Johan Kugelberg2013-05-20T16:59:26-04:00Johan Kugelberghttp://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/index.php?author=johan-kugelbergCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Johan KugelbergGood old fashioned elbow grease.The Shaggstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.29996042013-04-02T11:58:48-04:002013-04-03T10:09:01-04:00Johan Kugelberghttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/johan-kugelberg/
We weren't there, and all I can do is hope that this wonderful music sometimes made the Wiggin sisters happy. The Shaggs album is by far the most mysterious of the American private press albums by children or adolescents that we've had the fortune to hear. Other examples such as The Mystic Zephyrs 4, The Dandelions or Jr. and His Soulettes are wonderous examples of the private language of childhood innocence that rendered, say, the Jackson Five superstars, and somewhere in the homemade nature of those records, alongside The Shaggs sits a notion of how we all crave a visceral nod to those moments of free-flowing creativity that is the privilege of the child, and a long-gone lugubrious echo for adults.
We've listened to a lot of grade school and high-school records put-ting together this book. Albums issued by schools as yearly fund-raisers, often with sour, out-of-tune renditions of classical standards, sometimes interspliced with a Jesus Christ Superstar medley or a version of "Theme From Shaft." The joy of the human spirit is rampant in these recordings, as is a spurious side-note of melancholy that we generate as we are listening in. The relationship to the music of The Shaggs sits right there: How we listen to The Shaggs sets in motion what The Shaggs masterful album is, and what they were.
Philosophy of the World is an idiosyncratic American master-piece, worth a thousand-million and a hundred internet memes. Remember: The game has changed with YouTube and the internet: The effort, distance, cumbersome labor and financial commitment that were all roadblocks necessary to circumnavigate in order to have your musical vision distributed on vinyl has all been rendered null and void. We are all daily consumers of the privately expressed residue of everyday life: "Chocolate Rain," "Numa-Numa," "It's Friday," maybe even "Wally-World." Austin Wiggin had those mass-culture hopes for his daughters. An anecdote describes his perplexity at the success of the Beatles, he felt his daughters were deserving of such fame.
I often gravitate to a YouTube clip that I find profoundly and embarrassingly moving: Chris Brown's "Forever" used as the processional soundtrack at the wedding of Jill and Kevin. They've rehearsed and staged a hot-cha-cha choreographed routine to amuse their friends and families. A slice of mainstream pop has been infused with the collective emotional good will of a happy familiar crowd on a big day. Jill and Kevin and their loved ones inform Chris Brown's R&B swill with the sublime, and this process once executed, can never be reversed. If I hear "Forever" in a deli, my eyes water up with the drool of Pavlovian sentiment, and that is a beautiful thing.
The clip has now reached, oh, 20 million viewings on YouTube. The experience of watching this clip is intimately connected to my relationship to The Shaggs' masterpiece, reminding me in a most serious manner that, to quote Michael Daley, "music needs to serve people and not the other way around." In that spirit, one can quote from Austin Wiggin's liner notes from the album, as our Shaggs experience is solitary, is holy and needs to be taken as seriously or flippantly as all of our everyday rub-ups against the sublime:
The Shaggs are real, pure, unaffected by outside influences. Their music is different, it is theirs alone. They believe in it, live it... Of all contemporary acts in the world today, perhaps only the Shaggs do what others would like to do, and that is perform only what they believe in, what they feel, not what others think the Shaggs should feel. The Shaggs love you... They will not change their music or style to meet the whims of a frustrated world. You should appreciate this because you know they are pure what more can you ask? They are sisters and members of a large family where mutual respect and love for each other is at an unbelievable high... in an atmosphere which has encouraged them to develop their music unaffected by outside influences. They are happy people and love what they are doing. They do it because they love it.
