March 21st, 2008
Roger L. Bagula wrote this exclusive article for ManuelMarino.com.
History of Music and Current Recording Industry Crisis
In a time when the whole future of how music is distributed is in question, maybe we should look at the history of music for a guide.
Many of us find music is a part of our everyday life; both in terms of listening and making it. I have an egroup on the archaeology of prehistoric men. Music seems to have been part of what distinguishes men for other beats. The discovery of a bone hollowed out to make a flute by Neanderthals has made many speculate that music is one of the oldest “preoccupations” that didn’t actually produce survival rewards.
We picture men with low foreheads sitting around the campfire playing bone flutes and beating on hollow logs. The man who was good on the flute had to be subsidized by the other hunters. In the Sahara Arab culture the women are the make the music. There are ancient Egyptian drawing of people playing stringed instruments, The god Mot is said to have had music in his temples. The ancient Greeks had a very well developed theory of 5 tone music as well.
In the European tradition what is called “church music” was actually scripted in a staff in 8 tones during the medieval era. In both church and secular life music was an everyday entertainment and some people spent their lives as singers in the Jewish Cantor tradition. At this time a distinction between “holy” and profane (dance) music seems to have been made.
The age of reason gave us Bach fugues and well tempered music with twelve major tones instead of just 8. Keyboard instruments appeared in churches and the drawing rooms of the rich and famous. Europe was a center of world culture in the arts and sciences with university courses being taught in music theory.
Revolt against this almost always pleasant sounding music turned up in the form of Schönberg and his ideas of twelve tone sequences. Others experimented with expressionism and what they called “tone color” in trying to match the music and art of a puzzling modern world.
But little known to the European intellectuals a new music form came to life in America based on a African folk form and being fostered by the black community quite by itself. Jazz was a free form music where chord forms called progressions were used and many of the people playing the music couldn’t read sheet music at all. It involved syncopation, drums and rhythm fugues as well as multi-melodies in an ad lib setting. It was involved in moods as the blues and dance in terms of swing and jitter-bug and was considered profane in many white communities. Until recording and radio it was pretty much played for free in clubs where blacks went at night . But even as simple as the chord progression were it displaced classical forms in the hearts of most of the world’s population in less than 50 years form Rag time in 1900 to the 1950’s Rock and Roll. In the materialistic society success came with money and records by these artists sold so well that they became the new rich of the 20th century.
In the ’60’s I met a black sargent (hard stiriper) in Army who did this odd kind of poetic singing that he called rap. We all scorned him because we knew that Rock and Roll was king and it was here to stay. Again out of the sub-community of the black in a America and off shot of funk music used as backing for this rap singing came out of seeming nowhere in the 90’s to become a real musical movement world wide. The poor black was angry: he had been promised “equal rights”, but he got welfare and lingering on street corners while dope dealers preyed on him and his community.
Urban renewal meant that he was shoved out of his generational neighborhoods so that up town whites could have new condos closer to work. Gangs took control of streets and whole communities and had shooting wars while the mostly white police forces hid in their substations until the shooting stopped. As far as I know there has been little reform in response to this widely popular music style and the angry and profane words involved.
Another trend in music has been multi-tonality. Everyone knows listening to a slide trombone that there are an infinite scale of notes possible to music. Mostly we think in terms of a scale based on powers of two. The twelve tone scale came about when the Greek pentatonic scale was rationalized with the church 8 tone scale. Adding an C flat and an F flat (or two more sharps) seems to even out the keyboard in 14 tones instead of 12. The Arab musical intellectuals who were influenced by ancient Indian musical theory added twelve “between” tones and special Indian like tuning forms. To western ears Indian and Arab music has a unique blue or “color tonal” feel to it that is attractive to a mind tired out by a limited tone scale of 12 tones.
In the early 20th century an electronic instrument called a Theremin was invented using the electronics that came with shortwave and AM radio. This instrument involved producing tones of all kinds of sine waves. By the 50’s this kind of music found it’s way into science fiction classics as Alien music.
In the 60’s with the use of computers the digital slicing and dicing of sound had started. The result as we all know is the compressed digital sound file called the mp3, but electronic music had become more than this ! From digital midi sequencing and interfaces that captured keyboard notes as score notes on an electronic staff to distortion electronics that could make a guitar sound completely different with feedback and reverberation effects, new music that had never been heard by human ears before was being invented and circulated. Like rap music, it wasn’t at first very easy to get such music to the mass audience, but the European “House” dance music of night clubs began to change that in the 80’s. Here a century long decline in European music began to turn around, so that the German school of electronic music is a leader in innovation and Americans seem to be trailing behind?
The conversion of the CD digital formate files (Aiff and wave) to mp3 in the 90’s by Classic Mac SoundJam which was taken over by Mac and called iTunes made upload of digital files to the Internet easy. People began to share their favorite music internationally. Downloads of digital music even at several megabytes each became very common.
The recording Industry being on the back end of this movement and historically behind in the innovation curve was caught unprepared. They began suing private citizens (college students who are the poor). For the rich to be openly prosecuting the poor for the crime of “downloading” became the democratically most unpopular move in ages.
It is the royalty money from the sale of recoded media that has made the new music rich like the Beetles. The failure of recording industry executives to find a way to plug this hole in revenues seems to signal a decline in such music as a way of passing music around that has been popular since the 1920’s and AM radio started it off. Before that it was sheet music that passed the music from one place to another.
