The Talk of Creatures

Pathway Three: Show-off's a Goin' Dress reveals that one of the Residents is most certainly a woman. The evidence is removed from the 1978 Not Available, not only because it compromises the essential obscurity but because Part Three: Ship's A'Going Down made a far greater, far more subtle, point in 1978.

Catbird⁵:
Why not live?

The catbird shrilled!

And give a hall a cheat!
For soon the motorboat will skin-diver a twist and I'll be libertarian to deb.

Well, students have libertarian on longer travesties before.

The conversation goes back and forward, ostensibly, between a black man and a white woman. The historical context being the fallout from the 1960's Civil Rights Movement. The same themes arise in Mister Wonderful from Demons Dance Alone particularly when performed live. In retrospect, this conversation highlights how the Residents repeatedly return to ideas that are central to their Work. While Not Available had a Blueprint which would allow the construction of a musical work under the constraints of The Theory Of Obscurity the consequences of realising that work resonate down through subsequent pieces. Not Available is not simply a disposable piece of pop culture that can be consumed. Not Available becomes a cultural durable.

The Residents are well known for consuming popular culture. Third Reich 'n' Roll highlights how adept they are at taking the recommendations of Dick Clarke and turning them into something disturbingly different. Not Available highlights how that same consumption of popular culture can be far from trivial. Three: Show-off's a Goin' Dress highlights the impacts of the strange politics of 1974. Rather than being something that the Residents could forget, the collapse of the Nixon era was something they, like others, might want to forget.

Yes,
shibboleth and shout, and century,
a stable, to be a mockery!
Exist inside a lido duodenum
and century no wrongdoing to be.

If after all this oleo a splashdown of eating exists,
We'll set atom a common title
'twixt fume and who he's kissed.

In August 1974, the use of pseudonyms and doubtful or obscured identities was of concern to the Media. The Symbionese Liberation Army had, according to some accounts, kidnapped Patty Hearst  (b 1954) and according to others seduced her into membership. Whichever is the case, the consequence in the media was that hidden identities were open to scrutiny. The paranoid style of Nixonian Politics - where conversations were recorded and crudely edited  - led to the collapse of the Republican Administration. The Catbird - Upstart Remus conversations could be taken as veiled references to imagined Patty Hearst and William DeFreeze conversations. However it is much more likely - given the role of the Enigmatic Follow-through" that the whole section is a riotous critique of Nixon.

Since the Residents were, in the 1970's, committed to variable speed tape machines and physical tape editing to achieve much of their sound, they could hardly have missed the crass stupidity of Nixon in erasing tapes after secretly recording conversations shibboleth and shout sums up the whole fiasco of the Nixon tapes: the words that could not be spoken were erased and everything else roared derision thus leading to everything to be a mockery!. Had Nixon hired a decent tape editor, he might have finished that tricky second Administration.
.

Enigmatic Follow-through⁶:
He throw-in
the entree was overdue,
but daybroke him instead,
And consequently what he read
was never what he said.

And dowse't you never,

Which outlines, briefly, the problem Nixon had with his tapes: they had gaps. The whole transcript of the Nixon Tapes are known to be unreliable. Not through failure to transcribe but through the nature of surveillance taping. Which introduces the role of the Residents' self built studio. Already in use for the recording of Vileness Flats, the recording of Not Available might well have been, in 1974, the out takes of Vileness Flats: conversations and anecdotes reimagined, through the lense of the Motorik rhythm and then redesigned to be a complex rhythmic and tonal work. The kind of cover up that Richard Milhouse Nixon (1913-1994) could only have dreamed about.

The idea that daybroke him instead, and consequently what he read was never what he said is a perfect summary of the entire process of Phonetic Organisation as practiced unde the Theory Of Obscurity. The Enigmatic Follow-through is not only describing some arcane story but also the entire environment in which the story is being created.

Said the ever Enigmatic Follow-through

Lose your coroner,
or after screening,
They'll find me horse
woman in bender.

