Lao Tzu and Copyright

I'm not going to rehash a lot of info I've covered in previous blog posts.  Regular readers know I am working on an analog tape project, recording songs on an old cassette four track, which will be an album or EP tentatively titled Retro Grade.  I previous mentioned I had lyric ideas for about five songs so far.  One of them, is a song based on the writings of Lao Tzu.

I'm not usually one to use existing works as the basis for my work, but I make an exception with very old and/or public domain works.  Not only because I won't get into any legal trouble, but because I cannot possibly harm the artist, who must have been dead over 75 years.

Lao Tzu certainly qualifies, since his works are believed to have been written about 2500 years ago, though the exact date an authorship remain questionable.  The Lao Tzu writings are useful in another respect too. They have been very important to me since I first read them when I was 14, so they fit the whole "retro" nature of the project, from my perspective, as they represent a part of my past.

I liked the Dao De Ching so much, I looked for potential companion works to read.  Having discovered a (potentially apocryphal) story about Lao Tzu conversing with and teaching Confucius, I mistakenly thought the Analytics would be a great companion to the Dao De Ching.  I could not have been more wrong, especially when Confucius writes so much about obedience to parents.  This is not what a rebellious young teen wants to read.

That said, unfaltering obedience to parents doesn't pass the western philosophy smell test.  What if your parent is a sociopath?  Are you still supposed to be completely obedient.  In Confucius world, you could have escaped a Nuremberg tribunal if the illegal and lethal order came from your dad.  "I had to torture that queer, my father told me to do it."  And you can't disobey your father.  I exaggerate and I digress.

Unfortunately for me, I don't read ancient Chinese, so I am reliant on translators to access the Dao De Ching.  And this is my Achilles heel.  Because my whole life the translation of the Lao Tzu writings I've kept close has been the D. C. Lau translation from Penguin Classics.  Unfortunately for me, this translation is only about 50 years old, too new to be in the public domain.  Although the original text is free for everyone, a modern translation is not.

However, I suspected, given the ancient nature of the work, that it had been translated into English before.  It might not have Lau's poetic touch, but it would still get the job done.  I started at project Gutenberg, a great resource for public domain texts.  But I found something even better.  This site, were you can read 23 English translations at the same time.  I'm totally blown away by it.  I've never felt closer to the actual Chinese, which is a really good thing, if my plan is to turn ancient philosophical text into song lyrics.  As it is. actually.


I love the Rashamon effect.  In the movie, it leads to chaos, no one knows what has happened, because there are too many conflicting accounts.  But what happens in Rashamon is an outlier.  Normally, mutliple accounts get you closer, not farther from the truth.  This is the genius of the wiki, though wikipedia manages to get it wrong, IMO.

Guessing how many jelly beans are in a jar, the crowd will be more accurate than any one individual.  Unfortunately, the architecture of Wikipedia gives individuals the ability to edit the opinion of the masses.  To say nothing of the fact, that the masses often misremember history.

But in the controlled world of translation of ancient texts, the different views get you closer, not farther from the truth.  Which is perfect for me.  If I'm to turn the writings of Lao Tzu into song lyrics.  I need to know the "truth" of the starting point, before I start inventing and editing.

Juxtaposition, continued (sort of)

Back in my student days, I used to make these surrealist movies (I did say I liked surrealism).  Mostly they were short, like 3-6 minutes.  I had to make at least 6 per semester, but there were no other requirements, no assignments, no specific hoops to fly through.  But if I start the story there, I'm getting ahead of myself.

The first video I ever made, with a borrowed video camera, contained music I borrowed too.  Better to say, music I stole.  Jazz, Classical, Avant-garde Electronica, all blended together with the "live" sound thanks to a borrowed mixer.  It was okay.  The first version was way too long at 18 minutes, so I had to cut it down to 6 minutes and it was almost watchable at that length, just don't ask me to watch it now, lol.

