The Argentines, the Portuguese and the Greeks (1923)

The Library of Congress has just unveiled the National Jukebox project, a streaming of its collection of historical recordings (thanks to Kirby Bell for flagging this). Naturally, my first search was for Greek music, and I discovered "The Argentine, the Portuguese and the Greeks," a 1920s song that expresses native anxieties about this particular ethnic immigrants (and the Armenians, too). The song seems to have been first recorded in 1920 by Nora Bayes (here), then in 1922 by Edward Meeker (here, w/lyrics), and finally by the Duncan Sisters in 1923, which is the version streamlined by the Library of Congress (here).

Rosetta and Vivian Duncan were a vaudeville duo from California. They began their careers as children performers and made their name in the racially charged Topsy and Eva routines. "The Argentines, the Portuguese and the Greeks" contains a mixed message of fear, envy and respect. It's perhaps the earliest example of Greek immigrants making it into American musical history. There are a few variations between the Bayes and Meeker versions, but I have transcribed the lyrics of the Duncan version. Take a listen.

Columbus discovered America in 1492
Then came the English and the French
The Scotchmen and the Jews
Then came the Dutch and the Irishmen
To help this country grow
And still they keep on coming
And now everywhere you go

There's the Argentines
And the Portuguese
The Armenians, and the Greeks
One sells the papers
The others shines the shoes
The other shaves the whiskers off your cheek.

When you ride again
On a subway train
Notice who has all the seats
Ah. They are all held by the Argentines
And the Portuguese
And the Greeks

Now there's a little flat
Where you hang your hat
Here’s a mystery I'll explain
The janitor is Irish,
The hall-boy is a goon
The elevator driver is a Dane
But who is the gent
That collects the rent
At the end of each four weeks
Ah. That is all done by the Argentines
And the Portuguese
And the Greeks

There's the Oldsmobile
And the Hupmobile
And the Cadillac and the Ford
Now these are the motors
That you and I can own
The kind that anybody can afford
But the Cunningham
And the Mercedes
And the Rolls-Royce Racing Prix
Ah. They are all owned by the Argentines
And the Portuguese
And the Greeks

Now there’s the Argentines
And the Portuguese
The Armenians, and the Greeks
They don't know the language
They don't know the law
Yet they vote in the country of the free
And the funny thing
When we start to sing
"My Country 'Tis of Thee"
None of us know the words
But the Argentines
And the Portuguese
And the Greeks

Now there’s the Argentines
And the Portuguese
The Armenians, and the Greeks
When we’re departed
Our souls above in heavenly peace
At the golden gate when the angels wait
We’ll be asking there for seats
And they’ll all be reserved by the Argentines
And the Portuguese And the Greeks

Kitchen Skyline

This is what the skyline of our kitchen bookcase looks like. It has been recently populated by my new Sirius satellite radio and all its messy appendages (antenna, plug, wires). Thanks to Santa for a new subscription to Sirius radio, which I had given up when we stopped the long-distance marriage and the commutes from rural places that lacked NPR. Having grown up in the age of radio, I get no satisfaction from internet alternatives like web radio or Pandora. For me the radio DJ's role has been more than a corporate playlist or a statistical formula. As a kid, I used to hide the radio under my pillow and steal some nightly moments of story-telling. When I was growing up, the radio DJ was an arbiter of taste and a transmitter of intelligence. DJ'ing at the college station was a true aspiration. For our Generation X, the small niche of alternative radio defined a self-invented cultural aristocracy whose membership defied class and other contingencies.

One of the skills that made DJ'ing a craft was assembling thematic unity across genres. Making smart and unexpected links runs against today's paradigm of market niches. Although one has to pay for it by monthly subscription, satellite radio still offers antiquated intelligence. Imagine listening to a radio show by Bob Dylan, where he chooses a string of songs based on a theme of choice (like water, or war). Sirius makes such an experience possible every week.

Although I listen to a lot of NPR, BBC, and CBC, most of the time I listen to music. My favorite channel right now is SIRIUS XM U, the indie rock station (it used to be called Underground). This week, for instance, Colin Meloy and John Moen of the Decemberists will take over the station, preview their unreleased new album, and spin their favorite songs. Many of the station's regular hosts are a new breed of blogger DJ like Brooklyn Vegan and Gorilla vs. Bear. Another station that I regularly listen to is First Wave for the sheer nostalgia of classic 80s New Wave. I also like Underground Garage produced and hosted by Little Steven (of Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band and the Sopranos). The station features some famous personalities like Kid Leo (a legend in the Cleveland music scene), Handsome Dick Manitoba (lead singer of classic 70s NYC punk band The Dictators), and Ko Melina (current garage scene in Detroit).

I'm also a huge fan of Classic Radio, a station that replays radio drama from the 40s and 50s. Where else can one listen to series like The Shadow, Dragnet, Philco Radio Time, or Lux Radio. And a day does not pass when I don't also tune into the channel devoted to Forties Swing. You might have guessed, my tastes are rather scattered (or eclectic if you want to spin them positively).

Rock in Athens 85'

On July 26-27, 1985, the ancient stadium of Athens hosted an interesting happening organized by the newly formed General Secretariat of Youth (Γενική Γραμματεία Νέας Γενιάς) and the French Ministry of Culture. Rock in Athens 85' was a two day New Wave rock festival, which was quite cutting edge for its time. Although major bands like the Rolling Stones had performed in the ancient stadium before (Apr. 17 1967), Rock in Athens was the first rock festival to ever take place in Greece. A New Wave festival at Kalimarmaro in 1985? How radical is that? But it makes little sense considering the lack of a following for New Wave in Greece at this time. A Heavy Metal festival would make sense, rising naturally from Greece's Hard Rock tradition. I can't be certain about my observations, since I wasn't present, but as a committed follower of New Wave, I was struck by the shortage of punks in the summers that I would visit Greece. My cousins, who followed music closely, would confirm these observations. I was a New Wave Greek-American looking for a scene in Greece. Sure, there was the punk band Panx Romana from 1977, singing "You Greeks! you are worms, and the Acropolis doesn't belong to you/Έλληνα είσαι σκουλίκι και η Ακρόπολη δε σου ανοίκει." And there were also anarchists squatting in Athens (less institutionalized and violent as they are today). And there was the store REMEMBER 77, on Adrianou 77 in Plaka (founded 1978), where I bought my first Creepers in 1991.

