Friday The Thirteenth: Mask

"One of the principal ethnographic mysteries is conceded to lie in the general use of masks in primitive society. An extreme and even religious importance is attached everywhere to these instruments for metamorphosis. They emerge in festivals - an interregnum of vertigo, effervescence, and fluidity in which everything that symbolizes order in the universe is temporarily abolished so that it can later re-emerge. Masks, always fabricated secretly and destroyed or hidden after use, transform the officiants into gods, spirits, animal ancestors, and all types of terrifying and creative supernatural powers. (...) The eruption of phantoms and strange powers terrifies and captivates the individual. He temporarily reincarnates, mimics, and identifies with these frightening powers and soon, maddened and delerious, really believes that he is the god as which he disguised himself, cleverly or crudely, in the beginning. The situation has now become reversed. It is he who now inspires fear through his possessing this terrible and inhuman power". Roger Caillois, "Man, Play And Games".


"Everything behind the mask is mysterious. When the mask is taken seriously, as in the cases we are discussing here, no-one must know what lies behind it. A mask expresses much, but hides even more. Above all it separates. Charged with a menace which must not be precisely known - one element of which, indeed, is the fact that it cannot be known - it comes close to the spectator, but, in spite of this proximity, remains clearly separated from him. It threatens him with the secret dammed up behind it. Unlike a face, there are no passing changes in which it can be interpreted, and so he suspects and fears the unknown that it conceals.
(...)
The true mask is something, which never changes, but remains permanently and unmistakably itself, a constant in the continual flux of metamorphosis. The mask is perfect because is stands alone, leaving everything behind it in shadow; the more distinct it is, the darker everything else. No-one knows what may not burst forth from behind the mask. The tension between its appearance and the secret it hides can become extreme. This is the real reason for the terror the mask inspires". Elias Canetti, "Crowds And Power".


So what to make of "Friday the 13th"'s mask, which first appears at summer camp, a festive interregnum when parental order is temporarily abolished for teenagers? What to make of the mask, which stays the same, constant, whether it is at Camp Lake Crystal or in outer space? What to make of that utterly impersonal, expressionless ice-hockey mask? It's whiteness is a blank - not so much signifying nothing as signifying absence; absence of a human face; absence of a human head; absence of human speech; absence of human thought. Jason Voorhees is headless, the acephalous monster, the minotaur in Camp Lake Crystal's labyrinth.

Friday The Thirteenth Blog-A-Thon

This blog will be in communion with Jason Voorhees come Friday...

Five Times Weill

Burroughs performing "What Keeps Mankind Alive?"





Louis Armstrong performing "Mack The Knife"





The Young Gods performing "September Song"





Lotte Lenya performing "Seerauber Jenny"





Mina Mazzini performing "Surabaya Johnny"

Wold - Screech Owl

The poet and novelist Robert Graves, like Georges Bataille, was an amateur armchair anthropologist whose work strove to be "applied anthropology". Both were deeply influenced by Sir James Frazer's anthropological classic text "The Golden Bough" - though Bataille was much better informed about then-current anthropological theory than Graves.

Graves' 1948 book 'The White Goddess. A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth' unfolded the theory of the "mythopoetic". Graves proposed that all true poetry is an invocation of the White Goddess. The White Goddess, so he speculated, was a female deity whose worship dominated Europe and the Mediterranean in the Stone Age. Thus, for Graves all poetry is mythological in nature: "The function of poetry is religious invocation of the Muse; its use is the experience of mixed exaltation and horror that her presence excites". Graves described his paleolithic divine Muse as a Triple Goddess, having the aspects of a young girl, a nubile woman, and a crone. The three aspects are closely linked to the seasonal cycles of nature. Graves' theory, which can be described as ecocentric and eurocentric, has been quite influential, making an important contribution to the neopagan and wiccan spiritualities. Coil - a band with a neopagan outlook, after all - has been influenced by Graves' thinking.

