Eve of the War

A little revelation for me today. I finally found a song that I was whispering from time to time, without knowing the title or who the artist is. And yes, it has dawned on me, thanks to my friend Rade who is a meticulous seeker of pop culture stuff on the Internet. It is Jeff Wayne’s “Eve of the War”! Big thanks. You know, this is really a situation where search engines don’t help. How are you supposed to enter a keyword for something that you can only reproduce as music. Is this a good idea for an innovative search engine? Probably not.

There’s one thing that connects me strongly to this song. It was used as intro to a 1980’s Yugoslav sci-fi review show “Zvezdani ekran” (“Starry Screen”) hosted by Zoran Živković, the leading authority on science fiction in former Yugoslavia, later a big friend of Michael Moorcock and the most translated Serbian writer.

I watched the show in 1985 and 1986 usually some time at noon, before the school. I am sorry that the recorded shows are nowhere to be found, otherwise I would put the whole intro here, not just the music. The one below is from an animated series.

Yes, mid-eighties Graf! That was the time of those BBC documentaries, ones from Thames production. Wildlife shows like “Survival”. David Bellamy and wanders of nature somewhere around 10AM and then Zvezdani ekran. It was in that show that I saw a short sci-fi film "Quest" by Saul Bass based on a story by Ray Bradbury of the world where people live for only eight days and try to get out of that world for generations. One of my great impressions which is now decades old. It is another artefact of my TV life that I am lookin for...

Here's the video with Jeff Wayne's "Eve of the War" as a theme:

Sinister

Graf Oderland, thanks for the picture. However, it reminds of something that I thought about long ago, and that is how the cracks on the film really added some sinister look to the event. There is a lot of noise on the picture you placed as the header, and there is a strange feel I get from it. It is like in those dreams where you speak and the words come out distorted or with delay, or when you try to look at something, but the light is somehow too bright.

I found a video showing a footage of outer space taken from V-2 rocket in 1946. Our planet, that we are used to seeing as a pearl white ball with emerging blue and green, looks very sinister due to footage noise. What else to expect from a V-2?

Fiddling with design

As you can see Zoran, I've started playing around a little bit with the look of the site, mostly to make it a little more interesting and easy on the eye. I've actually been meaning to do so for a while - had the image all chopped up and set to go. Finally got around to it on this chilly autumn Saturday morning.

Given our theme, and the fact that both your Pynchon and my Burke links touched on the V2, I thought it was apropos. And I liked the picture. Tell me what you think. And by all means, go in and fiddle with the settings/features yourself.

I'll continue my thought from a couple weeks ago presently.

It's got EVERYTHING to do with your vorsprung durch technik, ya know?

A segue and homage in that post title; from the Britpop-inspired thoughts of my last response on Cool Britannia, via the cockney-caricature monologue of the real musical epitome of the era in all its pastiched, referential glory, Parklife, to the things I really want to talk about. Like epic scientific/historical documentaries, how we conceive of the course of history, technology's role in it, and the notion of specialized knowledge. And where that leads us, in turn. Sometimes in unanticipated directions.

It'll take me a few posts, spread over a few days (at my slovenly pace) to even scratch the surface of the connections (a pre-emptive pun) that I'm making. But here goes.

This summer, I discovered to my delight that someone has put virtually all of James Burke's major documentary series on the development of modern society, emphasizing science and technology, on Youtube. Thank you, "jamesburkefan." I'm not sure how familiar you are with Burke, Zoran - perhaps you are, perhaps not. But even if you're not, I've got the feeling you would recognize the feel and style of the documentaries he presents.

And what style! To say nothing of the content itself, which is quite awesome. These are the archetypal 70s-80s era BBC popular documentaries, as full of goodness as they are laden with dynamic, easily-parodied stylistic touches. The showy camerawork and cuts, for starters. It is all so nerdy, it can't help but be hip. Britain may have been going down the tubes in the late 1970s, but it couldn't have been all bad if they were capable of producing television like "Connections." Whiz-bang CGI special effects? Who needs those?* Spend the money instead on creating something worth saying, with enough left over for re-creations, round-the-world travels for the sake of a single shot, and one ubiquitous, fantastic off-white leisure suit. They don't make television like this anymore - or even show it much anymore, and that is a shame.

*Then again, the final moments of this episode are not special effects - and it's so much better than anything you could cook up on a computer. Talk about an astounding shot.

I had never seen all of the original Connections, nor most of his other series like The Day The Universe Changed. I've read that a couple of our "educational" cable channels (i.e. Discovery Channel, History Channel) may have shown some of these documentaries years ago, but nowadays they're more concerned with showing educational "documentaries" about custom motorcycle shops, UFOs and ghost hunters. So I've been slowly catching up with Burke on Youtube since late summer. An episode here, an episode there.

