GATZ by Elevator Repair Service

Photo by Gene Pittman

Though I have yet to see the Public Theater incarnation of Elevator Repair Service’s masterpiece, Gatz, I did view it in its entirety years ago at the Wooster Group’s Performing Garage space in Soho. A killer concept—a reading of the complete text of Fitzgerald’s fine American novel, The Great Gatsby, while simultaneously shadow-performing the work on stage and recontextualizing the action as if in a drab work office—with all of the inter-office relationships that entails.

Photo by Mark Barton

Because of legal entanglements with Fitzgerald’s estate the work is only now officially seeing the light of day in New York City at The Public. Profoundly moving at times, Gatz is brilliant, though something of a workout clocking in at six and a half hours. (I viewed it in sessions over two days). A pantomiming of the ephemeral, of lyrical beauty, Scott Shepard shadows and participates in the action on stage while always reading from the novel, and the experience is extraordinary.

Photo by Chris Beirens

The Vocoder & “Pac(k) Jam”

My 2010 twilight-of-the-summer-jam was an electro curio released on Tommy Boy Records in 1983 called “Pack Jam”, by a group calling itself The Jonzun Crew.

I first came across this electro-funk gem in Dave Tompkins’ How To Wreck A Nice Beach, a twisted history of the vocoder—that most mysterious of musical instruments—from World War II, when it was used as a U.S. intelligence tool, up to the futuristic hip-hop voice altering machine it is known as today. (My review of Tompkins’ book and the weird history of the vocoder will appear in BOMB magazine later this year.)

Dave Tompkins’ tome, with a KORG VC-10 vocoder on its cover

According to Tompkins’ book, The Jonzun Crew was is essence a creative front for a man named Michael Johnson, who dubbed himself Michael Jonzun (eventually going on to produce “Candy Girl” for New Edition). Jonzun was a fairly straightforward R&B and funk session musician who got tired of the INDUSTRY and went off on a solo futuristic funk tangent that led him to create one of the first albums completely done with a vocoder, Lost In Space.

Jonzun, in full “French aristocratic” Jonzun Crew performance regalia

The song’s full title, “Pack Jam (Look Out for the OVC)” begs clarification. Jonzun was understandably worried about being sued by Namco, makers of the video game Pac-Man, for his vocoder manipulated song, changing the title from “Pak Jam” to “Pack Jam”, with accompanying “P - A - CK” chorus. The “OVC” (Outer Visual Communicator) was an eclectic, even-weirder-than-the-vocoder instrument created by producer Bill Sebastian to accompany outré jazz musician Sun Ra’s stage show (you could not make this stuff up). The OVC, according to How To Wreck A Nice Beach, was something of a mix between an organ (or keyboard), a rock light show, and an interior onstage “performance environment” attuned to musical expression—remember this is Sun Ra. The OVC created “spacescapes” and operated in the “Suboptic Shadow World”. Sebastian would need close to a full week to set up the OVC at tour stops before Sun Ra and his band arrived. The reason “Pac-Man” needed to “look out for the OVC” is because the game was a passive experience sucking up the minds of Reagan-era youths, structured around someone else’s rules. With the OVC you created your own environment with your own rules, a total experience, rather than playing a game and following someone else’s rules. The OVC allowed one to actively interact with one’s environment, it would—“destroy all Pac-Man machines”.

The OVC in concert

Remnants of Bill Sebastian's OVC, from How To Wreck A Nice Beach

How To Wreck A Nice Beach is a fascinating read with a larger theme—the weird connection between eras and nations and purposes. As described, the vocoder was both a very important tool that may have helped win Big Wars, and a silly little instrument that rocks the party.

“Pack Jam” sounds eerily similar to a number of eighties songs you might know—the orchestral organ, techno arpeggios, funky analog bassline. Perhaps it is itself a rip-off of electro pop songs from the time. It’s a quiet electro masterpiece either way though—Najela and I rock to “Pack Jam”.

