Rock History And How It's Made

Several blog entries ago I discussed Art Laboe's first Oldies But Goodies (1959) compilation, a collection of mid-50s doo wop and R&B consisting largely of L.A.-based groups such as The Penguins (“Earth Angel”) and The Medallions (“The Letter”). By issuing the Oldies But Goodies album in 1959, so I argued, Laboe was the first to historicize rock ‘n’ roll, to lend it the dignity and distinction of a “classic” or “golden” era, represented by the album title itself emblazoned in gold. While I think I was correct in that observation, in retrospect I don’t think at the time I wrote the entry I had fully considered all of the implications of my remarks. What I should have said in that earlier post is that the initial Oldies But Goodies collection serves to mark or distinguish the first from the second generation of rock ‘n’ rollers.

Although he’s writing about the idea of “nationhood” and the formation of modern nations, Benedict Anderson makes the trenchant observation in Imagined Communities that since it was impossible for the generation that came of age after the historic ruptures of 1776 (America) and 1789 (France) to recapture the spirit and inspiration that gave rise to these revolutionary moments, the following, or second, generation began “the process of reading nationalism genealogically—as the expression of an historic tradition of serial continuity” (1991 paperback ed., p. 195). The process of reading nationalism genealogically, as a process unfolding serially in time, gave rise to the study of history, history itself as a profession—the historian. Those who, for example, take upon themselves the duty of constructing The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll perform the same sort of activities as other historians, selecting representative figures, moments, and events from the past and then ascribing to them value and distinction in a larger pattern of meaning.

Take, for example, the claim widely attributed to Brian Eno, that although just a few thousand people bought the first album by the Velvet Underground, virtually every one who did so was inspired to start a band. While one might legitimately ask how he (or whomever actually uttered the remark) managed to acquire such information and to possess such grand, omnisicent knowledge, that’s really not the point. My point is that he’s taking on the role of the historian—like all historians, his role a self-appointed one—constructing a cause-and-effect narrative history of rock, giving it a genealogy and hence a tradition. In this case, he’s ascribing to the Velvet Underground a key or foundational moment in a larger, sequential narrative called the history of rock, asserting that those who came within earshot of that VU album were the inheritors—the torchbearers—of the spirit and innovation of the band (the proper names of the group normally would follow). By analogy, think of the genealogical style of Biblical chronicles: x begat y, y begat z, and so on.

He has every right to make remarks like that, of course, as Benedict Anderson points out, since those who come after, the second, third, and subsequent generations, have the right to speak for the dead--even when those on whose behalf they speak could have never understood themselves as such (198). (As Anderson points out, Michelet, the self-appointed historian of the French Revolution, claimed to speak for those who sacrificed themselves for the nation of France, insisting that he could speak on behalf of the dead, saying what they "really" meant and what they "really" wanted.) In the creation of a narrative in which the Velvet Underground serves as the grand ur-precursor to every subsequent avant-garde, experimental, glam rock, punk, post-punk, new wave, goth, and indie rock band to follow, the historian is actually speaking his own history, in actuality his own desire, articulating a faith, for he is really designating as a precursor a band whose members authored a future that they could have neither predicted nor fully comprehended.

Here’s the same general point, stated more poetically, by Gertrude Stein:

No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept. And they refuse to accept it for a very simple reason and that is that they do not have to accept it for any reason. . . . Those who are creating the modern composition authentically are naturally only of importance when they are dead because by that time the modern composition having become past is classified and the description of it is classical. That is the reason why the creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic, there is hardly a moment in between and it is really too bad very much too bad naturally for the creator but also very much too bad for the enjoyer. . . . For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. (“Composition as Explanation,” in Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Carl Van Vechten (The Modern Library, 1962), 514-15.

