#Musaeum Clausum

[shirtysleeves]

From Musæum Clausum

OR

BIBLIOTHECA ABSCONDITA

CONTAINING SOME REMARKABLE BOOKS, ANTIQUITIES, STATION & MOTION PICTURES & RARITIES OF SEVERAL KINDS, SCARCE OR NEVER SEEN BY ANY MAN, WO OR OTHERWISE, NOW LIVING

18. “Asexual Healing” (1981).

While it is more or less widely known that in the interval between his separation from Janis Hunter in 1979 and his death in 1984, Marvin Gaye was almost monastically chaste, practically nobody knows the extent to which he had adopted chastity as a modus vivendi by the beginning of this interval, let alone the extent to which this selfsame MV was seminal (an admittedly inapt but no-less-admittedly infungible adjective) to the composition of his chart-topping quasi-swansong “Sexual Healing.”  The history of this seminality reads as follows: within weeks if not days if not hours if not minutes of his last-ever meeting with Hunter, Gaye happened to be vouchsafed a viewing of Chaka Khan’s promotional video for “I’m Every Woman” and was immediately struck (or stricken) by this video’s simultaneous presentation of four fully mobile clones of Ms. Khan—and struck (or stricken) by that presentation not, as might be expected, in appreciation of it qua electronic Kunststück, qua virtually guaranteed elicitor of an ejaculation of Wonderful what we can do nowadays! but rather in appreciation of it qua presumptive first-bringer-to-mind of the potential gratuitousness of sexual coition to biological reproduction.  Chaka can do it on her own, he is reported to have murmured in presumptive émerveillement whilst spectating on this video; she don’t (sic) (sic) need a man to help her.  This viewing was the genesis of a hymn to parthenogenesis, “Asexual Healing,” which Gaye categorically envisaged being released in tandem with a promotional video essentially identical mutatis mutandis to the one for “I’m Every Woman.”  But alas!: the Havana-puffing fatwigs at Columbia (the record label, not the U.S. state-capital or U.S. federal district) put their collective foot down on this envisagement.  The videodisc [for so music videos were then quasi-universally called, incredibly appalling though this may sound to present-day LaserDisc gourmandizers and Martha Quinn-stalkers alike], quoth these foot-downputters, is the most-prestigious music-presentation genre of the immediate future; we can’t have our flagship male soul-cum-R&B artist releasing an instantiation of this genre that simply echoes what Chaka Khan has already done, that in visual terms effectively merely proclaims ‘I’m every man’ in an erotic, non-Hofmannsthalian sense.  Whereupon Gaye is reported to have consternatedly cried: Shia, Neroni! I already done (sic) (sic) recorded the whole damn song.  Do you fatwigs really expect me to toss the whole damn thing in the skip (sic) (sic) and book the Fellas [“the Fellas” being Gaye’s priceless nickname for his powdered coke-powered team of session musicians] for a whole ’nother weekend? Faute de mieux, the fatwigs expected him to do just that, and entirely on his own dime.  But ever-resourceful and ever-adept at the most minute minutiae of electronic studio w****dry, not to mention acoustic English prosody, Gaye quickly concluded that via a deletion of the unaccented a from each occurrence of asexual in the main vocal track, the song could be salvaged in its entirety, admittedly to the utterly fatal detriment of its potentially What’s Going On-eclipsingly revolutionary denunciation of the entire world-governing coitional dispensation. But Gaye, being at heart and bottom more of a Stoic than a stoichiometrist, took a philosophical attitude to the entire artistic debacle.  When they finally let me both make the video I want to make and restore that unaccented ‘a’, he mused, the true message of the song will be all the more devastating for having been so vociferously heralded by its antithesis. Sadly, on April Fools’ Day, 1984, Marvin Gaye, Sr. put paid to all hopes for the making of that video, and consequently “Asexual Healing” has finished up being the last thing in the world its composer ever wished it to become –viz., the ultimate hookup track.

 19. “(Don’t Fear) the Umlaut” (1976).