What I noticed though, was that the music really carried the thing.  Take away the stolen melodies and the whole thing would fall flat on it's face.  There's a quote which I first heard attributed to Kubrick, but which I've never been able to verify, "Film is 90 percent sound."  I keep that quote close because I agree so thoroughly with it.  I would also amend it to say, "And film is 80 percent music."

If you have ever seen the 1984 production of Dune, Produced by Dino De Larentis and compare it to the 1980 production of Flash Gordon with the same producer you can kind of see a petri dish of this phenomena.  Without getting too far into it, I consider Flash Gordon to be a successful, if flawed movie, and Dune to be a failure, without flaws.  I'll go further and say Dune is a much better made movie than Flash Gordon, but Flash Gordon is much more enjoyable to watch.  The reason the better film is not as good, in my opinion is in the scores of the two films.  Queen's score for Flash Gordon improves a weak film and really drives it forward.  Toto's score for Dune brings the film down and wrecks a superior effort.

Recognizing that the strength of my first video relied so heavily on music, music that I didn't produce, I decided, if I was to make any more video, I would have to start producing my own music.  So, with no training at all, and no clue, and being kind of tone deaf, I started to make music.

That early stuff is worse than any video I ever made.  It's not just unlistenable, it's downright annoying to hear, it grates on the ears.  The event I credit most with helping break me out of the terrible musical rut I was in was learning about John Cage's compositional process, casting sticks using the iChing.  His process was completely random.  It liberated me because it made me believe I couldn't make any mistakes, if random chance could be used to write music, then mistakes were an impossibility.  As soon as I wasn't afraid of making mistakes, I got more adventurous and the music I produced became more interesting.

I continued to do my little musical experiments (that's really what they were), and record them to tape.  I produced hours and hours of material.  On rare occasions, I produced something I liked, and anything I liked would be cataloged on a series of "Master" tapes I began to make.  By the end of this way of working, I'd produced three 90 minute "Master" tapes containing music of various lengths, tempos, and moods.  I would describe most of it as Avant-garde Electronica with contemporary classical ambitions.  There were a few pop oriented tunes as well, but not many.

The only time I have ever visited a large film production facility, one of the more interesting things to me was the music room, essentially, a room with a sound system and two walls filled with CDs (this was a while ago).  The room existed so directors and producers could go find music for their projects.  I always wondered how they picked which CDs to include in the room, if it was dependent on some licensing agreement.  The only time I tried to arrange legal borrowed music for a video I was producing, the record company sent me a large package of CDs from their second tier artists.  Artists who would love to be included in a movie sound track, even for very little money.  The exposure is often invaluable to them and hence they are willing to come cheap.

The three "Master" tapes I produced became my "music room" for my videos.  Each time I finished editing a new video, I would peruse my music tapes looking for something interesting to include.  Very rarely, I would score a specific music work for a specific video.  Going back to that first video I made, using "found" music seemed to add depth to the work and I liked that process.  The difference was, now the "found" music was music I had produced earlier, at another time and place.

And this gets back to the idea of juxtaposition.  Taking music recorded months earlier in a different emotional state, different time, different place and adding it to a just completed video creates a moment of juxtaposition.  Similarly, I have taken my own writings from years in the past, poetry and essays from high school, for example, and used them, word for word, to make new things, videos, songs, etc  . . .  Once I was doing this series of miniature photographs in my apartment.  Obviously, I couldn't include a "real" sky, because I was indoors, but I remembered this series of cloud paintings I'd done with pen and ink, years earlier.  I scanned those and used them as the "sky" in the miniature photo series.  I once wrote a poem, years later, made an art book of the poem, years later, made a video based on the art book, and am now considering using the same poem as lyrics for a song in the retro project.  I wouldn't call it a good poem either, but I like it, obviously, since I keep returning to it.

I think it's often the case, that our own creations from the past offer the easiest and most personal means of creating juxtaposition in current work.  You could even say, past work is a treasure trove to be mined for value in the present.  It enriches and adds depth.  It's like working with an independent clone of oneself.  All the benefits of "design by committee" with none of the negatives, after all, you can be a dictator over your past self, but I would say you, and more importantly, your work, benefit by being a benevolent dictator in that relationship.