September 21, 2004
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My first playlist as an amateur veejay. Now with
"what was he thinking" remarks added in italics on each track.
And much self-indulgent rambling of all sorts.
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Overall goals:
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| Small bit of (essentially PG-13 rated) porn, faking the idea that this tape was taped over a porn tape. A naked woman out in a western desert is supposed to seem a familiar sight to the audience. |
| Raven seemed to think it was remarkable that some guy named "Joseph Brenner" produced the movie Inframan, so I used this bit of the title sequence more to keep her happy than to claim credit. (I think she's forgotten that she suggested it.) |
| Here we go: introduction to the meditation tape. Silly joke number 1, and the suggestion that all here is not silly jokes. |
| Beginning a series of icons for mediation: the great moose, evidently a bad statue of Rocky and Bullwinkle, from a courtyard of a place on the Sunset Strip in the 60s. |
| In the beginning... |
| Eagles are interesting icons, if you ask me. The Roman Empire, Napoleonic France, Nazi Germany and the United States.... what do these things have in common? |
| I think I had this in here somewhere... |
| You're supposed to notice the bat and skull logo on Princess Dragon Mom's desk. Much like the Alternative Tentacles record label, suspiciously enough |
| Ra draws the card of Judgment, with an image of his spaceship on it: two eyeballs with flaming irises and sperm-like tails... |
| Our first bit of mediation narration, the "control"/"humility" angle being an obvious set-up for a bondage joke: |
| Women in black strapped to a rotating chandelier... one of the odder bits from a well-known Hollywood musical, that strangely never seems to stick in anyone's mind. |
| And the ultimate in physical control, Jackie Chan. If I had some Christian narration about "Grace" I would've used it as a lead-in to this... |
| A different kind of "grace", the game with the Overseerer perhaps as another struggle for control over "physical nature"? Leads up to some scenes of a red convertible Cadillac in action (a reliable laugh: it's much like the Caddy the screen is mounted on). One of my missions here is to spread some knowledge about Sun Ra to the Burning Man folks, most of whom should know more about him than they do. Ra is a pretty brilliant jazz improviser/composer, often given short-shrift by the establishment because of his psychedelic/messianic aspects -- consider that in the Ken Burn's Jazz documentary, there is no mention of Sun Ra, not even in the long list of the many well-known musicians to graduate from Fletcher Henderson's ensemble. That omission is the smoking gun, the tip-off that Ra was skipped intentionally: word has it that he refused to let Wynton Marsalis play in the Arkestra. |
| Still on the car motif, slo-mo of a brief glimpse of 60s tailfins |
| beginning of a chase scene: a weird "moonbuggy" driven off into the Nevada desert (a joke much like the above: it's intended to seem like a familiar burning man motif in context) |
| jump to a woman in a gold minidress walking away from camera... did I think that seemed Burning Man? Seems like a forced/flawed transition to me. (Trivia: close study of Mondo Mod shows that this shop was next door to The Great Moose statue.) Anyway, the narration about the coolness of weird fashion is supposed to make you think Burning Man, but then -- |
| The Inframan costumes put all others to shame. Note: 'become my slaves'. Have we been enslaved? |
| Perhaps we've been enslaved by our cars? (I'm now edging toward undercutting the above hints of car-worship. This is, of course, all too obscure.) The narrator goes on about how the sunset strip turns into a traffic jam every weekend night, which can "only mean one thing--" |
| i.e. that we are in the grip of some nefarious, villainous forces, "The Lame One" and his henchmen, including "Moloch" (another obscure chain of association: "Moloch" is the devil of modern civilization haunting Allen Ginsberg's "Howl Part II", and we will shortly see Ginsberg interviewed.) |
| Silly bit -- a dig at Los Angeles -- from a truly terrible horror movie. Do you have any idea how long I've been waiting to use this joke? This is probably the real reason that I agreed to do this project. |
| An alternative to the Los Angeles nightmare: bike transport. Some scenes from Critical Mass (also suggestive of Burning Man fashion) |
| Kerouac poem about Times Square, with some vintage clips. The point: this is what a real urban area is like. |
