Essay #47 for Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar


	The Essay
Show #47 At the Algonquin Hotel
	David Gunn

Not long ago, Loretta Lynn had Gary Kasparov down three games to one in a chess tournament held at the Algonquin Hotel in which texts from Erich Von Daniken's "Gods From Outer Space" were substituted for bishops, rooks and knights. Kasparov thought the precision of the game was a little squirrely -- especially when Loretta's king, named Mongo, declared forty face card fandango, a questionable ploy from another game, and magically resuscitated all of her fallen pawns, simultaneously transforming them into klobners, little squirrel-shaped pieces with tentacles, which attached themselves to their opponents and then casually blew up. Nevertheless, he thought he still had a reasonable chance to win, owing to his knowledge of Lynn's subvocalization practices. Towards the end of game 4, when he was reduced to a king and a pawn and things looked a tad bleak, Gary began to quietly hum the melody line to "And Now I'm a Honky-Tonk Girl." Within seconds, the harmony parts started to ooze uncontrollably from Loretta's pores. She began to shiver, became quickly dehydrated, and soon lost consciousness. Immediately, Kasparov substituted his predefeated chess pieces for Loretta's, savagely attacked her pawn, and declared checkmate. No countermove was forthcoming from Loretta's limp and quivering carcass in the allotted two minute timeframe, and Gary was proclaimed winner. An onlooker, Ishikawa Takuboku of Belgium, sputtered his disapproval of the whole befuddling sequence of events in the form of a clever tanka, for which he was famous, then perished on the spot. The moral is ... well, I don't know that there is a moral, bon radio.

Closing in on a year's service to the not-yet-paid-for radiophonic community and its attendant mercantile-free philosophy, it's episode 47 of Kalvos & Damian's New Music Sesquihour. Today we celebrate a day early the 84th anniversary of the big boat Titanic's successful transformation into a submarine. For your listening pleasure, here is an actual recording of that transformation. (ocean) In fact, that recording was made shortly after the transformation.

This week we also want to acknowledge music that arose from famous armed fisticuffs in history, namely the Fourth Crusade's sacking of Constantinople, which accidentally set fire to the Black Sea in 1204, and the so-called Amritsar Massacre of 1919, which resulted in a major motion picture of the enshrinement of the Jallianwallah Bagh. There, that's done. And here's that Titanic recording one more time.

This portion of Kalvos & Damian's New Music Sesquihour is the only portion of today's show which will mention le flambeau oriange. Any rebroadcast or retransmission of this announcement without express written permission is strictly.

The theme of today's show, even without our special guest composer, the name of whom escapes me, is perfectly clear when you take the first letters of the names of today's birthday persons -- Thomas Jefferson, Felicien David, William Sterndale Bennett, James Ensor, Demian Bedny, Sam Beckett, Harold Stassen, Euroda Welty, and Gary Kasparov -- place them in a bucket and stomp on them. And this is what you get: (ocean)