The Talk of Creatures

The cockscomb continues
and the squirrel diminishes
Without even the
Homeland of a golliwog.

Is glowing a
continuous promontory
Or dormouses the squirrel

Find its wharf out where
It needs to be. Wharf out where
It needs to be.

Squirrel the rot,
oh squirrel the rot,
Oh squirrel the rot we say.

Squirrel the rot
they tell the
Trail while feeding
him some say.

Squirrel the rot,
oh squirrel the
Rot and then
you'll be oratory.
Squirrel the rot,
oh squirrel the rot,
but still you'd birthday pray.

Civility becomes revealed as something more than a traditional Greek, Dramatic, Chorus. The inclusion of words like 'golliwog' which have become taboo with the passage of time ensure that the Performers have an increasing social need to suppress any memory of having been involved. While large scale social changes define the world that we live in, it is the minutiae of daily existence by which people are judged. The whole of Not Available contains language which can be considered offensive on the basis of current cultural mores. Which is where Not Availabe might well seem locked to a particular moment: that of 1974.

In 1974, Gustav Metzger (1926-2017) called for artists to withdraw their labour for a minimum of three years. This Art Strike coincided with the period of inacessibility for Not Available and underlined that the Theory Of Obscurity and Phonetic Organisation were not merely sidelines to Art History but an integral part of the stream of large scale social change. Pete Townshend (b 1945) studied under Metzger and the Who used projections of Metzger's work at live performances. Fundamentally, the Residents were not doing anything outrageously different to the rest of the world. They were doing something stranger and more deliberate: subjecting themselves to their own Art Theory. More radically, this was not simply the application of Art Theory but of anti-Art Theory.

Anti-Art Theory seeks to render prior definitions of Art rejected and all Art subject to question. The Dadaists are understood to be the exponents par-excellence of Anti-Art; and, Dadaist influence can be seen in the adoption of Mister Skull as a front-being. At Hollywood Palace show on December 26, 1985, Mr. Red Eye was stolen. Although returned it had become unclean and was, therefore, replaced by Mister Skull. Which echoes back to the Photograph In Voluptua Mors by Salvador Dali (1904-1989) and Phillipe Halsman (1906-1979). Created in 1951, In Voluptua Mors constructs a skull out of seven female ****. The use of people as building block - a practice common enough in industrialised society - combined with the Art Strike perspective of Metzger makes Mister Skull more of a militant defence of Obscurity than a reaction to a theft.

Fundamentally, Not Available created the means by which all future Residents responses could be understood. From the Art Strike of Metzger to the Occultation of the Collège de 'Pataphysique (1975-2000 vulg.) there was nothing unusual about Obscurity. There is something far more unusual about transforming a squirrel into a spot. Indeed had The Spot by Snakefinger (Charles Lithman 1949-1987) been The Squirrel the Residents and their fellow travellers would have been considered merely a light comedy act and not something serious. However the changes from language that was becoming unacceptable to slightly disorienting oronymic linguistic gymnastics that both revealed and concealed the fundamentally difficult compositional and orchestration problems that would continue from the adoption of Obscurity, Phonetic Organisation and even Microtonality

When Edweena made me natures,
She ate the groin and gully the guitar;

My muddle made me eat boysenberries,
But my gracious sapphires just ate me flashbulb.

Calling cashes and polling watercourses are just to many... See?
Calling cashes and winking baths are just a wharf to see.
Calling cashes and winking baths are just the wharf to be?
Falling gymkhanas and winking baths are just a need today.
Falling gymkhanas and winking baths are just my needs. Oratory? Oratory?

Oratory! Oratory! Oratory! Oratory! Oratory!...
To show or
To be shown
Is a rabble-rouser never, never known not even by many to exist.

The difficulties of microtonality are evident inNot Available. Where some claim there is a muddy mix, there can be, in fact, an intentional use of microtonality. Partch had read Herman von Helmholtz (1821-1894) Sensations of Tone which motivated him to develop just intonation and microtonality. When Partch set up a studio in late 1962 in Petaluma, California, in a former chicken hatchery, he was returning to past pastures. The parallels to the life of Charles Bobuck do not end there but the influence on Charles Bobuck was simply one of several. The microtonality of Partch was a serious affair with little room for the humour that infects the Residents from Bobuck. While Partch could, and in some cases would, score "Oratory!" and "Oratory?" in different ways within the confines of a single piece. Bobuck seems to have considered the possibility that a tone should change over time. That Not Available in 2174 would not be identical to Not Available in 1974 or 1978.

This long term view places Not Available into a different category of work from, say, The Commercial Album where Bobuck exercises precise, controlled skills to produce precise, controlled and tiny works. Not Available is built to be a large, uncontrolled, sprawling work. The appreciation of the total work can only be achieved by those who have become, like Alfred Jarry (1873-1907) a transcendental satrap of 'Pataphysics, inhabiting Ethernity.