The Barberini Mafia Minuets to the Philosophy of the World

How many albums have you heard where you can tell the order in which the tracks were recorded by how far out-of-tune the guitars are?

--An Amazon.com reviewer on the Shaggs

April in Rome has an acute lack of the romantic, dewy-fresh atmosphere that popular imagination ascribes to that month. Audrey Hepburn has yet to go by on a motorino, and the grey skies are less the chic monochrome of La Dolce Vita than they are the backdrops of a bizarre, counter-Reformation Elsinore. The sun and the rain have been battling over our heads for almost a week now. At the moment, an unsettled truce prevails, Tiepolo skies breaking through the drizzly leaden canopy cantilevering over rust-red stucco.

Rain at the Ogre's Castle

Everyone here has their ways of beating this diluvian melancholia, this rainy funk. One choice is to ignore it. In that spirit, the whole class packed up Friday morning for one last ride in our faithful D'Amico Tours bus. We struck out for Caprarola, a grey, Etrurian town under a streaky grey sky. It streaks slowly up the narrow ridge of a vast hill overhanging a wet green gorge thick with ferns and foliage. The village is low and humble, a tired medieval peasant laying low to the uneven stony ground.

It's one street, razor-straight to the peak of the steep slope. There, the pentagonal bulk of the Palazzo Farnese looms with lugubrious semi-gothic gloom over the ash-grey tiled roofs of Caprarola. It's dark against the pale sky as we step into the terraced piazza that rises skyward. Before us is an expanse of switched-back broad steps and rusticated embankments weedy with mildew and decay. The heavy cryptoporticus gates are fortified with massive vermiculated quoining, rich with broken statues and vivid velvety mold.

It's sad and beautiful as we consider the shattered, bleached wood of the boarded-up portal. It's also starting to be, in addition to sad and beautiful, increasingly damp. Professor D., the rain just starting to fall out of the bare, white-void sky, explains to us with typical gusto that it's the door to the wine-cellar.

I try to sketch. My notebook is spotted with grey-black raindrops running the ink like pigeon droppings.

High overhead, the palace drawbridge is suspended on chains from a highly classical gate, full of chunky blocks and dignified capitals. In the grey light, the many-windowed, many-pilastered palace is a massive, rationally oppressive fortress. Its three-tiered, five-sided bastioned bulk seems like a Palladian ogre's castle, full of dried blood and wet, rainy wonder.

Later, I looked at some photos of Caprarola taken during the high blue skies of summer reveals a colorful but alien world, charmingly Renaissance in its bright, sunny plastered yellows and gardens full of green thickets and spraying foamy white fountains. Somehow I prefer the gothick miasma of my visit to the computerized toy-store castle of the guidebooks. It's lonely and bittersweet, the kind of place to find the family ghost of some doomed cardinal stabbed with the poison-filled glass stiletto of a mythical Venetian bravo, the brutal, feted gangsta rappers of their day.

The palace is full of unconsciously melodramatic touches. The pseudo-Pompeiian grotesque-frescoed ceilings are full of gilt and remarkable chlorinated green backgrounds. They brim with perversely dense webs of symbols that mix Christian and pagan, humanist and biblical. Not always with complete success, as the serpent of Greek wisdom clashes almost obscenely with the Chalice of the Sacrament, balanced with unsettling indifference at the apex of one vault. The eponymous goat of Caprarola grins everywhere amid these interlocking ceilings full of boughs and fruit and divinities framed in plasterwork, giving me a pleasant touch of aesthetic creeps.

In the dismal rain, this masterpiece of Peruzzi and Vignola--Palladio's tutor, appropriately enough, for this classical haunted-house--becomes something close to an art lover's version of The Munsters. Even the dark-gold unicorns and bucking Farnese pegasuses on their painted cameos amid swarming Greek letters have a touch of salva me ex ore leonis et de cornibus unicornium exaudi me. The usually sensible helmeted Athena who decorates the low dome of one tiny study is weirdly Siamese-twinned with Mercury in some strange flourish of rhetoric. Commerce and wisdom and antique gender dysphoria. Herm-Athena, a name never to pin on a child you love.

