The two slideshows I’ve done on Loudon Wainwright songs (“Men,” and “Dead Man”) exemplify Loudon in his serious, almost philosophical mode, although he is probably better known for his sardonic, humorous side as well as an almost brutal, self-mocking honesty and insight. I’m pretty sure this is supposed to be a funny song (the audience laughs, anyway), but like a lot of humor it has a rather cutting edge to it that cuts rather close to home. Personally, I think it would be a great song for a holiday for all those people without Valentines (perhaps February 15th, or maybe the Ides of March). It is also a tribute to all those non-human companions that make life bearable (ha! Note the visual pun in the last frame). The song is, of course, “Much Better Bets,” and this is the version from his “So Damn Happy” live album (a great album, by the way).
This is for Sharon, Curt, and Ziggy (they’ll know why if they watch it to the end).
In my memory, buying David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane album is inextricably connected with getting deeply into music, at least in terms of buying record albums. I’m sure I had a few before (I remember having the Beatles Second Album, which may have been a gift, and a couple of Monkees albums growing up), but it was probably about this time (I would have been fifteen in 1973 when the album was released) that I started working, making money, and having money of my own which I spent almost exclusively on books and records. By the time I had finished my teens, it was virtually impossible to get around my bedroom as stacks of albums or science fiction and fantasy novels basically filled every available inch of floor space except for narrow pathways so I could reach my record player and the closet where my clothes were.
I was very aware of music, and read Robert Hilburn, the longtime popular music critic at the LA Times, religiously. While he had his detractors, and I didn’t always like every musical suggestion he made, I will always be grateful to him for exposing me to so many different artists and genres. In the early seventies, glam rock was happening, more in the UK than America, but it certainly had an impact in the big cities, including Los Angeles, and I was an Anglophile from very early on, so the fact that Bowie was more popular in his homeland than in the US was–if anything–a kind of recommendation to me. Bowie’s very conscious experimentation with multiple personas and public bisexuality was a source of both attraction and anxiety for me and one day, having somehow scraped together four dollars, I determined that I was going to buy his new album, Aladdin Insane, which was being praised to the skies by Hilburn. The punning title, with its promise of both magical transformation and a kind of companionship in my own mental struggles with the “strange changes” that I was going through, was undeniably an attraction too, while the striking cover art seemed both a more overt statement of a kind of gay aesthetic, and a more hidden one than the limp wristed photo of David in a phone booth that graced the back of Ziggy Stardust, an album which I was very much aware of, but hadn’t yet quite summomed up the courage to buy.
As I remember, at this time the only local record outlet, which sold a very limited selection of music, was Thrifty Drugstore, a big chain at the time. I think only the sleeves were out in the racks, so you had to take the sleeve to the cashier and exchange it for a copy that actually had a vinyl album inside. I remember taking the sleeve out and putting it back several times as I built up and then immediately lost my nerve. I think I finally realized that I was making more of a spectacle of myself in my public indecision than I would do actually purchasing the record so, like ripping off a bandaid, I walked briskly to the counter where the young, dark haired, female clerk checked me out. I think she gave me an odd, slightly searching look, but that was probably my imagination (Does she know? I’m sure I thought at the time).
After that, I was off, getting into Mott the Hoople, T. Rex, and even the New York Dolls, and very quickly into many other musical genres as well. I soon got a license, then a used car, and after that the record stores of the San Fernando Valley, and even the iconic Tower Records down on Sunset, suddenly became accessible to me and I discovered not only used records, but really esoteric things like imported singles and albums, which were instrumental in getting me into punk rock a few years later. I actually saw Bowie once in 1974, on his Diamond Dogs tour when he did a five day stint at the Universal Amphitheatre (here is a link to a video of “Cracked Actor” recorded at one of these shows, and a live recording drawn from the entire run has also just been released–I had completely forgotten, by the way, that he performed the song with a skull, although I remember the shades and the sweater). Anyway, here is my video tribute. I chose these two Who covers not so much because they reveal anything about David, but because they really nail what he meant to me at the time: a slightly inexplicable attraction coupled up with a sense of the opening up of near limitless possibilities: gender, art, politics, literature, everything. Where have all the good times gone, indeed?
I’m also going to include David’s official video of “I’m Afraid of Americans,” partly because I identify with it (which is odd, at least according to my Passport, I am an American), and partly because I had been thinking of making a slideshow about it. After looking at it, however, I doubt I could do better, and there is simply no way I could replace David’s magnetic presence in it. So, if you haven’t seen it, enjoy; even if you have, it’s probably worth watching again. Sort of unfortunately, it seems even more timely today than it did when it was released.