Blue Öyster Cult recorded this track for both inclusion in or on their album Agents of Fortune and release as that album’s first single. Reportedly, the principal impetus to or catalyst of its composition was lead guitarist Donald Bruce “Buck” Dharma’s annoyance at thousands of queries and complaints from fans, critics, and compositors alike regarding the band’s surmounting of the second vocable in its name with an umlaut that admittedly flouted English orthographical conventions to no apparent phonological purpose, inasmuch as not a single BÖC-member had ever been heard by an interviewer to pronounce that second vocable as anything other than an exact phonological copy of the famous upmarket first pronunciation thereof in the Gershwin brothers’ “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off,” let alone as even the vaguest approximation of the Franco-German œ, to which it, the umlauted o, was and ever had been appropriated by default. (Impetus-aut-catalyst-wise the remonstrations of compositors in particular must not be discounted, inasmuch as back in those footy days of pre-desktop publishing, the acquisition of the so-called supplemental Eurotrash grid comprising the first tier of diacritically enhanced cast-lead forms could set the purchaser back several thousands of those days’ dollars, an imponderably large sum for all but the largest metropolitan newspapers [and hence {perhaps damningly?} well beyond the reach of such college rags as the Stony Brook Statesman, whose concert-review page had undoubtedly contributed a good meganewton or so to the initial rocket-boost of publicity that had thrust the ’Cult {not to be confused with the transpondial and as-of-then-not-yet existent cult-ensemble The Cult} into the Billboard-bathing limelight].  What I meantersay here is that vis-à-vis the compositors’ particular case, Dharma may very well have been reacting defensively—i.e., in preemptive disavowal of all remorse at any financial hardship he may have occasioned the poor sods.)  Perhaps not quite needless to say, the audio-rushes of this song were not favorably received by the Havana-puffing fatwigs at Columbia (yes, the same record label referenced in the preceding entry in this catalogue and presumably presided over by an executive team of H-PFs exactly three-fifths identical to the one that were [sic] destined to put the kibosh on the tune-video referenced therein [the three-fifths figure is extrapolated from data presented in that now-classic 1996 analysis of the actuary actualities of corporate boardrooms The Silver Ceiling by the eminent Anglophone sociologist of undetermined national passportship, Brad Macpherson Caputo]): dreading to the depths of their hobnailed jackboots a backlash from Anglophone consumers of virtually every shape, nationality, and stripe [for this was, after all, a mere 31 years after the conclusion of the so-called Second World War, when every umlauted vowel was instantly evocative of Nazi Germany and hence resuscitative of potentially lethal cardiac-arrest-or cerebral hemorrhage-inducing memories] those selfsame fatwigs reportedly required each and every such transcript to be ingested by a goat that was to be cast immediately thereupon into the core of a nuclear reactor lest some intelligible trace of the lyrics survive in its excreta.  This requirement having been completely efficaciously fulfilled, no complete transcript of the lyrics of the song survives, but a Tonemaster C-60 cassette comprising the otherwise worthless so-called session diary of Seth Meyers (no, not that or the Seth Meyers [at least I think not that Seth Meyers, but who the heck can be arsed to check]), the Agents of Fortune sessions’ coffee-gopher, affords us the following tantalizing glimpse of but a few of the presumably umpteen-trillion glories contained in the Liedertext of “Don’t Fear the Umlaut”: Nietzsche and Strindberg / Are united in eternity / Ninety million people every day / Like the Germans both East and West / Not to mention the Swedish / (Albeit not the Danish) / All use the umlaut / We can be like them.  Inasmuch as here in contrast to the otherwise consubstantial case of “Sexual Healing,” the crux of the fatwigs’ beef hinged on the lyrics of the song, and especially on a portion of those lyrics that contained an accented syllable, any circumvention of the fatwigs’ fiat by studio w******y was absolutely out of the question, and even if it had not been, the band were [sic] then so inured to being led about by the nose-ring by their producer, David Lucas (so Bob Sedule, music critic of the abovementioned Statesman), himself a notorious fat- wig chattel, that they would not have lifted a finger, let alone fingered a lift, in demurral at the fiat.  And so Dharma dutifully penned what he only-decades-afterwards, and only after much Jello-shot-fueled plying, described as a “dull-as-dishwater knock-off of a Black Sabbath death ode,” an ode to whose poetic and prosodic niceties he reportedly (i.e., via the reportage of the above Jello shot-plyer, who must remain anonymous) devoted so little attention that he managed to Bic or Biro “the f**king execrable scrap of doggerel” out in its entirety with his left foot onto a discarded square of toilet paper while employing his right-cum-writing (albeit cum-non-onanizing) hand exclusively in a game of darts, a game in which he solidly won via a hat-trick of bull’s eyes despite reportedly (i.e., via the reportage of the abovementioned Mr. Sedule) being the worst darts player west of East Hampton-cum-east of Westport.  In the light of all o’ the above, it will readily and correctly be inferred that the notorious once-per-beat cowbell-clunking of “Don’t Fear the Reaper” was also part of the soundscape of “Don’t Fear the Umlaut”; and in the light thereof it will perhaps at least be queried whether the  notorious prominence of the cowbell vis-à-vis the first song enjoyed some rationale in “Don’t Fear the Umlaut” that it lost in being recast as “Don’t Fear the Reaper.” The answer to this query is an unqualified if ultimately disappointingly prosaic Yes.  You see, the abovementioned David Lucas, having enjoyed a holiday in the prevailingly Germanophone Bavarian-cum-Swiss-cum-Austrian Alps, and almost exactly contemporaneously purchased and listened to Karajan’s recording of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, concluded that there was something inalienably Alpine and consequently umlautine about the cowbell and thereupon insisted upon that instrument’s accentuation in the instrumental mix.  And as they say the rest is [far too abominable a(n) SOA to be denoted by mere farting noises].