And so has Saskatchewan Black Metal band Wold, whose 2006 album "Screech Owl" is reviewed in this post. On the album's sleeve, it is stated that it was recorded in "the mythopoetic lodge", and the album's lyrics seem to refer to the White Goddess in her aspect of the crone. The crone - or: the hag - is the aspect of the Goddess that is concerned with death, the underworld, winter, the waning moon. For Wold, the Screech Owl apparently is a symbol for the Crone Goddess. The lyrics for the fourth track (I wouldn't want to use the word 'song') are illustrative:

"Bitch, Badb,
Witch, old crone:
They call you the field hag,
Yours is the weed and the sage.

Barren one, yet you contain fertile depths,
Dry one, yet you are lush deep within,
They call you the field hag.
It is you who makes the pastures green.

Field hag I shall provide thou offering,
In obiesance I await your conjuring,
Tie her down when the moon is nice and round
Smoke her with smoke under moon and ember.

Old crone holds me down
Speaks of things profound:
"She must be immersed down in coulee,
When all is done bury her in prairy thrall".

The moon is full under autumn chill,
Capture the village maiden,
Perform the ritual of the Field Hag,
Rigid and cold as impending winter.

Hag's cruel grasp of ice:
Molestation by the cold night,
Break the earth with spade and wonder
There I bury her, in the coulee.

Village maiden rests in the coulee,
An offering to the field hag,
The old crone is wise and kind,
I give gifts to wise field hag.

When the snow queen departs,
The coulee begins its thaw,
The field hag unearths the village maiden
And uses her remains for magic".

Nonetheless, the usual signifiers for ecocentrism and neopagan inspiration in Black Metal music - melodic folk, acoustic guitars and frilly blouses like those worn by Ulver on Bergtatt's album artwork - are completely absent. In fact, Wold's sound world is as far from folk and Nature Goddesses as one can get: the music is a very harsh, dense and industrialized take on Black Metal, sounding like Gorgoroth or Darkthrone channeled by the clairaudient medium of Boyd Rice's Non or that of Whitehouse: not unnatural but anti-natural.

If there is a moon in Wold's sky, it is the violent electrical moon of the Italian Futurists; if Wold's forest floor is covered by snow, it is artificial snow, made from carbide dioxide; if fog hangs over Wold's prairy, it is noxious, made by polluting smoke machines, smelling of gasoline; if grass covers the prairy, it is made from needles; if there is wildlife, it is wildlife as built by Survival Research Laboratories, plate-armoured, steel-jawed, red-eyed, spitting out napalm, with mechanical manipulator arms brandishing various attachments such as claws and stabbing knives.

Thus, 'Screech Owl' in an unholy matrimony (inhierosgamos?) of White Goddess Paganism and Futurism.

Though it is interesting to see such hybrid monstrosities come into being, Wold did not entirely convince me on the musical level. I found Wold's noise a little bit too dense, the rhythms a little bit too monotonously harsh, the album as a whole too linear, too straight-ahead, not Free enough. Taken in small doses, the music is OK; but listening to the entire album wears me out before the end.







Post Scripta

Here is an interview with Wold's Crookedjaw (vocalist and "devices"), Opex (guitars and "drums"), and Obey ("scourge") at Pitchfork.
Here is a review of Wold's Screech Owl at Stylus magazine, by Stewart Voegtlin.
Here is a review of Wold's Screech Owl at Decibel Magazine.
Here is a post on Wold at "WFMU's Beware Of The Blog".
A post on Wold on S. Kobak's "Apples And Heroin" blog.

Black And Tan

In the Documents exhibition in the Hayward Gallery in London - the exposition which breathed life into this blog - the 1929 jazz film "Black And Tan" was projected as a part of the multimedia extravaganza. Duke Ellington plays himself in the lead role of the film, which was set in the legendary Cotton Club.

The Surrealist magazine Documents, which Georges Bataille edited, regularly featured articles on Jazz, amongst others an interview by Jacques Fray with Ellington (published in the 6th 1930 issue).

An article by Simon Baker in the Documents exhibition catalogue ("Undercover Surrealism") is critical of the use the surrealists of Bataille's little coterie made of Jazz as a Black Music. Baker is a Lecturer in Art History at the University of Nottingham, who has written extensively on Surrealism. In the catalogue, he writes that "(...) Bataille, Leiris and Rivière were neither willing nor able to engage with, or reflect, anything like an authentic 'black' perspective".