The result of this crisis is that we are faced with a change in how music is given to the public. From my own experiences the recording industry corporate model hasn’t been a perfect one. We are looking at an art form where their are several kinds of artists who need to support their families: composers, performers and song lyrics writers. If these people “suffer”, then the listeners will be affected shortly after in not being able to get music that they want.
Survival and eating are usually a little above making music on the daily calendar.
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March 11th, 2008
Benjamin Clark is the Curator of Education for the Oklahoma Museum of History. Benjamin wrote this exclusive and very interesting article for us. He retains copyright of the first image and the text, of course. The second image is in the public domain.
My personal collection of book trade ephemera
My personal collection of book trade ephemera is *supposed* to focus on the book trades of the frontier. I have to remind myself of that every once in a while. But I’m almost always a sucker for beautiful typography. Am I the only collector who gets sucked down tangents? I doubt it.
I’ve had a business card for a while for one FR Aldrich, an agent for Advance Steam Printing Co. in Norman, Oklahoma Territory. The Aldrich card is one of my favorites, because of the frontier association and for the simple beauty of the typography.
Now, Norman was founded and occupied the night of the initial land run into the Unassigned Lands April 22, 1889. Oklahoma became a state in November 1907. That date range was the closest I could get to FR Aldrich and his business. An 18 year gap is a little too big for me for someone really not all that long ago or far away.
I tried Googling the name F.R. Aldrich, thinking Aldrich would be an uncommon enough name to locate easily. I did find lots of Fr. Aldriches, as in Father Aldrich, and I did find a couple FR Aldriches. One was a female college student in the 1940s on the east coast; others had too little info for a positive ID. But one suspect turned up in Kansas in 1913 and 1916 and was a school district superintendent. He (?) could be the same person. Not much difference in time and location, but a little bit of a career shift. Then again, I’ve already uncovered more than one barber/ bookseller. I could see how connections to publishing and printing could be useful as a school superintendent.
I turned my attention to identifying the font used for the main text. I hoped the font would help me date the card. Printers like to use new hip typefaces in their advertisements, an opportunity to show off new faces and technical capabilities. This was truer in the past than it is now. If I can get the actual name of the face, maybe I can track down a date and get closer to figuring out FR Aldrich’s story. Today, thanks to the charter member from Michigan of the American Book Trade Index, I found another example of this cool, odd font in a directory ad for a newspaper in Ann Arbor Michigan from 1892.
The 1892 date of the directory is spot on for the range I had established of 1889-1907. I’ve run through the resources of the Oklahoma Historical Society for FR Aldrich and the Advance Steam Printing Co. without any luck, although someone is chasing one last idea down. I ran the FR Aldrich card through What the Font , a website you can upload .jpg files and the website searches out the closest match for your font. The first time I ran the card through none of the “matches” were even close. Admittedly, the image of the card isn’t very sharp, and there just aren’t that many letters to work with, especially letters that would be totally unique to this type face. I ran the Ann Arbor Democrat ad through, and What the Font matched it very closely to a face called Trapeze Normal. Very cool. Almost.
The problem is that there are several computer fonts called Trapeze. That and computer fonts are not the same as printing typefaces. I can’t seem to find the historic typeface’s name it is based on. It’s a lead and perhaps one more piece of the puzzle. Maybe just a piece of a piece.
But, Emma E. Bower caught my eye. Now, it really was not uncommon for women to be editor/ publishers of newspapers in the U.S. In fact, women had been in charge of presses from the very earliest presses in North America in 1639. However, in many cases, these women were widows taking full control over the family printing business. They would often operate under their husband’s name, or under initials.
Googling Ms. Bower reveals some tempting tangents. First of all, she is Dr. Emma E. Bower, M.D., of Port Huron, St. Clair County, Michigan. Not only a Democrat, but a Delegate to Democratic National Convention from Michigan, in 1920. She served as Secretary of the Ladies of the Maccabees, an insurance/ fraternal organization for women only, from 1893 until at least 1919. The Knights of the Maccabees claim them as an auxiliary organization at least well into the 1920s. The Ladies of the Maccabees said they started out as such, but had become “wholly independent” after a couple short years. Her name also appears with some mentions of the suffrage and temperance movements, but I couldn’t find any specifics or print sources I could access for more info. She certainly sounds interesting!
So, from the Land Run in Oklahoma to a suffragette in Michigan. Stupid, wonderful tangents…
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February 29th, 2008
Bruce Atchison is one of my Yahoo Group best members and he wrote this great article. Bruce is a legally blind freelance writer and the author of two books, When a Man Loves a Rabbit (Learning and Living With Bunnies) and Deliverance from Jericho (Six Years in a Blind School). The first memoir is about his fascinating experiences and discoveries made while living with rabbits in his home. The second is a chronicle of the years he spent in an institution for blind children during the sixties, hundreds of miles from all he knew and loved. More information, and free samples from his books, can be found via links on the Deliverance and When a man pages. Bruce lives in a tiny Alberta hamlet with his house rabbits, Neutrino, Sierra, and Deborah.
The Invictas are back
There seems to be a trend in the music industry where once-popular sixties acts are reuniting, The Lovin’ Spoonful and Herman’s Hermits being only two which are currently touring. A lesser-known but just-as-good group which reformed recently is The Invictas. With their garage band sound still relatively intact, the four original members and two new musicians toured in 2005 and 2006, delighting rock music fans of all ages.
