Re: GG and CD shop clerks

["Lawrence T. McDonnell" <trixie@ksts.seed.net.tw>]

Hello--

Interesting contrapunctal threads here.  GG's humor; CD store clerks, trips to
TO, etc.

As a Torontonian transplanted in Taiwan, I'm always amazed by the high
visibility of GG's disks in CD stores here.  Twenty years dead?  Tell that to
marketing--he is front-and-center with the Backstreet Boys and doing quite
well here, thank you.  More than this, people know who he is and are quite
interested in discussing him with you.  ("Glenn Gould didn't play Bach," my
neighbor informed me.  "He played Glenn Gould."  I still don't know if this
was praise or criticism.).  A ten-year old student of mine was delighted to
explain to me why GG's "Moonlight Sonata" is so darn fast (I didn't quite
figure out her reasoning, but it wasn't just a Bad Joke, others to the
contrary).  And my CD store clerk, who did not know who the Bare Naked Ladies
were, instructed me that he only buys Glenn Gould on vinyl, though he is
willing to sell to the masses in CD format.  So the barbarians have not scaled
all the walls just yet.  My island paradise is still OK.  I have no faith in
matters at the corner of Bay and Bloor, however.

I am also surprised that no one in this discussion has mentioned the films
"Clerks," or more importantly, "Slackers."  That pretty much says it all.

On GG's humor, and how weird and eccentric and hammy he was, and how it was
all strung out far too long, and, and, and.....  I just don't get it.  I think
what we're lacking is context.  Gould grew up with wartime British/Canadian
humor which was heavy on slapstick, bad accents, verbal counterpoint, and on
and on....  When Gould made his mark, the dreadful borscht-belt Ed Sullivan
veterans Wayne and Shuster were kings of Canadian comedy,  Lorne Michaels (the
wunderkind of SNL) was trying to get a break at CBC, John Candy was about to
hit kindergarten, and Mike Myers was a baby in a stroller somewhere out in the
suburbs.  It's easy to forget that since 1975 Toronto has been ground zero for
hip modern comedy (I should probably say _white_ modern comedy--the black
streams have been entirely different) in North America..  Anyone who has
watched Canadian television in the past seven or eight years can tell you that
the bull's eye has latterly travelled not to New York but to Newfie, but that
is something of a secret still, in the lower forty-eight and beyond.  Just as
well.  Ask Marge.

A couple of people have suggested that Gould was given to bad accents, bad
jokes, a bad ear for humor.  I really don't think so.  Spin the Silver Jubilee
CD, then put on anything by the Firesign Theatre  (try "Not Insane," for
example).  Tell me the difference.  The humor segments on both are uproarious,
and the counterpoint is brilliant.  This is a tradition carried on every
Saturday morning on CBC radio (check out "Royal Canadian Air Farce" among
other programs).  There's no Keillor-ish attempt to live in NYC but sound like
Minnesota here--it's all howlingly over-the-top, in the tradition of SCTV or
Kids in the Hall (think of Count Floyd).  What do you think Gould was
listening to on the radio all that time he was driving up and down the 400?

The other point worth making about GG's humor is its carefully structured
nature, its deliberate use of counterpoint, which goes back both to Bach and
to Chaplin, if you will.  Or at least to Abbott and Costello's "Who's On
First?"  There is really no use in trying to explain a joke, but all I can say
is, the more you know about the CBC, or Scots in Toronto, or the role of women
in government broadcasting, or summers at the lake, or, or, or....  the
funnier Gould is.  Now me, he just cracks me up every time.  I think I get
it.  Even if I didn't, I was laughing.  If you think Gould was a ham, pick up
any DVD with Mike Myers--preferably "So I Married an Axe Murderer."  Who's he
stealing from?  Well, not Glenn, but from the same WWII  source as Glenn.
Sorry.  Hammy is funny.

How strange that people who think they must study his music assume that his
humor will be automatically accessible.  Stranger, too, that folks who don't
understand his jokes and their sources claim to understand what he was about.
Time to spin those Petula Clark records once more.  And watch the SCTV crew do
their horrible, wonderful schtick again.

One point I think eludes most listeners to Gould who are non-Canadian:
resolution is not required.  To say the least.  Canadians revel in
mosaics--the contrapunctal theme which dominated GG's cultural life in
Canada--they abhor melting pots.  Difference is welcomed and even cherished
where I grew up.  Multiculturalism is not a goal, it is a fait accompli, taken
entirely for granted.  In Toronto people love to stroll up and down Yonge
Street for the simple purpose of walking and gawking, and the first thing they
perceive is cultural difference (in sights, sounds, smells, and tastes).
Since there's obviously no hope of achieving a homogenized resolution here,
the only choice is to seek to understand how it all weaves together.  That's
great.  Bach would have had a great time walking down to the Skydome.

