Values Learning From The Crisis Wealth 95 Essential Items Happiness I The Taste Of The Muña Happiness II Dance! Beauty The Forms Of Nature Sensuality SkinScapes Fashion Copy & Taste Music Scarlett vs. Tom Waits
This is a first sketch of a series of magazines, all themes contain of words beginning with “ex”
Ex Number 01 – Exist | Andreas Hidber, Elisava Barcelona, 2009
Values Learning from the crisis
05 5
William Shakespeare, baptised 26 April 1564 to 23 April 1616 was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world’s preeminent dramatist.[1] He is often called England’s national poet and the “Bard of Avon” (or simply “The Bard”). His surviving works consist of 38 plays,[b] 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several other poems. His plays have been translated into every major living language, and are performed more often than those of any other playwright.Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, who bore him three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, later known as the King’s Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare’s private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1590 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories, genres he raised to the peak of sophistication and artistry by the end of the sixteenth century. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest examples in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. In 1623, two of his former theatrical colleagues published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare’s. Shakespeare was a respected poet and playwright in his own day, but his reputation did not rise to its present heights until the nineteenth century. The Romantics, in particular, acclaimed Shakespeare’s genius, and the Victorians heroworshipped Shakespeare with a reverence that George Bernard Shaw called “bardolatry”.[4] In the twentieth century, his work was repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are constantly performed and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. Pericles is a deceptively non-topical and apolitical play, with the accent falling so much on the “deceptively” that generations of critics have been lured into thinking it essentially non-topical and apolitical, as well as one of Shakespeare’s least successful works of dramatic art.[1] How could a play that begins by conjuring up the ghost of its medieval source to serve as Chorus and presenter throughout possibly have any connection with the burning social and political issues of Shakespeare’s own time? To sing a song that old was sung, From ashes ancient Gower is come….[2] Given the way that Pericles puts all who might otherwise have pursued a topical social and political reading off its trail, it is hardly surprising that some of the best recent accounts of Pericles have been developed by psychoanalytic and thematic critics, who have focused our attention on the way this play works through the fundamental human dread of incest at the level of the primary process and in terms of universal family romance dynamics.[3] Unfortunately, however, a generalized psychoanalytic reading of Pericles cannot account for the most salient facts about its audience reception. For while Pericles seems to have been one of Shakespeare’s
most popular plays with its contemporary audience, its popularity did not survive the seventeenth century and has never fully been revived.[4] If the “aim of a psycho-analytic reading is the search for the emotional springs that make the spectacle an affective matrix in which the spectator sees himself involved and feels himself not only solicited but welcomed, as if the spectacle were intended for him,” it must be admitted that few post-seventeenth-century spectators or readers of Pericles have felt as if the “affective matrix” it provides were specifically intended for them.[5] On the other hand, the few topical and political accounts of Pericles that have recently appeared have not been nearly as illuminating as those focused on the plays which surround it in the development of Shakespeare’s dramatic corpus. Pericles does not share the relatively explicit topical riddles and references that characterize Coriolanus to a certain extent and Cymbeline in particular, nor has anyone yet discovered a very specific correlative for Pericles’ central concern with father-daughter incest—nothing nearly so specific as the way Coppélia Kahn, in her combined psychoanalytic and socio-political reading of Timon of Athens, has been able to relate that play’s “core fantasy” of bounty to the pleasures and anxieties aroused by King James’s open-handed (and debt-producing) fashion of distributing court patronage in this period.[6] I think that I may have uncovered just such a topical and political correlative for the incest theme of Pericles, one with which the specific form of the psychoanalytic family romance presented in this play resonates both richly and persuasively, in the ideological family romance that James and his propagandists employed in the promotion of his pet political project at the time, the Union of his two kingdoms of England and Scotland into the empire of Great Britain. In what follows I will present this discovery in detail, using the associations between incest and Union established in the opening scene of Pericles to unravel the implications of the way the rest of the play works through this material in terms of the political fears and aspirations of its contemporary English audience. I will argue that Shakespeare raises the scandalous specters of father-daughter incest and murderous
Here comes the sun, and I say it’s all right. George Harrison The Beatles – Abbey Road, 1969, EMI Records
parental violence here in a fashion which implicitly serves to parody and delegitimize not only Union but also the hereditary and absolutist premises on which James based his claim to rule England alone, and that the symbolic action of Pericles works not only to undermine this claim, but also to elaborate an alternative model of monarchy in which the king would enjoy an elective status merely, and no longer an absolute and hereditary one. Moreover, this reading of the family-romance dynamics of Pericles will enable me to account for the peculiarly fairy-tale- or dream-like quality of its plot as the
07 7
in early 1604 to the form it had attained just prior to Pericles’ composition and first performances in late 1607 or early 1608. By doing so we will be able to see how James had unwittingly, if only symbolically, managed to involve himself in an incestuous “marriage” with any or all of his political “daughters” England, Scotland, or even the united Great Britain herself by the time of Pericles, an incestuous marriage that was almost exactly parallel with the one the legendary Antiochus and his unnamed daughter are presented as sharing in the opening scene of the play. James seems to have thought that the Union of his two kingdoms had been accomplished at the very moment of his ascension to the English throne in 1603 by virtue
True is it, that we have seen better days. William Shakespeare As you like it | Act II, Scene VII
of the fact that both kingdoms now had a single sovereign; he consequently expected the English Parliament to recognize this fact by putting a Union in both name and deed into immediate legal effect. As James would later recall in a speech to Parliament, “When I first propounded the Vnion, I then though[t] there could haue bene no more question of it, then of your declaration and acknowledgement of my right vnto this Crowne [of England], and that as two Twinnes, they would haue growne vp together.”[13] In his first speech to Parliament on 19 March 1604, then, James had no qualms about deploying the long-traditional figures of the king as husband of the realm and head of the body politic in such a fashion as to cast himself in the role of a political bigamist and two-bodied monster in an attempt to persuade Parliament to reaffirm his symbolic normalcy through their speedy agreement to Union: What God hath conioyned then, let no man separate. I am the Husband, and all the whole Isle is my lawfull Wife; I am the Head, and it is my Body…: I hope therefore no man will be so vnreasonable as to thinke that I that am a Christian King vnder the Gospel, should be a Polygamist and husband to two wiues; that I being the Head, should haue a diuided and monstrous Body….[14] Strange as it may seem, James himself seems to have taken these matrimonial and bodily figures fairly seriously: in this first speech to Parliament he relies on them almost exclusively to make his point that Union is an immediate political necessity. By having this speech promptly printed and distributed for the edification of the English public at large, James must also have wished to impress the persuasive force of these figures upon the imagination of his English subjects outside Parliament as well.[15] The members of the English Parliament, however, and in particular of the House of Commons, seem not to have taken his symbolic argument in favor of Union nearly so seriously as James might have wished. Instead of immediately putting Union into effect, they debated its advisability at length and delayed taking any action on it, even what must to James, when he proposed it, have seemed