20.  The Pope of Greenwich Village (1984).  Not to be confused with a certain film of the same name shot on the same location in the same year by the same production crew with the same cast.  The scene is the eponymous Village in ca. 1950.  Lex (Mickey Rourke) is a struggling garret-dwelling poet who obdurately insists on composing exclusively in metrically unimpeachable heroic couplets as if it were still ca. 1699.  Dick (Eric Roberts), an unmistakable if corporeally unlikely stand-in for Allen Ginsberg (although he reportedly gained 96 pounds and had 98 percent of his head hair transferred to his face for the role, the results of this exercise in De Niro-esque hyperMethodism are ultimately unconvincing), is an unstruggling ground floor-dwelling poet who prosodically (not to mention extra-prosidically) lets everything hang out to resounding critical and financial success.  The all-too-memorable climax of the film centers on Lex’s disruption of Dick’s reading of his epoch-making narrative-cum-epic poem Ouch! at the GV Brentano’s, as follows: “Though as self-styled King you may rob and pillage / I’m the only proper Pope of Greenwich Village” (to which Roberts all-too-deflatingly retorts: “Yes, you are indeed the only Pope of Greenwich Village, inasmuch as you are the Village’s only avowed imitator of Alexander Pope.  But what of that?  Can I get on with my reading?” and Rourke counter-retorts in abashed Pindaric non-numbers, “Yes, by all means. / Please do continue.”). Geraldine Page garnered a second best supporting actress Oscar nomination for her portrayal of Djuna Barnes, the Queen of Patchin Place, in a grand total of thirty seconds of screen time spent haggling mutually unintelligibly over the price of a shorty of Southern Comfort with a Basque liquor-store proprietor, portrayed by an impeccably vocal-coached Bill Macy (not to be confused with William H. Macy, then still a struggling garret-dwelling stage actor).  Although the film postdates the nascence of so-called rap or hip-hop by a full half-decade, it has been name-checked, as they say, at least once by every so-called rap or hip-hop so-called artist who has since emerged into provincial, let alone national or international, prominence, owing to its implicit promulgation of metrical monotony and copularly sequestered rhyme as prosodic norms.  For example, in 1993 the self-styled Dr. D** ejaculatively opined, That bitch, what’s his name, played by what’shisgoddamnmuddahfuckin’name—brother o’ that bitchess Hotlips Julia [here he is obviously confusing Roberts’s performance with Rourke’s]—the one that played that high-class ho opposite Richard Gere back in nineteen-naughty-ought…well, anyway, never mind that goddam bitch’s name: the point is, I done learnt everything I know about rhyme-hemorrhaging from that muddafuckin bitch, from the way he hemorrhaged rhymes in that movie from way back in the first Reagan administration…Shiah…what’s it called? etc.  The circle of influence came full circle in the most appalling fashion in 2015 with the unkenneling of the unspeakable hip-hop pseudo-musical Hamilton, wherein brutalized sub-sub-sub-approximations of heroic couplets were placed in the mouth of a near-contemporary of Alexander Pope whom the latter presumably would have smothered in his crib like the Heraclean serpent (had chronology permitted) on account of his manifestly Whiggish political orientation.