Why is the construction of such genealogical histories so important to us? Because to claim that there is no rationally directed development is to open one to the realization, as Karl Popper observed in the 1940s, that history has no discernible meaning or pattern, that the future is radically contingent. His argument has never been answered because it is unanswerable (except by an appeal to faith, a belief in teleology). Popper claimed that the human future will be as it has always been, dominated by technological changes. The history of rock has been dominated by technological change; a book ought to be written exploring the role of technology rather than, as most all are, as genealogical influence. What would rock music be if not for the electric guitar? The programmable synthesizer? And way back when: how else would have Elvis burst onto the national spotlight if not for television?

Genealogical history has the virtue of connecting the present to a past that consequently becomes meaningful, and hence providing the semblance of continuity from one generation to the next. But as for the creation of rock histories, influence (however defined) is a faith, and hence undemonstrable.

Charlton Heston, 1923-2008

There is a story that Jean-Luc Godard, although he despised John Wayne’s politics, nonetheless burst into tears at the moment in The Searchers (1956) when the John Wayne character, Ethan Edwards, rather than killing his niece Debbie as we think he’s going to, sweeps the girl up in his arms and says to her, tenderly, “Let’s go home, Debbie.” Thus Godard understood early on something about the cinema that a filmmaker such as Michael Moore, apparently, never has: no amount of ideological demystification can diminish the sheer power of the movies—or movie stars, for that matter. In my undergraduate days at a major midwestern university, I remember standing in line to see Citizen Kane; there were several screenings that day, each of them with packed audiences. As the earlier crowd was leaving the theater so that we, the next audience, could take our seats, as he was leaving a spoilsport who’d just seen the film yelled out, loudly, so that all waiting to see the next screening of the movie might hear him, “Rosebud’s a sled!” But the joke was on him: did he really think that we were all waiting in line to see Citizen Kane merely in order to learn the final revelation of its grand enigma, as if that is what going to the movies is all about?

John Wayne became the biggest movie star of all time because he understood the fundamental principle about being a movie star: play yourself. Robert B. Ray writes:

Film stars, in fact, have always been less actors than personalities, paid to personify (rather than impersonate) a certain character type. As one film historian (Ronald L. Davis) has written, “Most of the old studio stars created a persona, and they acted that persona no matter what role they played. Audiences flocked to the theaters more to see their favorite stars than to watch realistic performances. . . . Most of the great Hollywood stars were almost pure personality, like Clark Gable, who didn’t much like acting.” (“The Riddle of Elvis-the-Actor,” 103-04)

Charlton Heston was a great Hollywood movie star because he was pure personality--he played himself. He can thank Cecil B. DeMille in large part for his magnificent career, for it was DeMille—who didn’t care two pins for so-called “realistic” acting, despite his claims to the contrary—who early on realized that Heston never would be effective at playing “slice-of-life” drama: his personality was too strong, his acting skills too rudimentary, to succeed at that sort of performance. Thus it was only appropriate that his star-making performance should have been in The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), a superb melodrama that’s really more like vaudeville than “slice-of-life.” As circus boss Brad, Heston commanded that heterogeneous group of circus performers by sheer force of his personality, not by patient, carefully reasoned argument. That movie was the proverbial harbinger of things to come: he played the same role for DeMille again, but under a different name, in The Ten Commandments (1956).

He won an Academy Award for his performance in the Biblical epic Ben-Hur--this time reprising his role from The Ten Commandments rather than The Greatest Show on Earth--and thus became a Big Star. But had Charlton Heston by chance died after making Ben-Hur, he would have become simply the answer to a trivia question: the actor who played Moses. Or perhaps the actor who appeared in one of Orson Welles' best later films, Touch of Evil (1958).