I have been thinking,. recently, of how Glenn Gould would have reacted to the
Naked News, which also makes its home in Toronto the Good.  I am still trying
to think this through, and I have no set conclusions, though I imagine that a
telephone would be involved.

Best,

Larry

Bradley P Lehman wrote:

> At 12:19 PM 7/13/01 +0000, Kate Clunies-Ross wrote:
>
> >And like Anne I also hjave encountered someone working in a record store
> >who asked "Glenn who?"   Yeah. Honest.  Her next question , after I
> >replied "Gould" as clearly as I could, was actually "How do you spell
> >that?" I am not sure how many  reasonable spelling  variations of  the
> >name Glenn Gould there are, but sometimes I despair of the human race
> >.....  ;-)
>
> Yep.  CD shop clerks who have no concept of good music, or of music
> history (of even the past 25 years of ANY kind of music).  They just sell
> "product."
>
> But I despair even more when I see the inability of CD shop clerks to
> understand sixth-grade arithmetic. They're being paid to do numbers
> accurately, but they have no concept of how numbers work. They have no
> mental sensors to catch it when something is obviously WAY OFF.
>
> Last week at a typical CD shop in a mall I bought three CDs from a sale
> display. The sign said everything with the yellow "SUPER BUY" sticker
> would have 75% discount at the register. A nice sale. The original prices
> of the items were 19.99, 9.99, and 9.99.
>
> The clerk, a guy about 25, rang them up and I noticed that each item was
> only 50% off at the register. I always watch the register because I know
> that retail clerks often don't know how to do arithmetic. They just do
> whatever the register says and they assume it's right. (If something is
> not in the computer, it doesn't exist.) I said, "These all have a yellow
> sticker and are supposed to be 75% off; the register rang only 50%."
>
> The clerk asked me to show where this sale was, and I pointed: directly in
> front of where we were, in plain sight. So he re-ran all three items and
> came up with a total of 15.00 plus tax. I said, "Sorry, that's still not
> right. That's only a little over 60% off, not 75%." He said, "No, it rang
> up 50% the first time and I took another 25% off of that, so 75%." I said,
> "No, it doesn't work that way."
>
> Confused, he then brought the next clerk into it, a gal about 25. We
> explained that it was supposed to be 75% off but the register originally
> rang only 50%. I pointed to the same sale display where this was
> advertised. She said, "OK, I guess we'll have to figure this out by hand.
> How much is it supposed to be?"
>
> I said helpfully, pointing at each item in turn, "Five bucks, 2.50, 2.50."
> She said, "No, you can't round them off like that, it has to be exact." I
> said, "That _is_ exact. I took each original price, divided by 4, and it's
> to the nearest penny." (I'm thinking, how hard IS this? Or couldn't they
> just take another 50% off the original 50% to get the 75%?)
>
> They obviously both didn't believe that this method of dividing by 4 is
> correct, and they stared at me as if there is nobody on this planet who
> can do arithmetic in his head.
>
> So they took fully two minutes figuring something on paper, privately.
> They then ran each item through the register again, and this time the
> prices came up 4.00, 1.40, 1.40. The total was just over 7.00 with the
> tax.
>
> I started to say a third time, "No, that still isn't right, now it's 3.00
> too low...." but before I said it aloud I thought, "Hang it, they're never
> going to get it right, or if they do by some chance get it right they
> won't believe me that it's right.  I'll just pay this and shut up now." I
> paid, I said, "Sorry I had to make an argument," and I left.
>
> What should I have said? "Sorry you both missed school the year they
> taught percents and problem-solving?" I can understand that some people
> just don't get math. That's OK. But these people were professionals.
> Whatever happened to thinking outside the computer?
>
> I looked at the sales slip later. Evidently they rolled it back to the
> original 50% off 9.99, 4.99, 4.99 and then manually took off 5.99, 3.59,
> 3.59. Decent idea, wrong execution. Staring at it now I still can't figure
> out how they came up with those particular numbers. Their numbers aren't
> proportionate to one another. Anyone?
>
> More importantly, what thought processes go through their minds?  There
> has to be SOME pattern to it, but what?  Yesterday's Dilbert seems
> apropos:
> http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert-20010712.html
>
> Bradley Lehman, Dayton VA
> home: http://i.am/bpl  or  http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bpl
> CD's: http://listen.to/bpl or http://www.mp3.com/bpl
>
> "Music must cause fire to flare up from the spirit - and not only sparks
> from the clavier...." - Alfred Cortot