Dream Land

Posted on by Dale

Inspired, or shamed, by my copper chalice with my Lichtenbergian coals here in front of my monitor, where it catches my eye like a flame on the edge of my consciousness, I spent yesterday looking over “Dream Land,” the young couple’s song from Day in the Moonlight. My goal was to finish it and make great strides with Fedallini’s “Catalog,” but all Lichtenbergians know how that went.

This morning I tightened up some harmonies, cut a few measures, squeezed in a few new lyrics, and I think it’s done now other than the constant second guessing.

The verses are cute and the chorus is very good. The bridge will serve. Hey, Mike, I’m assuming that we’re relying on the talent to make these songs work, right?

Here’s the PDF piano/vocal score, and here’s the mp3. Will it serve, do you think?

Attend the tale

Posted on by Dale

I know Turff gave us until Jan. 12 to see Sweeney Todd, but since Jeff has started butchering it (har!) in other comments, I thought I’d go ahead and post for all of us to pile on.

Nearly all the reviews of which I am aware have hailed it as a masterpiece. Eh, not so much. Mostly effective, and the music is superb. But directorially, I think Burton is repeating himself. I was not surprised or impressed by any of it. (Pleased and entertained quite a bit, actually, but not impressed.)

Ms. Bonham Carter in particular is spectacularly miscast. Mr. Depp is, as Jeff has said otherwheres, simply repeating his Edward Scissorhands/Jack Sparrow shtick, although it is adequate to the task. Ms. Bonham Carter, on the other hand, I just wanted to smack. I wanted to yell, “Cut!” and ask her, “Sweetie, can you give me some decision-making during this song? I mean, Ed’s only ten, so I can cut him some slack, but Helena, you’re putting me to sleep! Johnny’s doing the catatonic thing, let’s you and I figure out something else, OK?”

I find the decision to leave out the chorus altogether not as offensive as leaving out the humor. Yes, Sondheim’s music will bear the weight of a tragedy, but the original piece is a satirical commentary on human passions, both emotional, physical, and economic. I really missed the counterpoint between Sweeney Todd’s monomania and Mrs. Lovett’s greed.

The Grand Guignol blood was a good choice. At least it provided some color. (I found the limited palette forced and uninteresting.)

All in all, a good movie, barring Helena Bonham Carter, but not quite the masterpiece the professionals are raving about.

The Lichtenbergian Society Annual Meeting

Posted on by Dale

Well, that was one of the best times I’ve ever had. You might surmise from the fact that it’s been 36 hours since the meeting and I’m just now posting about it that I had too large a time, and indeed most of yesterday was spent recouping my precious bodily fluids.

I don’t think we decided anything of importance, correct me if I’m wrong here, but we did get some things done. We ratified and signed the Charter (everyone got his own copy, suitable for framing); we acclaimed our officers, such as they are; we engrossed our Lichtenbergian Efforts for 2007 into the Record then engrossed our Proposed Efforts for 2008. That was interesting, because rather than a stately confession, which would have been dreary, it was a relaxed, open discussion of our goals and wishes, and it’s always fascinating to discover how multitalented the group is.

Throughout, there were toasts: to Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (who, far from being some obscure Enlightenment aphorist, turns out to be a major if inconsequential Enlightenment aphorist); to the Corroborative Evidence, consigned to the flames; to our Efforts; to our Proposed Efforts. There may have been one or two more. Memory is unclear. The first toast, to GCL, was made with the little bottle I had bought in Waldkirchen/Hofvonstein. It was labeled as being from Waldkirchen, but that’s all the ID it had. The ladies in the shop sort of giggled when I picked it up, saying only that it was “eine Spezialität” of the area. So of course it was moonshine, which probably makes sense given Waldkirchen’s history of gold-mining days.

And then we talked and talked and talked about Art: what is it? Who knows? We certainly got nowhere in our discussion, but it was the creative, intelligent conversation that was the attraction. We probably could have been more determined to at least examine the sources of our creativity, although we did give both God and evolutionary forces a tip of the hat, but perhaps we can continue the conversation next year.