It all started during 1960 in Rochester, New York when Herb Gross heard a group of older teens practicing rock music instrumentals in the basement of the house next door. He and a few local friends decided they should form a group of their own. After doing a bit of brainstorming with school friends, they named the band after Buic’s car called the Invicta. A local college bar, Tiny’s Bengel Inn, was looking for a house band and hired Herb’s group. As they perfected their sound and changed a few band members along the way, The Invictas began playing gigs at colleges up and down the east coast and even in Canada.
The Invictas’ provocative single hit song, The Hump, was inspired by a couple of dancers in front of the stage at Tiny’s who were “humping,” as they called it, to the music. Herb thought the idea was so interesting that he wrote lyrics and the tune in one week. A record producer from Buffalo, Steve Brodie, heard the song and asked the band about recording it. Since the band members were accustomed to live performances and playing The Hump in the studio made the song sound uninspired, Herb invited 30 friends, bought several cases of beer, and The Hump was recorded. In fact, their first album, Invictas A Go-Go, was completed in one weekend and released on the Sahara Records label.
Radio stations were rather prudish in 1966, refusing to play the hump because of it’s title and suggestive lyrics. The record was even banned in Boston, a fact which the band members still treasure. After hundreds of fans flooded radio stations with requests, the record was allowed on the air. It went to number one in Miami and made the top one hundred in America during August of 1966. In Rochester, some record stores were reporting that The Hump was even out-selling The Beatles. The Invictas also appeared on some local TV shows and played at the Watkins Glen Race Track. It was around that time when the band started driving a 1955 Cadillac hearse on stage as a promotional gimmick. The members, aping the British groups popular at that time, wore English riding boots, turtlenecks, fur jackets, and grew their hair long. They also played with famous acts as The Young Rascals, Gene Pitney, Gary Lewis and the Playboys, The Shirelles, and Otis Reading. Later, they opened for The Beach Boys.
The invictas became so popular that they required police escorts, had their own fan club, and attracted plenty of eager female fans. Girls waited for them on their front lawns and called them on the phone at all hours of the night. Bass player, Jim Kohler, came home late one evening to find that some groupies had actually broken into his apartment and prepared a meal for him. Herb was once chased by a crowd of girls across a street and into a department store, where he hid in a ladies’ changing room. Their hearse, which sported gold racing stripes and the band’s name in bold yellow lettering on the doors, proved to be unreliable, breaking down often on the way to gigs. Then the Vietnam war caused the band to break up.
The Invictas did reunite in 1980 for a festival tent gig. Then again in 1995, they played another gig, recording Long Tall Shorty and The Hump 95. Throughout the years, Herb had established his own advertising agency and was earning a substantial income. While he visited Invictas member Dave Hickey, Dave’s wife Marilyn suggested they go to a blues club called The Dinosaur and see a group named The Mary Haitz Band. Mary heard that the two Invictas members were there and asked them to play a number. Dave declined but Herb performed Long Tall Shorty. The crowd became excited and called out for him to play The Hump. Herb, having a Blues Brothers moment, realized that he had to get the band back together one more time.
The Invictas toured in 2005, launching their ’60s’ tour at a bar called the California Brew Haus. The members enjoyed the experience and crowd reaction at various venues so much that they toured again the next summer and recorded The Skip ‘N Go Naked tour live CD, named after a popular Tiny’s Bengel Inn drink made with gin, beer, and lemonade. Herb also found a 1984 model cadillac hearse for sale in Oklahoma City and had his friend Dan Parsons customize it to look like the original Invictas vehicle. The ’60s tour covered the northeast states and parts of Ontario while the Skip ‘n Go Naked tour happened in upstate New York. The Invictas played various northeast U. S. gigs in 2007 as well. Though the band lost money, they all plan to continue rocking into their retirement years.
For more information regarding The Invictas, and to download a free song called Red, White, Blue, and True, go to the www.theinvictas.com website. On this site is some band merchandise, including their 2 CDs and Banned In Boston, a DVD of them playing live. Herb also wrote Rock Till Ya Drop, a coffee table book about his group, featuring many photos of the band and their gear.
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February 28th, 2008
Michael Marcus (also known as “Jacques Treatment”) is a published author, poet, artist, and game designer; with George McVey, he has been publishing comics as “The Hamtramck Idea Men” on the very sensible grounds that they live in Hamtramck, have many ideas, and they are men. Joint work can be found at http://idea-men.us while his earlier work sits at http://www.treatmentlabs.com.
Art, Communication, Connectivity
When first approached by Manuel Marino to write an article, I found myself excited in the extreme — first, because I had been noticed in the vast sea of high-noise/low-signal called the Internet as someone worth approaching, and second, because it would be an opportunity to promote the work that George McVey and I were doing with our comic books, games, t-shirts, and other fine arts, and third, because it would give me an opportunity to vent about the apparent lack of creativity in the comics biz and why we are producing the finest comic books in the field. Then, when I sat down to write, I thought I would write about my own particular love of game design and how it mixes the art (and in some cases, storytelling) with what is essentially a mathematical process to produce something attractive and entertaining without giving one player or another an inherent advantage. In the end, however, as passionate as I am about both subjects, attempts at writing the articles proved dry to any but the most familiar of audiences, and the last thing I wanted to do is bore people. Instead, the subject that came to mind is the one behind everything I do: communication.
