READIN

🦋 Patter

Storefront Hitchcock is a beatiful concert film. It is from right around the time of Moss Elixir/Mossy Liquor; a lot of songs from that album are featured. Deni Bonet is playing on a couple of songs and boy is she a fine musician. Tonight I am watching it and I wanted to transcribe some of Hitchcock's patter, which I found pretty fun and engaging, and vaguely apropos to this evening's Mineshaft discussion. He has just finished "Feels Like 1974" and introduced Bonet:

If you stand up properly, it's possible to make yourself -- with this technique, it's called "Alexander Technique", for actors, and people who have, ah, incredibly bad posture but enough money to try and get over it. Ah, you can actually make yourself grow two or three inches by doing it correctly. They align you as if, as if your spine was an, an endless plate of crockery. And kind of line it up properly so it won't tip. Most of our spines zig-zag heinously, and you can go up for miles.

They're planning... as you know, people get taller -- the average human height increases by one and a half inches every hundred years. Most of our an-- Julius Cæsar would have only come up to your pelvis. You could have broiled him, you know. He would have been no trouble -- those legions -- they were just midgets.

I went to an astrologer's house in um, wherever that place is with the rose-colored rocks, ah, Arizona... built for astrolog, sorry astronomers in the fifth century BC, and all the doors were really tiny, they were like the size of cucumber frames. So I pictured all these cucumbers, going into the astronomers' house and like spiraling up the stairs. And um, well what they're planning to do is make people -- not only because people are eating more and more pure beef, which as you know is probably the best possible foodstuff that the world can produce. One of the reasons we were created, that ah Siemens and Glaxo and Virgin and Disney got together and said "Let there be humanity" was, so that we could eat beef... and I'm very proud of our wonderful country that they haven't forgotten that...

Thank you. And ah, let's just hope the conservatives get in again, shall we... And ah, if you're watching this in the future, I come from a time when there was a two-party system, but things have veered toward an inevitable monopoly -- people have complained about the eastern bloc being a monopoly for years. This is exactly what's happened in the west, there's just -- when the final Big Fish fellates the last Medium-sized Fish and, and absorbs it, thoomp like that, there will just be one Big Fish with a distended stomach... Anyway, back to the beef, let's not forget it, ah people are supposed to just be getting bigger and bigger, and as you know, Neil Armstrong was seven foot seven; all those -- you've already been to the Smithsonian, you've seen those capsules, the Mercury Capsule and the Gemini Capsule, they're very tiny, they actually look like the Stonehenge in the Spinal Tap thing, where it comes down on a spider's web. This is a posthumous public relations thing by NASA; in fact these men were giants, cause they were put into a, into a (also actually in Arizona) government site, and fed radioactive carbonated beef for two years until they became very tall. Their capsules were huge, and ah, anyway they're planning for the rest of us to follow suit, and I got so angry I wrote this song:

Hitchcock and Bonet play Filthy Bird.

Yeah, um this is, this is another one. Thing is, people, I don't know why people ever actually introduce songs, because, the song itself is an introduction to itself. It's like if you meet somebody named Martha, they say, "This is Martha"; I mean, you know, that person happens to be known as Martha, just as I might be called Bloomingdale's, or, or you know, Deni might be called Statenisland. But that's really only the beginning of the story. There's a whole mass of molecules, and complexes, and, things bound together by terrifying physical improbabilities, and the truth is, she could fly apart at any moment. Like some terrible pent-up lock that's waiting to snap and spatter her psyche across the universe. God knows... It is disgusting Deni, it's life, and if it weren't for our ribcages, it would just be spleens à-go-go. I mean, you know people are just held in by all this, and then they're called almost insultingly by a single name. And the same with a song, I could say what a song's called, which isn't going to be much of a clue, unless you've heard it before, or I can explain what it's about, and I'm gonna be lying. So in the end it's very much, there's ah not much point in it.

That's interesting, there's some people polishing a gun carriage over there. One of those big brass eighteenth-century things, for storing in time capsules. There's a very thin line between torture and cosmetics. I wonder, now's our chance to cross it. Okay, take a deep breath and yip-a-dang.

Hitchcock and Bonet play Let's Go Thundering.

More transcription another time.

posted evening of Saturday, May 5th, 2007
➳ More posts about Storefront Hitchcock
➳ More posts about Robyn Hitchcock
➳ More posts about Music
➳ More posts about Robyn Hitchcock's patter

Respond:

Name:
E-mail: (will not be displayed)
Link:
Remember info	Send