The Invictas are back

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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Art, Communication, Connectivity

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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Punk music in the late seventies

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.

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.

Posted in Arts, Culture, Music | 1 Comment »

What is Anglo-Welsh Literature and why Should Anyone Care?

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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How to film an award winning movie with no money

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!

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The value of photographic prints

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!

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How Has the Internet Affected the Music Industry?

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!

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Reflections on some well loved Poets

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’.

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The Elegance of the Art

Doug Stahnke is a sculptor. And this is a wonderful exclusive article he wrote for us.

The Elegance of the Art

Let me begin by first defining some terms as I apply them:

talent – I think there is a simple truth here. You were either born with it or you weren’t. But talent comes in many varieties and categories. Many people have talents they haven’t discovered; or they have discovered them but choose not to pursue them. I believe everybody has some sort of talent. It could be painting, drawing, or sculpting. It could be singing, playing musical instruments, or having a special sense of rhythm. It could be cooking, designing fashions or in architecture. It could be in writing, film making, dramatic acting, comedy or magic. It could be one’s business acumen in financial management, marketing, design engineering or in leading a workforce. It could be very clearly in your dreams. This list could go on ad nausea.

passion – The drive to start, pursue and complete your next creation. An Artist without passion is a hacker.

hacker – One who is experimenting or exploring in an attempt to discover and develop one’s talents. If one’s initial experiment is critiqued as having even a modicum of beauty by even one reviewer, passion may start to grow. The downside is hackers can be very critical of their own work, which can kill their passion. This, in turn, may cause the hacker to bury his talents. Some hackers may create a work and then trash it, showing it to no one.

beauty – Is in the eye of the beholder? Many creations, even though the Artist has completed his work, start out ugly. The work can be transformed into one of beauty when just one person openly opines and says, “Now isn’t that a work of beauty!” If those folks who sloughed it off overheard this comment, they will likely take a second look, another taste, or even ask to hear it again. Then, hopefully a second person will soon chime, “I like it!”, with others hearing the appreciative praise. Then three, four, and five, etc., will follow in the appreciative. A work of Art can be transformed from ugly to beautiful starting with one simple, favorable opinion.

ugly – The reciprocal or opposite of beauty. One unfavorable opinion, openly stated, can negatively influence the acceptance of one’s work in a larger group. This can happen and carry many other opinions down with it.

Artist – One who creates something, with at least a modicum of passion, and asks someone else, “Well, what do you think?”

critical acclaim – The one person who stated your work had beauty, influenced another to pay money for your creation, while you were still alive. How frequently can you repeat such action? I don’t ever recall meeting an Artist who wished to reach critical acclaim only after they were dead.

media – Whatever stuff the Artist decides to use to create his work.

The Elegance of My Art

I am basically a sculptor. The roots of my talent go back to my childhood. I always liked to make something or build something. If someone else made something, I liked to take it apart to see how he did it. My current work is to sculpt crafts and pieces of furniture; write about what I’ve sculpted, illustrate it, make it into a “Set of Plans”, then sell the Plans through my Website. I call them ePlanSets. I want to have many people, all over the world, build, or sculpt my projects for their own enjoyment, just like I do.

Do I have any passion? It’s either that, or I am just plain nuts. My media is Plastic Pipe and Plastic Pipe Fittings. You know like PVC or ABS Plastic. It’s actually quite an easy media with which to work… for instance it’s much easier than working with wood. All of my designs are totally elegant. You can clearly see the elegance in my Table CenterPiece, my Candle Holders, the furniture in my Master Bedroom Suite, as well as many others.

One of my favorite, critically acclaimed sculptors is Michelangelo. I know, he was also a painter, an engineer and an architect, too. He would often consider himself a hacker because he was so dissatisfied with his work. I remember hearing a Michelangelo quote about his Angel sculpture, “I could see the Angel in the stone. All I had to do was chip away what didn’t belong to her!” Of course, Michelangelo works have all reached quite an enviable level of critical acclaim… even before he died.

Following the magic of Michelangelo, I frequently go to the plastic pipe fittings section, of the plumbing department, in my favorite home improvement store. There, I hold up some fittings, starting with like maybe a toilet flange, and very quietly say to myself, “I can see a lamp!” Or maybe, “I can see a Candle Holder!”

I am still waiting for my own Critical Acclaim to grow. So, what do you think?

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The Emperor’s New Clothes

Ananda Sukarlan is an Indonesian composer and pianist living in Spain. This is an article he wrote for a magazine which has been published a few years ago in Spanish. We are very proud to have the original in English which has never been published anywhere, so this is an exclusive writing for ManuelMarino.com. Read his Blog and visit Jakarta New Year Concert page (he is the founder and director). Also, you can listen to some of his music compositions on YouTube.