#Alexander Pope #Musaeum Clausum #The Pope of Greenwich Village #blue oyster cult #Marvin Gaye #Chaka Khan #Pastiches #more cowbell #Sir Thomas Browne #Djuna Barnes #Allen Ginsberg

[a-l-ancien-regime]

Cabinet of Curiosities (ca.1695) by Domenico Remps, held in the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, Florence

(via Lost Libraries | In the latter half of the 17th century the English polymath Thomas Browne wrote Musaeum Clausum, an imagined inventory of ‘remarkable books, antiquities, pictures and rarities of several kinds, scarce or never seen by any man now living’. Claire Preston explores Browne’s extraordinary catalogue amid the wider context of a Renaissance preoccupation with lost intellectual treasures.)

[podilatokafe]

Republic of Jazz: Musaeum Clausum – Musaeum Clausum (2018 UMLAUT RECORDS) Πηγή: Republic of Jazz: Musaeum Clausum - Musaeum Clausum (2018 UMLAUT RECORDS)

[experimentik]

20.June.2018 / Luciano Maggiore / Hannes Lingens

20.June.2018 / 20:30-

2 x Solo

Luciano Maggiore - playback devices, birds call

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Hannes Lingens - percussion

FB event: https://www.facebook.com/events/356137688213807/

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Luciano Maggiore (Palermo 1980) lives and works in London.

Active musician in the field of electroacoustic music, in recent years he has developed a strong interest in the mechanisms of sound diffusion, using speakers and several analogue and digital devices (walkmans, CD players, tape recorders) as principal instruments. His interest is focused on the architectural and psychoacoustic as well as dynamic and directional values of sound with a strong emphasis on fixed sounds.

His works are published by Balloon & Needle, Boring Machines, Consumer Waste, Hideous Replica, Palustre, Senufo editions, 1000Füssler, Triscele Registrazioni and Tulip records.

http://lucianomaggiore.blogspot.co.uk/

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Hannes Lingens - Percussion

In his recent solo performances, Hannes Lingens uses selected percussion instruments to explore and enlarge their inherent acoustic qualities. Within a predefined framework and in dialogue with the peculiarities of the respective space, he carries out in depth explorations of the instruments' resonance.

Hannes Lingens is a musician and composer active in the field of contemporary and experimental music based in Halle (Saale) and Berlin. Born in Hamburg in 1980, he studied drums with Michael Griener and Günter "Baby" Sommer in Dresden from 2003-2007 and moved to Berlin in 2006. In his work, he focusses mainly on the intersection between improvised and composed forms of experimental music. He plays drums and accordion in the ensembles Obliq, Konzert Minimal, [ro] and Die Hochstapler and is part of the musicians collective Umlaut Berlin. He has performed in most European countries, Japan, Israel, Russia and the USA with artists like Pierre Borel, Johnny Chang, Christof Kurzmann, Olaf Rupp and Derek Shirley. As an interpreter he has collaborated with composers Peter Ablinger, Philip Corner, Phil Niblock and Catherine Lamb among others. His music has been released on labels such as Umlaut Records, Intonema, Insub  and Another Timbre.

Website: hanneslingens.de

Selected Discography:

* Sébastien Beliah, Louis Laurain, Hannes Lingens - Musaeum Clausum LP/CD (Umlaut Records 2018) * Jamie Drouin & Hannes Lingens - Alluvium CD (Intonema 2017) * Die Hochstapler - The Music of Alvin P. Buckley CD (Umlaut Records 2015) * OBLIQ - Obliq 2014 CD (another timbre 2014) * Hannes Lingens - Four Pieces for Quintet DL&print (Insub 2013) * Hannes Buder & Hannes Lingens - [ro] CD (Umlaut Records 2013) * Die Hochstapler - The Braxtornette Project 2CD (Umlaut Records 2013) * Lingens/Borel - Anemic Cinema (on compilation "Echtzeitmusik Berlin", Mikroton Recordings 2012) * Obliq & Christof Kurzmann - Live at Umlaut Festival LP (Umlaut Records 2011) * Lingens/Borel - Murmur/Norestfortheastronaut 7“ (Umlaut Records 2010)