Although I now contradict the standard (sanctioned) career retrospective, his greatness as an actor lies in the films he made in the 1960s and 1970s, films such as El Cid (1961), Khartoum (1966), and Planet of the Apes (1968). It is the latter movie that placed Charlton Heston on that privileged Mount Rushmore of Hollywood stars inside my head--it has remained one of my Top 10 favorite movies for forty years. Planet of the Apes gave Charlton Heston one of the greatest moments--and greatest punch lines--in Hollywood history, and only Heston could have delivered that line addressed to a "damned dirty ape" with such memorable panache, a mixture of arrogance, contempt, loathing, recalcitrance, and seething hatred.

Moreover, after the triumph of Planet of the Apes, he performed in a series of apocalyptic films that I still find remarkable:

Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970)
The Omega Man (1971)
Soylent Green (1973)

He dies the reluctant martyr in each one, going one step further than Brando, who often greatly physically suffered, but seldom died. It has been observed, correctly, that Marlon Brando brought to the movie screen an eroticized violence, in films such as On the Waterfront (1954), One-Eyed Jacks (1961), and The Chase (1966). I think Charlton Heston learned from these films, and like Brando began to take on roles in which he had to suffer great physical violence at the hands of his enemies: he suffered, but like Samson, took his enemies with him. I love his performance as the cynical, corrupt cop in Soylent Green: he's by turns slimy, nasty, thuggish, sentimental, and teary-eyed--and has to suffer a terrible beating by someone who's even more slimy, nasty, and thuggish, and corrupt than he is, Chuck Connors. And at the end of Soylent Green he gets to utter another famous line, but this time not yelled out with arrogance or hatred, but with revulsion and disgust mixed with resignation: "Soylent green is people."

And then, afterwards, with the films he made after that amazing stretch from 1968-1973, he was the movie star, always playing himself, as certain as gravity, his face as instantly recognizable as one's own. He would later appear on a couple episodes of Saturday Night Live, shows which I've seen in re-run; he genuinely seems to be enjoying himself, and having fun puncturing his own image. Always the actor, he couldn't turn down the limelight, accepting the controversial role as figurehead for the NRA--leader once again, defending the U. S. Bill of Rights as Moses defended the ten commandments. But unlike Michael Moore, his politics didn't much interest me. Counterculture figures such as Frank Zappa defended the Bill of Rights, too--remember the Grand Funk Railroad album Zappa produced, Good Singin' Good Playin' (1976), the album which contained the song, "Don't Let 'em Take Your Gun"?

Charlton Heston will forever remain one of my favorite Hollywood stars, one of the stars who in my lifetime conjured up the magic of the cinema, and drew me under its spell. He did so for a reason I hope he would take as a sincere compliment: by sheer force of his personality.

Trans

My friend Tim Lucas posted a comment in response to my previous entry, “His Master’s Voice,” containing a number of interesting ideas that prompted me to pursue yet another line of speculation regarding the meaning of the Moog synthesizer in sixties popular music. I'll admit to being especially intrigued by an observation made by Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco in Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer (Harvard University Press, 2002), one which I cited in my earlier post:

The Moog was a machine that empowered . . . transformations. The [Moog] synthesizer . . . was not just another musical instrument; it was part of the sixties apparatus for transgression, transcendence, and transformation. (305)

In addition to the grouping of transgression, transcendence, and transformation, one could add any number of words containing the prefix trans: transmission, transistor, translation, transvestite, transferal—and transsexual. Pinch and Trocco speculate as to whether Walter Carlos’ transformation into Wendy Carlos--which roughly coincided with the time she began work on the hugely successful synthesizer album Switched-On Bach (1968)--occurred “around the time she was developing as a synthesist,” and whether the transformation “had anything to do with the Moog, and with synthesis itself” (137). Admittedly, as Pinch and Trocco themselves point out:

The question of gender and the synthesizer is a tricky one. Certainly electronic music technologies have traditionally been used for building masculine identities—the boys and their latest toys. But different sorts of masculinity can be involved in how men interact with technologies, and several women we interviewed for this book, notably Suzanne Ciani and Linda Fisher, have developed intense personal relationships with their synthesizers....If, as Judith Butler argues, gender identities have to be performed, a key prop in the performance of these synthesists is the machine with which they spent most of their hours interacting—the synthesizer. What we want to suggest with Wendy [Carlos] and her synthesizer is that it may have helped provide a means whereby she could escape the gender identity society had given her. Part of her new identity became bound up with the machine. (138)

