In honor of Stephen Colbert’s final “Colbert Report” tonight, here is a column I wrote in September about attending a taping of his show. Thanks for the memories, Stephen (and Gerry and Theresa).
Comedy Central’s two main franchise shows are both recorded in a part of New York City called “Hell’s Kitchen,” a section of Manhattan that extends about 25 blocks south and west of Central Park and west of Midtown over to the Hudson River. Most of the buildings in the neighborhood are former walk-ups and townhouses that are now offices for media companies; “The Colbert Report’s” studio looks like it was a house or storefront once upon a time.
The Thursday, September 18, 2014, broadcast of “The Colbert Report” was a very special one because I was in the audience, as I wrote yesterday, in “Four Minutes and 24 Years.” Terry Gilliam, the legendary film and theater director (the list is epic and includes: “Time Bandits,” “Brazil,” “The Fisher King,” “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” “The Zero Theorem”) and Monty Python animator and cast member, was the guest.
The only message worth devoting much time and effort to communicating is love. Today, a sad news day, is a good day to remember that.
A few months ago I wrote about two artists who played with the question of whether what they are depicting is anything more or less than words on a page or paint on a surface. Both George Herbert and Arcimboldo (and Andy Warhol, in his own way) make art of the question, What is art? Is it what it depicts, an idea about what it depicts, both at the same time (which makes it a third option), or something less than? Is art, by definition, always a misfire, in that a depiction of a thing is not the thing and never can be?
Arcimboldo painted portraits of character types rather than individuals; for instance, a librarian composed entirely of books or a gardener made of vegetables in a bowl. That latter painting depends on the viewer to decide to see the bowl filled with veggies or a human “face.”
When is a face a face and when is it a bowl of root vegetables? When is a painting a painting and something greater than a collection of chemicals on canvas?
Vegetables In A Bowl, Or, The Gardener
George Herbert wrote poems about the only idea that he deemed to be worth considering: The eternal love of his Christian God and man’s time-and-space-and-language-constrained attempt to return that love. Two of his poems are written in the shape of what they are about. Like Arcimboldo painting a root vegetable for a nose, Herbert uses words to build an item; in one, “The Altar,” each word is a “stone” making up the altar that the poem is conceived as being:
A broken ALTAR, Lord, thy servant rears,
Made of a heart and cemented with tears;
Whose parts are as thy hand did frame;
No workman’s tool hath touch’d the same.
A HEART alone
Is such a stone,
As nothing but
Thy pow’r doth cut.
Wherefore each part
Of my hard heart
Meets in this frame
To praise thy name.
That if I chance to hold my peace,
These stones to praise thee may not cease.
Oh, let thy blessed SACRIFICE be mine,
And sanctify this ALTAR to be thine.
One word, a single syllable, too many or one word mislaid or deleted, and there is no altar there. It is an altar made of words but no less central to the life of a church than an altar made of stone. The poem appears in the only book of poems that he compiled himself, a book titled “The Temple,” which walks the reader, a “dejected poor soul,” through a church. Thus, his altar, “The Altar,” is central in the book. (At Herbert’s request, the book was published posthumously, with his stated desire that it might bring “consolation of [to] any dejected poor soul.”)
It is probably an untranslatable poem, in fact if not sentiment. (Indeed, an admittedly brief survey has not yielded one.) The shape of the poem is dictated by the number of syllables in his choice of words; it is a translation of an object, a real thing, into words anyway, and as such is forever a failure. It is a “broken altar.” The human heart is the only perfect, unbroken, stone for worship, is the only true altar. All that his mind can make is something out of these pieces of meaning, words, and if he can get out of his own way (“if I chance to hold my peace”), these words as assembled here only exist to worship and love. They are what they are, words, and the words each on their own are not an altar, and a spoken version of this poem is not an altar, either. When is an altar an altar? At what point is a poem something other than, more than, words on a page?
