The Celestial Monochord

Against Camp: The Cosmological Argument

a nickel I bought in Seattle for a couple bucks

 

I have five nickels from 1940, all gotten as change over the last few years when buying coffee in the morning. You pay for a bagel and as change you get this thing minted before Pearl Harbor. Before the bomb. Before rock music. It says so right on it.

My wife Jenny sees me picking through my pocket change — or through hers — looking for a penny with an attractive patina or a dime from when Frank Cloutier was still alive.

I'm not a real coin collector. For me, coins are vehicles for thinking about the mundane objects of the past. Like old music, they're intimate little windows, in the palm of your hand, on what used to be intimately in the palm of somebody else's hand.

Old movies do the same job. A character picks up a phone, pauses, and finally says something like "Bensonhurst 5472." I saw it a hundred times before I ever really asked myself what was going on there. How did you used to make a phone call, and how does it matter that it's now different?

The small stuff is ignored by history, even though that's where all the significant changes happen. Money and politicians still shuffle things around — build stuff up, knock it down. Newspapers gin up wars overseas and most people worry about their livelihoods more than anything else.

What does change in dazzlingly profound ways are the mundane details. What does your pocket change look like? What are your shoes made of? What's playing at the local theater? Where's your bank? If Native Americans living in, say, 1491 could see today's America, the ephemera of our everyday lives would lead them to conclude that the world had ended — and they would not be wrong.

Here's the point. Somebody made the mistake of telling straight people about camp — I don't know, maybe it was Susan Sontag.

In any case, when I see old movies (say, 1967 or earlier) in a theater, there's always somebody who aggressively laughs as loud as he can. A kind of projected stage laughter. Hysterical, as if this were the first movie he'd ever seen in his life. It seems meant to signal that he recognizes something campy.

The last time I witnessed this, the movie was Rear Window. Everything about it was hilarious to the guy sitting immediately behind me. The sight of the murderer smoking a cigarette alone in the dark was a particular knee-slapper.

What's so funny, you wonder? It's the past. Anything marking the film as having been made before the current instant in time makes it worthy of derision, as if stupidity were confined to an earlier phase of cosmological expansion. The reason you and I happen to exist NOW, as opposed to some moment before now, is that you and I are mind-blowingly sophisticated. We're cool — that's why the current time happens to be "now."

But consider the alternative, as a cosmologist might. The past and the future are the same stuff. Both the past and the future are absent. They exist only in the mind's eye. They are only imagined. Neither is "here." Only the present is ... well, present to us.

But there is one difference between the past and the future. Exactly one difference.

It's cause and effect. Cause and effect goes in only one direction, from the past to the future. The arrow of causation never goes the other way. If it did, there would be no difference between the past and future.

And "cause and effect" is another way of saying "information." Information flows only from the past to the future. A coffee cup is information about the past — we can't drink out of a cup made in the future. Likewise, you can't meet a person born in the future — people, such as you and me, were caused in the past. We are information about the past.

This is why you should never trust a psychic — the universe depends on his being a liar. More to the point, this is also why old movies — and old music, and old newspapers, and old coins — are the closest you'll ever come to being able to look into the future. They're not funny, they're information about the past ... which is the only information anyone will ever have.

So wipe that smile off your face and sit quietly ... even if it's The Sound of Music. Even if it's Barbarella. Possibly The Ten Commandments ...

 

Editor's Note: This is installment 27 of a 28-part experiment. I'm trying to post one entry to The Celestial Monochord every day (or at least FOR every day) during the month of February 2007.

 

Hearts in Dixie

 

Lately, I spend a lot of my time in university libraries, city and county libraries, and state historical societies, often looking through old newspapers from around 1925 to 1959. I now have no patience for anybody who ever feels "bored" — just pick up a newspaper from the 1920's and go nuts.

I recently ran across the headline above in a July 1929 newspaper from St. Paul, Minnesota. "Hearts in Dixie" has been written about often by scholars working on media images of African Americans, and I can't add much to that work. The main subject of interest, of course, is the racist nostalgia for the antebellum South to which the movie appealed and which it reinforced.

But for me, finding the particular article above drove home a few things. It appeared in a newspaper from one of the highest latitudes in America — Minnesota's state motto is "The Star of the North." The article reminds me again that these fantasies of blacks yearning for the happy days of slavery were not solely — in fact, not primarily — southern fantasies. A lot of northerners liked images of African Americans who wanted to go back where they came from.

Roughly the same preference gave rise, a hundred years before, to black-face minstrelsy, which was invented in northern cities like New York and Boston and remained more wildly popular there than in the South. I often think of the American vision of Ireland as a place where people are always covered with shamrocks and drink green beer — a total lack of familiarity is ideal for growing fantasies.

For our purposes, gentle Celestial Monochord reader, it's the article's musical content that's most interesting. The short article consists almost exclusively of a list of 25 songs that appear in the movie. Presumably, the writer believed the Minnesota audience would recognize these songs and have an opinion about them. I have a relatively shaky grasp of the history of where that belief came from.

