​CompleXities eXplained away by Boomers
             with no sense of guilt for eXcess
    becomes an eXcuse to do an end run nose dive
      leading by eXample straight to siX feet under.
 
One foot in the grave & still trying to hold on
        to the dyskinesia of gerontoXicity
        clutching the pill boX of the gerontocracy.
 
We are graphic designers inspired by FluXus
     who skip the eXamination to go on to the neXt McJob,
           feeling a sense that the future has been eXploited



sarcastic irony is a way of life when all things feel caustic
                     to the eXtent (of eXistenz)
that even I don’t need to put on my They Live X-ray speX
to see through the feigned fog of their neuropathic compleX.
 
       psychiatry industrial
 
Go back to your suburban dupleX
and your Viagra dreams of oral cyberseX
as we contend with fixing broken hyperteXt
collecting tchotchkes and Ikea objects
playing in basement bands and ministudio side projects.


Contend with too many Comet burritos
craft beer, now acid refleX, slow down reflects
try not to worry about making rent
or when its going to bounce, that check
or about lung cancer when smoking after seX cigarettes.

Let’s look each other up in the rolodeX.

This is a leXicon for the unorthodoX
follow the path of the bright eyed foX
into our own escape-from-reality sandboX.

​We eXult in all things auXillary
even as you ignore us in economic pillory.

We put it down all right there, in the miX tape we made
While Boomers with boners gallivant and escapade.
Sometimes I really do want to sink the blade,
but then I kneel down at the pew to reconcile my hate
that I need to eXplicate; while the tech barrons


                     dope blood rejuvenate
 
prepare to upload minds to a Silicon slice of heaven
while their cryogenic brain freeze farts
slurping bone broth health slushees from the 7-Eleven
in a stockyard bid to hold onto youth and power
    but the flower of your hour has passed
as have the hippies and the grass they pass
as even the youngest of X pass into midlife crisis

                 this too shall pass
 
but that doesn’t make us any less strapped for cash
while the big boom booms hold onto real estate
at least its only notional wealth, I seek a higher template


& so look to the eXemplars & so look to the templars.

The new culture in the crack of the old takes time to gestate
     germinate the wild dandelion weeds spreading seeds
    
          adaptable and invasive
 
in the face of mothers & fathers eating their young like cannibals.

Yet we brought you hip hop and trip hop and punk, it was so delectable
         but time zoomers right over us, so feral and ephemeral.
         This age pivots on its axial so radiant. Slipping into decline
                             at an ever tilting gradient.
It’s time to fleX, so don’t jinX us with your aXioms
though latch key, skipped over, we take our lot to the maXimum.


Dropping mail art in the post boX like we did before the Internet
when it crashes look to us and we will find the alternet
routes through communication space
 hosting shows that are all ages
straight edge X on hands again
while the machine burns
and our hate against it rages.

Did you ever hear about the hobo, Boxcar Clayton Jones?
He lied, cheated, and stole his way, across the interzones.
Once he was a stockbroker, or so the old stories say,
hated life on Wall Street and threw it all, shirt and tie, away.

He met his wife while hunting snipes on the streets of Chicago,
they shared a smoke and a toke, as she strummed her old banjo;
she’d just escaped the psych ward, wore a jacket that was straight,
said, “psychiatry is a racket, man. Me, they never will sedate.”

They hopped a train to the far out west, to live life in the sun,
and since that day have never strayed, have lived their life as one.
They made love in the orange groves, and picked Humboldt County weed,
sleeping underneath the burning stars in that far off land of the free.

One day he went to the pawn shop, to swipe her a ring of silver,
and when he slipped it on her finger, she broke out in goose bump shivers.
They were wed by a drunken preacher, one they met on a spellbound train,
who said that he was hellbound—preaching had only caused him pain.

In Chattanooga they got off the rails, to see what fortune had in store,
and there they met the Buddha of the south, in a shack on a dirt floor.
He was a sadhu from the holler, who found enlightenment on moonshine,
and folks came from all around to seek white lightning at his shrine.

Boxcar Clayton took a swig when the communion jug was passed around,
and felt the senses of his spirit tug when he heard the whistle sound;
outside the long iron horse was gathering up its coal black steam:
it was time to ditch this two-bit town and see if they could hitch a dream.

Now Clatyon Jones, he was not a rich man, he left all his money behind,
but he loved his wife and the clack of the track, and despised the daily grind,
so they road along the interzones from Kalamazoo to Poughkeepsie,
from the North to the South, to the West from the East, up and down the Mason Dixie.

​And when their bones got too tired to travel any further, or very far,
they settled themselves down on the Ohio river in a rusted out boxcar.

On the other side of the mountain, in a spot so desperate and wild,
there lived a lady with long black hair, who was kindling a child.
There was nothing in the cold dark shack except a bed she’d made of leaves,
and she cried herself to sleep at night wiping tears upon her sleeve.

The man who’d filled her up with seed, he’d left her there alone,
and went back out into the old cruel world to try and make his bones.
He would love to see her dressed up, in pretty clothes oh so fine,
but he couldn’t even afford a rose, nor a bottle of drugstore wine.

