The Transom Review Volume 9/Issue 3 Gregory Whitehead June 2009 (Edited by Sydney Lewis) Intro from Jay Allison If you're experiencing toxic levels of radio as headline delivery system, exploiter of consensus or conflict, or sonic carpet... may we suggest some Gregory Whitehead as antidote. Gregory is a radio philosopher, passionately discouraged with the medium and still wondering at the power of the disembodied voice. His work is dark and theatrical, every beat and syllable, every plosive and fricative... considered and placed just so. In his Transom Manifesto, he writes in the middle of a sentence, "I imagined and then documented." First offered on the eve of Gregory's appearance at Boston's Megapolis Festival, check out his "Let Us Lay On Splendid Nights," with tips of the hat to Orpheus, Gaston Bachelard, and Allison Steele the Nightbird. About Gregory Whitehead Gregory Whitehead is the creator of radio plays, documentary essays, voiceworks, castaways, soundscapes and acoustic adventures that have roamed the American psyche for the past twenty five years. He is the co-editor of Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio and the Avant-Garde, and the author of numerous essays that explore radio dramaturgy, poetics and philosophy. Gregory Whitehead He is presently at work on a major project exploring voiced memories of the American dream, and on a number of plays for radio and live stage. For more information: http://www.gregorywhitehead.com/GregoryWhitehead/frontispiece.html The Transom Review – Vol.9/ Issue 3 LET US LAY ON SPLENDID NIGHTS Wings of Eros, Birds of Prey Way back in 1951, the philosopher Gaston Bachelard published an obscure little essay titled Radio and Reverie, a gentle manifesto that called for radio stations to hire creative radiomakers. These “psychic engineers” would venture forth into the logosphere and craft sublime soundscapes. Listeners would then experience deep reverie through acoustic immersion in nocturnal worlds of their own choice. Bachelard writes: “Radio really does represent the total daily realization of the human psyche.” Thus the psychic engineer would enter into the daily flows of broadcast representation, to sound out and give voice to the prevailing spirit of the times, and to offer broadcasts that might bridge alienation while opening up an “axis of intimacy”. Through time, such sound bridges would serve to reconnect listeners, one by one, to the “power of the Gaston Bachelard, Radio Reverist fantastic”. Even though much of the rest of the essay becomes lost in somewhat misty ideas of archetypes and the unconscious, I love Bachelard’s conception of a psychic engineer because it implies a creative practice for radio that is as subtle and complex as the medium herself. First, the idea stirs reflection upon the experience of Psyche, a mortal born with a beauty to rival that of Aphrodite. One day, she is carried away by Zephyr into a dark forest where, that same night, she will become the involuntary but not unwilling lover of Eros. Aphrodite, wild with jealousy, attempts to put Psyche in her place by treating her as a lowly errand girl, and sending her on what Aphrodite hopes will be a terminal journey into the Underworld. Zeus eventually intervenes, and Psyche then joins that small group of humans who may take a place among the immortals, as wife to winged Eros. Psyche soon gives birth to a daughter, Voluptua, who is and does exactly as she sounds. I sense the spirit of radio everywhere in Psyche’s story: in the capricious winds; in sparky frictions between erotic possession and the treacherous underworld; in the dull bass throb between mortality and eternity; in the time zone of Night, whose son is deadly Thanatos, who is himself the twin of Sleep; and in the birth of sensual delight, because the art of 2 The Transom Review – Vol.9/ Issue 3 radio gives nothing, and sustains nothing, and creates nothing, unless it can deliver significant jolts of pleasure along the way. Psyche demands it! http://transom.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/transom1new.mp3 Every Radiocast Cuts Both Ways The word “engineer” in this context is equally as suggestive, as it descends from the Latin ingenium, a term that invokes both pure mental power and its pragmatic application to the world. Alas, the first engineers were more concerned with crushing heads than with stimulating the imagination. Their first engines were weapons such as ballistas and trebuchets, designed to launch hard and heavy projectiles into or over the walls of cities under siege. Sometimes, the invading army would hurl rotting corpses into the cities. These were intended to spread disease among the citizens, giving us an early and perversely ingenious incidence of biological warfare. Radio would seem fully present in this image as well, since the illuminative promise of ingenuity mixes inside every wave with the power of oblivion. For every broadcast that heals wounds and creates community, there is another that foments violence and hatred as shock jocks lob rotting corpses into the midst of their grunting mobs, not to infect them, but to feed their rage. Ancient Shock Jock Anyone setting out to make something within the medium must be alert to these crosscurrents, for radiophonic space is as