[shirtysleeves]

From Musæum Clausum

OR

BIBLIOTHECA ABSCONDITA

CONTAINING SOME REMARKABLE BOOKS, ANTIQUITIES, STATION & MOTION PICTURES & RARITIES OF SEVERAL KINDS, SCARCE OR NEVER SEEN BY ANY MAN, WO OR OTHERWISE, NOW LIVING

17. The Obviator (NBC; 1986-1988; running time: 48 minutes; 73 episodes; starring Edward Woodward, Patrick Macnee, and Patrick McGoohan).  NBC’s merely intermittently successful “Monday Night Football-trouncer” (as NBC president Brandon Tartikoff described the series in an intra-office memo) about a man whose job is to get people out of the way in the most literal sense (as series-creator Reinhold Weege [Barney Miller, Night Court, etc.] described the show in a pitching-tag that in the series’ third and final season [in UKspeak: the show’s third and final series] was incorporated into a quietly stentorian Don LaFontaine-voiced voiceover of an Incredible Hulk-style montage sequence leading into the opening credits]) has been universally hailed in retrospect by television critics as the most salient forerunner of such utterly irreproachable and 24/7, 7/52, and 52/10 oral gratification-exacting drama-series (or shows) as House, Breaking Bad, and Dexter, series (or shows) centering on a so-called morally ambiguous protagonist, in this case the unnamed title character, played by Woodward.  The lengthy (2-3 min.) opening scene of each of the show’s (or series’) first 59 episodes was of an ascot and cognac snifter-acting-exacting, beveled walnut wainscoting-swathed tête-à-tête conference between the two senior administrative figures (Macnee, McGoohan) of the Organization (in UK-distributed versions: Organisation) That Shall Not Be Named under any Circumstances, or OTSaNBeNuaC.  Minus a bit of preliminary “How’s the wife’s lumbago?”-style small talk, each of these conferences consisted entirely of a highly circumstantial briefing of McGoohan by Macnee (or, from Episode 43 onwards, Macnee by McGoohan, reportedly as a consequence of some behind-the-scenes rank-pulling on McGoohan’s part [“I was on Columbo as a villain twice—once as the commandant of a military academy and again as the CIA’s most-wanted double intelligence agent, both of which appearances self-evidently blow away your single supporting non-villainic appearance as a bloody twopenny-halfpenny bumbling cruise-ship captain in shorts,” he screamed during lunch at the studio canteen whilst menacing Macnee with a prawn fork-impaled custard blancmanche of potentially asphyxiating dimensions, according to Rona Barrett] on some ostensibly potentially world “peace”-annihilating or saving event—a summit between or among two or several major nation-State executives, a treaty-signing, a conveyance of some highly destructive weapon or highly toxic material across state (or State) lines, the walking of a major nation-State executive’s prize miniature Schipperke with a multi-milliard-dollar insurance policy autc.  At the conclusion of the briefing McGoohan (or, from episode 43 onwards Macnee) would lower (though not set down) his snifter, frown with seeming worried thought, and query Macnee (ditto, mutatis mutandis), “But what about [the surname of the obviatee, generally some utterly untranscribable syllable-string of apparently Slavic, Magyar, or Indian- Subcontinental {though never east-Asian, owing to the microepochal geopolitical necessity of offending neither the Chinese nor the Japanese nor the Vietnamese nor the Filipinos} origin]?”  To which query Macnee (ditto simpliciter), holding his half-full snifter aloft within inches of his lips, would reply with chilling equanimity, “Oh, he [or she]’s been obviated, of course,” and then drain the glass in one gulp.  The remainder of the episode would consist of a single protracted flashback dramatizing the circumstances leading to the obviatee’s obviation by Woodward only minutes—and, indeed, sometimes even only seconds—before the commencement of the potentially world “peace”-annihilating or saving event. The central turbine of the episode’s suspense-dynamo was the audience’s initial unawareness of whether the obviatee was ultimately to be obviated qua indispensable instrument of the attainment of OTSaNBeNuaC’s objectives or qua insufferable obstacle to that attainment—hence, whether he or she was to be saved from destruction or consigned to it; whether in obviating the obviatee Woodward was to rescue him or her or bump him or her off.  