That's Just Insipid!

A Valediction for Abandonment

If the friends around you change
into canyons, then swell many words
like soaked worms, re-etch re-carve —rejoice
into a deafening hollowness
a dozen reminders of the day, then

softly erase them from the paper.
Regard this ruined thing. Remove all
need from its unfilled whiteness to fill.
What master's stroke, what gossip caught could
wrench this wrong from your ribs?

Turn away from edges with your hands
or eyes loosening their chilly ire.

puberty

We are warned,
and yet that draws us
to the house of girls.

We were warned,
and yet that took us
to where we are.

We were blinded
by all of life,
to make our warnings.

Casual shoulders calling
yield! -- an embrace beckoned
across the expanding defense
with a pair of ruddy sticks;
each photo eased away from life
like shaving a sliver of cheese
to share with likewise ruddy tagalongs.
"But come back to the imagination, the erasing--
our erasing of a wicked treasury" says
Blue is to wonder for her;
red was to wander for her warmth,
for her seventeenth chaos.
Beyond legs' rekindled postures.

It Rhymes with 'Vogue'







At least three times in the new documentary Moog, Dr. Robert Moog tries to convey

to the camera his belief in the possibility of a connection between man and machine that

is neither tactile nor scientific, but mystical. He is quick to qualify that by 'mystical' he does

not connote 'religious', but rather 'possessing a true power that is yet ungrasped by

science.'



The image of the seventy-year-old engineer, pioneer, musician, and inventor of the analog

instrument known as the Moog staring intently at a circuitry board while trying to explain this

unexplainable phenomenon



is emblematic of the film's approach to its subject: focused less in

technical definitions and textbook diagrams than on the spirit of human ingenuity and

collaboration. Jargon arises here and there, but the basic defintion of what the Moog synthesizer

is is presented by Dr. Moog himself, a simple-spoken and proundly humble man, while standing

around tables piled high with half-finished circuit boards and casing materials. No graphics, no

montages, just a man talking about his invention; rather, he calls it not invention, but discovery.

He allowed himself to be open to the possibilities of electronic music, and one day about a half a

decade ago, he was made to see: discovery.



The risk in such an organic approach to a tech-heavy topic is that it leaves the viewer wondering

if he or she is actually learning anything about the instrument; the genius is that such an

approach matches Moog's carefully articulated belief in the preservation of performance, his

corollary intending the users of his technology not to forget in their rush to make and record

new sounds, that the creation of these sounds should be a public event, in which the creator and

the audience share in the power of the music. Only in such an environment, Moog warns, is a

culture created.



It is exactly this imprecise, quasi-mythological attitude toward music that makes Robert Moog

such a fascinating subject. An engineer, a doctor of science, balanced by a conviction of the

untangible.



Filmmaker Hans Fjellestad follows Dr. Moog as he travels to performances and visits with former

colleagues and musicians who agree that the Moog transformed the face of music: Rick Wakeman,

Keith Emerson, Money Mark.



So what is the Moog synthesizer? In a revealing interview between Moog and DJ Spooky, Moog

reveals the misconception that the term "synthesizer" means that the sounds made by the

machine are "synthetic"; rather, the term was first used because of manifold elements on a

circuitry board being brought together to produce an authentic sound, this "synthesis" ultimately

creating sound. Spooky relates this to his theories of sampling, which is the process of arriving

at a new music through the synthesis of elements from old jazz records, 70s funk records, 90s

pop records, etc.



According to the liner notes from one of my favorite albums ("Moog Indigo", by J.J. Perry, who's

seen in vintage footage in the film), the Moog is "the remarkable instrument or our electronic

age...[that] operates a system of of interconnected oscillators, amplifiers, generators, filters,

mixers and voltage controls which can produce any variation of pitch, wave frequency, overtone

mixture, timbre, dynamics and tone duration." More vintage footage of a Bob Moog in the late

1960s reveals the joy he and his colleagues felt from experimenting with these sounds, never

before heard by human ears.



The film cleverly presents historical context, however, by contrasting popular and critical

opinions of electronic music in its early days with its prevalance in both popular and avant garde

music ever since. Journalists were shocked at the Moog's attack on the purity of "real"

instrumentation. Also questionable were the perversions of the technology for commercial

use. The first to buy Moog synthesizers were advertising executives and producers, hoping to

allure consumers with "space age" sounds and melodies. Never taking definite sides on the

money vs. art issue, Moog is presented as simply a man making the music possible. He was a

businessman as much of an inventor, his allegiance seems more than once to side with more

experimental musicians than commericial ones (although he firmly retains a sense of humility

throughout the film).



At one point, Moog tellingly recalls an early debate over whether a keyboard was necessary. It

would ground the player with a familiar format, but was absolutely unecessary, and in fact

misleading. The theory of the Moog was a machine that processed a single sound through a series

of circuits, changing all of its qualities in infinite combinations. The musician could manipulate

these combinations using any means: levers, knobs, sliders. Keyboards connoted melody, from

which the early inventors were trying desperately to flee. Unavoidable was the seizing of the

instrument for commercial appeal (see Perry and Kingsley, Wendy Carlos).



And, truly, the noise-machine has entered the cultural soundscape: A Clockwork Orange's

soundtrack, Guided By Voices's "Teenage F.B.I.", Sun Ra, t-shirt collections of geeks everywhere,

saturday morning cartoons, everywhere. The reverence for Dr. Moog in the film is overwhelming,

and deserved for such an unassuming but bonafide genius (he built his first therimin before he

was old enough to vote).



The documentary often seems amateurish, or rather, organic and homegrown, but not to a fault.

To explain the mystery of the Moog machine would be to eliminate its dependency on the human

element, the creative element. Moog is correct to assert that the convergence of musician and

machine, of music and audience, is the crucial, and magical, component in electronic music.