HL Mencken – Words As Weapons

“As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

H.L. Mencken, The Baltimore Evening Sun, July 26, 1920

“That night in my rented room, while letting the hot water run over my can of pork and beans in the sink, I opened A Book of Prefaces and began to read. I was jarred and shocked by the style, the clear, clean, sweeping sentences. Why did he write like that? And how did one write like that? I pictured the man as a raging demon, slashing with his pen, consumed with hate, denouncing everything American, extolling everything European or German, laughing at the weaknesses of people, mocking God, authority. What was this? I stood up, trying to realize what reality lay behind the meaning of the words. . . . Yes this man was fighting, fighting with words. He was using words as a weapon, using them as one would use a club. I read on and what amazed me was not what he said, but how on earth anybody had the courage to say it.”

Richard Wright, Black Boy, The Richard Wright Reader, (New York: Harper &Row, 1978), p. 17.

CBS broadcast – Radio Biography 1956

 

Lockdown Xenochrony

(21,07,21)

“Xenochrony” is a musical technique associated with Frank Zappa, who coined the name from the Greek words xeno (strange) and chrono (time). According to Zappa, “In this technique, various tracks from unrelated sources are randomly synchronized with each other to make a final composition with rhythmic relationships unachievable by other means.”

Since the summer of 2020 the barbarism of pure culture has linked to archived weekly radio broadcasts from the Late Lunch with Out to Lunch show on Resonance 104.4 FM.

As in 2021 and the Covid Crisis and our favourite xenochronic musians are still alive and kicking, we are relaunching our support with the following links:

Ben Watson takes the Late Lunch House Band, honed via several years playing weekly at the Resonance studio and “xenochronically” during pandemic lockdown, to the Betsey Trotwood pub on Farringdon Road for a live session. The Lessons of Xenochrony are not forgotten, though, so you also get to hear the superb post-Bailey guitar of James Wilson of Music With My Insane Friend (“The Castro Eulogies (My Friend Fidel)” and “No Imagination (My Plastic Bottle Caught in the Strings)” from I Digress Indeed’s Retirement Music (SoundCloud, 2017) and “Leguminous Legroom Trio”  a xenochronic composition combining Peter Baxter “Pots, Pans & an Open Window” 14-vii-2021 8:13, Out To Lunch’s organ piece “Nachsteuererklaerungsjubel” and Robert “Sugarlips” Goldsmith’s “On Cloud Roland Nine”). Association of Musical Marxists All-Stars at the Betsey Trotwood 16-vii-2021: Peter Baxter – pots’n’pans and electronics; Guy Evans – percussion; Iris Watson – djembe hand drum, thunder tube, handclaps; Luke Davis – typewriter, poetry; Out To Lunch – vocals, thunder tube, handclaps, word jazz, yamaha organ, mix, xenochronics; Dave Black – electric guitar; Robert “Sugarlips” Goldsmith – sopranino sax, tenor sax, baritone sax.

Twang Verbal 26-v-2021

Xenochronic AMM All-Stars in order of appearance (not counting excerpts in the theme tune opener): Graham Davis – synth, electric guitars; Robert “Sugarlips” Goldsmith – saxophone; Out To Lunch – Splash’n’Klang, tap drip, recitation, xenochrony; Mike Watt – electric bass; Ben Moran Healy – acoustic guitar, electric guitar, recitation; Eleanor Crook – electric guitar, wah bass; Mike Watt – electric bass; Guy Evans – hybrid drumset.

