(Author's note: Robert found this in his midden and now he wants to print it. It ws written ten years ago as a text-within-a-text, the liner notes a character in a novel wrote to accompany her fictious indie single. The character, Cathy Altschuler, was a 16-year-old religious ecstatic; her writinmon. Its presence in Perforations is as a found object, and not as the opinions of its maker, then or now. R.G)
Liner Notes For the Authorized (third pressing)


"Do the Noveau,"
by Claire Altschuler

Richard Gess



1. The Venusian that George Adamski met was about 5' 6" and had slightly slanted green eyes. It wore a cocoa jumpsuit with no visible seams and oxblood shoes thin enough to reveal the movement of its feet. Indecipherable symbols were imprinted on their soles. The Venusian, pointing to its feet, told Adamski that the preservation and decryption of its shoeprints was enormously important. Luke 10:24: "Many prophets and kings desired to see what you see, and did not see it." Adamski admits he didn't understand the Venutian's actual words. What made him so sure the Venutian wasn t just complaining about its arches? Incomprehension. Obstructivism.

2. " It must always be remembered ( Alexander Campbell, from the January 1846 Millenial Harbinger ) by him who would be a scribe, well instructed in the ways of heaven, that the whole Bible comprehends three distinct dispensations of mercy to the human race. These are the Patriarchal, Jewish, and Christian ages of the world...and under each of these there will be found a different economy of things." Darbyite dispensationalism constituted the inversion of Millerism after the Great Disappoinment of 1844. John Nelson Darby s teaching is essentially correct: the rapture is secret. But it is more secret than Darby imagines; it is individual by individual, in individual private ascents. Instead of one current Dispensation there are infinite unique ones. Theodore Parker told a Millerite in Concord that the end of the world did not concern him, because he lived in Boston. The world will never end; souls will only continue to leave bodies. Lieutenant Comander Zachary Landsdowne, Captain of the Navy airship Shenendoah: "This big airship is in reality a flying laboratory, which by its construction and operation is developing not ony a new element in the national defense, but is testing...allied industries which in time will become of extreme importance in the utilization of air navigation..."

3.There are the 5 Obstructivisms: words, the cultus, transpersonal generalization, chiliasm and incomprehension. All the obstructivisms are failures of understanding. Is there any path through our immense obtuseness? Yes: to not try. The truly ingeneous, invisible, are blessed. The word "cahonka," as in:

DO THE NEW NEW cahonka

DO THE NEW NOUVEAU

neutralizes its context. No scheme of decoding can overcome nonsense. The angels told Joseph del Reina of Safed that the devil was a certain black dog; he caught it and it murdered him.

4. There are Jesuses and Jesuses, history drips them, there a few of them in the aisles around you right now, but only a very few of them will know that they are Jesuses. Jesus Christ knew he was a Jesus but he failed to understand his particular case: here is the Obstructivism of incomprehension, a virulent form of which is hubris. Jesus Christ taught the surrender of the fiction of personal righteousness (Luke 18:14: "I tell you, the publican went down to his house justified rather than the Pharisee: forevery one that exhalteth himself shall be abased...") but at the moment meant for his own abnegation, April 7, on Pilate's airing deck the freshly bathed PRAEFECTUS JUDAEAE introducing the stinking prisoners to the mob -- at this perfect political moment, instead of lowering himself to rule us, Jesus, unable to comprehend, chose grotesque public suicide. Perfect rulers disappear and Jesus Christ could not bear the thought of being forgotten. The Christ who left no footprints (see Acts of John) died in a fury of will and he would not stop at that; he came back for boiled fish and honey and the insurance of his perpetuation. He threw our salvation over for his. The palm branches deafened him. Christ was meant to rebel against us but he got it backwards. Dancing in Gethsemane with the disciples, Jesus chanted: "To the Universe belongs the dancer...He who does not dance does not know what happens." The next day Jesus forgot; God blared music but Jesus Christ stood like a post.

5. Ezra Pound: "170 pages of mathematics are of less value than a little curiosity and a willingness to listen to the sound that actually proceeds from an instrument."

Albert Ayler: "You have to purify and crystallize your sound in order to hypnotize."

Ornette Coleman: "What do you play after you play the melody if you don t have nothing to go with?"

Ezra Pound: "A sound of any pitch, or any combination of such sounds, may be followed by a sound of any other pitch, or any combination of such sounds, providing the time-interval between them is properly gauged..."

These ideas intertranslate in that they all concern silence. Silence contains all sounds as all colors filter from transparency. Music is only a narrow band within silence. The heaven solicited in this record would only be an image of heaven, heaven's shadow; this is an understanding of the lyric headphones whisper lies, but you cannot derive that from the lyric itself, which is only a noise.

6. Ingenuousness in the 45 rpm single is best exemplified in the Phil Spector/Girl Group canons, in the Stax/Volt artists, in Johnnie Ray, Brian Wilson, Phil Phillips and some of the first British Invasion. The breath of other planets evaporated as the music was completely overrun by capitalism, although some of the most perfect singles were produced with the single motive of large profit; making money is the humblest wish possible. This record contains music which was transcribed, not composed, which is why it is being distributed for free, at Claire Altschuler's expense. Only the unauthorized version is offered for sale: DO NOT PAY FOR THIS RECORD.

