Throat Singers of Tuva

(This was written many years ago, as pre-show publicity, and then my concert notes say, “Huun Huur Tu means Sun Propeller, the way the rays shoot out from a cloud – the visual effect that a friend once pointed to and said “Look, there’s God.” The harmonics are not what I expected. I’d been thinking in terms of the violin, where you touch the string lightly in a certain place and it makes a sound an octave higher – but for the throat singer, the lower voice is a drone, while upper voice moves around.”)

The brilliant physicist Richard Feynman was the youngest member of the team that invented the atomic bomb. He conceptualized the field of nanotechnology as far back as the 1950s, and many years later it was he who figured out and explained to Congress that the Challenger space shuttle exploded because of defective O-rings.

One of the most interesting things about Feynman was his burning ambition to visit Tannu Tuva. As a child, he had collected the country’s wonderful triangular and diamond-shaped stamps depicting feats of horsemanship, wrestling, archery, and hunting, along with foxes, sables, and many other animals. The bureaucratic red tape took years, and Feynman died before he could get to Tuva. He never even got to hear the unique music except on tape, but we have the opportunity to hear and see Huun-Huur-Tu, the Throat Singers of Tuva. They will be at the Boulder Theatre on February 6. A slide show begins at 7 pm and the concert itself at 8.

Tuva consists of a group of high valleys located in the basin of the Upper Yenisei, between Siberia, the Altai Mountains and the Gobi Desert. The forested zones support a reindeer herding and hunting economy; the high forest and meadow zones an economy based on cattle and horses. Dry upland steppes in the south and east pasture several different kinds of herds – sheep, goats, camels, cattle, horses, yaks and reindeer. A 1931 census revealed that 82% of the population were nomadic herders who followed set migratory routes, moving an average of four times a year.

The people of Tuva also engaged in farming, smithery, jewelry making, and stone and wood carving. Chonardash, or carvable stone, is the rare mineral pyrophillite, which is found only on the summit of one mountain, and has to be dug from a depth of several meters. When first excavated it is pliable, but soon afterward becomes hard as iron.

The people of Tuva are from an ethnic group called the Uriankhai, and historically lived in yurts, round felt-covered huts. Their language has thirteen different words to describe horses of various ages, appearance, function and behavior. Traditionally, the heads of small children of both sexes were shaved except for one lock of hair at the front. The most treasured delicacy of the cuisine is fat of lamb’s tail. Several thousand Tuvans live in Mongolia. The actor Maxim Munzuk, who starred in the cult movie Dersu Uzala, is a Tuvan.

The title Ulag Kham means Great Shaman. The shamans or traditional spiritual leaders would attire themselves in complicated, many-layered costumes, ornamented with iron, that weighed over fifty pounds. Inhaling the smoke of a local narcotic grass, they would play the drums until they entered a trance state.

Tuva is rich in such archeological finds as spectacular Scythian bronze and gold sculptures from between 800 BC to 200 BC, including jewelry for horses. In the Hunnic period, the first 500 years of the Christian era, the Tuvans made arrows with oddly shaped tips which caused them to whistle in flight. One of the wonders of Tuva is an eighth-century fortified palace which nearly covers an entire island in the middle of a lake, and no one knows to this day how the stone was transported there

An eccentric Englishman who made it his life’s work to reach the midpoint of each continent and erect monuments there, deemed Saldam, in Tuva, to be smack dab in the middle of Asia, and put up his monument to it in the late 19th century.

As late as 1943, Tannu Tuva was shown in atlases, but after that it disappeared, because in 1944 the nation allegedly asked to join the USSR. This had little to do with the desires of Tuva itself, and a lot to do with the discovery there of massive amounts of uranium, the first such deposits found in the Soviet sphere of influence. Kyzyl, the capital the newly-christened Tuvinskaya, became the Soviet Union’s “Atom City.”

Throat singing, or khoomei, is described as a “marvel of applied physics” in which the singer produces two or even three notes at once. The ancient style of vocalization has its dangers, and may cause a chronic inflammation of the throat that can lead to cancer. According to legend, khoomei began when a monk heard overtones in a waterfall in an acoustically unique canyon in Western Mongolia. A manual on folk arts said of a khoomei singer, “With his lower voice he sings the melody and accompanies it at the same time with a surprisingly pure and tender sound similar to that of the flute.” Other harmonic techniques produce the sounds of birds, flowing water, and the jingling stirrups of a galloping horse.

