gah!

Occasionally, I worry excessively about other people's taste - or lack thereof. For example, this image -



- which the young man depicted (whom I do not know) felt was a good promotion for his voice recital at the UWM School of Music. (In other words, this is a publicly available image, which I photographed.) He is very, and deeply, wrong about this.

Here are some reasons why:

* The faux-Boreanaz hairdo: I suspect he thinks he looks like him.

* The shadows that render his nose aggressively beaky.

* His posture, with what he probably imagines is a rakish angle but which only makes him look incapable of holding his head straight.

* The washing-out of the right side of the image, as if he's just emerged from some sort of spooky primordial murk. Note also that, like Lord Voldemort, certain body parts (in this case, his left ear) appear creepily underdeveloped and waxen in their pallor.

* The weird thing with his hands. I am guessing that autocannibalism is rather uncommon, but he really looks as if he thinks his right index finger is terribly tasty indeed.

* His facial expression, which says, "Someday, when the cops finally rip the floorboards up from the secret crawlspace beneath my attic, even the most hardened veteran will retch uncontrollably."

I am sorry, Mr. Singer Guy, but the thought of attending your recital fills me with icky dread. Thank god it's this weekend, so these posters - unavoidable in the environs of the music building, next door to where I work - will mercifully disappear.

At least until the next mysterious disappearance of a ten-year-old boy last seen en route to his "voice lessons" with this guy.

the pompitous of what now?

It's the early '70s, payola is (supposedly) illegal, and you want to get a song on the radio. What do you do? Well, the subtler method is to write a song about how cool it is to be listening to the radio...less subtly, you can write a song drooling all over an influential DJ - and, if you're even less subtle, hire the DJ himself to babble over your tribute to him. Do you think he'll play the record? Check the record, check the guy's track record: the Guess Who song reached #6; Rundgren, being the perverse fella that he is, didn't bother releasing his song as a single.

The Guess Who "Clap for the Wolfman"
Todd Rundgren "Wolfman Jack"

ps: The whole "pompitous/pompatus" thing is rather amusing - I'll let you google away to your heart's content - but here's an odd little page that suggests that "pompatus" is an actual word...pertaining in some way to spiders. Curious and curioser...especially since this is the only page on the web wherein "pompatus oningis" is mentioned. Oops.

pottering about (note to self: no more puns on subjects' names)

My reaction to the Harry Potter movie accords pretty well with glenn mcdonald's. The opening was worrisome - even though real-life mega-events are equally tacky, that's no reason to subject us to gigantic magical exploding faux-Irishmen in the movies. The movie was dead-on in its exploration of adolescence...which made it all the more irritating when it asked us to utterly overlook the moral culpability of Hogwarts in subjecting not only willing participants, but also non-consenting friends and relations, to risks apparently foreseen in their severity if not specificity. And I might have been able to put that at the back of my mind...had the movie not rubbed my nose in it, by asking me to bleed in sympathy with Cedric Diggory's father: as if Fleur Delacour's family wouldn't have been every bit as distraught had her sister died, and as if the school wouldn't have been every bit as culpable for that death as the League of Pointy-Hatted Men was for Diggory's. This, of course, is Rowling's fault, not the filmmakers' - but it somehow had more impact on the screen for me than it did on the page, and failing to make anything of the issue was their decision as well.

Curried favors

Although I'd heard of him and heard and been intrigued by one or two tracks previously, it's primarily through the offices of my friend Miles that I've gradually become more familiar with the works of Nick Currie, b/k/a Momus. At first, I was a bit put off: the sleaze seemed gratuitous, and the music seemed to be inanely dancey or made up entirely of noises sampled from videogames. (Both descriptions are probably literally and intentionally true, for some songs...) His ideas seemed far more intriguing than his music...and "intriguing" (along with "interesting") is a graveyard of an adjective, the word one falls back upon when one is flummoxed in the face of something that can't be dismissed but doesn't seem readily enjoyed or understood. (His websites - one primarily concerning his music, the other increasingly serving as a workspace for his unlikely and increasingly prominent status as roving public intellectual - are indeed probably more interesting to most people than his music is.)

