Disinformation Book of Lists (31 page)

1

“Beware of the man whose god is in the skies.”
–George Bernard Shaw

2

“In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.”
–Thomas Jefferson

3

“A people who despise sex must also despise their god.”
–Beth Brant

4

“Belief is messy, a violence that pushes life around into categories, choosing from infinite realities this truth or that.”
–Robin Podolsky

5

“I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind—that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.”
–H.L. Mencken

6

“A few years ago we finally persuaded psychiatrists to remove homosexuality from the list of recognized mental disorders. Maybe it's time we started lobbying them to add belief in God to the list. Belief in an angry, intolerant one, anyway….

“I demand assurances that a given religion will not cause or potentiate mass homicidal psychosis or priestly pedophilia, before we let it indoctrinate helpless children and vulnerable adults. Bloodthirsty, authoritarian theology threatens Canada as much as tobacco, obesity and booze put together. It endangers our planet more than global warming, nuclear winter or rogue asteroids.”
–Spider Robinson (Hugo- and Nebula-winning science fiction author)

7

“We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.”
–H.L. Mencken

8

“I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches, and the effect of religious belief, is positively harmful.”
–Christopher Hitchens

9

“Hell is paved with priests' skulls.”
–Saint John Chrysostom (347-407)

+ Movies, Music, and Pulp Fiction

1

Dolorita in the Passion Dance (1894)

Showing that film censorship is almost as old as film itself, this titillating little number was excommunicated from New Jersey after being shown in peepshows on the Atlantic City Boardwalk. The three-volume reference work
Censorship
says the film “was probably the first to be banned in the United States.”

2

Reenactment of the Massacre at Wounded Knee (1906)

William Cody, better known as “Buffalo Bill,” had been reenacting Wild West life—with a ten-gallon hatful of poetic license—in his traveling shows. When he decided to film a staging of the 1890 massacre of Native Americans at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, he enlisted the help of the US government. According to
Censorship
, the feds weren't too happy with the result, which displayed some sympathy for the slaughtered Indians, so they shelved the footage, permanently.

3

The Birth of a Nation (1915)

“The most banned film in American history,” according to
The Encyclopedia of Censorship.
D.W. Griffith's racist, pro-KKK look at the Civil War and Reconstruction was outlawed in Ohio, Colorado, Boston, Pittsburgh, and dozens of other jurisdictions.

4

Birth Control (1917)

This lightly fictionalized film about eugenicist Margaret Sanger's quest to tell poor women about contraception in the face of suppression was banned by New York's film censor. It was written by and starred Sanger, who later founded the organizations that would become Planned Parenthood.

5

Scarface (1932)

The original, non-Pacino version of Al Capone's life—directed by Howard Hawks and produced by Howard Hughes—was banned in five states, including New York, and five cities, including Seattle and Chicago, owing to its violence and/or supposed glorification of crime.

6

Two-faced Woman (1941)

Greta Garbo's swan song was banned in New York City and elsewhere because of its theme of adultery.

7

Let There Be Light (1946)

Legendary director John Huston
(The African Queen, The Maltese Falcon
, etc.) made documentaries for the Army during the WWII era. The final one,
Let There Be Light
, focused on shell-shocked soldiers being treated at a Long Island Hospital. The Army confiscated the film and refused to release it, citing violation of the doughboys' privacy, although Huston was convinced it was pulled for PR reasons. It was finally screened in 1981.

8

The Vanishing Prairie (1956)

Censorship
describes this idiotic incident succinctly: “Walt Disney's
The Vanishing Prairie
, an Academy Award-winning documentary, was banned in New York because it showed a buffalo giving birth; an American Civil Liberties Union complaint led to a reversal of the ban.”

9

Titicut Follies (1967)

Director Frederick Wiseman was granted legal access to the State Prison for the Criminally Insane in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, for a month in 1966. He and his crew filmed scenes of mind-bruising degradation and sadness. Almost predictably, state officials went apeshit when they saw the final cut of
Titicut Follies
, and a Superior Court judge blocked the film's release.

The authorities charged that the documentary violated the inmates' privacy. Perhaps it did, but it's telling that they were suddenly so concerned about the privacy rights of the prisoners, while still uninterested in their human rights, which were obviously in a state of constant violation, as captured on film. The Massachusetts Supreme Court partially overturned the ruling, allowing the film to be screened only for doctors, sociologists, judges, and others who would have a professional interest in the subject. The Supreme Court refused to hear Wiseman's appeal of this unprecedented restriction, and there the matter stood until 1991, when a Massachusetts Superior Court judge dropped all restraints. Two years later, the documentary was aired a single time on public television. It has never been broadcast again, nor has it been released on video.

10

I Am Curious—Yellow (1967)

This Swedish hippie/art movie with explicit sex scenes was refused entry into the US by Customs. An appeals court slapped down the import ban, but then fifteen states barred it from their theaters.