What makes Rock in Athens 85' peculiar is its sponsors. The festival was conceived by the Greek and French Ministries of Culture. It was a state event televised on national TV and hence totally different from festivals like Woodstock, Live Aid, Coachella, or the extremely successful Rockwave in Athens. Melina Merkouri, then Minister of Culture, was present. Priceless footage shows the grand Merkouri meeting the wild Nina Hagen (and her clean-cut mother) backstage. The General Secretariat of Youth was formed in 1982, soon after Andreas Papandreou's Socialist government won elections and tried to liberalize cultural policy that had been dominated by the conservative right and its family-tradition-religion priorities. Quoting the current website, the Secretariat's task was (and still is) "shaping, monitoring and coordinating the government policy for youth and its connection with society and social entities. In this way, Greece was harmonised with the european and international practice of high-level, self-sustained and integral government services aiming to public youth policies." We must also remember that, only two weeks earlier in the summer of 1985, Live Aid took place in London and Philadelphia. But this was a private venture, organized for famine relief in Ethiopia by Bob Geldof. Live Aid was the first concert to be televised in a global scale through satellite. As the interview with Boy George reveals, Culture Club did have a fan base already in Greece. But it seems that there was not enough of a fan base for each of the bands to appear individually. The festival garnered each group's small fan base into a guaranteed (and cheap) event. We must also consider that Rock in Athens 85' was not exclusively targeted to Greeks. Hoards of vacationing European and American youth attended. After all, Greeks flee Athens for the countryside in July and August.

Whatever the motivations of the concert may have been, it seems to have taken a great risk. As a result it did begin shaping cultural attitudes at least in so far as New Wave's popularity boomed. Nevertheless, the conflict between audience and performers, the awkwardness of the ancient stadium, the July heat are all evident in the videos. The performers included Culture Club, Depeche Mode, Stranglers, Nina Hagen, the Cure, Talk Talk, Telephone and a surprise guest star, the Clash (or at least the remnants of the Clash--Mick Jones and Nicky Headon had already left, and the Clash disbanded in 1986). According to eye-witness accounts, fights broke out between the police and fans outside the stadium. Italian tourists were somehow involved.

If anyone wants to watch the televised festival (ERT2), you can find it almost in its entirety (minus the Clash performance) on Youtube. Extremely interesting are the backstage interviews below. To see the Melina-Nina encounter, go to Part 3. In the spirit of Punk Archaeology, Youtube allows me to investigate an event that took place in the ancient Panathenaic stadium that was reconstructed for the first Olympics of 1896. The footage is source material for an ephemeral moment. The videos not only transport us to a different era of Greek cultural policy, but they offer evidence for an almost surreal confrontation between a primarily Anglo-American (and German) youth movement and a resisting Mediterranean. Just watch the accumulation of sweat on Boy George's face as the night progresses. Although I haven't studied the videos in great length, they also reveal tensions in a cultural dialogue. Note for example homosexual tensions between Boy George and the audience. I hope that the readers of this posting interested in the history of the Greek 1980s will offer closer reading and insights.

Interviews Part I



Interviews Part II



Interviews Part III




For those that want to watch the concert in its entirety, the following links will direct you to individual band performances:

July 26:
Telephone 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Culture Club 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11

July 27:
The Stranglers 11, 12, 13, 14, 15
Talk Talk 15, 16, 17, 18
The Cure 18, 19, 20, 21

Rural Modernism

Thanks to Marisa Midori, whose comment on my last posting led me to her blog Good Good that contains what might be already my favorite video of 2011. The video is taken from some unknown 1960s television performance. Googling inquiries have led to no leads as to the identity of the dancers or the TV show. It's the choreography of Dave Brubeck's 1961 hit "Unsquare Dancing."



The video represents an interesting 1920s/30s American tradition that tapped conservative agrarian rural life for radical cosmopolitan hipness. Consider, for instance, the paintings of Charles Sheeler that were inspired by vernacular architecture, my absolute favorite being "American Interior" (1934) at the Yale Art Gallery:

The greatest manifestation of this propensity is, of course, Martha Graham's choreography of Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring from 1944, with minimalist sets designed by Isamu Noguchi. Appalachian Spring is the subject of Studio 360s American Icons, see here for podcast.



And since, we are on the subject of rural modernism, one of the first books on my 2011 reading list is R. Tripp Evans' new biography Grant Wood: A Life. The creator of the iconic American Gothic (1930) at the Chicago Art Institute seems to have engaged in journeys of homo-eroticism that his conservative fans would never approve. See NYT review here. I'm glad that Grant Wood's Arnold Comes of Age (1930) is included in the National Portrait Gallery's exhibit, Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, which I'll be visiting with my students at the end of the month.

1930s Jazz Fonts

Thinking about 1930s fonts, I made some references to the effects of neon lights in the exaggeration of letter elements (the thick-and-thin). I hope that the image below will clarify this added three-dimensional factor that neon lights introduced. Although the particular font comes from a recent restoration, the building is a movie theater at Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. I was out there last Friday to organize a traveling venue for the Peschke show (the meeting went well beyond my greatest expectation). I will have more to say about this building -- since it was designed by the architect who shaped Franklin & Marshall's 1930s identity (William Lee is to F&M's 1930s what Charles Klauder is to F&M's 1920s).
So, neon lights came to the U.S. in the 1920s and took over the night-time urban landscape in the 1930s. Since it is "Franklin" that got me started on period fonts, let me turn to another Franklin case study, not Franklin Field, or Franklin & Marshall College, but Franklin the jazz nightclub in New York. I saw the Franklin's marquee while previewing Ken Burns' Jazz (2001) documentary, Episode 4: The True Welcome (1:12:29 min). What I tried to show with the sketch below is the placement of the letters against the neon tubes (shown in red).
Period photos of nightclubs like the Savoy, show the use of jazzy fonts to advertise performances. Look at the font below used at the Brooklyn Paramount to advertise "DUKE ELLINGTON and His Cotton Club Orchestra IN PERSON," also from Ken Burn's Jazz (Episode 4, 1:17:23 min).
I wouldn't want to argue that swing directly influenced typography. The swing nightlife, however, had a profound graphic effect in advertising shows and grabbing the passer's-by attention.

Astaire Shoes

In addition to the projected triple shadows, Fred Astaire's Bojangles dance in Swing Time (1935) has psychoanalytical potential from the point of view of shoes. I feel that this must be mentioned, in order to clarify Kevin Brady's recommended readings from Zizek, quoted below. The dance routine begins with a gigantic personification of Bojangles through the bottom of Astaire's shows. Above, we see the stage sets for the soles, the bow-tie, the collar, the hat, and the racially exaggerated lips. In the background, a model of Harlem can also be seen. As the dance progresses, Astaire spreads his gigantic legs to reveal his striped pants that lead to his crotch. The dancers spread his legs open, and the viewer realizes that they are superhuman props.

I've followed up some of the racial tensions of Astaire's Bojangles to encounter a critical impasse. Some critics find Astaire's blackface intolerable, while others see in this performance an honest commemoration. Astaire's "Bojangles of Harlem" is here paying direct tribute to a historical figure, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson (1878-1949), one of the most popular African-American dance performers. At one level, therefore, we must acknowledge that Astaire is paying direct tribute rather than stereotyping. He acknowledges Bill Robinson's contributions to dance innovations. Hence, in the racially offensive scale, Astaire is somewhere in the grayer zone.