While I’d like to pursue some implications of these speculations by Pinch and Trocco, I'll digress for a moment in order to point out how their speculations contribute to a theory about how we might possibly interpret a musician’s particular use of the synthesizer during live performance:

Keith Emerson (Emerson, Lake, and Palmer): genital prosthesis/phallic symbol
Rick Wakeman (Yes): genital prosthesis/phallic symbol (but more synths than Emerson, therefore his is “bigger”)
Allen Ravenstine (Pere Ubu): non-instrumentally, as noise, a child playing with a complicated toy, thus conforming perfectly with David Thomas’ odd stage persona as a prematurely large, chubby kid (Baby Huey)

In Wendy Carlos’ case, the use of the synthesizer to interpret a Baroque composer such as Bach is, of course, avant-garde in its impulse, but if one pauses to consider the synthesizer as a fetish object, her identification with the Moog, a machine whose operation rested upon its capacity to be re-wired--think of the endless plugging and unplugging of patch cables across a bewildering array of panels, as well as the tweaking of many dozens of knobs--in order to produce a different sound effect, is not an inappropriate object of identification for a transsexual, since gender is indeed in part a social performance--an effect. (Derrida on the fetish: “the projection operates in the choice rather than in the analysis of the model.”) In addition, engineers' coding of wire connections as "male" and "female" is highly suggestive as well.

Early Moog synthesizers had the capacity not only to produce “ethereal” or “unearthly” sounds but also the capacity to produce simulacra--not the sound of an actual harpsichord, for instance, but a pseudo-harpsichord--a “fake” or “trick” harpsichord. A simulacrum is like its model in every way, yet is unlike it because of an often intangible difference based on lack. For Wendy Carlos, the synthesizer is not a prosthesis for genital display (as are banks of synthesizers, or the electric guitar), but is homologous to a castrati, a castrated male who, dressed as a female, sang soprano parts in Italian opera. Although their high voices were the consequence of a physical cut, an alteration, castrati were nonetheless highly feted singers. (See Roland Barthes’ S/Z, a reading of Balzac’s “Sarrasine,” the story of a naïve French artist named Sarrasine who takes the requisite artistic pilgrimage to Rome. Ignorant of the fact that soprano parts are performed by castrati, Sarrasine falls in love with a soprano who goes by the name of La Zambinella, eventually to learn the devastating truth about the actual identity of his beloved and that his love is un-consummateable.)

How appropriate, then--and I remark upon this without irony or sarcasm—that Switched-On Bach was presented by “Trans-Electronic Music Productions.” It is also interesting to note that, as revealed by Pinch and Trocco's interview with Bernie Krause, the eccentric Paul Beaver--an early synthesist pioneer who died prematurely in 1975, and whose career has been largely overlooked in favor of Wendy Carlos' career--was bisexual, yet another provocative association with the Moog synthesizer, and those drawn to its mystery and singularity.

His Master's Voice

Although colloquially referred to as a “Leslie”, the Leslie Rotating Speaker System is actually a sound modification (deformation) device, not a standard speaker as such, in the sense of being an amplification and reproduction mechanism, one so accurate and so realistic in its sound that the reproduction could fool one’s faithful dog. The mythic origin of the relationship between the master, the master’s voice, and the faithful dog is ancient: it can be traced back to Homer’s Odyssey, with the relationship between Odysseus and his elderly dog, Argos. If you’ll remember, Odysseus has been gone from Ithaca for twenty years, and when he finally returns, he’s disguised as a beggar. Having landed back home after such a long absence, when Odysseus eventually speaks, even after all those long years, Argos, his old, dying dog—so miserably old that the only way the beast can stay warm is lay on a composting manure pile—instantly lifts up his head in excitement, having recognized his master’s voice. The presence of his master’s voice, of course, means to the dog that his master has finally returned. Thus Nipper, the name of the dog used as a model in the painting that eventually became RCA’s logo, is really misnamed. In honor of that miserably old dog that waited twenty years just to hear--once more before he died--his master’s voice, RCA’s mascot should be re-christened Argos.