| Ginsberg and Huncke talk about the scene in Times Square in the 40s: This is the kind of social interaction possible only in a Real City where people aren't entirely sealed up in cars. Ginsberg's closing lines about searching for supreme reality take us into... |
| Another urban scene: a woman finds meaning to her life, playing the freak in a public place. Then an escalator of her dreams transports her to another (higher?) reality... I chose to play this *entire* tape including the silly claymation stuff at the end because it's at least funny, and I thought the artists who did this one deserved some respect. I was told to "do what ever I want" with this tape (by Bob Limp, the director's husband): since it had no obnoxious restrictions placed on it, playing the entire thing was fine (no need to invoke a "fair use" defense, if challenged). But I'm afraid the claymation stuff damages the thematic momentum I was trying to build, here, moving into... |
| From the metaphysical escalator to the "ladder heavenward". The "primal, thrusting energy" association might suggest a sexual transition, but I am not low brow enough to indulge that thought... |
| But I am lowbrow enough to associate it with sword fighting. But then, here sword practice segues into the ghostly appearance of a "dream lover", so maybe the sexual connotation really is there. Note also the associations with "ladder heavnwards" and running around on swords, climbing about the snow and ice covered mountains. I am actually proud of all these overdetermined connections, though I'm not sure it really means much of anything. |
| Another sort of dream lover, who discusses a dream lover of her own. |
| And speaking of dream lovers: Jackie Chan in drag. A transition from "dream" to "illusion". |
| Now we're on the theme of "illusion", a demo of a stage illusion, the "Lite Flight" product. |
| this rap is supposed to have something to do with illusions, though I don't remember how much at the moment. Funny I didn't do ocean scenes from this "sea of consciousness" idea, eh? But then, surfing and "wiping out" comes up a little later. |
| Back to the "Lite Flight", the illusion is explained. |
| Speaking of illusions, Nixon tells us "let's get away from trust". (I let this bit run on too long: sorry. Some decisions I was making on the fly, and I was lazy about going back and editing it down. Amazing how painful it is to listen to Nixon talk.) |
| A reprise of "The Lame One": now used as a Nixon joke |
| Another comment on Nixon, who is best known for the way he wiped out. And this leads into... |
| The creative wipe-out of Charlie Chaplin. Another obscure association: Jackie Chan and Charlie Chaplin strike me as equivalent figures. Masters of physical grace, inspired clowns who both took total control over the film medium in a way equaled by few others. |
| Still another style of "wiping out", get it? This time on purpose. (Here I'm trying to get in some promised bits-of-porn, without offending the now-prudish Burning Man administration.) |
| Another bit of porn, with some R-at-most glimpses of a lesbian trio, (including a dikey woman stuffing away her strap-on)... closing on a lesbian kiss is another (excessively obscure) set-up for something else I had in mind, so hold that thought. |
| Get it? Get it? Menage a trois => the number three. Also the "bridge", obviously a reference to that strap-on. Right? That was obvious wasn't it? Oh well. Fortunately it's also the segue to... |
| Some sublimely dorky cycle-activists singing about the need for bike lanes on bridges. Here, I'm probably still doing penance for getting involved with an auto-phillic art project. Or maybe this is my idea of being subversive (an artsy excuse for being compulsively obnoxious). |
| Excessively long, but somewhat funny narration about the unreliability of local news media, included by way of explanation of the following bit: some scenes of cops assaulting cyclists. |
| This bit is too long, but I think it's outrageous that video tape can exist of this kind of police malfeasance without it making big news. If you watch this carefully, you'll note: (1) at the outset, there's nothing much going on stage left, or else the woman with the camera, and the female cop she's videotaping would have been looking over there (2) two cops, in a coordinated attack, have picked up a bike by the handle bars, and flipped it and the rider upside down... they're then getting their nightsticks ready to beat him up (3) the cop who was originally on camera runs back, and presumably gives warning that they're on camera (4) the police give some guilty glances at the camera (5) the cops who assaulted that cyclist quickly wander away off to the left, and bust someone else, who knows for what reason: we see this big guy doing a post-Rodney King ostentatious display of submissiveness (6) the cyclist who was originally assaulted, the guy in the green wool cap, has gotten up and is walking away unencumbered -- if he had done anything to deserve that assault, wouldn't he have been restrained? (By the way, nearly everyone who was arrested that day had charges dropped... whatever prompted the police actions in this case, it evidently wasn't anything that would stand-up in court). Anyway, that's what I saw. What did you see? |