Going back to shoes, I quote the Zizek passages that Kevin Brady sent me, along with a most recent conversation:

Hi Kostis,
I re-read your new blog post about Astaire and Bojangles. Something that strikes me about the illustrations you provide (- besides the odd (bizarre? anamorphic?) - in any event, a floor-up perspective in which all lines converge on crotch (genitals and anus): from that viewpoint, we're as far as possible from the humanizing (& subjectivizing) features of the face, and the heads-up, feet-down "architecture" of the human figure is subverted (recalling here surrealist photography of toes and upside-down faces - Man Ray 1920s?). The identification of the movie screen itself with the dance floor - the mediating surface between the audience and film worlds - is interesting - horizontal is vertical, as if to say, this is one kooky, topsy-turvy world!
Kevin Brady, December 6, 2010 10:06 AM

ZIZEK PASSAGES

"Andersen's fairy tale The Red Shoes, an impoverished young woman puts on a pair of magical shoes and almost dies when her feet won't stop dancing. She is only saved when an executioner cuts off her feet with his axe. Her still-shod feet dance on, whereas she is given wooden feet and finds peace in religion. These shoes stand for drive at its purest: an 'undead' partial object that functions as a kind of impersonal willing: 'it wants', it persists in its repetitive movement (of dancing), it follows its path and exacts its satisfaction at any price, irrespective of the subject's well-being. This drive is that which is 'in the subject more than herself': although the subject cannot ever 'subjectivize' it, assume it as 'her own' by way of saying 'It is I who want to do this!' it nonetheless operates in her very kernel." From “Love Beyond Law” by Slavoj Zizek, a paper was first published in the Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society 1 (1996), 160-61, as a review of Bruce Fink's The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).


"The fascinating thing about partial objects, in the sense of organs without bodies, is that they embody what Freud called “death drive”. Here, we have to be very careful. Death drive is not kind of a Buddhist striving for annihilation. I want to find eternal peace. I want… No. Death drive is almost the opposite. Death drive is the dimension of what in the Stephen King-like horror fiction is called the dimension of the undead, of living dead, of something which remains alive even after it is dead. And it’s, in a way, immortal in its deadness itself. It goes on, insists. You can not destroy it. The more you cut it, the more it insists, it goes on. This dimension, of a kind of diabolical undeadness, is what partial objects are about. The nicest example here for me, I think, is Michael Powell’s Red Shoes, about a ballerina. Her passion for dancing is materialised in her shoes taking over. The shoes are literally the undead object." From Slavoj Zizek, The Pervert’s Guide to the Cinema.

Astaire and Zizek

Friend and F&M colleague Kevin Brady sent a great response to my earlier posting on Astaire's Swing Time, suggesting psychoanalytical trajectories and Zizek readings:

Dear Kostis
You might find this interesting - on a note tangentially related to your blog post about Fred Astaire, projected shadows, fonts and Robert Longo (all fascinating, by the way) - Your description of Fred Astaire standing aside to watch his own triple projection dance dovetails nicely with Slavoj Zizek's various film illustrations of Freudian-Lacanian desire vs. drive, and "death drive" in action (see two texts from Zizek, attached) - and in that regard, your use of the word "subject" in the blog is spot-on (desire is subjectivized, drive isn't).
The "projected" self, in Lacanian lingo, is the subject "barred" upon entering the socio-symbolic order (i.e. culture and language). The fact that Fred Astaire stands aside to watch three magnified selves dance autonomously can be related (I would think, speaking as a psychoanalytic amateur) to several other film motifs - e.g., Mickey Mouse in The Sorcerer's Apprentice (1940), where the broom is a nightmare evocation of the Lacanian "partial object" (autonomous body part); the young woman in The Red Shoes (1948), who in the original story has to cut her feet off, because they won't stop dancing; Peter Sellers' "Heil Hitler" arm/hand in Dr. Strangelove (1964); even Forrest Gump's crazy running legs (1994, he can't stop himself, and his running always follows upon some loss or tragedy - in a word, drive takes over from desire). Zizek would add Fight Club (1999), where the main character can't stop his own autonomous fist from beating him up.
I haven't read much about Robert Longo, only seen images; but the psychoanalytic patterns suggested here (drive vs. desire, partial objects, symbolic castration or dismemberment in the socio-symbolic order) would probably readily apply - people flattened almost violently in their 1980s corporate costumes. It's significant that the three Longo figures are facelesss, de-subjectivized - possibly more traumatized than "dancing"? Has anyone related these images to crime scene photography?
Thanks for the thought-provoking blog piece!
Kevin Brady, December 4, 2010 9:42 AM

Bojangles in Harlem 1936

I thank Johanna for commenting on the Top Hat font and sending me to Fred Astaire's Bojangles in Harlem in Swing Time (RKO Pictures, 1936). The scene is aesthetically rich, if the viewer manages to pass over the highly offensive blackface. At the end of the scene, Astaire dances behind a triple projection of his own silhouette (sketched left). I send readers to my earlier thoughts on 1930s silhouettes here, elicited by the portraits that Georg von Peschke drew while excavating in Corinth. Incidentally, I got a chance to see all 20 of the Peshcke silhouettes in Athens this summer, but I must leave them for a future posting. Astaire's silhouettes elucidate the popular 1930s font, which pitch a thick line against a thin line in each letter. High contrast, thick-and-thin, large-and-small are in some ways the product of illuminated projection and the electricity of film and signage. I will show in a future posting that neon lights contributed to the development of fonts in the 1930s. Neon lighting has a three dimensional quality. The solid letter in the background is illuminated by a neon tube in the foreground that replicates the letter in form a few inches in front of the letter. The neon light does not occupy the same plane as the letter which it illuminates because physical contact would burn the letter from the tube's heat. A physical gap between neon and letter backdrop introduces perspectival variation as the viewer moves around the sign. Perspectival variation is what distinguishes Astaire's three shadows, since they are generated by three lights positioned around a circular platform to the right, center, and left of the real Astaire.

Like the black shadow of Fred Astaire, typography and neon tubes engaged the viewer in a game of projection. The high-contrast of shadows cultivated a minimalist aesthetic on a fertile black-and-white screen. But the dialectic of dancer vs. shadows supersedes simple mechanical replication the moment that Astaire's shadows disengage from Astaire and take on a life of their own. Astaire stops and observes his triple body move without his volition behind him. He stops being the generator of motion, or the object of projection, and he turns into a subject. He watches himself, as we watch him. His triples become his dance partners.

Astaire's black silhouettes are also interesting in light of Robert Longo's 1979 "Men in the Cities" series. Longo's involvement with the post-punk New York scene makes "Men in the Cities" the most iconic artistic expression of 1980s New Wave. It was one of the first images in Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll since 1967, a groundbreaking exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 2008. Fortunately for me, the Archaeological Institute of America's annual meetings in 2008 were in Chicago and I got a chance to see the show; see catalog, here. As with the staging of Astaire's dance, Longo's dancers were displayed as a triptych (see photo of Dominic Molon, curator, in front of Longo's series here).