At several points, but especially here, in the finale, Burke talks about specialized knowledge in our modern world. And that is what I want to highlight, the idea that the further we go along, the more complex and recondite that knowledge gets (especially at the boundaries of science and technology), the more we all must depend on others, on "experts" and "expert interpretations" to make sense of it for us. Which leaves us extremely vulnerable to all sorts of manipulative things. Speaking as someone who considers himself somewhat intelligent, many intelligent, intellectually curious people are drawn to understanding things which, beyond a certain point, they just can't grasp in full. Stuff like quantum physics, superstring theory, and so on. I know that even the people working in those fields don't grasp it all. Yet we still want to know, and there are people claiming that it really means X, as if they grasp it all, as if it's a settled question. And this can have some political/cultural/environmental consequences. So who do we give creedence to?

I'll say more about this next time. It doesn't have much to do with Burke per se, more about things that interest me like the co-opting of certain near-impenetrable scientific ideas by certain New Age types.

We can talk all you want about James Burke - I would be glad to. He's still writing books by the cartload and heading up a curious project called the Knowledge Web, which seems to extend his basic perspective on history and historical figures - "everything is connected, often in ways you can't predict" - into a collaborative web space. It's a perspective that I find inspiring and provocative. But I would be remiss if I didn't also include this bit from one of his predecessors. Through a little research (I mean, wikipedia) I found that Burke's Connections was really just one in a line of big-picture-oriented historical documentaries produced by the Beeb in the 60s and 70s. Before him, there were projects like Jacob Bronowski's similar, but more highbrow and academic The Ascent Of Man.

Watch this clip. This is one of the more moving, meaningful and important few seconds of television I can remember seeing. Where Burke - not so much an academic, but a former TV science correspondent - tends to leaven the startling parts with a little whimsy and irony, this is pure drama and pathos. It chills. I can't get it out of my mind, the survivor stepping into the ash-puddle and "touching people." I wish that the clip didn't cut off when it did, and I'd like to hunt down the original series, probably on video somewhere but not in our library, to see the whole thing.

Jacob Bronowski at Auschwitz:

Cool Britannia

I mentioned squaddies in the previous post. Good reminder. It's exactly ten years since the expiration of my first ever employment contract. A one-year full-time job with British Forces in Bosnia as an interpreter. The year of 1996 was really something. Seventeen, straight from school, I got to meet the "lads" from Liverpool, Leeds, Lancaster...of whom many were my age. A rising generation of Cool Britannia who ended in shitholes of Bosnia as peacekeepers. I was ok with that, just changed one military service into another. Instead of doing a one year conscript service in domestic forces, I managed to join the peacekeepers and get paid for what I do.

Although the subsequent years brought me more in touch with the civil component of international presence in Bosnia, that eventually launched me overseas after the university, the first year was really "a first contact" of a sort. Stories of a rising club scene in England, photos of squaddies' naked girlfriends who sparked the imagination of a club night aftermath. It was also the year that Trainspotting was showing in cinemas.

Around the camps kiosks with pirate CDs mushroomed. Locals (who I also learned to call that way and later found out that it is a perfectly suitable depiction) got their first supplies then very expensive CD burners and made a fortune on burning fresh club music, Blur and Oasis for more "refined" ones. Noel Gallagher set against the background of improvised CD shops on main roads with lightly dressed girls and bunch of lads in their full combats making noise.

I wondered what happened with that generation of screw-ups of whom many went to army to avoid being sent to corrective facilities. Regardless of their past and family background, they looked the same under the Union Jack. A Generation, indeed.

Today I found an article on bbc.co.uk where some of them, probably not those who I met, but nevertheless them, talk about how Cool Britannia perished into the unfulfilled promise of labour with style that was supposed to build the true clubbing capital of the world.

Somewhere under the bed there's a Panasonic "boogie box" I bought "tax free for British Forces" in Sarajevo AAFI that first year. There are also those "near the main road CD shops" CDs somewhere too. It's different music for me these days, but I silently lament over that year of 1996 when Cool Britannia and British tax payers' money made me cooler in Bosnia than I would usually be. It would make the story too long if I started on how things went down almost in the same way that people in that BBC article describe it. As if the shift from the immediate post-war optimism in Bosnia followed the thought path of that generation of Britons of whom many ended in Afghanistan and Iraq, and slipped into the same undefinable state of mind as a cause of promises unfulfilled.

But, as I said, it would make the story a tad too long. Read the article.