His only job had been as a garbage man who made the morning rounds,
his only friend in the world a lonesome braying hound.
He scraped a few dollars for the bar, to try and forget his plight,
it warmed his belly from the chill outside but gave his mind no respite.

Back in the shack with a panic attack his lady was going wiggedy-wack,
afraid the dream of her life was a train slamming into a dead end track.
So she crept down off the mountain and she made her way into town,
looking for her man, and when she found him, he was dressed like a flipping clown.

He had seen the circus poster scabbing off the timber of the telegraph pole,
thought he might as well join, if only to fulfill the terms of his parole:
for he had once robbed a man just for kicks, outside the five and dime,
and she had a thing for bad boys, it made her hot to know he’d done time.

People say the road is no place for having kids and growing a family tree,
and people say if you fall in love with a rambling rover you will never be free,
but the tattooed ladies took her in, and the gypsy queen read her sweaty palm,
and in the chaos of the freakshow life, she found her center of calm.

​So they traveled inside a trailer and heard people call them carnie trash,
and made due with what the world gave them, never quite flush with cash.
Their baby girl was born under the big top, under the great plains open sky,
and they were a freaky folk family, until they met their sweet bye and bye.

            In the past few months, I’ve noticed the term “knowledge worker” more and more, though I had come across it well before. Every time I would see the word “knowledge worker” in an article I’d get this little prick of irritation, hence this rant. Why the prick of irritation? It started sounding ever more and more dishonest to me, that’s why. Not dishonest in that there is a difference between the work of our hands, of making things in the real world, as opposed to the world of words, scribes, bits and bytes. It has struck me as dishonest, intellectually, because we already have a word for people whose work is in the more abstract realm of thoughts as opposed to things: that is, the intellectual.

            How could intellectuals themselves allow the word that describes them to be swapped out with the bland term “knowledge worker” in the first place? I think it has something to do with ensuring they have a place in the limited positions available for brainiacs in an economic system that has been reduced to service industry wage slavery.  In thinking about this so-called “knowledge work” I wondered about where the term came from in the first place. The least I could do would be an internet search to see what the Artificial Idiocy of our ever-weaker search engines came up with for an answer.  

According to the patterns spat up by the machine learning on tap, it seems we have the infinite wisdom of Peter Drucker to lay the blame on for this blunder of a term. As a key architect of so-called management education, it looks like Drucker can be a useful scapegoat for much of the crumbling edifice of the professional managerial caste at large. I guess if they are the knowledge workers, their work has left a lot to be desired.

            It incenses me because mere management requires doesn’t require extensive knowledge beyond making a schedule and being a middleman between the admin and the peons below. Nor do most managers seem to really work that much either. If they did, they wouldn’t be managing other workers, but working alongside them.

            The term itself came from Drucker’s 1959 book, The Landmarks of Tomorrow. As such, it seems to belong to a hauntological past, a Disneyworld that will soon become a ruined wonderland beneath a swamp full of gators in our not-too-distant futures. The ghosts of J.G. Ballard’s Drowned World will be kayaking above fighting off the anacondas and pythons that people have released into Florida’s humid wilderness. The real Landmarks of Tomorrow will be Epcot center golf ball floating in a mire of turpitude. The carousel of progress is rusted and there is a lot of gunk in its gears.

            Drucker thought of his word coinage as a descriptor for a new white-collar class of citizen, seated in an office, engaged in deep thought, providing his expertise for the greater good of the company. In 1959 it was for the most part, his expertise, after all. These ideations weren’t in service to ideas so much as they were to the corporate boardroom, because the principle objective of the knowledge worker was to bring “value” to the organization.

            This kind of corporate bullspeak has now trickled down into collective consciousness, much to our own detriment. It has colonized our mindscapes with the kind of coldly calculated minimalism as seen on television shows like Severance. Part of the reason why that show is such a hit, I think, is because corporate work really is actually so dulling to the mind that you have to get some kind of cybernetic lobotomy to be able to go in every day. That, and you have to cut off the part of your brain that thinks about the effects corporate work is having on the world and its many beings. Perhaps, rather than sever ourselves into two parts, corporate American’s could adopt the same kind of drinking culture as Japan. After a hard day grinding on some dumb widget designed to collect data from cell phone users, or something worse, they go get absolutely sloshed together after the long day in order to tolerate the stress. Americans just tend to binge drink at the bar in an empty bowling alley. 

Peter Drucker was a smart guy himself though and the consequences of his vision might not have been malicious. He was born Vienna in 1909 when the Austrian-Hungarian empire was still a thing. Having grown up as a Jewish intellectual during the rise of the Third Reich, and leaving for England once the Nazis were in power, his main drive came to be the creation of a “functioning society.” He knew what a nonfunctional society looked like, and it wasn’t all that great.

While in England, Drucker became something of a disciple of economist John Maynard Keynes, a regular attendee of his lectures at Cambridge. It would be no mistake to consider Drucker a Keynesian. Keynes taught his students to look at the behavior of commodities as part of his economic theory. But Drucker was a people person and his interest was to look at the behavior of individuals. This led his work to becoming a cornerstone of management theory in the twentieth century. As such, the professional managerial caste can be seen as part of his legacy.