That said, slowly, over time, I've found his music more and more enjoyable (conveniently, now that his long out-of-print Creation recordings are likely to become available again, as Momus' own label has purchased the rights to them) and am slowly making headway into his rather dense catalog. The difficulties - readily apparent if you read more than a few pages of his writing - are that his interests are tremendously broad and, as a "non-popular" artist who is now more or less independent of the demands of labels, he feels free to indulge those interests - often all on the same album. On his most recent release, Otto Spooky, you can find everything from quasi-Baroque countertenor madrigals to faux-pagan folk to urban Euro-Arab dance numbers - not to mention all kinds of unclassifiable experiments. I'm not sure what you'd call "Lute Score" - but there probably isn't a pre-existing musical schema to accommodate lyrics that (insofar as they're about anything) concern themselves with a videogame whose interconnected goals are writing a tune for lutes and blowing the heads off of animated pandas. Logically, though, Momus' solution is to combine vaguely Eastern scales with a rhythm derived from children's songs. Of course.

Going back a bit further in his career, to his 1995 release The Philosophy of Momus, we find not only a song of that title but possibly my favorite song of his (judging by number of mixes it's ended up on: tied with "Jesus in Furs," his topical rejoinder to Mel Gibson's S&M paean to blood-n-guts Christianity), "The Cabinet of Kuniyoshi Kaneko," which also would appear to outline a Momus philosophy. Here we have a rhythm that seems derived from the clubs underlying an unsettled, almost jazz-like harmonic sequence, held together by a solid and straightforward melody.

Ten years earlier, we find "Little Lord Obedience" in an almost Nick Drake-like mode, musically - although I can't imagine Drake writing these densely allusive lyrics. If that all seems too pretentious to you, you might prefer one of the two (!) tracks that ended up being removed from Momus albums due to litigation, "Michelin Man" (the other is "Walter Carlos," from The Little Red Songbook's original release). Originally on the cringe-inducingly titled Hippopotamomus, the song incurred the wrath of the tire company, and the song was disappeared. Not entirely, though: when Aaron sent me a copy of his 2004 bests, it included "Blowin' Me Up with Her Love" by JC Chasez...and between the main metaphor and some sonic treatments, I'm pretty sure the track's producers had heard the Momus song. So that's how Momus (sort of) made the hit parade.

Momus "Lute Score"
Momus "The Cabinet of Kuniyoshi Kaneko"
Momus "Little Lord Obedience"
Momus "Michelin Man"
Momus "Walter Carlos"
JC Chasez "Blowin' Me Up with Her Love"

why I am not a cartoonist

Inspired by a misheard Genesis lyric...

maps and legends

I recently discovered an amusing coincidence: the first street I can remember having lived on (N. 105th St. in Wauwatosa, where I lived from about one year up to about five years old) once shared my surname: at one point it was called "Norman Ct." I'm not sure when the name changed, although was able to find a street map from 1930 at the UWM library's website that lists that street name.

For no particular reason, a list of street names I've lived on, in reverse chronological order:

Bradley
Humboldt
Murray
Geneva
Broom
Sherman
Johnson
Jenifer
Langdon
Frances
Washington Heights
Mary Ellen
87th
105th
North
Arlington Heights

Take this, brother: may it serve you well

I assume everyone reading this has a copy of the Beatles' "white album" on hand. (You cannot possibly hope to understand popular music without a complete Beatles catalog. End of story.) Anyway, if you're like 95% of the population, when you get near the end of the second disc, and you hear someone muttering to George Martin about claret, you probably lunge for your remote and hit "skip track," landing you safely in the arms of Ringo and the enormous string section introducing "Good Night." (Or maybe you're a real rocker and you skip that track, too.) In my occasional role as God King Emperor Dictator of the Galaxy, I hereby command you to actually listen to that skipped track, "Revolution 9," about three or four times (and if you're curious, here are two very detailed analyses of what's going on there: the first from the well-known musicological studies of every Beatles track by Alan W. Pollack; the second an exhaustive (and exhausting - but rewarding) analysis from Ian Hammond). It's okay: "you will not die - it is not poison." For whatever reason, maybe because I've always tended to listen to albums as albums, or maybe just because I sometimes like weird, avant-garde-ish noise, I've always listened to "Revolution 9," and having done so, I'm familiar enough with it that I know its structure, know its musical motifs...in short, it sounds like a song to me now.