Richard Leighton wrote, “At first the higher ‘voice’ sounded like a flute, several octaves higher than the fundamental tone. Then came even stranger styles of khoomei, the most bizarre of which was the ‘rattling’ style, which sounded like a long-winded frog.” One explorer reported hearing a native sing in front of his yurt – “He sang in what seemed to be two voices at once, one reminiscent of the homus, a Tuvinian stringed instrument, and the other the mating call of the woodgrouse at dawn in spring.”

The singers of Huun-Huur-Tu accompany themselves with traditional instruments. Their stringed instruments, embellished with carved horse heads, include a vertical fiddle called the igil, a banjolike lute called the doshpulur, and a cello-like bowed instrument called the byzaanchi. They also employ the shaman’s drum and a rattle made from a bull’s scrotum.

For those who get hooked on the lore of this ancient land, more information is available from an organization founded by Richard Feynman.
Friends of Tuva
Box 70021
Pasadena CA 91117

photo courtesy of Ssppeeeeddyy , used under this Creative Commons license

Antony

Antony

I adore this androgynous person, who is like Roy Orbison meets Joe Cocker. He’s in the Leonard Cohen tribute concert film “I’m Your Man” and in this clip he sings “If It Be Your Will.”

In the YouTube clip, as in the movie, Antony wears the ultimate grunge garment, which appears to be a sweatshirt so deconstructed it almost doesn’t exist, a gossamer shell of mostly spider-web fineness. I bet it cost $1200 on Melrose Avenue or whatever the contemporary equivalent hipster street is.

The composite image above is made from Creative Commons photos by marillo (left) danieluis (center) and marillo (right)

Antony Hegarty represents to me what fellow Irishman Bobby Sands might have been, if he had followed art instead of politics, if he had made love not war, if he had flourished as a poet instead of starving himself to death in Long Kesh prison. Who’s to say which is better?

Bobby Sands

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Leonard Cohen Quotations

Leonard Cohen Quotations

Recalling his time at McGill University ” I yearned to live a semi-bohemian lifestyle, an unstructured life; but a consecrated one; some kind of calling.“
in an interview

Do not be a magician, be magic.
Beautiful Losers

“I had the title Poet, and maybe I was one for a while.“
in an interview

I saw a beggar leaning on his wooden crutch
and he said to me, “Don’t ask for so much.”
And a pretty woman by her darkened door
she cried out to me, “Why not ask for more?”
“Bird on a Wire”

“We all thought that we were immortal…We did have this mythological sense of our own lives.”
in an interview

You told me again you preferred handsome men, but for me you’d make an exception.
“Chelsea Hotel #3″

There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.
“Anthem”

Many stones were rolled but God would not lie down
Beautiful Losers, and Buffy Sainte Marie recorded this long passage as a song, “God is Alive, Magic is Afoot”

Magic loves the hungry.
Beautiful Losers

He talks about the song “Traitor” and
“...the feeling that we have of betraying some mission that we were mandated to fulfill, and being unable to fulfill it, and then coming to understand that the real mandate was not to fulfill it, and that the deeper courage was to stand guiltless in the predicament in which you found yourself.”
in an interview

If I have been unkind
I hope that you will let it go by
And if I have been untrue
I hope you know it was never to you
“Bird on a Wire”

“It was in the realm of things that couldn’t be disputed or rejected or even judged.”
about his father’s death

“Creators care nothing for their systems except that they be unique. If Hitler had been born in Nazi Germany he wouldn’t have been content to enjoy the atmosphere.”
in an interview

and even though it all went wrong
I’ll stand before the Lord of Song
with nothing on my tongue but hallelujah
“Hallelujah”

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Suzanne Vaillancourt

Hedwig Soundtrack

My feeling is, if it’s worth hearing once, it’s worth hearing 150 times. When I fall in love with an album, I’ll play it for a month with nothing else in between. Such a masterwork is Hedwig and the Angry Inch, the splendid sound track of a splendid movie, made from a splendid stage play.

To tell the strict truth, after listening to the whole a few times, I made a tape with just the ballads. The rockers are great, but I like to sustain a mood for writing. “Midnight Radio,” “In Your Arms Tonight” – does music get any better than this? In “Wicked Little Town” there’s a line, “…and nothing you can find that cannot be found,” that seems to be a Beatles homage. “Nothing you can do that can’t be done, nothing you can sing that can’t be sung…” Beatles, right?

One of my friends describes preparing for an important meeting as “putting on the mink eyelashes,” and I know the exact feeling. You don your armor and face the day. Apparently, every stage show must include a number where the character declares the necessity, no matter how shitty life is, to suck it up, smile, and move forward. The obligatory face-life-with-courage song, like “Tomorrow” in Annie. In this show, the transsexual rock star Hedwig sings “I’m pulling the wig down from the shelf.” Different metaphor, same idea.