So, for example, on the salvational obviational hand, in Episode 27, “A Knight to Re-Member,” in which the PW“P”-A/SE is the fitting-out of the British foreign secretary, Sir Roger Twitt-Thornwaite (Charles Gray), with a prosthetic penis containing a so-called listening device or bug, the obviatee,  a master de-fluffer (a young Hugh Laurie) charged with forestalling an inevitably cover-annihilating erection of Sir Roger’s non-prosthetic membrum virile has to be got(ten) out of the way of the highly radioactive glutinous polonium discharges of a Soviet assassin (an old George Pravda)’s so-called double-dong water pistol. (Naturally such a highly off-colo(u)r or blue scenario occasioned many a demurral from the NBC censors, but in the end the excision of even the most marginal meta-priapistic components of the script was obviated by a resourceful combination of verbal innuendo and film-editing.)  A fine example of the other, destructive obviational hand is furnished by Episode 67, “As Ye Sow, So Shall Ye Weep,” in which Woodward is tasked to lure an obdurately recumbent 23-stone (146-kilogram) female pig (Sonya, who, incidentally, at the time was pregnant with Suky, the principal non-animatronic portrayer of the eponym of the 1995 cinematic international smash hit Babe [such that one may readily infer that no actual pig suffered any great harm {at least any great non-psychological harm} during the filming of Obviator Episode 67]) from athwart a two-lane stretch of U.S. Highway 301, and into a custom-built “slaughter cabana,” to make way for a convoy of Camp David-bound MX missiles.  Throughout the first nine-tenths of his share of this episode, Woodward’s comportment towards the pig is so gentle, playful, and indeed amorous (at one point he serenades her to the Spanish-guitar-strummed strains of Lorca and Shostakovich’s “Malagueña” with a long-stemmed rose clenched between his teeth) that the viewer can be forgiven for all the while supposing that he or she is in for a denouement of the same jib-cut as that of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.  It is only when, at about 40:03, Woodward moves off to the shoulder and starts waving a red cape at Sonya that the viewer even begins to suspect that he may have a destiny less ingratiating than cross-species matrimony in mind for her.  The spike in ratings numbers occasioned by this tearjerker impelled the show’s producers both to include Woodward’s psychoanalytic transference vis-à-vis his obviatee as a plot-device in every subsequent script and to postpone the moment of revelation of the determinant hand ever closer to the conclusion of the episode, such that by Episode 71, “The Perils of Pauline” (whose very title was and is a godsend of a dead giveaway to any viewer attuned to the richesses of ambiguity inherent in that wee preposition of), one sees Woodward not only falling in love with but becoming betrothed to his obviatee (Charo) by 27:32, and in the episode’s final half-dozen seconds, he is seen sawing away the ropes binding her to a railway track in the immediate path of an oncoming train; but no sooner has the last bit of twine been severed than the camera cranes back to reveal that the track is only inches away from a terrifyingly high steep cliff edge down which Pauline-stroke-Charo precipitously tumbles to her death and Woodward’s unmistakable gratification.  Ever keen to rub the viewer’s nose in the moral ambiguity and psychological complexity of their protagonist, the producers invariably rolled the closing credits of each episode over a micro-scene palpably set during the evening after the obviation, a micro-scene in which Woodward was to be observed either celebrating or mourning depending on whether he had bumped off or saved, respectively, the obviatee.  Thus, under the CCs of “The Perils of Pauline” one sees him reveling in a brothel with a half-naked doxy on either brimful champagne flute-bearing arm (L: Claudia Schiffer, R: Cindy Crawford); whereas under those of “A Knight to Re-Member” he is seen brooding in a manifestly inexpensive hotel (or possibly even motel) room over a brimful ashtray and alternating jiggers of two different mid-shelf bourbon-style whiskeys (Jim Beam and Schlomo Minkowitz, respectively).  The deafness induced by the groundbreakingness of this scene is surpassed in intensity only by the blindness induced by the brightness of the limitless prospects consequently opened up.

