Saturday, August 18, 2007

Dionne Warwick and Philip K. Dick, Together Again for the First Time



NYT reports on the alluring conceptual mail art work recently launched by artist Sean Dack at the Daniel Reich Gallery: mailings of sheet music from vintage soft pop tunes, with the Nostradamus-like predictive 1981 utterances of Phil Dick substituted for the original lyrics. "Future Songs" does not title the individual pieces, meaning you have to read the sheet music (or, better yet, sing the songs out loud) to figure out that, say, the following is set to Burt Bachrach's "That's What Friends Are For" (performed by Dionne Warwick in 1986 with Elton John, Gladys Knight, and Stevie Wonder):

"...such satellites will uncover vast unsuspected high energy phenomena in the universe indicating that there is sufficient mass to collapse the universe back when it has reached its expansion limit..."


Or the following to the Police's "Every Breath You Take":

"The Soviet Union will develop an operational particle beam accelerator, making missile attack, against that, the USSR will, develop this weapon, as a satellite killer, the United States will turn, then, to nerve gas."



Res ipsa loquitur.

Bland Lemon Denton, you now have the playlist for your next Saturday night con performance.

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