11

Blue Movie (1969)

Also called
Fuck
, Andy Warhol's movie was banned as obscene by a New York criminal court, a ruling that was upheld on appeal.

12

Deep Throat (1972)

One of the first hardcore porno features, and still the most famous,
Deep Throat
was outlawed in 23 states, and the feds convicted a bunch of people, including starring penis Harry Reems, involved with its distribution. All convictions were later overturned.

13

Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987)

This unauthorized biopic is a double whammy. Todd Haynes used Barbie dolls as the “actors” with the Carpenters' recordings as the soundtrack. The only question was whether Richard Carpenter or Mattel would be the one to permanently block this film's release. It was Carpenter.

14

The Making of “Monsters” (1990)

John Greyson's short feature about gay-bashing includes an unauthorized, reworked version of “Mack the Knife,” a gigantic hit for Bobby Darin and Louis Armstrong. The estate of the song's writer, Kurt Weill, had the movie pulled from circulation.

15

The Profit (2001)

Peter N. Alexander's movie follows the rise of a paranoid cult leader and his organization, obviously based on L. Ron Hubbard and the Church of Scientology. According to Alexander, Scientologists interfered with this movie at every step of the way. Lawyers and spokespeople for the Church professed that the movie bore absolutely no resemblance to Scientology, then turned around and sued the filmmakers after it had been showing for a few weeks. The Church claims that the only reason the movie was made was to taint the jury pool in a trial over the shadowy death of Lisa McPherson, a member of the Church. A Pinellas County Florida Judge apparently agreed and blocked the film from further release. The litigation continues…..

16

Ernest and Bertram (2002)

Described by
The Advocate
as “a retelling, in eight minutes, of Lillian Hellman's classic play of unrequited gay love,
The Children's Hour
, using the
Sesame Street
characters Bert and Ernie,” Peter Spears' short film showed at several film festivals (including Sundance), but soon the Sesame Workshop made sure it would never flicker on a screen again. Another film by Spears, the 37-minute
Scream, Teen, Scream
, also met death by intellectual property law, this time over the song “Love Rollercoaster.”

1

Genetic music

The idea here is to take a sequence of DNA—whether a fragment, a gene, an amino acid, a protein—assign a musical characteristic (such as pitch, chord type, voice, or even a note) to various aspects of a mapped strand (bases, amino acids, molecular weight, light absorption frequencies, etc.), and then play the resulting composition.

David W. Deamer is a pioneer in the field, having created DNA music since the early 1980s. Using some simple rules, he started playing gene sequences on his piano. The first portion of human DNA he tried resembled a waltz; the insulin protein sounds like an Irish jig. Deamer currently has two albums available, with composer Riley McLaughlin.

More recently, Alexandra Pajak, a biology and music major at Agnes Scott College (Decatur, Georgia), created two works—a symphony based on the DNA of the school's founder and a CD of eight synthesized compositions, each one derived from a gene, including that of the Herpes B virus.

Other genetic musicians include Henry Alan Hargrove
(A Splash of Life)
, Munakata Nobuo (“Duet of AIDS”), Susan Alexjander
(Sequencia)
, John Dunn and K.W. Bridges (“Squid Eye Lens,” “Scorpion Stinger,” and “Slime Mold”), M.A. Clark and John Dunn
(Life Music)
, Peter Gena and Charles Strom (“Collagen and Bass Clarinet”), Linda Long (“Calcium Chimes”), Aurora Sánchez Sousa
(Genoma Music)
, and Larry Lang (“Oxy Fugue 9”).

2

Other body music

DNA is the most popular basis for bodily music, but many others exist. In 2003, at a live event called “DECONcert: Music in the Key of EEG,” 50 people were simultaneously hooked up to machines that made music out of their brain activity. Also, genetic musician John Dunn has created the fifteen-minute composition “Theta Music” from brainwaves (it's available on his self-published album
Algorithmic Music).
As you might imagine, full albums of gray matter music are few and far between; a couple include
Cerebral Disturbance
by Aube and the 1976 compilation
Brainwave Music.

In a small study at the University of Toronto, scientists measured the brainwaves of insomniacs, then had a computer translate the measurements into sound that was sometimes melodious, sometimes cacophonic. Listening to these CDs, the subjects fell asleep significantly faster and stayed asleep significantly longer than subjects who listened to
other
people's brainwaves.

A number of albums designed to put babies to sleep (they're said to work on adults, too) incorporate sounds based on heartbeats. At least one series—
Heartbeat Music Therapy
by Terry Woodford—uses an actual human heartbeat as gentle percussion for the lullabies.

Galvonic skin response (GSR) measures electrical activity of the skin, and is believed to reflect a person's internal state, particularly the actions of the parasympathetic nervous system. Several hardware-software devices, including Mental Games by Mind Modulations, will translate your GSR readings into music.