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Phil Ochs Miscellaneous

In There but for Fortune, an Ochs biography, the author says Pleasures of the Harbor was not a perfect album, an opinion that isn’t universal.

One night R and I dropped acid and rolled around on the mattress until dawn. Disheveled and still about half fucked up, we walked over to J’s apartment and got him out of bed, and sat in his front room with the early light filtering in through the closed curtains. I heard the Pleasures of the Harbor album for the first time, and it was one of my life’s peak experiences.
Anne Alexander

The 1940 movie The Long Voyage Home is said to have been the inspiration for the piercingly lyrical song, “Pleasures of the Harbor.” One biographer says Ochs worked harder on it than on any of the others on the album. He says the vocal track gave trouble, and had to be removed from the tape and redone in several places. There was disagreement over how to orchestrate the song, and three versions exist – on the album with the same name, on Gunfight at Carnegie Hall with Lincoln Mayorga on piano, and on Then and Now with Ochs on guitar.

Originally, the album was too long, and Ochs removed verses from “Cross My Heart.”

“I’ve Had Her” is said to have been written as the result of a fight between Ochs and the great love of his life, Tina Date, an Australian musician who managed to play guitar despite having two-inch fingernails. It’s been called misogynistic and the weakest song on the album.

One critic calls “Crucifixion” the biggest recording failure of the musician’s career.

During that trial I learned many ugly things in this country, but I don’t think I had a more shining moment than when I had the honor and privilege to take Phil Ochs through his direct examination.
William Kunstler on the Chicago Seven trial

When Ochs was a kid, his family lived in Perrysburg, NY, and he played the clarinet. One writer says that he would go yearly to Fredonia State Teachers’ College for evaluation, and got A grades for his individual performances. I’ve been to Fredonia, so it’s almost a kind of link. There’s always that wish to feel close somehow to the artists you admire. Even more interesting, the chain of acquaintanceship between me and Phil Ochs is only two people. He hung out with the cartoonist Ron Cobb, who knew Sherry Gottlieb of A Change of Hobbit Bookstore. And I knew her.

To have a career you need a society to have it in. You go off and you make works of art and you present them here. You’re glad to be making a contribution. America doesn’t provide that society any more.
Phil Ochs, around the time of the Chicago Democratic convention

The master tapes for one of his albums remained in A&M’s vault for 23 years.

Phil Ochs is another one of those Gary Webb-type of deaths where, if you had a good imagination and a paranoid mind, you could find CIA written all over it, or one of those creepy agencies anyway.
Will Knott

He left behind a 12-year-old daughter. His body was cremated, according to his wishes.

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Troubadour in the Shadows: Phil Ochs

Phil Ochs was the singer-songwriter who could have been Dylan, had Dylan not already occupied that position. If Dylan had never been born, Ochs would have been the major musical spokesman for the Sixties. Since Dylan did exist, Ochs always felt somewhat like the little brother tagging along.

Perhaps to prove his authenticity, or perhaps because it was just his way, Ochs put his life and body on the line in ways that Dylan never did. He joined demonstrations and got into fistfights. He went to Chile with counterculture icon Jerry Rubin to check out the progress of the revolution. He adventured in Australia and journeyed to Kenya, where his vocal chords were permanently damaged when he was mugged.

Phil Ochs was born on December 19, 1940. A journalism student in college, Ochs became one of the strongest voices in the civil rights and anti-war movements. He wrote “The Draft Dodger’s Rag”

I’m only eighteen, I got a ruptured spleen,
and I always carry a purse…

During the Sixties, Ochs was certain he would be assassinated because of his radicalism. It wasn’t such a crazy idea, in view of the fate of Latin American poet and musician Victor Jara, whose hands were cut off before his execution. One writer says that when the Chicago Seven were charged, Ochs was insulted not to be included, which meant he was only important enough to be an un-indicted co-conspirator. He needed to feel relevant. His former manager said, “He thought he was risking his life by singing.” One school of thought says, when he finally realized that nobody wanted to shut him up that badly, he became terminally depressed.

Ochs could be a real pain in the ass, which was why he often didn’t receive from the world the consideration and respect that his genius deserved. As the political climate changed and songs of social injustice went out of fashion, he felt redundant, drank more, acted worse, and perceived enemies everywhere. In the fall of 1975 he turned up at New York’s legendary Chelsea Hotel, registered under a false name, and was arrested for drunkenness and assault on a woman friend.

