Essay #61 for Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar


	The Essay
Show #61 Apollo 'n Eddy
	David Gunn

Bon radio. Seventeen years ago today, the prototype space bus, Apollo 11, allegedly en route to the moon, abruptly appeared in the skies over Hollywood and splashed clumsily down on a closed set at Universal Studios which was, serendipitously enough, beginning to film "Embittered Aliens on the Moon." The motion picture cameras rolled into action as space explorers Shedaker and Clembeake, now played by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in sudden cameo roles, clambered out of their dented spacecraft to deliver unrehearsed but pithy pronouncements in static-vision, drive Fiat-designed astromobile concept cars, and hop about in the special effects low gravity chamber, generally convincing everyone following the events through the tightly-controlled news media that they really had landed at a bare-bones resort on the moon! Today, of course, thanks to diligent research done at a famous midwestern university, we know conclusively that there actually is no moon -- that the illuminated pockmarked sphere we seen in the sky is merely a complex reflection of thousands of luminescently refractive nocturnal beetles of the Amazon rain forest. The whole lunar landing project and attendant moon rock merchandising program were just an elaborate scheme to generate big money for a consortium of foreign -- some might say alien -- mercantile agents, among them Sir Edmund Hillory and Nam June Paik, both of whom share birthal anniversaries on this very day. Coincidence? You be the judge.

We hope you will also judge today's episode of Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar with compassion, considering the alternative type of music we must present. It can, I believe, best be described by putting the following acoustic events into a Mixmaster: the first seven chords of the prelude to the second act of a 1956 opera by a Portuguesian composer named Phil; the duck feather Oedipus presumably swallows in Stravinsky's cantata of the same name, i.e. "Duck 'n Eddy"; a piece of baling wire used to secure Enya's left headlight to the frame of her Karmann Ghia after she sideswiped the monument to Pancho Villa in 1978, moments before she was briefly abducted and then returned by the French; the only note Mother Bickerdyke ever sang on pitch in her brief but historically torrid career as a minimalist 19th century au pair; and finally, the number six, hermetically sealed in an Algonquin Toast bag and left to mature for a year in the Fort Wayne grange.

I said to put these items or events into a Mixmaster, but I didn't say what to do with them next. I leave that part up to you, our listening audient, and also to our Guest Composer-o-the-week, whose name escapes me, but for good reason, and one which will become apparent as the afternoon and program wear on, clinging like adhesive bleach to linoleum trees in that part of the Amazon rain forest known to enthusiasts as le flambeau oriange.

This portion of Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar is brought to you in spite of fiscal difficulties which plague this portion of Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar, but which we are doing our utmost to overcome -- and that is where you, our listening audient, can help. Unlike the powerful, programmatically bashful radio station to the northwest which would have you pledge untoward amounts of cash in trade for "Saturday Afternoon at Another Redundant 19th Century Opera," our request is for a simple phone call. Just ring us at 454 7762, Glipsob, and say hey. That's all. Just a little reassurance that there is, in fact, an audient out there aware of our presence. That alone will help us through these trying times. To be sure, some spare change would, too, but we'll save that for another time ... unless, of course, you're feeling particularly generous today. Whatever. And likewise whenever, which is now, and whoever, which is likewise ... Kalvos.