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#Post#: 479--------------------------------------------------
VOICE OF MIDNIGHT (Project of The Week for 2nd of October)
By: moleshow Date: October 2, 2017, 8:37 pm
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it's divisive. it's spooky. it's got the Sandman. it's The Voice
of Midnight.
#Post#: 480--------------------------------------------------
Re: PROJECT OF THE WEEK (2nd of October): VOICE OF MIDNIGHT
By: CheerfulHypocrite Date: October 7, 2017, 10:35 am
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In 2007 the world was falling through its own fundament. It was
four score years after the publication of "L'histoire de l'oeil"
- The Story Of The Eye - by Georges Bataille under the pseudonym
of Lord Auch, and forty-five years after Roland Barthes
published "Metaphor of the Eye". Barthes argues that the body
fluids and explicit narrative does not necessarily form a
pornographic narrative. It was the year the Voice of Midnight
arrived. Nine score years and five after Ernst Theodor Amadeus
Hoffmann died. Hoffman wrote as a contemporary to Mary Shelley;
"Der Sandmann" arrived two years before "Frankenstein" and, in
many respects treats similar themes. In 2007 "The Voice Of
Midnight" appeared as a Horspeil before "The Bunny Boy". It was
a foreshadowing of the modernity of the Madness of Roger and
Harvey and the multitudinous incarnations of the secret deities
of the Rabbit.
Harry, a talented Greek Filmmaker and Comic Book creator with a
penchant for requiring sentences to begin with a capital and end
with a full stop, and a knowledge of the Number 24 London Bus,
had not yet begun to make pointed remarks about rabbit trails.
"The Voice Of Midnight" was a caesura in an ebb and flow of the
tumult of storytelling. It was the year Mark Wallinger won the
Turner Prize for spending a night in Mies van der Rohe’s Neue
Nationalgalerie in Berlin wearing a Bear suit and pursued by a
camera crew.
Liverpool was 800 years old. In the throes of becoming the
Capital of Culture. Not only the Residents hated the Beatles.
Liverpool has a suffered and benefited from the impact of the
Beatles. Sooner or later, every single band gets compared to the
Beatles. Which is a hindrance. The Liverpool Institute of
Performing Arts (LIPA) is both a benefit as a place of higher
education and a curse in that it, apparently, actively
discriminates against poverty stricken Liverpool residents.
Tourists come to Liverpool and expect to be able to go on a
Magical Mystery Tour - they can.
The Magical Mystery Tour starts and finishes at the Cavern Club,
10 Mathew Street, Liverpool. The tour lasts 2 hours and includes
the following locations with stops for photos on the way: the
childhood home of Ringo Starr; George Harrison’s birthplace
Penny Lane; St Peter’s Church Hall; Strawberry Field;John
Lennon’s childhood home; Paul McCartney’s childhood home; Former
schools and colleges of John, Paul, George and Ringo including
the Art College and the Liverpool Institute (now LIPA); and, the
driver manically pointing out other Beatles related things along
the way. It is a sterile and pornographic circuit of a City that
might benefit from an exorcism.
By 2016 - a mere decade later - The Sandman is missing in
Liverpool. Children are not going to sleep. Nothing helps.
Lullabies fall on deaf ears, teddies fall to the ground
un-hugged and there are no bed time stories. Something is very
wrong with night time tales. Such is the Theatre. It picks up
stories that are bubbling around.
Mr Morpheus from the Chillait Corporation is here with his new,
soothing night time milk! As if there were some kind of
commentary on the media. Kid calming and soporiphic. A group of
adventurers known only as The Dream Team are called together to
travel the globe in search of The Sandman. Bed times will return
to normal if they find the Sandman. If they don’t, Mr Morpheus
will take control forever…
The Residents seep into the Culture of Liverpool. They are there
at the margins of the City. Hoffman died a paralysed alcoholic
and Bataille is besmirched with the being a mere surrealist
pornographer. It is as though the Residents looked around the
world and considered which City most closely guards - or covets
- its mask. They thought "San Fransisco" but then, on a moment
of chance they saw "Published by Liverpool Distributors, Los
Angeles, CA (1970)" on the frontis of an erotic novel in the
Sandman Series.
It was in the moments leading to the actual creation of the
Residents. The foment of birth. The most secret truth of the the
Masked Ones is that they chose to consider the Beatles purely
because of a filthy novel left on a train. From that moment
forth they began to seep, far and wide, into the strange culture
of the world. At the back of their minds, always, the
inevitability of the Eyeballs and the certainty of the madness
of obscurity.
ETA Hoffman, in "The Sandman" created an archetype that has
entered into World Culture. The recurrent theme of the Eye.
While Metropolis has the Romantic Magical Realism of a robot
woman, it is the Eyes that Thea von Harbou uses to capture the
transformations of Brigitte Helm into a sensual robot that have
the greatest potency. These are the eyes that Nathaniel fears
losing as he crashes onto the telephone answering machine of
Claire.
Claire de Lune - musically by Debussy but also poetry by
Verlaine, Hugo and de Maupassant - overload the names of "The
Voice of Midnight" with a rich backstory that nobody notices.
Like tourists on the Magical Mystery Tour. Nathaniel bursts into
existence on an answering machine with a crash of machinery
reminiscent of the shift work of Freder in Metropolis.