His last real public performance was at a party for the owner of a folk club. It was practically a dress rehearsal for the Rolling Thunder Revue, and Ochs had “understood” that he’d go along, but he wasn’t invited on the tour because of the drinking and unpredictable behavior. He stayed in Manhattan until December, drifted from one hotel to another, drank, crashed with friends or even slept in the street. He finally bottomed out and went to stay with his sister, where he quit drinking and played a lot of cards with her three kids.

Back in the good times, Ochs wrote a wonderful song that outlines some of the reasons why life is painful, but returns always to the refrain

I’m gonna give all that I’ve got to give,
cross my heart and I hope to live.

At 35, Phil Ochs had given all that he had to give. On April 9, 1976, he hanged himself. “He had often talked about suicide,” said Jerry Rubin, who had seen him four days earlier. “He was so tied to political changes that when that spirit went down he went down with it.”

——-

An earlier version of this appeared in Salon: A Journal of Aesthetics

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GENERATION ECCH! The Backlash Starts Here

A cultural critic named David Toop once said, “What’s utterly now will soon be thoroughly then; once it becomes then, it might as well be paleolithic….” That’s what this book is all about – the ephemeral nature of “what’s happening now.” Generation Ecch! is written by Jason Cohen and Michael Krugman and illustrated by the brilliant comix artist Evan Dorkin. It’s funny as hell.

The whole generation, created as a marketing strategy, was big news for a long time, leading to such heinous faux pas as the New York Times printing a “Lexicon of Grunge”, which purported to give outsiders the key to insider lingo. It turned out to be a hoax, much as I often suspected back in the Sixties that the journalistic revelations of lists of hip drug terms were a put-on, my favorite being “mohaski” for marijuana – uh-huh.

The text begins with a long examination of all the names that have been given to “Generation X.” They examine Ecch’s taste in comics, and its preference in so-called literature, the “MTVesque brand of fiction” that spawned Fast Sofa, Less Than Zero and of course Generation X. Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights Big City comes in for a big chunk of criticism, not least for the unparalledly annoying device of narration in the second person. The exuberant hatchet job culminates in a parody called Ecch-topia.

Cohen and Krugman have not a single kind word to say for MTV’s “mockudramedy,” The Real World. Its clones, Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place are also savaged. Why waste hours and hours watching the vapid things when you can just read this chapter?

The authors give Ecch-deity Quentin Tarentino a verbal beating equalled only by the recent Baffler articles by Gary Groth and Ray Carney. They take apart John Hughes and The Breakfast Club in irresistibly hilarious style, reserving particularly merciless ridicule for Judd Nelson’s “transparent bid to get his nostrils nominated for an Academy Award.” Fast Times at Ridgemont High is analyzed as the prototypical Ecch movie. Pretty in Pink and Reality Bites are slandered- “Why create a character when you can just saddle someone with a job at the Gap, a Charlie’s Angels lunchbox, and a list of the sixty-six different men she’s slept with?” The holy of holies, My Own Private Idaho, is savaged, followed by an examination of the reasons for such pathetic excuses for heroes as River Phoenix.

There are some disrespectful observations about the fashion for hemp, and a comment on Newsweek’s concern with the fact that not only grunge kids but regular straight-looking teenagers buy clothes and accessories with pot leaves on them. “The nation is concerned about these clean-cut youngsters: pot T-shirts are gateway fashion, leading eventually to suit jackets emblazoned with syringes.”

The authors joyfully deconstruct Kurt Cobain, “the very manifestation of all that is ecch.” “If Kurt could see the canonization that accompanied his demise it would kill him. Again.” They take us on a tour of Lollapalooza which is characterized as “ridiculous.” The Deadhead phenomenon comes in for even worse. “The keyboard seat in the GD is perhaps the most dangerous job in showbiz. Three, count ‘em, three Grateful Dead ivory ticklers have kicked the bucket over the group’s twenty-odd years, yet both drummers live on and on…and on and on and on and on….”

There is a very disrespectful examination of Antioch College’s verbal consent policy in regard to sexual activity. They take on the silliness of most of the doings “online” and of the rave movement. “Pearl Jam is the one band that exemplifies all aspects of the Ecch world: the sappy liberal politics, the sad victim mentality and the classic rock meets grunge sound. Oh yeah, and they’re from Seattle.”

Unlike the perpetrators of too many of the zines that show up in the mail, the authors of Generation Ecch are literate, widely read, very smart, and conscious of the existence of other values and other world-views than the narrow spectrum embraced by the rest of what they call the “rebel without a clue” generation. They even know about stuff like the Living Theater and Judith Malina before she was Grandma Addams. Their lively, funny, irreverent approach is reminiscent of Tom Wolfe’s incisive takes on cultural phenomena, and there isn’t a dull sentence to be found. “If a modern-day Allen Ginsberg were to write a Howl for the age of Ecch, the minute he saw the best minds of the generation he’d drop the poesy and go into the schmatte business.”