I feel I must take issue with this sentence. First of all, there's something odd about putting the word ' black' but not the word 'authentic' in parenthesis. One cannot both have one's cake and eat it, one cannot distance oneself from essentialism by putting the b-word in parenthesis while calling for authenticity of perspective at the same time. Second, Baker 'forgets' (now it's my time to use parenthesis) that Michel Leiris was an professional anthropologist who participated in many expeditions to Africa, whose work played a vital role in the abolition of slavery in French colonies and who was one of the first to sign the ‘Déclaration sur le droit à l’insoumission dans la guerre d’Algérie’, the 1960 manifesto supporting the fight against the colonial powers in Algeria - now if that's not engaging with a 'black' perspective, I don't know what is. And even if Bataille, Leiris and Bataille did also use the physical and intellectual excitement of Jazz as a weapon against the dreary utilitarian world of the French bourgeois, there can be little doubt their appreciation of the music was genuine.

Be that as it may, here is Black And Tan on YouTube. The three videos together form a complete 19 minute version.

Archie Shepp - Live At The Pan-African Festival

From the 21st of July to the 1st of August 1969 the First Pan-African Cultural Festival was held in Algiers, Algeria's capital.

The Festival was organized by the Organization of African Unity (OAU). Host to the festivities was "His Excellency, Houari Boumédienne, President of the Revolutionary Council, President of the Council of Ministers of the Algerian People's Democratic Republic, and current Chairman of the Conference of Heads of State and Government of the Organization of African Unity"; Algeria's military dictator, who had come to power in a blood-spattered coup. With the Icarian rhetorical style of Soviet-type bureaucrats, Mohamed Seddik Benyahia, the Algerian minister of Information (i.e. the minister of Censorship), said in the inaugural speech: "We have always believed that independence was not an end in itself, that it should promote the birth of new men, completely liberated and free. The task is to create, in each one of us, a new mentality, a new way of seeing the world (...)". In other words: national liberation should be the first step towards ideological brainwashing. The African Dream had already started to go sour.

The OAU was quite self-satisfied with the Festival: "Never before had African culture and arts given such a brilliant display of their richness, variety and genius. Above cultural and artistic achievements, this First Festival was the triumph of African solidarity and sense of purpose, the triumph of AFRICANITY". The OAU's satisfaction with the dislay of culture and arts was not entirely unjustified: the Festival had been able to attract quite a number of important jazz musicians from the United States. There, the Black Power movement had just come into being, and the rhetoric of that movement underlined Black African ethnic identity politics and Black nationalism - not unlike the propaganda of the Pan-African Festival. Thus, it was not illogical that militant American jazz-men would gravitate towards Algiers to participate in the Festival.

In the first (November 1969) issue of The Black Scholar, Nathan Hare wrote "A Report on the Pan-African Cultural Festival":

"There was a battle in Algiers in late July, with lighter skirmishes both old and new, and emerging signs of struggle which low lurk ready to boomerang around the world in the years (and months) to come. The troops came together, African generals and footsoldiers in the war of words and politics that splashed against the calm waters of the Mediterranean Sea - in the first Pan-African Cultural Festival - from everywhere in greater numbers than ever before; from San Francisco to Senegal, from Dakar to District of Columbia...

Hundreds of delegates came from thirty one independent African countries and representatives from six movements for African liberation, from Palestine to Angola-Mozambique and Congo-Brazzaville. And there were Black Panthers and 'black cubs' and old lions from the American contingent.

Secretly exiled Eldridge Cleaver chose this occasion to reveal his whereabouts, and expatriated Stokely Carmichael came with his South African-exiled wife, Miriam Makeba. Kathleen had her baby during the festival, and there was Panther Minister of Culture, Emory Douglass, inernational jazz artists such as Nina Simone and Archie Shepp, and Julia Hevre (the late Richard Wright's daughter, now living in Paris). LeRoi Jones (whose passport had been held up) could not get over, but there were: the serious and quietly charismatic young poet, Don L. Lee; Carmichael lieutenants, Courtland Cox and Charlie Cobb; Panther Chief of Staff, David Hilliard, who had to return to the United States before the Festival was over to take care of a crisis with the Chicago Police; and the compassionate black Parisian poet Ted Joans. There were many young black Americans who had not been invited but who had cared enough to piece together their own fare."