Whether intentional or not, I love the visual affinity solicited by Astaire's iconic dance. After all, punk archaeology begins in the 1930s, as Lewis Erenberg has convinced me in "The Crowd Goes Wild: The Youth Culture of Swing," Swinging the Dream: Big Band Jazz and the Rebirth of American Culture (Chicago, 1998), 35-64.

Ultimately, both Astaire and Longo are the descendants of that famous Nude that Descended the Staircase in 1913 at the Armory Show. Unlike the male-gazing Duchamp, the American artist of the 1930s and 1980s is interested in a dressed male body, a suited figure that does not descend but ascends.

Top Hat 1935

Previewing Top Hat (RKO Pictures, 1935) on my way home, I noticed that the opening credits use the same font as noted on yesterday's posting. This Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers film is a candidate for a lecture on Art Deco in Hollywood. The sets include a stylized classical hotel and a Venetian fantasy. The Gay Divorcee (RKO Pictures, 1934) is another possibility. The dynamics of the fonts in Top Hat are complemented by the sudden movement of the camera (as soon as the credits are finished) that reveals an actual person wearing the hat above. The next calligraphic delicacy is a zoom into a sign hanging on a wall: "SILENCE must be observed in the Club Room." The fonts here are traditional and Gothic and set a foil to Fred Astaire's uncontrollable desire to break the silence through dance.

Being a bit silly on my late train ride, I considered how my name would look like if I was an RKO actor in the 30s and a protagonist in Top Hat. Not very attractive:

Patti Smith: Life as Narrative

Over the Christmas holiday, I chanced on the Patti Smith documentary that I had heard about on Studio 360. We had just unloaded the U-Haul, moving to Philadelphia, and the WHYY feature somehow reaffirmed the move to an an urban capital. Patti Smith herself has roots in Philadelphia, a fact that she talked about at length when I saw her perform exactly 8 years ago, at the Keswick Theater, Dec. 27, 2001. That was a special concert for me. I went with my best friend Yorgos and we were both amazed by the number of older people (like us) in the audience who even brought their children. Smith's own mother, who lives nearby, was in the audience and both Smith's sister and son played with her onstage (see a review here).

Soon after Patti Smith lost her husband (Fred Smith of MC5) and her brother (Todd) in 1994, REM's Michael Stipe caller her out of the blue to offer condolences; he also recommended a photographer. Steven Sebring entered Patti Smith's life a that moment, documenting the experiences of an ordinary human being rather than the legendary "godmother of punk." Sebring's filming became the documentary Patti Smith: Dream of Life that premiered on Dec. 30, 2009 on PBS's Point of View. Dream of Life is hauntingly beautiful capturing the creases in the artist's life. I also enjoyed Sebring's focus on Smith's children, especially Jackson Smith who is married to Meg Ryan (of the White Stripes). In many ways, Patti Smith's story after her marriage to Fred Smith is a life centered around Detroit (Saint Clair Shores). Documentaries on rock musicians tend to follow generic lines. Dream of Life breaks away from the mold and becomes a creative enterprise in its own right.

Patti Smith has also just published an autobiographical work on her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe (1969 booth photo, top). Just Kids was released today (Ecco, 2010). Just as Dream of Life takes us to the period after Smith's New York apotheosis, Just Kids takes us to the period before. For a review of the book, see Janet Maslin, "Bohemian Soul Mates in Obscurity," New York Times (Jan. 18, 2010), pp. C1, C8. Maslin points out that Smith's growing up with Mapplethorpe took place before many of the disturbing pictures that earned Mapplethorpe his late notoriety (and censorship by the NEA). I am looking forward to matching the Sebring documentary with Smith's own reflections. After all, Smith is just as much a writer as a rocker. Returning to the home where I spent my own growing up, I'm especially susceptible to such stories. It was in this old/new home that I first admired Patti Smith.

London Calling

It seems only yesterday that the landmark LP London Calling by the Clash turned 25, an event celebrated by a re-release of the album with new video and footage. On December 13, London Calling is turning 30 this time. And at the ripe age of 30, the Clash turns archaeological. The anniversary will be marked by the auctioning of the Clash's original art work, the classic album cover with Paul Simonon smashing his Fender Precision bass on stage at the New York Palladium. There's lots to say about Simonon's instruments, including a Rickenbacker given to him by Patti Smith, but basically the white Fender Precision was iconic. The 1979 image contains its own archaeology, namely, The Who smashing their instruments in the 1965 performance of My Generation at the Beat Club, as well as, Sid Vicious hitting an audience member with his own Fender Precision bass. The bass that Simonon smashed in the photo had been newly bought in 1979. Simonon regretted destroying this instrument because it proved to be one of his best sounding ones. The very bass has become a relic and it now resides at the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame. You can read the entire history of Simonon's 11 basses (scroll down to Paul Simonon Bass Story 1976-2008 here ).

At any rate, Bonhams auction house is selling the original London Calling art work by Ray Lowry valued at $100,000 (Sale 16905 Lot 26), and two autographed photos valued at $500 and $300 (Sale 16905, Lot 293 & 294). Ray Lowry, unfortunately, passed away in 2008. After the dissolution of the Clash, by the way, Paul Simonon has turned to a career in painting.

Hawass, the Greatful Dead, Beyonce

In a recent biographical article on Zahi Hawass, we learn that the most powerful man in Egyptian archaeology attended a Grateful Dead concert at the pyramids during the mid-1970s, see Ian Parker, "The Pharaoh," The New Yorker (Nov. 16, 2009), p. 52ff. A couple of months ago, I posted on the Pink Floyd concert in Pompeii (1971), pondering the connections between rock and archaeology. Parker's reference to Hawass' pyramids concert attendance made a nice match to the photo on the left, from a few days ago, when Hawass guided Beyonce at Giza. Beyonce's "I Am..." tour has raised some controversy in the Islamic world, see Art Daily (Nov. 10, 2009). Although I used this news story as a conversation piece in my Islamic class, I will make no comments on the irony of this picture (the Egyptian cowboy archaeologist and the scarfed sex idol). Hawass spent a few years in Philadelphia as a grad student at Penn. His appreciation of American pop culture is not surprising, nor are his own super-star ambitions.

I will simply take a moment to remember the Grateful Dead concert, which took place in September 1978. The performance at the Giza Light and Sound theater was followed by three shows in Cairo. Interestingly enough, highlights of this Egyptian tour were released a year ago, see David Fricke, "The Dead Rock the Pyramids," Rolling Stone (Oct. 16, 2008). The CD title, "Rocking the Cradle/Egypt 1978," presumably refers to Egypt as the cradle of civilization. I am not a fan of the Grateful Dead, but I appreciate the inclusion of oud player Hamza El Din in their line up. El Din had appeared in the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, and in the 1980s/90s he taught ethnomusicology in various American universities. The 1978 Grateful Dead concert must be added to the saga of rock archaeology.