And I'm guessing something similar was at work for The Shazam, for how else can you account for this cover of "Revolution 9" which, against all odds, turns the piece from an assemblage of tape fragments, only some of which have traditionally "musical" content, into an actual song...albeit an oddly structured song. Who would have guessed that that jumpy little guitar part about halfway through the original could be reproduced and made the basis for the sort of mod little dance-number part The Shazam make of it? Or that the original's ending could be transformed into a very Who-like finale? And it's important to note that, as far as I can tell, The Shazam played all these parts, rather than sampling them from the Beatles' recording.

I've only somewhat enjoyed other Shazam records - but the EP this is from (titled Rev9) is my favorite, with its leadoff track "On the Airwaves" making the case for theremin as rock'n'roll lead instrument.

The Shazam "Revolution 9"
The Shazam "On the Airwaves"

More Irreal Folk Blues

I've been curious about the apparent fact that, even though people posit certain concepts as being beyond, more than, or other than reality (God, new-age healing, the square root of negative one), they immediately seem to try to stuff such concepts back into the box of reality by attempting to "prove" they "exist" (with the last verb defined pretty much the way we'd define it in speaking of a table, a pony, or a camcorder). Yet (and I do not have the brain of a logician, or particularly of a philosopher, so I may well be completely wooly here) since "reality" is pretty much defined as that which "exists" - i.e., the two terms are interdependent - it seems almost absurd to attempt to define the irreal (I'll borrow the mathematical term to generally describe things that are beyond, more than, other than real) in terms of a quotidian notion of existence.

More practically: things can also exist in the sense that they have effects on people. The concept of race, for example, isn't really rooted in anything that contemporary biologists would recognize (a random set of biological indices - some other set could have been chosen, including ones we attach no significance to: handedness vs. skin color, for instance), yet to say that it follows from that that "race" can have no significance in culture because it's not "real" is, well, stupid. God may or may not "exist" in the "real" sense - but certainly, God (as concept, as influence on human behavior: that is, as motivator for various manipulations of what's pretty much indisputably real) exists insofar as people act on that belief.

I'm not sure, though, how far to take this. I suppose some people do believe that God real-ly is a very tall, elderly white man with a long flowing white beard - but does that belief (only that belief - not other beliefs about God) affect their actions in any significant way? Certainly, defining an irreal entity in terms of the everyday real is doing what I complained about above (stuffing back into the box etc.). But if you define God only as (to ridiculously quote Frank Zappa parodying late-sixties proto-new-age "seekers") "a cosmic love pulse matrix," as some sort of abstraction approachable only through counterliteral metaphoric waxings, why apply the label "God" to it at all?

At any rate, I'm finding it somewhat useful to be wary of re-realizing the irreal: to defend against both those who'd reduce the irreal to something you could pack in cardboard and throw into the back of a 1978 Chevy Nova, and against my own tendencies to utterly dismiss whatever isn't rationally explicable. That last attitude, in some respects, is rather like dismissing Wallace Stevens' jar because you can't pour water into it.

traveling the edges

Yes, I'm one of those contrary people who insist that, song for song, John Cale's post-Velvets career easily trumps Lou Reed's. Cale's certainly released relatively weak, bewildering records...but, two words: The Raven.

Anyway, Cale has a new record out, Black Acetate...and, who would've thought that now, forty years into his musical career (!), he'd release an album whose most common mode is straightforward guitar rock? But as usual with Cale, there are several other ideas at play here. Jefitoblog put three Cale songs up a month back: the opening track, "Outta the Bag" (a somewhat dancey number sung in, of all things, falsetto - which, except for a few notes on last year's Hobo Sapiens, is something he's never done; "Mailman (The Lying Song)" which I like, but whose grating, annoying background vocals really need the context of the rest of the album to make work; and "Hush" which for me is the weakest track on the album, built on a cheesy squished guitar loop and faux-soul femme backing vox. Anyway, here are three more tracks.

First up is "Perfect," which would be the single if there were such things, if anyone thought Cale should have one, and if anyone cared about guitars wielded by folks lacking mall tattoos and piercings, snotty attitudes, and raccoon eye makeup. From his pretty but relatively weak vocals on his first solo album Vintage Violence, Cale's become a powerful and muscular vocalist, as displayed on this track. I like the way the bridge eventually turns into a countermelody over the chorus.

One of a couple of left turns on Black Acetate, "Brotherman" uses loops much more effectively than "Hush" to create an off-center, somewhat spooky atmosphere, with Cale grunting contemptuously at the beginning, "I write reams of this shit every day..." (a line given different context when it recurs in the song's lyrics).