7. An historical paradigm for genuine ingenuousness is Phillip V of Spain s second expedition to the Spice Islands in 1524. 7 ships left Spain; one went down in the Atlantic, one lost its mainmast and turned back, one broke up off Patagonia, and a few days around the Horn the remaining four were separated in a storm. The SANTIAGO limped up to Mexico. The SANTA MARIA DEL PARRAL went aground in the Philippines. The SANTA MARIA DE LA VICTORIA got to Guam, where she was greeted by a deserter from Magellan. The caravel SAN LESMES just vanished; she was last seen veering west in heavy weather on 1 June 1526. The last physical trace of the SAN LESMES can be seen at Amanu, in the Tuamotus, where four of her cannon were unearthed early this century. The SAN LESMES crew diffused through Polynesia like a dye, their Spanish genes and manners hybridizing the Tuamotus, the Society Islands, Easter Island, and New Zealand. Quietly absorbed wherever they landed, the caravel's crew marked the cultures of their hosts with anomalies: handshaking, shirts, rings, pigs round-bottomed boats, houses with windows, messianism, polygamy, dancing, singing, tuberculosis and chairs. The Polynesians, confronted with beings no less alien to them than the Venutians to Adamski, simply accepted them. The sailors were neither eaten nor deified. The Polynesians were as we should be. In "Do the Nouveau" the E over C# locus was not understood as such until ex post facto analysis of the fingerings; that is most of the ingenuousness here.

8. Claire Altschuler's father once set two fat green apples on a grey-draped table in a limbo set. On the television screen they seemed to float, one with eyebrows and one without, a girl and boy without bodies. Claire's father, by way of breaking up his singing arithmetic program once or twice in the half-hour, used to stage little math chats with these apples. Do you remember those Board-of-Education TV sets in their black cabinets, bathing your heads in blue light in the dark?

9. What begins as it's inventor's prayer of action usually winds up stolen. The most beautiful objects ever made, the U.S. Navy s rigid airships SHENANDOAH, AKRON, and MACON, were constructed as experimental weapons systems, and when their curious trials (the SHENANDOAH mooring to a collier in Naragansett Bay, the MACON catching biplanes with an underslung trapeze) proved inconclusive, the Navy forgot about them. Could there be anything lovlier than the AKRON, 785' long, shining in its coating of powered aluminum, lifting into the first light at the foot of Seiberling Street? Could there be anything lovlier than the SHENANDOAH'S shadow on the ocean, alive with fascinated whales? All of them crashed with many lives lost in misadventures directly traceable to Navy underfunding. They were useless, expensive, and dangerous. Their only value was as gestures, their silver skins winking mirror signals upward.

10. White people, the plague-bringers, stole black people and then stole all the black people had left, their primary language of music, the reductive inadequacy of speech being relegated in some African cultures to light entertainment and the use of the illiterate. Claire Altsschuler won t let this happen to HER music again, but her predicament is less clearly defined. Who could these thieves be? She refuses to generalize transpersonally, so she cannot uncover hearts, so she runs the risk of being robbed again, but being robbed again should free her from fearing robbers, wouldn t you think? Hugo Eckener: "It was not, as generally described, " `a silver bird soaring in majestic flight,' but rather a fabulous silvery fish, floating quietly in the ocean of air and captivating the eye just like a fantastic, exotic fish seen in an aquarium. And this fairy-like apparition, which seemed to melt into the silvery blue background of the sky, when it appeared far away, lighted by the sun, seemed to be coming from another world and to be returning there like a dream."

11. PROGRAMMERS: AIRPLAY SPOT MONITORING INSURES COMPLIANCE WITH THE FOLLOWING AIRPLAY RESTRICTIONS: (1) No talkover, cutoff, or in medias res airplay; (2) No more than one playing in any airshift; (3) Absolutely no airplay in playlists containing the unauthorized version of "Do the Nouveau."

12. As there are Jesuses and Jesuses so there are gospels and gospels. "I am George Adamski," George Adamski wrote, "philosopher, student, teacher, saucer researcher. My home is in Palomar Gardens, on the southern slopes of Mount Palomar, California, eleven miles from the big Hale Observatory, home of the 200-inch telescope--the world s largest. And to correct a widespread error let me say here, I am not and never have been associated with the staff of the observatory. I am friendly with some of the staff members, but I do not work at the observatory." Mr Adamski sat on Mount Palomar and called the Venutians down to him with prayer. "Winter and summer, day and night, through heat and cold, winds, rains, and fog, I have spent every moment possible outdoors watching the skies for space craft and hoping without end that for some reason, some time, one of them would come in close, and even land...I have thought, too, that it would be interesting to take a ride in one of these craft...as a result of these years of constant watching for space craft, I have developed the habit of always looking up--for it is there I see the ships from other worlds. And I couldn t even guess at the number of them I have seen during this time." Adamski's account of his meeting with a being he believed came from Venus can be found on pages 171 through 224 of Flying Saucers Have Landed (New York, British Book Centre, 1953). This is a forgotten gospel; by the time of its appearance we were familiar with the Sub-obstructivisms of gospels. Gospels are shifty: "Nor did I ask [the Venutian] his name. But in a time like this, names and personalities are entirely forgotten...In fact, I didn t even think of this point until someone later asked me about it." Gospels demand unquestioning trust: "In fact, I might add right here that [the Venutian] told me a number of things I must not reveal at this time." Gospels make threats: "If we continue on the path of hostility between nations of Earth, and if we continue to show an attitude of indifference, ridicule and even aggession toward our fellow-men in space, I am firmly convinced they could take powerful action against us...by manipulation of the natural force of the universe which they understand and know how to use." Gospels stir up millenialism: "Now I am hoping that the spaceman will return again..."