Lost Landscapes of Detroit

“Ich bin ein Detroiter”

stills from Rick Prelinger’s Lost Landscapes of Detroit

Rick Prelinger collects old film footage from a myriad of sources and crafts elegiac films from the detritus. His recent compilation of found imagery, Lost Landscapes of Detroit, emanates from a love of, rather than a requiem for, the city. The footage, spanning 1917 to 1970, screened at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD). It was subsequently placed online, where I first came across it, at Lost Landscapes of Detroit, as part of the Prelinger Archives. It is a wonderful work of cinema.

excerpt from Rick Prelinger’s Lost Landscapes of Detroit

An old, funky service announcement on the technical capabilities of film cameras and the nature of modern cities starts Lost Landscapes. From there it moves to silent footage of a bus in Three Rivers, Michigan (destined for Detroit) and an overhead shot of the city of Detroit from what looks to be the 1940s or ’50s. Lost Landscapes is in essence a beautiful and silent journey through forgotten footage of a city: factories, roads, skylines, homes, neighborhoods, and cars, many, many cars of old vintage. Not landscapes, per se, but the visual essence of a place.

A downtown Detroit parade and cavalcade for Otto Preminger’s 1959 Anatomy of a Murder, filmed in Michigan and based on a notorious case in the state, floats past silently. Hollywood faces and starstruck townsfolk glide by. Detroit mayor Louis Miriani (1957–1961) rides in a car with his wife and beaming film star Lee Remick. Police officers on horseback trot along with an all-white high school marching band strutting funky and graceful. As dusk falls Hollywood searchlight beams light the sky.

A fabulous middle section of Lost Landscapes moved me deeply—flickering film of a barely visible African American church procession at the grand opening of a new “Triumph The Church Kingdom of God In Christ”. The choir is happily dressed in robes in the morning sunlight, mothers of the church in white. Much of the film is so faded and violently flickering as to be barely visible—it is elegiac, spiritual, regal. The pastor, a “Bishop D.H. Harris” gets into his big, fancy car. There’s an all-black marching band, doing their thing. The segment’s coda has an old woman walking alone in a courtyard next to the (old? the new?) church. The film flickers and fades off, these souls and their stories sifting away with it.

Later there is imagery of old hotels, random buildings, theaters, old beer signs, and bus stations on scratch-laden black and white film. Much of the film buckles rhythmically as if blowing in the wind. A 1995 Village Voice article described Prelinger’s archives (then located in New York’s meat-packing district, now in San Francisco, along with the heralded Prelinger Library) as residing in a “climate-controlled cavern filled with pallets and rows of floor-to-ceiling shelving groaning under countless film canisters”. Here Prelinger had obsessively collected celluloid flotsam since the 1980s. In 2002 the archives were acquired by the Library of Congress.

An old man shovels winter snow while a dog runs about. A corner sign reads “Mendota & Oakman”. Cars, beautiful cars—Fords, Chryslers. An A&P Super / Market. Fromm’s hardware. Vernor’s Ginger Ale. The Annex Theater. The Riviera. A “hot rod” shop. Neighborhood banks. “Air Planes & Trailer Camp & Other Views At Detroit Michigan”. A De Soto automobile plant. Old footage of cars along 8 Mile road. Black women and a white family sharing a kiddie pool at the beach. Steam railroads from the sixties.

An info reel from the ’50s is titled, “This Is Your Police Department”, with an authoritative Dragnet-like voiceover that features the police cap logo “TUEBOR”— Latin for “I Will Protect” or “defend”. Officers help children cross streets, with a rookie officer “Joe” learning the job—reading car licenses, observing the way criminals “walk” ( a suspect is captured in this way). We view police precinct meetings, radio dispatchers on the job, and proclamations that many police calls are for “family trouble”. It ends with a glorious payroll office armed robbery broken up by Joe and his partner, who is shot and injured. “Joe understood now why [Detroit’s] police were considered bad insurance risks…”

Then a grand coda:

A short documentary with music by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. The temper of ideas put forth about the city of Detroit in this eloquent short is so grand and monumental that it made me sorry I didn’t live in Detroit in the ’70s. Voiceover is handled by then mayor Jerome P. Cavanagh (1962-1970):

“The most cosmopolitan city of the Midwest, bustling, standing at the threshold of a bright new future. A spirit of brotherhood, born and nurtured, people from many nations. An exciting new vision. A metropolis of thriving commerce and culture. A resurgence of civic pride and unfettered imagination. Applied skills of planners and idea men. Urban efficiency. A finer Detroit of bold new form.”

