Tune In, Blow Your Mind

 

 

I remember when I was a child I used to listen to the radio in the shower. One day I was about to get in when I turned on the radio and froze. I heard the last thirty seconds of a song and it blew my mind and changed my life. The next Sunday I sat next to the radio with my finger hovering tensely above the cassette record button to catch the song. I did but it was ruined by the DJ speaking over the end of the song. It was Black Rebel Motorcycle Club asking Whatever Happened to My Rock ‘n’ Roll? Those were the days when ‘…I’d listen to the radio waiting for my favourite song’ (The Carpenters) to record and then painstakingly transfer it from tape to tape making compilations until the quality would deteriorate. Incidentally this is why so many old blues, folk etc records sound so bad now- it is not the equipment it is just that the master pressings have been played to (literal) death and the actual reel-to-reel tapes were recorded over or used to line chicken coops, no wonder Casey Bill Weldon had the Rooster Blues.

 

  

Jenny said, when she was just five years old

You know there’s nothin’ happening at all

Every time she put on the radio

There was nothin’ goin’ down at all

 

One fine mornin’, she puts on a New York station

And she couldn’t believe what she heard at all

She started dancin’ to that fine-fine-fine-fine music

Ooohhh, her life was saved by rock ‘n’ roll

 

Despite all the amputations

You could dance to a rock ‘n’ roll station

And it was all right

It was all right

 

(The Velvet Underground (Lou Reed) – Rock ‘n’ Roll)

 

Lou Reed, in University, used to go and listen to Jazz through the vents of clubs, being too poor to pay the cover charge, he then used what he had learnt on his own radio show ‘Excursion on a Wobbly Rail’ (named after Cecil Taylor song). Jenny (and/or Lou) wasn’t the only one to have his life saved by the radio.

 

‘I was always fishing for something on the radio. Just like trains and bells, it was part of the soundtrack of my life…One night, I remember listening to the Staple Singers, ‘Uncloudy Day.’ And it was the most mysterious thing I’d ever heard. It was like the fog rolling in. What was that? How do you make that? It just went through me.’ (Dylan) and they had the same affect on me many years later- check out their song ‘I’m coming home’, man, it seems to exit beyond space and time, wow. The Staple Singers were formed when Pop Staples could not find a group to sing with him so he went home and coerced his family into being his singers. Mavis, with the best voice, soon became the lead singer (she is still touring (this year opening for Dylan on his US tour) I saw her a few years ago and it was an absolute joy), The Staples used to open meetings for Dr Martin Luther King and were the first family of Gospel- think The Carter family for country.

 

Speaking of the Carter family, Johnny Cash used to listen to June Carter and fell in love with her voice-

 

‘That was the big thing when I was growing up, singing on the radio. The extent of my dream was to sing on the radio station in Memphis. Even when I got out of the Air Force in 1954, I came right back to Memphis and started knocking on doors at the radio station.’

 

Later they would marry after he crawled into a labyrinth of caves to die and by some unknown reason June knew he was missing and where he was and went and found him, (check out his self-titled autobiography- well worth a read). Johnny Cash was a very sick man but carried on living until June died then a few months later he died too. Read into that what you will but I find it more than a coincidence. Maybe coincidently Dylan had a relationship with Mavis Staples, proposing to her but Staples turned him down, feeling she was too young. ‘I often think about what would have happened if I’d married Bobby, though’– who says that radio has no impact on popular culture? – Years later Dylan even had his own prime time radio show- Theme Time Radio Hour where he would play songs that fitted into the weekly theme (hair, guns etc) and Dylan would preface each song with a history of the song, performer and even the history of the music style, mixed in with witty comments, (good and bad) jokes and presumably fake emails (paraphrased) ‘Bob I live in my mother’s basement and wonder at your pronunciation- why do you speak as you do?’ ‘Well, I could tell you but first get out of your mother’s basement…’

 

One of the things about the radio is that it makes one colour blind. Dylan thought that Chuck Berry was a ‘white hillbilly’, listening to the Shangri-La’s I thought they were black and that The Shirelles were white- I was wrong on both accounts. This shows that colour does not matter in music, one can be a rockin’ or soulful as the other

 

 

The radio is not only good for music. In 1938 Awesome Welles caused minor or major (depending on which account you read) kafuffle when his Mercury Theatre broadcast of Herbert George Wells’ War Of The Worlds was taken at face value and people thought that we really were being watched by our next-door neighbour who had decided to come over for more than a cup of sugar.