Beyond these forms, the trail goes pretty cold, with just fleeting references to music based on pulse, respiration, and other bodily activities or measurements of those activities. This is definitely a ripe area—practically
terra incognita
—for musicians to explore.

3

Plant music

“Sound ecologist” Michael Prime created the album
L-fields
by reading the bioelectric signals from plants, then feeding them into an oscillator. The All Music Guide says: “Prime later compresses, overlays, and integrates sounds from the surrounding environment to the signal and voilà: through a work aesthetically close to electroacoustics, the listener is invited to hear a plant live its life!” The three performers he chose are very telling: marijuana, peyote, and fly agaric mushrooms. Prime did similar things with fruit on David Toop's album
Museum of Fruit.

Likewise, after measuring the electrical vibes given off by plants, Michael Theroux arranged the resulting sounds into musical compositions on the album
Plant Tones.

Biochemist Linda Long creates compositions by transcribing 3-D models of proteins in parsley and other plants into music, making her work essentially a subgenre of genetic music (item #2, above).

Stretching the genre of plant music to its limit is the First Vienna Vegetable Orchestra, which jams on nothing but musical instruments made out of vegetables (with a few kitchen implements, such as a blender, thrown into the mix). Some of the instruments are simple, such as a tomato or turnip that gets thumped for percussion, but often they're more complex, like the wind instruments carved out of carrots, celery, and cucumbers, or the marimbas made out of radishes. The group's website says that their “musical spectrum ranges from traditional african pieces to classical european concert music through to experimental electronic music.”

The eight musicians perform one or two concerts a month. After each performance, the group's chef chops and cooks the instruments, which the audience and band members then munch. If you can't make it to Europe, you can always buy their two CDs (meal not included).

4

Math music

Math was never my strong suit, so the ways that various numbers, constants, formulae, etc. are translated into music flies several thousand feet over my head. But it sure sounds purty. The largest subgenre is undoubtedly fractal music, though Daniel Cummerow has made compositions from trigonometric functions, prime numbers, and the Fibonacci sequence, among others.

In the Pi Project, over two-dozen musicians created compositions directly based on the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. You know: π (3.141592….). Basically, any aspect of music that can be expressed as pi was employed—frequency, pitch, measure, etc. Others chose to take graphic representations of pi—either the Greek letter itself or the endless string of numbers that is pi—and convert them into sound through various means. Each piece is exactly three minutes and fourteen seconds long.

On an even more complex level, classical composer Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001) applied calculus, probability, game theory, Boolean algebra, set theory, and other brain-crushing forms of mathematics to his work, which is regarded as some of the finest orchestral music of the twentieth century.

5

Underwater music

Michel Redolfi is the Neptune of underwater music. His album
Sonic Waters
contains original electronic music recorded in pools and the Pacific Ocean. The follow-up,
Sonic Waters #2: Underwater Music, 1983-1989
, showcases soundscapes derived from natural noises recorded by submerged microphones. In his concerts, Redolfi—while on land—plays his music, which is broadcast on nearby speakers that are completely underwater. Landlubbers hear nothing; you must put at least your head into the drink in order to hear the songs. Redolfi has even written an opera meant to be sung by performers encased in specially-designed bubbles at the bottom of the sea, and vibraphone virtuoso Alex Grillo has been known to team up with him for live sets
performed
underwater.

Jim Nollman—by virtue of the fact that he plays music with whales—is a
de facto
underwater musician. His live guitarwork is piped through speakers suspended under a boat. Through a hydrophone, he hears the cetaceans answer him. He then responds musically, and an underwater, interspecies jam session occurs. As part of the same series of experiments, chanting Tibetan monks and a reggae band have also had two-way musical encounters with the whales.

6

Palindromic music

“Palindrome” usually refers to a word or sentence that reads the same backwards as forwards:
mom, dad
, “Do geese see God?” But anything composed of discrete units, such as music, can be a palindrome. Classic composers including Mozart, Bach, and Haydn created pieces in which time, pitch, and/or melody was reversed at some point (a trick called a “crab canon”).

According to the Wikipedia: “The Icelandic music-band Sigur Rós composed a song [“Staralfur”] on their album
Ágætis Byrjun
, which partly sounds the same, playing forwards or backwards. Not only symmetric from the notes, but also symmetric in the sound by mixing the reverse music over the original…. The interlude from Alban Berg's opera,
Lulu
is a palindrome.”

College radio staple They Might Be Giants has a song called “I Palindrome I” in which one verse is a word-by-word (but not letter-by-letter) palindrome:

“Son, I am able,” she said, “though you scare me.”
“Watch,” said I.
“Beloved,” I said, “watch me scare you, though.”
Said she, “Able am I, son.”

