Happy Purim!

Tomorrow evening is the holiday of Purim, a minor holiday on the Hebrew calendar, often described as the Jewish mardi gras. I wrote about it in a previous post, My Purim Spiel, so you can read more about it there, if you care to.

In that previous post, I also mentioned how one of the traditional ways of celebrating Purim is to put on a Purim spiel, a play based on the biblical Book of Esther, which in turn is the basis of the Purim holiday. Purim spiels usually are humorous, loose adaptations that might include parodies of popular songs, movies, TV, Broadway shows, etc.

And in that previous post, I mentioned that I had written a Purim spiel, my first, which was performed last year at Congregation Adas Emuno in Leonia. The title of the spiel is The Schnook of Esther, and we have since made it available to read online. You can click on the link to see a PDF of the spiel. (There's also a note about how anyone wishing to perform the play can do so, all we ask for is a donation to the Adas Emuno Social Action Fund. Most congregations purchase their spiels in this way, although usually without the opportunity to read them first.)

So, in celebration of Purim, you can read the spiel, and also read along with the admittedly amateurish performance we put on last year, twice, actually. The first version was also included in my previous post, but I'll include it here as well:





And here's the second version:





And just in case you're in the neighborhood, you can stop by Congregation Adas Emuno in Leonia to see my new spiel, Shalom Shushan, performed tomorrow night, Wednesday, March 23rd. Here's a link with all the info: Purim Time! And I hope to share the new spiel here on Blog Time Passing before too long. Until then, Happy Purim!

My Purim Spiel

So, in case you're not familiar with it, Purim is a minor Jewish holiday based on the biblical Book of Esther. It's sometimes compared to Halloween, because one of the traditions is that kids (of any age) dress up in costume for it. Nowadays they dress up in any kind of costume, but originally it was only as characters from the Book of Esther, i.e., Ahashverosh, the king of Persia and Medea, living in the citadel of Shushan; Vashti, his disobedient queen who he banishes; Haman, the villain of the story who, as the king's prime minister, plots to kill all the Jews; Mordecai, the Jewish hero of the story, and cousin or uncle (the original is unclear) of Esther; and Esther, the heroine who becomes the new queen and risks her life to save her people.

Rather than Halloween, however, Purim is best understood as a Jewish Mardi Gras, falling during that same time of year, early spring or the end of winter, and involving rites of reversal (and for adults, depending on the context, getting drunk as well). As for the historical accuracy of the Book of Esther, well, it comes across as a bit of a joke or satire, and some point to the fact that the name Esther appears to be derived from Ishtar, and Mordecai from Marduk, two Babylonian deities, while Haman is the name of a Babylonian demon.

Be that as it may, the tradition is that on Purim, the Book of Esther is read in its original Hebrew, from a scroll:

By the way, the reason why the books of the bible are called books and not chapters is for this very reason. Originally, they were all separate scrolls, the first type of book, and they retained that designation even after they were bound together to form a single volume (the same is true of the ancient Greek and Roman texts).

The Book of Esther is also known as the Megillah, a term that can also be applied to the books of Ruth, Song of Songs, Lamentations, and Ecclesiastes. But most only associate it with the Book of Esther. And because it is read out loud on Purim, and because it takes a long time to read the whole thing, megillah also became a Yiddish word for any kind of story or speech that seems to go on forever, for anything that goes on for too long, or otherwise is perceived as boring.

There's also the expression, the whole megillah, which has the connotation of too much, too much. And who can forget the Hanna-Barbera cartoon character from the 60s?

Of course, Magilla Gorilla had nothing to do with the Megillah, the story of Esther, or the holiday of Purim, and there wasn't even any reference to the Yiddish usage in the children's TV program, but there was no question as to the origin of the character's name. And the silliness of the cartoon was very much in keeping with the topsy-turvy theme of the holiday itself.



During the reading of the Megillah, the tradition is that whenever the name of the evil villain Haman is mentioned, the kids (of all ages) shake noisemakers, called groggers, maybe also stomp their feet, and yell "boo!" loudly, the idea being to drown out his name. Sometimes, the names of Mordecai and Esther are greeted with cheers as well.

There's also a tradition going back some centuries of putting on some kind of play or show during Purim, the Yiddish name for it being a Purim spiel, or alternately a Purimshpil (Yiddish is a German dialect, but is written with Hebrew letters, hence the alternative transliterations). It could be a puppet show or a dramatization of the Book of Esther, but in contemporary times it tends to be some kind of comedy, satire or parody, reinterpreting the story of the Purim in different ways, especially in ways that modern audiences can appreciate. And this often includes song parodies as well.

So, all this is background to the main reason for my blog post. You see, the synagogue that I belong to, and serve as president of, Congregation Adas Emuno in Leonia (Bergen County), New Jersey, puts on a Purim spiel every year. And for as long as I can remember, this involves purchasing a script from someone (the purchase price going towards some charity). And I have to say that I was not terribly impressed with the quality of what we had been getting, and for a long time have been saying to myself, I can do better than that.

So last year, I sat down and wrote a Purim spiel, which I called, The Schnook of Esther, and it was performed this past March in celebration of the holiday of Purim. In fact, it was performed twice, on Sunday morning March 1st, for our religious school, and then on Wednesday evening, March 4th. And I also played a couple of minor roles in it.