| What some people saw was the Willie Brown administration doing some muscle flexing to get the numbers down at Critical Mass. Anyway, note the actor playing Blowfeld... |
| Same actor, yes? I've always liked these pretentious sentence fragments at the close of Rocky Horror, and they give me an excuse to jump to... |
| A rap about how tremendously useful insects are in the process of breaking down compost, transforming it into fertilizer, which undercuts Charles Grey's lines dismissing the human race as insects. Perhaps we have our own role to play? |
| From recycling to redemption, and from redemption to... |
| Perhaps the queen of mid-80s gothic-industrial culture, a woman with more edge than any thousand members of the burning squid gang. This is one of the "risky" points, by the way, one of the places where I thought there was a serious chance that the Burning Man crowd might be too weirded out and insist on a change of tape. (It's funny I didn't realize the long Nixon bit was a risky point too, but for some reason I didn't worry about that, and that's where this tape got yanked the first time I saw it in use.) |
| An atmospheric connection, at best... I liked the noir imagery, the pensive look of the woman looking over her shoulder, who in the original film was supposed to be "chinese", but to stretch things a bit (well, a lot) we can pretend she looks japanese enough for this transition to... |
| A grossly unconvincing propaganda film explaining how the US managed to convince itself it needed ethnic concentration camps. America: the Best Damn Concentration Camps in the Free World. This stuff is intercut with different other japanese associations, mostly as jokes. There *may* be something going on here about japan then-and-now, and maybe an attempt at adding a little color to the famously whitey-white burning man scene (there's more of that below). |
| silly association, from "cheerful" japanese, to a japanese grind core band |
| another silly association: sacrifice of japanese property to... |
| Ghidrah destroying japanese property |
| some sort of spiel about "cooperation"... |
| decidedly uncooperative japanese monsters |
| We leave the propaganda film with perhaps the silliest joke transition of the entire mix. Camouflage nets->Fishnet stockings |
| Long bit, intended to be crowd-pleasing, and at least Sam the Soul (or whatever he called himself) had a decent voice. I bet they didn't tell the band they were going to intercut their performance with upskirt shots of the same woman jumping around in different outfits in an attempt at conveying the impression that there's a crowd of girls in miniskirts in the audience... |
| The transformation of evil into good... does that have something to do with women in fishnets? Anyway, there's a connection to... |
| The "monster" Mothera (sometimes spelled Mothra) plays the good-guy in this particular film. The plucky young Mothera is ambassador to the other monsters, and is willing to take on Ghidra (perhaps better: "Ghidora") himself. Here we have the diminutive faerie twins doing a televised astral projection, to a scene of pagan worship, perhaps unrivaled in any B movie anywhere. Some really strange lines of poetry: "Why are you weeping, happiness?" |
| mouths transmitting holiness => Mothera's song, for example. And a counter-example... |
| Nixon once again shows us his unholy mouth. His "untrustworthiness" is to be compared with... |
| An honest admission of inauthenticity. Sun Ra insists that black people are myths, or people of myths... |
| Some somber "elegy" rap, which was a minor craze in the early nineties, a reaction against pro-violence Gangsta rap. This one is here because (1) I like the way it sounds, in comparison to most rap, certainly most major label rap like this (2) I want to raise the issue that all of this gangsta/anti-gangsta/revolutionary black stuff is largely just more posing, another kind of survival-as-myth (3) This is probably the only piece of hip-hop anyone was likely to encounter at Burning Man (4) the refrain is both catchy and interesting "the only way to get there is together, so start the revolution, you know I mean whatever", where "whatever" appears to be a reference to the famous Malcom X line "by any means necessary" (which I suspect has been taken way out of context in popular understanding, but let that go for now...). |