Why the Balkans Attract Women

I remembered something from the book I read before:

Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination
by Vesna Goldsworthy

“Through much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, writers and filmmakers in Western Europe and America have found in the Balkans a rich mine of images for literature and the movies. Bram Stoker's Transylvania and Anthony Hope's Ruritania are among the best known of these images. In this pioneering book, Vesna Goldsworthy explores the origins of the ideas that underpin Western perceptions of the "Wild East" region of Europe. She examines Western and East European letters, diaries, personal interviews, and a wide range of Balkan-inspired literature. She shows how the lucrative exploitation of Balkan history and geography for Western literature and for the entertainment industry has affected attitudes toward the countries of the region and the West's political involvement.” (Powells Review).

In a chapter with title “Why the Balkans Attract Women”, Goldsworthy refers to an unsigned article with the same title that appeared in 1912. in Graphic magazine. The question raised then and almost a century later by the author of Inventing Ruritania is “why those rough, wild, half civilized and half orientalized small countries attract some of the best women intellectuals?”. The unsigned article, as quoted by Goldsworthy, states that the East attracts women because in it's being it is female to the bone, as much as the West is male.

It can't get rid of the idea that the successor of Goldsworthy's Vicountess Strangford, Mary Adelaide Walker, Adelina Irby, Lady Hutton, Flora Sandes and other women who went to Balkans in the early 1900s, is, let's say, Christiane Amanpour. She did have fun in Sarajevo, but I'll leave her alone. A better example is an American anthropologist I met in Sarajevo at a conference couple years ago who conducted a research about the perception of civil society among the formerly opposed armies of Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks in Bosnia. I somehow know, at least from my experience as an interpreter for British Forces in Bosnia, that squaddies in all armies, everywhere in the world, think about just one thing – getting laid. She said that they were very cooperative when she went to visit them in the barracks and in the places where they hung out in free time (!) . The other one I met conducted a textual analysis, or something like that, of voting ballots at the far out polling posts during the several election years.

Now, the question raised here is whether is there is some king of fetish that Balkans satisfy in a safer and more discrete manner than elsewhere where shit has happened or is happening? Is it perhaps a case that, for instance, Bosnia still has something of that 19th century concept of a lost land, a place of refuge for the western pervert. A place where you can get lost? It's not my experience, I feel quite claustrophobic in this small country, but in a way that Bosnia is mediated, with two most sought war criminals still at large, and many of little pockets where all sorts of people hide, it may be the focus of some mild sort of orientalism. It's a four hour highway drive from Trieste to world's end.

Archers of afterthoughts

A week ago tonight I went to see the amazing Andrew Bird in concert.

It's difficult to describe just what Andrew Bird does, musically. Let me try and take a shot at it: he's a whistling, violin/guitar/glockenspiel playing one-man-band. Trained in Suzuki method, obviously influenced by Eastern European gypsy music (a formative influence, but he bears many influences), and a terrific, if allusive and oblique lyricist. Because he plays with minimal accompaniment (at this show, it was him and him alone) he uses this recording apparatus which allows him to play a small bit on his guitar or violin, capture it and loop it, then play over it (or pull it out). This all takes fancy footwork and timing. It's pretty amazing to watch him play like this, layering melody over rhythm then fading it out. At least it is for me, but I couldn't play a scale on the piano, much less imagine knocking out a tune while singing.

I've been haunted by his song "Scythian Empires" since his newest album came out earlier this year, and especially since I heard him play it live in concert. I figured I would share it with you; while I'm not sure how up you are on American indie multi-instrumentalists, I thought it might hit a chord, given your historical and philological interests. The creation story of the song itself is interesting; according to this interview (among others I've read) it stemmed from his adolescent fascination with the Scythians, that now-forgotten (at least here) ancient race of the steppe. How many great songs have their roots in Herodotus? Much less, how many songs about lost Indo-European tribes sound so quite so pointed and elegiac when alluding to another tribalized empire in the process of losing itself?

Anyway, here are the lyrics.

Five day forecasts bring black tar rains and hellfire
While handpicked handler's kid gloves tear at the inseams
Their Halliburton attaché cases are useless
While scotch guard Macintoshes shall be carbonized
Now they’re offering views of exiting empires
Such breathtaking views of Scythian empires

Scythian empires, horsemen of the Russia steppes
Scythian empires, archers of an afterthought
Routed by Sarmations, thwarted by the Thracians
Scythian empire

(Whistle solo)

Scythian empires, exiting empires
Scythian empires, exiting empires
Routed by Sarmations, thwarted by the Thracians
Scythian empire
Kings of Macedonia, Scythian empire

And here's a live performance from some other show.  You get more of a sense of the song from it, but sorry about the shaky camerawork.