the merely token step of eliminating the name of England and adopting that of Great Britain in its place.[16] Sir Edwin Sandys, for example, in a speech to the Commons on 26 April 1604, worried that if the English Parliament voted to abolish the name of England, they might likewise abolish their very institutional existence along with the name, leaving England and indeed Great Britain itself without a lawmaking body: “We can give no laws to Britain because we are but parcel. Scotland cannot because it is another part. Together we cannot, because several corporations.” The adoption of a change of name might also entail the abolition of all the specifically English liberties that James’s subjects in that nation currently enjoyed: The King by his oath at coronation tied to maintain our liberties, etc. The subject by oath of allegiance tied to serve the King, to maintain all rights annexed to the Crown, etc. He [as King of Great Britain] may exact another oath of us. We have no warrant to require any of him.[17] Hold on reading, please While many other practical obstacles to Union were debated by James’s first Parliament in the three sessions that took place between its opening in March 1604 and its dissolution in July 1607, the principal sticking point throughout this long period of debate remained Parliament’s fear that Union would necessarily entail the abolition of its long-established institutional privilege to protect the liberties of the subjects it represented, and hence a ceding of potentially tyrannical power to the king and the effective loss of any independent English national identity as well.[18] Given Parliament’s continuing resistance to and delay in putting Union into effect, it is understandable that James would eventually tire of playing the roles of political bigamist and two-bodied monster in which he had cast himself in his initial attempts to promote Union. Worse, as James himself noted in his speech to the Union committee on 20 April 1604, “the question of the union had become alehouse talk” within a month of the speech in which he had conjured up these figures; vivid and memorable as these figures are, it seems likely that knowledge of the scandalous roles James had given himself in it must soon have become a little too common among his English subjects at large.[19] And so starting in late 1606 and early 1607, James began to disseminate a different matrimonial configuration for the Union project, one elaborated in terms of the equally long-traditional figure of the king, not as the husband of the realm, but as the father of the nation. Into this traditional figure, James introduced a novel matrimonial variation of his own to make it suitable for the promotion of Union: that this father was currently arranging a marriage between his two national children, England and Scotland. James broadcast this idea by arranging actual marriages to serve as living figures of Union (with court masques to celebrate them), by giving sympathetic pamphleteers free rein to present it to the nation, and by presenting it to Parliament himself in a speech of 31 March 1607 which, as with his 19 March 1604 speech, was promptly printed for the consumption of his English subjects at large. [20] The most important of these court marriages in helping to negotiate a decisive transition to this new mode of promoting Union was the one James arranged between the Scottish Lord Hay and the only daughter and heir of the English Lord Denny on Twelfth Night 1607. Even without poetic elaboration, this marriage could serve as a living figure of the matrimonial Union of James’s Scottish “son” and his English “daughter” as arranged by their “father” James, with all the enduring institutional implications of this political Union likewise figured by Honora Denny’s status as an English heiress—this Union too would be an “hereditary” one. And though the author James commissioned to compose the masque celebrating this wedding,
Thomas Campion, did not lend Union nearly the thematic centrality that Jonson had accorded it a year earlier in Hymenaei, he did help disseminate the ideological import of this marriage in a poetic epistle to James included at the very beginning of the published 1607 text of the masque, the concluding lines of which make the parallel between the Hay-Denny marriage and Anglo-Scottish Union patent. Emboldened by this success, James employed this new matrimonial model himself in urging Parliament to bring their preparations, the necessity of which he was now in the symbolic position to acknowledge, to a satisfactory close in his next speech on 31 March 1607—though James tactfully varied the respective genders of the national bride and groom so as to allay any fears that England would be given the subservient role of wife in Union itself, as it had been in the living figure of Union wrought by the Hay-Denny marriage: Vnion is a mariage: would he not bee thought absurd that for furthering of a mariage betweene two friends of his, would make his first motion to haue the two parties be laid in bedde together, and performe the other turnes of in early 1604 to the form it had attained just prior to Pericles’ composition and first performances in late 1607 or early 1608. By doing so we will be able to see how James had unwittingly, if only symbolically, managed to involve himself in an incestuous “marriage” with any or all of his political “daughters” England, Scotland, or even the united Great Britain herself by the time of Pericles, an incestuous marriage that was almost exactly parallel with the one the legendary Antiochus and his unnamed daughter are presented as sharing in the opening scene of the play. James seems to have thought that the Union of his two kingdoms had been accomplished at the very moment of his ascension to the English throne in 1603 by virtue of the fact that both kingdoms now had a single sovereign; he consequently expected the English Parliament to recognize this fact by putting a Union in both name and deed into immediate legal effect. As James would later recall in a speech to Parliament, “When I first propounded the Vnion, I then though[t] there could haue bene no more question of it, then of your declaration and acknowledgement of my right vnto this Crowne [of England], and that as two Twinnes, they would haue growne vp together.”[13] In his first speech to Parliament on 19 March 1604, then, James had no qualms about deploying the long-traditional figures of the king as husband of the realm and head of the body politic in such a fashion as to cast himself in the role of a political bigamist and two-bodied monster in an attempt to persuade Parliament to reaffirm his symbolic normalcy through their speedy agreement to Union: What God hath conioyned then, let no man separate. I am the Husband, and all the whole Isle is my lawfull Wife; I am the Head, and it is my Body…: I hope therefore no man will be so vnreasonable as to thinke that I that am a Christian King vnder the Gospel, should be a Polygamist and husband to two wiues; that I being the Head, should haue a diuided and monstrous Body….[14] Strange as it may seem, James himself seems to have taken these matrimonial and bodily figures fairly seriously: in this first speech to Parliament he relies on them almost exclusively to make his point that Union is an immediate political necessity. By having this speech promptly printed and distributed for the edification of the English public at large, James must also have wished to impress the persuasive force of these figures upon the imagination of his English subjects outside Parliament as well.[15] The members of the English Parliament, however, and in particular of the House of Commons, seem not to have taken his symbolic argument in favor of Union nearly so seriously as James might have wished. Instead of immediately putting Union
