Cloudcuckooland

Posted by Michael Curran on October 27th, 2008

I want to riff on birds, riffing as a way of exploring morphic resonance between different kinds of material. Out there in the world, in art, music and literature, birds are ubiquitous. See Max Ernst’s Two Children Are Threatened By A Lark or re-run Hitchcock’s The Birds. Listen to Patti Smith’s Birdland while reading The Raven by Poe. Recall the Four and Twenty Blackbirds Baked in a Pie, Tennessee William’s Sweet Bird of Youth, Jim Morrison’s Bird of Prey, Leda’s Swan, Coleridge’s Albatross and perhaps the saddest bird of all Lewis Carroll’s Dodo. The augurs of ancient Rome would interpret the will of the gods by studying the behaviour of birds, their flight patterns, eating habits and songs. I make no such soothsayer’s claim for my activities, which are more akin to an open play of fanciful pattern matching.

/files/2008/10/private_life_of_gannets.mp4

The Private Life of Gannets, available to download in high quality from the Internet Archive.

The Private Life of Gannets can be located on the Internet Archive – such a veritable storehouse of bird footage that I chose the gannet completely at random. The film was directed by Julian Huxley and shot by John Grierson, the uncompromising Scottish filmmaker and theorist who introduced the word ‘documentary’ to the English language. In the spring of 1937 they began shooting off the Welsh coast on the island of Grassholm (Welsh; Ynys Gwales). Its name, Viking in origin, means ‘green island’ although the rock, pungent with guano and the plumage of the birds, is white in appearance. A camera captures the hatching of a chick; its physical development unfolds in time-lapse photography. New born birds are completely black, and gradually their feathered down shows increasing amounts of white. The use of slow motion reveals the operations of flight. These fowl have far forward eyes with binocular vision allowing them to judge distances with acute accuracy and they are shown diving down into the sea to skewer fish. The term “greedy gannet” arises from their voracious appetite and the species’ arrah arrah cry has made one more recent visitor to the island describe it as an avian discotheque. Today this colony of gannets still rule supreme on a terrain wholly unoccupied by humans. If they could only know this - the gannets might indeed be grateful.

In Aristophanes’ satire - The Birds - the leaders of the bird kingdom are disastrously misled by two humans into defying Zeus by building a city, “Cloudcuckooland” which interrupts the flow of communication between mankind and the gods. The aerial blockade prevents the steam of sacrificial offering rising skywards to the gods.

For the literary ornithologist this play is a delight – amongst its extensive cast are a Hoopoe, Partridge, Mallard, Kingfisher, Sparrow, Owl, Jay, Turtledove, Crested Lark, Reed Warbler, Pigeon, Woodpecker and Vulture – to name but a few.

They describe their creation thus:

It was Chaos and Night at the first, and the blackness of darkness, and hell’s broad border;

Earth was not, nor air, neither heaven; when in depths of the womb of the dark without order

First thing first born of the black-plumed Night was a wind-egg hatched in her bosom,

Whence timely, with season revolving again, sweet Love burst out as a blossom,

Gold wings glittering forth of his back, like whirlwinds gustily turning

He, after his wedlock with Chaos, whose wings are of darkness in hell broad-burning,

For his nestings begat him a race of birds first and upraised us to light new-lighted.

Aristophanes’ 2500 year old comedy, combines natural history, mythology and augury, to explore governance and corruption in the birds quest for primacy over gods and humans. Cloudcuckooland transforms from an egalitarian state into dictatorship. This theatrical entertainment, outwardly light, colourful, absurd and played for laughs has much darker undertones.

In 1920 the German composer Walter Braunfels used the play to devise an Opera, Die Vogel. On August 29th 1920 another bird was born in Kansas City – Charles Parker Jnr. Die Vogel with other works by Braunfels was banned in the 1930s by the Nazis as part of their campaign against Entartete Musik (Degenerate Music). Other than a general hostility to modernist styles this included music made by composers with differing political views and those of Jewish Lineage. It also included a strong censorship of Jazz because of its Afro – Americans proponents. However later in a perverse form of propaganda a Nazi Jazz band was devised and named Charlie and his Jazz Orchestra, recording versions of popular songs with the lyrics altered and radio broadcast to Britain and America. On both sides, music, film, art even birds were appropriated as tools of warfare.