The Enigmatic Follow-through clearly refers to Vileness Flats the invented world hidden in 20 Sycamore Street. The intention to screen the film, but technology and ennui railroaded the Residents into other things. The 1974 Not Available clearly refers to Women and their role in the day to day happenings of Sycamore Street. The Enigmatic Follow-through reveals diminishing amounts of information and eventually makes all notions of individuals fold in on themselves. Leaving distinctly mythopoetic names - such as Catbird - that distance the performers from their own selves.

What hoover you raven,
you fate a taking and a mating motor;
Confuse to lose
and quake to brittle
are simple saddlers to you.
Why send a curly heave to bender
and know her sensibilities too?

The piling up of names and meanings onto the top of each other results in some curious language. Yet, with effort, it is possible to see the clear references to Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) in phrases such as "mating motor". Which alludes, obliquely to the alchemical possibilities embodied in a lot of the Residents output. Duchamp regularly masqueraded as rRose Selavy whose eponymous pun announces exactly what she is. The constant reference to people - for example President Hoover (1874-1964) - and literature - for example the poem "The Raven" by Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849) builds up too much for any one person to remember. The effect is, even if nobody realised it, of a ship where the deckchairs are being rapidly, and repeatedly, rearranged.

Goner it dress you dripping coda,
and be not busy, too;
If a needy,
if a seedy
lets him come on through.
Knapsacks are not thrust open squibs, and neither is a broken string!

There are cockpit that heartbreak't been worn,
Forfeits that heartbreak't been shorn,

There's centuries that heartbreak't been given a proffer.
Need I say more?

The Enigmatic Follow-through lives up to their name by performing a form of aural collage that provides hypnotic sound sculptures. Much like the Fluxus Indians headdress being similar to an eyeball, the sound sculpture becomes similar to a conversation. Which not only gives a narrative that appears to push the Pathway Three: Show-off's a Goin' Dress narrative towards some kind of conclusion. The truth is that, like the Fluxus Indian headdress, the narrative is principally an artefact of the Listener seekingto make sense of the sounds. It is the mondegreeen technique finally bearing fruit and obliging the Listener to suppose that they remember something that has, quite patently, never been told to them. Which is causally dismissed by Upstart Remus, yet the Enigmatic Follow-through makes an observation that does not seem to vanish: "There's centuries that heartbreak't been given a proffer" even in the 1978 Not Available record. Which leaves the Upstart Remus with almost nothing useful to say except to introduce the finale.

The sot spoken electroplate was a close flatmate
With the warped open crematoriums so many.

Simply connects the conversation to the tragic outcome of the entire Pathway Three the Show-off - who is never really identified, except by being a she - getting dressed. The possibility that the whole preceding section has been a covert, salacious tale is rapidly dismissed in by the arrival of Pathway Four and the arrive of the Never Known Rabble-rousers but made all the more intriguing by the transmutation from The show-off she's a goin' dress to The ship's going down. Given the references to the Speedwell and the Calumet, there is an untold and quite outrageously rude anecdote being forgotten in the cause of the techniques of Obscurity. Sadly for anybody, the actual anecdote is obliged to be lost in order to preserve the artistic integrity of Not Available

All⁷:
The quick bribe drained the main
And the show-offs a goin' dress
me mediators,
The show-off she's a goin' dress.
The show-off' she's a goin' dress.

Which brings everything to the dramatic climax. Again the effects of the 15/11 ratio are heard in the jazz age saxaphone which is almost a solo leading into Pathway Four and a more complex series of layers of musical bricks. In the transition from the 1974 vinyl to the 1978 was less abrupt than the transition to Compact Disc technology. While Senada might well have appreciated that technological transitions influence music profoundly - having witnessed the development of 33 and 45 recording technologies with their various possibilities - there is little scope for being able to predict the precise detail of innovation. In acknowledgement of this, the Never Known Rabble-rousers simply wraps a story up, while continuing the systematic derangement of the senses recommended by Rimbaud (1854-1891) in his savage experiment.