complex and contradictory as the human psyche; one twitch of the finger, and the radio of benevolent community mutates, or mutilates, into a radio of command, control and dispersion. How could it be otherwise, in a medium that gives voice to ubiquity, and a powerful pulse to thin air, vibrations that seem to resonate and replicate with the voices of the gods? The primal potency of such air born resonance has not been lost on those who fabricate ever more ingenious engines of destruction in the present. Sound waves have been weaponized in a variety of forms, each designed to mess with the psyches of designated adversaries, and eventually to debone them, in every sense of the joint. One might well imagine an ultimate weapon in the final stages of development in some dark corner of the Pentagon -- code name: Joshua. When the word “glory” is transmitted at the proper infrasonic frequencies by the weapon Joshua, a simulacrum of the Voice of God (VOG) explodes onto the battlefield. Exposed psyches collapse into the sucking 3 The Transom Review – Vol.9/ Issue 3 black hole created by deep vibrations, and the bones of warriors and citizens alike are instantly transformed into jelly. http://transom.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/transom2.mp3 Sad Songs From Severed Heads What about casting Orpheus as the prototype for a radiophonic psychic engineer? Orpheus, whose voice and lyre, an ancient acoustic engine invented by Hermes, could reshape the landscape by changing the course of rivers, and by luring trees and stones into nocturnal dances. Even the hardened hearts of the immortals were moved by his song. Like Psyche, Orpheus survived his journeys through the Underworld, protected, it seems, by the resplendent tonal quality of his resonating chambers. As companion to Jason and the Argonauts, Orpheus served as a sort of sound cancellation machine, neutralizing the dangerous transmissions from the island of the Sirens, who, like so many radios, promised wisdom and delivered oblivion. Later, Orpheus, his own psyche severely damaged by the loss of his beloved Eurydice, refuses to sing in praise of Dionysus. During the frenzied climax of a Bacchic ritual, a Thracian girl gang known as The Maenads tear off his head, and toss it in the river, together with his lyre. The head continues to sing as it floats down river to the island of Lesbos, where it was pulled from the water by another girl gang, The Nymphs. They place the head at … the center of a shrine, where I would like to imagine it Psychic Engineer in Hot Water still sings, at least when the wind is right. A few years ago, with Orpheus in mind, I imagined and then documented an exclusive social club in New England, founded during a Gilded Age previous to the one that has recently imploded. In the course of excavating for the club house, workmen had unearthed two buried Mohawk skulls. During the summer season, these skulls, given the nonsense nicknames “Mahkenoose” and “Pompynoose”, were placed upon the end stakes of the croquet court, a macabre trophy tradition that was then passed down from one generation to the next. 4 The Transom Review – Vol.9/ Issue 3 When players strike the stakes with their balls, they shout out the names of the two skulls, to the great amusement of those watching from the veranda. When such sounds floating through the late summer evenings of this elegant nihilism, my psyche longs for Orphic narcosis. http://transom.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/transom3new.mp3 American Noir Is So Fantastic In 1962, when nobody except his own parents had ever heard of Jean Baudrillard, Daniel Boorstin, who would later become head librarian for the Library of Congress, and could never be mistaken for a fashionable theorist of the simulacrum, wrote that “the American lives in a world where fantasy is more real than reality, where the image has more dignity than its original. We hardly dare face our bewilderment, because our ambiguous experience is so pleasantly iridescent, the solace of belief in the contrived reality is so thoroughly real." I have inhabited the Grand American Delusion for my entire life: a country where evidence is routinely fabricated to justify grave and frequently lethal actions by corporations and governments; where private and public securities are exposed as elaborate Ponzi schemes; where public discourse and reportage become ever more subordinate to entertainment and obfuscation; where everybody is a star in their very own reality TV show; and where any idea of transparency begins to sound quaint, which was, as you recall, the same word used by a former United States Attorney General, regarding the provisions of the Geneva Convention as they pertain to prisoners of war. Not Jean Baudrillard The fact is, in order to build our perpetually shining City On A Hill, we have created one bewildering blood bath after another, with the killing invariably executed in the name of God, for we are nothing if not righteous. That is our psychic core. What sort of radio casts forth from such a dark idealism? And what sort of radio casts forth when events force us, without warning, to face our bewilderment? Consider the case of world famous hedge fund manager Sir Harry Hammersmith. In the summer of 2007, he announces a legacy gift of one billion dollars to his Alma Mater, an elite private college south of Boston called Plymouth Mather. He plans to deliver the fabulous gift in person, arriving by parachute to land at the dead center of the college quad. 5 The Transom Review – Vol.9/ Issue 3 Local dignitaries and the global media gather at the appointed hour. Harry does indeed fall from the sky, but there are a few little glitches: he has no parachute; he is stark naked; and he has no head. Within minutes of his body striking the turf, global markets crash, and the world plummets into the Greatest Depression. In this scenario, “pleasant iridescence” becomes terribly hard to come by, as you can hear in the voice of the Plymouth Mather president, Dr. Walter Woodworthy. http://transom.