a most immaculately hip aristocrat LINER NOTES
Ah, yes, Lord Buckley. A most immaculately hip aristocrat. He was the purest, noblest, and most beautiful hipster since the One he called The Nazz was hammered up onto a cross. He knew, as The Nazz had, that life is the world's most precious commodity, and he was determined not to waste any of his. He was largely successful. He lived furiously, making excitement when there was none to be found, ecstatically discovering beauty and gleefully creating it, having a fabulous time and showing his friends one, carefully disregarding those conventions and restrictions which existed merely because of other people's silliness, and hiding nothing. He kept his scene far-out and beautiful, his head straight and wild, and his heart wide open with a pure, sweet love for all the members of the nobility.
... if the sphere swings in its plumed height with all its garlanded beauty, then it must have a fantastic basis. So all ladies and gentlemen are Lords and Ladies, my dear . . .
For Sir Richard Buckley, Lord of Hip Castle, was a truly christian hipster. He loved gangsters, politicians, and hopeless octagon-head squares as well as his family and the jazz musicians, hookers, artists, ghetto hipsters, beatniks, and others he dug being with.
Love is the international understanding that each and every one of us have exactly the same problems to fight.
Ah, yes, Lord Buckley. A ost magnificently powerful performer. Notice the remarkable flexiability of his voice and the tight control he has over it, using the perfect tone, volume, and inflection for each word said. Listen to his genius with the language of the underground, a dialect which he called the "Hipsomatic", on The Bad Rapping of the Marquis De Sade, The Kind of Bad Cats, The Hip Einie, and "The Raven". These monologues glow with the poetry inherent in this tongue of the outcase, the droupot, the artist, the black, and the young. Listen to the Hipsomatic translation of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven", and feel the beauty of power of Lord Buckley's poetry as he takes the listener with him on Poe's journey into a tortured mind. He enables the listener to experience strongly the gloom and despair found there and to feel the mind's growing panic as it is being forced to the breaking point. . . by itself.
It has a fantastic sense of renewal that can take any ordinary verb or movement and swing it right up to the punce of the knob in meaning . . .
Notice the range of Lord Buckley's wildly inventive approaches toward presenting comedy, especially on Governor Slugwell and The Train. Listen to Governor Slugwell greeting the masses just before you read the front section of your local newspaper or tune in the evening news report. Both the dignitaries and the common folk might come off the newsprint or the tube differently from the way they used to. A bit more reap, perhaps. You might also notice that one or two of the news stories seem to make a little more sense.
Listen to The Train make its everyday journey to its unexpected destination. Then realize, perhaps, that it’s really the most logical destination of all, and wonder why it wasn’t expected. After all, both The Train and Governor Slugwell are basically funny and entertaining and strikingly original pictures of pieces of life in America.
The citizen is confused. He’s tired to the machines, the washing machines, the television commercials, the time payments, the out doing Charlie, the living better than Fred, the unhappiness.
Notice how straight, in his own way, Lord Buckley really is with whatever he’s talking about – he might come on with a lot of jive at times, but never subjects his audience to any dishonesty. And notice as well, if you can, that’s he’s always talking about something, never just talking, that he’s telling the audience something sweet and beautiful with nearly every breath, and that each insanely funny tale he spins is at the same time also an intensely moral parable.
The theatre came to me as a very religious work. It’s a work of complete dedication. It’s a dangerous work.
Listen to His Royal Holiness of the Far Out explain how the Marquis De Sade’s neighbors got green-eyed about him having a good time and all his carryings-on and bad-rapped the poor cat every step of the way. Think about the logic of evil and the logic of good, and about how much difference there really is between them.
Listen closely as His Lordship recounts the story of the dinner-party which The King of Bad Casts, gave for the Marquis’ buddies. It is possible that the listener might discover something about people who sell out openly and who are able to live with evil; his concept of moral responsibility might start to become less certain and more subtle. Notice also, if possible, that the most maniacally funny parts of the story tell us some very chilling things about ourselves. Ah yes, Lord Buckley: a most extraordinary man – extracting roaring laughter from people by telling them a bit about the nature of evil and by making them see a glimpse of the terrible evil within themselves. There is even a chance that by listening carefully to this satanic monologue you could gain a larger understanding of what The Nazz was talking about when He spoke of Love. Who knows?
… the problem of humanity, of progress to be beautiful, to be more gracious, more sweet, more divine; and, when you balance yourself, the international truth that the world is a family – love – will hit you. And love is swinging.
Listen to the Noble Sir Richard Buckley give the biography of The Hip Einie, telling if the heavy obstacles he had to fight through until he came to where he “laid back into the longest goof in the history of the far-out wig-stretch” and became King of All Spaceheads, and of how this resulted many years later in the building of The Big heater, an event which has changed the world, and which could destroy mankind. But all The Hip Einie did was to live his life, and live it gently and righteously, fighting his problems as best he could. He was, after all, only human.
And that is what Lord Richard Buckley was telling us about most often – our humanity. He talked about what being human is, about how weird an animal we are, and we laugh at our own weirdness. He showed us how strange and wonderful it is to be a living human being, and he showed us how to make the most of it. He taught us how easy it is to love our neighbor, and how beautiful it is to forgive.
People, of course, can be nothing but people; we each just find different ways of fighting the same problems – and of loving the beauty of the same Earth. Lord Buckley shows this to us, and we laugh. Ah, yes, Lord Buckley.
Richard Selinkoff
