Pretending I'm Viking Moses crossed with Enzo Mari

[imomus]

This morning I'm scribbling lyrics, cutting and pasting verbal objects of value, playing with words as if they were wooden animal shapes by Enzo Mari. Where will today's scribbly doodles end up? Who knows... I'm going to try singing them to a guitar in a minute, pretending I'm Viking Moses.

under flickery tubes
drinking spilly tea
the calcutta book dealer
reads "the botany of the drupe"

the caucasus pistachio
grows in asia minor
7000 bc, turkey, the nuts were used for food
the deeper the shade of green, the more
the nuts are esteemed
shake the tree, collect the seeds
upon a tarp or canvas
shells split well, you open them by hand
one pistachio tree can live for centuries
i understand

when your eyes have come back to your eyepits after draw
will you knit a scale model of the alps from white wool?
will you do a bit of reading, or fish about for squid
take a pad for scribbling, in the mopey poky style

a house pet and a pot plant
fight through your apartment
the lion and the unicorn
jamaica and tibet

the house is washing dishes
an eclectic thermo-meter
virtue and responsibility
are automated

time to take a spidery walk
blue gas and glass animals
shooting contre jour
clapping hands
an experimental sound field
on a map on which the suburbs don't appear

cute formalism of the carpenter
enzo mari
this page has a peephole to the future
spring husband, shaving
bright plum generation
wooden self-build table smell

eat a soup cooked with leeks
and black bread in the bath
wholemeal in the sauna room
white bread in the bedroom
sausages with flour, kidneys, chocolate buttons
change the water filters, fit jelly bean shoes

solve a chinese puzzle, make a chinese box
pour ink into the milk jug of a wedgewood cement mixer
play chess with a monkey, let the monkey win
visit antwerp briefly, staying at the winter inn

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

to me you're are random word generator at worst and a cultural leech who use exotic sensibilities as a western currency to means of achiving the cult of personality.

[(Anonymous)]

that was just a nasty thing to say! Do you say things like this to people face to face?

[dmlaenker.livejournal.com]

The both of you are needed.

UNRELATED

[benchilada.livejournal.com]

Linked my brother Jason to your Goldfinger article, and here's his response. He's an interesting fellow, under 40 and wearing bow ties and starching shirts with boxed starch and plays the organ (including the reed organ he owns) and so on. He was born about 80 years late...

"I think he's off base on this one.

Without researching the matter by watching all the old 007 flicks I can lay my hands on, I would say that Goldfinger had a high modernist office because Bond wasn't Sgt. Paddy O'Reilly, and he didn't concern himself with middle-class crooks. He moved among the upper crust, and the villains, likewise, were men of culture. I can't remember what the MI5 offices looked like in the 007 movies. Can you?

At any rate, I don't think it's at all remarkable in the world of cinema for the sets to be of the best contemporary design in whatever era, at least when you're dealing with the lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-famous genre.

Right now, I'm trying to remember some other films from the 1950's, and I'm not doing too well, but everyone had modernist offices. Even Perry Mason.

Momus seems to forget that Technology is Swell. There were shorts about the really Swell kitchens of the future, where Mom could just push a button and the nuclear oven or whatever would cook the roast, and push another button and a cabinet full of plates would come up from its recessed hiding place with the reassuring nnnnn of the electric motor. In the end, Mom or The Missus ends up serving dinner for the family or a lovely cocktail party without breaking a sweat. Then, with the press of another button, the Super Electronic Dishwasher of Tomorrow cleans up and puts all the dishes back where they belong.

Regarding the future-dystopia genre, he overlooks a very practical problem: Only the very latest looks even remotely futuristic. If Fritz Lang had set Metropolis in the London of Jack the Ripper, no one would have believed it. Will the home of the future look more like 221-B Baker Street, or the latest issue of Architectural Digest?

Perhaps now *I* am reading too much into things, but do I detect a rejection of the rejection of the notion of Progress? Progress, that Victorian-era idea that society is always getting better, dripping with social darwinism, and of a piece with the thoughtless optimism that could make Orville Wright predict that the airplane would make future wars impossible because it had removed the element of surprise from the battlefield. (Yes, he really said that. History of the Great War, by Frank Simmonds. ca. 1918-1920. Some editions have appendices at the end of each volume. The interview with W. is in the appendix to Vol. 1.) And, surely it did remove the element of surprise from much of land warfare, but we didn't let that stop us from fighting the Great War with all the strategical subtlety of General U.S. Grant. Which brings me to something that I have thought for a long time. If the Titanic had sunk in 1919 instead of 1912, she would have been a footnote in maritime history. (Do you remember the Morro Castle? Didn't think so.) But in 1912, Progress was gravely affronted by the fact that a Swell Technological Marvel could come to grief at the hands of a mere iceberg, and society remembers the shock it received, even after the Great War had destroyed the notion of Progress.