into effect, they debated its advisability at length and delayed taking any action on it, even what must to James, when he proposed it, have seemed the merely token step of eliminating the name of England and adopting that of Great Britain in its place.[16] Sir Edwin Sandys, for example, in a speech to the Commons on 26 April 1604, worried that if the English Parliament voted to abolish the name of England, they might likewise abolish their very institutional existence along with the name, leaving England and indeed Great Britain itself without a lawmaking body: “We can give no laws to Britain because we are but parcel. Scotland cannot because it is another part. Together we cannot, because several corporations.” The adoption of a change of name might also entail the abolition of all the specifically English liberties that James’s subjects in that nation currently enjoyed: The King by his oath at coronation tied to maintain our liberties, etc. The subject by oath of allegiance tied to serve the King, to maintain all rights annexed to the Crown, etc. He [as King of Great Britain] may exact another oath of us. We have no warrant to require any of him.[17] And though the author James commissioned to compose the masque celebrating this wedding, Thomas Campion, did not lend Union nearly the thematic centrality that Jonson had accorded it a year earlier in Hymenaei, he did help disseminate the ideological import of this marriage in a poetic epistle to James included at the very beginning of the published 1607 text of the masque, the concluding lines of which make the parallel between the Hay-Denny marriage and Anglo-Scottish Union patent. Emboldened by this success, James employed this new matrimonial model himself in urging Parliament to bring their preparations, the necessity of which he was now in the symbolic position to acknowledge, to a satisfactory close in his next speech on 31 March 1607—though James tactfully varied the respective genders of the national bride and groom so as to allay any fears that England would be given the subservient role of wife in Union itself, as it had been in the living figure of Union wrought by the Hay-Denny marriage: Vnion is a mariage: would he not bee thought absurd that for furthering of a mariage betweene two friends of his, would make his first motion to haue the two parties be laid in bedde together, and performe the other turnes of
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Fragile (by Matthew Gorden Sumner aka Sting) If blood will flow when flesh and steel are one Drying in the colour of the evening sun Tomorrow´s rain will wash the stains away But something in our minds will always stay. Perhaps this final act was meant To clinch a lifetime´s argument That nothing comes from violence And nothing ever could For all those born beneath an angry star Lest we forget how fragile we are On and on the rain will fall like tears from a star, like tears from a star On and on the rain will say how fragile we are, how fragile we are On and on the rain will fall like tears from a star, like tears from a star On and on the rain will say how fragile we are, how fragile we are How fragile we are, how fragile we are Recorded 1987 for the Album ‌ nothing like the sun | A&M Records
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William Shakespeare, baptised 26 April 1564 to 23 April 1616 was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world’s preeminent dramatist.[1] He is often called England’s national poet and the “Bard of Avon” (or simply “The Bard”). His surviving works consist of 38 plays,[b] 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several other poems. His plays have been translated into every major living language, and are performed more often than those of any other playwright.Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, who bore him three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, later known as the King’s Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare’s private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1590 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories, genres he raised to the peak of sophistication and artistry by the end of the sixteenth century. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest examples in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. In 1623, two of his former theatrical colleagues published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare’s. Look twice before you begin to read Shakespeare was a respected poet and playwright in his own day, but his reputation did not rise to its present heights until the nineteenth century. The Romantics, in particular, acclaimed Shakespeare’s genius, and the Victorians hero-worshipped Shakespeare with a reverence that George Bernard Shaw called “bardolatry”.[4] In the twentieth century, his work was repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are constantly performed and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. Pericles is a deceptively non-topical and apolitical play, with the accent falling so much on the “deceptively” that generations of critics have been lured into thinking it essentially non-topical and apolitical, as well as one of Shakespeare’s least successful works of dramatic art.[1] How could a play that begins by conjuring up the ghost of its medieval source to serve as Chorus and presenter throughout possibly have any connection with the burning social and political issues of Shakespeare’s own time? To sing a song that old was sung, From ashes ancient Gower is come….[2] Given the way that Pericles puts all who might otherwise have pursued a topical social and political reading off its trail, it is hardly surprising that some of the best recent accounts of Pericles have been developed by psychoanalytic and thematic critics, who have focused our attention on the way this play works through the fundamental human dread of incest at the level of the primary process and in terms of universal family romance dynamics.[3] Unfortunately, however, a generalized psychoanalytic reading of Pericles cannot account for the most salient facts about its audience reception. For while Pericles seems to have been one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays with its contemporary audi-
ence, its popularity did not survive the seventeenth century and has never fully been revived.[4] If the “aim of a psycho-analytic reading is the search for the emotional springs that make the spectacle an affective matrix in which the spectator sees himself involved and feels himself not only solicited but welcomed, as if the spectacle were intended for him,” it must be admitted that few post-seventeenth-century spectators or readers of Pericles have felt as if the “affective matrix” it provides were specifically intended for them.[5] On the other hand, the few topical and political accounts of Pericles that have recently appeared have not been nearly as illuminating as those focused on the plays which surround it in the development of Shakespeare’s dramatic corpus. Pericles does not share the relatively explicit topical riddles and references that characterize Coriolanus to a certain extent and Cymbeline in particular, nor has anyone yet discovered a very specific correlative for Pericles’ central concern with father-daughter incest—nothing nearly so specific as the way Coppélia Kahn, in her combined psychoanalytic and socio-political reading of Timon of Athens, has been able to relate that play’s “core fantasy” of bounty to the pleasures and anxieties aroused by King James’s open-handed (and debt-producing) fashion of distributing court patronage in this period.