Towards the end of the 1930s Drucker had moved to the United States. In 1939 his first book was published, The End of Economic Man: A Study of the New Totalitarianism which traced the rise of fascism in his time. In 1942 he followed it up with The Future of Industrial Man: A Conservative Approach. This garnered him attention from the bigwigs of business. His obsession with how authority and control were used in Europe led him to a friendship with Donaldson Brown, who was vice chairman of the board of General Motors between 1937 to 1946. Brown was able to give Drucker access to the inner workings of GM for his next study which resulted in the Concept of the Corporation. This was followed in turn by The Practice of Management. After all, a corporation has to extract as much as it can from its “human resources.” Now might be a good time in this essay to cue up your copy of Throbbing Gristle’s Second Annual Report.  

It might not have been Drucker’s direct goal to help elevate corporations to new levels of power. He was well aware of their power, and he thought, that if they were managed correctly by intellectuals, er, I mine, knowledge workers, there would be less of a chance of them going down the path of fascism he had seen overshadow Europe in the first half of the twentieth century.

With his influence spreading this Fordist capitalism version of knowledge-workers would soon spread its dark wings over an increasingly corporatized landscape. It might be useful to think that the process was completed when Bill Gates turned people into what author Douglas Coupland has called, “microserfs.” In Coupland’s book the characters work on a variety of projects at Microsoft where it feels like they are the serfs in a feudalistic society, with Bill Gates as the kingly technolord.

If the “knowledge worker” is the manage than the microserf in the cubicle is really just that, a serf, a peasant, someone given a pittance, while all the resources they produce are extracted. Such strategies have made the platforms promoted by Silicon Valley rich. We provide the content, the harvest the capital. They also spit what we make back at out at us, through the simulacra, flattening imagination and creativity. One things Drucker did correctly predict how the incoming information economy would erase many blue-collar jobs. In reality, it just off shored them, so the producers of American consumption were no longer visible.

            The stuffy stuffed shirts at Forbes magazine define a knowledge worker as “someone who generates value through their knowledge” and the more reliable Oxford English Dictionary defines an intellectual as a person “possessing a high degree of understanding or intelligence; given to pursuits that exercise the intellect; spec. devoted to academic or cultural interests.” Is that what the people in these office jobs are doing? I’m not convinced.

It seems to me a knowledge worker is just a defanged intellectual with a severed head. An intellectual was a person who thought long, deep and hard on a certain set of subjects. A knowledge worker is just another kind of pusher of bytes, to a person whose job it is to just shuffle bits around, whether that is information (itself not actually knowledge) or people.
​
            I’d see these kinds of people have the potential to “generate value” from their activities if they were given a space for them. But the place of the intellectual has been brushed aside by these workers who supposedly “think for a living.” What is it that they think about, I wish to know? If it is branding, marketing, management, then count me out.

I may work at a library, surrounded by all kinds of knowledge and art, but please don't call me a knowledge worker.
           ​

My name is Freddy Fiver and I live all alone
kicked back, chilled out, hurried as a stone.
You’ll find me up north, in the city of Detroit
living by my wits in a squat quite adroit.

My house it was empty for many a year
except for the rats who moved in without fear
the roof it has holes, that lets in the cold rain
but I tacked up a tarp and try not to complain.

Hurrah for Detroit city, land of the freest of free
it’s a gem in America for a squatter like me.
Don’t let out a tear, there is really no need
I’ve lived here for years without title or deed.

My jacket is all ragged and my language is foul
my life rock hardened, in the School of Knock POW!
My stuff is all scattered across the whole fucking floor
and I covered the hole with a broken down door.

What dishes I have are encrusted with grime
with the water turned off I just skip washing time
but I have cans of sardines and old cans of spam
and when I run out of them I have potted ham.

Hurrah for Detroit city land of the last hurrah
the factories moved out, folks got lost in the sprawl
when you’ve got nothing to do and nowhere to turn
come up to the city where it is a pleasure to burn.

How happy I am when I crawl into my patchwork sack
and the voices start spinning cuz my heads outta whack
and the big cockroaches who are devoid of all shame
crawl up to my fire bucket to get close to the flame.

The tiny little bed bugs have covered me with pores
so when I scratch and I itch pus out of me pours.
A large spider in the corner stares and spins its crazy web
but its not a bad life for poor me, not at all for a pleb.

So hurrah for Detroit city when the polar vortex descends
may the good times return, we can always pretend.
How happy I am in this suburb deserted
for the freaks on the streets with who I have flirted.
There is no job, no money, no police I do swear.
I make friends with coyotes, await the return of the bear.

Here I am happy and here I must stay
ain’t nothing else for me, so I won’t go away.

So come up to Detroit where there’s a home for you all
it’s a safe place to be amid the Empire’s fall.
No need to go elsewhere when you can squat here for free
and make a life in the rubble of Detroit city.

Please don’t let troubles brew in your mind
you can come do your thing and let it unwind
just stick to your squat and guard it ‘gainst scrappers
hang out on the block with the MC’s and rappers.

It will be a city of music to Detroit’s dying day
so come rave in the streets til your toothless and gray.

