VOLURE'S LAMENT

"I miscounted the men, Liz! I miscounted the men!"

Gavin Volure (Steve Martin) thinks he will get away with a daring and cunning escape from his white collar house-arrest. Instead he gets crash-tackled by a federal marshall. Poor Gavin Volure! Having bid goodbye to the woman he loves (Tina Fey), Gavin locks one federal agent in a bathroom and flees across the law, anticipating -- wrongly -- that all his guards were occupied as this critical moment.

He miscounted the men.

This bizarre and hilarious episode (s03e04) of Tina Fey's sit-com "30 Rock" on NBC, penned by John Riggi, provides a compelling glimpse into the unfolding edge of language itself. The phrase "I miscounted the men!" is uttered masterfully by Steven Martin with the force of a catch-phrase, punchline or slogan although it is none of these. Nor is it really even a joke.

At base it is simply a partially applicable linguistic oddity with an ambiguous potency. The Liz Lemon character, after Gavin Volure's failed suicide attempt ends in a tackle from pop-star Tracy Jordan, mutters to herself, "Hmm... he miscounted the men."

Part-joke, part slogan, a dash of sense and a spoonful of nonsense -- all these factors are arranged in this remark in a particular proportion to each other. They are held in a curious and delicate balance which recurs through out this episode, demonstrating very bluntly the point at which new meaning arises into human languages.

Linguistic coherence and incoherence always meet in verbal comedy but no two meeting are exactly the same and the use of these meetings by comedians does not exhaust the significance of this conjunction. It is like a zen-movement in which sense and non-sense are balanced upon the tip of a sword's blade.

Here it is again: Liz Lemon mistakes a Japanese "sex doll" replica of Tracy Jordan slumped stiffly in a chair in the corridor for the real person pop star. She exclaims, with great agitation, "Tracy, get out of the hallway!" Immediately the living man steps from an adjacent doorway with a sly grin of paranoid triumph, declaring, "Or am I???"

Sure, this gets the message across -- Ha! You did not realize that this "me" was only a decoy. I fooled you just as I will fool others! However it also fails to get its message across. The grammar is mis-wired and blows a fuse. There is a special balance of coherent and incoherent communication presented in these exchanges.

And a third time: When pop-star Tracy Jordon, newly wealthy from his porn video game profits, hears the tale of the horrible killing of Jose and Kitty Menendez by their own children. Fearing the worst, Tracy takes steps to prevent his own patricide while employing the false plural term "Menendi" and explaining how he intends to "ex-cape Unmenendez." He plans to escape from the situation with a Menendez-style result, obviously, but the grammatical constraints of the expression are reduced in a specific degree which produces this new reaction -- humorous and puzzled appreciation. (or dismisall in the case of those who are not sensitive of swift enough).

This is not a challenge to the definitions of appropriate and inappropriate semantics, it is an applicate of appropriate semantics in the production of new linguistic order. The Frenchman Gilles Deluze once went on television to define style as "creating a language within your language." The work of the artist is to access a style which is functional but appears invalid or inert when compared to old existing works. It compares unfavourably to past fashions and therefore has the potential to present new style. This is a balancing act by which the articulator, if he or she succeeds, carries the project of language forward.

When Gavin Volure attempts to give Alec Baldwin the slip by escaping out the bathroom window of his mansion-jail he buys himself some time by leaving a running tape-deck behind to simulate conversations with Mr. Baldwin who is standing outside the bathroom door. A few comments work in this fashion but rapidly it becomes clear that no one can very well predict a random future conversation enough to plan all his responses in advance. The comments from within the bathroom lose the expected timing and start to slip away from the coherence of the conversation. At a certain point in this slippage the audience laughs as we pass through the invisible veil into nonsense.

"Innovation... Tomorrow... America... Sunstream."

That's the narration from a coporate television advertisement for Volure's bogus company "Sunstream." We are invited to laugh as the use of mere mood and associative terminology by corporations to move people without actually communicating the facts. Yet the membrane of meaning that should go between these evocative terms is not really absent. Instead it is present in the form of the humorous revelation of a new stylistic sense -- a very subtle feeling which is shared between these words and their context and the contemporary mind.

The feeling comes across and words are employed but we are directly confronted with the absence of the connective tissue. Or rather we are exposed to the actual connective tissue of the comedy -- since it is humourous delight and social critique rather than persuasive business rationality which is presented. The writers take us to the border where conventional linguistic sensibility would rupture but they do not present it as ruptured quite simply because it is not ruptured -- a new bit of membrane provides teh substructure but, of course, because the new is not recognized in comparison with the old expect in contrast, the mystery is the "absence" of sense coupled with the form of sense.

The edge of the blade is articulated as we pass from the sensible to the insensible, a move that is reiterated in the final descent into madness as Volure begins to sing "Tomorrow"

Tomorrow, tomorrow

I love you: "Tomorrow,"

You're only a day... doh dohday...

THE FUTURE OF ART IN DARK TOWERS

"The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed."

An evocative opening sentence?

Stephen King thinks it is. He claims these are the finest words he has ever written and perhaps we should consider him seriously -- since he is supposedly the most widely-read English-speaking author since Charles Dickens.

"Horror writer" is definitely poor and inadequate category for Steven King. He is remembered by the uninformed for a set of classic supermarket bestsellers featuring demonic house pets, haunted automobiles & sexually disturbed adolescents who can start fires with mind-power. It hardly need be pointed out that these are already a large-scale attempt to re-mythologize the contemporary American landscape. And in the decades since his fame, Steven King has continued his mutation into the most popular, most prolific and, quite possibly, the most important mythic artist of the late 20th century.