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/transom4.mp3 Night Birds Know How to Hunt Returning to Bachelardian reverie, my favorite passage in his essay proposes “that if our psychic radio engineers are poets concerned for the welfare of humankind, tenderness of heart, the joy of loving, and love’s voluptuous trust, then they will lay on splendid nights for their listeners.” Possibly I am so attracted to this idea because I first fell in love with radio during late solitary nights as a twelve year old boy, with a cheap transistor under my pillow, and the great Allison Steele, the Night Bird, on the air. It could be that I was still unaware of the beauty of the medium and was simply in love with her voice, and her irresistible invitation, “come fly with me”. The Night Bird, whose splendid flights of fancy, delivered with cool precision along an axis of intimacy, provided welcome adventures for my adolescent ears. Come Fly With Me In 2003, partially in hommage to my comforting first encounters with a quietly seductive disembody, I imagined a young psychic engineer from New England. She spends time as an intern at WGBH, but soon becomes frustrated by the byzantine rules of a game she neither anticipated nor wanted to play. So she packs her bags and heads out west, where she starts a one person low power pirate station called WDOA, in the naked state of Nevada, the W and her pronunciation of “Nevada” emblems of her stubbornly rhizomatic New England roots. Her name is Ava Ravenella, the Hungry Raven, live to air on WDOA: Dead On Arrival, Deserts Of America, Degenerate Or Artful? The choice is yours Route Five Zero, as Ava flies into the tense borderlands of the American psyche, over and out into the desert night, a flight that swoops down into the final verse of The Loneliest Road theme song, as performed by The Books, who are themselves remarkable psychic engineers: 6 The Transom Review – Vol.9/ Issue 3 A Hungry Raven in the sky a wounded rabbit, slow to die Bones piled in the sun America has all the fun http://transom.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/transom5.mp3 Note on sources: The Bachelard essay is included in his book, The Right to Dream. For more about the power of the fantastic, find a copy of the extraordinary little book by Allen S. Weiss, Phantasmic Radio. The audio excerpts are from Bring Me The Head of Philip K. Dick (2009); Project Jericho (2005), produced in collaboration with Mark Burman; The Club (2006); The Day King Hammer Fell From the Sky (2008); The Loneliest Road (2003). Related Links: Gregory Whitehead: http://www.gregorywhitehead.com/GregoryWhitehead/frontispiece.html Megapolis Festival: http://megapolisfestival.org/blogalogadingdong/ Deep Wireless: http://www.naisa.ca/deepwireless/ Resonance FM: http://resonancefm.com/ The Books: http://www.thebooksmusic.com/ Ubu Web Sound: http://ubu.clc.wvu.edu/sound/index.html free103point9: http://www.free103point9.org/ Radia Network: http://radia.fm/ 7 The Transom Review – Vol.9/ Issue 3 ________________________________________________________________________ Comments milutis - Apr 14, 2009 - #1 when the shepherd Aristaeus wondered why his bees were suffering, he went to his Nymph mother, who told him he needed to wrestle Proteus, who in turn told him the story of Orpheus, whose end was precipitated by his nymph mother, at which point he was told to propitiate Orpheus with a dead bull carcass out of which bees spontaneously regenerated . . . a plan for the regeneration of radio??? or the state of the art. Joe Gregory Whitehead - Apr 14, 2009 - #2 I would say that I have never been more ENcouraged by the medium, as it exists in various undertones and sub strata, though it is true, I am also DIScouraged by most of what I hear on mainstream airwaves, including those which remain nominally “public”. I used to think the absence of cultural ambition reflected a crisis of politics trumping poetics, but I’ve come to hear it as a plain vanilla crisis of the imagination, and inside them apples, as a crisis of philosophy. So forgive me the scary P word — but we need to talk about it. And we can also talk about directing voices, or why there is so little space for radio plays in the USA, or about the relationship between music and stories (that’s an Orpheus question). Or even what happens to the whole notion of “public” when everything goes digital? Do we want to let this happen? From Third Coast, to Resonance FM, to Megapolis, to Deep Wireless to La Radia, to Radiophonic Creation