[6] I think that I may have uncovered just such a topical and political correlative for the incest theme of Pericles, one with which the specific form of the psychoanalytic family romance presented in this play resonates both richly and persuasively, in the ideological family romance that James and his propagandists employed in the promotion of his pet political project at the time, the Union of his two kingdoms of England and Scotland into the empire of Great Britain. In what follows I will present this discovery in detail, using the associations between incest and Union established in the opening scene of Pericles to unravel the implications of the way the rest of the play works through this material in terms of the political fears and aspirations of its contemporary English audience. I will argue that Shakespeare raises the scandalous specters of father-daughter incest and murderous parental violence here in a fashion which implicitly serves to parody and delegitimize not only Union but also the hereditary and absolutist premises on which James based his claim to rule England alone, and that the symbolic action of Pericles works not only to undermine this claim, but also to elaborate an alternative model of monarchy in which the king would enjoy an elective status merely, and no longer an absolute and hereditary one. Moreover, this reading of the family-romance dynamics of Pericles will enable me to account for the peculiarly fairy-tale- or dream-like quality of its plot as the basis of this play’s ability to attack and transform both the ideological promotion of Union and the ideology of kingship in Jacobean England at their very imaginary roots, by virtue of its own equally imaginary, dream-like dramatic disguise. The specific form in which the monstrous specters of incest and parental violence are raised in the opening scene of Pericles is both rather peculiar and peculiarly primal: primal not in the Oedipal sense per se, since this is not a case of mother-son incest and filial violence, but rather in terms of the even more archaic figure of the patriarch of the so-called “primal horde” whom Freud discusses in Totem and Taboo.[7] The incestuous relationship Antiochus enjoys with his daughter and the threat he poses to his potential son-in-law Pericles represent a nightmarish revival of the figure of this primal patriarch within the exogamous form of social organization which, according to Freud, his sacrificial murder by his sons founded. By committing incest with his daughter and setting up a mechanism to eliminate all potential matrimonial rivals for her affection, Antiochus has not only violated the incest taboo fundamental to
the expansion of exogamous society. He has also reneged on the Oedipal contract between generations and families fundamental to its reproduction: the promise which fathers implicitly make to sons that, if they will renounce their childish desire to replace the father directly by marrying their mother and instead submit to the instruction required to attain adult status, another father of a different family will allow them to marry one of his daughters someday, with the son thereby fulfilling this desire in a displaced and sociallyreproductive fashion. Think before you act The deep and manifold resonances that the situation at Antiochus’s court has with the figure of the father of the primal horde might encourage us to deal with this situation and the transformations of it later in the play strictly in terms of currently available psychoanalytic and anthropological theories. However, the choice of this mode of analysis would, it seems to me, be a mistake, even in terms of a purely psychoanalytic mode of analysis. For as Freud himself noted in The Interpretation of Dreams, when we dream of incest or familial violence, or when a dramatist includes such fantasies in the poetic daydreams he produces for us to share, this does not mean we have a present wish or anxiety that such situations might occur. Rather in such cases the dream-work makes use of these long-repressed materials as the disguised and distorted mode of expression for another present wish or anxiety which troubles us in our latent dream thoughts even more. While our actual present anxieties cannot escape the agency of dream censorship, these primal scenarios of incest and familial violence in which they find manifest expression can escape. They are so monstrous that the censorship is not armed to meet them, especially when we do not in fact harbor such wishes ourselves—just as, in Freud’s analogy, Solon’s penal code had no law against patricide, the act being so unthinkable on the one hand, and its criminality so obvious on the other. And when a dramatist includes such fantasies in a play—with Freud citing the example of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex—they do not represent the issues that a psychoanalyst should consider to be the central concern of the theatrical daydream it induces. Instead, in Freud’s account Sophocles hitches what is in fact the central concern of the play—”the contrast between the supreme will of the gods and the vain attempts of mankind to escape the evil that threatens them”—to the primal anxieties stirred in us by Oedipus’s discovery that he has unwittingly committed both incest and patricide, in order to make the play’s exploration of this theological issue more emotionally convincing than it would otherwise have been.[8] It will be my contention here that the murderous and incestuous scenario conjured up at the beginning of Pericles and revisited throughout the play operates in a similar fashion, and serves as the disguised and distorted mode of expression for ideological and political anxieties shared by Shakespeare and the members of this play’s contemporary English audience, anxieties much more intimately related to this particular scenario than the theological anxieties that Freud extracts from Oedipus Rex. Before uncovering the most intimate topical and political resonances that are latent in the opening scene at Antiochus’s court, however, it may prove useful to situate the anxieties it stirs with respect to Pericles’ contemporary political and theatrical context in a more general fashion initially, if only in order to provide a preliminary justification for the more detailed and specific examination to follow. I will begin by approaching the incest scenario of scene one, then, much as Freud does that of Oedipus Rex, as a bit of intrigue that lends a certain measure of emotional persuasiveness to topical and political instigations with which the specter of father-daughter incest itself has no very
intimate connection at all—instigations concerning the theory of the divine right of kings and the mode of theatrical realization it was achieving at court in the early Jacobean period. In the first place, it is fairly clear from the terms Shakespeare has Pericles employ in his attempt to appeal to Antiochus’s conscience after deciphering his incest riddle—an appeal that represents a marked departure from Shakespeare’s sources, where the Pericles character accuses Antiochus of incest much more directly and succinctly[9]—that this highly-charged situation is presented as a kind of “worst-case” scenario which reveals just how criminal an absolute monarch like Antiochus can become, given the lack of any earthly constraints on his power: Kings are earth’s gods; in vice their law’s their will; And if Jove stray, who dares say Jove doth ill? Look twice before you begin to read It is enough you know; and it is fit, What being more known grows worse, to smother it.In his appeal to Antiochus here, Pericles echos propositions fundamental to the reigning ideology of kingship in the early Jacobean period: specifically, that the king, as god’s earthly lieutenant, is above the law since he is himself the lawgiver; hence no matter how wicked a king might be, his subjects have absolutely no right to judge and punish him. However commonplace these propositions are, of course, James himself had given canonical expression in his The Trew Law of Free Monarchies in 1598, a tract he had republished for the benefit of his new English subjects immediately upon his ascension to the throne in 1603.[10] By having Pericles naively echo such propositions in his appeal to Antiochus, Shakespeare would seem to be performing what amounts to an implicit reductio ad absurdum on them dramatically: a divinely-appointed king is above the law and can do anything he wants, with his subjects having no lawful right to intervene except through “patience, earnest prayers to God, and amendment of their liues”[11]0
Happiness II Dance! Even if it’s in the office
Photographs by Anybody
Muña – The Plant Minthostachys is a genus of the mint family Lamiaceae currently comprising seventeen species of aromatic scandent shrubs.[1] It occurs along the Andes from Northern Venezuela through Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia to Central Argentina. The plants are valued by the local population for their content in essential oils, mostly pulegone and menthone, but also limonene, carvone, carvacrol, thymol and similar substances. They are used as condiments, medicinally against illnesses of the respiratory and digestive systems, and traditionally for the protection of stored tubers against pests, especially in Southern Peru.[2] In Argentina and Peru, the essential oils are extracted commercially on a larger scale, and at least locally, this has lead to overexploitation in recent years. Argentine researchers are looking for ways to protect Minthostachys or to take it into cultivation to meet increasing demand.