Archie Shepp performed at the Festival on the 29th and 30th of July 1969 and apparently he was in a pretty militant mood: "We are still black, and we have come back. Nous sommes revenus! We have come back to our land of Africa, the music of Africa. Jazz is a black power! Jazz is an African power! Jazz is an African music! We have come back" he harangued to the audience.

Shepp played together with a great line-up: Clifton Thornton on cornet, Grachan Moncur III on trombone, Dave Burrell on piano, ex-Sun Ra Arkestra member Alan Silva on bass, and rhythm revolutionary Sunny Murray on drums. The jazz-man played with a large group of Algerian and Tuareg musicians, possibly Diwan percussionists (Diwan is an Algerian style related to Moroccan Gnawa music).

Dave Burrell: "I was part of the all-star group that Archie Shepp put together to take to the Pan-African Festival in Algiers in 1969. (...) When I got to Africa and all of the countries were represented with their musicians, I heard drums all day and all night. Finally, it was our turn to play and they had us in a boxing ring in the town square. The boxing ring had an upright piano in it. I will never forget being led through the crowd to the boxing ring and getting in under the ropes. It was a very, very hot and intense evening. The music started to play itself and the people's energy made it easy. After that experience, we got to play in a hall opposite Oscar Peterson and Nina Simone. The French press was there from Paris and they talked about coming through Paris and doing a series of recordings. By this time, I was very spiritually charged".

The sessions were recorded and released by the French BYG/Actuel label under the title "Live At The Pan-African Festival". Given the conditions in which the recordings were made, it comes as no surprise that the sound quality is rather poor. Sunny Murray's drumming and Silva's double bass are completely drowned in the trance-inducing fury of the massed Algerian and Touareg percussion: drums, tambourines and karkabous (metallic castagnettes). Dave Burrell's piano can be heard only occasionally. The wind-instrument players - Shepp himself, Thornton and Moncur III - improvise their lines over the North-African rhythms, but the jazzmen's playing seems a little lost at the roaring sea of North-African percussion. Perhaps Free Jazz is too much of an individualistic music to comingle succesfully with the communal ecstatic music of Diwan. Let is not forget that Jazz is a Creole music, not a "pure" Black music, let alone an Arabic music. Shepp's "Live At The Pan-African Festival" mainly has value as a historical document.

Nevertheless, the Pan-African festival was an important moment in jazz history, as it provided a great inspiration to the musician's who attended it and who were invited to record in Paris by BYG Actuel's Jean Georgakarakos and Jean-Luc Young. The number of albums recorded after the Festival in Paris for the French label testifies to the impression that the occasion made on the musicians, and many albums directly or indirectly referenced the Festival: Clifford Thornton recorded an album called "Ketchaoua" (the name of the Algiers district where they had performed) on August 18th, 1969, and most of the album's titles explicitly pointed towards the Festival; Sunny Murray recorded an "Hommage to Africa" and Grachan Mocur III "New Africa"; the sleeve art of Archie Shepp's "Yasmina, A Black Woman" featured a North African photograph; and the last track of Shepp's "Blasé" was called "Touareg".

So perhaps it it a little too ungenerous to call "Live At The Pan-African Festival" "...mainly interesting as a historical document". Perhaps it is better to marvel at this intersection of decolonisation, Soviet-style dictatorships, Black Panthers, Free Jazz, Avant-Garde and Paris' May 1968 movement; and better to quote Michel Leiris for the second time in the blog: "As far as I am concerned, I love everything that presents this dimension of mixing, everything mixed blood, from sarcophagi dating from Roman times with faces of splendidly made-up women painted in the most realistic way to Fuegeans wearing European pants found in shipwrecks, not forgetting Alexandrine philosophy and the unmatchable elegance of Harlem negroes along the way”.

Meanwhile, the definitive history of the Pan-African Festival waits to be written.