0:00 Marc Guillermont’s “Make a Blues Noise Here” plus two excerpts from RSG’s “Response to Foistive Thirty Take One”; GE “Little of the Original Structure Remains” 0:29>>0:34; GD “Fat Bassist Ponders Life” 1:41>>1:56, 0:00>>0:22; GE “Posthorn Pat” 0:23>>0:53; OTL/BMH “Pesky Attic Dooda” 7:49>>8:16; OTL “Water3” 9-x-2018 4:06>>4:34 + EC/GD “Twixt the Shed & Here #3” 1:30>>1:59 4:30

4:59 Toilets or Marx – Don’t Make Me Choose (GD/RSG “Foistive Thirty Take One” 7:20>>10:15/OTL “Water3” 9-x-2018 13:26>>14:13/MW “Foist #12” 1:03 spaced) 3:13

8:46 Foistive Thirty feat. Robert “Sugarlips” Goldsmith on tenor sax (RSG/OTL “Tap Drip 12-iv-2021a” 8:47>>44:48/BMH “Biblical Rain” 4:17, “New Shapes Found in Hovel” 5:17/EC “Response to Iris & Finnegans Wake in London Zoo” 7-v-2022 10:48>>32:57/MW “Foists #112-118″/GE “Response to Here’s That Rainy Day” 2:25, “Response Chain (GE to EC) to PB’s One Splatter” 12:57>>32:03, “Response to EC’s Response to Beefheart Lecture 6&7” 0:27>>3:43/OTL “Splash’n’Klang” 10-vii-2018 1:51>>5:29) 35:51

45:35 Pesky Attic Dooda (BMH “Humped Dooda” (guitar), “June Attic Mildew” (voice)/OTL “Pesky Interim Fly” 23-v-2021/excerpts from “Splash’n’Klang” 4-xii-2018) 9:29

55:35 Shittin’ in a Bag … Again (BMH/OTL “Splash’n’Klang” 10-vii-2018b 1:51>>5:24) 4:38

Concerto for Graham

by

Xenochronic AMM All-Stars

Music assembled from contributions by AMM All-Stars during Covid-19 lockdown. Tracks 1-4 were extracted from Concerto for Graham, an hour (Late Lunch with Out To Lunch broadcast from Resonance 104.4FM 2-3pm 31-iii-2021) in which multi-instrumentalist Graham Davis (guitar, bass ukelele, vocals) responded to a collage put together by OTL. Tracks 6-7 were broadcast on The OTL Show (Soho Radio 8-9am 2-iv-2021): “Blob Stance” is an acoustic guitar improvisation by Ben Moran-Healy with responses from the Somers Town dawn chorus and OTL on piano and penny whistle; “I’m Bleeding Obedience” is a song by Peter Baxter with bass, Chapman stick and synth added by Jair-Rohm Parker Wells. “Clangs the Dearth in my Loins” (track 5), OTL performing Peter Baxter’s online review of Concert for Graham at the piano, is inedit jusq’ici.

All tracks by Xenochronic AMM All-Stars; in order of appearance: Graham Davis – electric guitar, bass ukelele; Out To Lunch – field recording of fireworks at Moss Hall School and dawn chorus in Somers Town, Splash’n’Klang, mouthnoise, piano, penny whistle, organ, xenochrony; Guy Evans – drums; John Roy – banjo; Ben Moran-Healy – guitar; Jair-Rohm Parker Wells – bass guitar, Chapman stick, synths; Mike Watt – bass guitar; Peter Baxter – vocals, drum machine, synth.

  1. GD/OTL/GE (sped-up)
  2. GD/OTL
  3. GD/JR
  4. OTL (“Tap Drip is Getting Faster” 29-iii-2021; “Organ Response to Mike Watt & Dave Black on 85th Street”)/BMH (“A Nimble Mop Is …”)/GE (“Sunday Piano Just Hybrid Kit 2:36>>7:20)
  5. PH (words)/OTL/JRPW/MW
  6. BMH/OTL
  7. PH/JRPW

Return of the Toby Jug 10-iii-2021

“Make a Blues Noise Here” from Marc Guillermont’s Zappostrophe) intercut with excerpts from: AMM All-Stars “Send Out Assent Dung”; Jair-Rohm Parker Wells “llcontrib060321a”; Dave Black “Blackheart Mountain”; Out To Lunch “Intimation” 11-vii-2020; Guy Evans “Sunrise Piano Response Hybrid Kit Response, Just Kit”; Eleanor Crook “Tiny Surf Hands Just Guitar (Clean Settings)”.

