Stephen McClurg's Blog, page 47

To Find Words When the Words Are Hard to Find

My mom spent most of her birthday hanging out with the grandkids and the two new kittens. Thinking about our generations together made me think of some of the poems that give words to that kind of joy and the odd feeling that ripples through your vision as you get older (sometimes a sadness? a sense of loss? Maybe it’s not “odd” at all, just an acknowledgement of time moving on–like I said, I don’t mean this in a depressing sense, I just haven’t found words to evoke the richer sense of it) . I’ve tried to give words to that for a long time and certain images find their way out, but I’ve never done it well enough over the course of a whole piece.

I like what Cath Song does with her poem “Waterwings.”

Happy Birthday, Mom!

To Boldly Go

After a library visit, we were driving by a very popular taco joint near us and I commented on its popularity. My youngest improvised a song:

I sat down at the taco place
and asked them to feed my face.
I ate it all and then got scared,
‘Cause I farted myself up into space.

I thought it was pretty good for her age. As far as content, I guess I can’t complain because I couldn’t stop giggling about the book my oldest checked out (pictured above).

May your family library trips be filled with butts and space.

Summer Alembics

The kids and I finished the second-to-last phase of filming for a video project that will hopefully be done within a month.

When asked about the experience making stuff, I was told, “My butt just burped.” [Identity withheld to protect the guilty.]

Here are some pre-edit screen shots.

[image error]Title sequence in which I animated in probably the least efficient way possible.



[image error]From a short sequence with some editing.



[image error]I was changing a light and dropped it and decided to take advantage of it.



[image error]I had other reasons for including owls, but I just realized this one in particular was probably also influenced by Twin Peaks.



[image error]I don’t know if I’ll use this.



[image error]False Empress



[image error]Real Empress



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McClurg’s Music to Ouija By

At some point a relative of mine worked on novelty recordings, including several haunted house records, and then made albums that supposedly capture the sound of these hybrid Ouija/keyboard instruments he built that played music and conjured EVP. We’re not sure how many of these he built or where they are, but the tracks that have been found (and sort-of re-issued) feature three: The Magic Tray, The I-D-O PSY-CHO-I-D-E-O-GRAPH, and The Electric Mystifying Oracle. No one’s sure if it was part of his Halloween or seance party recordings or something he took more seriously. Below are some photos and liner notes. Here’s where you can listen.

Notes:

The recording you now possess was created by an entity born in Eastern Kentucky as Allie Bob O’Robbie McClurg, called Allie by his family, and later known as Mus Mus. His birth brought together two clashing households–the O’Robbie and McClurg clans–and they decided that he should have both surnames. With a love of Tin Pan Alley tunes and cowboy ballads, he left home to pursue a career in entertainment. Never very successful (his early career involved providing sound effects on novelty records), he did manage a lifelong friendship with Toronto-born composer/arranger Percy Faith. They also shared the same birthday: April 7, 1908. 

Jake Wimly remembers the hard days: “We was all trying to get to the big time, you know. I had been to some wrestling matches at the Piper Domes when a pal of mine named Deuce Rogers asked me if I wanted to be in a movie they was filming about a cowboy band because the director didn’t like the look of the cross-eyed tenor. I had sidlined before so it was no big deal. That’s where I met Allie, that’s what we called him until all the ‘Mus Mus’ crap. He played a bar patron and did some lighting work from what I remember. He was always a little strange, but good people.” 

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Murphey DePaul, a producer on the Ouija sessions has some Mus Mus memories as well: “He would only work by candlelight. One person was allowed at a time in the studio with him. He called them a ‘psychic battery’ for the session. No one would go in with him, so I volunteered. He shook my hand, strapped me down in a chair, and stepped behind the curtains erected around the instruments he designed. People always ask me about the boards and other instruments he built, and as much as I’d love to exaggerate their qualities, none of us were allowed to see them uncovered. One of the boxes was marked ‘The von Krieg Estate’ and that’s about all I can say. I just know something…something happened that night I can’t explain. That or he pulled one helluva Oz stunt there in the studio.” DePaul swears that any and all voices on these tracks were never heard during recording, but only during playback. 

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Smile Your Smile

Then run off to sleep. Bolan’s tune has been on the brain.

Couplet

While reading a De Quincey collection, I came across some lines of Shelley that I either hadn’t read or hadn’t remembered, but I immediately responded to them in this context:

With hue like that when some great painter dips 
His pencil in the gloom of earthquake and eclipse.

I genuinely enjoy Puritan writing, especially diaries and journals. I’ve discovering some interesting Victorian journals (not De Quincey) that I’ll write about soon. Some read like excerpts of the Psychopathia Sexualis, quite different from the Puritan journals.

Ringing New Ears

One of the ways I celebrate the New Year is through music. For the past few years that has meant Thai music, especially phin and isaan music.

This year I’ve been listening to the Sons of Kemet record Your Queen Is a Reptile. The quartet of sax, tuba, and two drummers plays powerful, danceable, and reflective pieces. The music is about memory and celebration (at least one piece is dedicated to a family member), and while looking back, has an aggressive drive forward.

Sounds like a good way to approach a new year to me.

Happy New Year!

Sons of Kemet performing “My Queen Is Harriet Tubman.”

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Stull crawls into the light…

I’ll hopefully have more thoughts about this soon. I hadn’t played with a drummer in six years and I knew I was going to approach playing improv in a different way than I had in the past. I was full of monkey mind, but I’m happy with the results and look forward to more work with Stull and with a few other projects.

The Subversive Workshop

Stull is a long-running improvisational group with me on guitar and Tracy Harris on drums. Our friend Stephen McClurg joins us now on bass, and we’re putting some recordings of a recent get-together at The Subversive Workshop up on Soundcloud. Here are a couple for you to get into a deep space freakout with…

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I’ll Cut a Hole and Pull You Through

The first in a series of videos based on music and poems. 

Stolen Moments

I’ve wanted to write something for Chuck Wendig’s Friday prompts for a long time. During the school year, it’s difficult to eek out something in a week and during the summer I usually have a variety of other work going on. Last Friday, in honor of Anthony Bourdain, Wendig asked us to write about food with the idea that food is almost always more than that. I also wanted to experiment with second person. Hope you enjoy!

Stolen Moments

You sit and say water’s fine. You move the fork, knife, and napkin to the other side. A habit. You hear your palm sliding on the table. It reminds you of pans scraping across the counters in the bakery. You worked there with your mother. She always wore her hair long, but at the bakery she wound it into a top knot that reminded you of samurai or fantasy characters, the smaller ones like elves. You remember seeing her make pigs-in-a-blanket. She stood over the pan wrapping little red sausages in white dough. Plastic gloves. Apron. She looked fragile to you for the first time. You get your water. It’s cold and the glass is sweating. You order. You had moved back home and felt that failure in your core, eels twisting in your intestines.You worked at the bakery to save money, while it was the last time you spent regularly with your parents. You started learning alto saxophone. You learned bebop melodies. “Salt Peanuts.” “Body and Soul.” “Tempus Fugit.” “A Night in Tunisia.” You never played them at bebop tempos. You couldn’t. You would even slow the metronome to forty, thirty, even twenty beats per minute, and listen to how the notes connected. Or how you hoped they would connect. The spaces became larger. Grave, the tempo is called. Slow and solemn. The waitress pours more water with your order. She asks how everything is. You fork your yolk and watch its perfect weep. Everything’s fine, you tell her. Fine, like the end of a song.