Wild Oats Goes Hogwild
these writings are a continuation of the writings from issue one titled some writings on audible edge, or, wild oats goes buckwild which you can read in the previous post here. following a discussion of a maria moles concert, it concludes with the words “all these drips with the unmoving heads? they can eat my bulldust.”
iv. signifying magnet house
the following week i encounter this indignant feeling again. at goolagatup heathcote the artist jemi gale is doing a karaoke performance to an audience of fifty. i am enjoying it quite severely when i begin to become perturbed. why is it that, again, i am the only one nodding my head? why am i the only one who seems remotely attuned to what is so obviously popular dance music, the most popular genre there is? sure, the singer’s voice is a bit low and husky compared to, say, katy perry or miley cyrus, but is that really such an obstacle to the moving of one’s hips or the nodding of one’s head? what about the noticeably big beat and the big throbbing bass? what about all the other famous signifiers of popular music: the disco lights, the smoke machine, the singer’s long blonde hair?
i don’t even like popular dance music, so if i, a famous anti-dancer, am moved enough to dance, then surely this dance music must be extremely good… so why are all these people sitting down? why is no one even tapping their fingers? its not like these people are stupid, most of them have honours degrees. is it because we are in an art gallery and not connections or metros or magnet house? are people really that dependent on context? is the art world and music world really that seperate? if you brought mccubbin’s Down on His Luck into air nightclub, would everyone stop dancing to sip their white wine in silence?
when the show finished, i asked these questions to a local curator named chandler. “well” he said, “i wanted to dance, like, i kinda felt like it, but then i looked around and thought, uh, yeah, it just wasn’t the vibe”. not the vibe? what? but it so obviously was the vibe. the smoke machine and popular dance music and colourful lights and long blonde hair - not the vibe?
and then on the drive home, i started to worry: what if it was the vibe? what if it was the vibe, but i had somehow killed it? is my presence really that bad?
i have been told i have a not very good vibe… but surely it can’t be bad enough to stop fifty people from dancing - and its not like i was being obnoxious or embarassing. it wasn't like i was appropriating a hip hop maneuver or “shaking my money maker”. i was simply nodding my head. is that really so bad? my hands on the wheel began to shake. bad vibe? bad vibe? all because i was nodding my head? all because i was being in the room? all because being in the world at all? something made me snap the wheel rightwards to merge without looking. bad vibe? surely not everyone can think this about me. but everyone clearly must do, because no one was nodding or dancing.
had this collective act of non-action been pre-organised? a group email sent out that read “tonight at the jemi gale performance, we shall protest the injurious presence of a certain unendurable individual, a man whose name rhymes with ‘yenjamin baxley’”. i realised that this was clearly more than a conspiracy of stillness - it was a confederacy.
well say what you want about my “injurious presence" and that you wish my presence was absence; at the end of the day it was jemi gale, and not me, who suffered the blows of your inaction. do you know how hard it is to sing to a wilfully unresponsive audience? and her very gig too? perth is NOT ok.
v. theoretical investigations
everyone is always inferring that if i want to have a less contemptible vibe, i should try my best to be less “emotionally unstable”. i should instead attempt to act in a manner more scientific and measurable. oh, it all is too much. if i could only go back to being jizzum i would stop at the egg and say “after you”. but, i have taken your feedback on board.
in the last year i have been working like a dog to attain more rationality and wisdom. the monk who lives near my house has been lending me books from the theosophical society and i have also been trying to expand my general knowedge by watching more free-to-air television. so, if there really is not an embargoment upon my person, and if all of my problems are just problems in my head, then i still do not understand why i was the only one nodding.
the other night on channel seven, i happened to catch the second half of a very interesting documentary about zac effron called “we are your friends”. we all know zac effron from his role in the childrens movie “high school musical” yet not many know of his pro-bono work as a californian wedding dj. he doesn’t do it for the money. he does it for the love of EDM. the documentary is an entertaining crash course in music theory, and there was one scene in particular that very much peaked my interest, a famous scene where zac effron offers a biological explanation for my musical predicament:
Okay. Rocking a party, step one. So it's the DJ's job to get the crowd out of their heads, and into their bodies. So in order to do that, you want to zero in on their heartbeats. I like to start'em off at about 120 beats per minute. That's equivalent to the heartbeat of a long-distance runner. You see, BPM is the name of the game. It governs how your body moves. For example, reggae is slow, about 60 BPM. Dubstep is actually 140 BPM cut to half speed. It ends up being about 70 BPM. House is around 110 to 130 BPM. There's a popular myth that 128 beats per minute is the rate that synergizes most with your heartbeat. That's the magic number. Once you've gotten your crowd there, you're controlling their entire circulatory system.