The British were convinced the Nazis were preparing a pigeon invasion from occupied France and Belgium to deliver messages to their spies in Britain. The British trained battalions of falcons in preparation for a Battle of Britain with feathers. It never happened. The files reveal the Nazi pigeon invasion was the product of overheated imaginations.

Christopher Andrew

Looney Toons indeed, Daffy The Commando and Donald Duck in full Nazi regalia in Der Fuerher’s Face! Hawks, doves and eagles remain the cherished symbols of fighting talk.

The War is on!
War unutterable!
War with the gods!
Scan, scan the cloud-filled sky…

Aristophanes

Created before these rumblings, The Private Life of Gannets became one of many films that were to shape the course of scientific research itself, by encouraging an interest in visual communication within the animal world. Species were selected for their photogenic qualities and there was an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the image’s power to educate and inform.

Science and entertainment required that only the most spectacular and private aspects of animal life were recorded.

Gregg Mittman

Grierson was seriously committed to the fabrication of authenticity in the natural history film and more so in documenting the workings of human society, particularly that of the working class. He was a radical filmmaker. However to the contemporary viewer this observing eye can look and sound a little quaint. The soundtrack is crowded with voice-over and the sound of an anodyne orchestra playing sickly parlour music. A very English voice intones with gravity upon “the anchors and chains of wrecked ships” and the commentary, in describing the pale island, makes repeated poetic reference to the whiteness of snow. We never get to hear the sound of the birds or the rush of the sea or an occasional unearthly silence. Try visiting a different island in Antonioni’s L’Aventurra and you will hear the sound of the wind and waves crashing against the jagged perimeter of rock. You will encounter another form of seeking and looking in which the psychology and sense of place has the exactitude of an almost scientific eye. Yet the two very different films both articulate a terrible sense of remoteness and awe.

It is too easy to overlook Private Lives. The cinematography reveals a passion for expanding the language and content of the medium, within the often limiting conventions of public information films of this time. The aim? To show life and nature as it is. It is a film that wants to fly and what better subject than birds that can, not flightless things like ostriches, penguins, kiwis and chickens.

During the First Punic War, Publius Claudius, a headstrong man, consulted the sacred chickens which were not eating, which was a bad omen, he replied, “Let them drink!” and ordered them to be thrown into the sea. Shortly after that he lost his fleet of the Aegeate islands. This was a great disaster for our Republic and indeed for Claudius himself

Neptonius

In adulthood Charlie Parker Jnr became Bird. While out on the Road with the McShann Band, in the wilds of Nebraska, the car hit a chicken that had run onto the highway from a nearby farmyard. Parker suggested going back to pick up the “Yardbird” and thus his nickname came into being. Was this an augury of sorts?

Bird ate that chicken but why did it cross that road?

Plato: For the greater good.

Aristotle: To fulfill its nature on the other side.

Karl Marx: It was an historical inevitability.

Thoreau: To live deliberately … and suck all the marrow out of life.

Mark Twain: The news of its crossing has been greatly exaggerated.

Emily Dickinson: Because it could not stop for death.

Bird would not stop for anything. He wanted to play a music that “they can’t steal from us“, “they” being the white musicians who copied earlier forms of jazz and received most of its financial rewards.

His playing had such dexterity, such fluidity. In his playing, if you take his nickname Bird and you picture a bird flying through the air – in flight – he’s totally free. Even though the music is structured, his style of playing is so totally free, that he can just fly – go in any direction he so desires.

Milt Jackson

On April 30th 1941 Alto saxophonist Parker made his first commercial recording “Swingmatism” with Jay McShann’s band in Dallas. Also in 1941 an elephant flew, albeit a cartoon elephant. Dumbo’s aerial feat was immortalised in the song – When I See An Elephant Fly. The song was sung by a crew of jive-talking Crows – (voiced as blacks performers). This was not unusual at the time, amongst other crude stereotypes in the world of animation, such as monkeys or cannibals, Afro- Americans were often depicted as black birds, Disney’s unwitting racial divination.

cra, cré, cro, crou, crouou.
grass, gress, gross, grouss, grououss.
craé, créé, croa, croua, grouass.
crao, créé, croé, croue, grouess.
craou, créo, croo, crouo, grouoss.