A lot of intellectuals get riled up about the looming specter of anti-intellectualism. I can understand the fear. Perhaps they were picked on for being brainy and artsy instead of being brawny, athletic and good at working with their hands. Gym class was a living hell for me in high school. I had already denounced the flailing jocks, conventional sports, and the clueless philistines I perceived to be all around me when I embraced punk rock, poetry and skateboarding. When punk made its mid-nineties comeback, I called all the newly minted fans poseurs even though they had gotten there just a few years later than me. Then again, they liked shitty bands like Green Day and Offspring, where I listened to Crass and Conflict. My denunciations were just as reactionary as the censure and bullying I’d experienced for dressing funny and writing in a journal. Now I see the same thing happening again with the fear intellectuals have for the anti-intellectual forces stalking America.

I will confess that I love theory. It excites. But the excitement and amusement and joy that comes from setting my brain abuzz with abstract music and heady papers diminish with ferocity when I see how much contempt intellectuals have for those who work with their hands, for those who dare not to pay attention to those theories and what they have to say. It’s no wonder that people don’t pay attention, when so much hatred has been spent on deriding those deemed dumb and uneducated.

In the United States this dual animosity, of intellectuals on the one hand, and so called uneducated on the other, has now settled into a holding pattern of locked horns, a real duel. The differences in taste on the part of each binary group contributes to this failed state. Each group looks down on what the other likes and dislikes.

            The echo chamber silo of higher education creates a self-reinforcing world view and such a similarity of aesthetics that it has become impossible to read a literary novel from one of the big publishing cartels. So many of the writers pushed by the mob boss editors, only got into print by way of an MFA program. It feels like they only love literature because of the perceived prestige. They don’t want a genuine life of letters if it leaves them for poorer, only for richer. Where is the rapture for reading and life in letters? Not in MFA programs. (Nor is it in StoryGrid but that’s another matter.) These folks themselves can’t seem to understand the appeal of pro wrestling, reality television shows about people with a duck call business, or country pop music. The self-appointed highbrow have made deep cuts of separation with any association they might have once had with what they deem low brow. This current cadre of big uni graduated thinkers don’t understand why their extremely disconnected, abstract, theoretical pronunciations don’t relate to how large portions of the population experience reality, and then continue to lambast those who they believe inferior for what they call stupidity.

            This isn’t a good way to win friends and influence people.

Instead of denouncing the supposed anti-intellectual we should be asking ourselves what we do we intellectuals really have against the uneducated?  As much derision and venom flies against those deemed ignorant and unschooled on the part of the intellectual as does the hatred of intellectual from those who are suspicious of the life of the mind. What is this really but a superiority complex painted over the top of thinly disguised class hatred? Otherwise, why the judgment on those who have dropped out of high school, who have not gone to college, who do not have what is considered to be good taste, who do not hold the same opinions and values, in other words the opinions and the values of the educated?

Here we see again the ages-old divisions between those who would manage society from the safety of their lofty perch, and those ready to get their hands dirty. In times past it was the ruler who had access to books, to teachers, to the learned. It was the peasants and the underclass who served the upper class, and had to make do with the wisdom of their hands and the oral knowledge passed down between generations. Another way to look at this simmering animosity, is as the division between the literate and the illiterate, between the written word and the spoken word, each representing a different way of knowing and transmitting that knowing, each giving rise to different types of culture and ways of relating.

As literacy began to flourish it became possible for those who would have formerly had little access to the canon of printed thought, to become self-educated. Yet the self-educated are dangerous to a ruling class, because with access to knowledge, they can read what the Bible actually says, as happened during the Reformation, and they can start forming their own notions about its meaning. They can take what they have learned, the revelation of their own thought on what they have read from the books of the Bible, and start making up their own minds about what has been preached. They can decide if the priesthood is in service to the word, or just giving an interpretation of that word allowing them to hold on to the reins of power. For the priesthood, who were a large swathe of the intellectuals of the time, having all and sundry read and make up their own minds about theological doctrine must have been scary as the basis of their power was pulled away.

Fast forward to the Industrial Revolution and its economic aftermaths.  As Fossil Capitalism ramped up, on the one hand, and Bureaucratic Communism, on the other, it was those who worked with their hands who caught the brunt of the downsides of both of these systems. The intellectuals who set up and gamed these systems in the first place got to reap the rewards of underclass obedience. A few bones get thrown to the working class from time to time and some plucky bootstrappers are allowed to rise in the ranks here and there. But only a little bit. The brains always will be in need of brawn to get things done, and since the brains rarely like to give up the creature comforts they’ve accumulated, it is better for them isolate and keep as many resources to themselves as possible, while simultaneously sowing division so as to better stay on top as conquerors.

Our corporate managers and corporate landlords are now the would-be keepers of the intellectual keys. What might those who have been wage slaved in the service industry by systems of debt do with the knowledge and access to information the Internet promises to give them? In this situation it becomes better to feed people a steady drip of drugs and entertainment to keep their boredom with life at bay. In boredom, stray thoughts might arise. They might begin to distrust those on whose behalf they have been working and toiling their whole lives with the power of their hands and the sweat of their bodies.

