From B to A and back again

[imomus]

B: Hello A!
A: Hi, B!
B: So, what's been rocking your world recently?
A: Do you have to use such rockist language? If you mean, "What have you been appreciating culturally recently?", I'd say Harry Partch's "musical account of a transcontinental hobo trip", The Wayward Cycle.
B: Wayward is the perfect word for Partch. It's funny, although you talk a lot about Japan and collectivism, the stuff you end up liking is super-American, and super-individualistic. Who's "the Japanese Partch"?
A: Oh, there are Japanese Partches. Tomomi Adachi or Mamoru Fujieda, for example. There are people even further out than Partch. Toshiya Tsunoda, for instance. But I do like lots of American stuff. American stuff that somehow doesn't sound "American", especially. The other day someone called Ljova sent me a nice record called The World on Four Strings. It sounded like East European fiddle music, and it reminded me of the films of the Brothers Quay.
B: Never heard of them!
A: They're Americans too, but they live in London and they make these films which look totally Polish. I saw them on UK Channel 4, and they were the best thing I saw on TV in the 1980s. Someone's put one up on YouTube, Street of Crocodiles, the Quays' version of the Bruno Schulz story.
B: Thank God for YouTube, eh! Internet 2.0, they're calling it. That, and Flickr, and MySpace, and all these new Google services... the internet has the whole world covered!
A: I had dinner with the editor of Vice the other night, and he was saying something similar. "We're in the middle of a new dot com boom," he said. (He's deleted his MySpace page too, by the way.) But then we went to a gallery, the Artists' Space on Greene Street, and saw a performance by Ron Athey. He was suspended by hooks, with a baseball bat up his ass and oddly inflated testicles, covered in Native American tribal tattoos, and members of the public were greasing up his body with Vaseline. Now there's an experience they'll never put on the internet.
B: I just ran Ron Athey's name through YouTube. "Found no videos matching Ron Athey. Do you have one? Upload it!"
A: He's not on Internet 2.0, and he won't be on Internet 10. Another thing they'll never put up there is dance. There are one million videos of cute kittens and cars running red lights, but no videos of Japanese dance company Strange Kinoko. And no smells! That's what my next Wired piece is about. There are one billion opinions on the internet, but no onions.
B: Don't be silly, who needs onions on the internet?
A: I do! Just imagine a world where the internet could deliver us all free digital food as easily as it gives us porn! We'd never have to go out again!
B: It sounds awful. And speaking of going out, the sun is shining, and I don't mean on the internet. Are you coming out?
A: No, I want to listen to "Wayward" again. I prefer 1940s sunshine, it tastes better.

Comments

Unrelated...

[thetemplekeeper.livejournal.com]

...Feel very guilty replying first when this is only tangentially related to your post, but - look:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/happiness_formula/default.stm

Some very interesting stuff on what makes us happy (in a general sense). But time to give the floor to Japanese Partches, non-American Americana and 1940s sunshine, hopefully...

Re: Unrelated...

[imomus.livejournal.com]

And Americans are more ill than the English (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4965034.stm)! Oh dear!

[klasensjo.livejournal.com]

The Brothers Quay were commissioned to make two very nice videos for "His Name is Alive". Both are available on YouTube. Although heavily inspired by Jan Svankmajer's dark and mysterious worlds, the brothers definitely hold their own.

Re: Unrelated...

[cap-scaleman.livejournal.com]

And be careful with that meat you eat in the US. It can be Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in it.

[alphacomp.livejournal.com]

Did you resolve the whole skull controversy with the editor of Vice?

Re: Unrelated...

[thetemplekeeper.livejournal.com]

This must be particularly galling: "The healthiest Americans had similar disease rates to the least healthy English."

Also, although the facts are there, researchers seem to be feeling round in the dark for an explanation: wonder if it is in any way related to the (Environomics?) idea of the "atomisation" of American culture?

[cheapsurrealist.livejournal.com]

He was suspended by hooks, with a baseball bat up his ass

Reminds me of the time I saw Stelarc in the early eigties at a gallery in SF. Audience members inserted hooks through his flesh, no blood, and he was suspended by them. Fascinating and really creepy. Sometimes I womder if I actually saw it but there was a book about him at the time with a picture of the event and there I am watching it.

[jasongtokyo.livejournal.com]

Your mention of The Brothers Quay (natsukashii) suddenly reminded me of Survival Research Labs (http://www.srl.org/). I don't think there's a link between the two, but I remember watching their videos around the same time.

Re: Unrelated...

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Community is a good predictor of good health; people who live close by their extended families have much lower stress levels.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Sort of. He told me he was planning to get a skull tattoo, and I said "Don't, they're going out of fashion!" He said he might reconsider. He deleted his MySpace page before my article, by the way, so I don't claim to be his style guru.

[silenceinspades.livejournal.com]

of course there's dancing on the internet. (http://www.webhamster.com/)

[luolian.livejournal.com]

There are onions (http://www.theonion.com) on the internet too.