7

Toy instruments

The shtick for Pianosaurus, a trio from New York State, was that they played pop-rock on kiddie instruments bought at toy stores. Their only studio album,
Groovy Neighborhood
, includes covers of Chuck Berry's “Memphis” and John Lee Hooker's “Dimples.”

Although their complete devotion to plinky pianos and Smurf drums is unique, other bands before and after have occasionally taken the same approach. Indie-rockers Self released an all-toy album in 2000,
Gizmodgery
(with an explicit lyrics warning sticker) replete with Mattel Star Guitar, a See ‘n Say, Little Tykes Xylophone, talking stuffed animals, beeping robots, baby rattles, etc. None other than the Rolling Stones pioneered the approach, when Charlie Watts played a 1930s toy drum kit on the band's rowdy “Street Fighting Man.”

Outside of rock and roll, avant garde pianist Margaret Leng Tan is billed by one of her record labels as “the world's only professional toy pianist.” She plays the full-size version of the instrument, as well the string piano, but it's her 1997 album
The Art of the Toy Piano
, plus assorted shorter works, that earns her a spot on the list. Tan has played compositions by Phllip Glass, Beethoven, Lennon-McCartney, and John Cage (his 1948 “Suite for Toy Piano” is “the first ‘serious' piece ever written for” the instrument, according to Tan).

8

Corporate anthems

Companies have always sought to motivate employees, and some of them go to lengths far beyond taping up signs that say, “TEAM = Together Everyone Achieves More.” One such method is to infect workers' minds with a song that practically deifies the corporation. IBM was an early—if not the earliest—pioneer of these efforts. The 1931 edition of “Songs of the I.B.M.” has been reproduced online, and it contains such mind-numbing propaganda as “Ever Onward”:

Ever onward! Ever onward!
That's the spirit that has brought us fame.
We're big but bigger we will be,
We can't fail for all can see,
That to serve humanity
Has been our aim.
Our products now are known
In every zone.
Our reputation sparkles
Like a gem.

Despite such a long track record, the existence of corporate anthems only hit the mass mind in spring 2001, when Chris Raettig started a little website to collect these capitalist ditties. Soon the site was swamped with visitors, who were downloading the songs by the thousand, over a gigabyte of material every hour. The jingle that first caught Raettig's attention was written for a European conference of international accounting firm KPMG's consultants. For simpleminded cheesiness, most of the lyrics would embarrass Barney the Dinosaur. The chorus goes: “KPMG—a team of power and energy. We go for the gold. Together we hold to a vision of global strategy.” Another line actually declared: “We'll be number one, with effort and fun.” The song was remixed by amused Netizens into jungle, hard rock, industrial, and Nokia ringtone versions.

Not to be outdone, accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers commissioned a tune with the lyrics: “We don't sell no dogma. All we've got is skill. Doing each and every client's will.” “Global Technology” by Deutsche Bank contains this bit of doggerel: “Global technology is no easy game to play. A new challenge for all of us, every day.”

In perhaps the most ill-advised move in corporate music history, “Internet solutions provider” Asera wanted to kick it old-school style, so they chose to make “Asera Everywhere” into a rap song:

Yo! Homeboys, homegirls, gather ‘round.
We're poppin' it, kickin' it, gettin' down.
We're hot, we're bad, we're lean and mean.
We're takin' control of the e-biz scene.

Other corporations who took the dive into sonic drivel include Ericsson, Novell, GE, Honeywell, and Ernst & Young. The fad of collecting and listening to corporate songs died rapidly, but companies are surely still making such numbers under the radar.

9

One-man bands

Being able to play two or more instruments at once is a musical tradition that has been much overlooked. Sure, guys like Prince, Paul McCartney, Trent Reznor, and Dave Grohl have played all the instruments on some of their albums, but did they play them all
at the same time?
I think not.

The earliest known references to simultaneously playing two instruments come from Iceland in the eleventh century. In the journal
Musical Traditions
, Hal Rammel writes:

[I]t was in vaudeville and the music hall, a setting that encouraged the unique and unforgettable performer, that the one-man band flowered in its wildest varieties. Ragtime composer Wilbur Sweatman in the early 1900s did a vaudeville act playing three clarinets at once and Vick Hyde, a vaudevillian of the 1940s did his finale playing three trumpets at the same time and twirling a baton as he exited the stage. Virtuoso Violinsky concluded his act with a piano-cello duet by fastening a bow to his right knee while his right hand fingered the strings, leaving his left hand to accompany himself on the piano. The piano, generally thought to be a two-handed instrument was played with only the right hand by Paul Seminole in the 1920s while he played guitar with his left, and for jazz musician and comedian Slim Gaillard playing the piano and guitar at the same time was possible by turning up the volume on his electric guitar “…it'll play itself—you just make the chords and hit the strings, feedback!”