February 2022

Card 7. Les Paul, more Jesus.

Owen Land ‘I Grog and its alternatives’ (2003) card 7 Les Paul, more Jesus

Looking around the web, it seems that this joke is thinly recognised amongst some acoustic guitar teachers. A poster of it can be purchased from Etsy, here, alongside rainbow unicorns and Christian fan art:

https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/771509717/more-jesus-les-paul-instant-download

Acoustic guitar fans know this joke, as the Gibson Les Paul electric guitar was seen as gold standard of guitars, and 1970s christian sing-ins seem to be documented with acoustic guitars.

The “Father of Christian Rock,” Larry Norman, performing at the Hollywood Paladium ca. 1970. Courtesy of Archives, Hubbard Library, Fuller Theological Seminary.

[P. Adams Sitney, writing for Artforum, described Land’s search for the detritus of commercial culture: ‘the more banal, the more spiritually immanent.’]

But the design of this joke is such that it can be viewed also from the other side (or mutually inclusive other), a theological perspective. I went to Foyles bookshop to look at the theological section, and the Pauline Epistles do dominate! Some of the letters of Paul are debatably not written by Paul, there is a diffusion of naming again, like Owen.

Amongst the recent books on Paul, this anthology stands out as worth the read:

Bodies on the Verge: Queering Pauline Epistles

Edited by Joseph A. Marchal

‘Saint Friday Angel’ Mark Aerial Waller (2022) oil pastel on paper, 21cm x 29cm

Here is a sample from the chapter, ‘Dionysus, Disidentifications, and Wandering Pauline Epiphanies’ by Timothy Luckritz Marquis, following Muñoz’ writing on Disidentification, of the performance and film work of Jack Smith, “whose mission was to “destabilize the world of ‘pasty normals’ and help us imagine another time and place.”(Muñoz, 1999)

This essay follows, with [José Esteban] Muñoz and some other writers as traveling partners, a disidentificatory Bacchic scene less obvious than [Jack] Smith’s—that is, 2 Corinthians, viewing Paul’s writing as a style of performance that makes room for new ways of being. In so following Dionysus, Paul, Smith, and Muñoz, I contend that future study of Paul’s letters and communities should pay more attention to productive moments of misrecognition in Pauline interpretation—from his first communities’ reception of his message and mission to our own attempts to map his rhetoric—since such moments are, in most new social movements, the ones that join to build a previously unseen community. (Marquis)

Avantgarde filmmaker Michael Snow writes about the cinema experience of watching a Jack Smith movie in The Collected Writings of Michael Snow, by Michael Snow, Louise Dompierre:

I’m not sure if he is swearing about the noise, or if the audience were all having noisy sex, except for Snow, who was not grooving, but this does highlight a relationship between the screen and what is beyond it. A present tense experience was rubbing up against the timeless, out of time, film.

So, I am ‘more Paul’, but at least the saint brings us back to experimental cinema, via Muñoz. Thinking about Disidentification, there is an important place for Owen Land’s work, to carve out a space for the psychologically queer, where his transformation of the world, a world born though the performance of his characters as a ritual, allows for what Muñoz writes as ‘rich alternative treasure troves of queer possibility’. Here not sexually queer, but definitely giving a voice to crazy, in a way that Dali was less able to identify with:

By Mark Aerial Waller, ago

I Grog and its alternatives (Owen Land, 2003)

Coming to terms with the serotonin drop when you post a selfie or a joke that doesn’t hit the way you want it to.

The first six cards of ‘I Grog and its alternatives’ are concerned with names and naming. Owen Land’s name changes are the first obstacle to an engagement with his films. It seems somehow a joke, an incongruity, something less than authentic, but in these first sentences, he is standing up for the changed name, perhaps as a punk used to have a moniker – Polystyrene, Sensible, Lux, Poison Ivy, to deconstruct the family history of The Law, but maybe it is something a little more subtle. The first six jokes set up the way to meet ‘Owen Land’ away from ‘George Landow’

These jokes are set in the 18th century colonisation of America, its religion, social elite and slave trade, the history of names for things, groups of people, disease and wildlife. He questions the fatalistic emergence of etymology. What if sailors drank pee rather than grog, elite society men attended cocktail parties wearing foreskins rather than tuxedos and the guppy fish were a crab or bear?  How might we live today?