 

The radio serves many purposes- it entertains, informs and brings events that we would not know about otherwise from the four corners of the spherical world. The majority of my consumption of sport comes from the radio- on the radio it seems more vital, more important, more exciting. You are completely at the mercy of the commentators. The commentators can be more than an audio guide though, on BBC’s Test Match Special the team entertain and delight with matters away from the wicket. They often get emails from people saying how much they appreciate the company and camaraderie they enjoy.

 

However, this is not always good. Nowadays people are encouraged to interact with their radio by calls and various forms of social media ‘we rely on your participation, you make the show’ is a lie oft heard. Experts are drowned out by the babble of the public, although some of the experts seem to know little of their subject- just because you played doesn’t mean you know about it after all what do clocks know about time? I wrote a complaint to the BBC after an expert accused a sporting body and player of a ‘con’ after the player went home from a tour with a ‘stress-related illness’. The nature of my complaint was that the expert was not an expert on medical, mental health, matters so should not be making such statements on a public forums where it can be taken as ‘fact’. There is an inherent responsibility for the radio. People say that politicians, for example, should not be held to a higher standard. I disagree for they have chosen to be in public ergo they have elected to be held to a higher standard.

 

 

The radio is a precious thing and should be protected and a higher standard should be brought in. It should be quality not ratings that drives content for, after all, if Muhammad won’t go to the mountain the mountain should wait until he does.

 

 

 

——

 

 

Wow, all this talk of radio…hey, here’s an idea! How about a Thegreaterfool2016 radio hour? In the attachment below is such a thing. Exciting!

 

 

 

 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/sujbluqm73plbej/the%20greater%20fool%20radio%20hour.rar?dl=0

 

 

(after you have downloaded it, you’ll need to ‘unzip’ it using software such as WinRar)

 

 

http://download.cnet.com/WinRAR-64-bit/3000-2250_4-10965579.html

 

Any problems or comments, you can reach me on the email address below!

 

Thanks for reading (in general) and enjoy the show!

 

 

 

Thegreaterfool2016.yahoo.com

 

 

 

 

Let’s Talk About Girls!

 

I was listening to a documentary about a lady called Marie Josèphe Rose Tascher de La Pagerie (Joséphine) who emigrated to France in poverty but through social climbing achieved a position of prominence in society, which she then used to drag a scruffy Corsican up who went on to become Emperor, of course I refer to Joséphine Bonaparte, (Freud claimed that Napoleon called her Joséphine due to his intimate, ambiguous, relationship with his brother- the more of I read of Freud, well… but his daughter Anna Freud produced groundbreaking work on child development).

 

They say behind every great man there is a great woman but is that really all women are? Backgrounds? Inspiration? Muses? What about the women who have achieved great things on their own merit? Sabina Spielrein and Lou Andreas-Salome I have spoken of before but there are so many more- some of whom you may know, some of whom you may not.

 

 

In the Nineteenth century Elizabeth Cochran Seaman, better known by he non-de-plume Nellie Bly, was concerned about how patients were being treated in psychiatric hospitals, Nellie, at great personal risk, posed as being ‘insane’ to gain entry for ten days. She wrote a paper on the treatment, a paper which changed the way the mentally ill are treated and pioneered investigative journalism.

 

Ms Bly was not the only lady to take a scientific approach, Rosalind Franklin, recently brilliantly, award winningly, portrayed on stage by Nicole Kidman, discovered the double helix structure of Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) but, due to a desire for her work proven beyond doubt, did not publish and the discovery was stolen from her, also an honourable mention to Chien-Shiung Wu, one of the few female principle physicists on the Manhattan Project (Automic Bomb) (renowned for her work on Beta Decay).

 

Melina Jesenska was a Czech journalist who translated some of Kafka’s works into Czech (although Czech he wrote in German due to the Austro-Hungarian Empire) and had a relationship with him by letters but when she would not leave her abusive husband they drifted apart. The last known sighting of her was in a Gulag where she is reported to have brought great comfort to the other prisoners before she died.