Those who try to rule with the power of their minds alone have reason to be afraid of the unwashed mob who might any day show up their doorstep.

If intellectuals are harvesting a bad rep just now, it might just be because they have been the ones working to shape public discourse and policy for the last few generations following World War II. This was when the dream of a managed society really got its wings. That society has been managed straight to the point of multiple crises and escalating collapse. So now, when the populist uprising happens in this century as it has happened in past centuries, it gets seen by many as having strong anti-intellectual characteristics. The intellectuals however, wish to retain their clout, and once again, instead of listening to the criticisms laid against them, deem others as anti-intellectual populists. One thing that seems to get missed by the professional managers is that the flip side to populism is elitism. Unfortunately it seems they’d rather see what they’ve accumulated die on the vine rather than to share their hoarded resources.

            The PMC also seems to be missing the fact that their very denunciations of the rural, of hillbillies and rednecks, of the bitter young adults who see no future for themselves outside an entrenched service industry catering to the needs of the very managers they despise, has robbed them of potential allies. As often as not, the anti-intellectual is very smart indeed, and the working classes have historically had just as much appreciation of music, literature and art as the richly educated. More often than not, they have been continually priced out of sharing in the fruits of high culture. I love classical music, but a single ticket to the symphony now costs about eighty to a hundred dollars, and I’m only talking about a middling seat. Participation is thus kept out of the hands of those who need that money for milk and bread, but who otherwise share the love of these productions of time. With these economic separations in place, the cultural distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow then become a matter of what class a person belongs to, what they can afford. To keep class identity in tact they may tune to into the pop music they can hear rather than checking out the rich world available to them for free from public libraries.
​
            If the PMC thinks America has become too anti-intellectual, at least one prong of bringing the humanities back into greater circulation among everyone should be to bring down their affordability. The members of the intellectual class should also probably go to at least a few WWE matches and rodeos too, though, to get a taste of the friendliness of the people who they so dismissively assault.

All of this begs to question of what the role of the intellectual should actually play in society.      

Since the time of Pythagoras and Plato the Western imagination has been plagued with the idea that the intellectual should be the ruler of the people. The teachers at the universities, the educated heads of corporations, the Ivy League and blue-blooded politicians who have been running the show in the West, and their various lackeys, haven’t really made a good go of that inherited assumption. Something has to give.
A mere reversal of roles won’t foot the bill either. Casting doubt on the work of the mind, dismissing all science, dismissing all book learning and scholarship as suspect, is just as bad as calling all people who live in the rural parts of America rednecks and hillbillies, as if their interests and desires don’t matter.

 Rather than being dictators of taste (a hard thing for a music writer like me to say out loud), the intellectual should start to see themselves more as artists of the mind. A contributor to culture, whose creations swirl and play amid the ideas and imagination, rather than an enlightened ruler who gets to tell everyone else what to like and how to act. If intellectuals would like to see their ideas adopted more widely, we should do as Robert Anton Wilson has suggested, and seduce people into the reality tunnels forged by our imaginations. People are tired of being forcibly dominated by ideas and theory so abstract the practical value of them are like building paper airplanes for a humanity that is trying to travel back and forth between continents.

The intellectual as artist of the mind gives a new freedom to our own ideas. A thinker is someone who can excel at creating concepts. By working with concepts and getting them into circulation, the intellectual becomes a concept artist. Those concepts could be in the form of philosophy, written for the everyday readers who need philosophy to live, as well as the specialists who make a life pursuing the wisdom they purport to love.

I don’t see anything wrong with playing games of art and thought inside our heads. These games can none-the-less change the world as many intellectuals would like to do. But it would only be because other people feel drawn to and aligned with those ideas, not because they have been bludgeoned by them. In this respect the intellectual is better suited to have a role outside of professional manager, decision maker, politician. The world could use a few less politicians anyway, a few less executives, a few less bureaucrats and professors who get lost inside of the bloated systems of what the Left used to criticize and call the Establishment.

​            Whatever is left of the Left must now find a different way forward. When the life of the mind is not lived for the life of the mind, but for the sake of position in a priesthood of prestige, a lack of true presence of mind becomes a certainty. Those with presence of mind must allow their ideas to flourish or fail in practical freedom, and not seek to chain others inside cages of theory they too were once keen to escape.

​“May I take your order?”

Beef crumbled in the taco
shipped from south of the border.

“Biggie size the fries,”

“What do you want to drink with that?”

Outside the Waco compound
guns held waiting for rat-a-tat-tat-tat.

Cars pull into the drive thru
around the block cops respond to drive by
the fries are hot, covered in salt.

Across the street, at his ex-girlfriends house
just out of the pen, a guy gets re-arrested for assault.

The line is filling up around the burger shack
there is a man in the bathroom shooting up smack.
The manager grabs the Narcan, this happens every day
a schizophrenic drinks endless coffees
talking to himself, praying the voices away.

The computer system goes down, ransomware attack
the burger orders can’t be placed, horns honking
people lose patience, composure and grace
blunt smoke is wafting out the back of a Cadillac,
from the way that its rocking, people inside bonking.
One honked horn too many as tensions escalate
a newsflash on the cellphone says the burger lettuce
is doused in glyphosate. “Let us eat, let us feast,”
people start to scream. Visions of special sauce
(Catalina mixed with ranch) explode in a wet dream.