So let us put aside our like, dislike, or indifference to the story-telling skill of Steven King. Instead, we should diagnose the primary features associated with the cultural production of King's self-proclaimed magnum opus -- a massive 7-book meta-narrative, entitled: The Dark Tower.

1) The seed of this work lies in a line of dialog from Shakespeare's King Lear which formed the title of Browning's "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" and blossomed in Stephen King as the odyssey of Roland the Gunslinger in his Ahab-esque pursuit of the legendary fortress which stands at the Heart of All Possible Worlds. Thus the concerns of classical literature are continued into the modern world as an extension of their acoustic resonances and cinematic evocations. McLuhan never grew tired of quoting T.S. Eliot's assertions on this very point.

2) It is rooted in unconscious inspiration. The invocational open sentence "arose" into King's awareness, and vexed him with his sense of its unique perfection. One is reminded both of Coleridge's revelatory discovery of the opening lines of Kublai Khan and also the phrase "There is a man cut in two by the window," which set the young poet Andre Breton on the arch-contemporary path which would become called: surrealism.

3) A ghost in the machinery of the mind. The idea of the work suggested to King by Browning's poem neither dissipated nor dominated his psyche. It merely lurked. It persisted. There is a ludicrous aspect to hearing Steven King describe his fear that audiences would reject the story which was so dear to his innermost heart. Unlike his more popular books, he found THE DARK TOWER to be significant, peculiar and oddly unjustified. Our higher cultural inspiration, in order to be vital, must be a bit slippery, a bit vexing. If we can count on its style, depend upon its worth... then it surely it cannot be very fresh?

4) Poetry is the method. Everyone knows that Heidegger felt this way -- and he joins King in a concern to produce a world-mood. It is the implicit quality of the opening sentence against which all the rest of THE DARK TOWER is referenced, and not against any crude external factors that might be hiding the "meaning" of the work. King's dedication to unfolding the hidden implications and subtle personal reactions of the artist in each 'next step' of the work is obvious and admirable. It goes hand in hand with his devotion to the rambling aural poetry found in rural speech patterns -- which King works hard to sublimate into his own stream-of-consciousness responses to what he has already written -- decode a half-glimpsed but potently felt subtle world which the artist can expereince as mysteirously 'already existing.'

5) It is blatantly post-genre. This is not some little experimental hybrid like "vampire comedy" or "adventure-romance." It could truthfully be called a coming-of-age sci-fi fantasy Western-style adventure soap opera which mingles humor, myth, travel writing, social commentary, stream-of-consciousness under a simultaneously post-modern and classical-archetypal manner with a flavor of deep surrealism and an homage to small-town living. Part book, part film, part comic, part painting. THE DARK TOWER does not cross genres but confidently takes its stand in that global complexity which is establishing itself as the "new normal category" of the 21 century.

6) It is hyper-referential. Now only does the narrative enfold all other Steven King books and characters, even those not yet written, AND not only does it include King himself and the decades-long writing of THE DARK TOWER, but it also compresses different ages of popular culture and high literature into a single vast world and moment.

ULTIMATE DOCTOR WHO MIX

The Streaming Anthem of Cosmic Imagination

boyoehackenslash had this to say:

"This is brilliantly mixed, I've always liked the doctor's theme tune, though surprisingly, I've never been a big fan of the program itself. Go figure."

Boyoehackenslash is not special. A great many more people take pleasure in the opening title music of BBC's Doctor Who than actually enjoy watching the television program. It is popular with weird kids, technophiles, mythology enthusiasts & educated hippie children -- all of whom have a mysterious ability to tolerate the woeful British special effects. We are simply asked to behave as if in the Theatre and pretend that the unrealistic tin-can with the black golf-balls glued onto it is actually a race of malevolent cyborgs that symbolize the terrifying specture of the dehumanized future.

( Side note: The Dehumanization of Humanity into a mass-mind hive of man-machines, or h. cybermechanicus, was the sole theme dealt with by British cultural arts during the early-middle twentieth century. From T.S. Eliot's "Hollow Men" to J.R.R. Tolkein's armored hordes of industrial-power Orcs to the insidious world of Orwell's "1984," we find the same menacing species of Evil that Colin Wilson and the Beatles struggled to escape from. Gone were the days of simple flight into Neverland. Now, after the onslaught of Nazi bombing and the emergence of the Computer Age, the ethereal character of the British imagination needed to stand and denounce the regimes of inhumanity. And this is basically the plot for every episode of Doctor Who. )

This outlandish sci-fi TV program is an extended Aesop's Fable exhorting humanity to wrest control of the technological future from its nihilistic enemies and submit the "system" to intelligent control at the hands of the naturalized human qualities of humour, love, compassionate survival, and delight in the mysteries and coincidences of the vast cosmic realm outlined in modern physics.

Hence the anthem-like quality of the song composed by Ron Grainer and first mixed by Delia Derbyshire in 1963. Classic primitive techno music.

It was re-mixed several times over the decades, allowing new generations of Sound Editors sense and articulate the spirit of the composition. The job of splicing all these variations together into a seamless whole which reveals the shared intrinsic quality of all fell to ReverseThePolarity, who purports to be Craig from Chelmsford.

Well, "Craig from Chelmsford," your excellent work has been noticed! How better to discover the secret of this powerful musical composition than by streaming it seamlessly into itself? After all, to reveal the common stream between many examples is the very technique of discovery itself.

The philosopher Heidegger said, basically -- art is whatever Artists do, artists are whomever produce Art. A loop of meaning. Do we give up? No. Instead we journey around the self-proving loop and allow the common essence to emerge into presence.

Martin Heidegger is exactly like Craig from Chelmsford.

culture is religion:

Go to youtube.com and spend 8 minutes & 4 seconds attentively experiencing the multi-decade mix of the Doctor Who theme music called The Doctor Who Ultimate title Mix.