 

Hannah Arendt was a political theorist, most famous for her report of the Adolf Eichmann (Nazi) trial, which she called the ‘banality of evil’ shining a light onto the fact that most evil is not malicious rather, thoughtless.

 

Another seminal figure in this field was Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir who, unfortunately, is most famous for her relationship with Sartre, who, although she finished second to him in university, he treated as an intellectual equal but not gender equal often cheating on her and getting upset if she did the same. Her most famous work is The Second Sex, a revolutionary study of female sexuality.

 

At the age of eighteen, Françoise Sagan (Quoirez), taking Sagan from Marcel Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (In Search of Lost Time), failed the entrance exam at university so she wrote a novel instead. Bonjour Tristesse (Hello Sadness) became a big seller and made her into a star yet a car crash, drug abuse and tax fraud made this wonderful writer live a life of, well, a writer.

 

Another writer who was seemingly cursed was Carson McCullers. She thought she was destined to be a pianist but strokes from childhood paralysed the left hand side of her body. Her first novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is a story about a deaf man who offers help and comfort to those around but when he needs help none are there for him and, as Shakespare’s Timon of Athens, found people like to take from you when your times are good but dislike giving when your times are bad.

 

 

Françoise Hardy was a shy, introverted, very intelligent girl who had a surprise hit with Tous Les Garcons et Les Filles becoming the poster girl for the ye-ye girl movement in France in the sixties (think the US groups like the Shangri-La’s, Ronettes etc). Her sound matured when she took more control over her music writing songs such as Mon Amie La Rose and Voila and recorded in four languages. She stopped touring in ‘68 as she felt too self-conscious but still releases records. At the height of her fame she was asked for her perfect day ‘lying on my bed reading’, if she hadn’t already stolen my heart she would have then. She was around at the same time as France Gall. After Gall had success with Poupée de Cire, Poupée de Son written by Serge Gainsbourg he wrote her another song, Les Sucettes. Still innocent, Gall did not spot the innuendo and her career in France was ruined- so she moved to Germany and continued her career with songs like Ein bisschen Goethe, ein bisschen Bonaparte (A little Goethe, a little Bonaparte) and also recorded in many languages.

 

 

And last, but by no means least- Brigitte Bardot. Her recent right-wing politics aside, Bardot revolutionised cinema, (in the film And God created Women (tag line- and the devil created Brigitte Bardot) you see naked female flesh for the first time- her bottom!) and brought power to women. Brave and daring she recorded the original Je T’aime…Moi Non Plus after she asked Serge Gainsbourg to write her a love song- but her husband was not happy and the song was rerecorded with Jane Birkin.

 

Women are seen to have a secondary role in society- as Odysseus was off for twenty odd years killing, having affairs with goddesses, being a general rascal, his wife Penelope was expected to be faithful to him on the off-chance he returned- yet the names above, plus so many more- Grace Kelly (who in Rear Window redefined movement for me until I saw the Prima Ballerina of the Bolshoi Ballet Company (I still have no idea how she could move like she did)), Sarah Michelle Gellar (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) who said she would rather be thought of as intelligent than beautiful et al- show how great and interesting women are and how they should not reduce themselves, or let themselves be reduced to aesthetics for as Marcel Proust said ‘let’s leave the pretty girls to the men with no imagination’

 

 

—

 

Thanks for reading, make sure you tune in next Thursday when we’ll be discussing…the radio

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

 

 

Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river

You can hear the boats go by

You can spend the night beside her

And you know that she’s half crazy

But that’s why you want to be there

And she feeds you tea and oranges

That come all the way from China

And just when you mean to tell her

That you have no love to give her

Then she gets you on her wavelength

And she lets the river answer

That you’ve always been her lover

And you want to travel with her

And you want to travel blind

And you know that she will trust you

For you’ve touched her perfect body with your mind.

 

(Simple language that means nothing

And everything

A melody simple and hypnotic

A deadpan voice that sings like a nightingale

Angelic voices floating like water on the breeze

The divine mystery that transports one

Into the mundane world of the ideal dream)

 

And Jesus was a sailor

When he walked upon the water

And he spent a long time watching

From his lonely wooden tower

And when he knew for certain

Only drowning men could see him

He said “All men will be sailors then

Until the sea shall free them”

But he himself was broken

Long before the sky would open

Forsaken, almost human

He sank beneath your wisdom like a stone

And you want to travel with him

And you want to travel blind

And you think maybe you’ll trust him

For he’s touched your perfect body with his mind.