The Magnetic Age

David Thomas, the singer of the legendary Cleveland punk band Pere Ubu has written one of the finest essays on rock music. Thomas takes two ballads, "The Wreck of Old 97" and "Dead Man's Curve," and constructs a narrative explaining the fundamentals of American music. It all has to do with the Magnetic Age that started in 1877 when Thomas Edison invented the microphone and culminated with Elvis Presley ("the Homer of the Inarticulate Age"). "The Wreck of Old 97" is a ballad inspired by the 1903 train wreck in Virginia (photo above). The earliest version of the song was recorded in 1924 and it has since been sang by everyone, including Woody Guthrie, Johny Cash and Hank Williams. "Dead Man's Curve" is a ballad written in 1964 by the rock duo Jan and Dean, who preceded the Beach Boys in creating surf music. The ballad describes another wreck, half a century later, taking place with a car. The technical heroism of the two songs corresponds to the technical craft (magnetic electronics) of recorded music, "a dialogue inside the blurred zone between soundscape and landscape." Thomas asserts that the Magnetic Age is another way of saying the American Age and it unites seemingly unrelated individuals like Edison and Elvis or Eisenhower and Kerouac.

Thomas is not simply retelling a generic version of America's love for speed, cars and trains but constructs a paradigm through which to interpret rock music. In the spirit of art critic Clement Greenberg, Thomas brings attention to the materiality of the medium. Dan Graham (see Rock My Religion posting) placed punk's origins in the religious experiments of Protestant America. Thomas places punk's origins of the magnetic medium--the microphone, the vinyl record, the hi-fi system, the speakers, and the space inside our ears. I've been thinking a lot about the texture of dissonance and distortion that characterizes the project of punk archaeology. I have been listening to a lot of Sonic Youth lately--especially their brilliant new album, Eternal-- and I've been reading David Brownes' Goodbye 20th Century: A Biography of Sonic Youth (2008). I've also just received a library copy of another interesting new book, David Sheppard's On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno (2009). Eno is truly the glue between the Magnetic Age and punk. In 1977, Eno collaborated with David Bowie in the album Heroes, the final record of the Berlin trilogy. It includes the song "Sons of the Silent Age." I wonder if the Magnetic Age and the Silent Age are not but synonyms of the same mechanical predicament.

David Thomas' essay is called "Destiny in My Right Hand," and it appeared in The Rose & the Briar: Death, Love and Liberty in the American Ballad, ed. Sean Wilentz and Greil Marcus (2005), pp. 161-174. The book contains 23 essays interpreting some of the most fundamental American ballads. The authors range from R. Crumb to Luc Sante and Sarah Vowell. While reading this book, it's mandatory to listen to a parallel CD with the songs under discussion. I've been reading The Rose & the Briar on-and-off since 2005 and just hit David Thomas's essay.

Sonic Youth and Pere Ubu are the inheritors of the Magnetic Age. David Thomas does not talk about punk in his essay, although he credits "Dead Man's Curve" with a dose of "punk snottiness." On the dissonant culmination of the Magnetic Age, see my earlier posting on Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music. I have just listened to Thurston Moore's solo project Trees Outside the Academy (2007). The CD inner sleeve contains many pictures from Moore's youth. Among them, you see a teenage Moore strapped with headphones listening to Metal Machine Music (left). Now, in the 21st century, we should have witnessed the full demise of the Magnetic Age by the Digital Age. Nevertheless, old rockers like Sonic Youth, and even younger ones like Jack White (note his new band, Dead Weathers) remain purists in the Greenbergean sense. Craftsmanship of the Magnetic Age (i.e. the 8-track recorder) seems to have endured in the Digital Age, which might after all be a mere Post-Magnetic Age that claims an ironic self-referential stance to its predecessor.

Bowie's Philadelphia Sound

Much of 1980s New Wave (ABC, Duran Duran, Thompson Twins, Spandau Ballet, Culture Club, etc.) has an orchestral soulful sound. These "New Romantics" reclaimed the grandeur of Swing from the syncopation of Disco. The city of Philadelphia played a minor role in New Wave with figures like Hall and Oates (who met at Temple) and the Hooters (who met at Penn). A local music scene thrived in the late 80s and 90s, although many bands, like the Johnsons, Scram and the Dead Milkmen, received limited national attention.

Philadelphia is responsible for the origins of New Wave's grand sound by means of an earlier and lesser known avenue, David Bowie's 1975 album Young Americans. On August 11, 1974, Bowie spent a week in Philadelphia, recording Young Americans at the Sigma Sound Studios on 212 N. 12th Street. It is here that Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff created what is known as Philadelphia soul or the Philadelphia sound (Bowie called it "plastic soul"). Gamble and Huff had started the Philadelphia International Records label only three years before Bowie's visit. Y0ung Americans was an important point of departure from Bowie's earlier rock persona in Ziggy Stardust (1972), or Diamond Dogs (1974). In Philadelphia, therefore, David Bowie pursued one of his many incarnations as a spiritually black artist. And it is here that he met Puerto Rican guitarist Carlos Alomar, who became an integral member of Bowie's band. Young Americans also features back up vocals by Luther Vandross and includes the song Fame, co-written with John Lennon, which became Bowie's first American hit.

I doubt that 1980s New Wave (or New Pop) was directly inspired by Philadelphia International Records. Its point of departure is David Bowie's 1975 album, which had already reconfigured the elements of the Philadelphia sound. A year after the release of Young Americans, David Bowie turned a new chapter in his musical career by moving to Berlin with Iggy Pop. The short relationship with Philadelphia was hence quickly overshadowed by a three-year residence in Berlin. The Berlin trilogy (Low, Heroes, Lodger) incorporated Brian Eno's electronic experimentation into the Philadelphia foundations.

Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008 and an excellent 4-CD box set was released on the occasion, Love Train: the Sound of Philadelphia (Sony Legacy). Terry Gross interviewed Gamble and Huff in "Riding Philly's 'Love Train' with Gamble and Huff" (NPR, Nov. 26, 2008, replayed May 22, 2009). On May 19, 2009, Gamble and Huff received BMI's Icon Award.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: A new book explores Bowie's creative three-years in Berlin, see Thomas Jerome Seabrook, Bowie in Berlin: A New Career in a New Town (London, 2008). For the Philadelphia episode, see also Christopher Sandford, Bowie: Loving the Alien (New York, 1996), p. 128. The story of the Philadelphia sound is chronicled in, John A. Jackson, A House on Fire: The Rise and Fall of Philadelphia Soul (New York, 2004).

Metal Machine Music

In 1975, Lou Reed released one of the most radical albums in rock history. Metal Machine Music consists of looping guitar feedback, orchestrated dissonance, 65 minutes of noise. Released a year after the pop-oriented Sally Can't Dance, the album has puzzled historians. Was it a joke? was it a redemptive avant-garde gesture? did it fulfill an earlier record contract? However skeptical some critics may have been, this monumental double album had a huge influence. Not only did it invent New York's Post-Punk "No Wave" movement but also a new rock genre known today as Industrial. It also aligned Punk with contemporary classical music, the rarefied mechanical universe of Xenakis, Stockhausen and Cage. In an interview with Lester Bangs, Reed points out that he originally sought to release the album in RCA's classical division.