Compost Fetishisation 24-ii-2021

Topics audio esemplasm

LLWOTL 10 February 2010 <CLICK HERE

Xenochronic AMM All-Stars in order of appearance: Cloughie – electric bass; Mike Watt – electric bass; Out To Lunch – vocals, empty Turkish Delight box,Yamaha organ, Splash’n’Klang, djembe hand drum, xenochrony, announcements, master plan; Graham Davis – synth; Paul Shearsmith – trumpet; Eleanor Crook – violin, electric guitar; Guy Evans – hybrid drumset, wind capture; Robert “Sugarlips” Goldsmith – baritone sax, telephony; Peter Baxter – electronic devices; Ben Moran-Healy – acoustic guitar, semi-electric guitar.

LLWOTL 3 February 2021  <CLICK HERE

Polemic, politics, mouth jazz and spontaneous music with Ben Watson. Today: Out To Lunch and his crew address the current craze for sea shanties as Dave Black sings his version of the sea shanty “Haul Away Joe”, and sea water drips through strangely-possessed xenochronic realisations. With OTL on piano, djembe hand drum and xenochronics; Eleanor Crook on electric guitar and wah bass; Graham Davis on synth; Guy Evans at the drumset; Gareth Sager on various instruments.

Tagged

#resonance fm #arts radio #london #late lunch with out to lunch #sea shanties

EARLIER SHOWS

Margulis Forever 23-ix-2020

LISTEN HERE:The OTL Show 11-ix-2020

Episode of Ben Watson‘s Late Lunch with Out To Lunch dedicated to Lynn Margulis, the rebel biologist who lionised evolution via symbiosis and the lateral transfer of genes between species. Xenochronic AMM All-Stars in order of appearance: Jair-Rohm Parker Wells – Chapman Stick, electric bass, processing; Out To Lunch – voice, piano, Splash’n’Klang, poetry; Rob “Sugarlips” Goldsmith – sopranino and tenor saxophones; Graham Davis – synth; Eleanor Crook – violin, electric guitar; Guy Evans – drumset; Cloughie – electric bass; Dave Black – electric guitar; John Roy – synth. All played this week unless otherwise stated.

0:00 Marc Guillermont “Make a Blues Noise Here” plus Intimations 3:00
3:00 “Ribbed Rubbish” (OTL/R”S”G) 5:27
8:35 “Bass Response to Splash’n’Klang of Saturday 12-ix-2020″ (OTL/J-RPW) 7:32
10:24 “Violin Response to Ribbed Rubbish” (EC) 5:42
16:12 Internet Archive Robot reads Lynn Margulis 1:49
16:18 “Do We Have to Do It in Here?” (GD, slowed down -33%) 2:35
18:32 “Little Ted Murders his Elderly Neighbour” (GD)
19:01 “Vespertilionid” (EC/GE) 8:52
23:06 “Bass Bells” (C) 4:18
27:44 OTL on Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan’s Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Evolution from our Microbial Ancestors (1986) 1:50
29:34 OTL reads Margulis on spyrochetes 3:03
32:37 “Nine Seconds of Drum Samples” (GE) 0:09
32:46 “You Go to My Head meets Body & Soul” (DB/R”S”G) 3:45
36:19 “Korg’n’Drip 3” (OTL/J-RPW) 8:17
36:45 “Boing Craze Drip Threat” (OTL/DB) 7:45
39:42 “Procession of the Pocket Things” (EC) 6-ix-2020 4:17
44:25 OTL reads more Margulis on spyrochetes 1:01
45:25 “You Wouldn’t Want One in Your Ear” (GD) 2:02
45:59 “Guitruling Banjos” (DB/GD) 2:22
47:00 “Boingy Bonk” (C) 3:53
48:21 “Ogre Margulis” (OTL) 3:43
49:12 “Anal Probe” (GD) 2:03
49:56 “Jump Navel Asterix” (JR) 28-vii-2020 5:45
50:42 “Toy Drum Mutiny” (GE) 8:18
55:44 “The Vicar Insisted” (GD) 2:03
56:48 OTL reads Margulis on seawater 0:52
Factual Note: Margulis’s spyrochete theory, which generated some of the most colourful sentences of Microcosmos, has – unlike her symbiotic explanation of mitichondria and chloroplasts – not yet received corroboration by empirical research into the fossil and DNA record, although this is still ongoing. Modern spyrochete whips do not exhibit the “9 x 2” structure which characterises sperm tails and cilia in multicellular organisms.