The night was cold and drear, but after it stopped drizzling and the fire was really going, it was not bad at all. For seven hours we talked and toasted and were simply together. It was an amazingly good time.

For the record, there was no naked dancing, although several of us did accept the Mark, a handprint of ash on our chests. Well, Matthew didn’t take his on his chest, but you get the idea. We also all accepted a coal from the fire to set on our desks as a reminder of our Lichtenbergian ideals, whatever those turn out to be.

Next Annual Meeting: Saturday, December 20.

Lichtenbergian Ritual

Posted on by Dale

Warning: long post ahead

The Lichtenbergian Society’s impending Annual Meeting has me all aquiver, and I am at some pains to figure out why this is so. The mere whimsy of the association is one thing, the whole grown-men-forming-their-little-club aspect of it, complete with seal and charter; but that’s not enough to account for the genuine excitement around here.

Somewhere over on the Lacuna blog, Jeff wondered if we should have some kind of ritual thing, and I pointed out that over here on this blog we already had one outlined: the proposed Order of Business for the meeting. Go take a look at it.

I’ve been reading Ellen Dissanayake’s Homo Aestheticus (down, Jobie, down), in which she talks about how “making special” is an evolutionary adaptive behavior to be found in three aspects of human existence: play, ritual, and the arts. All three stem from the ability of humans to conceive of an “other” reality, and all three use that conception to different purposes. I’d like to look at Dissanayake’s examination of ritual and how it applies to our less-than-serious Society and how that in turn might in fact be invested with meaning far beyond anything we suspected when we cobbled it together.

She borrows a term from a study called Ancient Art and Ritual (1913), in which the author used the Greek dromenon, ‘a thing done,’ to concoct her own term, dromena, to describe the human imperative to act when impelled by strong emotions, our impulse get ‘things done’ in a ritual setting. We seek to do, and later in her book she will extend this idea beyond ritual to artistic creation. (It is her thesis that art did not spring from ritual but is an evolutionary adaptive behavior that developed alongside ritual.)

Dissanayake describes a ritual as a patterned response to a transition or transformation in human existence. Since transition or transformation is often anxiety-producing (“I’m going to start my symphony,” or “I need to get those ideas out of my head into novel format”), a ritualized response is useful to take the subject (i.e., us) through a comforting, patterned experience.

First of all, the main purpose of the ritual is to take the participants from their everyday state into the “liminal” state, over the Campbellian threshold, to a place where the rules of daily existence do not apply. This is one point at which, Dissanayake says, the aesthetic impulse rears its evolutionary head: we wear special outfits or disrobe, we use instruments that are created or enhanced for the occasion, we decorate ourselves and our surroundings.

Just think, for example, of the things that one or more of us have laughingly suggested for the evening’s activities: naked dancing, presentation of a piece of the fire to be contained in a specialized chalice, smearing of the participant with ashes, the Journal of the Proceedings of the Lichtenbergian Society, etc. More than one of you are bringing examples to guide our discussion of “What is Art?”

I say “laughingly suggested,” because as yet we are unsure of how serious any of this is or even can be. Marc has suggested that it is now impossible to devise a real ritual because of our postmodern penchant for irony. But even in his demurral I hear the yearning for such a thing, and I think, as I’ve told him on the other blog, that I believe that it is possible, and that it is possible to include our irony within the structure. Yes, we are prone to observe ourselves, but that doesn’t mean that what we witness cannot be truly meaningful.

Dissanayake goes on to say that the liminal state can produce a communal transformation too, an emotional condition called communitas. “Individuals feel themselves join in a state of oneness, with each other, with powers greater than themselves, or with both, a sort of merging and self-transcendence. [This] capacity for self-transformation, felt as… self-transendence… seems to be a universal element in the human behavioral repertoire.”

