We pause in our narrative to discuss a once and future topic. Once and future because it supplies background information to all the works of Quin, and because it will be the next great thingamagig in the series of performance art which is and has been his life. This next great thingamagig is and will be:
The dada hootenanny.
Readers are probably all already aha-ing on this holy of holy days--the culmination to the great holidays of consumption--when all have completed the required religious rituals of feasting, purchasing gizmos and gadgets in profusion, holding tight to old resentments in their hearts while watching loved ones' disappointed faces as they fight bitterly with the plastic packaging to get at the gizmos, and finally, with relief, anticipating the homeward journey inside some hugely large and heavy gadget, gizmo, or thingamagug, so that they may behold the faces of loved ones no more.
The dada hottenanny has something to do with gizmos and thingamagigs, and here is why.
First, you might want to try this: Enter the word "hootenanny" in your search engine and see how hard it is to find a description. It is rather hard. Try entering the words 'dada hootenanny', no doubt thinking that you will find pages complete with images of performances et. al. And you find nothing of very much interest.
There is very little out there about the hootenanny, let alone a dada hootenanny. So we examine these two confluent words in an attempt to glimpse what Quin's next performance art piece may look and/or sound like.
When we check out the word, hootenanny, expecting to find much referencing to, at the very least, Pete Seegar, here is the kind of thing we found.
A lot of links to a Magazine called Hootenanny.
Something which tantalizingly mentions the words hootenanny and counter culture but turns to be about playing guitars in the Catholic Church.
A site for Golden Voice recording? with an interesting comic book style cover.
and so on.
When we looked up "hootenanny definition," we are taken first to a thing called hyperdictionary, which gave us this:
: affair, article, artifact, choral service, dingus, dofunny, dohickey, dojigger, dojiggy, domajig, domajigger, doodad, dowhacky, eisteddfod, eppes, etwas, farewell performance, flumadiddle, folk-music festival, folk-sing, gadget, gigamaree, gimmick, gizmo, hickey, hootmalalie, jam session, jigger, material thing, music festival, musicale, object, opera festival, quelque chose, rock festival, service of song, sing, singfest, sing-in, singing, something, swan song, thing, thingum, thingumabob, thingumadad, thingumadoodle, thingumajig, thingumajigger, thingumaree, thingummy, whatchy, widget.
This was not what we expected at all. Apparently, more dictionaries know the term hootenanny in terms of its "thingummy, widgetty, doodad, flumadiddle connotations" than it's" music festival" connotations.
So far, we have found nothing referencing our concept of hootenanny, which, although visions of Pete Seegar dance in our heads repeating "one more time . . . . one more time . . . ." into the ether, we have always treasured images conveyed by the word, of bearded Bull fiddle playing Warner Brothers cartoon figures, Arkansas Hillbillies, stamping and fiddling away and reminding us that out there in cartoon land, there were those who dwelled in jug playing anarchy . . . maybe.
Finally, we went to Britannica.com where we found the following definition with a nice illustration of Pete Seegar in the Student Encyclopedia, which is always the more interesting of the two reference texts. If Britannica will let us cut and paste onto this blog, we will reproduce it here for you.
Seeger, Pete
Britannica Student Encyclopedia
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Pete Seeger, 1971.
David Gahr
[unfortunately, the photo of Seegar from Britannica is uncopyable]
(born 1919), U.S. folksinger. One of the foremost figures of American folk music, Pete Seeger spent decades popularizing his own brand of pop-folk both as a member of various groups and as a solo performer. His most famous songs—‘If I Had a Hammer' and ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone?'—became well-known pop-folk classics, and ‘Turn! Turn! Turn!' was a number-one hit for The Byrds.
Pete Seeger was born on May 3, 1919, in New York, N.Y. Both his father, a musicologist, and his mother, a violin teacher, were on the faculty of the Juilliard School of Music. By the time he was a teenager, Seeger was adept at playing the ukulele, banjo, and guitar. His interest in folk music began when he visited a folk festival in the southern United States. After attending private schools in Manhattan, Seeger enrolled at Harvard University, where he studied sociology for two years.
In the late 1930s, Seeger worked at the Archive of Folk Song in the Library of Congress and appeared on radio programs. He formed the Almanac Singers with Woody Guthrie, Lee Hays, and Millard Lampell in 1940 and released his debut album, Talking Union and Other Union Songs (1941), just as the United States was entering World War II. After serving in the Army, Seeger became the national director of People's Songs, Inc., where he used the term hootenanny to describe the group's pro-labor, antifascist songs. In the late 1940s, Seeger formed The Weavers, a quartet known for popularizing such folksongs as ‘On Top of Old Smokey' and ‘Goodnight Irene'.
