About

LOST AND FOUND is an evening of two song-cycles by composer Phil Kline - Zippo Songs & Fear and Loathing

Zippo Songs: Poems from the Front

By Phil Kline

I'm skeptical about communicating political ideas through art, and I have doubts as to whether a piece about the Vietnam War might change your mind about that conflict. I derive my political views through direct observation of life. Yet art inevitably enters the political process, as it reminds me what it means to be alive. They say all politics is local, and art helps me locate myself.

Zippo Songs originated when I found out about poems American GIs scratched on their lighters in Vietnam. It's interesting that this hadn't happened during World War II or the Korean War, since Zippos had long been widely available through Army PX stores; but in the '60s, personalized poems on the sides of soldiers' lighters became the norm. These inscriptions contain a world of emotion that spoke purely and directly to me without the baggage tag of political commentary. I saw the poems as a vital little body of literature and began to think of a way to work with them as dramatic material, not propaganda.

Wartime Zippos are highly collectible, so I was able to find them on eBay and through collector catalogs, which read almost like books of poetry. Once I had over 100 poems I began sorting and culling them, eventually hitting upon the idea of grouping them by themes: drugs, sex, fear, peace, etc. As the themes accrued, they seemed to mark the coordinates of a journey from life to death.

At this point, I realized that I wanted a prelude to the Zippo poems, and I looked to General William Westmoreland, the equivocating director of the Vietnam War. In classical terms I saw him as the underworld god who sent these souls on their dark journey. But I couldn't find any quotes I liked. However, right there in the news was Donald Rumsfeld's ridiculous circumlocutory. Different time, same game: I'd found my great prevaricator. Of course this implied a connection to the war in Iraq, which I chose not to avoid. So Zippo Songs begins with a suite of three Rumsfeld songs.

People frequently ask about making art in the post-9/11 world, and I always say the impulse is the same. The pain and anxiety was in the air before that particular Tuesday, and was already in the art. But the commitment to get it done, to communicate, is greater now. There is a sense of urgency, of time running out, and the upcoming election only heightens that.

These days, choosing an insecure income source such as music is in itself a revolutionary act. How much more strikingly can an intelligent person opt out of popular value systems? I do what I do because, really and truly, I need to. In advance of any project, I don't really know what I want to say other than, "Here is the world I see, a world that I find painful and baffling and hilarious and ravishing, that I want to continue to live in and maybe meet you in." And when I hear voices of authority telling me that I should be fearful and angry, I want to say "screw you" and be confident and joyful. Those are my politics.

Fear and Loathing

By Phil Kline

Hunter S. Thompson: prankster , agent provocateur, madman...poet laureate of the American soul?

Yes, there's more than a little bit of Walt Whitman in there, an all-consuming passion for the American panorama and its inhabitants, a love that flies past the scenery like a big red convertible roaring through the desert, but it's an often unrequited love that is sorely relieved of its illusions, one that flies into rage, explodes into space, crashes and burns.

He wrote about the death of the American Dream in capital letters, yet it seemed like Hunter thought things just might work out after all, if only people would wake up and see through the...well, that optimism faded over the years, a flame flickering lower and lower until his suicide, which in retrospect now seems like the least surprising thing he ever did.

FEAR AND LOATHING is a song cycle based on Thompson's works, drawing inspiration not only from the "gonzo" classics which bear that name, but from various essays, letters, and unpublished personal writings.

It is a song-journal of the American landscape seen with the terrible clarity of x-ray eyes. Here the sacred and profane drink together and swap identities in the men's room, familiar faces lie, and hallucinations speak the truth. The American Dream pulses through everyone and everything, as a source of hope, folly and, ultimately, as a vacated promise. Emotions are seriously mixed.

The cycle is scored for deep voiced singer and an electro-acoustic chamber ensemble of violin, guitar, and percussion, all, in the manner of the author, plugged-in and altered.