A Hall for the Mad Geniuses of the Counter-Reformation

We find ourselves going through a surreal interior corridor full of twists and turns, every inch frescoed with a tangle of leafy branches festooned with a net of curling cardinal's cords and tassels. Or up a vast circular staircase running up a hollow shaft framed by paired doric columns. Or out onto the second story gallery of the damp circular courtyard, floored with broken remnants of tile marked with painted heraldic fleurs-de-lys.

And then there is the map room looking down on the town, on a vast truncated blue peak floating in the distance on a pillow of cloud. The walls are marked with immense hemispheric projections in gold and blue, marked with dark Roman letters and full of twisty rivers. It looks like the GHQ of a Renaissance mad genius. "Let's see, Catholicism and classical architecture have triumphed here, here, and here..." I hear Vera say teasingly to myself and Amelia, and it's a moment that makes my Ultramontane heart proud.

I notice, on leaving, that on one chart my native Florida appears to have suffered some horrible wasting disease, while Nicaragua has developed warts. Peru swallows almost all of Brazil, its shrunken remnant reduced in this apocryphal geography to a sort of hyperinflated equatorial Uruguay.

The rain doesn't stop, though we trudge through the damp, dark, green gardens and spend a few moments amid the rocaille grottos. We are amid mustachioed stone herms with baskets on their heads and hands on their hips, on their heads, on their shoulders, across their chest. Professor Marconi makes some comment about the ubiquity of the Macarena, that dusty nineties dance fad that seems even more antique than our own surroundings. Meanwhile, Professor Duarte manages to trick us with a joke fountain underneath a pebbly, cavelike pavilion.

It seems a bit redundant, considering we're already soaked to the skin.

There Are Some Things I Wonder

Another way to beat the rain in Rome is to be a slave to it. Some of us, already chained to our work, don't bother leaving studio as the wind whistles down Via Monterone on those stormy days. A dangerous proposition, as studio culture is peculiarly ingenious in inventing ways to waste time. Vera and Amelia and Maureen and Peg have a habit of disappearing into the kitchen for long periods, which means I can usually count on leftovers, and high-quality ones at that. Banana bread, pastries, and the ubiquitous delicacy of American peanut-butter cookies. Studio is knee-deep in printouts from Epicurious.com.

There are worse things in which to be knee-deep.

Though sometimes they don't bake. Once, while cleaning up the kitchen after Peg's birthday part (delayed a week by order of the Italian bishops' conference since it clashed with Good Friday) I turned around to find a couple of my close friends welding dry pasta noodles into weird Frank Gehry shapes using candles. Their next project involves fusilli.

Nobody is safe from the madness. There's Drew, for example. I have discovered he appreciates my CD of early eighteenth-century Tenebrae music from Provence; however, he's also dug up some less highbrow music. Probably one of the worst albums ever recorded, and he's ape over it. Perhaps due to meterology, I share his excitement. It's hilarious.

I refer to the musicological disaster (and cult classic) of the late 1960s known as the Shaggs and their record, Philosophy of the World. As far as I can tell, they seem to have been a 1960s garage band staffed by the ancestors of Strong Bad's infamous Teen Girl Squad. I'm not kidding.

Loopy Polyrhythms Would Make a Great Name for a Chant Schola

Their names were Helen, Better, and Dorothy (Dot) Wiggin, their manager Austin Wiggin, Jr. Their father, a straight-laced, anti-hippie, a-musical son of an amateur fortune-teller, the last person who you'd expect to manage a band. It seemed he thought the rest of the music of the era was trash anyway, so his daughters could botch it with the best of them. Perhaps it's a cynical take, but the hideous reality of their music remains.

They were formed in 1968 and broke up in 1973, and hardly played outside their native town of Fremont, New Hampshire, where their lack of talent was painfully apparent to all and sundry. Yet, weirdly enough, their album, Philosophy of the World is being re-released by RCA Victor, and has even reached Germany.

Why?