A performer with a strong social consciousness, Seeger was blacklisted for his alleged Communist sympathies during the 1950s and was unable to get work on network television for 17 years. Throughout this period, Seeger continued to sing and record though his public appearances were limited. By the early 1960s, Seeger had found a new audience among young Americans who increasingly embraced his commitment to political and social change, especially his opposition to American involvement in the Vietnam War. Seeger's albums during that period, such as We Shall Overcome (1963) and Songs of Struggle and Protest 1930–1950 (1964), reflected his antiwar stance. The Byrds recording of his song ‘Turn! Turn! Turn!', which became a number-one hit in 1965, was a fusion of folk and pop with lyrics adapted from a Biblical passage in Ecclesiastes.
An accomplished storyteller, music historian, author, and instructor, Seeger educated and influenced many other performers. He played a pivotal role in popularizing the five-string banjo and introduced a variety of instruments into folk music. In the 1990s he continued to perform before audiences young and old in concerts that typically included active audience participation. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996.
From Britannica, we also gleaned this sugarplum about leadbelly and the hootenanny.
1885?–1949), U.S. folksinger and composer. Leadbelly was born Huddie William Ledbetter near Shreveport, La., probably on Jan. 21, 1885. An African American folk legend whose style influenced the hootenanny movement as well as folk music in general, he became a wandering musician who sang the blues. Although he had frequent run-ins with the law, he used his music to win a pardon and avoid work details while in jail. On a Louisiana prison farm, he was discovered in 1930 by John and Alan Lomax, who were collecting folk songs for the Library of Congress. His best-know songs, ‘On Top of Old Smokey' and his theme song, ‘Good Night, Irene', became hits after his death in New York City on Dec. 6, 1949. (See also Folk Music.)
Interesting. The Leadbelly citation mentions the "hootenanny movement . . ."
We think we'll just take a moment now to look up "People's Songs Inc." and see what we find. We will let you know in a moment.
Oh . . . well, now. You find at least some fairly interesting things when you look this up. First is a lovely long page of text by Woodie Guthrie who with Pete Seegar and others published the bulletin "People's Songs Inc." We'll summarize, and, when we are able again to access this blog in another browser, we'll put in some colors and indentions and things so that you can tell more easily where we stop, and Guthrie starts. You may just want to skip straight to the Guthrie parts. We know that. At any rate, in the excerpt that follows, Woodie is discussing the first ten months of the bulletin's life, and he castigates, or at least it seems so to us, his fellow readers and editors for not including more songs from real people. Read this over and see if you concur.
from: http://aztec.lib.utk.edu/~pelton/psi.htm
Jingles, jangles, and rangles by Woody Guthrie
Vol. I, No. 10; November 1946
You ask me to tell you what I think of our song bulletin at this tenth month of its birth and life.
I will talk with my eyes on a world of bloody fights, town rapings, bloodhound lynchings, fiery cross burnings, and with my ears and my feelings set to catch the pogroms, racial wars, the word "verboten", and the words "gentile only", and "no blacks", as well as words painted on boards that say, "no men wanted", "no vacancies", and see what I can say.
The nine issues of People's Songs bulletin so far has not been a full blooded, nor a full grown book of People's Songs. It has had soome very good partisan songs, anti-fascist war songs, we will all admit, but it has not had enough, even of these.
I think it has had too many jingles, rangles, and tangles right and left, so many that the more deeper and longer ballads and songs have been crowded out.
The best loved columns in any magazine or papre are the spaces set aside for the true stories of real living human beings. we have heated our hearth and warmed our bed for outstanding ballad singers and best song writers, and a few of our close kin, but we have pushed the deathless songs and ballads of Sara Ogan, Aunt Molly Jackson, and their classic protest songs about bloody Harlan County, out to stand by the door and wait.
Our song file here is running over with a few hundred or so of the sadder, madder, and gladder stories from out of our chain gangs and our work gangs. But the jingle of the day elbows many of our more human tales plumb out of the picture.
We have been the talkers when we ought to be the listeners. Our main aim is to cause folks to write their own songs and to sing them.
We need more songs that sing about actual fights, battles, on the level of "Montcalme and the Wolfe", "I am a Girl of Constant Sorrow", "The Worried Man Blues", Goin' Down This Road Feelin' Bad", "Columbus Stockade Blues", "John Henry", "East Texas Red", "The 1913 Massacre", "Dream of the Miner's Child", "The Bourgeoisie Blues", "Tom Joad", "The Biggest Thing That Man Has Ever Done", "Joe Hill", "East Virginia Blues", "The Death of Floyd Collins", and thousands more. I can see the parts of my own life reflected here, I believe, stronger and plainer than I can in all of these jingles and jangles.
I know a few of us have worked our heads off to keep our bulletin going and growing. It will grow more yet. I see it already bubbling and jumping up faster, as more folks see it, sing it and feel it. I feel sad only because more people haven't run and jumped in with us.
I just hope, maybe, to get you to feeling like I feel, and then to set down and write your own feelings in to us. I always was a lot better listener than I am a talker.
Your Oklahoma Pal,
Woody Guthrie.
What gives us the most solace from the above passage is that, it seems even Woodie Guthrie had trouble getting folks to come play in his sand box.