All the while the city is sleek and grand, stark, sharp color vistas of Detroit that make it look like a mix between a Mies Van Der Rohe urban utopia and Rome.

“The inner city becoming an exciting place to live, with the most modern schools. A 20th century vision…”

Lost Landscapes of Detroit ends with more silent visions of the city—call them landscapes if we must—downtown vistas, rolling cars, families strolling downtown, themselves taking photographs while being filmed. City architecture, old shops and hotels. A final montage displays city homes up for sale, some with “sold” signs in their yards, in what looks to be the ’60s, or even as early as the ’50s.

Then—the open highway—p.o.v. from a car driving an interstate Michigan highway.

And finally, a slow pan across a fine lawn with words physically scrawled upon it, in a landscape of bushes and shrubbery, that reads—

To quote Lee Rodney in an article on the future of Detroit in a 2009 issue of Fuse magazine, an, of all things, art magazine from Windsor, Ontario:

“…A number of people are looking at Detroit as a challenging and complex urban experiment, one that attempts to chart a different course than the repeat cycles of business development and demolition that have plagued Detroit since the early 20th century.

”

Izida Zorde, editor of Fuse, in the same issue:

“While [Detroit’

s] lack of development and market interest has created devastating living conditions, it has also produced an environment where municipal laws and codes of conduct are opened by default, creating opportunities to shift value-systems away from the market and imagine new equilibriums between the city, social communities and the natural elements.

”

This is to say that perhaps what Lost Landscapes shows us is that Detroit has for over a century possessed a spirit of ingenuity and vitality, as well as a strong sense of community (and may still, despite what doomsayers proclaim). If Detroit no longer possesses this spirit—which is debatable—perhaps like New Orleans, it too can possess spirit once again. Souls, families, and communities develop cities.

Archival footage from Prelinger Archives, San Francisco

Additional footage Timothy Caldwell

Lost Landscapes of Detroit may be freely reused and remixed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial License

Gil Scott-Heron - I’m New Here (XL Recordings)

Gil Scott-Heron’s I’m New Here is personal in nature, rather than political, and reeks of fatigue, if not perseverance. “Me and The Devil”, a reworking of a Robert Johnson Delta blues song, plays like a thick, lurching, dub lament. Despite substance abuse and legal problems, Gil has never sounded defeat in his music, but rather, defiance—keenly insightful, politically aware, contrarian anger. While he doesn’t have a lot to say here about the Bush wars, or Obama, he’s got a lot to say about the courageous role of women in broken families (“On Coming From A Broken Home”), and the idea of personal redemption, which traverses the entire record.

I’m New Here has been compared to the final recordings Johnny Cash made with Rick Rubin’s American Records. But whereas Cash recorded a wide spectrum of the American Songbook in his usual folk/country idiom, Heron’s songs here are in large part re-imagined in a score of contemporary electronic music genres—dubstep, traces of chillwave, trip hop—by producer and XL label head Richard Russell. I’m not always convinced of the purity of poet-jazzmen like Scott-Heron dipping into such waters, but do take great pleasure in the snapping jump-up blues of “New York is Killing Me”. This, along with the quiet acoustic cover of Smog’s “I’m New Here” work best.

Artist Rashaad Newsome’s Whitney Biennial video Five attempted to engage and re-contextualize underground black gay “vogueing” in much the same way Russell here attempts to take Scott-Heron’s essence and filter it into something that has contemporary relevance. Take it apart, put it back together as something new. I’m not sure such efforts are necessary.

There’s a scene in the 1972 D.A. Pennebaker and Godard film collaboration, One P.M., where Amira Baraka and his revolutionary poetic beat band shut down a Harlem street and jam with drums and multiple instruments while freestyling the sins of the West, practically into the face of a somewhat bewildered (and pleased) Godard. This is how I’ve always imagined Gil Scott Heron spending the ’70s. That the creator of “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”, “The Bottle”, and “We Almost Lost Detroit” is still here forty years on spitting poetry and engaging the musical culture is our gift. But Gil need not be “contemporary”, or gussied up, just given a proper band, a mic, and then recorded, thank you very much.