To wrap up. The latest modern design is merely necessary to make a credible futuristic landscape. The future-dystopia is not a reaction against modenism but the simple realization that invention is not Progress and that nanotechnology will not cure the blackness inside the human heart.

Pleasant Swell Dreams!

J

Jason P. Stone
Quincy, Illinois

[svenskasfinx.livejournal.com]

That has, at just a glance a very poetic feel to is, the words are lush and expressive...

I hope you will be as contimplative with the music that will be the backdrop...you've been working so hard on this, I know, but I'm concerned that so much restraint and conviction on how it SHOULD sound often limits the simpliciy of "pop-ish" possiblities..

Because of my stance of neither here nor there with the "experimental" I feel a bit "Shot by Both" sides when it comes to my musical expression and tastes..

On one hand I feel so much for the "accessible" and yet on the other, I love things that one can really get deeply involved with, on a musical level by concept alone, or the depth of reading the words and letting them be so strong that they stand beautifully on their own as a piece of fine litterature.. (I could only venture a guess you, of all people, DO understand this being a fan of Howard Devoto)

Best wishes to your project!
once again..

Dorian

Ah it is sooo lush (sorry I feel like I'm totally spamming you)

[svenskasfinx.livejournal.com]

reading it out loud is utterly beautiful... I really love it.

(sorry about my enthiusiasm) yet again..

[cap-scaleman.livejournal.com]

I like that, hard to imagine what it will sound like. Speaking about word-generators, or random sentence generator, ever heard of Bob Drake? He used a word generator on one of his albums making the lyrics using a random sentence generator which resulted the lyrics being totally unintelligible.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Never heard of Drake... I'm using Google translation a lot on this record, though. It generates some striking images, especially on the Beta Japanese setting. I'm also using hilariously poor optical character recognition from the early days of scanners.

You know those records whose lyrics you love because you mishear them and they're just so odd? Well, I'm building that into the composition. But you're still free to mishear them yourself, of course.

[cap-scaleman.livejournal.com]

Mishearing lyrics often gives a song a dmiension it never intended to have. But how are we going to be able to mishear the lyrics in a post-tinnitus album?

And when it comes to Bob Drake, here's his homepage:

http://www.bdrak.com/

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

"Don't believe in yourself/Don't deceive with belief/Knowledge comes with gas release."

(Lyrics as misheard by a friend - a favourite 'mishearing' of mine.)

[blndsnnts.livejournal.com]

Experiments (http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/experiments.html).

[nina-blomquist.livejournal.com]

singing random intellectual doodle lyrics as a ragged sweetheart viking moses really seems like a lovely fit.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Progress report: Rusty's gone out to buy a portable recorder, so I laid down a click track on the hard disk recorder, then played fragments of picked acoustic guitar in time with it, then sang these lyrics in a soft-pencil falsetto over the top of it. It sounds very scribbly indeed, constantly faltering and changing, and I think I want to leave all the mistakes in for the sake of wabi sabi. But perhaps work little arrangements in around the successful bits, so that it's a bit like fragments of an exquisitely-crafted frieze, preserved in a museum of antiquities, more beautiful because it's broken.

[nina-blomquist.livejournal.com]

go on! how do you do it, recording and giving a real-time report on it simultaneously?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, it involves switching between different types of software...

[cheapsurrealist.livejournal.com]

You've written a wonderful poem. Now you run the risk of screwing it up with with music. The dilema of "the singer songwriter"? I'm sure Woody Guthrie didn't sweat it. Try singing those lyrics to the tune of "New York Town". I did. ( I have the day off - a little extra time on my hands.)

Thanks for letting us in on the process of making this record. It will be a very special Momus record for me. Even if I don't like it.

Dave

[lolitard.livejournal.com]

Ha! Viking Moses, aka Brendon Massei is a good friend of mine. That photo that you linked, of him thoughtfully prodding the spikey green tree, is a snap I snapped. This reference of yours is very exciting!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Ah, that's interesting!

I've now finished the song, and it doesn't sound anything like Viking Moses, but he's an important bit of the pencil sketch now covered up with paint, so thank him from me! And tell him I enjoyed his songs, very refreshing, especially "Al Jazeera", the one about the young Palestinian whose house has just been demolished (I'm assuming that's what it's about).

[alchea.livejournal.com]

Hah. Brendan-Viking-Moses is a pal of mine, too. nice work.