#Musaeum Clausum #Sir Thomas Browne #Pastiches #Edward Woodward #Patrick Macnee #Patrick McGoohan #Charo #Breaking Bad #House #Dexter #The Equalizer

[shirtysleeves]

From Musæum Clausum

OR

BIBLIOTHECA ABSCONDITA

CONTAINING SOME REMARKABLE BOOKS, ANTIQUITIES, STATION & MOTION PICTURES & RARITIES OF SEVERAL KINDS, SCARCE OR NEVER SEEN BY ANY MAN, WO OR OTHERWISE, NOW LIVING

11. Glengary Glenngould (1995), by David Mamet.  A viewing of Thirty-Two Short Films about Glenn Gould reportedly inspired Mamet to pen this reworking of his classic real estate selling play.

SYNOPSIS: Centuries of received commercial wisdom are summarily nullified on the sales floor of the Buffalo branch of Steinway and Sons with the arrival of Gould, a mild-mannered, soft-spoken, holy water stoup-mouthed rookie sales rep from Toronto.  [There is, incidentally, a back story to Gould’s appearance in Buffalo: the town affords him ready access to his sweetheart Cornelia, the wife of the conductor of the Buffalo Philharmonic.]  Declining to deliver the barest rudiments of a sales pitch, and preferring to close his deals at night by telephone at his lodgings in a Howard Johnson off of I-90, Gould opts to fritter away his workdays by wordlessly (if not exactly mutely) playing the keyboard works of Bach, Haydn, and Orlando Gibbons on his favorite concert grand, CD 318, and quickly outsells every other salesman in the shop.  His seemingly inexorable juggernaut of a hawker’s career is finally and permanently derailed when Caputo, thitherto the rep with the least spectacular commission record, takes a spanner to the shop’s hot water heater, thereby preventing Gould from performing his indispensable pre-recital arm-soaking ritual.   For my illustrative excerpt I have chosen the Act II showdown between Gould and Wieszkieszwiscz, the branch manager, which is widely regarded as both the play’s pivotal moment and the finest stretch of dialogue as yet penned by Mamet.

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WIESZKIESZWISCZ: Ah, Gould.

GOULD: G. Gould, sir.

WIESZKIESZWISCZ: Shut the fuck up.  Tell me something, Glenn: you ever take a dump and feel like you just slept 12 hours?

GOULD: No, sir, but I have just taken a Valium and feel as though I could stand to sleep eight.

WIESZKIESZWISCZ: Enough of this babyshit chickenshit trying to bullshit its way into being taken for full-fledged horseshit.  I gotta fucking tell you, Gould, a lot of fucking us—erm, or, rather, a fucking lot of us here at S&S aren’t exactly fuckin’ in high shittin’ cotton—

GOULD: Excuse me, sir: but should that not rather be, erm, stuffing in high fluffing cotton?

 WIESZKIESZWISCZ: Erm, yes: mutatis fucking mutandis, I guess it fucking should.  So, as I was fucking saying: a lot of us aren’t exactly shittin’ in high fuckin’ cotton over your approach to sales.  You are, I fucking take it, familiar with something known in our fucking industry as a pitch?

GOULD: I was not aware, sir, that Steinway and Sons had given over flogging pianos in favor of procuring sexual favors.

WIESZKIESZWISCZ: Don’t give me any of that fucking patent-pended Jesuitical lip of yours, Gould.  You know full fucking well I said “our fucking industry,” not “our fucking industry,” and that there’s all the fucking difference in the fucking world between the fucking two. 

GOULD: Agreed.  So, sir, you were saying…

WIESZKIESZWISCZ: I was saying, Gould, that there is a thing known to many in our fucking industry as a pitch, and—

GOULD: “--and this pitch, as ancient writers do report, doth defile; so—

WIESZKIESZWISCZ: --doth thy fucking company.”  Shakespeare, I Henry fucking IV, Act II, Scene fucking IV.  That’s not the kind of pitch I’m fucking talking about.  I’m talking about a certain kind of pitch there you can fucking count—as in a pitch, some pitches, ten, a hundred, a fucking gazillion pitches—

GOULD: --for example, C, C sharp, C flat (more often known as B in the system of equal-temperament), D, D-sharp (more often known as E flat—

WIESZKIESZWISCZ: --No, not musical pitches, you fucking dumb or smart ass: sales pitches, of which I have yet to hear a single one via that insufferably smug fucking puss of yours.  Come on, Gould.  What fucking gives?  Do you think you’re too good to play ball like the rest of us peons?

