electroacoustic prose

The subject was not exactly changed by anyone, but it drifted off to something else. Lilly remembered that she had brought an electronic record for them to hear. They played it while they had coffee. Eric chuckled and made comments. The few words, said in German by a female voice, were interspersed by eerie, owl-like moaning and screeching. Clarence's thoughts drifted. He saw a garden of metal flowers, then a dark tunnel, an airless hell in which anything could happen, or spring out. It was an unknown world, yet completely known, as one knew one's own dreams, and yet did not know them -- because one could not completely interpret them, but not because one did not know them and their peculiar atmosphere.

Patricia Highsmith, A Dog's Ransom (1972)

I love depictions like this, made in passing, of the avant garde. The more marginal they are, the more unguarded and interesting they become. This one is quite finely nuanced; one character resists, but the central character responds -- and sympathetically, despite the hellish atmosphere evoked. The record's modernity is not an issue, though it is described in a vocabulary which is doubly atavistic: it speaks to Clarence's violent subconscious, and itself reanimates a fin-de-siecle lyricism: flowers of evil, seasons in hell. What was the original of this fictionalized record? Maybe some scholar of Highsmith and/or Stockhausen can tell me.

Hand in Glove

When in the summer i was thinking about Beyonce's single Sasha Fierce gauntlet as an homage to Michael Jackson's single white glove, I was really intrigued to discover their shared debt to Bob Fosse as a choreographer. This edit of Fosse's routine in The Little Prince is pretty extraordinary, a template for almost all of the moves and tics which we now consider to be characteristically MJ:




And then there's Beyonce's debt to, or rather deliberate homage to, Fosse in -- let me finish -- one the best videos of all time. I can't embed it but you can watch it here.

And this synchs up Fosse's original routine, devised for his wife Gwen Verdon, with Single Ladies:



The Fosse-MJ-Beyonce triangulation is so gloriously odd, the way it crosswires certain assumptions about gender and race, subverting projections like the idea that Jackson's performance of Billie Jean at Motown 25 'encapsulated a long tradition of African-American dance movements in one performance' (a view ascribed to Ian Inglis in the wiki for the moonwalk).

While I'm on the subject, I don't think I've ever linked from here to this post about Beyonce, the Sashe Fierce gauntlet as cyber-prosthesis and the etymological roots of cyborg in the concept of slavery.