Zoo in the head

Big swinging dicks of the avant-garde

Shaun Whiteside pointed me in the direction of this, after I had enthused about a radio programme on Frederic Rzewski. (The programme was an episode of Music by My Friends on Resonance FM.) The music is very good - echoes of Charles Ives and Bruce Hornby - but I was disturbed to see that it had been uploaded by someone called John11inch. The phallocentrism of the world of classical music is well known, but I didn't realize anybody took it quite that far. Apart from Pierre "Lick My" Boulez, obviously.

Sing Sing sing

 Can't have done much for prison as a deterrent.

Barking

Over the years, many people whose opinions I respect have tried to convert me to the Dylan cause and Lord knows I've tried, but it just won't take. There are a number of individual songs I find perfectly tolerable; I can sit through Bringing It All Back Home or The Basement Tapes without chewing off my own tongue; Theme Time Radio Hour is a lark, even. Sometimes I'll read a Greil Marcus essay about how The Basement Tapes transformed human consciousness and I'll believe light is about to dawn; but in the end I'm stilling grub around in the dark for clues.

In last Friday's Independent, Andy Gill (a person whose opinions I certainly don't despise) listed "70 reasons why Bob Dylan is the most important figure in pop-culture history". A lot of these turn out to be restatements of the proposition rather than reasons for accepting it, and while No. 61 ("Because he created an entire industry of Dylanologist commentators and interpreters, way beyond the attention afforded any other songwriter or performer") is, I suppose, a reasonable supporting argument it makes me heavy with nausea.

But if you want a knock-down argument, take reason no. 60: "Because, if you turn the cover of John Wesley Harding upside-down and look at the bark of the tree, you'll see The Beatles (vinyl only) (drugs optional)." This sounds like one of those "I buried Paul"/"It's fun to smoke marijuana"-type myths, but further research suggests it may be true, and there is something odd going on at the top of that tree. Is the ability to have upside-down photographs of a well-known beat combo concealed on the covers of your records really a measure of cultural importance? If it is, I for one intend to give up on importance now: I will settle down in my rocking chair and dwindle out my days reading old paperback collections of Peanuts and listening to Val Doonican, as the light of poetry and imagination fades in the west. Please do not disturb this side of the Rapture.

A slice of life

By which I don't mean realism, but sheer vitality and cheerfulness:

There is also an official video, which contains some terrific ensemble dancing. It's spoiled, though, by an embarrassing subplot involving Janelle Monáe being chased around an old-style madhouse by bizarre dementor-style creatures with mirrors for faces. 

Elephant juices

This is surprisingly good. (via P. Z. Myers.)

Obligatory pandamonium joke

While we're looking at videos, here's LCD Soundsystem directed by Spike Jonze:

The comments below are interesting; the most perceptive commentator is Insanaman, who writes "look at all those pandas. How does one even get that many pandas? This isn't china. Go home you silly pandas. you are hooligans."

Penguin/Not Penguin

Douglas Coupland has launched a project to celebrate Penguin's 75 years, Speaking to the Past: using mock-ups of Penguin covers to send a message to the people of 1935 about the world in 2010. He has used a wide variety of Penguin designs, but sticking to the same basic pattern. The one above is my favourite, even though Coupland has cheated by adding an extra strip of colour below the rule. Other messages include "The Moon: we stopped going there 30 years ago" (nearer 40 by now, it occurs to me), and "People Over 65 Are Almost the Majority (But We're No Wiser)". You can join in and make your own covers: not many takers so far, but you can see them here. 

The whole mock-Penguin meme is in danger of being overdone; but while we're at it we may as well take in a couple of other examples. Here's one of Ghostbox's album covers, complete with Quatermass reference:

 

(I very much like Ghostbox's Radiophonic Workshop sensibility, and recommend in particular the track "Sundial", from the album Other Channels by The Advisory Circle.)

And, though I suspect I've mentioned this before, drop in on Olly Moss's set of "video game classics".

The Daily DSCH

Not a Penguin

Other brands of nicely designed old paperbacks are available:

And while this blog's policy remains resolutely pro-Penguin, a change is as good as &c.

Published by Doubleday Anchor, 1956. Noah Greenberg was founder and director of New York Pro Musica Antiqua, with whom Auden collaborated several times in the Fifties - providing an English narration for their path-breaking revival of The Play of Daniel, and recording An Evening of Elizabethan Verse and Its Music with them.

The book is beautifully produced, and has an introduction by Auden and Kallman (his young man) to the texts:

"The poet who would write songs is denied many poetic virtues, but he is also guarded from many poetic vices; he cannot be prolix or private or preachy or obscure. When one compares the poetry of the preceding age, so crowded with endless maundering allegories, with the poems in these song books, one cannot but thank God for men like Byrd and Dowland, in response to whose demands the poets were compelled to practice the virtues of graceful ease and conciseness."

There are critics who would claim that Auden's career was an instance of precisely the reverse process: graceful ease and conciseness giving way to the vices of prolixity, preachiness and obscurity. (I admit to preferring the early verse; but that doesn't mean I don't admire and value the knottiness of the later stuff - e.g., In Praise of Limestone - as well.)

I'm not sure what is keeping that lute from falling over, but the illustration is perfectly lovely. It's by Edward Gorey, of all people: see also here.

Monday Penguin: Apotheosis of the Dance

Beethoven's Symphony No. 7 in A, Penguin Score 18, 1953, cover design by Stephen Russ.

This is static and formal in comparison with Russ's poetry covers, a decade later, but in the context of the Penguin Scores it's notably lively and relaxed - those formal-looking shapes are clearly hand-drawn, a touch wobbly. That suits the music, more concise and propulsive than the other symphonies (the "immortal nine", Gordon Jacob calls them in his introduction): "the apotheosis of the dance" was Wagner's description. Oddly, Jacob gets it wrong, attributing the phrase to Berlioz.

It's hard to tell how 57 years of fading have affected the colour - I'd like to think it started out lush and luminous, but it may just have been bilious.  

Very busy right now, hence infrequency of posts. If anybody knows the secret of combining blogging with productivity, I'd love to hear about it.

PS An oddity I have only just spotted: the covers of Penguin Scores have no Penguin logo, even on the spine; there is one on the fly-leaf.