So let's be clear, this isn't Shakespeare. It isn't Seinfeld. It's not Monty Python or Firesign Theatre. It's just a bit of fun. And I did try my hand at writing some comedy skits back in the 80s, although nothing ever came of it. Oh, and I do have one very small TV screenplay credit, an episode of the animated science fiction series, Galaxy Rangers (episode 8, "Ghost Station"). So I'm not entirely a novice at this sort of thing. Just saying.

Anyway, in this post I want to share the first performance of "The Schnook of Esther" on March 1st (its world premiere, ha ha), as it was recorded for posterity. Some notes first, so please bear with me. 

First, there isn't much of a stage to work with, and not much time to rehearse, so you'll see that everyone's reading, script in hand. The songs are mostly done karaoke style, and some of them get messed up a little bit. Not that I'm complaining, just that it isn't always exactly what I wrote. There was also an attempt to get the religious school choir kids involved, which didn't work out so well, and wasn't repeated in the second performance. And as for my theatrical performance, well, I look pretty silly in this, almost embarrassed to show it to you, but then again, that is the spirit of the spiel. And the musical performances of a couple of our congregation's teenagers are absolutely wonderful, and worth the price of admission (the admission that I can't act or sing very well myself, that is).

Anyway, you can watch The Schnook of Esther (A Purim Spiel) Adas Emuno March 1, 2015 over on the Adas Emuno YouTube channel if you like, or catch it right now over here:





Now, if you belong to a congregation that puts on an annual Purim spiel, and you are interested in doing "The Schnook of Esther" next year, just let me know or email adasemuno at gmail.com, and we can provide you with a copy of the script in exchange for a donation for the Adas Emuno Social Action Fund. Otherwise, I hope you enjoyed the show, for what it's worth, and I'll share a recording of the second performance another time. And maybe even a new spiel next year...

Firesign's Electrician

So, it's time to get back to Firesign Theatre, and their first album, Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him, released in 1968. As I noted in my previous posts (Waiting for the Firesigns, Sending Up the 60s, and The Enola McLuhan), side 1 of the album consisted of 3 separate, short (in comparison to most of their releases) pieces. Side 2, on the other hand, is made up of one extended radioplay, the title track, "Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him," clocked in at 17 minutes and 48 seconds. 

This piece is more like the surrealistic journeys that characterize the albums that follow, although it lacks the same amount of textured sound and sense of soundscape as can be found on their second album, How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere At All (see my previous posts, A Nick in Time for Firesign and Of Flip Sides and Firesigns).

"Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him" is framed by a play on instructional record albums, specifically language learning records, a wonderful bit of self-reflexive satire. That the language is Turkish, which then places the subsequent action in Turkey, retrieves the old, radio days/mid-20th century sense of the former center of the Ottoman Empire as an exotic and dangerous place, as well as a crossroads of the world. References to narratives based on the old British Empire and more contemporary (circa 1968) Cold War espionage are also present.

There's also a bit of play with radio eyewitness reporting. And the game show parody, Beat The Reaper, is one of their most memorable segments, generally considered among their best work. But it fits together as part of a larger whole, as you can see, er, hear, here:






The Wikipedia entry on this album refers to this piece as "a Kafkaesque fantasy of paranoia" and there clearly is an influence from The Castle and The Trial in this recording. But I would also point to Hitchcock movies in which an innocent becomes accidentally sucked into a world of intrigue and conflict, such as North by Northwest, and The 39 Steps. 
 
"Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him" employs an acoustic and dramatic variation of stream of consciousness, and an almost Freudian form of free association in humorous form, a real dive into a collectivist unconscious. Following the topsy-turvy logic that their comedy is based on, I guess you could say that their first album was worth the wait.

The Enola McLuhan

Let me start this off by saying that I think it's only natural to look at the world you're living in when you're growing up, and expect to enter that very same world and take your place in it when you finally are an adult. And there undoubtedly is a resulting sense of disappointment that is universal to the human condition, because the adults that we looked up to as children will have almost certainly revealed their flaws and weaknesses, their essential humanity, as we grow up. And more importantly, as there is no way to arrest the passing of time, those adults will have inevitably aged, sooner or later growing weaker, less capable, less healthy, and will ultimately pass on.

No matter what, we cannot enter the world of our childhood as adults, not unless someone invents a time machine of course (something I believe to be impossible, but that's another story). But in traditional societies, there is at least the comfort of entering a world that is more or less the same as the one you grew up in, with the roles essentially the same, just new actors taking filling in for the older ones. The rules don't change, nor does the environment for the most part. With the exception, I hasten to add, of catastrophic events, like natural disasters, epidemics, famine, and of course war.

Another catastrophic occurrence, albeit one that has come with a multitude of benefits, has been the revolutionary changes brought about by technological innovation over the past few centuries, social, cultural, psychological, political and economic changes, and biological, chemical, and physical change as well. The phrase future shock, coined by Neil Postman and made famous by Alvin Toffler, refers to the accelerated pace of change that we live with, in which the future is now, and the world of tomorrow is radically different from the world of today.

The point I would stress here is that the worlds that we moderns enter into as adults bear little resemblance to the worlds in which we grew up. I remember full well watching the 60s unfold as a child, mostly seeing it play out on TV, and finally going away to college in August of 1974, and upon arriving, wondering, where are all the hippies? Where are all the cool counterculture types I had heard about and watched and expected to become a part of?