In 2007, the German ensemble Zeitkratzer performed the piece with Lou Reed and released it on CD. See Pitchfork interview (Sept.17, 2007). Last Thursday, Reed performed Metal Machine Music once again at the Blender Theater in New York, with Sarth Calhoun and Ulrich Krieger (who first transcribed the work for Zeitkratzer). See review in New York Times (Apr. 25, 2009, p. C1)

It's amazing to think that 34 years have passed since the album's original release. Excluding Sonic Youth's success, the dissonant New York scene of No Wave is completely unknown to the general public. The situation might be changing, however, through a bibliographic explosion. In 2008, Thurston Moore (of Sonic Youth) and Byron Coley have published a documentary visual history, No Wave: Post-Punk Underground. New York. 1976-1980 (New York). Two other books were released in 2007,: Mark Masters, No Wave (London); Paula Court and Stuart Baker, New York Noise (London). A biography of Sonic Youth has also just been published: David Browne, Goodbye 20th Century: A Biography of Sonic Youth (New York, 2008). In so many words, the New York punk scene has found some solid scholarly footing in the last couple of years.

There have also been some serious attempts to document the visual tradition of punk rock. While attending the Archaeological Institute of America's annual meetings in Chicago (January 2008), I got a chance to see, Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll since 1967, an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art that tried to present rock's visual tradition after 1967. I must admit that the exhibit was disappointing (for a variety of reasons that I won't get into here) but at least it made one contemplate the difficulties of pulling threads between art and music. At least, it inspired me to design a class on Punk Aesthetics (which I doubt anyone would ever let me teach). For those that missed the show, the catalog is just as good, see Dominic Molon and Diedrich Diederichsen (Chicago, 2007).

Although not explicitly connected to Punk, a relevant show just opened in New York, believe it or not, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Pictures Generation 1974-1984 reflects on artists like Cindy Sherman that flourished at the hey day of Punk. Some of the artists were also part of the music scene. Robert Longo is a good example. He designed The Replacements' album cover Tim (1985) and shot music videos for New Order and R.E.M. Robert Longo's Men in Cities painting series (1979) stands out as the greatest visual statement of Post-Punk aesthetics that I grew up with (left). The Met show includes another work by Longo, a three-dimensional leaping man, American Soldier (1977). Holland Cotter uses Longo's leaping metaphor in his review, "At the Met Baby Boomers Leap on Stage" (New York Times, Apr. 23, 2009). It's unusual that this shows takes place at the Met, "a fusty backwater for contemporary art and an object of scorn in the art world" (Cotter). But the change is very much welcome. The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney and the Guggenheim have become so annoying with their "contemporaneity" and steep admissions. The Met for me has become a default in the good old world of public service.

Pictures Generation runs parallel to a "Generational" show at the New Museum. The Generational: Younger than Jesus surveys a new crop of artists born after 1976 (hence younger than 33-yr-old Christ). The title is pretty annoying. Harold Cotter's review it in "Young Artists Caught in the Act" (New York Times, Apr. 9, 2009). The Generational series at the New Museum is trying to out-do the Whitney Biennial.

The object of my posting here was simply to overview some recent phenomena in the historization of Punk. The scholarly armature is growing. Biographies, photographic archives, new performances and museum exhibits entrench Punk deeper into a hole, the halls of academic legitimacy. Still, however, there is little on Punk Archaeology. If the reader had the slightest doubt that Punk has accumulated an aged patina of cultural value, consider the following. Christie's held its first Punk Rock Fine Art auction on November 24, 2008. You can see preview all 236 lots (and respective prices) on Christie's website here.

Finally, congratulations to Holland Cotter, who has won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. His reviews in the New York Times have been a guiding light.

Istanbul (Not Constantinople)

Today, I chanced on the original version of the song "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)" recorded by the Four Lads on August 12, 1953. The song hit #10 in the Billboard chart. I had only known the 1980 version by They Might Be Giants. The Four Lads, as it turns out, was a Canadian group from Toronto. Connie Codarini, Bernie Toorish, Jimmy Arnold and Frank Busseri met at Saint Michael's Choir School. They performed under various names including (my favorite) The Otnorots--Toronto spelled backwards. They were discovered by American band leader Mitch Miller and moved to New York City, also known as Old Amsterdam (according to the song lyrics). "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)" made the Four Lads famous. I wish I had known this trivia when I was in Toronto with fellow Byzantinist Vasilis Marinis, getting a Licentiate at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Saint Michael's College. Saint Michael's Choir School belongs to the Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music in Rome and the Toronto Catholic District School Board. I'm tickled by Toronto's Catholic influence on American pop culture.

Stand by Me

Bruce Sperling, a founder of the cyberpunk literary genre, shocked the South by Southwest Interactive tech conference in Austin by raising issues of class in the jolly optimism of web networking. Sperling argued that Facebook, Twitter, Skype, text-messaging and other such forms of connectivity are registers of poverty. Poor folk, are essentially the greatest users of these technologies. Lacking resources to connect with other human beings, web connectivity fills in for class deprivation. The implications of Sperling's argument are profound, placing a buffer on the financial optimism that such services have depended on. Virginia Heffernan takes Sperling's reading further in "Let Them East Tweets: Why Twitter is a Trap," New York Times Magazine (Apr. 19, 2009), pp. 22, 24. And for an amusing take on Sterling's speech by Sterling himself, see his blog, Beyond the Beyond.

I personally agree. My ventures into web connectivity--this very blog, for instance--arise from desperation. Absolutely, if I had other venues of communication, I would choose them over the amorphous and undependable readership of a blog. If I could publish each one of my musings in a peer-reviewed journal, or even if I had a syndicated newspaper column, I would shut down this blog immediately. But such platforms require a different financial infrastructure, where I would ultimately also benefit financially (either directly through royalties or indirectly through tenure). At a moment of early optimism, I contacted my local newspaper offering to contribute a weekly column on architectural criticism, news in historic preservation and urbanism. But there was no interest. The cultural pages of the Greenville News, in this case, simply regurgitated articles circulated from USA Today, owned by the same conglomerate, the Gannett Co. I'm also fully aware that using the Blogger platform is dependent on mammoth economic players. Founded in 1999, Blogger was bought by Google in 2003. Indirectly, my medium of expression is a $23 billion dollar corporation.