The OTL Show is an hour of Internet DJing by Ben Watson on Soho Radio. This was a prerecord because the studio was closed due to coronoavirus lockdown, and was broadcast at 8am on Friday 11-ix-2020.

LISTEN HERE: Groove vs. Squeeze 26-viii-2020

Xenochronic AMM All-Stars in order of appearance: Peter Baxter – tabletop percussion; Out To Lunch – announcements, field recording, Splash’n’Klang, Google Gargle, piano, Korg ribbon synth, xenochrony; Ben Moran Healy – electric guitar; Guy Evans – drumset; Rob “Sugarlips” Goldsmith – tenor saxophone; Cloughie – electric bass; Graham Davis – Ladybird recitation, “WPLJ”; Eleanor Crook – electric guitar; Dave Black – acoustic guitar, vocals, harmonica, “Back Back Train” and “Jitterbug Swing”; Charlotte Whelan – tape deck fanny pack; John Roy – banjo.

Title Credit: Bob Cobbing, Lawrence Upton and Christopher Nolan

Image: “Painstaking Accretion” Out To Lunch, Doodle Buddy on Eleanor Crook photograph of oak fungus 29-viii-2020

LISTEN HERE:

DANburst of Dreams 2-ix-2020

By Xenochronic AMM All-Stars

Xenochronic AMM All-Stars in order of appearance: Cloughie – electric bass; Guy Evans – drumset, trumpet; Eleanor Crook – electric guitar; Graham Davis – jingles, synth; Out To Lunch – piano, readings from J. H. Prynne’s Squeezed White Noise, Splash’n’Klang, google gargle, announcements, xenochrony; Jessica Harper – rhythm mashes; Dave Black – bottleneck guitar; Peter Baxter aka The Baxterium “With Beyonce in the Bayou”, acid synth, percussion.

Drip Hop UK 12-viii-2020

Xenochronic AMM All-Stars in order of appearance: Peter Baxter aka The Baxterium – tabletop percussion, sound montage, “Does Anyone Have an Onion?”, “How To Escape a Place with Scree Walls”; Graham Davis – synth, “Mwaaaah”, “Scree”, “Tinkle”; “Sweep”; Out To Lunch – Splash’n’Klang, piano, announcements, xenochrony; Jair-Rohm Parker Wells – double bass; Eleanor Crook – electric guitar; Ben Moran Healy – electric guitar, Melodica, spoon’n’cup; Rob Jones – synth; Rob Goldsmith – sopranino saxophone; Guy Evans – drumset; John Roy – semi-electric guitar.

Groovy Fidget Muffin Rule 5-viii-2020

Xenochronic AMM All-Stars in order of appearance: Out To Lunch – piano, rural mouthnoise, Korg ribbon synth, acoustic guitar, xenochrony, urbane announcements; Ben Moran Healy – electric guitar, acoustic guitar, snuffles; Rob Jones – synth, Melodica, spoon’n’cup; Jessica Harper – harp; Graham Davis – jingles, synth; Paul Hession – drumset; Eleanor Crook – electric guitar, electric bass, pedal steel; Cloughie – electric bass; Dave Black – acoustic guitar, harmonica; Jair-Rohm Parker Wells – double bass; Guy Evans – samples, drumset; John Roy – baby hand drum, synth; Roy Castle – postponed.