And Cale shares with Reed an ability to write truly affecting songs (although unlike Reed, he usually knows to let well enough alone and not overplay the sentiment). "Gravel Drive" is one of Cale's ballads, making effective use of his (yes...) gravelly lower register in its opening phrases. (My only complaint is that I think this song would be very well-served by Cale's viola playing.)

John Cale "Perfect"
John Cale "Brotherman"
John Cale "Gravel Drive"

laugh and call him names!

One of the curious facts about the right wing in the US is the tension between its two primary components. It's as if not only one hand doesn't know what the other's doing, but one hand is pointing disapprovingly at "sinners" while the other one is reaching beneath its robes, furiously stroking its grossly engorged johnson. The social and religious conservatives don't seem to realize that all the sin and sleaze they condemn are, for the economic conservatives, pretty much the lifeblood of the economy they celebrate above all else. While "sex sells" is a cliche, the smirking, frat-boy-like version of sexuality mostly on sale is a particularly useful variety for marketing types, dependent as it is on being sexy-as-cool and reliant on a fear of utter rejection if one is adjudged insufficiently sexy. Sure, if you buy that one "body spray" (whatever the hell that is) you will, it is asserted, be up to your ass in ass - but if that guy's getting all the action, that only means none of those lovelies will be coming your way. Better correct that and fast.

We are, of course, currently thrust into the midst of marketers' biggest orgy - Christmas - and the usual whimpering cries of "keeping Christ in Christmas" are emanating from the expected quarters, all while the economists, advertisers, and corporations are well aware that the Christmas sales push is the climactic moment of each fiscal year - and as such is indispensable to our economy. The head reindeer is the almighty buck.

Speaking of reindeer and messages of social control, I was in a restaurant the other day, being besieged by Christmas music, and someone's version of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" came on. For whatever reason I actually paid attention to the lyrics (more, it must be said, than the singer did - who sang every line exactly the same, as if his native language was Finnish and he'd been provided a phonetic translation). Everybody knows them, I suppose, but who listens? "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer had a very shiny nose / And if you ever saw him, you would even say it glows. / All of the other reindeer used to laugh and call him names. / They never let poor Rudolph join in any reindeer games." Okay, so Rudolph is a misfit, scorned by his peers for his unfortunate deformity. However, the middle eight delivers its plot-twist: "Then one foggy Christmas Eve, Santa came to say / 'Rudolph, with your nose so bright / Won't you guide my sleigh tonight?'" The change is made up North, and the Big Man enjoins a new hand. (Sorry Bruce...) So what goes on back amongst the other reindeer? "Then all the reindeer loved him, as they shouted out with glee, / 'Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, you'll go down in history!'" The moral of the story, clearly, is that making fun of geeks is fine, until some authority figure shows up and finds value in them. Then, you'd better play along, and praise the ex-geek to the skies. Just remember, kids: that awkward kid that no one likes? His daddy owns General Motors, and someday you'll be kissing his ass. (No surprise, "Rudolph"'s words first appeared in 1939...as part of an advertising campaign for Montgomery Ward.)

All of that reminded me of the way our memories (thankfully) can undercut some of the more blatantly didactic childhood products. One of my favorite books as a kid was about a train named Tootle. In my mind, it was about how Tootle the train had all kinds of fun, not only in the fascinating roundhouse and with all the train cars he got to pull around, but also gamboling about the fields playing with the daisies. At one point several years ago, in fact, I mentioned this to a friend - who said that I had it all wrong: the book was really about how Tootle wasn't supposed to leave the tracks and play in the fields. In fact, he said, the book pretty nearly said that leaving the tracks and playing in the fields was equivalent to communism. Wha-ha? But he was right: I went back and found the book, buried away somewhere in my mother's house, and Tootle is told absolutely no way should he be going off the tracks and fucking up his engines with pointless flowers. The engineers in fact blazon the fields with hundreds of red flags (as a good little train, Tootle knows not to go where there are red flags) to warn Tootle of the dangers of the narcotic poppies and flaming red flowers lazing seductively about in the fields. Tootle must do as he's told, Tootle must do his job, as his superiors tell him to. Damn.

Talking Tina

A brief note (busy again), no songs...but, inspired by digging out "Artists Only" last week, I've been relistening to the first four Talking Heads albums (and tempting me to buy the damned Brick thing) - and being reminded that Tina Weymouth is a highly underrated bassist. Her lines often really make the songs work, not only in the expected rooting and rhythmic ways but also by adding nice little countermelodic cells. Two excellent examples: "Found a Job" and "Air."