Listening to their singing, full of missed notes, off-key harmony, bizarre drum solos and worse, you simply wonder how they ever got that close to the mike. Simply reading the reviews on Amazon.com are enough to make you sick with laughter from fannish obsession and pomobabble:

When listening to the Shaggs one needs to jettison conventional notions of song structure, what is "in tune" or not, even what constitutes suitable subject matter for a pop song ("My Pal Foot Foot," "Who Are Parents?"). Originally issued on a small, dodgy label in 1969, the guileless sounds of Philosophy cast a long shadow nonetheless; the group was one of Frank Zappa's favorites...

Name your kids Moonunit and Dweezil, and suddenly you're Karl Haas. It gets far stranger, with vast descriptions that sound like Guillame de Machaut, without the talent:

...delirious, playfully constructed music has everything you least expect: loopy polyrhythms that follow no external law, off-kilter singing conducted in unison that sounds like the hit parade broadcast from Jupiter, and bizarre, elementary-school guitar playing. Best enjoyed in small doses, this enchanting, accidental music approximates the highly personal charms of so-called "outsider" visual art...

And what, pray tell, is "outsider art"? Unlike the Shaggs, it's starting to go inside. The pristine Meierian spaces of Atlanta's High Museum were full of it when I last visited. It's full of weird bottle-cap rocaille, Watts-towers wanna-bes, Gaudi-manqué. An art of a certain ungainly crude innocence that seemed to fill the hole in individualistic southern rural Protestantism (with its Baptisms from Hard-Shell to Free-Will) to what the pink-and-white-and-blue Marian ex-voto offering does for cultures from Mexico to Sicily. But outsider art is everywhere in certain chic aesthetic circles these days, outsider art, outsider writing--stay tuned--and, it seems, quite horrible outsider music.

The Shaggs may not be on display in a museum (fortunately), but it seems their adoring thousands--hundreds?--tens?--make it up with quantity rather than quality. Their fans, however, make up for it online. They've created numerous websites (not one but two pseudo-official ones, to boot, one named after the girls' incoherent song about walking, "My Pal Foot-Foot") to offer up to their idols, who presumably have forgotten all about it and gone on to Boomer oblivion.

The Ars Nova of Hauntingly Bad Tabasco

In certain corners of the web, they are weirdly ubiquitous. Even Susan Orlean, the real-life writer who got weirdly immortalized on-screen as the character whose unadabtable writing was being adapted in Adaptation, has joined in on the rush and written an essay on them, "Meet the Shaggs."

As she says, Depending on whom you ask, the Shaggs were either the best band of all time or the worst. Frank Zappa is said to have proclaimed that the Shaggs were "better than the Beatles." More recently, though, a music fan who claimed to be in "the fetal position, writhing in pain," declared on the Internet that the Shaggs were "hauntingly bad," and added, "I would walk across the desert while eating charcoal briquettes soaked in Tabasco for forty days and forty nights not to ever have to listen to anything Shagg-related ever again." Such a divergence of opinion confuses the mind. Thus Orlean.

(Quoth the Shaggs: There are many things I wonder / There are many things I don't / It seems as though the things I wonder most / Are the things I never find out. )

She, of course, doesn't admit the fact that they might just be bad, and feels compelled to ask, with wonderfully unconscious pretention, Is this the colloquial ease and dislocated syntax of a James Schuyler poem or the awkward innermost thoughts of a speechless teen-ager?

That we can't tell the difference between poetry and incoherence says a good deal about modern culture. In some respects, the question is unanswerable, or the answer is both yes and no. It's three girls singing preposterously, so atonal as to have crossed some interior line never dared by such illuminati as John Cage and the sadistic inventor of twelve-tone rhythm.

It's a reductio ad absurdum of modern music: three girls from New Hampshire have outdone in Promethean pride everyone from Richard Strauss to Philip Glass. On top of that, it's funny, it's spectacularly awful. It's not even so bad it's good, it's so bad...it's bad. It's the sort of inspired awfulness that deserves recognition, though it's far more fun to talk rubbish about.

Exploiting the Tyranny of the Unconscious; and the Belgian Conga

At their first public appearance, the Shaggs had cans thrown at them. It's a more wholesome expression than trying to tart up these poor little innocents into something grand and spectacularly psychological, full of the numinous and long sophisticated words. It's better to simply enjoy and laugh. It's exploitation, yes, but at least it has a certain horrible honesty to it rather than pretending the emperor has clothes.