However well-constructed it may be—it looks like an altar, for crying out loud—it does not matter. It is no altar. Not even a photorealistic painting of an altar would be an altar. Further, no altar is truly an ALTAR, as no earthly object is made of the only stone of faith that exists: the human heart “cut” by God.
Herbert’s faith was that of a man for whom questions about faith were a part of it. His worship and his poetry exist in a space of failure, where a poem of an altar is not an altar but is a sort of altar, an attempt at one. His poetry depicts a figure who is struggling in every way to comprehend and return eternal love and who is met every time by a figure who replies that it is all a bit easier than he is making it. But all I have is language, Herbert’s speakers proclaim: “We say amiss / This or that is: / Thy word is all, if we could spell.”—”The Flower.”
Herbert often describes the moment when the perceiving of love comes easily, and it is always sensuous, often reads as if it is written to a new love:
Who would have thought my shriveled heart
Could have recovered greenness? It was gone
Quite underground; as flowers depart
To see their mother-root, when they have blown—”The Flower”
But Herbert’s worshipper is always doubting himself, his faith, whether his faith is correct or not. In “Love (iii),” Herbert’s speaker is an unworthy guest in God’s (Love’s) home, but his host is gently persistent:
Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back.
Guiltie of dust and sinne.
But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lack’d anything.
A guest, I answer’d, worthy to be here:
Love said, You shall be he.
I the unkinde, ungrateful? Ah, my deare,
I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
Who made the eyes but I?
Truth Lord, but I have marr’d them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, sayes Love, who bore the blame?
My deare, then I will serve.
You must sit down, sayes Love, and taste my meat:
So I did sit and eat.
So if poetry is always at best an approximation of True Love, why not try to sing this struggle, as well? The “cheerfully agnostic” (which pretty much describes me, as well) English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams created five songs out of four Herbert poems a little over a century ago. The suite is called “Five Mystical Songs,” and one, “Love Bade Me Welcome,” is a setting of “Love (iii).” Some churches use the last song, “Antiphon,” as a hymn sung by the congregation.
Here is Sir Thomas Allen performing the set (in two sections) with the BBC Symphony Orchestra:
____________________________________________ The WordPress Daily Prompt for December 16 asks, “You have to write a message to someone dear to you, telling that person how much he/she means to you. However—instead of words, you can only use 5-10 objects to convey your emotions. Which objects do you choose, and what do they mean?”
The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band has received a great deal of attention in recent years. Even its Wikipedia entry has grown from a stub to a forty-paragraph historical disquisition in a few short years, which surely must be a sign of something, with fourteen footnotes, two sources, and five “for further readings.” (Thank you very much, Mr. and/or Mrs. Whoever Did That.)
If you are a fan of the Bonzos, nothing I may write here will do more than remind you of something you also like. If you are not (yet), nothing that I write may convince you that you have a bright future ahead of you discovering the works of these music-comic dolt-geniuses, so here is an intro anyway (“Adolf Hitler on vibes”):
For a group that was somewhat pop, mostly tongue-in-cheek, unforgettable on stage, and almost-not-quite-but-why-couldn’t-just-one-more-person-have-bought-our-record a one-hit wonder, forty paragraphs is a lot. So perhaps I am not alone in my fandom. One of the pleasant surprises in writing this website has been the number of hits that a post I wrote about Bonzo founder Vivian Stanshall has received (in triple digits since March).
The Bonzos served as a bridge, a missing link (if you were looking for one) between The Beatles and the Monty Python group. In late 1967, the Bonzos appeared in both “Magical Mystery Tour” (partially entertaining the Beatles—John Lennon heckles them—with a performance of their song “Death Cab for Cutie”) and in the pre-Python but mostly Python-staffed afternoon television show, “Do Not Adjust Your Set.”
Here, from “Do Not Adjust Your Set,” a pre-Python Michael Palin introduces the Bonzos and Stanshall does his best worst Elvis in “Death Cab for Cutie.”