GOULD: Not at all, sir.  What bothers me, rather, is the competitive, comparative ambience in which the pitch operates.  I happen to believe that competition rather than money is the root of all evil, and in the pitch we have a perfect commercial vocalization of the competitive spirit.  Obviously, I’d exclude the round robin pitch from what I’ve just said.

WIESZKIESZWISCZ: Yeah, I know you have a dim view of salesrooms in general.  You once told the fucking New York Times that you found all the fucking live arts “immoral” because “one should not voyeuristically watch one’s fellow human beings in testing situations that do not pragmatically need to be tested.”

GOULD:  Yes, I confess that I have always had grave misgivings about the motives of people who go to salesrooms, department stores, whatever.  I don’t want to be unfair about this; in the past, I have sometimes made rather sweeping generalizations to the effect that anybody who visits a salesroom is a voyeur at the very best, and maybe a sadist to boot!  I’m sure that this is not altogether true; there may even be people who prefer the ergonomics at J. C. Penney to those in their living room.  So I don’t want to be uncharitable.  But I do think that the whole business about asking people to test themselves in situations which have no need of their particular exertions is wrong—as well as pointless and cruel.

I’m afraid that the “Let’s climb Everest just because it is there” syndrome cuts very little ice with me…there’s a pun in there someplace.  It makes no sense to do things that are difficult just to prove they can be done.  Why climb mountains, or ski back down, or dive out of airplanes or race motor cars, unless there is a manifest need for such behavior?

The sales pitch has been replaced, you know.  I don’t want to bore you with all the reasons why I think technology has superseded the sales pitch—I’ve enumerated them on many other occasions, and I don’t want to do that act again.  But there is one reason which I think bears on this question: technology has the capability to create a climate of anonymity and to allow the salesman the time and the freedom to prepare his conception of a product to the best of his ability, to perfect a statement without having to worry about trivia like nerves and spoonerisms.  It has the capability of replacing those awful and degrading and humanly damaging uncertainties which the pitching-session brings with it; it takes the specific personal performance information out of the commercial experience.  Whether the salesman is going to climb the commercial Everest on this particular occasion no longer matters.  And it’s for that reason that the word “immoral” comes into the picture.  It’s a difficult area—one where business ethics touch upon theology, really—but I think to have technology’s capability and not to take advantage of it and create a contemplative climate if you can—that is immoral!

WIESZKIESZWISCZ: No, Gould, I’ll tell you what’s really fucking immoral: that Goddam, chickenshit, panty-fucking-waist, high-fucking-falutin, way you got of fucking talking.  For fucking fuck’s sake, Gould, why the fuck can’t you fucking say fuck, you fucking fuck?

GOULD: Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

#Glenn Gould #David Mamet #Musaeum Clausum #Pastiches #Sir Thomas Browne

[shirtysleeves]

From Musæum Clausum

OR

BIBLIOTHECA ABSCONDITA

  CONTAINING SOME REMARKABLE BOOKS, ANTIQUITIES, STATION & MOTION PICTURES & RARITIES OF SEVERAL KINDS, SCARCE OR NEVER SEEN BY ANY MAN, WO OR OTHERWISE, NOW LIVING

10. Frost/Nixon II (2012).  A so-called prequel to the 2008 film Frost/Nixon, it dramatizes Richard Nixon’s efforts to sabotage John Kennedy’s inauguration via the services of the unscrupulous henchmen of  C.R.Ê.P.E  (the Committee to Royally Embarrass the President Elect), who attempt to break into Robert Frost’s room at the Mayflower Hotel and substitute Wallace Stevens’s “Man with a Blue Guitar” for Frost’s own “Dedication.”  With Martin Sheen as Robert Frost, Michael Sheen reprising his role as David Frost, Charlie Sheen as John Kennedy, Kevin Bacon as G. Gordon Liddy, and Bela Lugosi III as Richard Nixon. 

#Robert Frost #Wallace Stevens #Richard Nixon #John Kennedy #Musaeum clausum #Pastiches #Sir Thomas Browne