| There's an association between this and that notion of a murky, mythological black people, I think. |
| I like this bit, but why did I put it here? Damned if I can remember at this point. One more time, it returns to the phrase "dream lover". |
| One more time, another kind of "Dream Lover". Really terrible repro of a terrible film of Bettie Pages, but her spirit manages to punch through anyway, providing that sense of "utter holiness"... |
| A commentary on Bettie Pages, and an introduction to... |
| The holiness of Cecil Taylor, one of the early inventors of free jazz improvisation, and one of the greatest living masters. This is another type of music greatly underrepresented at burning man, and not often given the respect that it deserves in my opinion: in the Ken Burn's "Jazz" documentary, Cecil Taylor is the sole representative of free jazz, and the only performer to receive any critical remarks from the various commentators -- one of the Marsalis bros accuses him of "self-indulgent bullshit", which strikes me as a better description of the Marsalis bros... So this is some more score settling on my part, me trying to spread word. It's also another danger point where I risk losing the audience entirely... that's why it's in this cowardly position near the end of the tape. |
| A cut from Cecil Taylor's smile, to another type of smile. Another type of holiness? (The "wave at the camera" business is here because I thought I was closer to the end of the tape than I was.) |
| One more time, the aleph narration: we return to the beginning. I intended to do a reprisal of the icons of narration I led off the tape with (I only did this in a very loose way). |
| Yes, another riff on "primal thrusting energy" |
| The bat and skull logo again, closing on a different line of dialog. |
| Tossed in for general absurdity. Perhaps there's a suggestion that the apaches were even better assassins, or were the victims of assassination? |
| We worship the great moose again. |
| We worship the blinking skull. |
| We contemplate the great eagle. |
| Once again we ponder judgement... |
| a display of a complete lack of judgment... insane efforts to speed the composting process. A fortuitous close: the great icon of Black & Decker |
| I used a number of little bits of this, so I thought I'd provide some attribution |
| This on the otherhand, was mostly a joke - thanks to the Rosicrucian Museum and so on. |
| Waving goodbye one more time, now that I know we really are near the end of the tape. |
| Some naked guys doing some heavy kissing, with no naughty bits on display. So what "rating" does this rate? Some folks at Burning Man have gotten hyped up about public displays of sex in recent years, but I don't think it's even clear what that means... I get the definite sense though that obscenity is considered more obscene when it's two men doing it, so this is supposed to poke a finger in that wound. If someone objects at this point in the tape, why didn't they object to the lesbian kiss scene? (This would work a little better if the lesbian kiss was presented a little closer to the gay male one, but you can't have everything.) |
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Getting set to do this tape was as bad or worse than doing one of my college radio shows.
There was the usual period of excessive note taking, locating the little bits I wanted to use,
trying to stick them together into interesting/funny transitions that I thought would work.
Then, there was this painful period with all of this stuff swimming around in my head,
I felt totally stuck: what would
the opening move be? Which piece should go first? I had lots of things I wanted to use,
but they all seemed like stuff that should be put later in the tape, not right at the outset.
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Then I got it: the meditation tape "A Mystical Journey Through the Hebrew Alphabet"
(released in 1989, written by Edward Hoffman with images by Harvey Gitlin) would
provide the lead, with an appropriately absurd narration about how you should turn down the
lights and eliminate distractions. In fact, bits of this tape could be used to provide the
backbone for the entire mix, injecting a philosophic
tone, providing a hint about a serious undercurrent and also provide fodder for endless dumb
jokes, contrasting the high brow stuff and the low. Lead and theme, set and match, all
in one shot!
