age, Llao terrorised the Klamath by showering them with hot rocks and shaking the ground on which they lived. This continued until Llao was confronted by the benevolent spirit Skell who pulled the volcano down on the demon and created Crater Lake above.
What sounded to Steel like myth is more than just a story. It is a memory of an eruption that caused a volcano to collapse and form a giant caldera that, as many do, filled with freshwater. The eruption occurred 7,700 years ago, but the Klamath had preserved its story and even sustained associated protocols, such as not looking directly at the lake. Though they did not read nor write when Steel worked with them in the late 19th century, the Klamath people knew a story about an event that had occurred more than 7 millennia earlier, a story carried across perhaps 300 generations by word of mouth.
Many literate people today believe this kind of thing is impossible or, at best, an anomaly, because they evaluate the abilities of oral (or ‘pre-literate’) societies by the yardsticks of literate ones, where information seems far more readily accessible to anyone who seeks it. And, in doing so, they undervalue the ability of these oral societies to store, organise and communicate equivalent amounts of information. I have called this ‘the tyranny of literacy’: the idea that literacy encourages its exponents to subordinate the understandings of others who appear less ‘fortunate’. But accounts like Steel’s are beginning to help break apart this idea: oral traditions, rather than being subordinate, are capable of transmitting just as much useful information as the technologies of reading and writing…
Knowledge is where we find it: “Memories within myth,” from @PatrickNunn3 in @aeonmag.
* Stanley Kunitz
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As we respect our elders, we might spare a thought for Alfred Métraux; he died on this date in 1963. An anthropologist, ethnographer, and human rights leader, he published landmark studies of South American Indians, Haitian voodoo, and the ancient cultures of Easter Island. His work in South America was instrumental in illuminating the the brilliance of South American Indian cultures; he taught the world the reality of voodoo, and he solved the riddle of the Easter Island monoliths (the Moai).
Later in his career, Métraux worked with the UN, where he participated in the framing of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Later, as director of the Dept. of Social Sciences at UNESCO, he presided over a series of studies which resulted in a series of publications demonstrating the absence of scientific foundation for theories of racial superiority; the 1951 UNESCO Statement on the Nature of Race and Race Differences enshrined these findings.
“I rather think that archives exist to keep things safe – but not secret”*…
Brewster Kahle, founder and head of The Internet Archive couldn’t agree more, and for the last 25 years he’s put his energy, his money– his life– to work trying to make that happen…
In 1996, Kahle founded the Internet Archive, which stands alongside Wikipedia as one of the great not-for-profit knowledge-enhancing creations of modern digital technology. You may know it best for the Wayback Machine, its now quarter-century-old tool for deriving some sort of permanent record from the inherently transient medium of the web. (It’s collected 668 billion web pages so far.) But its ambitions extend far beyond that, creating a free-to-all library of 38 million books and documents, 14 million audio recordings, 7 million videos, and more…
That work has not been without controversy, but it’s an enormous public service — not least to journalists, who rely on it for reporting every day. (Not to mention the Wayback Machine is often the only place to find the first two decades of web-based journalism, most of which has been wiped away from its original URLs.)…
Joshua Benton (@jbenton) of @NiemanLab debriefs Brewster on the occasion of the Archive’s silver anniversary: “After 25 years, Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive are still working to democratize knowledge.”
Amidst wonderfully illuminating reminiscences, Brewster goes right to the heart of the issue…
Corporations continue to control access to materials that are in the library, which is controlling preservation, and it’s killing us….
[The Archive and the movement of which it’s a part are] a radical experiment in radical sharing. I think the winner, the hero of the last 25 years, is the everyman. They’ve been the heroes. The institutions are the ones who haven’t adjusted. Large corporations have found this technology as a mechanism of becoming global monopolies. It’s been a boom time for monopolists.
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As we love librarians, we might send carefully-curated birthday greetings to Frederick Baldwin Adams Jr.; he was born on this date in 1910. A bibliophile who was more a curator than an archivist, he was the the director of the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City from 1948–1969. His predecessor, Belle da Costa Greene, was responsible for organizing the results of Morgan’s rapacious collecting; Adams was responsible for broadening– and modernizing– that collection, adding works by Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Willa Cather, Robert Frost, E. A. Robinson, among many others, along with manuscripts and visual arts, and for enhancing the institution’s role as a research facility.
Adams was also an important collector in his own right. He amassed two of the largest holdings of works by Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost, as well as one of the leading collections of writing by Karl Marx and left-wing Americana.
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