The best known species are Minthostachys mollis distributed from Venezuela to Bolivia and Minthostachys verticillata of Argentina. Many species have a relatively restricted distribution but are locally common, like Minthostachys acutifolia around La Paz and Minthostachys ovata in central Bolivia. The common names used by the people of the Andes usually do not differentiate between species, but vary by region. In Ecuador, the genus is called tipo or poleo, in northern Peru chancua, from central Peru to Bolivia muña, and in Argentina peperina is the most frequently used name. [edit]References 1 Schmidt-Lebuhn, A.N. (2008). Revision of the genus Minthostachys (Labiatae). Memoirs of the New York Botanical Garden 98. 2 Schmidt-Lebuhn, A.N. (in press). Ethnobotany, biochemistry and pharmacology of Minthostachys (Lamiaceae). Journal of Ethnophar macology. [1] 3 Noticias Ambientales de la Provincia de Córdoba: Escasez de peperina, el yuyo cordobés
By Fergus McBrain Professor for Aesthetic Studies, University of Bingham
Beauty The Forms of Nature
Collage of Public Pictures by Andreas Hidber
basis of this play’s ability to attack and transform both the ideological promotion of Union and the ideology of kingship in Jacobean England at their very imaginary roots, by virtue of its own equally imaginary, dream-like dramatic disguise. The specific form in which the monstrous specters of incest and parental violence are raised in the opening scene of Pericles is both rather peculiar and peculiarly primal: primal not in the Oedipal sense per se, since this is not a case of mother-son incest and filial violence, but rather in terms of the even more archaic figure of the patriarch of the so-called “primal horde” whom Freud discusses in Totem and Taboo.[7] The incestuous relationship Antiochus enjoys with his daughter and the threat he poses to his potential son-in-law Pericles represent a nightmarish revival of the figure of this primal patriarch within the exogamous form of social organization which, according to Freud, his sacrificial murder by his sons founded. By committing incest with his daughter and setting up a mechanism to eliminate all potential matrimonial rivals for her affection, Antiochus has not only violated the incest taboo fundamental to the expansion of exogamous society. He has also reneged on the Oedipal contract between generations and families fundamental to its reproduction: the promise which fathers implicitly make to sons that, if they will renounce their childish desire to replace the father directly by marrying their mother and instead submit to the instruction required to attain adult status, another father of a different family will allow them to marry one of his daughters someday, with the son thereby fulfilling this desire in a displaced and sociallyreproductive fashion. Think before you act The deep and manifold resonances that the situation at Antiochus’s court has with the figure of the father of the primal horde might encourage us to deal with this situation and the transformations of it later in the play strictly in terms of currently available psychoanalytic and anthropological theories. However, the choice of this mode of analysis would, it seems to me, be a mistake, even in terms of a purely psychoanalytic mode of analysis. For as Freud himself noted in The Interpretation of Dreams, when we dream of incest or familial violence, or when a dramatist includes such fantasies in the poetic daydreams he produces for us to share, this does not mean we have a present wish or anxiety that such situations might occur. Rather in such cases the dream-work makes use of these long-repressed materials as the disguised and distorted mode of expression for another present wish or anxiety which troubles us in our latent dream thoughts even more. While our actual present anxieties cannot escape the agency of dream censorship, these primal scenarios of incest and familial violence in which they find manifest expression can escape. They are so monstrous that the censorship is not armed to meet them, especially when we do not in fact harbor such wishes ourselves—just as, in Freud’s analogy, Solon’s penal code had no law against patricide, the act being so unthinkable on the one hand, and its criminality so obvious on the other. And when a dramatist includes such fantasies in a play—with Freud citing the example of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex—they do not represent the issues that a psychoanalyst should consider to be the central concern of the theatrical daydream it induces. Instead, in Freud’s account Sophocles hitches what is in fact the central concern of the play—”the contrast between the supreme will of the gods and the vain attempts of mankind to escape the evil that threatens them”—to the primal anxieties stirred in us by Oedipus’s discovery that he has unwittingly committed both incest and patricide, in order to make the play’s exploration of this theological issue more emotionally convincing than it would otherwise have been.[8] It will
be my contention here that the murderous and incestuous scenario conjured up at the beginning of Pericles and revisited throughout the play operates in a similar fashion, and serves as the disguised and distorted mode of expression for ideological and political anxieties shared by Shakespeare and the members of this play’s contemporary English audience, anxieties much more intimately related to this particular scenario than the theological anxieties that Freud extracts from Oedipus Rex. Before uncovering the most intimate topical and political resonances that are latent in the opening scene at Antiochus’s court, however, it may prove useful to situate the anxieties it stirs with respect to Pericles’ contemporary political and theatrical context in a more general fashion initially, if only in order to provide a preliminary justification for the more detailed and specific examination to follow. I will begin by approaching the incest scenario of scene one, then, much as Freud does that of Oedipus Rex, as a bit of intrigue that lends a certain measure of emotional persuasiveness to topical and political instigations with which the specter of father-daughter incest itself has no very intimate connection at all—instigations concerning the theory of the divine right of kings and the mode of theatrical realization it was achieving at court in the early Jacobean period. In the first place, it is fairly clear from the terms Shakespeare has Pericles employ in his attempt to appeal to Antiochus’s conscience after deciphering his incest riddle—an appeal that represents a marked departure from Shakespeare’s sources, where the Pericles character accuses Antiochus of incest much more directly and succinctly[9]—that this highly-charged situation is presented as a kind of “worst-case” scenario which reveals just how criminal an absolute monarch like Antiochus can become, given the lack of any earthly constraints on his power: Kings are earth’s gods; in vice their law’s their will; And if Jove stray, who dares say Jove doth ill? Look twice before you begin to read It is enough you know; and it is fit, What being more known grows worse, to smother it.In his
“God and his evolution is pure aesthetic.” Fergus McBrain