Enjoy the Experience: Homemade Records 1958 - 1992 is edited by Johan Kugelberg, Michael P. Daley & Paul Major. Direct pre-orders of the book arrive in a deluxe slipcase and are accompanied by a foldout poster and a clear vinyl Century Records promotional 7-inch on "How To Press Your Own Record" - not available in stores, but available directly from the website: http://store.sinecurebooks.com/]]>Pussy Riot and the Legacy of Punktag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.18732062012-09-11T07:14:37-04:002012-11-11T05:12:01-05:00Johan Kugelberghttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/johan-kugelberg/
'And another lot of young people will appear, and consider us completely outdated, and they will write ballads to express their loathing of us, and there is no reason why this should ever end.' Alfred Jarry
I don't think that it is that funny to say that Pussy Riot is in response to Putin being a total dick, staging a pussy vs. dick dichotomy. Putin isn't just a dick, he is a complete douchebag. Say it using Eric Cartman from South Park's voice perhaps. Doesn't help if you try to bring the riff from the Team America movie on pussies, dicks and assholes into the equation. This is serious, and being flippant or attempting to blog some stuff about this situation feels petty. But here goes:
No doubt Putin has to over-react, as he has massaged the relationship between church and state in Russia for years and years and years. This situation reminds me of what the members of the band Crass had to go through, following their amazing culture-jamming in 1982, distributing the notorious faked phone conversation between Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the middle of the Falklands War. It reminds me of what Living Theatre had to go through as they toured Frankenstein and Paradise Now during the mid-late 1960's. It reminds me of the Diggers. It reminds me of the Ranters, the Levellers, of the people I read about in Christopher Hill's 'The World Turned Upside Down', or the people Greil Marcus wrote about in 'Lipstick Traces'.
Of punks; punks throughout history that talked the talk and walked the walk, of activists that are active.
Pussy Riot has their roots in the amazing Russian art-prank collective Voina, who you might remember got in trouble for painting a gigantic dick on a drawbridge next to the Russian Secret Service. They also flipped over empty cop cars and released thousands of cockroaches - all good stuff.
So why am I blogging about this. Blogging isn't doing something, it is consuming ideas.
Well. (sigh) I don't know. I hope you and me and everybody will send Pussy Riot's defense fund some money. They need our help. They are alchemists: They took germinating western punk rock ideas and are realizing their potency in real time, in meat-space.
The riot girls taught us that young women inside a counter-culture movement don't necessarily get heard until they grab the microphone. Occupy Wall Street, before they collapsed like a poorly assembled soufflé - intentional bourgeois analogy - the moment they started consuming their own ideology as a self-referential anti-establishment ceremony, showed us that youth can still be activated, notwithstanding issues around attention span. Pussy Riot has grabbed medial attention, and is spearheading change in a place where youth doesn't get as easily distracted as in the west. Or where grassroots activism doesn't get as easily defused by the distraction this society of spectacle provides, as the stakes for Pussy Riot are ever so much higher.
Brecht pointed out that the spectacle certainly has the ability when poison is spat in its face to immediately turn the poison into a delicious condiment. Considering how punk legacy reverberates this does not necessarily have to be the case: We all sighed over the photo a few months ago of a bunch of young Burmese punks, looked up by the authorities for exploring the rudimentary of adolescent rebellion, utilizing visual signifiers that to us in the west were no more than cultural clichés. But we have to stop right there: If dying your hair purple, shaving it into a Mohawk and wearing a leather jacket stenciled with a Crass symbol will have the elders of your society throw you in jail, then that indicates the fear prevalent in society where rocking the boat is unacceptable, as the sense is that things are too bumpy and stormy already for the powers that be.
Cue Russia, Putin, Pussy Riot: My first thought when I heard of the arrest back in March was to reflect how the Riot Grrl movement, which inspired Pussy Riot, certainly did amazing things to empower young women, and provide them with the impulse to get up and get on with it. That the ripples of Riot Grrl ended up in Russia, and is now inspiring hoards of young people to rally against a totalitarian regime is wonderful, but also incomprehensible for privileged westerners such as myself. It also leads to thoughts about how baffling it is that the anti-Iraq War movement was so flaccid. Putin certainly understands how fickle the relationship between church and state is in Russia. He is forced to react harshly when Russian youth stages an act with such immense symbolic potency.