They were gone, of course. Not entirely, but mutated into freaks (that was the 70s term that we used), similar but not the same. The point being that things had changed drastically over the course of just a few years. So the idea that the hippies would still be around for another entire generation was entirely unfounded. But back in the 60s, there was quite a bit of speculation about what would happen if the counterculture ever took control of the culture, if it ever became the mainstream culture, if the hippies ever took charge, and ultimately, what would happen when they became adults and moved into the leadership roles occupied by the generations that had lived through the Great Depression, World War II, and the Korean War?

One example of this sort of speculation was the 1968 film, Wild in the Streets, directed by Barry Shear, based on the 60s baby boomer slogan, Don't Trust Anyone Over 30! The film posits a scenario in which a young radical turned rock star gains voting rights for 14-year-olds, and is elected to the House of Representatives, and ultimately becomes President of the United States. He doesn't exactly play fair in his rise to power, and once in charge, establishes a kind of police state where all the members of the older generation are moved into retirement homes and forced to take LSD.






I know, I know, it's hilarious, isn't it? A cautionary tale, the real message being, don't trust anyone under 30. Hey, they didn't call it the generation gap for nothin'! 

And then there were the stories that predicted that the children of the hippies would rebel against their parents and reject their values and way of life, just as the youthful baby boomer had rejected the values and way of life of their parents. This revenge scenario, in some ways reminiscent of the universal argument that parents give their children, just wait until you have children of your own, then you'll see, was amplified and intensified to an extreme by the severity of the generation gap between boomers and their parents. 

Stanley Kubrick's 1971 film, A Clockwork Orange, is best understood as incorporating just this sort of extrapolation into the future. It is often not recognized as a science fiction film, even though it posits a dystopian future, and highlights the introduction of a major new technology, the Ludovico technique, an advancement in behavior modification, based on aversion therapy. This takes what was in the 60s a relatively new idea that criminal behavior is a mental illness that needs to be treated, the goal being rehabilitation, rather than a moral failing that needs to be punished, and pushes it to its extreme. 








Politically, the future dystopia is based on the liberal to socialist principles ascendant in the 60s, albeit with roots that go back to the New Deal era, with an expanded welfare state, housing projects, and permissive parenting. And whereas the counterculture youth preached peace and love, their children rejected the idea of flower power, as it was known, and that fictional rejection in some ways anticipates the advent of punk rock in the mid to late 70s. But beyond rejection, the children of the future embraced violence of every variety, to the extremes of rape and murder.

Moreover, the hippies emphasized the consciousness-expanding potential of hallucinogenic drugs, notably LSD, but also peyote and its derivative, mescaline, as well as the mild, mellowing quality of marijuana, while some got hooked on the comfortably numbing opiate, heroin. Drug use in general was condoned, but stimulants were generally used either to balance out the effects of depressants, including barbiturates and alcohol (drinking and popping pills was an activity they shared with their parents, albeit engaged in without parental or legal permission), or in the service of consciousness expansion, for example in the form of the psychedelic drug, STP. In A Clockwork Orange, their children favored stimulants, not for their mind-altering qualities, but to enhance their ability to engage in violence and sex. And they ingested them in the form of milk plus, milk being exactly the kind of wholesome, mainstream beverage rejected by the hippies.

The counterculture style was all about color, the psychedelic and the florescent and dayglo, paisley prints and the rainbow (an emblem adopted by Apple Computer, silicon valley being largely a Californian off-shoot of the counterculture, and in politics first by Jesse Jackson in the form of the Rainbow Coalition, an extension of the 60s Civil Rights movement, and later by supporters of gay rights, marriage equality, and the LGBT community generally). In Kubrick's film, their children dressed in colorless white, and black, a stark rejection of the psychedelic style (again, anticipating in some ways the punk style of the 70s).

The rejection of the baby boomers by their parents extended to their music . You might say that the call to arms of rock music was, roll over Beethoven, while in this narrative, their children, or at least the main character, Alex, preferred classical music, and Beethoven above all. 

I should note that the film is an adaptation of the 1962 novel, A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess, which of course predates the hippies, but not the counterculture itself, which had not fully flowered but was certainly firmly rooted by then. And in the United Kingdom, Burgess being an English writer, the Social Democrats had dominated the political scene since the end of the Second World War.

 And if you've never read the novel, I highly recommend it, if for no other reason than for its highly sophisticated emphasis on language. Burgess was a linguist, putting him in the same class as J.R.R. Tolkien, and much like George Orwell, he included a fictional future language based on English, in this case called Nadsat. In large part, Nadsat consists of words borrowed from Russian, such as droog, meaning close friend, devotchka, meaning girl, and Bog, meaning God. In some instances the Russian words are adapted into more familiar English ones, such as khorosho, which means good, turned into horrorshow, and golova, meaning head, turned into Gulliver. And according to the Wikipedia entry on
Nadsat, the name of this argot comes from the Russian suffix that is the equivalent of the English suffix -teen, implying that it is the speech of the fictional future's youth. Presumably, the use of Russian is a reflection of an increased acceptance and influence of the Soviet Union, in conjunction with the strong left wing political tilt of the dystopia imagined by Burgess.