appeal to Antiochus here, Pericles echos propositions fundamental to the reigning ideology of kingship in the early Jacobean period: specifically, that the king, as god’s earthly lieutenant, is above the law since he is himself the lawgiver; hence no matter how wicked a king might be, his subjects have absolutely no right to judge and punish him. However commonplace these propositions are, of course, James himself had given canonical expression in his The Trew Law of Free Monarchies in 1598, a tract he had republished for the benefit of his new English subjects immediately upon
in early 1604 to the form it had attained just prior to Pericles’ composition and first performances in late 1607 or early 1608. By doing so we will be able to see how James had unwittingly, if only symbolically, managed to involve himself in an incestuous “marriage” with any or all of his political “daughters” England, Scotland, or even the united Great Britain herself by the time of Pericles, an incestuous marriage that was almost exactly parallel with the one the legendary Antiochus and his unnamed daughter are presented as sharing in the opening scene of the play. James seems to have thought that the Union of his two kingdoms had been accomplished at the very moment of his ascension to the English throne in 1603 by virtue
Form follows function, funcion is beauty Fergus McBrain
of the fact that both kingdoms now had a single sovereign; he consequently expected the English Parliament to recognize this fact by putting a Union in both name and deed into immediate legal effect. As James would later recall in a speech to Parliament, “When I first propounded the Vnion, I then though[t] there could haue bene no more question of it, then of your declaration and acknowledgement of my right vnto this Crowne [of England], and that as two Twinnes, they would haue growne vp together.”[13] In his first speech to Parliament on 19 March 1604, then, James had no qualms about deploying the long-traditional figures of the king as husband of the realm and head of the body politic in such a fashion as to cast himself in the role of a political bigamist and two-bodied monster in an attempt to persuade Parliament to reaffirm his symbolic normalcy through their speedy agreement to Union: What God hath conioyned then, let no man separate. I am the Husband, and all the whole Isle is my lawfull Wife; I am the Head, and it is my Body…: I hope therefore no man will be so vnreasonable as to thinke that I that am a Christian King vnder the Gospel, should be a Polygamist and husband to two wiues; that I being the Head, should haue a diuided and monstrous Body….[14] Strange as it may seem, James himself seems to have taken these matrimonial and bodily figures fairly seriously: in this first speech to Parliament he relies on them almost exclusively to make his point that Union is an immediate political necessity. By having this speech promptly printed and distributed for the edification of the English public at large, James must also have wished to impress the persuasive force of these figures upon the imagination of his English subjects outside Parliament as well.[15] The members of the English Parliament, however, and in particular of the House of Commons, seem not to have taken his symbolic argument in favor of Union nearly so seriously as James might have wished. Instead of immediately putting Union into effect, they debated its advisability at length and delayed taking any action on it, even what must to James, when he proposed it, have seemed
the merely token step of eliminating the name of England and adopting that of Great Britain in its place.[16] Sir Edwin Sandys, for example, in a speech to the Commons on 26 April 1604, worried that if the English Parliament voted to abolish the name of England, they might likewise abolish their very institutional existence along with the name, leaving England and indeed Great Britain itself without a lawmaking body: “We can give no laws to Britain because we are but parcel. Scotland cannot because it is another part. Together we cannot, because several corporations.” The adoption of a change of name might also entail the abolition of all the specifically English liberties that James’s subjects in that nation currently enjoyed: The King by his oath at coronation tied to maintain our liberties, etc. The subject by oath of allegiance tied to serve the King, to maintain all rights annexed to the Crown, etc. He [as King of Great Britain] may exact another oath of us. We have no warrant to require any of him.[17] Hold on reading, please While many other practical obstacles to Union were debated by James’s first Parliament in the three sessions that took place between its opening in March 1604 and its dissolution in July 1607, the principal sticking point throughout this long period of debate remained Parliament’s fear that Union would necessarily entail the abolition of its long-established institutional privilege to protect the liberties of the subjects it represented, and hence a ceding of potentially tyrannical power to the king and the effective loss of any independent English national identity as well.[18] Given Parliament’s continuing resistance to and delay in putting Union into effect, it is understandable that James would eventually tire of playing the roles of political bigamist and two-bodied monster in which he had cast himself in his initial attempts to promote Union. Worse, as James himself noted in his speech to the Union committee on 20 April 1604, “the question of the union had become alehouse talk” within a month of the speech in which he had conjured up these figures; vivid and memorable as these figures are, it seems likely that knowledge of the scandalous roles James had given himself in it must soon have become a little too common among his English subjects at large.[19] And so starting in late 1606 and early 1607, James began to disseminate a different matrimonial configuration for the Union project, one elaborated in terms of the equally long-traditional figure of the king, not as the husband of the realm, but as the father of the nation. Into this traditional figure, James introduced a novel matrimonial variation of his own to make it suitable for the promotion of Union: that this father was currently arranging a marriage between his two national children, England and Scotland. James broadcast this idea by arranging actual marriages to serve as living figures of Union (with court masques to celebrate them), by giving sympathetic pamphleteers free rein to present it to the nation, and by presenting it to Parliament himself in a speech of 31 March 1607 which, as with his 19 March 1604 speech, was promptly printed for the consumption of his English subjects at large.[20]
Skin Sca pes A Photographic Travel on the surface of sensuality by someone in the world wide web