Searching for things about People's Songs Inc., we also ran across an FBI report on Judy Holliday--the actress? We encourage all of our readers to look over this link. Since this seems to be where we're heading again, or already are, we'd better get some songs ready, like Woodie says so we can be ready. If you want to read the FBI file on Judy Holliday, here is the link:http://www.wtv-zone.com/lumina/FBI/newyork.html.
If you keep going through google pages, you will indeed find some more interesting things there about People's Song's Inc. But for all of this, it's pretty hard to find a nice succinct bit of verbiage about, say, the histori-sociological significance of hootenanny in the mid to latish 20th Century.
Now, Let's consider dada for a moment. Here we find reams and reams.
http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/spec-coll/Bai/shipe.htm--This one gives you a pretty good summary.
Now, we'll discuss dada in our own editorial layperson's terms for a while, knowing all the while that Quin may one day see this and just poo poo the heck out of it. Many times he thinks our work is ok, many other times he tells us that it is bad work, fucked up, crap, or so forth. And so when we type, doodle some little design on the computer, knit, or whatever, we must always mentally prepare ourselves for if certainly not the inevitable, at least the possible.
And so, for those of us for whom dada or dadaism may not ring the biggest of bells, we offer . . . this.
Many people, since we are now in the absolute heyday of Gulf War: The Sequel, have forgotten all about some of the other wars for money or oil or whatever that the moneyed classes have propegated or promulgated in . . . well, in the previous century, we must now say, meaning, the 20th since we are now in the 21st. Dada, which for simplicity's sake, we can, for the next five minutes think of as perhaps an artistic movement. And to properly begin to discuss it, we need to remember a bit about The War to End All Wars . . . remember that one, no? yes? That one was World War I, or the First World War, circa 1914 - 1918. The one before Hitler. A great many men, especially European men (we include the English in this) died in this war. Zillions in fact. And it all happened soon after and around the continuing time of all of the arguments over the rights of the workers and the proletariet and so on. What we saw was that we can talk and talk and talk about the rights of the working poor, and then as soon as the rich folks and higher ups decide that we need a war, the workers all go marching off to die in one. You may just like to note that this is happening even now. Let yourself do a quick search about military salaries and find out just how much all those children being all that they can be are dying to make for the wives and children they are leaving behind. And those are the quote, professional, unquote, soldiers. The reservists are a different story entirely. We're not going to do that search for you, but let's just do a quick search and see if we can find out approxmately how many men died in WWI . . .
According to Britannica, around 8,500,000--eight-million-five-hundred-thousand, soldiers died in WWI. Ponder that a moment.
This is carnage.
Do you remember how they fought in WWI? It was a style of fighting carried over from the American Civil War, or War Between the States, and made even more manifest as soldiers dug their way across Europe. Both sides dug trenches, say, six to eight feet deep, or deeper perhaps, which were immediately filled with water and mud and dung and rats, and so forth . . . the rats came in handy because they could be eaten, and then when the commanding officers in the lovely homes they had comandeered to run the proceedings said so, they ran out of the trenches while men from the trenches on the other side of things fired on them, or blew them up with land mines they had planted, or bigger guns which fired shells, or if they still had legs to run on, stabbed them until they died with big swords called bayonets which were attached to rifles for that purpose. Did your teachers make you read "Johnny Got his Gun" in school?
Among those left, those who were not among the millions who had died, there was bitterness against the upper classes and bourgeois who were responsible for bringing this on, and who also managed to make quite a lot of money, as usual, on the whole enterprise.
Dada is a sort of serious minded hysteria which developed among artists/thinkers as they thought about this and what manner of thought processes might be needed in order to prevent another war of this sort. Remember, there weren't many of these people left . . . most of them were men, after all.
The Dadaists went after the various systems of thought, ways of life, political organization, and so on, that seemed at the root of this carnage. They went after language for instance. To do this, they used poetry, theater. They went after the traditional ideas about Art--with a capital "a". Most of the men continued in their day to day lives to wear attractive black suits in small sizes.
We will continue in our lay discussion of Dada, however, we want now to jump straight to Quin and his Dadahootenanny to be. It's working process may be perhaps best described by a quote from Jean Cocteau regarding a theatrical work, in his preface to Les maries de la Tour Eiffel . . .
Cocteau writes:
"A theatrical piece ought to be written, presented, costumed, furnished with musical accompaniment, played and danced, by a single individual. This universal athlete does not exist. It is therefore important to replace the individual by what resembles an individual most: a friendly group."
In our experience it is much easier for Quin as individual to write, present, furnish musical accompaniment, play and dance everything in a performance, than to find a "friendly group" to perform these functions. And so we expect that Cocteau's description will form the basis of his performance.
Their theater pieces were what we would call performance art today, only along more specific guidelines. The dadists, like almost anyone who thought much, could write, and could afford to publish in some way, published many manifestos. This was the fashion of the times--the manifesto. The Communist Manifesto did not get written in a vaccum. People were manifestoing constantly in those days.
7:14:01 PM 
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