WEISENHEIMER AND COMPRESSIONISM: A New Satirical Theme and Variation Chapter for Joseph Machlis' textbook, "The Enjoyment of Music." By Marc Frucht "Kill all cops," .Warm Milk "Kill all lawyers," .Shaquil Wilhelm (a.k.a. W. Shakespeare) In 2005 Marc Weisenheimer, folk singer and classical comedian, listened to a Black & Decker air compressor and contemplated the new music. The term "alternative" was fast growing old, and so was Weisenheimer. Never satisfied with the title youth had given him: "Founding Father of Generation X" he was searching for a new name to call himself, as well this new movement afoot that went far beyond Post-Modernism. The popular form included MTV re-runs, paintings of dried nasal mucus on high-priced canvasses, poems about slamming Spam and diets that require eating solely gefilte fish for four days, followed by three days of milkshakes and healthy dinners, repeated four times each month. This is now called the "rubber ball diet." "What will we call ourselves???" shouted Weisenheimer in the midst of a desperate quest of desperate despair. "There's nothing left!!!" And then it hit him. Actually he almost hit it. He'd stubbed his Miata 4-door alloy-mobile on an entire condominium made of particle board. "That's it," he thought out loud, "I'll call it 'Compressionism.'" He said something about smooshing everything up from thousands of years and rehashing it out every artistic orifice and just about "begging" for it to be called "Compressionism" and so a whole genre was born. Or at least named. THE COMPRESSIONIST PAINTERS In 1996 Brutus Gangreich proposed canceling all National Endowment for the Arts stipends and proverbial hell broke loose. "Anarchy," said Puerto Rico School of Design professor Denise Homogeno, "no one had any money," said the PRISD professor, "so they began making art out of just whatever was lying around. Everything." she said no medium had been left "uncoated." Artist Tish "The Wet" Sponge best represents Compressionist painting even though she was born considerably earlier than Compressionism's advent. Born in 1958, the Hell, Pennsylvania native was raised in 1970 and claims to have "soaked up all [her] inspiration in expensive coffee houses and poetry slams." "I just look at it all, think it over while slurping coffee, and then snot on the canvas," she explains. She pays a lot for canvas, but politically correct environmentalists will please to know that she doesn't use aerosols or other toxic waste to coat her art for setting. She simply spills her coffee refill over it in three even coats and chants the now-famous mantra, "I'll sue, I'll sue, I'll sue." Painters all over America and parts of the world calling themselves Compressionist must master the craft of coffee-spilling before going out from their salad days. One place besides Hell where much Compressionism is being studied is in Seminole, Virginia. John Elston started the Virginese school in an old abandoned catholic monastery in neighboring Virgin, Virginia. Any Compressionist mucus paintings bearing the stamp "made in Virgin," "Crafted by Virginese," or "Seminole Made," command thousands at auction before the painters are even famous. Red King of the alternative band Roomful of Pavement is most famous for his painting work before joining the band because he attended the virginese school as a child and then went on to paint houses with his popular mucus primer. King's "Canvas snottings" (as he calls them) can get him no less than half a million sometimes. Some other painters working in the Compressionist movement are Muriel Weddinghaus (1982-2005) Heinrick "All-U-Can-Eat" Buffet (1937-1992, Eric Tenuta (1985-present) and Johannes Schmithenstein (1999-pres.) They took studio painting out of the studio and into the coffee shop, or wherever else mucus art could be produced. Instead of mixing their pigments on the pallet it was all done in their heads, unrehearsed, unsketched, spontaneous and spur-of-the-moment. There's also a sub movement these years called "pulp fiction" where similar paintings are done right on pieces of particle board but they seldom get more than a couple hundred dollars, no matter who made them. Even if they came from Virgin. (TO BE CONTINUED) (next issue) ---------------------------------------------------------------- And now part II of the Weisenheimer Document ---------------------------------------------------------------- Weisenheimer and Compressionism. (Cont from ATI 65) THE PARTICLE POETS A similar phenomenon was pressing on in the field of poetry between the late 1990's and now. Compressionism took its shape in poetry much the same way it did in painting. Words were collected up from time immemorial then mooshed down into compressed "pulp" phrases that seemed to say almost nothing, at first read. Further study would show that they took at least a little thought to build. In the example "Ode to Odes" by the still famous Franco-American poet Carello Sands Burgero, it will at first seem to make no sense whatsoever: Ode to ode an ode an. I Splendid how odes of ode. Ode odic an what oh, and odes to ode, my. Ago centuries 21 it received I Is this "my ode" ode odious; Further study shows that if you read Burgero's "Ode" backwards it makes a little more sense. Hence: This is my ode to odes. Odious ode my ode, this is. I received it 21 centuries ago, My ode to odes, and oh, what an odic ode. Ode of odes, how splendid is An ode to an ode to odes. Particle Compressionism came to the fore in the work of such poets as Burgero as well as Neil P. Eugene (1990-2007) J. Edgar Oem (1988-2025) and Allen Kernsberg (1941-pres.) Kernsberg, Oem and Burgero were all trained at the Virginese schools, but all felt it only fair that they do with words what others were doing with brushes. Like paintings, some of these poems found some unusual things on the pages right from the poets' heads. In "The Winged Creature" by J. Edgar Oem legend has it that Oem's manuscript contains actual illustrations on every other page using decoupaged composted vegetables right out of his kitchen. Modern technology kept the texture and the smells in each print but managed to keep the bacteria from traveling book to book. By the turn of the century, programmers had gotten really good at debugging such virii. No one has seen Oem's original manuscript after publication of the copies distributed. Rumor has it that the entire book of galley sheets is under his wife's Corsican mint patch in their herb garden. A little must be said about Neil P. Eugene who in 1990 was born in a cottage in New Japan, Connecticut. That would suffice. COMPRESSIONISM IN MUSIC Music was very important to all the Compressionists, not just the recomposers and song splicers. Painting was done to fully orchestrated music; poetry was read aloud to such musical instruments as the Black & Decker drill, Norelco's Dial-A-Bean, and of course La Machine. Car stereos became obsolete at the turn of the century along with cellular phones, as people began wearing both on their wrist in a multi-purpose device called the Sony "Hand Stand Man." It allowed people to fax, phone and groove to old Grateful Dead songs while doing light calisthenics: all the necessities of the modern american workforce worker. Compressionism reflected this in its popular music in the '00's. "What Do You Want Me To Do, A Hand Stand, Man?" was the most popular song in 2002 and it managed to remain anonymous until 2007 when style sleuths were able to detect that the rhyme scheme was similar to another by Marc Weisenheimer. He was charged with 1 count of e-mailing a song on the internet without a Handel, and let go on grounds that the song was necessary with or without credit whether it lacks prurient interest or not. Even though the song wasn't made in Virgin, it got him $4000 and is still popular as today's most important work anthem, second only to The Who's "We're Not Gonna Take It." Other composers true to the Compressionist genre were Warm Milk (1998-pres) Gangsta M.C. (short for Mozart Christ) (1990-2005) Spinning Light (2000-pres) and L.M.N.P. Cool Musician. (1975-2005) It can be said Compressionist music comes from many styles but mostly from a cross between Gregorian Harmonies and Baroque MegaPolyphony. Cool Musician was called to do a Miller Light beer commercial last year and poked harmless fun at Compresssionism when he was heard saying "Sounds Baroque; Tastes like chicken." A little more ought be said about Marc Weisenheimer who was born 1964 in Rotten Villa, England; then moved to Virgin, Virginia in 2003 to see the beginning of Compressionism. That's enough. -#- Look for Compressionist Theatre and Dance subtitles in Machlis' twenty third textbook edition.