Punk taught Pussy Riot, and should still teach us all to create situations, and the Situationists taught that to the punks, taught that to the students in Paris in 1968, and is certainly teaching the Occupy Wallstreet crowd that digital media defuses activism as it provides the spectacle of participation, notwithstanding that which is served up is the technology of isolation.
Hey westerners: Send Pussy Riot some money.
For further background viewing, Johan Kugelberg's exhibition on punk graphic design, Some Day All the Adults Will Die! Punk Graphics 1971-1984, co-curated with Jon Savage, is at London's Hayward Gallery from 14 September - 4 November. Free admission. He also has a new book, Punk: An Aesthetic, co-authored with Jon Savage and published by Rizzoli.
Johan Kugelberg, William Gibson, Linder Sterling, Gee Vaucher, Tony Drayton and John Holmstrom talk punk at 7pm on Thursday 13 September in the Purcell Room as part of the exhibition.
'Everywhere, youth (as it calls itself) discovers a few blunted knives, a few defused bombs, under 30 years of dust and debris; shaking in its shoes, youth hurls them upon the consenting rabble, which salutes it with its oily laugh.' Guy Debord, Potlatch 1954]]>Swedish Pizzatag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.16081462012-06-19T06:50:54-04:002012-08-19T05:12:08-04:00Johan Kugelberghttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/johan-kugelberg/
Remember how the first generation of surrealists worshipped at the altar of the Marx Brothers. Then consider how the absurd conduct of mainstream celebrities (Bobby Fischer, Michael Jackson, Demi Moore, Charlie Sheen etc.) reach real-life pinnacles of Ionesco-esque exquisite meaninglessness. Then reflect upon how much of the media chatter around us can seem like pure dada.
In Sweden, its culinary landscape has created - out of necessity and osmosis - a national blanket of works of art that reach such a deeply fucked surreal and counter-intuitive culinary splendor that the most absurd creations by high-concept experimental artists, experimental chefs or artist-chef-experimental-weirdos wither in comparison.
Swedish Pizza.
The rudimentary basic here is a wide variety of combinations of toppings that are given mysterious or enticing monikers on the menu of the pizzeria. These names correspond in a mannerism-fashion to Italy and exoticism not unlike how a tiki-bar relates to the lives of Micronesian natives. These pizzas don't really have that much to do with stuff like the California Pizza Kitchen, or those grim UK/Oz gastro-pub pizzas, except for shared notions o the picturesque, Swedish pizza is its own thing, based on convoluted notions of exotica and on the base cravings that can attach themselves to base commerce.
(that would be Pizza Maritza Special from Pizzeria Maritza in Simrishamn)
It is hard to understand how all this began, but I have a couple of theories: There's plentiful anecdotal evidence that the first slew of 30-odd pizza restaurants that opened in Sweden were all owned by the same family, who saw a splendid business opportunity notwithstanding that their ethnic culinary roots weren't in the dish purveyed. Therefore, any authenticity and ethnic integrity of the dish offered went into immediate free-fall, as the inherent understanding that we all have within us in regards to the traditional foods of our country of origin were very much not at all in place here. Instead, anything anyone ever wanted as a pizza-topping at any point (including when very drunk) was unceremoniously placed upon the pie, notwithstanding how people from Naples or Rome or New York City or the Jersey Shore would feel about its interplay with a culinary tradition.
It snowballed/escalated from here: Anything that seemed exotic or exclusive would end up as a culinary titillation: something that seemed like a good idea to eat at the time.
Since a pizzeria is/was an easy and inexpensive restaurant to start up - great profit margin, not much need for culinary know-how - Swedish pizza was well on its way to becoming the abject culinary absurdity it is today.