Rhythmically Speaking 29-vii-2020

^^LINK^^

by Ben Watson

The Brief Passage in Time of the Letterist International 1954-57

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0uYSnj5lXY

(2 August 2020)

On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Moment In Time (1959) – English Subtitles

‘The form corresponds to the content. It does not describe this or that particular activity (merchant marine, oil exploration, some historic monument to admire — or even to demolish, as in Franju’s magnificent Hôtel des Invalides, but the very core of present-day activity in general, which is empty. It is a portrayal of the absence of “real life.” This slow movement of exposure and negation is what I was trying to embody in Passage. But very summarily and arbitrarily, I must admit. Despite the prevalent fixation on the economic obstacles, the main problem is actually that short films are quite unsuitable for truly experimental cinema. Their very brevity tends to encourage a moderate, neatly edited form of expression. But it does seem interesting to detourn the fixed form of the traditional documentary, and this tends to tie us to the inviolable 20-minute limit.’

GUY DEBORD
1960

Extract from David Black, The Philosophical Roots of Anti-Capitalism –Essays on History, Culture, and Dialectical Thought (Lexington Books (2014), Part 2, ‘Critique of the Situationist Dialectic: Art, Class Consciousness and Reification’

Derive and Detournement

The members and fellow-travelers of the Letterist International were young; nearly all of them in their teens or early twenties. These “lost children” (les enfants perdus) were of the generation who had grown up during the Nazi occupation (some of their parents had been Jewish deportees or Maquisards), but had been too young to fight in the resistance. Their youthful radicalism had been betrayed by the re-imposition of “traditional” conservatism on French society, with its authoritarian penal code and reactionary clericalism, its Gendarmarie who had in large part collaborated with the Nazi occupiers, and its conscription of French youth to fight imperialist wars in Indo-China and Algeria. They also felt betrayed by the bureaucratic class-collaborationism of the Communist Party, the ineffectiveness of Trotskyism, and the recuperation of the Surrealist avant-garde by the culture industry. The headquarters of the new international was a bar in the Arab quarter of Paris’s Left Bank. According to one of the regulars, Elaine Papai (who married Jean-Louis Brau, the Letterist poet):

‘The life of the Situationist International cannot be disentangled from Saint-German-des-Prés and the climate that once reigned in that neighbourhood. The Letterist International had set up its headquarters at Moineau’s, a low dive in Rue du Four where the letterists were joined by hitherto unaffiliated young revolutionaries. Drugs, alcohol, and girls (especially underage ones) were part of the folklore of the Letterist International, as revealed in certain slogans of that time which, curiously enough, reappeared on the walls of Paris in May 1968. “Never Work!” “Ether is freely available,” or “Let us live!”’

Another young woman of the group, the Australian artist, Vali Myers, recalls,

‘They were the rootless children from every corner of Europe. Many had no home, no parents, no papers. For the cops, their legal status was “vagrant.” Which is why they all ended up sooner or later in La Santé [prison]. We lived in the streets, in the cafes, like a pack of mongrel dogs. We had our hierarchy, our own codes. Students and people with jobs were kept out. As for the few tourists who came around to gawk at “existentialists,” it was all right to con them. We always managed to have rough wine and hash from Algeria. We shared everything.’

Unlike the rest of the avant-garde, the LI refused to be “answerable” to the court of art criticism and the gaze of the “other,” refused to seek fame, and refused to market anything they produced. The LI’s mimeographed journal Potlatch, which appeared in 20 issues between June 1954 and November 1957, with an eventual print run of 500 copies, was always given away free to friends of the group, or mailed to people who expressed an interest.

The Letterist International’s theory of “unitary urbanism” was first formulated by the nineteen-year-old Ivan Chtcheglev in a 1953 article in Potlatch. Unitary urbanism expressed a vision of city planning based on aesthetic and technological innovations in architecture, but freed from subordination to the needs of corporate developers and the endless expansion of private car ownership. “Psychogeography” – “the study of the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviours of individuals” – involved the “derive,” a form of daydreaming during Letterist excursions on foot through the urban environment, defined as “a technique of transient passage through varied ambiances.” Such pleasurable activity had yet to be impoverished by the pollution and noise of traffic jams, and the vandalism of planners and developers. Chtcheglev could still write of a future in which city dwellers would reclaim the streets: “we will construct cities for drifting… but with light retouching, one can utilize certain zones which already exist. One can utilize certain persons who already exist.”