Before he played it last week, he said he was happy that the venue had hardwood floors, because he wanted to
ask us, the audience, to stamp our feet to the beat (a ghost rhythm, you might say - there's no actual percussion) during the solo halfway through the song. We did, and it sounded exactly as you might imagine it would - the sound of an army drilled but run ragged, marching out under the cover of night.

The allusions are right there. But artful and deep. Thwarted empires. Exiting empires.
A note: that "archers of an afterthought" line. I read somewhere that a typical Scythian tactic was to ride on horseback through/around the opposing lines, turn, and fire into the enemies' backs. Now, what a lyric, if that is true.

Command Prompt

To continue the previous post by Graf, I found a refreshing idea in the season two of LOST, where in an underground complex, on an island where a bunch of survivors from a plane crash are dwelling, there is a computer with magnetic tape closets and a very old-fashioned command prompt on a black and green monitor. The operator must enter a code in the computer every 108 minutes, or the electromagnetic force discharges in an unpleasent manner.

Command prompt is a sort of rack and pinion steering, whereas the GUI, or the graphical user interface contains a bunch of servos that hide the machinery underneath. It's been hard to find the realistic depiction of command line in the movie industry, ever since “Wake up Neo” and even there it was a very eloquent prompt. What LOST managed to maintain is the unservoed, rack and pinion, lever-style prompt with a simple syntax that does the job for years. Undeground, hidden and world-saving, the command prompt in LOST definitely sticks to the Borghesian idea that points of control are lever buried deep under, in the subterranean realms of either material or spiritual world, where a single push of the button can change everything.

There is a striking resemblance with another kind of button that pops in and out of public consciousness...depending on the public interest of the moment, but is always there, regardless of our attitudes and philosophies. It's a reminder of the elapsing 108 minutes until the next push that TOTALS and resets the score.

Leverage

In the physical sphere, as in the financial or psychological spheres, it is a wonder what a little leverage can do.

Ax murderers we have known and forgotten

I hate to wonder, but do; are more people getting homicidally crazy around here nowadays? Less? Is the rate stable? We might be excused for asking such questions when there's a spate of people "snapping" (we might contemplate that metaphor) and going around randomly shooting others and themselves. It's not just the spectacularly horrible and sickening rare events - dozens shot at a high school or college. Worse perhaps, because of their frequency, are the three or five obliterated at a time at teenagers' parties, or in board meetings, or at workplaces, or wherever. And we rarely come up with a better reason why it happened there, and not here, beyond "he snapped."

I am a bit of a perfectionist, so when I was putting together my profile, with a specific literary reference intrinsic to it, I wanted to get one quote just right. Along with the pseudonym, it's from Frisch's "Graf Oderland." Which is about an ax murderer. That's not all it's about - it's social allegory - but the fact remains that people do get their heads split open with an ax. I thought it was "Graf Oderland comes with an ax in his hand," that I wanted, but I wasn't sure, and I needed it exact. Since I didn't have the play itself, or the Tagebuchs 1946-1949 in which it is sketched out at hand, I had to either punt, or else see what the internet delivered.

So in the interest of precision, I put the phrase "with an ax in his hand" into Google, and unearthed this amazing archival story from the NYT - "Madman kills 3, Gashes 3 with Axe" (pdf) (by the way, lets say thanks that the Times' pay-for-archival-content notions have now mercifully died, along with TimesSelect.)

I find it just fascinating - here's why. Brooklyn, CT is a pretty tiny, pretty nice place about a half hour from my hometown. I don't say that because I've been there - I may have dashed through it once, maybe - but because all little towns in that part of the world, mine included are nice, peaceful, bucolic havens. These are all places that play on their old agricultural heritage, historic character and fine schools, while spacing out their gorgeous $500,000 homes over the hills and woods. Come to my house, and see the stone walls that cover the entire neighborhood, because (I pointed this out to my parents, who aren't quite so observant about such things) a couple decades ago it was all someone's farm. I happen to love such palimpsest-traces. Now, 80 years ago the whole area was a very different place. Then it was much more rural, probably much more earthy and far more impoverished, and apparently just as mad. Just madness of a different character, born of isolation and god knows what pathologies. We can't ask Victor Lipponenn about those.