In most of their performances, Stanshall was the lead singer, focus of attention, easily distracted emcee, and camera hog whenever one was present. The basic Bonzo line-up was Neil Innes, Rodney Slater, Sam Spoons, Roger Ruskin Spear, Vernon Dudley Bohay-Nowell, “Legs” Larry Smith, and Bob Kerr. At times, the group was down to three members (when an album was required to meet a contractual obligation) and at others, more than a dozen musicians and affiliated acts might be occupying the stage.
As head song composers, Stanshall was paired up with Neil Innes, but according to Innes, “Death Cab for Cutie” was the only true collaboration between the two heads of the head-less Bonzos, because it was the only time he and Stanshall were actually in the same room while writing. Stanshall wrote wordplay-heavy songs with lines that were saturated in nonsense, and Innes was (and is) a songwriter whose Beatles-esque tunes led not only to to the Bonzos being produced by Paul McCartney (the minor hit “I’m the Urban Spaceman,” which qualified the group as an almost one-hit wonder) but also to a Beatles lawsuit in the 1970s when music he wrote for his parody group, the Rutles, was found to be too reminiscent for comfort. Several Innes songs for the Rutles now list Lennon-McCartney as co-composers. Further cementing the Beatles-Python link occupied by the Bonzos, “The Rutles” was an Eric Idle project with Innes.
Their collaboration “Mr. Apollo” combines an almost-too-catchy Innes tune with Stanshall’s absurd and long fake sales pitch for an exercise gimmick: “Five years ago, I was a four-stone apology. Today, I am two separate gorillas. No tiresome exercises. No tricks. No unpleasant bending.” The song also features a fuzzy heavy metal guitar solo, even though it dates from the era about six months before anyone had heard heavy metal guitar solos.
It is completely an Innes song, so Stanshall is relegated to court jester in performance; also, you can see how much the group dis-enjoyed lip-singing.
The Bonzos got their start in a pub in the early 1960s, when several similarly aged young men (20-somethings) hanging out there found they had similar interests, especially in kitschy old 1930s records, and started to informally perform together. Slater recounts Stanshall bringing in one such record and declaring, “Look at this! I bought it for a penny but it’s worth twice that!”
Their early performances were live and faithful renditions of the pop not-so standards that they heard on the records. But other acts were also performing live and faithful renditions of obscure 1930s records, too, so the Bonzos, many of them art students entranced by Dada, started to create their own Dadaist sound and look. The group was an act without a point that loved being an act and having no point except being an act.
By 1970, the job of jester in the court of pop music or musician in the court of comedy no longer needed to be filled. The Bonzos disbanded, sort of. Reunion line-ups performed through the 1970s and still come together. The group’s set lineup varied in name and number so whimsically anyway that it could be said that its members simply wandered away. Innes went on, as written above, to a long and varied career continuing to bridge a gap between comedy and pop music. Most of the surviving members are jazz musicians who will always be remembered as Bonzos.
The group celebrated its fortieth anniversary in 2006 with a live show that featured special guests like Stephen Fry. What it was the fortieth anniversary of was up for discussion, but 1966 was the year the group came to the attention of the larger British public, as it landed its first major label record deal and appeared on television for the first time.
And Vivian Stanshall. He died almost twenty years ago, in March 1995, because he used to smoke cigarettes and drink brandy in bed and those two things do not mix well with nodding off. He is one of those artists about whom one marvels at his inventiveness, at the waterfall of words most of his work produced, and still feels that his career was somehow smaller than it was meant to be. I certainly disagree. (I am sure his non-ghost is not thanking me, anywhere.) He left the world wanting more of him, which is what performers are always told to do.
____________________________________________ The WordPress Daily Prompt for December 15 asks, “We all have our semi-secret, less-known personal favorites—a great B-side, an early work by an artist that later became famous, an obscure (but delicious) family recipe. Share one of your unsung heroes with us—how did you discover it? Why has it stayed off everyone’s radar?”
The Gad About Town 