The Leslie did not originate as a speaker the purpose of which was to reproduce “his master’s voice.” Although invented in the 1940s to augment the sound of the Hammond organ, in the 1960s the Leslie--named after its inventor, Donald J. Leslie (1911-2004)--began to be put to use by rock bands in an unexpected way. Michael Jarrett writes:

The overlapping waveforms produced by the Leslie’s two speakers—not unlike the effect derived by yelling into an electric fan—generate a sonic moiré pattern (a Doppler effect): the tremulant sound associated with Hammond organs. But other instruments have also been played through Leslie cabinets....To the psychedelic mind, the Leslie and LSD were homologous; both altered everyday perception. (140)

The lead guitar part on The Beach Boys’ “Pet Sounds” was modified by a Leslie, while on “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” it was Ron Bushy’s drums. The Beatles’ vocals were modified by a Leslie on “Tomorrow Never Knows” (among others), as was Ozzy Osbourne’s on Black Sabbath’s “Planet Caravan.”

A Few Representative Recordings Featuring the Leslie:

The Beach Boys, “Pet Sounds,” Pet Sounds (1966)
The Beatles, “Tomorrow Never Knows,” Revolver (1966)
Procol Harum, “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” Procol Harum (1967)
Steppenwolf, “Born to be Wild,” Steppenwolf (1968)
The Band, “Tears of Rage,” Music from Big Pink (1968)
Iron Butterfly, “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida (1968)
Black Sabbath, “Planet Caravan,” Paranoid (1970)

The Leslie was to LSD what the Moog synthesizer was to interstellar space travel. If the Leslie was light-hearted and benign, the Moog synthesizer was dark and forboding: the Leslie was incapable of creating the sinister drone of the Moog. However, both machines reveal that for sixties rock bands, sound made all the difference. According to Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco, in Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer (Harvard University Press, 2002), Donald Cammell and Nic Roeg’s Performance (filmed 1968, released 1970) “is the only movie we know of where the Moog synthesizer [a Moog Series III] itself makes a cameo appearance.” (Brian De Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise [1974] featured the synthesizer TONTO, but not its sounds. Jon Weiss actually set up a patch for Mick Jagger on the Performance set.) Pinch and Trocco write:

In a key scene . . . Turner [Mick Jagger] for a moment is the mad captain at the controls of spaceship Moog. The Moog and its sounds are the perfect prop, part of the psychedelic paraphernalia, the magical means to transmigrate a fading rock star into something else. The Moog was a machine that empowered such transformations. The synthesizer for a short while in the sixties was not just another musical instrument; it was part of the sixties apparatus for transgression, transcendence, and transformation. No wonder the sixties rock stars loved their Moogs. (305)

The synthesizer’s key place in sixties rock began in June 1967. Paul Beaver and Bernie Krause (the recording duo of Beaver & Krause) set up a booth on the Monterey fairground as part of the Monterey International Pop Festival in June 1967 in order to promote, and perhaps even sell, the Moog synthesizer. They actually sold several. According to Pinch and Trocco, “Monterey was the place where the subculture became mainstream” (117).