Without cash no one can pay the bill at the window
civil society erodes because of one broken gizmo.
Outside the dumpster smells like chicken grease
and an old racoon nibbles on cold buffalo wings
the fry cook sneaks outside, takes a few hits from a vape
dreaming of another life, from fast food he must escape.

The chaos of the world is only one gunked up burger away
as the golden arches collapse and fall, true colors on display.

The chaos of the world is only one missing chicken nugget.
How to restore the order, once taken, to fix the hole and plug it?

A couple of days ago on March 26 2025 at the time of this writing, the centennial celebration of serialist defender, Pierre Boulez began. He was an ambassador of the avantgarde, and a celebrator of poetry. In today's post we will explore his legacy as a conductor and as the creative force who behind the establishment of one of the worlds great sonic laboratories of sound innovation, IRCAM. The following is an excerpt from my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Syntheis and the Birth of Electronic Music. 

.:. .:. .:. ​

At the end of the 1950s Boulez had left Paris for Baden-Baden where he had scored a gig as composer in residence with the South-West German Radio Orchestra. Part of his work consisted of conducting smaller concerts. He also had access to an electronic studio where he set to work on a new piece, Poesie Pour Pouvoir, for tape and three orchestras. Baden-Baden would become his home, and he eventually bought a villa there, a place of refuge to return to after his various engagements that took him around the world and on extended stays in London and New York. His experience conducting for the Théâtre Marigny, had sharpened his skills in this area, making it all possible.

Boulez had gained some experience as a conductor in his early days as a pit boss at the Folies Bergère. He gained further experience when he conducted the Venezuela Symphony Orchestra when he was on tour with his friend Jean-Louis Barrault. In 1959 he was able to get further out of the mold of conducting incidental music for theater and get down to the business he was about: the promotion of avantgarde music.

The break came when he replaced the conductor Hans Rosbaud who was sick, and a replacement was needed in short notice for a program of contemprary music at the Aix-en-Provence and Donaueschingen Festivals. Four years later he had the opportunity to conduct Orchestre National de France for their fiftieth anniversary performance of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, where the piece had been first been premiered to the shock of the audience. Conducting suited Boulez as an activity for his energies and he went on to lead performances of Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck. This was followed by him conducting Wagner’s Parsifal and Tristan and Isolde.

In the 1970s Boulez had a triple coup in his career. The first part of his tripartite attack for avantgarde domination involved his becoming conductor and musical director the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Then second part came after Leonard Bernstein’s tenure as conductor of the New York Philharmonic was over, and Boulez was offered the opportunity to replace him. He felt that through innovative programming, he would be able to remold the minds of music goers in both London and New York.
​
Boulez was also fond of getting people out of stuffy concert halls to experience classical and contemporary music in unusual places. In London he gave a concert at the Roundhouse which was a former railway turntable shed, and in Greenwich Village he gave more informal performances during a series called “Prospective Encounters.” When getting out of the hall wasn’t possible he did what he could to transform the experience inside the established venue. At Avery Fisher Hall in New York he started a series of “Rug Concerts” where the seats were removed and the audience was allowed to sprawl out on the floor. Boulez wanted "to create a feeling that we are all, audience, players and myself, taking part in an act of exploration".
The third prong came when he was asked back by the President of France to come back to his home country and set up a musical research center.

Yesterday, March 26 2025, began the centennial celebration of serialist defender, Pierre Boulez. He was an ambassador of the avantgarde, a celebrator of poetry, and an instigator who helped establish one of the great sonic laboratories of sound innovation, IRCAM. 

The following is an excerpt from my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Syntheis and the Birth of Electronic Music. This part takes his poetic imagaination.

As Boulez got his bearings as a young composer, the connections between music and poetry came to capture his attention, as it had Schoenberg. Poetry became integral to Boulez’s orientation towards music, and his teacher Messiaen would say that the work of his student was best understood as that of a poet.

Sprechgesang, or speech song, a kind of vocal technique half between speaking and singing, was first used in formal music by Engelbert Humperdink in his 1897 melodrama Königskinder. In some ways sprechgesang is a German synonym for the already established practice of the recitative in operas as found in Wagner’s compositions. Arnold Schoenberg used the related term Sprechstimme as a technique in his song cycle Pierrot lunaire (1912) where he employed a special notation to indicate the parts that should be sung-spoke. Schoenberg’s disciple Alban Berg used the technique in his opera Wozzeck (1924). Schoenberg employed it again in his Moses and Aron opera (1932).

In Boulez’s explorations of the relationship between poetry and music he questioned "whether it is actually possible to speak according to a notation devised for singing. This was the real problem at the root of all the controversies. Schoenberg's own remarks on the subject are not in fact clear."