LAPHAM’S QUARTERLY: SPORTS & GAMES

Lewis Lapham’s much beloved quarterly of historical essays and speeches takes on sports and games in this summer issue. Nabokov discusses chess, George Plimpton takes dictation from Muhammad Ali, Ovid has Venus recount Atalanta’s foot races against marriage, and Lou Gehrig’s final speech at Yankee Stadium in 1939 is published in its entirety, bringing tears to the eyes. Bullfighting scenes from Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises along with John Steinback’s hilarious extended letter to Sports Illustrated explaining the inexplicability of sports and why he could never write about the subject (in detail), rounds out the issue. Outrageous quotes from Yogi Berra and Charles Barkley are a coda.

New York Style Chronicles

During the spring of 2003 I bought my first New York City bike and with it came an unquenchable thirst to ride through as many neighborhoods as possible. I was always amazed by the virtuosity of street artists, writers, in crafting so-called graffiti, or wall tags, throughout New York—the underground language, urban architectural spirit, diligence in throwing up pieces. The heads who speak this language.

I found myself in neighborhood after neighborhood and obsessed with writing, as it is called. I spotted it everywhere—walls, trucks, elevator shafts, garbage dumpsters, expressway ramps, rooftops, post office letterboxes. Souls had bombed everything in sight while we were sleeping. Between April and November of that year I must have taken over five hundred photographs—off to a new neighborhood once or twice a week. Here are a few dozen of the pieces.

I became obsessed not with just the masterworks but some of the banal pieces too, work by so-called “toys”, as well as outlines—it is something about the sparse nature of these that attracts me, they are like rushed, rhythmic preparatory drawings, stark and raw. The ugly battle tags scrawled on top of one another were favorites also, writers tagging over existing work as a sort of diss, or challenge, to other writers.

I was often as taken with the physicality of a spot where a throw-up or piece was done as much as the art itself, the overall urban architectural beauty. These are my personal chronicles of various New York styles, wall hieroglyphics, circa 2003.

A writer who I’d never heard of, “ASP”, apparently died that spring or summer because R.I.P.’s were all over Brooklyn and lower Manhattan. I also remember being nearly jumped by writers in the Bronx, and having a nice talk with a young kid in the Flatlands/Marine Park neighborhood of Brooklyn about how one “gets out of the ghetto”.

The pieces were mainly in Brooklyn (many my then neighborhood of Bushwick), some Queens, the LES, Harlem, lower Manhattan, and the boogie-down Bronx. I never did make it to Staten Island. Think of it as a sort of DispactkéGraffArt. I’ve been sitting on these photographs for years.

For a deeper understanding of (and deeper digging into) the history of graff writing in New York and beyond check out these sources, really just a beginning. A few of these works were instrumental in instructing me over the years into an appreciation and understanding of the writing culture.

Broken Windows by James T. Murray & Karla L. Murray (2002)

Dondi White: Style Master General: The Life of Graffiti Artist Dondi White by Andrew Witten (ZEPHR) and Michael White (2001)

Aerosol Kingdom by Ivor L. Miller

Subway Art by Martha Cooper & Henry Chalfant (1984)

Style Wars, a film by Tony Silver and Henry Chalfant (especially the 2003 re-issued 2 DVD set)

Style: Writing from the Underground by Phase 2 (1996)

The Art of Getting Over: Graffiti at the Millennium by Stephen Powers

Spraycan Art by Henry Chalfant & James Prigoff (1987)

IGTimes magazine (International Get Hip Times)

149 st. website, www.at149st.com

Wild Style, a film by Charlie Ahearn

Futura by Futura (2000)

The Faith of Graffiti by Nornan Mailer (1974)

While You Were Sleeping magazine

Mass Appeal magazine

Many years ago a good amount of reading was done on my part through access to the online press archives of the Martinez Gallery. Thanks to Hugo and Erick Martinez for the hookup.

peace, 2010