Unaccountably, the voice of Nate becomes less frantic and
masculised and adopts a feminine quality. Reminiscent of "The
Confused Transexual" on "The Gingerbread Man" or even "The Old
Woman" from the same. There is something in "The Voice Of
Midnight" that connects music from "Nice Old Man" on "The
Commercial Album" to the voice distortions of "The Big Bubble"
and the tape speed manipulations of "Third Reich 'n' Roll".
Somewhere the Residents mastered the sleight of hand that
enabled them to disguise themselves more thoroughly than a
visiting "Voice" from the Moon. As though "The Executioner" was,
in fact, sung by the real vocalist. That somehow, the Residents
had disguised their female member for decades even when, in
"Wormwood", Molly Harvey became the Cryptic Diva.
The Story of "Voice of Midnight" needs to be listened to.
Perhaps as a radio play - the Horspiel of musical storytelling.
Again, there is the Theory of Obscurity bringing its power to
bear: Seneca has been claimed as a forerunner of radio drama
because his plays were performed by readers as sound plays.
These were not actors dramatising writing as stage plays. In
this respect Seneca had no significant successors until radio.
It is this obscure provenance that lets the Residents seemingly
point at the Beatles while, in reality, telling a deeper, more
fruitful, story. Like Bataille and "The Story of the Eye". The
Residents manage to smear a veneer of popular culture over art
and then persuade an audience to scratch, scratch, scratch - as
if getting rid of a Spot.
The poetry of Nate:
[quote=Nathaniel]
I feel a fire and see the empty-ness that was your sight
And sense a burning, boring penetration, leaking light
Surrounding me with heat and hopeless laughter, I am lost
Until I hear your voice imploring me to walk across
[/quote]
and the response of Claire:
[quote=Claire]
If this is a reflection of the affection in your heart
Then our ideas of love are an infinity apart
Your crude attempt at sentiment is odious and cold
And conceals the true condition of a damaged soul.
Something's hiding from you, Nate, it's puncture-proof and
sealed
You need to separate your sickness from the love you feel
Go away and think about everything I said
Go away and sleep with eyeless shadow shapes instead - of me.
[/quote]
are not only a narrative tour de force but a formidable
exposition of how works by the Residents function. Like Claire
accuses Nate, the Residents accuse their Audience of being the
bringers of bizzare weirdness. As though we are all tourists and
they merely point out the childhood homes of people we have
never met. People whose obscurity might never be penetrated by
simply driving around the Capital of Culture and looking at
buildings long sold off for other purposes.
The storytelling of "Voice of Midnight" is not some monolithic
authorial imposition of a narrative. There are multiple voices
and they ebb and flow. Yet, they are, like Seneca's Readers,
they are not dramatising - unless you scratch the surface. The
surface narrative is a bizzare tale which takes the historical
heritage of ETA Hoffman - Coppélia (The Girl with the Enamel
Eyes) and the Sandman and Hoffman's own life and love of cats -
and transforms it into a pop culture trinket surrounding a
powerful Symbolist-Romantic story. Yet the voice is never simply
one person. It slides and shimmers from one person to the next.
As if the identity of the "Voice of Midnight" was somehow
vanishing into a sea of obscurity. A Zen experience of non-being
in a sea of people. The closes experience to the whole world
sleeping. Which, if the Dream Team can track down the Sandman,
means it will not be the Sleep of Reason that brings forth
Monsters.
[Quote=Sandman]
Love is the feeling you get
Dropping eyeballs into
The mouths of hungry children.
Starving children raise emotions
Like rain raises weeds
Starving children feed the souls
of those that heed their needs
Starving children apply pressure
On a parent's mind
Starving children create pleasure
When they eat their eyes."
[/quote]
Starvation and the Eyeball is an image that swerves the story
through the paternalism of "dropping eyeballs into the mouths of
hungry children" to the horror of "starving children create
pleasure" - images and ideas that take shape once you begin to
start scratching. And Nate scratches.
[quote=Nathaniel & Sandman]
"Love is a skeleton key unlocking a small room filled with
darkness and hope."
[/quote]
Which transforms Nate's entire strand of narrative into the
image of Pandora's Box. Which, Nathaniel enters in a literal and
metaphoric manner when he discovers Olympia's body without eyes
in a basement laboratory. Which is the most dread horror:
Olympia is deprived of the windows to her soul: her eyes.
Nathaniel experiences the whole of the "Frankenstein" story in a
matter of a few words. One compressed incident where Nathaniel
transforms into a catatonic and his mother lets Claire know
there is noone there. Then the Shelley moment is over and the
Pandora's Box of a restored Nathaniel is presented as if it were
some kind of near miracle.
Which is how the assembled chorus celebrate the birthday of
Nathaniel in a pastiche of the "Happy Birthday to Me" of "Duck
Stab". Yet again bringing together stories that have taken
decades to mature and seep into the bones of the landscape. And
then the whole thing collapses as Claire and Nathaniel strive to
leave the grasp of "The Sandman". Which is never going to
happen.
[quote=Sandman]
The Sandman can
Make you sing and celebrate
The flowers that he irrigates
On your grave.
[/quote]
As if the Sandman were keeping "Our Finest Flowers" and killing
off those who would keep everyone completely asleep. As if there
is some kind of power and importance in dreaming. Even the death
of Nathaniel is ambiguous. Which is how the story should end.
Not in a two hour tour but a lifetime of speculation.
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