Communication is inherent, even if it is nearly forgotten, in almost every work of art. Whether it is the artist communicating an idea to the canvas or, eventually, to an audience by means of the canvas, the interaction spawned by the processes of a good game, the telling of stories by a good book or comic book, or the conveyance of mood and message by a good song or other musical piece, it is the very fact THAT there is signal being transferred and translated that often gets lost. Whereas Marshall McLuhan may have said, “The medium is the message,” I would hold instead that it provides a context wherein meaning is derived — while a book may describe an experience, for example, a comic book or film may share the same experience more clearly, but the same message carries differently with the immediacy of dramatic theater, wherein the wall of the participants and the audience can find itself weakened or even torn down by force.What, then, of surrealist work, or work done by surrealist means, wherein chance plays the greater part in creating the artifice than does a preconceived message? That depends on the type of work being attempted, whether it is to provoke a sense of whimsy or provide an initiation into an otherworldly space, whether it challenges the audience to “fill in the blanks” through a sense of mystery or negative space, or whether it encourages the reader to follow along with the author’s thought processes and achieve a similar critical or rational context along the same lines as the author. Where automatic writing encourages the latter, for example, Gysin’s “cut-ups” (wherein the pages of a written piece are quartered and refitted before publication) invite the reader to “connect the dots” and reassemble meaning, providing a disorienting challenge to the mind in the process. It is in this way that the surrealist confronts his or her audience with a work of art that engages the human tendency to attempt to make order from chaos, when the primary meaning is in the confrontation itself (and the secondary meaning is in the absurdity, whimsicality, or atonal nature of the process).
This, then, illuminates why I design games, write prose, paint, and create other things the way I do: They provide a context by which I might share an experience, or, more likely, the effect that something that I have experienced has had upon me. This is why I find that the most successful works that I have done are not necessarily those which I have created in a state of inspiration as much as those where I have had more of a dialog with the medium of the communication itself–that is to say, the pieces that seem to communicate best to the people who experience them, whether by being viewed (in the case of visual arts) or being played (in the case of a game), are the ones where I studied the piece itself as it proceeded, even if the result has less craftsmanship or less of my personal interest in the piece itself. For example, in my portion of the Hamtramck Idea Men art gallery the piece that has the most meaning for me is “Augmentation of Chaos,” which is gives chaos a “face” based on its connotations to me. The one, however, that seems to garner the most favorable interest is “Frustrated Joy,” which came to that title based both on the color scheme (the “Joy” in question) and how much it failed, at every step of creation, to become anything like my visualization and plan for the piece. It is as if the piece radiates my energy through the process of creation despite the fact that it has the least meaning for me.
If there is one thing that I have noticed with the advent of technology, it is that more and more experience come without the direct interaction of two people; the computer becomes an intermediary in most communication; this is true even in chat-rooms, where the users’ ability to edit what they say (at the very least, since some adopt alternate personae that they role-play) changes the nature of the exchange. Similarly, analog photographs lose some of their resolution (and with the advent of PhotoShop, still more of their original content), brush strokes lose some of the wondrous elements of their textures, and even digital sampling loses some of the fidelity of sound quality (even the best sample fails to be perfect). This is why, when I designed Gamer’s Dozen, I desperately wanted to create a set of games that anyone could play, face-to-face, at any skill level, with nigh-infinite replayability. I wanted something that facilitated communication and interaction between people without computer interfaces in the way. That, then, would have to be the source of my desire to create–to make a connection with the outside world, something that tends to be rather difficult these days.
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February 14th, 2008
Wade Crawley said me “I propose to write an article about the influence of punk and indie music and culture on a young person (myself) coming of age in England in the late seventies and early eighties”.
I accepted, and Wade wrote this article! I must add also these more lines from him: “I’m quite excited at the prospect of having it published on your weblog because I was very impressed by the quality. It’s a very good weblog and an entertaining read.” Thank you Wade! And I’m sure our readers will appreciate very much your writing.
Punk music in the late seventies
I was still at school when I first heard of the Sex Pistols. The now infamous Bill Grundy interview was only shown on a London regional news programme, so only people in and around London got to see it. For those of us living outside of London, it was the outraged front pages of the tabloids the following day that first made us aware of the Sex Pistols and punk rock.
“The Filth and the Fury” screamed one tabloid’s front page and most of the others had similar outraged headlines on their front pages. The foul language of some of the band members in that interview had outraged people so much, that in one case a man had put his foot through his television screen, reported one newspaper.
Looking at that interview now on YouTube, it all seems rather tame by today’s standards, but it perfectly illustrates just how uptight our society was back then. As a schoolboy going through the obligatory teenage rebellion phase, I found it all very exciting. Even now, I don’t think a music video has ever captured the air of menace and defiance like the Sex Pistols’ Pretty Vacant. Anything that upset parents, teachers and the establishment that much, had to be good, was my attitude at the time.
BBC Radio One was pretty much the only radio station catering for young people at the time as this was before the rise of commercial radio. They tried to ignore punk as though it wasn’t happening. The BBC’s flagship weekly music television show, Top Of The Pops, was a show whose remit was to include the acts that were selling well in the charts and as punk at that time was dominating the charts, they couldn’t ignore it any longer. The show’s DJ’s and presenters, middle aged men like Tony Blackburn and Mike Read who had made no secret of their dislike of punk music, much to our amusement, had to smile through clenched teeth and show enthusiasm for bands they hated.
When God Save The Queen by the Pistols hit number one in the charts, the BBC decided that there was no number one that week and refused to play it. In all of the official chart listings, when you got to number one there was just a blank space! At that time, any criticism of the royal family was treated pretty much as blasphemy!