if what the dj zac effron says is true, then my heartbeat must be somewhat miscalibrated because effron’s music does nothing for me. some jemi gale or maria mole on the other hand… that gets me going hogwild.
the other day i was bragging to some colleagues about my really fast pulse. they said i should go to a doctor so i went and the doctor said there was actually nothing wrong with my heart, in fact, my bpm was actually much slower than it should be. this would make sense in regards to my enjoyment of the thudding rhythms of jemi gale, but no sense whatsoever in the case of maria mole. her rhythms are buckwild. so in conclusion, this zac effron theory of music is moonshine - a classic case of “now you see it, now you don’t”. 128 bpm? consider this myth busted.
vi. theosophical investigations
perhaps my predicament is less to do with bpm and more to do with fps. in the 1984 book phenomena and noumena, buddhist philosopher william v zinn writes that consciousness is like a zoetrope, moving between 12-24 frames per second. apparently william james said the same thing too a hundred years prior. the important thing is that consciousness is said to move at a slower frame rate than our actual eyesight. we may see the 12 frames of a galloping horse as fast or slow depending on the zoetrope’s spinning speed, but whatever the case, the brain never sees the twelve frames individually. it just sees the motion of a galloping horse and thinks 'well that there horse is runnin’, and by the time the brain has finished its sentence, the horse has already galloped a handful of times.
well, the buddhist scholar’s point is that consciousness has a limited number of frames that only gives us the illusion of fluidity… yet there really exists frames between the frames, frames that only exist for a fraction of a frame, for a millionth of a second. and these secret frames may be called the unconscious, or the hunch, or affect, or what the buddhists call insight. in the split second between the picture of the horses leg kissing the ground, and the horses leg fully upon it, there exists thoughts that come from a place i don’t know where, thoughts that usually come clear to me in the moments before waking up.
this morning before i got out of bed, i knew without reason what i had to do today. i had to write something called "the big bikkie manifesto". i didnt know what it meant or what it would be about. i just knew it was a good idea. the only thing is, nobody has ever agreed on the correct way to spell bikkie in a satisfying way... biccy, bickie, bikky. i like the sound, i love the concept, but i hate the spelling.
perhaps it is a problem with the english phonetic system. english is not a very pleasant language to look at. we don’t spell things as good as the italians or the japanese. "the big biscotti manifesto" looks and sounds quite nice, but a big bikkie is very different to a big biscotti. in somalian it would be “the big buskud manifesto” which gives me a big smile when i say it alous. buskud, in some ways, is the most spiritual translation, performing the same humourous abberation on the root word biscuit. but this does not answer my problem on the correct way to spell bikky.
perhaps the problem is with the font. bickie in comic sans looks more acceptable than in times new roman, but i am searching for a combination of letters that looks acceptable in any type face.
i also tried looking at bikkie spelt in other writing systems - arabic, kanji, hebrew etcetera. biscuit in burmese is the most visually bikkie-like spelling:
“the big ဘီစကွတ် manifesto”. it rolls off the tongue unless you don’t know how to pronounce ဘီစကွတ်. to me ဘီစကွတ် is also a kind of logosoglyph - a word that looks exactly like the thing it represents, for example, "bed". however, ဘီစကွတ် may not bring to mind a tray of ten big bickies as it does to me:
most people, gun to their head, would say that ဘီစကွတ် looks more like:
“the mooning manifesto”. maybe i will write this after i am done with the first, but i am sure it has already been written, if not by andy griffiths then by a disgruntled victorian because unfortunately in 2016, the city of melbourne passed a ridiculous law to criminalise mooning - its purveyors facing up to two months in jail for “public indecency”. i think this is very unfair. my own sense of morality would argue that mooning is okay so long as you only show the surface of the butt cheeks and nothing more. also, if the melbourne government was actually serious about mooning, then twice i would be in jail, because once in brunswick i pulled the old pressed ham and another time at brighton beach i dived up out of the water to give the old "white whale". although these jests were met with general good humour among the persons present, i understand that my mooning behaviour may have been considered indecent by those who were not present. however, i like to think that i am a different person now and that my mooning days are far behind me.
—
every theosopher knows that there is a great pleasure in following a cognitive thread to its logical end. i can no longer remember what was at the start of this thread, but i have an inexplicable hunch that this is a good place to finish.
until next time,
wild oats.