The most important of these court marriages in helping to negotiate a decisive transition to this new mode of promoting Union was the one James arranged between the Scottish Lord Hay and the only daughter and heir of the English Lord Denny on Twelfth Night 1607. Even without poetic elaboration, this marriage could serve as a living figure of the matrimonial Union of James’s Scottish “son” and his English “daughter” as arranged by their “father” James, with all the enduring institutional implications of this political Union likewise figured by Honora Denny’s status as an English heiress. Hold on reading, please While many other practical obstacles to Union were debated by James’s first Parliament in the three sessions that took place between its opening in March 1604 and its dissolution in July 1607, the principal sticking point throughout this long period of debate remained Parliament’s fear that Union would necessarily entail the abolition of its long-established institutional privilege to protect the liberties of the subjects it represented, and hence a ceding of potentially tyrannical power to the king and the effective loss of any independent English national identity as well.[18] Given Parliament’s continuing resistance to and delay in putting Union into effect, it is understandable that James would eventually tire of playing the roles of political bigamist and two-bodied monster in which he had cast himself in his initial attempts to promote Union. Worse, as James himself noted in his speech to the Union committee on 20 April 1604, “the question of the union had become alehouse talk” within a month of the speech in which he had conjured up these figures; vivid and memorable as these figures are, it seems likely that knowledge of the scandalous roles James had given himself in it must soon have become a little too common among his English subjects at large.[19] And so starting in late 1606 and early 1607, James began to disseminate a different matrimonial configuration for the Union project, one elaborated in terms of the equally long-traditional figure of the king, not as the husband of the realm, but as the father of the nation. Into this traditional figure, James introduced a novel matrimonial variation of his own to make it suitable for the promotion of Union: that this father was currently arranging a marriage between his two national children, England and Scotland. James broadcast this idea by arranging actual marriages to serve as living figures of Union (with court masques to celebrate them), by giving sympathetic pamphleteers free rein to present it to the nation, and by presenting it to Parliament himself in a speech of 31 March 1607 which, as with his 19 March 1604 speech, was promptly printed for the consumption of his English subjects at large.[20]
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Photos Silke Weinsheimer
Fashion Copy & Taste
Styling Jennifer Hahn
Boxershorts: H&M
$6.00
Pizza with olives: Speedypizza
$4.00
Facts about the human skin: Minthostachys is a genus of the mint family Lamiaceae currently comprising seventeen species of aromatic scandent shrubs.[1] It occurs along the Andes from Northern Venezuela through Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia to Central Argentina. The plants are valued by the local population for their content in essential oils, mostly pulegone and menthone, but also limonene, carvone, carvacrol, thymol and similar substances. They are used as condiments, medicinally against illnesses of the respiratory and digestive systems, and traditionally for the protection of stored tubers against pests, especially in Southern Peru.[2] In Argentina and Peru, the essential oils are extracted commercially on a larger scale, and at least locally, this has lead to overexploitation in recent years. Argentine researchers are looking for ways to protect Minthostachys or to take it into cultivation to meet increasing demand. The best known species are Minthostachys mollis distributed from Venezuela to Bolivia and Minthostachys verticillata of Argentina. Many species have a relatively restricted distribution but are locally common, like Minthostachys acutifolia around La Paz and Minthostachys ovata in central Bolivia. The common names used by the people of the Andes usually do not differentiate between species, but vary by region. In Ecuador, the genus is called tipo or poleo, in northern Peru chancua, from central Peru to Bolivia muĂąa, and in Argentina peperina is the most frequently used name. [edit]References 1 Schmidt-Lebuhn, A.N. (2008). Revision of the genus Minthostachys (Labiatae). Memoirs of the New York Botanical Garden 98. 2 Schmidt-Lebuhn, A.N. (in press). Ethnobotany, biochemistry and pharmacology of Minthostachys (Lamiaceae). Journal of Ethnophar macology. [1] 3 Noticias Ambientales de la Provincia de CĂłrdoba: Escasez de peperina, el yuyo cordobĂŠs
Boxershorts: H&M
$6.00
Pizza with olives: Speedypizza
$4.00
Socks: American Apparel
$12.00
Sneakers: Converse
$120.00
Button: Starstyling
$10.00
Jacket: Hilfiger Denim
$190.00
Chemise: Marc O’Polo
$120.00
Scarf: Marc O’Polo
$79.00
Jeans-Shorts: Twenty8twenty $179.00
Socks: American Apparel
$12.00
Sneakers: Converse around $120.00
Text by Amanda Petrusich
Music Scarlett Johannson asks Tom Waits
Photos by somebody
Socks: American Apparel
$12.00
Sneakers: Converse around $120.00
Tom Waits’ latest endeavor, Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers, and Bastards, is a three-disc compendium of 30 new tracks and a mess of hardto-find soundtrack pieces, all organized into three categories that manage to accurately encapsulate more than three decades of brutal noisemaking. Like most of America, I’m so convinced that Tom Waits exists in a world populated only by freight trains and barmaids, rodeo clowns and shortwave radios, that to hear him say “Chamillionaire” is about as jarring as a car crash: Here, Waits opens up about his songwriting, Scarlett Johannson, and his own glorious artifice. Scarlett Johannson: Have you ever thought about living anywhere besides California? Tom Waits: I’ve been around. Chicago, New Orleans, New York, L.A., Portland [Oregon]. California has the public image, the land of milk and honey. It has one of those images that’s completely and utterly removed from what it really is. Like all great fantasies. Where are you calling from? Brooklyn. Everybody’s from Brooklyn! We lived in New York for a while. About 14 different places in two years. Do you ever miss it? I don’t know. Sometimes when I go back I go, oh man, I remember this. The energy of it. It’s like a big dragon. But I’m a hothead. I wasn’t well-suited for the temperament of that town. I need something that’s a little more – not as volatile. I get in arguments with shop owners. And slowly, all the little businesses in our neighborhood, the lights started going out and I had to go further and further from home to get supplies. I’m better off here in the sticks where I can’t hurt myself. You have a fine reputation for haunting California’s salvage yards and pawn shops. What attracts you to certain objects? I’m interested in things when I don’t know what they are. Like “Hey, Ray, what the hell is this?” Oh, that’s lipstick from the 1700s, that’s dog food from the turn of the century, that’s a hat from World War II. I’m interested in the minutiae of things. Oddities. Do you collect anything? Like little ceramic dogs? I collect instruments. It’s ongoing. There’s a blues singer in Clarksdale, Mississippi named Super Chikan who makes the most beautiful-looking guitars out of oil cans and other bits of hardware that he paints and strings. He has a guitar made out of a toilet seat that he calls the Shit-tar. Do you ever make your own instruments? I have friends who are builders who make instruments. “Alternative sound sources” is the technical way of saying it, which could really be anything – maybe something you found along the side of the road. I think hardware stores can be fascinating if you go in there with a mallet! I look for things that are left of center, something you’ve only seen your whole life, but never heard. Hit it! With a stick! I have a guitar made out of a 2x4 that I bought in Cleveland. You know, in Iraq, you can’t have a guitar in the window of a music store because it’s too sexy. You know, the curves. So I could go over there with these 2x4 guitars and really take the country by storm.