I went to school in Whitehawk, a heavily working class area of Brighton, on England’s south coast, with a reputation for some of the worst social problems in the city. Many of the bands that were around back then such as Genesis, Led Zeppelin, Yes, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, etc, were all made up of middle class art students or music graduates with nothing for us to relate to at all. Now, all of a sudden, along came punk rock with bands made up of people of similar age and from similar backgrounds to us. They had songs that we could relate to and expressed how we felt at that time. They also proved that you didn’t have to be a music student who had studied an instrument for many years, to be in a band and write great songs.
In the few years leading up to that time, I had gone to the movies to see ‘Tommy’ by the Who and Led Zeppelin’s ‘Song Remains The Same’ because I liked both bands. However, the films were so self indulgent and pretentious that I came away thoroughly disillusioned. The arrogance of the band members in the live footage of Led Zeppelin in ‘Song Remains The Same’ and their condescending attitude towards their audience, coupled with the narcissistic ‘fantasy’ sequences, not only left me with a foul taste in my mouth but also ensured I never bought anything by them again. After all this, punk rock was like a breath of fresh air.
Britain in the late 70’s was a pretty grim place to be growing up in. Industrial unrest was rife, rubbish was piled high in the streets because there was a strike by the dustmen who had refused to collect it and the ultra right wing National Front were beginning to come to prominence. They were organizing marches all over the country involving large numbers of their union jack carrying skinhead supporters, through racially sensitive areas. Taking advantage of all this unrest, they were targeting working class areas and managing to get members elected to local councils. Many young people were being indoctrinated into their ideology but punk bands were openly coming out against this and using their influence to fight back against the racists.
Many punk bands when they played live had reggae bands supporting them and the Clash famously played at a Rock Against Racism concert at Victoria Park in London to over 80,000 people. When they sang ‘White Riot,’ Jimmy Pursey of Sham 69, a band with a large skinhead following, joined them on stage and this was an extremely significant gesture. This really did make a difference to a young and still very impressionable audience. I had friends who were skinheads, some of whom were planning to join a National Front march that was about to take place in Brighton. That Clash gig, along with various interviews with band members in the music press, were some of the main reasons why they thought again and decided not to go. Another factor that helped was the fanzine culture that had sprung up directly because of punk and the ‘do it yourself’ mentality. ‘Sniffing Glue’ was one of the first and more well known. They were magazines written and printed by fans and included interviews with bands, reviews of gigs and political articles expressing the opinions of the authors, many in support of the Anti Nazi League. They started off just crudely photocopied on A4 paper but the ones that became popular ended up being quite professionally printed and presented. They only cost a little pocket change too so anybody could afford them.
Another positive repercussion of punk was the rise of the independent record labels. There would be no ‘indie’ music scene if it wasn’t for punk. In fact, the music scene now would be very different if punk hadn’t happened.
I really believe punk has made a difference to how I think in general and that music really does have the power to change the world.
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February 6th, 2008
Ceri Shaw is a former college lecturer from Cardiff, South Wales. Currently he attempts to make a living as a Web Designer and as a freelance writer on a range of topics including Literature. He is a regular contributor to Americymru.com. Ceri wrote this article about Anglo-Welsh literature and its exploration of the themes of national, cultural and personal identity.
What is Anglo-Welsh Literature and why Should Anyone Care?
As a Welsh ex-pat currently residing in the USA I have noticed a profound disparity between the notion of Wales that many Americans of Welsh descent entertain and the reality that I left behind five years ago. Nowhere is this more evident than in the literary field. The triumphs of yesteryear are rightly held in high regard but modern literary trends and authors are sadly neglected. The legacy of Dylan and R.S. Thomas is , of course, sacred to us all, but Wales has moved on and a new genertaion of writers reflect that fact.In recent decades we have witnessed a flowering of literary culture in Wales and stereotypical Welsh writing so famously satirized by Harri Webb in his poem “Synopsis of the Great Welsh Novel” has been left far behind. We have seen the emergence of Welsh noir ( Niall Griffiths, Malcolm Pryce, John Williams ) which continues to be popular and other major talents such as Lloyd jones, Rachel Trezise, Trezza Azzopardi and Owen Sheers have made their presence felt.
But what is Anglo-Welsh literature and why should anyone care? I would argue that at its best it provides a unique perspective (in the English speaking world at least) on modern ideas of national, cultural and personal identity. As Gwyn Williams once famously said:- “The Welsh as a people have lived by making and remaking themselves in generation after generation, usually against the odds, usually within a British context.” Both Welsh-language and Anglo-Welsh literature have played a prominent role in that process. It is not a literature of rage. At the risk of offending a portion of my audience I will say that English colonial rule has for the most part been far too benign to produce a violent reaction but it is a literature of self-assertion and defiance, albeit sometimes confused and unfocused.
These themes are explored in a number of fascinating works by contemporary Welsh writers. Owen Sheers’ magnificent debut novel ‘Resistance’ is set in an alternate universe in which the Nazis invade and conquer Britain in World war II. It focuses in large part on the struggle to reinvent oneself, adapt and survive in the face of extreme adversity.
The book ends with both protagonists facing a stark choice which is really no choice at all. In order to survive they must turn their backs on everything they have known and attempt to find personal salvation in a future that is as uncertain as it is dangerous.The novel hints at the special relationship which the Welsh people have with their landscape. The hills of Wales are indeed magnificent but they pale into insignificance, at least in topographical terms, when compared with the European Alps or the North American Cascades. Their special gravity and power lies in the fact that every nook and cranny, every fold and crevice, is invested with some human significance. The sum of history and legend which the landscape reveals is almost an externalization of Welsh identity itself. It is against this backdrop that Sarah, the heroine of this novel, must strive to uproot herself and accept the evolutionary challenge.