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I remember reading the novel as a teen, and seeing the film when I was in college, and I just have to note the difference between narratives like this one, and the present day penchant for young adult fiction with simplistic dystopian scenarios.

There's also a bit of the revenge scenario in the character of Alex Keaton, the role that first brought Michael J. Fox into national prominence, on the 80s TV sitcom, Family Ties. Alex's parents were former hippies who remained very much in the liberal, progressive camp, while their son turned out to be, much to their surprise, a young Republican, a conservative, and a Reagan supporter.

But putting all that aside, this has turned out to be a rather long preamble to the main point of this post, which is to continue my series on Firesign Theatre, and most recently on their first album, Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him. As I've mentioned before, the album was released in 1968, making it a product of the 60s, a product of the counterculture, its humor satirizing both the mainstream culture of the 60s, and the counterculture itself. This is apparent in the first two tracks on side 1 of the album, the focus of my previous posts, Waiting for the Firesigns, and especially Sending Up the 60s.

The third and final track on side 1 could be grouped in the same genre as Wild in the Streets and A Clockwork Orange, as a future scenario based on the present, circa 1968,
extrapolating what things would be like if and when the youth took over, the hippies were in charge, and the counterculture became the culture. And while there is a hint of dystopia in this satire, for the most part it's a comedic celebration. 

The title of the track, "Le Trente-Huit Cunegonde," is a bit mysterious. Cunégonde is a character from Voltaire's philosophical novel, Candide, itself a satire, and perhaps suggests a warning against the optimistic if not utopian sensibility of the counterculture, that the best of all possible worlds as imagined by the hippies might not be the perfection they would have believed it could be. I'm just speculating here, of course, and I have no idea what the reference to 38 in the title (trente-huit) refers to. But it really doesn't matter, as it has not bearing on the piece itself, which is almost 7 1/2 minutes long (one of their shorter bits, like the first two on side 1).





I find it interesting to recall that during the 60s, concern about police brutality was not simply or even mainly a race issue, and that cops were often referred to as pigs by members of the counterculture. The idea of a hippy police force may seem like an oxymoron, but there is a sense in which reform movements, when successful, turn their radicalism into a new orthodoxy.

The roots of 60s counterculture can be found, in part, in the Beat Generation of the 50s, writers and poets who began their careers in the 40s, and rose to prominence during the postwar era. Also known as beatniks, they had a major influence on and were greatly admired by the hippies. Prominent among them was the poet Allen Ginsberg, perhaps best known for his poem "Howl" published in 1955, which begins with the line, "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked..." When the woman at the beginning of the sketch asks the cops if they want to hear her rap, back in the 60s the term just meant talk, with the specific connotation of speaking in a sincere and truthful manner, a heart-to-heart. So when she starts to recite "Howl" she is actually not rapping as it was understood back then, plus while she uses Ginsberg's poem to try to demonstrate her hippy credentials, her choice also reflects the fact that she's an old-timer in this brave new groovy world, and therefore not with it, much like her faded body paint.

Dr. Benway is a reference to a fictional character created by another beat writer, William S. Burroughs, who was, among other things, a student of Alfred Korzybski and general semantics. And of course it's 8 million copies of the best known novel by Burroughs, Naked Lunch, that the hippy air force drops on the last stronghold of unhip resistance.


And the name of the plane they drop the literature from? Why, it's the Enola McLuhan, bet you were wondering what the title of this post had to do with all this, weren't you? The Enola reference is of course to the Enola Gay, the name of the aircraft used to drop the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. And not to make light of that horror, but it could be said that McLuhan's impact on the intellectual and artistic scene of the 60s was quite the detonation, in and of itself.

It's quite fitting that the Enola McLuhan drops books rather than bombs, and on a third world nation with low literacy rates, as McLuhan had argued that the social and psychological impact of the introduction of writing, the alphabet, and printing has been explosive, and militant in its own right. The medium is the munition! Indeed, arguably, the homogenizing effects of the alphabet and print far outstrips the flattening impact of the bomb.

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As I've suggested in my previous posts about Firesign Theatre (A Nick in Time for Firesign, Of Flip Sides and Firesigns, Waiting for the Firesigns, and Sending Up the 60s), their approach to sound recording has produced a form of comedy that has been compared to music, and that is based on the creation of a soundscape or sonic environment, along the lines of what McLuhan referred to as acoustic space (aka auditory space). The repetition in this particular radioplay of the 60s slang word groovy, by the way, also invokes an acoustic metaphor, as groovy is derived from grooves, which is how music is recorded onto vinyl and earlier recording media such as wax cylinders. So, back in the 60s, you might also say, dig those grooves, man, to refer to a musical recording that you like, and more generally to being in the groove, for settling into a routine in a positive sense (as opposed to being in a rut), for getting into something in depth, having a very positive experience, getting into the zone, etc.

There is also some play with media in this bit, involving telephone and television. But it is the direct reference to McLuhan that, for me, confirms the fact that Firesign Theatre represents a great example of media ecology praxis.

Now all that's missing is a breakfast cereal called Granola McLuhan!