Pierre Boulez wrote three settings of René Char's poetry, Le Soleil des eaux, Le Visage nuptial, and Le Marteau sans maître. Char had been involved with Surrealist movement, was active in the French Resistance, and mixed freely with other Parisian artists and intellectuals. Le Visage Nuptial (The Nuptial Face) from 1946 was an early attempt at reuniting poetry and music across the gap they had taken so long ago. He took five of Chars erotic texts and wrote the piece for two voices, two ondes Martenot, piano and percussion. In the score there are instructions for “Modifications de l’intonation vocale.”
​

​A few years later, he worked with material written by the symbolist and hermetic poet Stéphane Mallarme, when he wrote Pli selon pli in (1962). Mallarme’s work A Throw of the Dice is of particular influence. In that poem the words are placed in various configurations across the page, with changes of size, and instances of italics or all capital letters. Boulez took these and made them correspond to changes to the pitch and volume of the poetic text. The title comes from a different work by Mallarme, and is translated as “fold according to fold.” In his poem Remémoration d'amis belges, he describes how a mist gradually covers the city of Bruges until it disappears.

Subtitled A Portrait of Mallarme Boulez uses five of his poems in chronological order, starting with "Don du poème" from 1865 for the first movement finishing with "Tombeau" from 1897 for the last. Some consider the last word of the piece, mort, death, to be the only intelligible word in the work. The voice is used more for its timbral qualities, and to weave in as part of the course of the music, than as something to be focused on alone.
​
Later still Boulez took e.e. cummings poems and used them as inspiration for his work Cummings Ist der Dichter in 1970. Boulez worked hard to relate poetry and music together in his work. It is no surprise, then, that the institute he founded would go far in giving machines the ability to sing, and foster the work of other artists who were interested in the relationships between speech and song.

Pierre Boulez would have been 100 today, March 26th, 2025. Let's give this serialist defender some love.

Pierre Boulez doesn’t get enough street cred in today’s electronic and experimental music scenes. He doesn’t have the same cache of compositional cool as his fellow maverick of European serialism, Karlheinz Stockhausen. He doesn’t retain the respect of American noiseheads driven on the by the sound of Cage’s silence. He didn’t drone on an on and on as La Monte Young has, so the worshippers at the amplified altar of drone don’t think much about his message. Neither was he awakened to the trance reducing repetitive power of pulse as were Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Phillip Glass. His music doesn’t suck the listener in with these entranced dances of sound. His fellow Frenchmen Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry embraced technology at the expense of traditional instruments. Boulez never did away with the orchestral palette he knew so well, and combined it only in small ways with electronics to enhance the sound color of the instruments in play, even though he hung out in the world of concrète. His total dedication to total serialism kept him on the avant edge of classical composition, and often had him playing intellectual fisticuffs with its detractors, and he wasn't afraid of lambasting things he didn't like to smithereens. His stance was combative and he could come off like a total asshole. Yet the severity of his jerkiness can be tempered when it is realized that for French intellectuals, this sneering pose was in part an act, a role to play. ( His fellow Frenchmen weren’t as hurt or put off by this stance, as people in the English-speaking world were more inclined to be, because they were familiar with all the other intellectual jerks who make their national life of the mind as interesting as it is irritable. Think of Jacques Derrida, Michael Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Gilles Louis René Deleuze and Felix Guattari as similar arrogant types, and Boulez fits right in.  For us Americans, his bombast can come across as rudeness layered on top of egocentric rhetoric. Yet for the most part it seemed the European crowd was hip to this ruse, and overlooked his brusque shenanigans. 

Yet Boulez was also a conductive force. Not just through the sheer love of music that he exuded from his years as a conductor, but in this other role he took on as an ambassador of the avantgarde. His luminosity excited the minds and musical capacities of those around him, as he continually challenged the old forms and encouraged composers and musicians to take up the challenge of the new forms. 

As Boulez wrote, “A composition is no longer a consciously directed construction moving from a ‘beginning’ to an ‘end’ and passing from one to another. Frontiers have been deliberately ‘anaesthetized’, listening time is no longer directional but time-bubbles, as it were…A work thought of as a circuit, neither closed nor resolved, needs a corresponding non-homogenous time that can expand or condense”.

So let's take a look at his life and celebrate his accomplishments. The following is an excerpt from my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Syntheis and the Birth of Electronic Music.

His devotion to music can be seen in the way the path of his life moved him through his own non-linear circuit path to a dual career as composer and conductor. Part of his perceived arrogance can be thought of as a defense mechanism against the hostility of critics opposed to the new music. He didn’t let it deter him.
Boulez was born in Montbrison, France on March 26, of 1925 to an engineer father. As a child he took piano lessons and played chamber music with local amateurs and sang in the school choir. Boulez was gifted at mathematics and his father hoped he would follow him into engineering, following an education at the École Polytechnique, but opera music intervened. He saw Boris Godunov and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and had his world rocked. When he met the celebrity soprano Ninon Vallin, the two hit it off and she asked him to play for her. She saw his inherent and talent and helped persuade his father to let him apply to the Conservatoire de Lyon. He didn’t make the cut, but this only furthered his resolve to pursue a life path in music.

            His older sister Jeanne, with whom he remained close the rest of his life, supported his aspirations, and helped him receive private instruction on the piano and lessons in harmony from Lionel de Pachmann. His father remained opposed to these endeavors, but with his sister as his champion he held strong. In October of 1943 he again auditioned for the Conservatoire and was struck down. Yet a door opened when he was admitted to the preparatory harmony class of Georges Dandelot. Following this his further ascension in the world of music was swift. 

