(no subject)
purple
> At 01:10 PM 1/31/2006 -0500, purple wrote:
>> ... meanwhile, these guys don’t seem to be using Wyndham Lewis, yet.
>>
>> http://www.saltpublishing.com/books/sscl/1844710599.htm
>>
>>
>> The GREAT Bob Dobbs
>
> and yet quoting them
> "The vortex of Zappa's maximalism is a toilet"
>
> They are obviously Vorticist and hence Lewisians
>> "and here we see him seizing on a creative détournement of the human
body:"
>
> The complete wild body ---obviously our guy, WL
I was referring to the photo.
But, either they use him in the text - which I haven't seen. Or we've
found their unconscious "hidden ground". Since it's well known that
Beefheart ranked Wyndham Lewis on his short list (much is made of this
in the recent Beefheart bio), it will be interesting to see how and if
the authors use WL.
The GREAT Bob Dobbs
Short description/annotation: A comparative account of the musical and
cultural acts of Zappa and his cohort, collaborator and antagonist
Captain Beefheart. Written in the iconoclastic spirit of Zappa’s art,
this book traces the mixed media experiments of California freakdom
through the dada blues of Beefheart, mapping out the pleasures of
imaginative excess.
Main description: This book is not another critical biography, but an
interpretive essay investigating what we feel is the cultural and
historical importance of Zappa and Beefheart in the context of a
wide-ranging network of references that run from Michelangelo and
Arcimboldo to William Burroughs and Vaclav Havel. Readers who are only
vaguely familiar with their music will be introduced to a projected
pantheon of maximalist artists and “moments” which will in turn give
rise to poeticˇassociational readings designed to encourage them to
explore the processes of art production, consumption and rejection in
their expanding totality and to consider the body as the fluctuating
constant against which all composition (addition and subtraction of
parts) is attempted. In many ways, this book is also intended as a
maximalist alternative to the cultural studies take on the study of
popular music, which generally neglects aesthetics in favor of the
merely semiotic and sociological and is reluctant to investigate the
relationships and coincidences of mass, underground and “elitist”
culture. In what follows, we will propose an (anti-)method, a conspiracy
theory of the mind that seeks to foster a promotional application of
"paranoid" criticism risking its very credibility (and sanity) to
abandon itself to the energizing virtues of connectivitis and coordinology.
Table of contents:
Introduction
Chapter One
Breaking You Down
Chapter Two
We are the Mothers and This is What We Sound Like: On the Uses and
Abuses of Degenerate Art
Chapter Three
Birth Trauma and the Blues-Gothic: The Body at the Crossroads
Chapter Four
Laughter Inside and Out: The Subject-Object on the Edge
Chapter Five
Unprincipled Pleasure
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Excerpt from book:
That Blues Thing: Enter Captain Beefheart
When Frank Zappa and Don Van Vliet sat around after school eating
pineapple buns (from the remains of Mr Vliet senior’s bread round) and
listening to rhythm and blues records, they were indulging in an early
form of maximalist synaesthesia, performing the basic tenets of an
aesthetic philosophy and way of life which was, at various points
throughout the next thirty years, to unite and divide their parallel
careers as American maverick artists: Buns and blues, the listening body
eating, this was an auspicious beginning.
Van Vliet was one of Zappa’s earliest and most significant
collaborators who eagerly assisted in the forging of links between
discourses of bodily experience and music–making; along with Motorhead
Sherwood and Ray Collins, he was a key figure in the conversion of
teenage gross–out humour into an expanding aesthetic of the body’s parts
and processes. Zappa’s account of the origin of the name “Captain
Beefheart” captures the atmosphere of those formative years and
illustrates how so much of what we analyse below can be traced back to
the lewd anecdote or obscene gesture:
Captain Beefheart was a character I invented for the film [“Captain
Beefheart Versus the Grunt People”]. His name derives from one of Don
Vliet’s relatives who looked like Harry Truman. He used to piss with the
door open when Don’s girlfriend walked by and make comments about how
his whizzer looked just like a beef heart.
The vortex of Zappa’s maximalism is a toilet, and here we see him
seizing on a creative détournement of the human body: the penis becomes
a heart, a conflation of two organs of love — the literal and the
symbolic are fused together in an anthropomorphic leap of imagination
curiously prophetic of Van Vliet’s later pictorial style with its
Wellsian miscegenations. Artistic experiment is already inseparable from
research into what the body can do physically, how it behaves socially,
and how it can be manipulated aesthetically.
Van Vliet finally abandoned music for painting in 1982, and Captain
Beefheart was no more. His recording career was characterised by an
intermittent striving for an innovative
rock–blues–jazz–avant–gardiste–mélange which would sing back to us in
crazy voices from beyond the beat. In his assault on the “moma
heartbeat” and the sedimentation of form and response it imposes, Van
Vliet seemed to be working towards a maximalist enhancement of
possibilities; and his efforts in this direction have proved very useful
to us in our attempts to show how musical maximalism incorporates its
opposite, and how the meeting of extremes more generally is one of the
vital blowholes of maximalist art.
As a musician, Van Vliet lacked both the formal know–how of
technique, and an interest in advanced musical technologies, and this
may explain his unwillingness to extend the experiments he was making at
the level of the group to the broader plane of conceptual and
materialist manipulation, his failure to objectify his moments of
transcendent insight into a project/object with a life of its own.