I’ve been reading Marc Eliot’s biography of folksinger/activist/poet Phil Ochs, The Death of a Rebel, and this passage lept out at me, not so much because I wanted to include it in a larger project about Phil I’m working on, but because it seemed to encapsulate what I am trying to do in these slideshows I seem to be making at a remarkable pace. Eliot’s is describing how, in the early sixties in the Greenwich Village folk scene, Phil, Bob Dylan, David Cohen, and Dave Van Ronk would all pile into a cab and go to catch a double feature, often westerns:
They all loved the movies. Dylan’s use of the landscape as a metaphor for the soul (down the backroads of my mind) couldn’t be learned any better than by watching the cinematic technique of dramatizing internal conflict through visual images. (p. 82)
This technique, which dates back at least to the Icelandic sagas and probably a good deal further, applies very well to slideshows, where you are taking static visual images and–through transitions as well controlling the movement of the camera–both expressing an issue and attitudes (which may well be complex and contradictory) towards it. Ideally, of course, you want to express not only the heart (or soul) of an issue, but also touch and possibly even transform the viewers mind (and soul). In that spirit, I offer the following slideshow, inspired and accompanied by the influential (but never that successful in record industry terms) Townes Van Zandt. As the song is both mysterious and oblique, I’m not sure that I’ve really taken inappropriate liberties with it but–of course–now that I’ve put it out there that’s really for you to decide. You could argue that I’ve taken a song about human romance and turned it as a way of talking about man’s relationship to (and exploitation of) the natural world. However, the more I listen to the song, the more I find myself wondering if Townes intended it to be about romantic relationships in the first place.
This is a slideshow I created essentially because I’ve always been fascinated by the multilingual pun in this Rufus Wainwright song’s title. The “Tiergarten” is a large park that sort of starts at the train station and stretches several miles through what used to be west Berlin, more or less ending at the Brandenburg gate and the Reichstag, fairly close to where East Berlin used to begin. I walked through it several years ago and–while it’s not quite as impressive as museum island–it’s still pretty wonderful. Wainwright uses the changing weather as a metaphor for the ups and downs of romance in the modern world, setting it against a catch yet understated melody. Initially, I had planned the slideshow as basically showing pictures of happy and unhappy people, together and alone, falling in love and out of love. While looking for photographs, I realized that there was a virtual treasure trove of photographs (some of which are copyrighted, and I had to pay to use) of Berlin after the war, including many from the Tiergarten, many of which are recognizable because of the statues still survive. You could say that why I’ve tried to do is expand the song’s subject from the ups and downs of romance to the ups and downs of history, by juxtaposing pictures from 1945-47 (most of the trees had been cut down to be used for firewood in 1944), with pictures that I think are largely from the last decade or so.
Although I had really intended the slideshow to be a more or less pure aesthetic object with no particular message, it sort of evolved very quickly into a rather ambivalent statement about history. Possibly because I’ve read and taught Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller too many times, but also because I have been more or less paying attention for nearly the last sixty years as well as reading a fair amount, it was hard to escape the conclusion that what we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history. In the last few years, this has regressed into the even more pessimistic idea that what we learn from history is simply what we’ve already decided we are going to learn; in other words, history is basically something people cherry pick in order to justify courses of action they were going to take anyway, often for selfish, self-flattering, or vindicative reasons.
The slideshow doesn’t go quite that dark, probably because I am no longer quite as pessimistic as I was (although I doubt I’ll ever be an optimist). Instead, as well as trying to retain something of the song’s message about the vagaries of romance, it illustrates how we human beings can make a wasteland out of a park; but it equally demonstrates how we can make a park out of a wasteland, and actually it’s the latter, more optimistic, message that recieves the most emphasis as the slideshow develops. However, if you want to appreciate it (or, for that matter, if you hate it) as a purely aesthetic object with no particular message, that’s cool too.
This one’s for my dissertation director who–even if he didn’t exactly introduce me to history–certainly expanded my view and knowledge of it.
I’ve been wondering how to introduce a slideshow I made a few weeks ago as I continue to struggle with big questions, problems, and try to see my way through to possible (even if unlikely) solutions. Oddly enough, making these seems to be a way of processing and coming to terms with my experience. Anyway, by way of introduction, here is Loudon Wainwright III singing a live versions (from the early 90s?) of “A Hard Day on the Planet.” I believe he wrote in 1985, but it seems remarkably timely today.
Let’s face it, how many songwriters not only allude to, but actually name drop John Donne? (Van Morrison is the only other one that comes to mind).
There have been many diaries about the necessity of reaching out to people outside of the Democratic coalition, and also about the difficulty, even the impossibility, of doing so. I have been trying to work out a shared foundation to build on. Love doesn’t seem to work, perhaps because many people have so little experience with it, or have only experienced it in a dysfunctional way. I find myself wondering if pain, trauma, and suffering might actually be a more productive common element to focus on, and if it might actually be used to build some bridges. The following is my attempt to articulate through a kind of visual poem set to music, why we are where we are (“Private Hell”, how we got here (“Time for Truth”), where we are now (“Bitter Salt”), what almost everyone has in common (“Everybody Hurts”) and a possible way forward in transforming pain into beauty (“Let It Be”). I realize, of course, that the last bit is tricky (pain can perhaps be more easily turned into a desire to harm others), but it can be done, and I wonder if what is called “Creative Arts Therapy” might not be a way forward, at least for some individuals (including me), and perhaps for larger groups as well.
passage2truth 