The Medium is the Muesli

Well, I guess this all goes to show I'm probably better off living in this world, rather than the world I thought I'd live in when I was growing up, even if this world is not the best of all possible worlds. Not that I have any choice in the matter, or in the fact that, when it comes to media and technological innovation, it's bombs away, over and over again!

Sending Up the 60s

So, to pick up where I left off on last week's post, Waiting for the Firesigns, which featured the first of three separate tracks that originally appeared on side 1 of the comedy recording group Firesign Theatre's first album, Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him, the second track on side 1 is called "W. C. Fields Forever" for reasons that are less than apparent.

Of course, W. C. Fields was a 20th century comedy icon whose career path took him from vaudeville to Broadway to Hollywood. Here's a scene where he's playing the part of a con man turned sheriff/bartender from the 1940 film, My Little Chickadee:





And of course, "...Fields Forever" is an allusion to The Beatles' song, "Strawberry Fields Forever," originally released in 1967, a song that many would argue defined psychedelic rock (at least that's what it says on the song's Wikipedia entry):





So, put them both together and you get "The 'Lazy O' Magic Circle Dues Ranch and Collective Love Farm," which is where "W. C. Fields Forever" takes place. It all fits together in that California was very much a part of the wild west, the western genre was enormously popular through the 60s so it was a big part of the Hollywood film industry, the Hippy movement at the heart of 60s counterculture was centered in San Francisco, and of course Firesign Theatre was a Californian quartet. 

This track, then, merges various aspects of California counterculture with western generic formulas and conventions (which also were used in the first track), as the Firesigns make fun of Hippy communes, health food, yoga, Eastern mysticism and spirituality, the whole guru thing that The Beatles got into for a while (while also incorporating direct quotation of Beatles lyrics, a practice continued in the Nick Danger radioplay on their second album), and provide the answer to the question Elvis Costello would later pose, what's so funny about peace, love and understanding?

And, as you would expect, there's also a good number of references to psychedelic drug culture in this bit, with the commune being led by a character clearly based on Timothy Leary, counter culture leader and former Harvard psychology professor, who was the Johnny Appleseed of tripping via LSD (Leary claimed that his famous slogan, Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out, was given to him by Marshall McLuhan, a claim that McLuhan denied). The character's name is Tiny Doctor Tim, and in case you think this all very obvious, you are probably of a certain age, so understand that when I mention Timothy Leary in my undergraduate new media classes (in the 90s he became a big booster for virtual reality), no one knows who he was.

"W. C. Fields Forever" clocks in at a little over 7 1/2 minutes, so it stands as one of the shorter examples of Firesign Theatre's soundscapes, this one with less of a sense of acoustic space than some of their other pieces, and also less of a coherent radioplay, much more episodic, but certainly an example of how they were able to take the then relatively new innovations of sterophonic sound and multitrack recording on magnetic tape, and the "fun with audio" genre (at least that's what I call all of the 60s recordings that were all about playing with sound) to an entirely new level. It's not their best work, but still worth a listen. And so, away we go...







"W. C. Fields Forever" stands as a send up of the 60s and also a product of the 60s, the album it appears on, Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him, having been released in 1968. It's a product of its times, the humor is in many ways topical, and by the time I first listened to the album as a college student in the mid-70s, I didn't get all of the references and jokes. But it didn't matter then, or now (although I think I do get all or most of it at this point), because Firesign Theatre's form transcends their content. As I've noted previously, their recordings are more like music, rather than like simple stand-up routines or straightforward comedy acts. But if you like the 60s or are curious about the counterculture, this track is a great way to get a feel for it all.

Waiting for the Firesigns

So, the recent passing of Phil Austin, one of the four members of Firesign Theatre, prompted me to write a couple of blog posts featuring their second, and most popular album. Just on the off chance that you missed those posts, or are in need of a review, the first was A Nick in Time for Firesign, and the second was Of Flip Sides and Firesigns.

Well, now I'd like to turn to their first album, Waiting for the Electrician of Someone Like Him, released in 1968. Like side 2 of their second album, How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere At All, which features "The Further Adventures of Nick Danger," side 1 of Waiting for the Electrician of Someone Like Him includes some of their more accessible, mainstream material, relatively speaking.

In fact, side 1 consists of 3 short pieces, again relatively speaking, as opposed to "The Further Adventures of Nick Danger," which takes up an entire side of the album, and as opposed to side 1 of How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere At All, which, while listed as several separate pieces, is really one long journey through an insane, hallucinogenic landscape, and mediascape.

So, let's start with the first track of side 1, which is given the name, "Temporarily Humboldt County" for reasons I could not fathom. A quick hop over to the wikipedia entry for the album, however, reveals that, "the group had been told by friends in Humboldt County, California, that the local Indians added 'Temporarily' to the county's name as a way of saying no one could really own the land."

"Temporarily Humboldt County" is a parody of narratives that tell the story of the discovery of the New World, colonization, westward expansion, and our treatment of Native Americans. It's just over 9 minutes long, so here, take a listen:






As I recall, some time ago I was speaking to someone who was teaching a class on audio production, and he used this particular track as an example of what can be done with an acoustic medium and a radioplay format. No doubt, he also used it because it is relatively straightforward as a narrative.

