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vershy versh

Well-known member
It's fun being around couples/colleagues that are really good at unspoken communication they're so seamless and coordinated, a glancing look and suddenly they're doing somersaults in sync

I read an Autechre interview when I was listening to them a lot a few weeks back where they said they don't really talk about the music. They're so in tune they just instinctively know what to do.
 

sus

Moderator
There's a whole book about this in connection with Westerns (and other movie genres based around men of few words whose few words are generally of the tough-talking type)

Carducci (otherwise renowned for working at SST, with Black Flag etc whose aesthetic he characterized as "new redneck") celebrates an inexpressive style of unstyled acting - very much conceived against theatricality. Clint Eastwood is an archetype but he has many other heroes, often quite obscure and forgotten figures in B-movies, action movies, etc

He says the best Westerns are those with hardly any dialogue, that approach silent movies (albeit without the facial histrionics that a lot of silent movies went in for). And that some of the best actors in the traditions he's all about weren't actually trained actors originally but slipped into motion pictures through being stunt men or horse handlers - physical rather than verbal types. People with a sense of life as struggle and jeopardy. Often they were veterans of a world war.

His antipathy for theatre is part of a general slant of culture versus civilization, urban life as urbane as effete as decadent
Looks very interesting, I'll have to pick up a copy.

I was reading "Taboo: Time & Belief in Exotica" by the musicologist Phil Ford (who moonlights as a theorist of magic & alchemy on the Weird Studies podcast)

And he talked a lot about the transition from Greatest Generation 50s/early 60s exotica (& Polynesian Pop) to the Vietnam era mid 60s, when Boomers start dominating marketshare

And just how quickly exotica went out of fashion and was shunned for its campy inauthenticity

And yet Bobby Zimmerman, Elliot Charles Adnopoz (ie Ramblin Jack), Don Glen Vliet (ie Beefheart)—all these are also obviously inventions, fantasies, that go with the "Indian-style" fringed leather jackets and moccasins and featherbands. That really what happened was a shift from fantasies of the (spatially) foreign of the lush/colorful to fantasies of the (temporally foreign) roughened domestic: Greil's "Weird America"

Eastwood, and the antihero archetype he embodies, emerged at the same mid-60s moment, and I wonder if there's a connection. Obviously older Westerns (John Wayne in 48's Red River comes to mind) have this archetype too though.

And then in the 70s, a glam cowboy idea starts emerging—I still haven't sussed out the space, but there's Campbell's Rhinestone Cowboy, Elton John's poppy/diamond-crusted "Roy Rogers"—maybe even Joe Buck in '69's Midnight Cowboy. It all begins to feel more like exotica again
 

sus

Moderator
I was watching the new Hlynur Pálmason film, Godland last night.

Which is an attempt at a film in the tradition of the Romantic Sublime: a European who travels across Iceland on horseback and is exposed to both the beauties and terrors/dangers of nature. Lots of emphasis on landscape, on the sheer scale of mountains and glaciers and mossy canyons that dwarfs the human beings.

And what it reminded me of, more than anything, is a cattle drive film like Red River! This journey through a landscape where the landscape becomes a central character. River crossings and bad weather and moments of camaraderie between the men around the campfire.

Which is just to say that many Westerns seem like deeply Romantic films to me, upholding deeply Romantic ideals. The cowboys are poet-philosophers of silence and extreme linguistic economy, traveling through the wilderness and the fringes of society, whistling or humming their songs to the animals around them.
 

william_kent

Well-known member
then in the 70s, a glam cowboy idea starts emerging

don't forget the late 60s / early 70s "cosmic cowboy" Gram Parsons

it won't add anything to the discussion but there's a funny bit in the David Toop book, Gris Gris, where he is talking about the influence of "medicine shows" and blackface / minstrels on Dr John:

So-called Indian medicine was presented in increasingly elaborate revue shows including brass bands, vaudeville acts, folkloric tableaux of supposedly authentic Indian life and even, covering all bases, impersonations of supposedly authentic Hindu priests. In a pre-echo of certain cinema Westerns, in which predominantly Navajo actors would speak in their own language and seize that opportunity to direct obscene insults at the Great White Star, pitchmen like Nevada Ned and Texas Charlie would “translate” stirring speeches by one of the indigenous Indian participants, not having the first idea of what he was saying. The products on offer might include Dr. Morse’s Indian Root Pills, Rattlesnake Oil, White Beaver’s Cough Cream, Kickapoo Indian Worm Killer, Sagwa and the cure-all Ka-Ton-Ka, the latter said to be concocted in the woods by Indians of the Umatilla Reservation, Oregon, in fact manufactured by a drug firm in Pennsylvania.
 

sus

Moderator
In The Flame Alphabet, language has become literally poisonous: the carrier, it is suggested, of a primal allergen. It starts with children: their voices, their statements, make their parents sicken horribly, distressingly, and ultimately fatally. (One of the creepiest symptoms is the way people's faces become smaller.) Marcus has, then, taken the avant garde preoccupations of his earlier work and deftly transferred them obliquely to the form of the dystopic sci-fi novel.

Only it's not quite that simple. There are other strands at work, one being Jewishness. The Jews in this book listen to sermons delivered from an underground network: beneath huts erected in woods or other secret places, singly, or in pairs, they hear a rabbi deliver an intentionally incomprehensible sermon through a "Jew hole". "Since the entire alphabet comprises God's name, [Rabbi] Burke asserted, since it is written in every arrangement of letters, then all words reference God, do they not? … Therefore the language itself was, by definition, off-limits. Every single word of it. We were best to be done with it. Our time with it is nearly through.
 
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