Sparks of One, Half-Nelson of the Other

Perhaps inspired by my recent minor episode of automotive damage, I pulled out my handy combo reissue of Sparks' first, self-titled album (actually, I think it was released originally under their first name, Halfnelson) and the second, A Woofer in Tweeter's Clothing, since that CD contains the charmingly and cheerfully mad "Here Comes Bob," whose protagonist has, as the judge observes, "a bad means to a worthwhile end." But as Bob notes, how else can you make friends in car-crazed LA?

From the first, slightly more subtle in its ways of making friends album, we have the veering-toward-psychedelic song "Fletcher Honorama." I have no idea what that's supposed to mean. I'm particularly fond of the way the instrumental interlude keeps threatening to fade out, only to return with the annoyingly jaunty tack piano part, over and over again.

Returning to the second album, you could arguably call "Angus Desire" slightly psychedelic as well, although Sparks is hardly the first band to leap to mind when thinking of psychedelic music. Regardless, this track has that slightly slowed-down, narcotic vibe characteristic of some psych varieties. Unlike "Fletcher Honorama," this song is pretty self-evident in its subject: a guy who really wants to be the lead guitarist with AC/DC. Okay, I'm kidding: he's in love with the original drummer of the Velvet Underground.

Sparks "Here Comes Bob"
Sparks "Fletcher Honorama"
Sparks "Angus Desire"

have we seen this kind of thing before?

Here are two different versions of the same song, "Jackie, Dressed in Cobras," written by Dan Bejar. The first version, by Destroyer, comes from a split single with Black Mountain issued in late 2003. The second version, of course, is from The New Pornographers' Twin Cinema.

Destroyer's version, partially because it came first but also because of its more sparse arrangement and less glossy surface, ends up sounding like a demo of sorts. I didn't think of the song that way when I first heard it, but listening to the two tracks consecutively, the effect is nearly inevitable. This version lacks that cool piano part, derived from the tricky rhythm in the part after the chorus (on the lines "wrapped on the jungle floor"), which shows up in The New Pornographers' version after the second verse. There's also something tentative about the move to a new chord ("on a train devouring the land") compared with the remake. I think it's because the bass note on the Destroyer version isn't the root, and so the chord sounds a bit indefinite, whereas The New Pornographers punch out the chord so it feels like the entry of a new section of the song. Finally, the newer version adds that sort of "Ticket to Ride"-like electric 12-string lick in the intros to the verses.

Then again, the remake lacks the spooky feeling that comes from the freakishly long reverb soaking the original...and overall, the songs are almost completely different in mood (not to mention key: for some reason - a capo? - the Destroyer version is in the somewhat odd-for-guitar key of B-flat, while the New Pornographers' version takes it down to the easier-to-play key of A).

Destroyer "Jackie, Dressed in Cobras"
The New Pornographers "Jackie, Dressed in Cobras"

thank god there's no lame-ass pun on "Phair" here

Just a brief entry because I'm too busy to do a longer one: I just downloaded the live, acoustic Liz Phair track from community radio station WMSE's site (okay, it's actually a related site promoting the airing of local music), and I've got to say - if you were annoyed by the glossiness of Phair's self-titled album, listen to this version of "Why Can't I" - because dammit, it's a fine song that deserved to be a hit. It does what good love songs do: not blather on generically about love, but capture in detail a particular moment of a love affair.

IREPEATMYSELFWHENUNDERSTRESS IREPEATMYSELFWHENUNDERSTRESS IREPEATMYSELFWHENUNDERSTRESS IREPEATMYSELFWHENUNDERSTRESS IREPEAT

More time-travelogue: The late '70s and early '80s was a time when intensely artistic young men would work themselves into a yelping froth over...well, something abstract and vaguely artistic, but one was never quite sure. This became nearly a genre-unto-itself, in fact.

If you wanted someone to blame, you could do worse than blame David Byrne. Talking Heads' second album More Songs About Buildings and Food contained the track "Artists Only," which finds Byrne in a frenzied snit about his artwork. (Yes, I know: writing in character blah-blah-blah. But c'mon: isn't it much more fun to envision David Byrne himself pissily muttering "you can't see it till it's finished!"?) At this point, the intense-yelping-artist genre was still rooted, musically, in the sort of tensely-strung rockage typified by the first two Talking Heads records, but that would change.