A far more extreme adaptation and ‘remaking’ (or failure to adapt) can be found in the pages of ‘Niall Griffiths’ stark and brutal novel..”Sheepshagger”. Here we see what happens when ancient tribal resentments, personal greivance and drug-addled inarticulacy combine to prevent ‘personal growth’. The desperate and bestial acts of violence committed by the novels anti-hero are the products of a sense of loss and a seething resentment directed against those who have deprived him. He is unable to articulate his impotent rage by any other means. He asserts himself as a serial-killer. It should be pointed out that this exploration of the darker side of the Welsh ‘psyche’, whilst magnificent, also contains passages of graphic violence which would make Brett Easton Ellis blush.
The fact that the Welsh are a naturally restless people and constantly searching for a lost identity or fashioning a new one is perhaps more happily exemplified in Lloyd Jones extraordinary “Mr Vogel”. This novel which is by turns baffling and inspiring recounts an epic journey around Wales made by a delusional alcoholic. To say that the narrative is not straightforward would be an understatement but what this novel lacks in simplicity it makes up for in many other ways. We are never quite sure what the nature of the quest is but the journey is perhaps its own justification. Toward the end of the book, when his epic perambulation is almost complete, Mr. Vogel finds himself in a mental hospital where he offers the following observation to one of his fellow patients:-
“When was Wales? Wales has never been, it has always been.” he rambled on to his next victim, Myrddin the schizophrenic, who fortunately) was asleep. “I’ll tell you something for nothing.” he said, “true Wales is never more than a field away, and true Wales is always a field away, like Rhiannons horse in the Mabinogi. Got it?”
Jones’ work is a tribute to the transformative and redemptive power of the imagination and its ability to refashion national, cultural and personal identity.
None of the above should be taken to suggest that Anglo-Welsh literature concerns itself solely with these themes or that other literary traditions neglect them. I would contend howver that owing to Wales unique history,a history in which its cultural identity has constantly been threatened with absorption by that of its much more powerful neighbour,they are much more acutely focused in the Anglo-Welsh literary tradition.
Books Referenced in the Text:
“When Was Wales” Gwyn Williams Penguin Books 1985
“Resistance” Owen Sheers Faber and Faber 2007
“Sheepshagger” Niall Griffiths Vintage 2002
“Mr. Vogel” Lloyd Jones Seren 2004
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February 4th, 2008
This is a very interesting story about a director with a great idea but no money. Kely McClung is a director writer actor editor. He’s been able to film his movie with no money and very low resources. But he made it! The award winning Blood Ties is his first feature film. His first short film, AM Session, was recently nominated for HBO’s Short Film Award. Here’s what he wrote for us.
How to film an award winning movie with no money
The four year, twenty-three day, ninety-three minute movie!
Yeah, yeah. The movie’s not that long, it just has been for me. Everyone else, besides friends and family, will get to see the 93 minute version. And the reality is, I might be on it another couple years, though what anyone sees will still be the 93 minute version.
“Blood Ties” was filmed with no money by a crew of three in both the US and Thailand (with just a few moments over the border into Cambodia). Just to make things a bit more complicated, we filmed in the mountains of Virginia, Washington D.C. on the Mall, The Port of Miami, and Atlanta. Our crew numbers stayed at a maximum of three and our cast grew to 154.
And post production? Me. Sound, visual effects, editing, ADR, Foley, graphics, titles, music? Me. Which is not to say everything is great, it’s just what we could afford on a no budget movie. Every time I’d get ready to fire myself, I’d remember that I’m the only guy I could afford! And even with that, I definitely had some long talks with myself.
Is it worth watching? We hope so, and our success on the beginning of the film circuit says we might be right.
Blood Ties won The Action on Film International Film Festival’s “Action Film of the Year”, The Audience Award for “Best Director” at the Big Bang Film Festival, “Best of the Festival” at the Indie Fest USA International Film Festival, “Best Visual Effects” at the same, and has been nominated for various other awards at various other festivals.
Could I teach something about directing? Yeah, probably, even though Blood Ties is a first movie. About editing? Yeah, I’m known as a strong editor. After Effects, sound editing, composing for film, and 200 other subjects involved in making a movie? I’m pretty sure I could. But that’s not want I want to teach or preach or pass on in these few words.
The lesson I hope to share right now is in creating a vision - not only of the movie and what you want it to be but how you want to be perceived - keeping it in mind, and striving toward it with as little compromise as possible no matter how long it takes. Knowing that in twenty or thirty years, your first film won’t matter in the scheme of things except that it will always be, no matter how successful or not, your first film.
One of the things to strive for is surrounding yourself with a strong cheering section. My film partner, my family, my amazing girlfriend. Though they might not physically take on the work, without them, there is no movie.
My film partner, Robert Pralgo put up the initial money, as well as a seemingly endless trickle of money since. He also co-starred, help cast, pushed, pulled and dared me to make a better movie than what we thought was possible.
My family never talked down to me even though I am the one brother of five who they all have to worry about if I have a roof over my head.
And the Amazing Amanda let me see the movie from many different angles, again setting me up to challenge myself to make it even stronger.
Our crew of three rotated several times, and our cast gave their all because they somehow knew that I believed in what I was doing. There would be no movie without all of their many efforts. I give credit to almost everyone I meet and genuinely mean and feel it. They color the way I look at myself and my work, and are reflected in the images jumping around on screen.