Clearly, this recording also reflects the understanding, still not all that widely held in the 60s, about how Europeans treated the "Indians" (as they are are still officially referred to by the US government), and satirizes not only mainstream, but also the counterculture mythologies. Coming out of California, the Firesigns would have been much more attuned to both the stories of the wild west, and of the Spanish conquest, than us northeasterners.

Waiting seems to be a theme here, whether it's for the electrician referred to by the album title, or someone like him, or the "true white brother" the Indians are waiting for in "Temporarily Humboldt County" (and disappointed to discover it wasn't us). 

Perhaps the connection can be traced back to Waiting for Godot? Certainly, Firesign Theatre can be seen as heir to playwright Samuel Beckett's absurdism, creating sonic environments that place the listener at the center of the play, immersed in the action, spatially rather than sequentially in medias res. Orson Welles referred to radioplays as theater on the air, and the Firesigns also are part of that lineage, creating an acoustic theater of the absurd.

Waiting... what a concept! As much as we live in a temporal environment measured by nanoseconds, even picoseconds, as much as we eschew delayed gratification, as much as we want everything to be available on demand, it seems that waiting is as much a part of our lives as ever, and in some ways, due in large part to all of our technological innovations, more so than ever. It's like sports journalist Tim McCarver used to say when he was calling the New York Mets baseball games, nothing slows the game down more than speed.

Of Flip Sides and Firesigns

So, in my previous post, A Nick in Time for Firesign, I wrote about the significance of the passing of Phil Austin, the second of the four members of Firesign Theatre that we have lost over the past few years. And I wrote about Austin's most memorable character, Nick Danger, and included the audio recording of "The Further Adventures of Nick Danger," which appeared on the second record album Firesign Theatre released, back in 1969.

I want to follow up on that post now, and note again that the Firesign Theatre produced comedy audio recordings that were entirely unique, not recordings of stand up routines like most other albums in that category, nor recordings of film and television soundtracks, a la most Monty Python albums. No, what they did, drawing on a background in radio, was to produce spoken word comedy that was multilayered, complex, and comparable to music.

Paul Heyer, drawing on Marshall McLuhan, has written about Orson Welles, and makes references to his media sense, the fact that Welles understood the nature of the particular medium he was working with, and utilized its biases to full effect, whether it was film (e.g., Citizen Kane, generally considered the greatest film ever made), or live theater, or radio, notably the notorious 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast. And media sense is as good a way to characterize the Firesigns as any. They understood the concept of acoustic space, and were able to produce elaborate soundscapes that were so much more than simulating the experience of listening to performers up on a stage.

So, now, in that previous post, I explained that "The Further Adventures of Nick Danger" was one of their most accessible recordings, as well as their most popular overall, which makes it a great way to introduce the group to anyone not familiar with them. And I explained that "The Further Adventures of Nick Danger" took up all of side 2 of their second album, How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere At All, and that there were a couple of references to the other side of the album.

Okay, so now, let's get to side 1 of the album, shall we? If you want to just go ahead and listen to it, here it is, right after the next paragraph. Actually this is the complete album, so once the first side concludes, the second side plays. And that does make it easy to connect the reference in "The Further Adventures of Nick Danger" to the segment it specifically refers to on side 1. 

When I reviewed this clip, I noticed it was interrupted by commercials, something new on YouTube, and even less desirable than the other forms of advertising that can be tagged onto videos. The ads show up as yellow bands on the timeline at the bottom of the video, where the red area represents the portion of the video that you have passed and the gray what is yet to come. You can move the marker up and down to access different points on the video, and I found that if I go through the commercials one time, and then go back, the video plays straight through a second time. Since the interruptions ruin the effect of the recording, I recommend moving the marker to each of the ads ahead of time, so that once you've paid the piper, you can listen to the album uninterrupted, the way it was meant to be.







So, now, as I noted in my last post, "The Further Adventures of Nick Danger" is more mainstream, in being a single radioplay parody of an episode from an old time adventure series. The other side is more surreal, and also a better example of how their recordings are like music. It's divided into 6 or 7 tracks (depending on whether you go by the original record album or CD reissue), but the tracks are a fiction, not really being separated from one another. Instead, the side forms one long, hallucinogenic, well, trip I guess you could say. But for what it's worth, I looked up the Wikipedia entry on the album, and here's the track listings they had:

Side one

"How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere at All" – 28:27:

"Drink to Me Only with Thine Fox" (Mr. Catherwood and Ensemble) [CD retitle: "The Ralph Spoilsport Mantrum"] – 4:21

"The Policemen's Brawl" (Officers Bradshaw and Henderson) [CD retitle: "Zeno's Evil"] – 4:34

"Yankee Doodle Came to Terms" (All Fecal People's Chorus) [CD retitle: "The Land of the Pharaohs"] – 2:47

"Über Dubbing Over Alice" ('Arry 'N' Friends) [CD Track retitle: "VACANCY-NO VACANCY"] – 1:34

"You Ain't Got No Friends on the Left" (Babe and the Unknown Soldiers) [CD retitle: "The Lonesome American Choo-Choo Don' Wan' Stop Here Any Mo'"] – 7:34

""We're Bringing the War Back Home!" From Babes in Khaki" (Lilly Lamont*) (*Miss Lamont Courtesy of Paranoid Pictures) – 7:31 [split into 2 tracks on the CD, track titles below]:

"Babes in Khaki" – 3:53

"TV or Not TV" – 3:38

(This side of the vinyl LP was not divided into separate tracks, but the liner notes list the above titles and tracks.)