I do love everything about Swedish pizza, the general weirdness, the exotica narrative, the ceremonial naming of the pies, the economics of necessity. I love it all, with the exception of the actual eating of the pizza.
Wait.
That's not entirely true.
The aroma of the Swedish 'gräddost' cheese - used instead of mozzarella on the pizza - when toasted and/or burnt distributes a most enticing scent, and like most absurd junk-foods, when consumed in adulthood have more to do with the distant dreamlike echoes of childhood memories than anything else. I mean: Once a year it can seem like a good idea to purchase a can of Chef Boy-Ar-Dee, at least until the realization that the tin can contains shiny gelatinous glop sauce and the microcosm White Castle burgers of the ravioli pillows, resulting in your caveat emptor nausea flipping back into place. I have an Italian friend who eats at McDonalds. There are California Pizza Kitchen restaurants in Manhattan, within a rock throw of genius old school pizza joints.
You get the point.
Whenever I visit the old country I canvas the country side for pizza takeout menus, and my family are still (somewhat) delighted by the long-running in-joke of poetic/oratorical declamations of the most absurd concoctions I've found:
(that would be Pizza Chicago from Pizzeria Alfågeln in Waxholm)
A somewhat odious aspect of the new sincerity movement is that artisan foodstuffs have become luxury goods, rarified purchases that act as lifestyle accessories by connoisseurs. This notwithstanding how said new sincerity connoisseurs make squeaky-balloon-noises about sustainability, grass-roots-activism and locavourism. In Sweden, this has lead to regional cheeses, meats, vegetables, berries etc. nowadays are mostly only available as luxury goods, and that a landscape formerly littered with regional small-scale food producers and purveyors and restaurants that were cheap and great has had said domain ersatzed by big-city folk in a desperate luxury-consumption quest for authenticity.
Years ago, I went on a massive Swedish road trip with my pal Jesper. We were in pursuit of medieval churches with intact mural paintings, and for some tasty items along the way.
After having slaked our thirst for the nostalgic trashy Swedish fast-food we'd been craving since we left the old country for the new world (boiled frankfurters with mashed potatoes, mustard, ketchup, deepfried onions and chopped bread & butter pickles in mayonnaise is one of the less bizarre of said cravings), we really only wanted to concentrate on Swedish traditional peasant food, so called husmanskost.
Bupkis.
Few and far in between, always in bigger cities, and always with big ticket price tags for meals that for centuries before had fed those Swedes that weren't affluent. So what does non-affluent Swedes in the countryside eat these days if they don't eat at home? Well: There's plenty of crap Thai food. Thailand is the dominant Swedish fun-in-the-sun vacation destination for some reason. There's also an abundance of pseudo-classy grill-fat type stuff: béarnaise sauce served as a condiment in tabletop pump containers, sullen salads with sun-dried tomatoes and Greek-austerity feta, you know the drill. Exotica is rampant, and as the Swedes have had access to cheap chartered travels for a few decades, for Swedes to indicate towards an international worldliness has become a norm of lower-middle class betterment, especially when it comes to choices in foodstuffs. Mediterranean flourishes, a taste of the far east, and the hollow gesture of healthiness has replaced the rudimentary Swedish peasant fare, except, naturally, for the aspiring urban middle class who now chow down on those peasant classics as a symbol of keeping-it-real-refinement now that the great unwashed is traveling to Italy and Thailand.
The Swedish pizzerias are legion, however, and indications towards culinary ahead-of-the-curve-ness and bourgeois affluence have started to prevail at pizzerias in moneyed neighborhoods:
(that would be Pizza Le Chef from Pizzeria Malaren in Strangnas)
I am pretty sure that the pizzeria is a secret shame of the Swedish bourgoisie, and that pizzas with arugula or sea salt as toppings are supposed to relieve some of their pain.