Once upon a time - barely a blink of an eye ago, you know - that town suddenly became That Place, where such a grisly and immensely dramatic massacre took place. Cutting neighbors down with an ax. Killing an infant in the process. Burning barns full of livestock and hanging onesself. In the hands of the hackiest hack, this is at least the stuff of a gripping, bloodcurdling gothic novel. And - who knows - with all respect to the long dead - maybe in the hands of a Frisch, Victor Lipponenn is transformable into a sort of rural Connecticut Graf Oderland. But we will never know just what happened before, during and after (minus a trip to the police/newspaper archives that no one, the people living in the neighborhood included, is going to make.) Nor are there any allegories. It just evaporated, like 99.999% of human events do in mere seconds. It is (I assume) all lost to history now.

And maybe that's fine. We can't move, if constricted by all the accretions of history, can we?

I can just imagine that in the years immediately after, that area, those farms had some stigma on them. Not to mention the whispers and shadow that must have followed whoever survived or was connected to the event, especially in a small town.
And then in time most of those people died off or moved on, and the story must have retreated into the sphere of local legend. The stuff old-timers talked of now and then, maybe. Then they passed on.
And now there is a archived pdf floating in cyberspace and not much else. Like the stone walls ascending in solitude through woods that once were fields, like the stoic old metal historical markers off the area's old roads; "Lafayette camped here."

The Bush Idea

In the post below I mentioned bush as a point of retreat, I prefer bush over forest. Bush is more decadent and it is more European and even more French in terms of outdoor sex. It is almost a common point in European mind set to have something hiding in the bush. Graf Oderland may elaborate more on the Habsburg tradition of Ausflugs in der Wald. Here I mean products of perverted Habsburg minds such as that of Marie Antoinette of France at Trianon castle where there was a lot of shrubbery to hide in. If anyone remembers the Swedish band Army of Lovers and their 1990 video "Crucified" (link) will know what I mean.

The mustached guy appears with an artificial shrub on his head in couple of scenes. But I could swear there was more shrubbery in the video before, this seems like and edited version.

German writer Ernst Junger wrote in the fifties (in Waldgang) of the retreat to the forest as way of maintaining the personal integrity in the time of great disruption. It was the ideal of a Junker aristocrate to maintain its status as an observer of the great change - der Waldgaenger). I propose here the retreat to the bush as a its decadent counterpart. Graf, please advise.

Der Buschgaenger

My Introduction

Graf Oderland, thanks a lot for setting up the blog, I will give my best to keep up with the posting pace.

Since I am not a native speaker of English, I reserve the right to make as many spelling and grammatical errors as possible, but I promise that I will try to maket things legible, despite the fact that legibility is not the attribute of texts written by people that come from a background of cultural studies.

It's a shame that like many people who grew up on fiction I can't philosophise much without referring to films, books and fictional characters which reflect the current state of my mind, and I use them a "crutch" for walking a thought. So, the best introduction of myself on this blog and explanation of how I and Graf Oderlan met, is to use Mel Gibson's Apocalypto as a frame of reference. Like its protagonist, I was saved by a moment of deferred attention of my prosecutors, by the appearance on the horizon, by a force that appears suddenly and solves things. My fellow blogger came with a tide of impressions of the new world, of the Rimland. We said and heard things at the same place and time. I disappeared in the forest before my words settled and echoed to awake my obscured prosecutors. What I do here now is looking at you from the bush with marvel. Now, like in the movie, this is my forest, my father hunted here with me and I will hunt here with my son, and my son will hunt here with his son...If you do not see my forest from the tree, better for me.

That was the main idea, subsequent perversions are courtesy of author.

The Total Perverts.

10/8/2007: A new blog is born.
And just in time, too. People were starting to get scared that the internet was running out of unsolicited musings. Have no fear! The Total Perverts is/are here.

Months ago I talked to my dear friend ZE about something just like this. A transposition of the wide-ranging dialogues we once carried on over cheap beer, and which we engage in more sporadically now, over ten thousand miles, two very different cultures, and Gtalk. A more open, flexible and free-flowing intellectual conversation, you might say. A place to talk about what we were reading and thinking and seeing.
This is it, finally - The Total Perverts. And you can take that title any way you like. We will take it in many directions.

As for your correspondents:
Here I will go by Graf Oderland. The pseudonym isn't there to hide anything, really. Well, I guess that is self-evidently false. It does obscure, and lend a nice tinge of mystery. Good. I am an academic tyro on the loose in America, though I've been known to get around. Without a doubt, I'll come cleaner about myself in the course of writing, but it's not really important just yet. Among my many, many interests: media, technology, and culture. The history of ideas. Globalization and tribalization. Politics and trash. Individuality and systems. Our own little personal subversions and acquiescences. Ephemera and significance. Ambiguity. Also, making pretentious references to my literary heroes and their creations. That's pretty big with me.

I will let my colleague introduce himself as he likes.