            Two of the choices Boulez made that was to have a long-lasting impact on his career was his choice of teacher, Olivier Messiaen, who he approached in June of 1944. Messiaen taught harmony outside the bounds of traditional notions, and embraced the new music of Schoenberg, Webern, Bartok, Debussy and Stravinsky.

            In February of 1945 Boulez got to attend a private performance of Schoenberg’s Wind Quartet and the event left him breathless, and led him to his second influential teacher. The piece was conducted by René Leibowitz and Boulez organized a group of students to take lessons from him for a time. Leibowitz had studied with Schoenberg and Anton Webern and was a friend of Jean Paul Sartre. His performances of music from the Second Viennese School made him something of a rock star in avant-garde circles of the time. Under the tutelage of Leibowitz, Boulez was able to drink from the fountain of twelve tone theory and practice. Its waters of inspiration continued to renew him all his life.

            Boulez later told Opera News that this music “was a revelation — a music for our time, a language with unlimited possibilities. No other language was possible. It was the most radical revolution since Monteverdi. Suddenly, all our familiar notions were abolished. Music moved out of the world of Newton and into the world of Einstein.”

The work of Leibowitz helped the young composer to make his initial contributions to integral serialism, the total artistic control of all parameters of sound, including duration, pitch, and dynamics according to serial procedures. Messiaen’s ideas about modal rhythms also contributed to his development in this area and his future work.

            Milton Babbitt had been first in developing has own system of integral serialism, independently of his French counterpart, having published his book on set theory and music in 1946.  At this point the two were not yet aware of each others work. Boulez’s first works to use integral serialism are both from 1947: Three Compositions for Piano and Compositions for Four Instruments.            

While studying under Messiaen, Boulez was introduced to non-western world music. He found it very inspiring and spent a period of time hanging out in the museums where he studied Japanese and Balinese musical traditions, and African drumming.  Boulez later commented that, "I almost chose the career of an ethnomusicologist because I was so fascinated by that music. It gives a different feeling of time."
           
​ In 1946 the first public performances of Boulez’s compositions were given by pianist Yvette Grimaud. He kept himself busy living the art life, tutoring the son of his landlord in math to help make ends meet. He made further money playing the ondes Martentot, an early French electronic instrument designed by Maurice Martentot who had been inspired by the accidental sound of overlapping oscillators he had heard while working with military radios. Martentot wanted his instrument to mimic a cello and Messiaen had used it in his famous symphony Turangalîla-Symphonie, written between 1946 and 1948. Boulez got a chance to improvise on the ondes Martentot as an accompanist to radio dramas. He also would organize the musicians in the orchestra pit at the Folies Bergère cabaret music hall. 

His experience as a conductor was furthered when actor Jean-Louis Barrault asked him to play the ondes for the production of Hamlet he was making with his wife, Madeline Reanud for their new company at the Théâtre Marigny. A strong working relationship was formed and he became the music director for their Compagnie Renaud-Barrault. A lot of the music he had to play for their productions was not to his taste, but it put some francs in his wallet and gave him the opportunity to compose in the evening. He got to write some of his own incidental music for the productions, tour South America and North America several times each, in addition to dates with the company around Europe. These experiences stood him well in stead when he embarked on the path of conductor as part of his musical life.

            In 1949 Boulez met John Cage when he came to Paris and helped arrange a private concert of the Americans Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano. Afterwards the two began an intense correspondence that lasted for six-years. In 1951 Pierre Schaeffer hoste the first musique concrète workshop. Boulez, Jean Barraqué, Yvette Grimaud, André Hodeir and Monique Rollin all attended. Olivier Messiaen was assisted by Pierre Henry in creating a rhythmical work Timbres-durè es that was mad from a collection percussive sounds and short snippets.

            At the end of 1951, while on tour with the Renaud-Barrault company he visited New York for the first time, staying in Cage’s apartment. He was introduced to Igor Stravinksy and Edgard Vaèse. Cage was becoming more and more committed to chance operations in his work, and this was something Boulez could never get behind. Instead of adopting a “compose and let compose” attitude, Boulez withdrew from Cage, and later broke off their friendship completely.

In 1952 Boulez met Stockhausen who had come to study with Messiaen, and the pair hit it off, even though neither spoke the others language. Their friendship continued as both worked on pieces of musique concrète  at the GRM, with Boulez’s contribution being his Deux Études. In turn, Boulez came to Germany in July of that year for the summer courses at Darmstadt. Here he met Luciano Berio, Luigi Nono, and Henri Pousseur among others.

All of his experience, training and new found connections converged to force him into a role as an acerbic ambassador for the avantgarde. 

.:. .:. .:. ​This was in part, an excerpt from my book, The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Synthesis, and the Birth of Electronic Music published by Velocity Press in the UK and available from Bookshop.org and that big place named after a rainforest, and fine bookstores everywhere. 

The celebration of the Pierre Boulez centennial will continue tomorrow in an exploration of the way he fused music and poetry together.