Dark Comedy Hour Statements

The Dark Comedy Hour was never really explained to me. The site administrator, a living male, a musician, an aesthete, a friend, never really said the site was anything, he claimed it ‘just was’, and as my interest and involvement has escalated, so too does the irony in my writing this release. i have been put in the interesting position of trying to account for what has accrued here, and to announce the ways in which we’d like to grow.

We’d like to grow in a big coiling circle. We don’t want to grow for the sake of being tall but for the sake of becoming more dynamic and more enriched ourselves in the process. Variety is glorious. We’d love a trillion people to blog here under our odd little DCH umbrella and use the dry space however they see fit–be it to redress the news, re-articulate the arts, organize emotions, or to air ideas that become great ones once they cool off and curl. I have found the internet, and even the blogoshpere specifically can be like an espresso and enliven us, provide us some stakes. It can also be like a gale wind that tests the flakiness of our resolve, it can goad you at least minimally to put something together sorta seemly, swipe the corners of your mouth.

There is original music here, there has always been. We’ll start turning the mics on more this year. We’re going to make it easier to peek inside and see what’s been going on at the DCH studio, where a record label is growing from a second floor walkup with decent acoustics and the J train that doesn’t necessarily ruin recordings. We’d like to more pronouncedly invite folks to join us–
Musicians, singers, folks with interesting sound samples, reach out to Eugene Sounds and come by the studio. Poets, sages, characters, if the upcoming theme happens to render you inclined to contribute, reach out to Eugene and blow.

The serial piece, the actual Dark Comedy Hour had been done before, it just got in the way of the music for a minute, and had fallen off the table. The actual Dark Comedy Hour (which, on account of modernity, will never actually exceed twenty minutes) will be presented monthly. Mr. Blue Throat will contribute from passionate Philadelphia, I’ll report from wherever I may be in America, and E. Sounds will put it all together in Brooklyn and post it on the 1st. Invariably there’ll be guests, alchemy. The serial component is made of each of our interpretations of a certain theme. The seminal theme which we will meditate upon this upcoming month is Rebirth. We will prominently announce the upcoming theme in advance for all of you folks who might like to contribute an audio sample to be pasted, spliced or looped into the show.
As oh eight comes to a close, what has fallen together is a small network of folks, mostly strangers still to one another, who have played sessions at the humble studio, or from wherever have written on ‘blogs’ which they have interpreted and filled differently visiting them to varying degrees.
This site has evolved like one of those young twenty something scorching love affairs in which each lover would explain they were just carrying on just to “see what happens.” That’s actually much sexier than what’s going on here. This is simple, a bourgeoning arts collective, a seed in a cup.
We have taken the plunge online, have clicked our way through a fourth wall between you and I, and have met at least a theoretical audience head on.

A few folks who thought the world was ending, say why not celebrate? Why not catalog these days, and these friendships.

we’ve set out to stack something simple toward the sky,

we haven’t sacrificed any chickens

just had a drink, couldn’t sleep and sang

We decided to bury a time capsule here on the internet. We began to post our poems and recordings of the songs we were writing.  We’ve wound and launched alter-egos, have fed them tuna, and chocolates. We have cataloged this squirming before modernity serially in order to finish, or gold plate this phase.  We aren’t counting on deliverance, merely dialogue, shade.

Paint a flower on your television.
Listen to a podcast.

-R. Sirando
January 2009

***

The world is ending.

Well, for the sake of argument at least, assume the world is ending, in about 20-30 years, say. No one can do anything about it.

What would you do? One could imagine several impulses: the most obvious and reasonable: party. No need to plan or work for the future, no real need to invest too heavily in raising children, just party till the end of the world comes. Then, there’s the more reflective, humanistic impulse: party some, yes, but also attempt to engage in a measured celebration of life’s many gifts—love, art, music, the miracle of progeny. Then, one arrives at the positive spiritual impulse: attempt a greater communion with god in the short time you have left; pray, attend religious services, discuss the miracle of the now-ending creation in a profound and cleansing meditation upon the mystery of existence. There is also, perhaps, a comic impulse: appreciating the irony of the world coming to an end just as man seemed to be coming into his own, engage in a deep, wonderfully pleasurable belly laugh as you reflect upon the utter futility of human effort, and the insanity of our notion of progress. Sliding further down, there’s the negative spiritual impulse: desperately attempt in the short and ever dwindling time left to redeem your mortal soul; engage constantly in acts of kindness, love your neighbor, spend time with the sick, the depressed, the elderly or the beaten-down, all in the hope that, though all evidence may be to the contrary, a divine and merciful creator will, at the last minute, step in to save humanity, or at least your wretched self. Then there’s the hesitation impulse where, for lack of any initiative, one simply does nothing till the end overwhelms them. There’s also the defiant impulse, the wholly irrational suicide impulse, and, pertinently, the denial impulse. I’m probably skipping a few steps here, but, eventually, one arrives at the nihilistic impulse: realize that, just as the existence of life made little sense in the first place, it’s end is equally baffling, and after realizing this, proceed as usual.

Your options are, in other words, many, and several can be chosen if you’re afforded enough time. Accordingly, we at the Dark Comedy Hour are here to say, the world is ending, or at least human civilization. I know(,) this may sound unnecessarily pessimistic, but the signs are everywhere: catastrophic climate change, the clearly unsustainable yet inexorable rise in the population level, and a growing precariousness of life due to an over-reliance on transient and unstable technologies. I need not elaborate the causes here, but surely you can feel it in your heart. You surely also know the denial must eventually stop.

So what’s our reaction here at the Dark Comedy Hour? Our approach is to slowly begin the process of self-reflection that seems appropriate for these final years by building an archive of music, poetry, prose, and art of all kinds that may serve as a sort of point of departure for those concerned with seeing the big picture, finding the meaning in it all, and summing it all up, before it’s all gone. The archive will hopefully one day contain reflections of all the varieties of human experience one could easily think of, a base of material from which to formulate your own reaction to the end of the world, and, in a practical turn, we may just find a way to preserve it for the alien explorers of the future. But for now, we start small. We do hope you’ll join us.

-Bluethroat

January 2007