The Emperor’s New Clothes

“It is not enough to deface the Mona Lisa because that does not kill the
Mona Lisa. All art of the past must be destroyed.” — (Pierre Boulez)

“I dare suggest that the composer would do himself and his music an immediate
and eventual service by total, resolute and voluntary withdrawal from this
public world to one of private performance and electronic media.“ – (Milton
Babbitt)

“What happened there is (…) the biggest artwork of all times. That spirits
achieve in a single act what we in music cannot dream of, that people rehearse
ten years long like mad, totally fanatical for a concert and then die.
This is the biggest artwork that exists at all in the whole universe…
I couldn’t match it.” (K. Stockhausen, on the 9/11 attack ) . — All quotes
are from The New York Times.

Those three composers are supposedly “great” composers of the 20th century. Their piano works (in fact, ALL their works) were written “for the future” in the 1950s and 60s, when they were (and still are) a tough nut to crack for both the pianist and the audience. Now, if they were indeed “great”, as Chopin or Bach undoubtedly were, why are their works still not in the repertory of most pianists or other instrumentalists ? And why don’t we members of humanity, no matter how “retarded” we are according to those “great” artists, respect them now as we respect Schumann or even their contemporaries such as Shostakovich or Stravinsky ? When is the “future” they were talking about ? Is 2007 not “future” enough for those works created half a century ago?

The answer is simple. Boulez, Babbitt and Stockhausen are (or were) “great”, because they rely on, and receive huge government subsidies and were leaders of a very small but controlling establishment consisting of academics, critics and art politicians. They are “great” according to their colleagues in this group, but not according to musicians and the public. In fact, their “avantgarde” music is mostly written against musicians and the public. It even goes so far as calling the 9/11 event “the greatest artwork” (see Stockhausen’s quote above) , not only creating a work against people, but even more, killing (how can one be more against people ?) them all, “artists” and audience.

In other words, they write music to gain, and only to gain, government subsidy. What Walt Whitman said, that “Para tener grandes poetas, es necesario además grandes audiencias” is not valid anymore for this kind of “art”. In principle, government subsidies are supposed to be given to marginal artistic activities, and the more “minority oriented” that art is, the more it deserves subsidy ; this subsidy has enabled those artists to stay in their ivory towers without making any contributions at all to the public. Which is alright if one doesn’t think of the amount of taxpayers’ money that is used to subsidize those “artistic” works.

Let’s take one example: the IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique Musique) who was built by Pierre Boulez in Paris. It was kitted out with equipment to Boulez’s own specification to compose music for the future. IRCAM also swallowed 80% of the national subsidy for contemporary music of France. It was built at a cost of 90 million francs and thereafter at a cost of 15 million a year to the French taxpayer for its concerts, staff and upkeep. It happened that in 1969 Boulez got Georges Pompidou to build for him a huge high tech underground bunker , beside the site of what was to become the Pompidou Centre. Now, in 2007, shall we look back and reflect on how many masterpieces have been created out of this building ? What I mean by masterpieces are works that the general public recognise as such, like Britten’s War Requiem, Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms or, coming from the other continent, Copland’s Third Symphony. I don’t have to answer this question.

When I was living in Holland in the 1990s I had several encounters with “ex”avant-garde turned real composers, such as Toru Takemitsu, John Adams or Louis Andriessen. And it was in Holland that I met for the first time my amazing Spanish composer friends Jesus Rueda or David del Puerto (both winners of Premio Nacional de Musica, in 2004 and 2005 respectively). At that time, they were in a “transitional” period after getting out from the heavy influence of their avantgarde teacher, Paco Guerrero. All of them realized then, that our older colleagues had achieved their goals to “impress” the public by presenting them with uncommunicative works, and certainly they have gained a lot by doing that, but that we the younger generations have to pay for it. There have been composers at every corner of the street ever since, given that avantgarde music was designed to give jobs to many who could not compose in the sense of writing “traditional” music. Good or bad quality is not the criteria anymore. But there are simply not enough subsidy for all of them , whose works sound more or less the same.

Fortunately we are in a state of transition to a more audience-friendly kind of music. The avantgardists had achieved in emptying the concert halls, and now we will have to work harder to gain them back and convince them that the word “contemporary” is not equal to “avantgarde” ; on the contrary, “avantgarde” was a thing very much in the past, and not con (”with”) temporary (our time) anymore.

This situation reminds me of Hans Christian Andersen’s story, about an Emperor who is very fond of clothes. One day came 2 tailors, saying that they can make very special clothes that only good people can see. Naturally the emperor cannot see those clothes, but afraid of being called a bad person, he praises the beauty of the clothes. And if the emperor can see it, everybody in the whole country should do as well. Until comes a very young kid, much too young to be called a bad person, during the festive celebration of those clothes , shouting innocently, “Look, the Emperor is naked!”

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