Do you have a favorite instrument? I have a Chamberlain I bought from some surfers in Westwood many years ago. It’s an early analog synthesizer, it operates on tape loops. It has 60 voices – everything from galloping horses to owls to rain to every instrument in the orchestra. Including the human voice [Waits sings a scale in “synthesizer voice”]. Eleven-second samples! I like primitive things. I’ve used that a lot over the years on different recordings. I have a Stroh violin. Stroh is the guy who created the violin with the horn attached to the bridge. This was around when orchestras played primarily in pits. In old theaters, the string players would complain that they couldn’t be heard in the balcony. So this guy created the Stroh violin, which was a way of amplifying sound before electricity. It sounds almost like the violin is coming out of the horn of a 78 record player. He made Stroh basses, Stroh cellos. He even has a one-string Stroh violin. Those are interesting. I used one on a record called Alice. Do you have a favorite sound? Bacon. In a frying pan. If you record the sound of bacon in a frying pan and play it back it sounds like the pops and cracks on an old 33 1/3 recording. Almost exactly like that. You could substitute it for that sound.
“My favorite sound? Bacon. In a frying pan.” Tom Waits
There is a long human history of seeking impure sounds. In his book Deep Blues, Robert Palmer talks about the influence of West African music on early American blues, and how so many African musicians aggressively eschewed clean sounds – by attaching pieces of tin to their drums, humming into flutes, things like that. Do you have a natural affinity for sloppier tones? I think it lets you incorporate your own voice into the voice of the instrument. By nature, I think we’re all curious and looking for mutations all the time. It’s not peculiar to me. I guess it’s a question of taste. How do you like your eggs?
You sing Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski on this record. To what extent has literature influenced your music? I’m usually more concerned with how things sound than how they look on the page. Some people write for the page and that’s a whole other thing. I’m going for what it sounds like right away, so it may not even look good on the page. But I’m still a word guy. I’m drawn to people who use a certain vernacular and communicate with words. Words are music, really. I mean, people ask me, “Do you write music or do you write words?” But you don’t really, it’s all one thing at its best. Sometimes when you’re making songs you just make sounds, and the sounds slowly mutate and evolve into actual words that have meaning. But to begin with, most people who make songs just start out with [Waits makes noises]. Sure, and the Beats were very musical writers. And the Beats were performing their work in clubs, shouting their work. That’s another element of it.
What was it like touring with your son. He’s been playing drums since he was eight. He’s a big strong guy, taller than me. He’s a giant of a man. He has a lot of interest in music, he does beat-boxing and listens to music and it stays with him. He was playing with old-timers – he’s only 21. With families and music, you’re usually looking for something that can make you unique. And it can be hard to find that. But he was excellent, it was terrific playing together, as you’d imagine it would be. You learn as much from your kids as they learn from you.
“I married a record collection.”
What sorts of movie roles are you attracted to? Tom: I do some acting. And there’s a difference between “I do some acting” and “I’m an actor.” People don’t really trust people to do two things well. If they’re going to spend money, they want to get the guy who’s the best at what he does. Otherwise, it’s like getting one of those business cards that says about eight things on it. I do aromatherapy, yard work, hauling, acupressure. With acting, I usually get people who want to put me in for a short time. Or they have a really odd part that only has two pages of dialogue, if that. The trouble is that it’s really difficult to do a small part in a film, because you have to get up to speed – there are fewer scenes to show the full dimensions of your character, but you still need to accomplish the same thing that someone else has an hour and a half to do. In terms of making them anatomically correct. And you have to make sure that you’re working with people who you really trust and admire and feel safe with. That’s not always the case, and if you want to stay working, you have to take chances a lot of time. It seems like that’s the same case with making records. How different do you think your music would be if you hadn’t married Kathleen Brennan? It’s so hard to say. Everything would be different. She’s a remarkable collaborator and we have a real rapport, and that’s really what anybody who is working with anybody else is looking for. It clicks. I’m interested in the way songwriting works in your home. Less the artistic process, more the physical one – do you and Kathleen write in the same room, do you snack, do you bicker? Sometimes we go in the car, just take the tape recorder and go on a long trip. Sometimes we just sit around the piano – if we have a deadline, it tightens up the perimeters of the whole thing. We work independently and we work together. If both of you know the same stuff, one of you is unnecessary. Hopefully we’re coming at it from different angles. But I don’t really know how it works. It’s one of those things where you can’t really take it apart.
Tom Waits about Kathleen Brennan – his wife.
The new record is such an interesting compendium of your work, giving equal weight to all sides of your sound. How did you decide to organize the songs into brawlers, bawlers, and bastards? It was just a big pile of songs. It’s like having a whole lot of footage for a film. It needs to be arranged in a meaningful way so it will be a balanced listening experience. You have this big box with all these things in it and it doesn’t really have any meaning until it’s sequenced. It took some doing. There’s a thematic divide, and also pacing and all that. There are different sources to all these songs and they were written at different times. Making them work together is the trick. Was there a song where it wasn’t immediately evident to you which disc it would fit best on? Yeah. But, you know, ballads went on one – we wanted to call it Shut Up and Eat Your Ballads. The blues and gospel stuff seemed to go together. And the more uncategorizable stuff wound up on Bastards. That’s the stuff that’s spoken word. After a while it made sense. “Form three lines. You’re in the wrong line, buddy.”
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Exist.