Academic blogging is an interesting sub-genre. In discussions with colleagues, it still seems relatively counter-cultural and even dangerous. The medium of poverty remains more democratic than other options and is worth the risk. A few days ago I have even started experimenting with Twitter. Little did I know that on the same day, Oprah Winfried publicly joined, too, ushering Twitter into the mainstream, see Jenna Wortham, "With Oprah on Board, Twitter Grows" (NYT, Apr. 17, 2009). Thanks to the laborious commentary by Bill Caraher (Archaeology of the Mediterranean World) and others, we are beginning to understand the repercussions that blogging is having on the archaeological discipline and on pedagogy (much less so with Twitter). The effects (for me at least) have been astounding. And in discussions with Caraher, I still feel that academic blogging is a form of resistance. It is democratic and transparent in ways that run against the grain of academic institutions--even though a small number of academics have eagerly embraced the medium. This has been the first year, for example, that I've been on the academic job market with a blog visible to all future employers. The results have been interesting, and I will ponder on them later in the year (when the dust settles). I think it's undeniable that tools of connectivity have changed the rules of the academic market. Imagine doing a job search without Google's search engine, or without a Wiki. But enough about that.

I want to return to the issue of "Connectivity is Poverty" through a video that made me jump, clap, sing outloud and dance along. The video is a version of the 1961 hit "Stand By Me" rendered collectively by 16 dislocated performers throughout the world. Watch the video here. Stand by Me was produced by the Playing for Change Foundation and filmed by Mark Johnson and Jonathan Walls. "No matter how much money you got, you are gonna need somebody to stand by you," starts off Roger Ridley, a street performer in Santa Monica, California. Suddenly, Grandpa Elliott joins in, except that he is performing from another street in New Orleans, 1800 miles away (according to Mapquest). As the song further unfolds, we are joined by an array of musicians performing in the streets of New Orleans (Washboard Chaz, Roberto Luti), Amsterdam, Holland (Clarence Bekker), Zuni, New Mexico (Twin Eagle Drum Group), Toulouse, France (Francoise Viguie), Rio, Brazil (Cesar Pupe), Moscow, Russia (Dimitri Dolganov), Caracas, Venezuela (Geraldo and Dionisio), Mbouta, Congo (Junior Kissangwa), Guguletu, Umlazi and Mamelozi, South Africa (Pokei Klaas, Sinamuva Umlazi and Vusi Mahlasela), Barcelona, Spain (Djano Degen) and Pisa, Italy (Stefano Tomaselli). All the performers are street musicians and represent poverty; some bear the visible signs of poverty and even homelessness. They are all alone in their corners but collectively connected through the recording. They have never met each other, but the new media has brought them together. This may not be the best example of new connective technologies, but it gives a glimmer of hope towards new means of connectivity even if those connected are poor folk. I thank Brenda Gray for sending me the video. It is truly inspiring and has brought "tears of joy" to many bloggers throughout the world.

The Turtledove

Greek folk culture can be a far cry from Victorian niceties. Some of its themes and imageries can be outright shocking, brutal and surreal. But this, of course, can be said about many pre-modern folk traditions (think of the American "Pretty Polly"). In 1927, folklorist Georgios Megas published a collection of Greek children stories, Παραμύθια, illustrated by Photes Kontoglou. Ellenika Paramythia has been reprinted many time; the latest, 7th edition is still available at Estia publishing house and bookstore. An English translation, Folktales of Greece, was published in 1970 (Chicago University Press). Four years ago, when my niece was born, I bought her a copy. Kristina is now old enough to have Greek folk tales read to her and my sister is going through the collection. Both have realized, however, that compared to Dr. Seuss, the Green Caterpillar, or Goodnight Moon, Greek folktales can keep you up at night with nightmares.

Last week, I wrote about a sexually charged lullaby that my grandmother sang to my sister in 1967, the Partridge. To see the function of another bird in a 19th century folksong from Nauplion, see "Lady 'Reen, the Little Bird, and the Pirate," in Surprised by Time. The bird here tells of incest. Seeking lullabies for my own daughter, I am thankful to my koumpara Anna Androulaki for sending The Great North Wind and other Traditional Songs for Children, a compilation by Domna Samiou, who is a monumental figure in Greek folk music as both interpreter and folklorist. She is the Alan Lomax of Greece. I first saw Samiou perform on the steps of the Gennadius Library in 1999, as a fellow at the American School. Harris Kalliga, director of the Gennadius at the time, had invited Samiou to perform. Looking back at the festivities, I wonder how many American students appreciated the concert. Many faculty and students, I remember, danced their hearts out, including Ioulia Tzonou-Herbst, the best Greek-dancer of the School.

In Samiou's 2-CD collection of children songs, we find another bird, Τρυγώνα (Turtledove) from Epeiros. It is a beautiful song, but it's theme, the discovery of a dead corpse, would surely scare the wits of any modern child. Here are the lyrics:

High up upon your way, turtledove,
down low as you pass by, sweet beautiful turtledove,
might you have caught sight
of my beloved, turtledove,
my sweetheart, my dearest man?
"Last night we saw him
or the night before
laid out upon the plane.
Black birds were eating him,
white birds circling above him."

or in Greek,

Αυτού ψηλά που περπατείς, τρυγόνα, μωρή τρυγόνα,
και χαμηλά λογιάζεις, τρυγόνα μου γραμμένη
μην είδες τον ασίκη μου, το άντρα το δικο μου;
-Εψές προψές τον είδαμε στον κάμπο ξαπλωμένο
μαύρα πουλία τον τρώγανε κι άσπρα τον τριγυρνούσαν.

Note how the turtledove is γραμμένη (striped, marked, or fated), same as my grandmother's partridge. Based on a reference in the Song of Songs, the turtledove has been a Judeo-Christian symbol of love. We find it in many English and American folk songs of loss of love; see, William Shakespeare's "The Phoenix and the Turtle."

The Partridge

In 1967, my grandmother Afendra Kourelis came to Athens for a short visit with my parents, who just had their first baby, my sister Afendra (or Angeliki). Giagia Afendra was raised in Leukada, a small agricultural village in Fthiotis, in continental Greece (Sterea Ellada). One of the treasures that she brought along from the village were folk lullabies she sang to her baby granddaughter, no doubt the very same tunes she sang on my father's bedside back in 1929, when my father was born. Mid-60s Athens was a booming metropolis, but my grandmother hated the city and could not wait to return to her fields. But modern Athens offered new media like television, film, phonograph records and tape recorders. My father did an amazing thing at that moment, to record his mother's lullabies. My father's obsession with recording sound is itself an interesting topic for another posting. I found the reel-to-reel tape a couple of years ago and transcribed it into a CD, which I am now going through closely in order to lern the songs and, in turn, sing them to my own infant daughter. The whole experience has been incredibly moving, listening to a woman born in 19th-century Greece. My infant sister is making baby sounds, while my parents (both deceased) are engaging with her in silly ways. It is also fascinating to hear my father, who was born and raised in Leukada but became totally urbanized as a teenager. While encouraging his mother to sing more of those old songs, he flips into the local dialect, a different voice from the one we grew up with. The songs were recorded in a small apartment in the neighborhood of Kypseli. My sister's childhood photo album contains a picture of this very visit, with a grandmother wrapped in her black tsemperi, sitting royally in a tight balcony.

