This is the last thing I’ll be doing this morning before my wife wakes up and the official day gets underway.
We turn in around 10:30 or 11:00 pm, and I can usually sleep for between an hour and a half and two and a half hours. This morning I woke up thinking of Glenn Gould. He’d crossed my mind yesterday because I’s written an Instapunk post about one song by a girl singer I’d never heard of before. She’s in the memory banks now for that one song/video I thought made an artistic whole beyond the song itself. (Wrote a fairly lengthy post some years ago about a particular video of Philip Glass’s The Hours, in which I brashly proclaimed it the best music video ever made. The one-song meme had reminded me of Glenn Gould’s Opus 1, which I really like and hadn’t heard in a long time. Then I forgot about it without looking it up for another listen.
“Glenn Gould.” That was what I woke up with in my head. Not Opus 1 though. In the scheme of things that was dismissible as a poke at critics by a genius with no need to prove anything. “Composition. Yeah I can do that. There. You happy?” The thing in my mind this morning, though, was another, more obscure Gould recording, this one a component of a longer treatment about the man’s enormous esthetic reach. What I went looking for was a video project called “32 Ways of Looking at Glenn Gould” or some such title. The one I remembered and succeeded in finding was this:
The clip shows us an incident that probably did happen and was confided to someone by Gould. He’s in a diner and his highly trained ears are automatically tuning in and out of the background blur of conversations around him, creating a spontaneous composition very like music for the one man who could hear it play. I’ve known that the mind is extraordinarily adept at adjusting the volumes around us (once heard a tape recording of a corporate meeting I was in — unbelievable how loud the paper shuffling, coffee cup clatter, and incidental voices were compared to what I’d been hearing…), and I’ve had recent conversations with my wife about that. She’s reluctant to get a hearing aid, because all most of them do is amplify all sound, turning even passive listening into a cacophonous assault. There’s new technology that claims it screens out the background noise to highlight voices rather than dishware. Haven’t convinced her yet…
She’s up now, so the official day has begun. Still, I’m going to finish this account because there’s no news again this morning but the cacophonous Trump-bashing on all sides. Any real work I was working on is done for a few hours at least. Time for coffee and catchup with my girl…
Soldiering on. The phenomenon shown in the Gould clip is how I actually think of The Boomer Bible and its Intercolumn Reference (ICR). The text of the books is all deliberately oral, meant to be heard not read silently. They are also simultaneous, all aware of one another in the whole, which the ICR documents in terms of specific echoes or resonances. The experience of The Boomer Bible, ideally, is of a lead narrative declaimed by the book the reader is hearing backed by a constant many-voiced murmur of all the other books, with volumes of the resonant materials rising just slightly as they are highlighted by the ICR. What I have vaguely referred to elsewhere as lighting up the book as a whole in a realm above the physical page’s ink and paper. I actually had that experience when I was compiling the ICR over a period of four weeks in which I lived and dreamt of nothing but the connections that built the internal architecture of the book’s ideas.
I’ve used the same aural phenomenon for simpler purposes in satirical pieces, notably in video spoofs I’ve done for my ‘XOFF News’ sendup of Fox News hosts. Which sent me to my Johnny Dodge YouTube Channel to see if I still had an example of simultanous voices as content. The answer was yes, but there’s more than one YT channel (for defensive purposes in CensorLand USA), and it took some time to reassemble these four snippets videoed directly from a much spiffier original still imprisoned in my wife’s computer.
This is where I get into trouble, distracted by couldabeen, mightabeen, shouldabeen, couldtheybe-type ruminations. Two of the clips above were buried in a hideaway at the Johnny Dodge Channel called Random Thoughts, where it was clear I was playing around with extemporaneous musings unrelated to other stuff. I’ve never played much in the deep end of the playwrighting pool because that’s a whole different set of agents and obstacles and corporate ladders I’m not equipped to deal with. Aside from some brief spoofs of Scandinavian plays in The Naked Woman I haven’t tried to write an actual play, no matter how oral works like the Boomer Bible and various chunks of ST99 are. There had been a screenplay that was useful as a precursor to Punk City and probably the origin of the St. Nuke character and maybe even the cartoonish setting of Shuteye Town 1999. Is there still a chance for a “the play’s the thing” adventure?
As I said, where I got into trouble. I’d also stumbled over this video from the Johnny Dodge Channel when I was looking for the XOFF News stuff.
By now it’s three in the morning, and I was seized with the fancy that with some wordsmithing and clever cutting and pasting (and some new stuff of course) I could make a real stage play out of the equally, definitively oral work from ST99 called “The Lounge Conversations.”
So I wound up jotting this wee-hours noodling into my iPad Notes app:
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The Lounge Conversations - A Play in ‘n’ Acts
“Our Town” Template dramatizing my book The Lounge Conversations
[Actually a mashup of Our Town, The Time of Your Life, and The Trial]
Interrogator/narrator with Daniel Pangloss in custody, orange jumpsuit natch, stage left introducing and stage managing of the scenes
Main stage is a barroom set from Shuteye Town surmounted by three large HiDef screens capable of showing scenes from all over Shuteye Town (drawn from original ST99 artwork)
Scenes are blackout pieces from various barroom subway stations featuring iconic Pangloss in duster with vodka flask, engaging in Socratic dialogue with customers.
Plot of the play: Pangloss is being held by federal authorities and investigated for hate speech transcribed from the actual recorded conversations dramatized in the play. In the end he escapes, as the center screen above the bar set shows a “No Security” (Ref Rolling Stones) style black and white video of a punk band come extract him from custody…
The prisoner Pangloss was already lurking in multiple places among my Image files.
He was already leaning against the bar in a dozen subway stations…
I aleady had a design concept for the overhead screens above the barroom set…
Not for football this time but for glimpses of the station platform,
Shuteye security cams, other stations, the lounge, the restrooms, etc.
That brings me up to the present moment pretty much. End of my hopefully not too depressing description of how time gets away from me on my customarily broken nights of sleep. I live with it. I still get real work done. Most of the time anyway.
And just to be sure you didn’t skip the link to the big rescue scene at the end, here’s the inspiration piece I saw myself when they played it at the Spectrum in Philadelphia at the beginning of the “No Security” concert, ahem, some years back…
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