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Then the tape broke. Or something. It made horrible noises on re-wind and
then refused to play correctly. I had much experience in my ill-spent youth in
hacking audio cassettes, but I had no idea what went on inside VHS cassettes...
I broke out the jeweler's screwdrivers and dismantled it, figured out how the ratchet
mechanism worked (and the secret override for the ratchet mechanism, which if I'd known
about I might have avoided this disassembly), and then figured out what had happened to the tape:
it had flipped itself over on one end (something I've known to have happen to audio cassette's
though the symptom in their case is you hear the sound from the other side of the tape played backwards).
I flipped it back, straightened everything out, figured out where all the little plastic bits
and springs had to go to get it to work again, and I was in business once more.
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But it turns out that VHS tape-to-tape dubbing is an even clumsier process than I expected
it would be (pausing the record deck then un-pausing it works well for a controlled
transition, but there's no way to check what you've done without doing a full stop,
and re-wind, and the stop/start mechanism has so much positioning error that you can
never get it precisely where you want it). Even worse:
I'd hoped I could record a "base" layer on the tape, then record over it in an intentionally
sloppy way so you'd get little bits of the base layer in the gaps between things,
but when you do a Stop it evidently dumps some junk on the tape (probably this is
part of the DPSS mechanism, or as I like to think of it, DPISS: doing a Stop pisses
on the tape, so that you can later scan for the urine stains between tracks).
At any rate, this totally nixed that "base" layer idea...
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And that was that. Some sloppy transitions, but nothing
that seemed really damaging,
Some outright broken thematic transitions, but it's not
like anyone was going to notice what I was doing there
anyway.
My real regrets: no Japanese anime, and worse, no Indian filmee.
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So, I started thinking about doing a sequel, a second
tape -- hopefully slapped together a little more quickly
that the first -- which would focus on the stuff I left
out of the first. I started looking at the Filmee videos I own (these were random, $1 pickups at Bombay Bizarre on Valencia Street), and one of them had a really cool musical number in it I wanted to use, but the dubbing of this tape was totally messed up, there were lots of dropouts, half-second blips that would even go to blue screen sometimes. So I started trying to think of ways to do video mixing... if I could put another signal in with this Filmee, I could possibly fill in the dropouts (not to mention create something really weird). First thought: the video jacks on VCRs just use audio connectors... why not try an audio mixer? I tried my cheapo Radio Shack job, and found that no output came out of it whatsover and concluded that the video signal must use a much wider range of frequencies than audio, and any audio mixer would probably throw away a big part of the signal (of course, this Radio Shack job throws away a big part of the audio signal too, but you don't usually get exactly nothing out of it...). But what about audio Y-connectors? Just plug two VCR outputs together, and record on a third VCR, how does that work? Answer: it's really messy, very pleasingly weird. Both singals continually fight each other for dominance, the image jiggles and rolls and sometimes you see one image and sometimes the other, sometimes both... one of the VCRs I was using had really bad heads, and that added some bands of static to one of the images, too. For the sake of balance between the two sources, I generally used the audio signal from the tape in the bad VCR: audio dominance given to the less dominant image. Thus, "Something is Wrong With the Picture" was born, a simultaneous "mix" of some Indian Filmee and Japanese Anime. I like this one a lot. Raven liked this one a lot, too. I have my doubts it went over well with the crowd, but I could be wrong. |
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And so, my ideas for doing another collection of little bits
were put on hold, probably indefinitely because it's not
likely I'll have a motivating excuse to make one of these
things again. Still, I do have a bunch of left over material. And I really do like the first tape, sometimes Raven and I watch it again (never know when you're going to be in the mood for the Mothera song). And "Mystic" could use some balance in other directions as well. Mystical philosophy is all well and good, but some more scientific/technical material would be good too... |