[shadowshark.livejournal.com]

Hella the Wayward. "I got a letter and the letter it said, 'May God's richest blessings be upon you!' la da da da da da da DA DA dum, la da richest blessings be upon you. ...And that's why I'm thinkin'--Chicago."
On that subject, what do you think of composers Iannis Xenakis and Einojuhani Rautavaara? Or, a better question, could you recommend some lesser-known composers along those lines? Sorry to be a bother; I just discovered this journal a few days ago, and I'm enjoying it a bunch. Thank you!

[cargoweasel.livejournal.com]

He was suspended by hooks, with a baseball bat up his ass and oddly inflated testicles, covered in Native American tribal tattoos, and members of the public were greasing up his body with Vaseline. Now there's an experience they'll never put on the internet.

Hey, that's a typical evening on the Internet. Pretty vanilla in fact.

Re: Unrelated...

[henryperri.livejournal.com]

"The researchers suggested the lack of social programmes in the US, which in the UK help protect those who are sick from loss of income and poverty, could partly help explain why there was a greater link between Americans' wealth and disease."

The researchers suggested THAT? Shock of the century!

Re: Unrelated...

[thetemplekeeper.livejournal.com]

True, though the question "why?" is very interesting - I wonder how broadly "community" can be construed, and how much progression towards personal goals affects us, too. For instance, I ought to be thoroughly unhealthy and miserable: single; friends and family living all over the place (Spain, England, Malta, Hong Kong, Thailand, Jersey, etc); unemployed (through choice - living off savings)... yet I am happy overall and hardly ever ill. Of course, maybe I'm just insane (a simple explanation!); however, I think it is more the sense of liberation, having left a job I did not enjoy and was unsuitable for, and having found a way to achieve my aims and help other people (through teaching, writing and theatre) - as well as even a possible "love interest"! - makes me content overall. I wonder if that same sense of purposive self-direction also keeps you from illness and worry!

Re: Unrelated...

[thetemplekeeper.livejournal.com]

Actually, more of a shock is that they said differences in healthcare provisions could not be the whole story - in part because expenditure on healthcare in USA is apparently twice what it is in UK per head of population (obviously, though, inadequate insurance cover and underfunded state hospitals/healthcare provision would affect your health in the US - although the same problems seem to exist in the UK as well).

[silenceinspades.livejournal.com]

'Or, a better question, could you recommend some lesser-known composers along those lines?'

i can, momus.
his music tends to be xenakis-eque (xenakis-tastic?) at times.
:)

Re: Unrelated...

[henryperri.livejournal.com]

America is responsible for creating something like 75% of the drugs out on the market. This country, for better or worse, has very high standards when it comes to the amount of testing a drug must undergo before it's approved (it costs approx a half a billion dollars per drug from start to finish). In order to recoup their r&d expensives, a company must charge a pretty penny for a drug while they still have exclusive rights to it. If America allowed knock-off prescription drugs to be imported from other countries, all of our drug companies would promptly go out of business. We would immediately see the number of innovative drugs coming out of America drop to nothing. Other countries don't have this problem because their companies aren't creating shit. So the American citizen foots the bill so that people in other can have acces to innovative drugs. Welfare on an international scale. But again, let's not forget that America is the enemy.

[benchilada.livejournal.com]

I want an interweb that gives me onions.

My friends and I once had a discussion about how, if the interwebs gave us vegetables and fruit--no junk food--we'd all be in better shape today.

Nothing like a 2am web-surfing snack of a banana to curb the urge to go out and buy Cheetos.

Re: Unrelated...

[thetemplekeeper.livejournal.com]

Not sure I understand your reply: first because I didn't set up USA as the enemy (!); second because the drugs companies presumably don't just charge US citizens for the drugs they sell - residents of other countries must either foot the bill themselves or their governments must subsidise them - different models for different countries.

Re: Unrelated...

[thetemplekeeper.livejournal.com]

Also, of course, most large drugs companies are multinational rather than US-centric: not sure of the current biggest drugs companies, but certainly in 2002 half of them were based in Europe -
GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca (Britain; Novartis and Roche (Switzerland); Aventis (France).

[crucible.livejournal.com]

If you like baseball bats in people's asses combined with native american iconography, check out Steven Leyba and his Apache Whiskey Ritual piece.

Vice is a pox, a hipster-generation/ meaning-appropriation-shit-machine. They moved their store here in Toronto from Queen West to Parkdale, just so they can better ruin everything for EVERYBODY.

The Brothers Quay should do videos for Gogol Bordello. They should also open a church dedicated the to the veneration of hane McGowan's teeth.

And, for good measure, someone should feed me Grapefruit Sorbet out of the trepanned head of John the Baptist, as in, fucking YESTERDAY.

Selah.

Re: Unrelated...

[henryperri.livejournal.com]

The part about the US being the enemy wasn't direct at you specifically.

The US has the most stringent testing requirements for new drugs, that's why they're more expensive. And that's why the US has the highest health care costs. It's also illegal to sell off-brand versions of prescription drugs while they're still exclusive to the original creators. This means that citizens in the US do not have access to the cheaper versions of newer drugs like people in other countries do.

My other point was that other countries benefit from the US having to do such extensive testing. Better drugs are created and people in other countries have access to knock-offs of these drugs for a fraction of the price.

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[(Anonymous)]

warhol?