Is seems like everyone is riffing off Romney’s high school bullying incident. Edmund White is particularly brutal in the New Yorker, while Georgia Logothetis blisters Romney at Daily Kos. I’m a little impatient with the armchair psychology (“He no longer had the constant support of his tight-knit family. Now he had to win approval from the other boys.”) in White’s piece, but as a gay boy who attended Romney’s high school, he does offer some keen insights. Logothetis uses the occasion of the forcible haircut to talk about the Greek sovereign debt crisis, which also involves forcible haircuts. Now, that’s clever!
And she ties that all back to Romney’s proposals for America. Both pieces are well-crafted, and it occurs to me that there’s something unusual about these weird stories about Mitt Romney. Whether he’s strapping his dog to the roof of his car, barreling down the freeway for 14 hours at 70 mph, stopping to clean the inevitable dog diarrhea off his vehicle, and then telling us his pooch really enjoyed the ride, or he’s denying that he remembers traumatizing a gay student in high school and calling it ‘hijinks,’ he’s creating a kind of rhythm section for artists to play off. His goofs and gaffes carry more than the usual poignancy. “Corporations are people, my friend.” “I am not concerned about poor people.” “Who let the dogs out? WOOT, WOOT.” Each event seems like an invitation to improvise. As if these concise events are so pregnant with greater meaning that they need to be fleshed out into a full-on jam.
Maybe I’m feeling a little weird today, but this calls to mind Mickey Hart’s project “Mysterium Tremendum.”
The percussion virtuoso tells Billboard.com that he built the songs from the 12-song set from celestial sound waves captured by scientists at Penn State University, the Lawrence Berkeley Labs and Meyer Sound. “This is a mixture of songs from the sound of the universe and the whole Earth, the world’s music,” Hart explains. “I mean, the Big Bang, the beginning of everything, that was the first beat, beat one, the downbeat, where everything started. So I started to transfer light waves from radio telescopes into sound waves and changing their form from radiation light into sound using a computer alogorhythm, turning it into music and composing with it. I built all the song forms around that.”
Somewhere between the first downbeat of the Big Bang and the present day, there is a weird distortion caused by the utter strangeness of Mitt Romney. I don’t doubt that, given enough time, Mickey Hart and his scientist pals could find that distortion and put it to music.