Indeed, if you will recall, the invitation to join me for a Winter Solstice get-together, which enjoined us to nothing more than drinking and musing, preceded the formation of our Society by a couple of days. My desire for communitas must have struck a chord, because everyone on the email list responded almost immediately to say he’d come. My intent was already to invoke dromena/communitas in a more generic kind of way, and the Society has given us a very important, at least to this group of men, and focused way to do that.

This communitas is related to Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of “flow,” that state of play/work/creativity to which we all aspire, in which there is a dissolution between the “I” and “other,” and the stuff we do comes easily without barrier or impediment, especially from us. I think this is germane to the ritual we have constructed, since we are dealing with one of our self-made barriers within it.

Finally, as part of her ethological thesis, Dissanayake posits that the “effect of ritual actions and performances, of dromena, is to make people feel better, and indeed one might suggest… that ritual practices are not so much expected to work, though certainly it is hoped that they will, as to deliver people from anxiety.” I don’t think I need to explicate the anxiety which the items on our Efforts lists can generate or have generated in us.

Jeff has suggested in comments somewhere around here that this anxiety springs from our comparing our inner, “perfect” selves with our everyday, lazy, ineffective, unproductive selves. He states that we should ignore the two obvious choices, to pretend the inner one is real and live in delusion; or to gnaw ourselves into agony through focusing on the outer one, and go with a third choice: embrace the gulf between the two.

I believe this is what our ritual Annual Meetings are destined to do. By listing the things we never got around to (adromena?), by recognizing that we do not struggle alone (communitas), by toasting ourselves silly into companionability, by drawing a picture of the coming year as we hope it to be, we stand a chance of neutralizing or even dispelling the anxiety which accompanies all of us as creative men and which often threatens to paralyze us.

So when you end up dancing drunk, naked, and smeared with ash in my backyard, remember: you’ll be a better man for it.

A Noble Heart (Terry Maiers)

Posted on by Dale

Terry attempts to shame us by submitting his abandoned novel a day after the deadline.

A Noble Heart

THIS being the prurient attempt to chronicle the LIFE OF A MAN who stands above all for TRUE LOVE in its purest form, which is so rarely observed today, and in his search for the WOMAN who will fulfill his dreams of a marriage of TWO SOULS so in LOVE that even though they may engage in some of the more SALACIOUS ACTS of human behavior their love remains commensurate to the PISTINE ACTS of two virginal individuals.

Introduction

In which the Author appeals to the Reader for empathic consideration of his writing style.

In attempting to capture the true nature of our subject, the Author can only rely on his own observations and thus begins the slide into the inscrutable behavior of all men, of which the author has indulged all too much, and the predicament of trying to sort out the feelings and actions of one man who stands so far above others. Yes our subject is of human embodiment with the bulging torso muscles, the sculptured yet elegant stomach, the legs of such sinew like that of an athlete and in between those manly parts which can only be described as magnificent. Oh Dear Reader if you were to gaze upon the form of which I speak your thoughts may indeed go in the same direction, yet this is not what the Reader is to dwell upon if he is to gain the veracious impression that the Author intends to reveal. No it is the soul and the beauty that lies within that must be focused upon if this story is to capture the essence of its purpose.

But surely the Reader can see the botheration that enters into the mind as mere words do not do justice to what is in the heart, but can so well describe the outer attributes which were formerly mentioned. But it is that heart, which beats in that august chest, on which we must focus, and not let our gaze fall slowly to the other more salient parts of the anatomy. The Author will endeavor to use the most accurate words that he can to portray this most genuine love but do not be disturbed by the occasional foray into the more physical attributes as one is wont to do. Words by their very nature are mere tools and much better for describing the tangible world around us which our senses perceive. Those other-worldly qualities of which we can sometimes only hint must be sensed by you the Reader through the maze of flesh consuming tales in which this Author indulges at times. And with that forewarning let us begin our tale, an adventure in love so great that the sedulous task of telling it may sometimes fail to hit its mark and fall into the more licentious area of passionate affection.