Some of Afendras' songs are difficult to decipher because of the thick Sterea Ellada dialect. Among the discernible tracks is the song of the Marked, or Striped Partridge. I transcribe my grandmother's lyrics below, trying to be faithful to all the words, even the ones that I don't undrestand (like the "mo" and "mari" insertions).

Που ήσαν πε μαρί πέρδικα
που ήσαν πέρδικα γραμμένη
κι ήρθες το πρωί βρεμένη

Ναι μανί μαρί πέρδικα
ναι μανί ψηλά στα πλάγια
στις δροσιές και στα χορτάρια

Κι έτρωγα μαρί πέρδικα μω
κι έτρωγα το μαντριφύλι
κυδωναύγουστο σταφύλι

Where were you partridge?
Where were you, you marked partridge
that, in the morning, you returned all wet?

Yes, said the partridge
I went to the high slopes
where there is dew and grass

And I ate
I ate the clover by the sheepfolds
and the quince-like grape of August

The song is amazing in many ways, and I have not gone through any close linguistic or symbolic readings. I know that in Byzantine literature, the partridge symbolized the church and fidelity but also temptation and betrayal (see, 14th-c bird epic, Πουλολόγος, etc.) To me, the song has clear sexual connotations; the partridge returns all wet having tasted some forbidden fruit. The wonderful thing about Greek folk songs is an ambiguity that leads to multiple readings. In the context of an infant, the wet partridge stops being sexual and becomes a metaphor for the baby that wetted itself overnight having traveled to idyllic dream-lands.

I also love the way that the partridge is described as "γραμμένη," which literally means "written," but refers to the "γραμμές," the lines that marked its body. Alectoris graeca, the partridge indigenous to Greece, has beautiful black stripes on its wings. In English it is known as Rock Partridge. The partridge, moreover, has a beautiful voice and is, thus, a worthy model for the crooning singer. Alcman, the Archaic poet from Sparta, for instance, learned his poetic skills from partridges. To call a partridge "γραμμένη" also adds an element of inevitability, the participle form also means "fated," as in "it has been written." My friend Nassos Papalexandrou, whosε family is from the same region as mine, tells me that his mother still uses the word "γραμμένη" to describe the beauty of well shaped facial features, like eyes and lips.

Domestic Archaeology: House of the Rising Sun

The House of the Rising Sun is one of the best known rock songs, a landmark across many genres: American blues and folk, the British Invasion, garage rock and even punk. Its origins are complicated and contested; people still argue whether it was Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, or The Animals who ushered the song into the popular mainstream. It probably dates to 18th-century American folk tradition but entered ethnographic fact on September 15, 1937, when folklorist Alan Lomax taped a 16-year-old miner's daughter, Georgia Turner, performing the song in Middlesborough, Kentucky. Since then, many have rendered their own versions, from Roy Acuff (1937), Woody Guthrie (1941), Lead Belly (1948), Glenn Yarbrough (1957), to Bob Dylan (1961). The song, however, did not become a classic until 1964, when the The Animals from Newcastle, Britain made it into a number one hit.

The song refers to a New Orleans house of prostitution with a contested archaeological history. Some claim that 826-830 Louis Street is the original location of the house, originating from the name Marianne LeSoliel Levant, the brothel's Madam from 1862 to 1874. There is no proof of this lineage. An 1838 newspaper mentions a Rising Sun coffee house on Decatur Street, and a Rising Sun hotel stood on Conti Street before it burned down in 1822. The latter site was the subject of a 2004 excavation by Shannon Lee Dawdy, now assistant professor of archaeology at the University of Chicago. Dawdy could not conclusively prove whether this was the famous House of the Rising Sun. For Dawdy's fascinating work after Katrina, see John Schwarts, "Shannon Lee Dawdy: Archaeologist in New Orleans Finds a Way to Help the Living," New York Times (Jan. 3, 2006).

More interesting than the song's real archaeology is its idealized archaeological projection. The Animals performed their number one hit in the 1965 music film Pop Gear, surrounded by a fantasized archaeological cage, stripped down in groovy mid-modern minimalism. The clip (seen here) is absolutely stunning. The artistic level of its production is so superior that it makes one wonder what happened to the integration between popular music and the visual arts.

The set design is based on an Ionic colonnade built by purely white thin boards through which The Animals circumnavigate. A yellow wall (matching the band's shirts, beneath their 4-button suits) forms the background and receives both the white thin columns and their intense gray shadows. I've tried to capture the dynamism of this imagined House of the Rising Sun in a sketch at the beginning, but much of the energy of the video comes from the movement of the mobile musicians (Burdon, Valentine, Chandler) around the stationary musicians (Gallagher, Steel), the close ups on Burdon, and the movement of the camera behind the colonnade providing a peculiar (both thin and thick) sense of depth. The set reconfigures the porch of southern domestic architecture, its classical vocabulary, as well as its papery thinness. The composition, however, is entirely modernist with Cubist composition, Constructivist combinations and an Expressionist sense of light.

The L-shaped elements may also remind us of the hang-man games we played as children and, thus, suggest connotations of lynching. Without a doubt, The Animals were aware of Billy Holiday's Strange Fruit. A fascinating song in its own right, Strange Fruit was written by Abel Meeropol, a Jewish school teacher from the Bronx. Meeropol cited Lawrence Beitler's graphic 1933 photograph (click here) as inspiration for the lyrics, which he published in a school-teacher union magazine in 1936. Holiday performed the song at the first integrated night club in Greenwich Village in 1939. But this is only a slight, if not sublimated reading.

Overall, The Animals' House of the Rising Sun is pure form. Like the British Invasion in general, the clean-cut gentlemen from Newcastle distilled the southern blues, and repackaged them with a sleek force that could bring down the walls. Cleaned up, the House of the Rising Sun stops being an item of ethnographic "authenticity" and becomes pure libidinal force. Much more than the legendary Beatles, Eric Burdon and The Animals offer the building blocks of a raw subversiveness that leads straight to The Clash. One can clearly see that the architectural style of Deconstructivism begins in 1965. Zaha Hadid, Bernard Tschumi, Daniel Liebeskind and other paper-thin superstars suddenly seem derivative. Are The Animals so important? I hope to study more Pop Gear clips and see how other peer groups contributed to punk archaeology. This includes performances by Herman's Hermits, The Four Pennies, Matt Monroe, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas and other slightly forgotten pioneers of what we now group under the category of garage rock.

I must thank my 10-year-old nephew Sean Gray for introducing me to Pop Gear inadvertently. Grandparents Terry and Brenda Gray got Sean a guitar for his birthday in July. During the last few months, Sean has become a studious guitar player, giving his first public recital in Albuquerque, of the House of the Rising Sun. He emailed The Animals video to his uncle and aunt, in case they had never heard of the song before. Since I also got a guitar last Christmas (thanks to Terry and Brenda), I have taken up the challenge of the Rising Sun. Sean is much better than me, but Popi is enjoying the finger picking across the classic Am, C, D, F and E7th chords.