And jump around they do! Blood Ties embraced the hand held look simply because I knew where I was wanting to shoot, a tripod, a dolly, or a steadicam would get us arrested. “You mean you aren’t supposed to shoot on the Mall or the Port or in the streets of a foreign country without permission?” Permission is relatively easy to get, if you pay for it. And that just wasn’t part of the budget!
I am sure I could talk about the making of the movie for the about the same length of time it took to make it. And maybe I’ll get the chance to write more. There is a lot more information on our website and other people are starting to talk and write as well.
What I hope with this introduction is to pass on the challenge to others to make the movies they want to see. To learn and persevere. To look at the art around them and if they find themselves saying “I could do that” – then to do it!
Posted in Arts, Business, Ideas | No Comments »
January 22nd, 2008
Stephan R. Lewis is a professional photographer. He accepted to share his knowledge with us, with this exclusive article.
The value of photographic prints
I have been in the photo industry trenches for a long time and have watched many things come and go in popularity.
When I say ‘trenches’ I mean not the glamour part of the industry that you see everyday on magazine covers, beautiful and famous people, but rather the nuts and bolts of mass producing press release photos of tired employees, photographs of products for advertising for small business, other time sensitive materials with a short shelf life, created for immediate usage with no value once the deadline has come and gone.
My actual primary concern at the beginning of my career was printing archival black and white photographs for exhibition and professional use, art prints designed to last 100+ years, so the disposable and transient nature of consumer photography amazed me.
Which brings me to the popularity of one-hour photo finishing of snapshots that existed until recently. Everything from birthday parties and Christmases, the latest vacation snaps and spontaneous party photos to out of focus and overexposed close-ups of newborn babies, dog noses and amateur porn.
Everyone seemed to be shooting like crazy and getting prints that ended up in a box or still in the envelope, if they (the prints) were lucky they were put in a photo album or even framed on the wall- or maybe just stuck to the refrigerator with a magnet.
110, 126 and 35mm cameras made it easy and affordable to make photos, fun, quick and relatively cheap. Then came APS, the last gasp of film as a consumer product, and now we have the most insidious of all- the camera built into your cell phone and all types of image capturing devices. These devices are so great because once you have bought one your ongoing expenses theoretically are nothing- but computer time!
A big part of my photo lab duties has always been restoring old photographs. Photographs from 1890, torn and or folded images from the 1950s, photographs that had Dad cut out in the 60s after a bad divorce and the kids want him reinserted in the 90s! I have worked on wallet sized prints that had in fact been in a wallet for 20 years until someone realized it was the ONLY print of that person and now they needed an 8×10 for the wall, for the memorial service… the oldest photograph I ever worked on was from 1849. Plenty of those images I have worked so hard to restore and make like new had started out as ‘happy snaps’ and ended up being the only or last or best photograph of someone beloved and, sadly, now departed.
Why? People forget - photographs are priceless, one-of-a kind records of a specific moment in time, a moment that will never occur again, a method of capturing and preserving memory that mankind has only had for about 160 years.
As small children we go through the family photo albums, laughing at the way people used to dress, marveling at how much someone looks like great-grandpa, examining vintage cars and houses, looking at things and people that no longer exist. History.
Now we have digital photography, images that might never leave the memory card, maybe get stashed in a folder on the desktop, turned into a slide show that can only be seen on that specific computer, at best uploaded to share with friends and family online. Where will these images be in 20 years?
Is the current advent of technology creating an attitude towards photography that is undermining its inherent value as a historical record, thoughtlessly making it too disposable and transient to be appreciated and preserved?
I photograph lots of special events, large groups, and school kids and sales of prints from these sessions are down markedly. After spending 30 minutes setting up a group shot and capturing it with my high-end digital camera, with the intent of selling true photographic prints designed to last 50 or more years, a Mom or kid next to me will hold up their camera phone and grab a shot and figure: “Got it!” and good enough. As a result, they don’t buy a thing.
Then they get home and maybe look at their quickie capture, email it to grandma and forget about it. Ultimately it may be saved under an incomprehensible filename or not at all, put on a hard drive that will inevitably crash, or uploaded to a website that ceases to exist in three years, or even worse- forgotten about altogether!
Let me tell you people- that camera phone image, that image on your computer screen is not a memory preserved for all time! As long as it is not PRINTED, a physical hard copy that can be whipped out years and years later, it only exists for the moment.
Do yourself a favor. Print that photograph and put it in a photo album so your kids, your grandkids, maybe even their children can see what you looked like on your myspace or Yahoo profile in 2008!
Posted in Arts, Technology | 1 Comment »
January 19th, 2008
This article is written by web designer Josh Gutteridge who runs Skyte Media. Skyte Media is based in the Midlands (England) and is a professional web design company that specialises in web design and development. Josh would like to receive comments about this article on his blog. But of course you can comment it also here, on ManuelMarino.com!
How Has the Internet Affected the Music Industry?
Music has always been something that has inspired mankind. Sir Thomas Beecham once said ‘a musicologist is a man who can read music but can’t hear it’. The pure beauty of music is that we can all listen to the same notes played by many different instruments, yet make our own individual conclusions with regards to what the music means to us; and nobody can argue.
It is not in the nature of this post to go in depth on musical history. Nonetheless, music has developed rapidly through the ages with the vinyl when it was first really used in 1948 by Columbia Records. Since then the music industry has seen the use of the Audio-Cassette and Compact Disc (CD).
Consequently, since the internet became more widely available it has made music more easily accessed by such means as Online Music Stores. There are thousands of these stores online including three of the most famous: iTunes, Napster and Rhapsody (US only). Let’s focus in on iTunes; an offshoot of the famous/infamous Apple Company (delete as applicable).