Day, to Acousmatic Theater and on and on: I know there is abundant energy out there to create something new, whether a new sort of network, or a new sort of radio vibe, and if it takes a bull’s carcass to get there, so be(e) it! 8 The Transom Review – Vol.9/ Issue 3 ________________________________________________________________________ miguel - Apr 15, 2009 - #3Hi Gregory, I’ve worried for a long time about the lack of room in public radio for creative work. You hear little things here and there every once in a while. But overall it appears that public radio exists in a very restricted space, with restrictive rules, and with a certain attitude (not a good one) towards those who don’t understand or get (or want to get) those guidelines. But then there is the question of… why even think of public radio as a place where creative radio should happen? That’s one question… but I have another one for you: How do you find the energy and inspiration to keep creating in such a hostile environment? ________________________________________________________________________ Gregory Whitehead - Apr 15, 2009 - #6 I can say that there are plenty of *listeners* out there who are very hungry for new sorts of radio play (whether docs or fiction, or hybrids), and their response is usually enough to keep me going. Plus, I guess I’m just plain stubborn in my passion for the pure beauty of la radia, even when she’s dragged into the trenches. Good collaborators help, too (people like Mark Burman, The Books, and my remarkable ensemble of actors, who have taken radio voicing into entirely fresh territory). The tightness in the system is just a symptom of the more general crisis of American imagination, psyche, spirit. There are two possible resolutions: increased tightness to the point of suffocation or a rejuvenated spirit of open experimentation and renewal. What sorts of attitudes have you witnessed, in response to proposals for more creativity? When I give master classes, I encounter all sorts of talent (conceptual, acoustic, literary) from young potential audio artists or radiomakers, but sadly, they generally end up doing something else within a year or two, because there is no place for them to go. (Web audio is beginning to change that, but it will take time to incubate a new kind of network, and also to address issues of providing adequate payment for high quality work.) It would be so incredibly easy for every public radio station in the country to offer the position of an artist-in-residency, or “resident psychic engineer”, whose sole purpose would be to push and cross boundaries, and to offer moments of radiophonic invention, humor and pleasure. 9 The Transom Review – Vol.9/ Issue 3 It would not be an expensive project, certainly not in proportion to the bloated salaries of management. I would be very happy to help define such a role, and in recruiting, and giving guidance. Any takers out there? ________________________________________________________________________ Justin - Apr 15, 2009 - #4GW, I think (hope) we all can see the value in someone creating these longer-form theatrical radio productions with some heft, but what is the best way to absorb them? Long gone are the days of the family sitting around a radio on a cold, dark night, hanging on every last word and sound effect until the however bitter climax, in lieu of disparate visual media (tv, movies, videogames) and a general lack of communal ‘ingestion’ in a public setting — does the listening habits of the modern world, and WHO you think is listening, affect the way you construct a radio play? Gregory Whitehead - Apr 16, 2009 - #12 Justin, oh yes, excellent points, and thanks for those questions. I never expect to replicate that old image of the ear bent to the proscenium radio box, which was probably apocryphal in any sense. That’s why my plays (and longer form docs) are structured as three to five minute episodes, and there is plenty of circularity as well, offering lots of entrances and exits. (This has been true since Dead Letters, dated 1984!) That’s also why I try to use very familiar formats like talk shows and interviews, so listeners can at least relax within a familiar format, even if I fully intend to invite them into some fairly twisted places. As you know, I also love short “castaways” that can slip in anywhere. I’ve done dozens of 1-10 minute docs or mock docs, and these frequently end up being remixed or bouncing all over the place in webland, all of which is fine with me. (creative commons) The detail I put into longer form composition is there to honor the space, and to honor my actors and musicians, but I also know that radio is a lo fi medium, often used on the run or in the bath. In fact, I love the idea of hooking ears that don’t really want to “go there”, and I have a whole file of letters and emails from people who pulled off some highway or another to have a listen. It’s a mistake to take the current media fads or fashions entirely for granted (including the brevity fetish), because things change in changing circumstances, and in a hurry. There are some who say Facebook and Tweets are the future. If they’re right, well, we are toast. But I don’t think they are right — and I come into very frequent contact with other appetites, other needs. 10