 

 

(Jesus in the world

On the cusp of manhood

And the divine

Slowly being destroyed

By the world he came to save)

 

 

 

Now Suzanne takes your hand

And she leads you to the river

She is wearing rags and feathers

From Salvation Army counters

And the sun pours down like honey

On our lady of the harbour

And she shows you where to look

Among the garbage and the flowers

There are heroes in the seaweed

There are children in the morning

They are leaning out for love

And they will lean that way forever

While Suzanne holds the mirror

And you want to travel with her

And you want to travel blind

And you know that you can trust her

For she’s touched your perfect body with her mind.

 

 

The above are the lyrics (to, in my opinion, the perfect song), originally published as a poem, for Leonard Cohen’s song Suzanne, a song about going to his friend’s house and being served Constant Comment tea (yes I managed to find out what tea it was, a black tea with orange rind and spices) whilst looking out over the Montreal docks at Chapel of Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours, also known as Sailor’s Church (‘This is the first time I was ever in a city where you couldn’t throw a brick without breaking a church window’- Mark Twain)

 

Historian Douglas Brinkley said that Jack Kerouac (most famous for On The Road, but my favourite is Big Sur, written after the ‘crack up’ (to use F. Scott Fitzgerald’s words) which came after six long years of trying to get Road published only to become famous- when the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers) “inspired an entire generation to look for holiness in the mundane, God in oneself and beauty in every shard of broken glass of a bottle in the street’.

 

Leonard Cohen was significantly influenced by the Beat Generation saying ‘…One of the things I always liked about the early Beatnik poetry – Ginsberg and Kerouac and Corso – was the use of the word “angel”. I never knew what they meant, except it was a designation for a human being and that it affirmed the light in an individual. I don’t know how I used the word “angel”. I’ve forgotten exactly, but I don’t think I ever got better than the way Ginsberg and Kerouac used the word in the early ‘fifties. I always loved reading their poems where they talked about angels.’

 

The Beats wrote of the beauty of madmen just looking to get home, of spilt wine and the tenderness of cats drinking milk. The world of the Beats was very holy and, above all, gentle. Leonard Cohen spoke of meeting Kerouac at Allen Ginsberg’s apartment: ‘He was lying under a dining room table, pretending to listen to some jazz record while the party swirled on ’round him.’

 

The Beats were influenced greatly by the likes of Proust, who would dive into the nuances of situations, and William Blake, who died considered a madman, who wrote

 

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour.

 

One of my favourite pastimes is to go on long (essentially pointless) walks. When I am in the ‘civilised’ areas I need my mp3 player but as soon as I get into the wilderness I no longer need it and give myself over to nature. I never realised just how loud birds and crickets are, I’ve also attempted many conversations with rabbits although I don’t think they find my conversation interesting enough to talk back and my aversion to insects, bees etc means that sometimes I cannot relax as much as I would like, not that I ever really approach a state akin to relaxation.

 

Max Richter released an eight cd set called Sleep, ‘sleep is my personal lullaby for a frenetic world- a manifesto for a slower pace of existence’

 

With all of the advances in technology and the cheapening of things, it is now easy to become over saturated- with books, music, television, cars, holidays, mass media, which, ironically, has no gravity as it lacks (e)motion, essentially everything. Everything seems to be built around instant gratification. If one follows the correct model then one’s life can be essentially over by twenty-three and the remaining years spent just living out what has already been constructed. Many, it seems, die before they start to live. However, this may just be a coping technique, after all Anton Chekhov said ‘Any idiot can face a crisis – it’s day to day living that wears you out.’

But at what cost? Maybe, as Proust said, ‘The only true paradise is a paradise we have lost,’ and would we really want to go back to a time of no sanitation, where a small infection could kill? No, I don’t think so either. This is the world that we have created but surely progress will be greater if one takes the time to, as Socrates famously did, stop en-route to explore the allure of some attractive young flower for the devil is not in the details, rather the divine is (read Spinoza’s Ethics) and as Franz Kafka said ‘Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.’

 

the God is Dead- which god?