For exceptionally melancholic, entertaining and perverse reasons, I've located Swedish husmanskost ingredients as pizza toppings. I found these surreal dream-states on the menu of Pizzeria Station in Hallsberg:
"Edwin's":
Tomato sauce! Cheese! Swedish Meatballs! Onions! Pickled Beets in Mayonnaise!
"Affe's":
Tomato sauce! Cheese! Swedish Meatballs! Onions! Chopped Pickles in Mayonnaise!
"Berggös":
Tomato sauce! Cheese! Bratwurst! Eggs! Leeks!
One might, and one could argue that James Joyce in his writing attempted to incorporate the human experience in its totality in the writing of Ulysses. One might furthermore also suggest that Samuel Beckett chose to disconnect from the human experience in Malone Dies or Molloy. Could a similar dichotomy be structured for pizza?
The New Jersey/Bronx grandma pie which emphasizes the relationship between the dough and a slow-cooked tomato sauce, often without the addition of any mozzarella, results in an ascetic pizza experience where the limited notes and timbres the palate is reacting to increases the nuances of said food-aesthetic reaction. This I chose to set as the Beckettian counterpoint to number 58 at Pizzeria Parken in Orebro where a Joyceian masterpiece of sorts is offered up, as every pizza topping available is placed on top of the dough and baked in the oven to subsequently be served up to Gargantua and Pantagruel as a sine qua non of the cooking grotesque. Here it is, number 58:
My favorite scene in Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel is where Pantagruel arrives late to a monastery and is famished. He decides to go to sleep in the surrounding spinach pasture, but not until after he has chowed down. Unluckily, some deeply religious pilgrims have chosen the same spinach patch to sleep in, and are mercilessly eaten by Pantagruel who doesn't notice them as the pilgrims are so spiritual as to not make a sound as they get eaten, Pantagruel mistakes them for extra-chunky crutons.
Is this how Swedish pizza works?
Through distraction?
What Pantagruel would chow down on at Pizzeria Parken is interpreted by him as pizza, and the chowing down process and the intermingling of disparate and grotesque flavors isn't that noticeable? Maybe the act of ordering the luxuriously named pie with its myriad of toppings is a petit mort of yearning in an everyday that is devoid of exoticism, in a small country in the far north with a chilly climate and the ever-distant souls of xenophobic peoples?
The notion of choice in tangent with convenience has brought about a culinary narrative that is perpetual and perennial, but where it doesn't matter if the food is tasty or not.
A recent study on customer satisfaction at McDonalds showed that people were satisfied eating there but no one really liked the food much. They liked the process, of recognizing the food, the taste, the surroundings, but the food itself not such much.
Is that it?
The Swedish pizza is recognizable, but yet the myriad combinations of tomato sauce, cheese, banana, capers, chicken, ham, guacamole, onions etc. etc. very much ad nauseum provides a pleasant process of selection, choices, exoticism and naming.
We people like choosing, especially in this Facebookian day and age (another riff/story), and we also like naming and compartmentalizing things a whole hell of a lot. I don't have to go all anthropology on my ass, but think of the naming of things and the naming of their corresponding gods in early (so called) primitive societies. Tree Gods, River Gods, Forest Gods, Animal Gods, go down the list, think of Catholic Saints, think of Roman Gods. Think of sub-cultural slang: skateboarders - the myriad names for a myriad of maneuvers. Fly-fishing. We really like to name stuff and to compartmentalize stuff.
Think of it: Friday night, you are plowed, you stumble through the doors of a Pizzeria somewhere in small town Sweden, and your scrambled eyeballs dance across the menu. The Imp/Id that steers your intoxicated food-craving is begging your central nervous system for béarnaise, meat, spicy heat, goo, crisped dough, for something special, for the food that lives inside dreams:
"I want... I want... I want...
a PIZZA MORINO!"
(Tomato sauce! Cheese! Guacamole! Horse sausage! Bell Peppers!)
