The Lion and the Hare
While I love The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and The Onion for topical satire, in my opinion our times sorely lack a broader satirical/questioning perspective, like a Swift, Orwell or P.K. Dick.
What most grabs me about your stuff is your story metaphors, like the UFFF and Pharaoh Jim. For me they provide a new way to look at important questions while remaining entertaining and easy to understand. I think they pair well with the satiric voice from your sped-up “alien” mp3s. If the two paths in African fairytales are the lion (brute force) and the hare (the trickster), isn’t Bush is the lion? Swift wrote “Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own.” And so the hare slips by the lion…
January 25th, 2008 at 4:02 pm
Have you thought about creating an authentic guru as a character in UFFF or your other fiction? In a way that would bring Dune into the here and now.
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January 25th, 2008 at 4:29 pm
UFFF is entirely concerned with this subject… though there is no perfect character, in that sense representing a similar perspective to that expressed by Dune.
the way of the hare is also the (pre-shakespearean) way of Hamlet.
anyway, yes, i see my social role, the work that stands to be done, much as you do. music hasn’t been a means, exactly, but it’s not an end, either. making this album is a necessity for me, but i don’t see it as the sum of my work. i need to follow through on developing and articulating that satirical perspective, and following through on these songs has been, i think, part of that. this is as near as i’ve ever come to following through on creative work of my own.
hence, the album art didn’t really feel done to me until it connected back to the political (via the new title, Get Well Soon, and the colors). hence also my impulse to move this discussion over to originaljones.info, so as to have a single (though variegated) focus of expression.
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January 27th, 2008 at 6:50 pm
i think less in terms of authentic gurus than i do of authentic processes. in short, the aim of the UFFF is to explore the possibility of authenticity within inauthentic individuals. this is akin to PKD’s notion of God as a force that transmutes the garbage of the world; or in other world, that takes our faulty imaginings and makes them real.
that, in a sense, is what Sister Please is about.
one of the concepts of Alchemy that has stuck with me is the notion that its convoluted failure as a material science is intentional, or at least critical to its function. this logical failure requires Grace. an idea which, given all of the religious abuses it has been put to, that i’d happily jettison were it not for the fact of my own experience of creativity. something happens, and it’s not me.
again i return to Rumi’s line: when a lute becomes full, the Player puts it down and picks up another.
who could be more cruel than that Great Lute Player in the Sky? impermanence, impermanence… everywhere impermanence!
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