Side two

The Further Adventures of Nick Danger – 28:11

"From the Archives of the Original Firesign Theatre Radio Hour. As First Broadcast December 6, 1941. Rebroadcast Courtesy of Loostners Bros. Soap Co."

So, the album begins with a parody of a radio ad for a car dealer (the Firesigns started out doing radio in Los Angeles, after all), then slips into a customer being shown a car, buying it, and driving off. If you are new to this sort of listening experience, you have to be a little patient with it, because the next sequence is the one I would especially point to as a brilliant example of creating a sense of acoustic space, as the Firesigns generate the feel of driving down a highway via talk alone, by giving voice to the signs you would see as you pass them by. There is also a wonderful little bit involving Zeno's Paradox included in this segment. They then move into a bit of an Alice in Wonderland sequence that winds up taking us to the "Land of the Pharaohs," and a hotel, where we get a sequence involving patriotic song and a parody of American history straight out of the 50s. That brings us into a parody of an old war movie, set during the Second World War, which then turns out to be broadcast on television, so there's a bit of channel flipping, and a return to the car dealer commercial that somehow slips into the finale of James Joyce's Ulysses!

How's that for a recap? It is truly difficult to do the recording justice with any kind of summary, but I hope this helps to get a sense of it all across to you, if you have not listened to it yet. 

The first side actually does have a reference to side 2, towards the end, when the channel flipping briefly lands on some kind of crime drama, and a couple of guys are talking about how they hate cops, and one of them says he's going to get even with them, the punchline being that he's going to do so by turning in his badge. And the character saying that is named Nick, presumably the same Nick Danger who is the hero on side 2, before he became a private detective. So the album has self-reflexive moments where it acknowledges that it is an album on both side 1 and side 2.

And one last point. Again, in my previous post, I provided a bit of explanation about the significance of record albums having two sides, and I want to emphasize the importance of the concept of the side. I remember it being said that iTunes in some sense retrieved the single, which in the early days of rock and roll from the late 50s to the mid 60s was the format emphasized in popular music. But singles were not purchased as individual songs, but as little 45 rpm records, and you may be buying it for the song on the A side, but it also came with another song on the B side. And that was not the same thing as downloading one isolated song. B sides often held unexpected surprises, and delights. They were listened to.

Anyway, when the emphasis shifted to record albums, sometimes we'd just play one track on the album, but often we'd put the album on and let it play through. But that meant play through the one side. It was quite common to play a side, then rather than flip it over to the other, switch the record to another album, and just play one side from that record. That was how we experienced recordings. The fundamental unit was the side, not the song, and not the album. With CDs, the side as a unit disappeared, except as a notation in track listings.

And I want to point out that sides really were a good unit to use. A side was usually at least 15 minutes, and less than 30 minutes. As a unit of time, it felt just right. So while it was perfectly fine to listen to both sides of an album, a recording like How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere At All would often be heard as isolated sides. And if you were going to listen to the whole album at one sitting, you would have to get up after side 1 was over, and flip the album over to listen to side 2. You could not help but be aware of the side as a unit.









So, the side as a unit is something that has been lost, for all intents and purposes, with the transition from vinyl records to CDs and MP3s. And so has the idea of flipping the record, and with it, of flipping for the recording (or something or someone else), flipping out over the recording (or something or someone else), and of course, see ya on the flip side, flippity flip, and so, my friend flipper, over and out!

Penning Our Stories

My most recent op-ed in the Jewish Standard  was published on May 29th, and entitled Penning Our Stories. And as is the custom here on Blog Time Passing, you can click on the old link to read it over there, or stick around and read it here:

“The last time I got a fountain pen was for my bar mitzvah.”

That line was uttered during the two-part season finale of the ABC television network’s popular series Once Upon a Time, which aired on May 10. It was a little inside joke inserted by series creators Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz, who co-wrote the episode; both of them may well have received fountain pens as gifts for their own bar mitzvahs. There was a time when a fancy fountain pen was as commonplace a gift as savings bonds for bar mitzvah boys, so much so that an often repeated bar mitzvah joke was, “Today I am a fountain pen.” (This was a play on the cliché declaration “Today I am a man,” this being a time before the bat mitzvah was fully instituted as an egalitarian religious practice.) Michael Hilton, in his book Bar Mitzvah: A History, reports that “in July 1946, Barry Vine of New Haven Connecticut, received sixteen fountain pens as gifts”! Now that’s the write stuff!

Fischler as Jimmy Barrett

Once Upon a Time’s bar mitzvah boy was played by the actor Patrick Fischler, who perhaps is best known for his role as the Jewish comedian Jimmy Barrett on the recently concluded AMC series Mad Men, and who also appeared on the series Lost, a series that Kitsis and Horowitz previously had worked on as writers. Fischler’s character was introduced in March, during the final story arc of the series’ fourth season, first through references to a mysterious “Author” whose writings set the course of the series’ storybook characters, such as Snow White, Prince Charming, Rumpelstiltskin, Captain Hook, Robin Hood, Maleficent, and Regina (aka the Evil Queen, Snow White’s nemesis); as “The Author” he also had the power to rewrite their stories, and change their fate.