A transcription of crow-calls made in 1806 by Dupont de Nemours

In 1945 after an unsuccessful engagement ended with Dizzie Gillespie, all the musicians returned to New York except for Bird, who cashed in his airplane ticket and stayed in California. Stranded there with a serious heroin addiction, his need for cash led him to Dial Records where he recorded “Moose The Mooch,” “Yardbird Suite,” “Night In Tunisia” and “Ornithology.”

“Ornithology” is a ‘contrafact’ – a newly written melody over the chord progression of another song –”How High The Moon” Again notions of flight, of becoming airborne, are never far from reach. Contrafact gives birth to improvisation.

arrah arrah
bebop bebop
be-babbe-debop
boo bam boo
hoopoe hoopoe
baba-baba-BA!

The regal instrument sounds out timelessly.

King Solomon then called in the animals, birds and creeping things, one by one, to parade before the king and his onlookers, without any man leading them, and without any of them being bound by fetters or restraints. While this was taking place, King Solomon noticed that the Hoopoe bird was absent among the birds, and commanded his servants to bring unto him the bird, even if it meant chaining him. When he was eventually brought before the king, the king enquired where he had been.

The Hoopoe bird tells King Solomon of a land he has discovered in the east whose capital is called Qitor and whose ruler is the Queen of Sheba.

Lo! I found a woman ruling over them and she has been given abundance of everything; she has been given the knowledge of all things in her country, and has a mighty throne adorned with gems, pearls, gold and silver.

The bird is sent by Solomon to request the queen’s immediate attendance at Solomon’s court. The Hoopoe is a spy, messenger, envoy and diplomat but being a mercenary he too likes to fly in any direction he so desires. He hovers through Time with a pearl in his beak, flying across centuries towards the 1950s streets of New York, to 1678 Broadway, to Birdland. He swoops right inside the club and nests that pearl in the interior of an alto sax.

Down them stairs, lose them cares - where?
Down in Birdland.
Total swing, bop was king - there
Down in Birdland.
Bird would cook, Max would look - where?
Down in Birdland.
Miles came through, Trane came too - there
Down in Birdland.
Basie blew, Blakey too - where?
Down in Birdland.
Cannonball played that hall - there
Down in Birdland

Saturday morning, an empty sky.

His death, too and his deification after death were known in advance by unmistakable signs. As he was bringing the lustrum to an end, before a great throng of people, an eagle flew several times about him then across to the temple hard by, perched above the first letter of Agrippa’s name

Suetonius

On March 12th 1955 Bird took flight from a room in the Stanhope Hotel. An ornithic host gathered in the branches of a Sawtooth Oak in Central Park and sang sweet and plaintive laments. Only the Hoopoe remained aloof from the congregation – perched alone in the recesses of a Black Willow, completely mute. He was preparing to change places, tempos, time zones; ready to fly back to King Solomon, or perhaps further forward to who knows where.

Walls in Greenwich Village were covered in the graffito: BIRD LIVES.

Never again
Through my domain
Shall a god presume to stray;
The birds are on guard,
The gates are barred,
Not one shall pass this way!

Never again
Through my domain
Shall the smoke from altars rise;
In vain they’ll sniff:
For the faintest whiff:
We’ve cut off their supplies

Aristophanes

Back at the end of the day, the film crew at Grassholm are packing up their kit and waiting nervously on the rocks for the boat to the mainland, oblivious to the Gannets continuing to dive into the ocean for fish. The film must go to the lab in Soho as soon as possible. They rub their sides and stamp their feet against the chill air – never for a moment considering the possibility of taking the auspices.

In 357 AD the emperor Constantius outlawed all methods of divination including Augury.

The art may have gone the way of the dodo, yet when watching Huxley & Grierson’s film or foraging through the links below, you may discover your own propensity towards divination. If you don’t believe me – you are almost certainly in Cloudcuckooland.

The Private Life of Gannets
Directed by: Julian Huxley
Produced by: Alexander Korda
Written by: Ronald Lockley
Starring: A. L. Alexander
Cinematography: John Grierson, Osmond Borradaile
Release date: July, 1937
Running time: 10 minutes

View the full film or download a high-quality version on the Internet Archive

To visit the island of Grassholm call:
A Thousand Expeditions +44 (0)1437 721 721

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