 

 

In his book The Gay Science, the German Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, a man with whom, if you are familiar with my blog, you will be enraptured by/sick of by now, (when I read him my friend defines my conversation style as ‘Nietzsche, Nietzsche, Nietzsche’) wrote a parable about a madman who goes into the marketplace at noon with a lit lamp and tells everyone that God is dead and that we have killed him. When they laugh at him he is filled with despair for he realises that the news is like a distant star and knowledge of it is yet to reach them even though we did the deed and the blood is on our hands.

 

The son of a Lutheran Minister, Nietzsche, when he was a child, listened to a choir singing Handel’s Messiah and exclaimed that it was the voice of angels but soon afterwards his father died after one fourth of his brain was eroded through illness (a year later Nietzsche’s brother died). The realisation that such suffering could come to such a great and holy man shook Nietzsche and his life suffered its greatest crisis- a loss of meaning, he was five.

 

In search of truth and meaning, God, Nietzsche went to university to study theology yet the discovery of Schopenhauer’s concept of the will to power (World as Will and Representation) and absolute despair, ‘it is better to have never been born’, sparked something in Friedrich and he decided that he had to find the elusive meaning that was lost with the death of his father.

 

Nietzsche is often considered to be a nihilist but this comes from those who do not understand the concept. A true nihilist sees there is no meaning in the world and sets out to find it. To say that God is dead is an impossible statement for to be dead, or to even live, God would have to be in the finite plain which is absurd, what F.N meant was that the world had lost meaning and all of the principles of morality were being carried out by wrote and without any higher purpose or meaning, the gesture was hollow and empty. The concept of a dead God was not even new to Nietzsche (or later Time *spits* magazine) for it was prevalent in ancient mythology and theology (the conception of Christ springs to mind- a great life reduced to a symbol of ignorance and murder)

 

Nietzsche once said that there is nothing a philosopher wants more than to be a good dancer- the same way that Plato said that music ‘give flight to the imagination and wings to the soul’- and that we love life not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving.

 

A kind, gentle man, Nietzsche became a volunteer medical orderly for the Prussian army but his service was cut short when he became very sick. In his book, a book that terrified even him, Beyond Good and Evil, an attempt to redefine morality and values, Nietzsche wrote his (probably) second most, contextually incorrectly, quoted aphorism ‘what does not kill me makes me stronger’. This was clearly not true. The consequences of his illness and that he could not read or write for more than twenty minutes at a time before being plagued with migraines and bleeding, almost totally blind, did not kill him, a heart problem would, it clearly made him weaker.

 

Nietzsche generally gave the impression that he had little respect for love and compassion, emotion in general, but he fell in love with Lou-Andres Salome, as I call her The Collector, young and brilliant she collected great minds such as Rilke, whom she wrote a biography of with the heartbreakingly beautiful title, ‘You Alone are Real to Me’ and lesser minds like Freud. In competition for her with his close friend Paul Ree (see the picture at the top of the page), Nietzsche called his new aphoristic style Ree-lism, (Ree once remarked ‘imagine having to kiss that moustache’), his proposal was rejected (twice- first time he got Ree to do it) consequently Nietzsche seemingly gave up on looking for love from mortals and came up with the Ubermensch (bastardised by the Reich so that Nietzsche lamented in a preface that he wished that his books were written in French to prevent them being used to justify such nonsense), the transcendent, who, ironically to some, finds his perfect form in a Christ like- Buddhaesque figure.

 

There is an old saying that it is hope that kills you, Fred even once wrote that the kindest thing that the gods did was to close Pandora’s Box before the worst thing (hope) could get out, however the pain of hope, to me, is not a terrible thing, yes it hurts you and can destroy you, for it is proof that you are still alive within, that you still breathe, long and yearn, still live a life of emotions (be they terrible) and are not dead within like so many people. However, it is a sad truth that knowledge generally comes from suffering.

 

Nietzsche went mad, not, as is generally believed, from syphilis from his first trip to a brothel (his doctor had prescribed it in university to try to help his general health- NHS take note… (also as revenge for Nietzsche falling out with him, Wagner wrote to Nietzsche’s doctor saying that his ill health was caused by onanism)), however Nietzsche had been one of the few people in the world not to have lived a life of madness, he had just been a sweet guy searching hopelessly in the world (There is not enough love and kindness in the world to permit us to give any of it away to imaginary beings.) for God, that is meaning, that is love, in a godless world.