A few of the songs are familiar to me from simply being an American. I don't know, I guess I heard them in grade school — "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot", "Nobody Knows the Troubles I've Seen", "Old Folks at Home", and "Swanee River".

But a surprising number of the listed songs were completely unknown to me until I started listening intensively to what's known today as "Old Time" music — The New Lost City Ramblers, Tom Brad and Alice, and so on. Others may have been familiar before, but I now closely associate them with old time, bluegrass, or the Harry Smith Anthology. The article lists "Lonesome Road", "I Couldn't Hear Nobody Pray", "Li'l Liza Jane", "Shine On", "Turkey in the Straw", "Old Hen Cackle", and "Oh Dem Golden Slippers".

As a consumer of so-called roots music, one line of the article is all too familiar:

Some of the other numbers are noteworthy in that they are foundation stones, so to speak, in the structure of jazz music.

Of course, jazz, particularly if loosely defined, was the most popular new music of the day, and it's funny to see that even back then, companies were using dubious claims of historical significance to move product.

I've written before, though, about newspaper stories that cited a kind of old time revival underway in the late 1920's, and this article is further support. One of those articles featured record store owner Harry Bernstein, who discussed the revival entirely in terms of repertoire, as opposed to performance style — it was old songs that were popular, not necessarily old styles of playing. THAT revival had to wait for Harry Smith and the New Lost City Ramblers. I haven't seen "Hearts of Dixie," although I'm sure I'd find the performances rather disappointing, stylistically ... at the very least.

I know vastly more about the history of performance styles and instrumentation than I do about repertoire (Benjamin Filene's chapter on it has helped a lot). This blind spot probably results from my being more directly a product of the revival of the 1950's and 1960's — which was so much about the rebirth of sounds — than a product of the various late-19th and early-20th century revivals, focused as they were on texts. If there had been an article about banjos in Minnesota, I would have had some good contexts in which to understand it, but this list of old songs is a little more mysterious to me.

 

Editor's Note: This is installment 18 of The Celestial Monochord's great February 2007 adventure — we are posting an entry a day all month long! JUST IMAGINE ... magine ... magine ... THAT ... at ... at ... at ...

 

1969 and the Moon LandingPart 2: Alice's Restaurant

Alice's Restaurant is a long, rambling, very funny song about a lot of things — particularly the absurd way that its author, Arlo Guthrie, got out of the draft. A fascinating film version of the song was rushed to the theaters soon after the song became a hit. In Arlo Guthrie's even more fascinating audio commentary for the "special features" of the film's DVD, Arlo describes the writing of the song, and then its first public performance:

And then I went to the Newport Folk Festival in 1967, and they said, "Oh, Arlo Guthrie, you know, aren't you Woody's kid?" And they put me out in this field — you know, I was just 18 or 19 years old, I was a real young guy — and I remember playing Alice's Restaurant standing on a box in a field with about 300 people. They got such a response that they put me on some other program later on that afternoon with, you know, about a thousand people and that got such a respsonse that they put me on at the very end of the festival, and that evening there were probably about twenty, thirty thousand people in the audience. They were afraid to put an unknown person like me at the end of a big festival. It'd be really chancy, I mean, what if I was terrible? What if it was horrible? ...

And so Judy Collins came out, Joan Baez came out and then other people came out, and Pete Seeger came out. And by the end of the evening, all the performers were onstage singing Alice's Restaurant. And that was the day that Man first walked on the Moon. I remember being onstage and telling everybody, you know, "There's people walking around up there." And looking at the moon. And it was a big day. Big day for me, big day for everybody. The next day, I started getting the phone calls from all the record companies and the execs and stuff.

It's true that the song made its public premier at the Newport Folk Festival in July 1967. But "Man first walked on the Moon" two years later, in July 1969. There were no astronauts in space during the 1967 festival. Part of what fascinates me about the film, and Arlo's commentary, is that they are haunted by endless mysteries, coincidences, misunderstandings, and misinterpretations — most of which Arlo points out, and they aren't all his fault. But the moon landing the night of his great triumph at Newport happened only in Arlo's memory.

The exact timing of the song and the film interests me. As I understand it, Alice's Restaurant was Arthur Penn's next directing job after Bonnie and Clyde. Hollywood in the mid-60s was in pretty bad shape and the studios were desperate to get people into theaters. Bonnie and Clyde (produced by 28-year-old Warren Beatty) was a surprise success and helped encourage bolder movies by sometimes by younger artists, oriented toward younger audiences. Penn's "Alice's Restaurant" has a disorienting strangeness that comes from being a weird hybrid of countercultural documentary and studio pandering. Alice's Restaurant catches Hollywood in mid-morph, trying to figure out how to do a new thing. That's why the issue of timing is important if you want to understand film in the 60's.