Regularly, also, the Captain tried to conform to the norms of popular
music, writing songs which seem to labour under a load of assumed
sincerity while lending themselves to a perversely melancholic listening
experience. Much of the Unconditionally Guaranteed album falls into this
category (especially “Magic Bee” and “This is the Day”), together with
the notorious “Too Much Time” from Clear Spot and the Bluejeans and
Moonbeams album, where the Magic Band was replaced with the critically
lambasted “Tragic Band”. This hesitation between modes of creativity,
together with his eventual selection of a neo–primitive
abstract–expressionist aesthetic for his painting contrasts
interestingly with Zappa’s self–consuming commitment to the Big Note and
its cosmic ramifications. And it is significant that Zappa’s own
attempts to write songs that could be played on the radio always contain
elements of social and/or formal satire (“Bobby Brown”, “Dancing Fool”,
“Valley Girl”).
After his musical researches, where questions of sound and form
were complicated by the struggles of individual and group, Van Vliet
settled into a painting style which has achieved a traditional coherence
(and a degree of international recognition to go with it) through the
accumulation of signature effects from work to work. This kind of
artistic practice is diametrically opposed to the genre–leaping of
Zappa, and its origins in the fraught abutments of collage.
In spite of these differences, many of Van Vliet’s texts are
thematically consistent with Zappa’s concerns, and both hark back in
various ways to the anti–art activities of Dada (perhaps the key
maximalist movement of the modernist period): Van Vliet drew on the
paradox of ordered disorder exploited by Hugo Ball in his sound poetry,
together with the “primitivism” of Tzara, rendered urgently audible in
the free jazz of Ornette Coleman; while Zappa fell in love with the
materiality of sound, and the theatrical extravagances of burlesque, key
components in his self–recharging brand of social satire. While Van
Vliet played with the paradox, evolving his own surrealist slant on
those odd overdetermined objects so dear to Zappa, the latter branched
out and out into parody, satire and beyond. Often, in Van Vliet’s work,
these objects are freakishly human, the Ant Man Bee, the Man With the
Woman Head, Apes–Ma, The Human Totem Pole, and express his ludic
approach to the lineaments of human being, a delight in monstrous
combination and subtraction which has affinities with the gothic
tradition and the uncanny stresses of the “is it or isn’t it?” exploited
in the art and literature of terror. Here again, Van Vliet seems to
cross Zappa’s maximalist trajectory, and we explore the double
intersection of their work with the gothic tradition and some of its
more recent avatars in Chapter Four.
Van Vliets’s neo–primitivism proclaims itself through his
interviews in the denial of all influence; a rhetorical move which is
often coupled with an enthusiasm for the existential and ethical purity
of animals. While Zappa could satirize the notion of natural being (and
its racist overtones) in “You Are What You Is”, Van Vliet seems to work
within the tradition of the individual genius, whose every act is a work
of art, the quality of which is directly related to the sincerity of the
gesture. In this system, authenticity remains the final index of
artistic value: If Picasso wanted to paint like a child, Van Vliet wants
to paint like an animal. From the relativisng perspective of
post–modernism, Van Vliet’s stance might seem quaint or merely stubborn
in its attachment to the mystique of essence, the “It” which the Beat
generation venerated, that indefinable something which connects one to
life and separates one from the mass of people who don’t have or haven’t
found “It”. Whether or not Van Vliet had “it”, he was at the very least
capable of remarkable idiosyncrasy; and Zappa, who was equally
disdainful of the cultish “it” and the dogma of cultural relativity
which came to oppose it, regularly sought to tap this source.
Even if finally not a maximalist himself, Van Vliet participates in
and engenders a series of maximalist moments through his lyrics and
musical ideas, his physical presence and bodily projections, his ego
statements, and his shifts between the verbal, visual and sonic media.
By examining some of these moments below, we hope to shed more light on
Zappa’s developing art and the key ideas of maximalism, and our essay
will culminate with a comparative discussion of the two artists and
their relationship to that vexed and faintly illicit subject — aesthetic
pleasure.
Unpublished endorsement : Here is a book that has to be played loud.
Zapping as irreverently through the icons of dangerous culture as the
zany Zappa himself, plotting the gothic with the abject cunning of Don
Van Vliet, Michel Delville and Andrew Norris puncture quite a few
balloons of our current esthetic doxa, from body art to weak consensual
clichés on post-mortem postmodernism. Here is baroque modernism come
back to haunt us with a vengeance: it screams, it bites, it claws and it
kicks. - Jean-Michel Rabaté
Unpublished endorsement : Amid the erudition and the exhaustive
unpicking of the Zappa worldscape, the key to the value of this book is
its understanding of the man's musical output – the records, the lyrics,
the compositional approaches, the performance intentions. Delville and
Norris exhibit an assured grasp of the creative line from the Mothers to
Beefheart to Boulez and beyond. This book’s appeal lies in its richness
of contexts – its ability to mention Braxton and Burroughs, Reich and
Freud, Bakhtin and Houston A. Baker Jr, without ever moving too far from
its object of scrutiny, a frustrating genius whose life of
contradictions requires a study as unrelentingly unbound and as
intellectually promiscuous as this one. - Simon Warner
The Bishop
purple wrote:
> <snip>...rner
What a verbose way of telling us you suck.
purple
You got a problem with that?
The GREAT Bob Dobbs