First published in Scene, July 1996

Note: the work of Evan Dorkin appeared several times in Salon: A Journal of Aesthetics.

Inspired by Rubber Tramps: 9 designs

Inspired by the movie Rubber Tramps, 9 t-shirt designs.

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The Best Song Lyrics Ever

There are lines so good that the writer’s immortality should be assured even if they never wrote anything else. There are lines so insightful that they make you realize a thing you knew all along. Sometimes to get the full effect, the music has to be there too. But the ones I like best, all pretty much stand alone. They’re in no particular order.

I know this feeling might be crazy but it’s the only one I’ve got
Dylan

You been sleepin’ with leeches, it’s making you sick
Kevin Johnson

Everywhere I turn I see your face
It’s no better anyplace
Martha Davis

And if you’ve got no other choice
You know you can follow my voice
Through the dark turns and noise
Of this wicked little town
Stephen Trask

Do you feel what I feel?
Can we make that so it’s part of the deal?
Robbie Robertson

I think pretty is nice but I’d rather see something new
Ani DiFranco

Deal me up another future from some brand new deck of cards
Bob Seger

We won’t do one single song that we can’t do from the heart
Daniel Market

Just a perfect day
You made me forget myself
I thought I was someone else
someone good
Lou Reed

The things that pass for knowledge I can’t understand.
Steely Dan

Who’re you going to be if you can’t be yourself?
Ani DiFranco

I’d be much happier if I were home
Uriah Heep

Even though it all went wrong
I’ll stand before the Lord of Song
with nothing on my tongue but hallelujah
Leonard Cohen

Wish I was here
Phil Ochs

If you had my feelings I’m sure you’d feel the same.
James Booker

Dig themselves a hole and blame you for the dirt
Kevin Johnson

And it’s a shame that all our friends can’t be here with us today
Jimi Hendrix

You can’t play the blues in an air-conditioned room
B.B. King

I’d sell anything to buy some time
Kevin Johnson

I should be drinking a toast to absent friends instead of these comedians
Elvis Costello

It’s tired and I’m getting late
Peter Rowan

Better not look down if you want to keep on flyin’
B.B. King

No one told you when to run
You missed the starting gun
Pink Floyd

Wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then
Bob Seger

Who am I to ask you to lick my sores?
Bruce Springsteen

Every tool is a weapon if you hold it right
Ani DiFranco

No matter where you sleep tonight or how far you run
She’s the one.
Bruce Springsteen

Hearing strange words stutter from the mixed-up mind of you
Hendrix

I would rather be anywhere else than here today
Elvis Costello

I’ll get to you if I have to crawl
Robbie Robertson

You try changing their minds and you burst into flame
Kevin Johnson

You’re all grown up and you don’t care any more
And you hate all the people that you used to adore
And you despise all the rumors and lies of the
life you led before
Elvis Costello

She wrote a long letter on a short piece of paper
Travelling Wilburys

Won’t Somebody Believe Me?

About a thousand years ago (actually, 1969) I saw a movie called The Idol, which I don’t remember, but the soundtrack included a haunting torch song that I was crazy about. I wrote to the production company, asking if it was available as sheet music – I played piano, when there was one around, and wanted to be able to learn it. Some beautiful person sent back a promotional copy of the entire sound track album. My husband liked it too, and after the divorce, we used to take turns having custody of the album for a couple of years at a time. It disappeared long ago and I don’t even have a recording.

The song, whose title I don’t remember, but which may be “Won’t Somebody Believe Me?”, was sung by Cleo Laine. The composer, John Dankworth (her husband) was knighted a couple of years ago, the first British jazz musician to be honored in this way. They have a website where an incredible number of albums are for sale – but The Idol isn’t one of them, and the lyrics aren’t online anyplace. I hope I’ll be forgiven for trying to reconstruct them.

Won’t somebody believe me, in this troubled world
Won’t you believe me, when I say I’m alone
And the life that I’m leading makes me want to say
Trouble is the thing on my mind.

I could be lyrical with what I’m saying
But I’m hysterical in my empty, lonely life
I could refuse you, but I’d be praying
That you’d be back to find the lonely, only one]
And that’d be sad.

Won’t somebody believe me, in this troubled world
Won’t you believe me, when I say I’m alone
And the thoughts that I’m thinking make me want to say
Trouble is the thing on my mind.

That’s all I remember. Might be all there is. Great song. Great singer.