But even more, I want to understand the year 1969 and how the The Moon Landing fit into it. One lesson of Arlo's mistaken timeline is that the recollections of the major players — whether astronauts or folksingers — are 36 year old, and are bound to be cloudy. Certainly, any drugs consumed at the time are unlikely to help, but they're not the only factor that can make things "run together" — young people in 1969 had a lot on their minds, what with a draft, a war, assassinations, Nixon, and such. I often remind myself that between 1965 and 1970, there were ... well, just five years.

But the main lesson of Arlo's mistake is that it wasn't some other mistake — it was about the Moon Landing. It is testimony to the importance of the landing not just as a technological feat, but in its reflecting and affecting the headiness of the times. The 1967 Newport Folk Festival was certainly one of the most important events in Arlo Guthrie's life. It changed everything for him, and it was inextricably wrapped up in momentous national events (just listen to the song). It really was a big day for everybody — every day seemed to be — and it makes sense that memories would get pegged to Apollo 11, that memories would move around to best reflect their intensity and the way they were shaped by dramatic displays of American power.

Part 1

1969 and the Moon LandingPart 1: M*A*S*H

The first major Hollywood movie to use "the f-word" was Robert Altman's M*A*S*H. It was hard enough to get this past the studio, but the word was spoken by a gung-ho, frat-boyish soldier, whose buddies were smoking marijuana on the sidelines. Released during the depths of the Vietnam War, it was not exactly the kind of depiction of Our Troops people were used to seeing on-screen. It is said, though, that many state-side soldiers found a way to go AWOL from their bases for a few hours to see the film.

While editing M*A*S*H after filming was complete, Altman was disappointed in the results. He thought something was missing, and eventually decided the film needed a kind of Greek chorus — a detached voice that could comment on the action. So, he sent a camera crew back out to film many dozens of shots of a loudspeaker on a pole, and then he dubbed the 4077's camp announcements over this footage. It was just what he was looking for.

One of those shots of the loudspeaker has a gibbous moon in the background. According to the DVD's "special features," that shot was taken the night Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made the first moon landing. There are people up there on that moon, behind the camp's loudspeaker in the movie M*A*S*H.

I wan't really there in 1969, so it's not easy to imagine the impact M*A*S*H must have had on its first audiences (the more familiar TV series doesn't help). What it must have meant for that moon landing to drop into the middle of 1969 is even harder to reconstruct. After all, when is it ever possible to grasp the mood of an entire nation in any year — much less America in 1969?

John Prine said recently, "If you want the big picture, you need a really small frame." That shot of the 4077's loundspeaker with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in the background sometimes rests in my mind for a long time, like a shrine for contemplation or like some kind of worry stone.

Part 2

Lisa Simpson Goes to Banjo Camp

My wife Jenny reports that the episode of The Simpsons that aired on Sunday, April 17 briefly showed Lisa Simpson wearing a t-shirt that said "Banjo Camp." I missed it because I glanced down to peel a shrimp. I would love a screenshot of it, if anybody out there can make that happen for me.

Also, if anyone would kindly explain to me just what's so funny, exactly, about wearing a t-shirt that says "Banjo Camp" ...

UPDATE (April 26, 2005)

It turns out that Lisa's shirt actually said "Band Camp":



"Banjo Camp" was merely wishful thinking on Jenny's part. Ah well, it could happen to anyone. Actually, it does explain a lot — of course, band camp is for dweebs, and so, is funny. But banjo camp? That would've needlessly alienated a key demographic, don't you think?

Art and Science on "Morning Edition"

NPR's Morning Edition has been airing a series exploring the intersections between art and science. It's had some fine moments, and it's definitely worth listening to on the web. Probably my favorite segment was on Louis and Bebe Barron, pioneers of electronic music in the 1950's.

An apparently eccentric husband and wife team, the Barrons found ingenious ways to get crude 1950's-era electronics to make strange noises. Frequently, they would deliberately push circuits beyond their limits, creating various whirrs, whistles, and pops as the circuitry fried — that is, they made instruments that made music through self-destruction.

The home page of the series reads like a kind of Dream-Jobs-Only classifieds section.

Spider John: Amateur Astronomer

You may know the great Minnesota bluesman Spider John Koerner as a character in Bob Dylan's recent book. He's portrayed there as, essentially, "the other guy" around Dylan's university neighborhood who, in 1960, played the accousic guitar and tried to sound 45 years older than he really was. Well, now John really is 45 years older than he really was, and you can still find him playing in bars near the same old Dinkytown neighborhood, sounding better than ever.

The City Pages now confirms the obvious — Koerner is an amateur astronomer. This great bearer of the folk-blues tradition is also a "StarGeezer." Since tonight marks the premier of a new documentary about him, "Been Here, Done That," it's a good day to award Spider John the coveted Monochordum Mundi, given to those who best represent the fusion of science and music we're looking for here at The Celestial Monochord.

Go to Spider John's website and try clicking on the pictures of him there.