A Few Representative Recordings Featuring the Moog Synthesizer:

Mort Garson and Bernie Krause, The Zodiac Cosmic Sounds (1967)
Johnny Mandel, Point Blank (1967) (Film Score Monthly, 2002)
The Doors, Strange Days (1967)
Paul Beaver and Bernie Krause, The Nonesuch Guide to Electronic Music (1968)
The Byrds, The Notorious Byrd Brothers (1968)
Walter [Wendy] Carlos, Switched-On Bach (1968)
Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, Emerson, Lake, and Palmer (1971)

Critical Overcomprehension

In his witty and insightful book, Adventures in the Screen Trade (1983) William Goldman, a highly successful screenwriter (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) but also a wry critic of Hollywood, observes that a Hollywood studio head is very much like the manager of a baseball team: each and every day he wakes up knowing that sooner or later he is going to be fired.

No doubt the vast majority of today’s critics--of the theater, movies, music, contemporary fine arts--wake up each morning in a similarly precarious position, not necessarily thinking they will be fired from their privileged critical occupation, but that most certainly and with a creeping, unavoidable inevitability--like the day of their death--they will be wrong. What is a critic’s deepest fear? To have erred in judgment, to have made the wrong call, in short, to have missed the boat.

No music critic wants to miss the boat--to have critically underestimated, or what’s worse, to have dismissed the next Velvet Underground, for instance--so in order to avoid making such an unwitting mistake, the critic engages in what Robert Ray, employing a term coined by Max Ernst, calls overcomprehension (How a Film Theory Got Lost, Indiana University Press, 2001, p. 82). Ray writes:

Aware of previous mistakes, reviewers become increasingly afraid to condemn anything....Hence ... [one] ... of modern criticism’s ... great dangers, what Max Ernst called “overcomprehension” or “the waning of indignation”.... (82)

No critic, of course, can see beyond the curtain of time. Time is the ultimate critic, and the critic’s limited perspective doesn’t allow him to see beyond his own pitifully narrow moment in history. Critical overcomprehension--the act of giving every new record an equally glowing reception--is a result of the critic’s deep fear of being judged by history as wrong. No one wants to be, for instance, television critic Jack Gould, who reviewed the Milton Berle Show appearance of Elvis Presley for the New York Times in 1956:

Mr. Presley has no discernible singing ability. His specialty is rhythm songs which he renders in an undistinguished whine; his phrasing, if it can be called that, consists of the stereotyped variations that go with a beginner's aria in a bathtub. For the ear, he is an unutterable bore, not nearly so talented as Frank Sinatra back in the latter's rather hysterical days at the Paramount Theater. (qtd. in Robert Ray, 80)

Of course, as Ray points out, Gould’s kind of critical error had its own unintended consequences: such gross critical mistakes, Ray argues, led to “rejection and incomprehensibility as promises of ultimate value” (82). In other words, if an album sold poorly, or the artist who recorded it was given scant attention--or worse, completely neglected in his time, the record must therefore be great, perhaps even a masterpiece.

I suppose we all have adopted our favorite neglected artist, the artist whose critical neglect or, if you will, martyrdom, ironically, is the sign of greatness, of ultimate value. In my own music collection, this sort of artist is represented by, among others, Tim Buckley and Phil Ochs.

But I’m wondering, what do we do with the opposite case, the artist who is the critical establishment’s darling and whose records we therefore own, but never play? (Perhaps I'm a heretic, but I find myself playing only certain selections of Trout Mask Replica, not the entire disc.) The presence of both sorts of records, side by side in our music collections, reveals the persistent problem of what Robert Ray calls the Gap, the problem of assimilation, the failure of a new or unusual artistic style to be made intelligible to the public. Although rock 'n' roll is now over fifty years old, we still find ourselves struggling to fully comprehend its challenges and complexities, rather like a person who has difficulty reading or understanding the lines indicating contours and elevations on a topographic map.