Following this are two religious’ jokes at the expense of Christian sects that fled Europe to America in the 18th Century, with a Yiddish slant, Landow himself of conservative Jewish upbringing. He became a Christian convert with interests in Gnosticism, Messianic Judaism, Christian Fundamentalism, Scientology, Hinduism, Buddhism and finally as P.Adams Sitney (2011) wrote “his own fusion of Christianity and Tantra.”

THE FIRST SIX JOKES

1 Grog got its name because the admiral who first served it to sailors wore a grogram coat. What if he had worn a pea coat?

2 The guppy got its name from R.J.L. Guppy, who introduced it to England from the West Indies. What if his name had been Byrd, Crabb, Bear, Lyons or Katz?

3 The tuxedo got its name from the town where it was popularized, Tuxedo Park, NY. What if it had been popularized in Fawnskin, CA?

4 [?] Mennonites got their name from the first name of their founder, Menno Simons. What if his name had been Paris Simons?

5. The Amish got their name from the surname of their leader, Jacob Ammann. What if his name had been Jacob Nebel?

6. Lime disease was named after the town of Lime, CT, where it was discovered. What if it had been discovered in Tombstone, AZ?

Owen Land “Grog and its alternatives” card 1 (2003)

Card 1. We are “pissed as a newt”, when inebriated and go out for a night “on the piss” in the UK and in Australia, but are angry, or “pissed at someone”, in USA English.

Admiral Edward Vernon had the idea to water down the rum rations for his sailors in 1740 during manoeuvres in the West Indies, it seems to reduce the severity of yellow fever casualties amongst his men, which made them pissed. They called the drink ‘grog’ after the clothes Vernon wore. He was known to parade on deck in his Grogram coat. Grogram was a corded fabric with prominent transverse ribs, this kind of material lent itself to the peculiar lustre of ‘moire’ patterning when pressed.  

Moire pattern on Grogran silk

A year before, in 1739, Vernon and his fully-proofed crew captured Porto Bello, Panama from Spanish colonial possession. This is a curious link, as Land became obsessed with palindromes, citing:

A man, a plan, a canal, Panama

Card 2. R. J. L. Guppy was a naturalist, married to the daughter of a plantation and slave-owner on Trinidad, to descendants of French aristocrats who fled the French Revolution guillotine. He discovered the guppy fish in Trinidad and introduced it to the UK. This fish is used as a modal organism for experiments in fish genetics because of its short lifecycle and ease of breeding, producing two generations per year. They are used in experiments of genetic drift over many generations and the effects of in breeding, also in behavioural studies, sexual selection and evolution. The history of this fish sounds terrible, a reminder of the horrors of colonialism.

Owen Land “Grog and its alternatives” card 2 (2003)

Land’s first alternative is ‘Byrd’. The Byrds were folk rockers, but William Byrd (16th Century) was an English Renaissance composer who moved from Anglican to Roman Catholic religion.

Alman” (W. Byrd) from the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, Performed by Ulrich Metzner on a harpsichord of the type used in the early 20th century

My favourite alternative here is ‘Crabb’. Lionel ‘Buster’ Crabb was an alcoholic navy frogman who vanished during a reconnaissance mission for the MI6 in 1956. He was inspecting the screw of a soviet cruiser berthed at Portsmouth. A body was found decapitated and handless 14 months later, but no proof was ascertained. The story and surrounding conspiracy made news headlines for years. ‘Buster’ Crabb was the eponym of the American two-time Olympic swimmer and screen actor, Buster Crabbe, playing ‘Tarzan’, ‘Flash Gordon’ and ‘Buck Rogers’.

Mark Aerial Waller, Buster Crabbe Crabb, aquerelle and oil pastel, (2022)

To be continued…

P.Adams Sitney (2011) Passages: Owen Land. Art Forum [Nov 2011]. Online at:

https://www.artforum.com/print/201109/owen-land-29195 [last accessed 2/2/2022]

By Mark Aerial Waller, ago