Fischler as Phil from Lost

By the end of the season, we learned that the “Author” is a title and status that has been bestowed upon many different people, that this particular Author is named Isaac, that his last name is Heller (possibly a tribute to Jewish novelist Joseph Heller of Catch-22 fame), that he was from Brooklyn, and that back in 1966 he was a novelist who was having great difficulty getting anything published, working to support himself selling television sets, a job at which he was also unsuccessful. Selected to become the next in a long line of magical authors, he is asked to select a pen to use, prompting his remark about his bar mitzvah. Although that comment was the only instance in which the character was directly identified as Jewish, his name, voice, place of birth, look, and manner all allude to his ethnicity, and presumably his religion.

Part of the humor of the bar mitzvah comment comes from the incongruity of inserting a bit of Yiddishkeit into a series that remixes characters from Disney’s animated films, most of whom are derived from European fairytales and folklore. (Disney owns Once Upon a Time’s television network, ABC.) After all, even during the two decades that Michael Eisner was CEO of the Walt Disney Company, the film studio added no characters to its pantheon like Fievel Mousekewitz of Stephen Spielberg’s An American Tail. And we certainly don’t expect to see anyone named Cohen or Levy in Cinderella, Peter Pan, Beauty and the Beast, or Frozen.

Fischler as "The Author"

There is, however, a long tradition of inserting inside jokes that only Jews could appreciate fully into Hollywood films. My all-time favorite is in the 1936 Marx Brother movie Animal Crackers, when the cast sings, “Hooray for Captain Spaulding, the African explorer,” and Groucho responds, “Did someone call me schnorrer?” I also love the subtle jab in the 1930 science fiction musical Just Imagine, in which characters from the future explain that people drive planes instead of cars, planes with names like Rosenblatt, Pinkus, and Goldfarb. In response, the distinctly Jewish character from 1930 remarks (in reference to the automaker’s anti-Semitism), “It looks like someone got even with Henry Ford!”

No doubt there also was a degree of identification between Kitsis and Horowitz, as the creators of Once Upon a Time, and their character, Isaac Heller, as “The Author” of the storybook tales that seal the fate of the series’ heroes and villains. And perhaps making Heller a villain involved a bit of self-deprecating humor. Certainly, it was ironic that Isaac’s status as “The Author” is revoked for changing the heroes’ and villains’ stories. That is exactly what Kitsis and Horowitz have done in the series, not the least by making both types of characters less black and white, more morally ambiguous, and therefore more realistic.


Still, portraying Once Upon a Time’s only Jewish character as a villain is more than a little problematic. There are echoes of Shakespeare’s Shylock in the explanation that Isaac gives to Snow White and Prince Charming, that it was “a lifetime of bad bosses” who “fancy themselves heroes, pushing around people like me,” that led him to resent the heroes and identify with the villains. The problem with having only one Jewish character in a popular narrative is that the character’s Jewishness becomes more than an individual attribute. Instead, the character becomes a representation of the Jewish people as a whole, in this case a negative representation, indeed, a negative stereotype.


But there is nothing negative about the Jewish connection to the role of “The Author” after all. On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we pray that we may be inscribed in the Book of Life for a good year, and we wish the same for others. In our tradition, God is an author, indeed, The Author, an understanding that has been adopted by the other Abrahamic religions. Of course Moses, our greatest prophet, was also a writer, and through the Torah and the Tanach, we became the first people to write our own historical narrative. And the stories our ancestors wrote have changed the course of history for the entire world, and continue to capture the imagination of billions of people.


Upon doing a search for “Jewish authors” via Google, a listing of “authors frequently mentioned on the web” appeared, and cited 50 names, including Phillip Roth, Saul Bellow, Franz Kafka, Bernard Malamud, Sholem Aleichem, Anne Frank, Joseph Heller, Isaac Asimov, J. D. Salinger, Elie Wiesel, Isaak Babel, Ayn Rand, Primo Levi, Marcel Proust, E. L. Doctorow, Amos Oz, Arthur Koestler, Leonard Cohen, Theodor Herzl, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Gertrude Stein, Emma Lazarus, Art Spiegelman, Tony Kushner, and Boris Pasternak. No doubt a full listing of every Jewish novelist, short story writer, poet, playwright, screenwriter, comics writer, and writer of nonfiction would strain even the Google search engine’s enormous capabilities. Interestingly enough, Google’s list also included King David, Josephus, Maimonides, and Paul the Apostle, and it is certainly worth noting in this context that the Christian Gospels are to a large extent the product of Jewish authors, their impact immeasurable.

So maybe a fountain pen isn’t all that terrible a gift to give on the occasion of a bar or bat mitzvah? Certainly, research indicates that in the classroom, learning and retention is greater for students who take notes by hand as opposed to on laptops and tablets, and there is much to be said for taking pen in hand in regard to creativity. Our tradition of writing extends from Torah and Tanach to Talmud and Zohar, from Maimonides and Karo to the writings of our modern rabbis and lay leaders, from the Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist branches as well as the Orthodox, and to the secular, scholarly, popular, and artistic works of Jewish authors all around the world. With the magic of the pen, we can continue to be authors of our own history as a people. And with the magic of the pen, we can inscribe our own names into a personal book of life that we each can write for ourselves.