DIDs and the Principle of Parsimony

Last night my fellow Video Watchdog kennel member Kim Newman left a comment on my “DIDs” entry (DIDs=Desert Island Discs) that I found so interesting I was prompted to share it:

I assume you know this, but sometimes bits of British pop culture are surprisingly obscure outside the UK. The term “Desert Island Discs” comes from a long-running BBC Radio 4 program--it started in 1942, and is running [!]--in which a celebrity selects the eight records they’d take to a desert island (along with one book and one “luxury”) and is interviewed about their life, work and how they’d survive in this situation. It’s such a simple format that it’s lasted forever in broadcasting terms (its creator, Roy Plomley, was the host until 1985, and only three other presenters have succeeded him). I’d be surprised if it hadn't been done in other countries.

I very much appreciate Kim taking the time to post this information, because in fact I did not know the origin of the practice of selecting Desert Island Discs. In the U.S., most lists default to a “Top 10,” so I’d always assumed a DIDs list consisted of ten albums. But, as Kim points out, the original practice was to select eight records, one book, and one “luxury.” As Tim Lucas pointed out in his comment on the DIDs entry, there are books on the subject of DIDs (the one I know about being Greil Marcus’s), but I’ll admit having never read any of them (see Tim's comment for a discussion). As I mentioned in my earlier blog entry, I find most DIDs lists uninteresting: either they consist of a recitation of the same old titles, or they are so willfully obscure as to be intellectually impenetrable.

The fact that the practice of selecting DIDs originated in England during wartime--that is, during a time of shortages, of scarcity, of rationing (frugality mandated by the government)--in short, a time of widespread lack of the necessities and comforts of life requiring of all civilians the necessity of sacrifice--is quite revealing, really, for in my initial post I’d connected the practice of DIDs to the Principle of Parsimony, an unstated linkage I’m now convinced, thanks to Kim’s post, is correct.

The Principle of Parsimony (parsimony generally being defined as excessive frugality or stinginess, especially with regard to money) is sometimes called “Occam’s Razor” after its putative originator, William of Occam (pictured above). His specific purpose was to formulate the rules of logic that would minimize the proliferation of causal and/or explanatory hypotheses--in colloquial terms, "the simplest explanation is most often the best," or in its laconic, Dragnet formulation, "just the facts, m'am." However, the Principle of Parsimony became more popularly formulated as, “entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity,” a utilitarian principle that not only justifies stinginess (“parsimoniousness,” sometimes referred to as “miserliness”--the Scrooge syndrome) or excessive frugality but forms the basis--seriously--of the Puritanical injunction against recreational sex: recreational sex violates the Principle of Parsimony. In strictly utilitarian terms, you have sexual intercourse when you intend to procreate--period. Parsimony, like the Reality Principle, strives to restrict or inhibit the various expressions of pleasure.

The adage, “entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity,” is just about as good a Puritanical justification as one could find for the practice of compiling DIDs lists. However, if the Principle of Parsimony is the Puritanical underpinning of DIDs lists, the actual mental activity that dictates the selection of the list itself is perversity (resistance, obstinacy). In other words, when faced with the choice of having something or nothing (even if that something is “just a little,” i.e., the Reality Principle), desire chooses something: perversely--out of necessity--it selects a single object of pleasure out of a vast number of possibilities: the rarified, fetishized object--one DID out of a possible 8 or 10 (the total set). Each element of the set is like a game piece one must select before the game starts, the game being how to negotiate the operation of pleasure with a highly restricted economy premised on lack.

There’s a Warner Brothers cartoon (I think) that expresses this mental operation of lack determining desire in a wonderfully concrete form. If my memory serves, the scene depicts a weak, starving, sad-eyed character (a dog?) placing a lone, small bean in the center of an immense plate. With his napkin, knife and fork on his left, he very carefully salts and peppers the single bean. He then ceremonially ties on a bib and raises his knife and fork over the bean . . . and then oh so delicately, with tender, loving care, cuts the bean in half, raising the parsimonious morsel to his mouth and begins to chew it, savoring its delicate, subtle flavors.

Can someone leave a comment with the name of that cartoon? If I happen to have it, I'll try to post a frame grab on a future blog entry.