I refer to iTunes as the ‘pied piper of the 21st century’ lulling people into easily downloading content with minimal hassle. iTunes is a free piece of software developed by the Apple company at Macworld Expo in San Francisco. This allows you to download digital music, music videos, television shows, iPod games, audio books, various pod casts and in the USA feature length films, and ringtones. Downloaded content can then be used to create your own play lists and personalised albums to burn to CD. It can also be transferred onto various different types of iPod including the new iPhone making music more accessible and easy to get hold of.
How does this affect the ordinary person who enjoys listening to their preferred genre(s) of music?
In this case, music has never been so easily manipulated and accessible. We live in a convenience obsessed world with personalised portals such as Last FM where you can listen to any artist known to mankind, you can listen to personalised internet radio with Pandora and also listen to all the music and view the videos on YouTube. It doesn’t take much effort to rip music (ripping is the term for digital audio extraction). The cost of downloading an album from the net is generally cheaper than an album brought in the shops, after all, downloads should cost less as there are less overheads for the record label to pay for: CD sleeve, CD case, CD cost, copying equipment etc.
How does this affect the music industry?
Some artists find the concept of the internet hard to adapt to; however, as they are forced into the mould of technology modern artists tend to embrace the internet as a friend rather than a foe. They view it as a ‘creative and inspiration-enhancing workspace where they can communicate, collaborate, and promote their work’ - Mary Madden (Research Specialist) in her project ‘Artists, Musicians and the Internet’. Sites such as MySpace have helped Artists and Musicians address their target audience rousing more interest in their style of music.
But let’s face it; there will always be people that are looking to find a loophole. I’m talking about those who engage in illegal music downloading. Experts admit that illegal downloads will never be stopped. This messes up the system and makes it unfair for both the artist and the people who are paying for downloads. The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) has joined forces with the Federation of Phonographic Industries (IFPI) to take legal action against internet file-sharers.
How will illegal downloader’s effect record labels? A record label makes, distributes and markets sound recordings; basically at the end of the day they’re out there to make money. The music industry produce mainly alums…how many albums have you brought just because you like one song? I have! We’re forced to buy albums to get the songs we love. As sales figures are falling record labels will be forced to look at the logic. Are people going to buy a whole album or just download one song? What effects do you think this will bring? Might we see a rise in the cost of internet downloads?
So in conclusion we have seen that the music industry has created stronger ties with new technology over the past decades and now can only go forward. We have seen that internet music downloads can be both an advantage and a disadvantage as we see the battle between the illegal downloader and the record companies continues. However, it is safe to conclude people – adapt or die!
Posted in Business, Music, Technology | No Comments »
January 16th, 2008
Ziggy Olivier wrote this article. He met Dylan Thomas and spent some of his youth drinking whisky with him. He said me: “Everything you may have read about him was true.”
Reflections on some well loved Poets
Approaching my own demise, I was delighted this Christmas to receive from a teenage granddaughter a gift that I will cherish – Richard Burton’s famous reading of Under Milk Wood. More so that she should be aware of the poem and have a liking for it’s hypnotic, entrancing language.
Sensual, beautiful, musical prose with indelible images of people and their behaviour.
Here was rich irony - an ageing man once again enjoying a work in which inevitable death is one of the recurring themes!
I do not have the talent to fully describe my sense of well being as I sipped an ancient Macallan and revisited fond memories from my youth as I listened, with my granddaughter, to the cadence of those words describing our human condition.
Only those who have heard Dylan Thomas reading it himself have known better, for he had a wonderful, rich, appealing voice which enveloped you into his magical world.
‘It is night neddying among the snuggeries of babies.
Look. It is night, dumbly, royally winding through the Coronation cherry trees; going through the graveyard of Bethesda with winds gloved and folded, and dew doffed; tumbling by the Sailors Arms.
Time passes. Listen. Time passes.
Come closer now.
Only you can hear the houses sleeping in the streets in the slow deep salt and silent black, bandaged night.’
This reminded me of Eliot in the love song of J. Alfred Prufrock
‘The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.’
Eliot did remark, somewhere, words to the effect that young poets imitate and mature poets ‘borrow’ ? I can forgive Dylan for pinching an idea for his poetry transports us into a wonderful world of rich imagery.
In the after glow, once the reading had finished,the moment was almost spoilt when she asked if I could help her with an essay she had to write on the poem and I realised she would be researching reviews by critics who would destroy her blossoming love of such song language as they reduced it to comment such as Edith Sitwell writing of his ‘distorted syntax and religious symbolism.’
Critical essays too often review art entirely in terms of life reminding me of Eliot’s
“I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”
Why must we bow to academic interpretations of our emotions?
Robert Frost commented that poetry is what gets lost in translation and Eliot firmly believed that poetry communicates before it is understood.
University almost destroyed my love of literature as we sweated over critical essays trying to explain some masterpiece or another.
Like Joyce, Thomas can be almost incomprehensible but any great writer uses language that is different to the way we speak and because of its intense imagery causes our emotions to provide us with a deeper view of life.
Dry intellect is no match for emotion in driving our soul for it is emotion that stirs us to action.
So I discussed with her ways and means for her to say what the poem meant to her. How she understood it was more important than some critic’s view, for I did not want to destroy that magic that had impacted deep into her young soul.
Ultimately, in a small fictional Welsh town called Llareggub, as the long night approaches, you realise that such critic’s voices do indeed mean ‘buggerall’.
Posted in Arts, Culture | 3 Comments »