This “first phase” of the LI lasted until 1954, when Debord moved the headquarters from the nihilist atmosphere of the Rue du Four to another bar, this time on the Rue de la Montagne Sainte-Geneviève. But, for Debord, that early phase of the LI, in which the bloom of youth, like the old Paris Left Bank, passed by them before it could even be seen as what it truly was, was the “golden age” of real struggle and potential; and it is this, rather any utopian vision of the future, that haunts all of his subsequent work. As Kaufman points out, in the Society of the Spectacle, written fifteen years later (1967), the first thesis states that in a world in which “all that was once directly lived has become representation,” the “separation from, and disappearance of, life has become perfected.” By 1968, when the streets of the Paris were once again fought over, the city of the Letterists had disappeared and its utopian urbanist potential had already been destroyed.

In 1954 the celebrated Danish painter Asger Jorn (1917-73) became aware of the existence of Potlatch and the Letterist International, and made contact with Debord. Jorn, who had founded the International Movement for an Imaginative Bauhaus in 1953, shared the LI’s hostility to abstract expressionism and socialist realism, and saw their concepts of unitary urbanism and psychogeography as in line with of his own critique of functionalist design and architecture. Constant Nieuwenhuys (1920–2005, known as “Constant”), the Dutch artist friend of Jorn, was also coming into the Letterist orbit. In 1948, Constant’s Manifesto for the Dutch Experimentalists, who later became part of CoBrA group (Copenhagen- Brussels-Amsterdam), argued:

‘A new freedom will be born that will allow mankind to satisfy its desire to create. Through this development the professional artist will lose his privileged position. This explains the resistance of contemporary artists.’

Debord’s new friendship with Jorn, Constant and other leading figures of the artistic avant-garde had convinced him that the time had come for the Letterists to shift their focus from the bars of Paris to developments in the wider cultural field of struggle. In an article published in Potlatch in 1957, entitled “One Step Back,” Debord argued that the LI, rather than constitute itself as an “external opposition,” needed to “seize hold of modern culture in order to use it for our own ends” and join forces with artists – even painters, whose activities has been generally despised by the Letterists. Debord accepted that the LI might have to initially settle for a minority position within a new international movement; although, he thought, “all concrete achievements of this movement will naturally lead to its alignment with the most advanced program”:

‘…we need to gather specialists from very varied fields, know the latest autonomous developments in those fields.. We thus need to run the risk of regression, but we must also offer, as soon as possible, the means to supersede the contradictions of the present phase through a deepening of our general theory and through conducting experiments whose results are indisputable. Although certain artistic activities might be more notoriously mortally wounded than others, we feel that the hanging of a painting in a gallery is a relic as inevitably uninteresting as a book of poetry. Any use of the current framework of intellectual commerce surrenders ground to intellectual confusionism, and this includes us; but on the the other hand we can do nothing without taking into account from the outset this ephemeral framework.

Debord added that the LI needed an expansion of its “economic base.” He was well aware of the huge amount of money being made out of art by the artists themselves as well as the curators and galley-owners. Debord’s potlatch anti-book, Mémoires, consisted of collages produced in collaboration with, and financed by, Asger Jorn (whose financial support for Debord’s work continued long after Jorn decided in 1961 that he could not reconcile his working life as an artist with Debord’s organizational demands).

In July 1957 at the conference in Cosio d’Arroscia, Italy, the Situationist International was founded. Those attending the were: Guy Debord and Michèle Bernstein of the Letterist International; Giuseppe Pinot Gallizio, Asger Jorn, Walter Olmo, Piero Simondo, Elena Verrone of the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus; and Ralph Rumney, representing the London Psychogeographical Association (of which he was the sole member).

Kindle edition now available