A year or so later, in 1979, another David, David Thomas of Pere Ubu, addresses what appears to be a similar sort of project of some sort of other. Thomas, though, begins in something like a calm state - if his muttering warnings ("here it goes...") can be called calm - and only gradually works himself into a lathering state of IYAity. That he's enthusiastically barking "this one is alright!" rather than maniacally worrying about something or other is, somehow, more disturbing. (This despite the track being called "One Less Worry.") Ubu here works within a musical framework fairly close to early Talking Heads, in that sort of "James Brown as played by 90-pound white guys in plastic-framed glasses" style so popular in that era.

Finally, two years later, a guy named not David but Adrian yelped forth his vagueness in the form of King Crimson's "Indiscipline." And you know, despite the musical abstraction of this track, which alternates between stark, fat bass notes (okay, "Stick" notes, if you insist) and Robert Fripp's trying-to-start-a-fire strumming, Adrian Belew just seems like such a nice, normal guy that you can't really get too bothered by his ranting here. I think he's just frustrated over being unable to solve a Rubik's Cube, and will shortly give up and curl up in a chair, stroking his cat and studying a National Geographic coffee table book on macaws or something.

Talking Heads "Artists Only"
Pere Ubu "One Less Worry"*
King Crimson "Indiscipline"*

* These tracks will be up for only a very brief period, since I know both Thomas and Fripp deliver stern frowns about digital distribution of their music. The idea, you know, is to hear this, think it's way cool, and run out and spend money on the actual CDs, which will sound way better than these crappy little mp3s. Unless, of course, you play them through your cheesy computer speakers at work anyway. I'm pretty sure Thomas, at least, would (if he could) insist personally that you listen to his music only through sound systems calibrated to his specifications. (And those of you who invested wisely in buying anxious young artists in the late '70s can use your wealth to buy that new Talking Heads box, Brick.)

initial enthusiasms

In honor of the, uh, not-particularly-awaited sequel to 1998's The Mask of Zorro, I present a list of failed swashbuckly, swordfighty heroes who emulated the Zorro character and his signature sword-slashed initial.

Norro: Sued for copyright infringement by Zorro's attorneys, who argued that Norro's "N" was merely Zorro's "Z" turned on its side. Norro went into a sulk, eventually re-emerging as a sensitive, poetic swordfighter who insisted on writing his name entirely in lowercase. Unfortunately, "norro" was then sued by a legal team representing the rather obscure sword-wielding avenger Uorro - who argued that norro's new mark was merely Uorro's mark upside down. Sadly, norro eventually killed himself with a single sword thrust to the heart. Attorneys for the punctuation-based swashbuckler Period, the PowerPoint-loving swashbuckler BulletPoint, and various opportunistic gunfighters were advised to take a number and wait for their turn to sue norro's estate.

Sorro: After much fanfare and many press releases, the much-anticipated debut of swashbuckler Sorro was put on indefinite hiatus. Rumor has it that Sorro just couldn't master the sinuous curves of his initial; meanwhile his landlady pressed charges for malicious vandalism arising from Sorro's having covered the walls, ceiling, and floors of his flat with inept attempts at the capital letter S.

Жорро ("Zhorro"): This Russian hero, sadly, lost his life at the hands of forces of the corrupt regime for which his opponent was fighting. Zhorro was taken midway through his efforts to carve the Cyrillic "zhe" character Ж which begins his name - a character that just takes too many damned strokes to render correctly. (His successor, Щорро ("Schchorro"), fared little better.)

Zorro: In the early '90s, typographic designer David Carson (of Raygun magazine fame) tried to push this intensely graphic-designed sword-slinger. However, Zorro never took off - perhaps because his radical, cutting-edge design concept for swashbuckling - breaking swordfights into seemingly random gestures around the room, using multiple and overlapping swords, choreographing thrusts and parries that were nearly indistinguishable from one another - often left opponents baffled and frequently was not even recognized as swordfighting. Several of Zorro's foes left the site of his fights midway through the fighting while mistaking Zorro's actions as possibly an entry in some sort of avant-garde knitting festival. Zorro is now retired to a community of Buddhist minimalist monks who eschew speech and legible text, communicating entirely in white text set on a white backdrop.

you knew this was going to happen, right?

Behold: a newly identified marketing demographic.