When you look at what the recording industry folks had to say about their work, it has a certain sad, exploitive clarity to it. Orlean, in the article mentioned above, quotes Joe Mozian (also the genius behind the release of a Belgian lounge music piece, the surreally-named "The Frère Jacques Conga) at RCA Victor:

The Shaggs were beyond my wildest dreams. I couldn't comprehend that music like that existed. It's so basic and innocent, the way the music business used to be. Their timing, musically, was...fascinating. Their lyrics were...amazing. It is kind of a bad record; that's so obvious, it's a given. But it absolutely intrigued me, the idea that people would make a record playing the way they do.

In other words, it's so awful, you wonder why they tried. It's a heartbreaking thing to say.

It's alarming, somehow, this bizarre exploitation, this search for uninspired inspiration in the dregs of creativity. Indeed, some of the most celebrated of the outsider artist cult have been, in fact, clinically insane. Perhaps if the Shaggs had been schizophrenic, they might have gotten a grant. This is especially true among outsider writers. Manic writer and lunatic Henry Darger wrote 18,000 pages of his secret fantasy The Story of the Vivian Girls in what is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandecco-Angellinean War Storm, caused by the Child Slave Rebellion before his death in the early 1970s.

Or there's the founding father of outsider art, the mad Adolph Wölfli. Committed to the Waldau clinic in Bern in 1895, by his death in 1930 he had amassed a rat's nest of scribblings numbering almost 25,000 pages. Imaginary memoirs, plays, fictive geographies of magical kingdoms peopled by weird animals and the eponymous St. Adolf, one writer in the hallowed pages of the Fortean Times called them "improbable, monotonous and self-referential."

Rather like the Shaggs. It's original, it's pure, it's unique.

So what? It's also hilariously awful. What can one say, for example, about such uninspired lyrics about that uniquely creative time of the year, Halloween?

It's Halloween,
It's Halloween,
It's time for scares,
It's time for screams,
It's Halloween,
It's Halloween,
The ghosts will spook,
The spooks will scare,
Why, even Dracula will be there.

Shades of the Palazzo Farnese at Caprarola.

Soluable Fish Would Also Make a Great Name for a Chant Schola

The Surrealists, whose dreamlike world of Freudian cloud-castles, Quixotic mustaches and bowler-hatted men was forming at this time, loved Wölfli's lunacy, loved the idea of a man as a writing machine devoid of self-meaning, loved the subconscious and the trance.

Yet, it seems Adolph's self-canonization and interior cosmologies seemed so fraught with personal meaning as to be almost unreadable. And really dull. Lunacy, for all its poetic posturing, seems inevitably to turn out to be prosaic, and very consciously prosaic. To paraphrase Chesterton, if I think I am a piece of glass, I'm quite tiresomely a piece of glass. I'm used to it. It's normal. It's boring. And so the Surrealists discovered that their soulless Cartesian writing-machines weren't everything they were cracked up to be, as Antonio Melechi wrote in his article on the subject:

...the Surrealist project proved impossible. Automatic writing offered few of the surprises that were to be found in...insane writing... Texts such as Possessions and Soluble Fish were passable “simulations of mental debility,” but their spontaneity and exuberance was formulaic.

Indeed.

Soluable Fish, I think, would make a good name for a band. Rather like the Shaggs. But getting back to them, they're quite awful, really: it doesn't matter whether they're outsiders or not. They're awful, and I'm happy to leave Drew's and my exuberance to that fact. Bad music always is good enough to cause laughter.

Or even smiles. As one reviewer put it:

When their voices get soft and quiet at the end of "Who Are Parents?" it's about the sweetest moment I ever heard on a record. The songs were all arranged and practiced before entering the studio; they are not "accidents", they just feature the same sort of charming "incompetence" as your kids' refrigerator art.

I just wouldn't put it in a museum.

And Pope Urban VIII as Spiderman

And then the sun comes out, eventually; then the best way to beat the rain is seize the day. Yesterday, I headed out towards Palazzo Barberini with Liz the grad student. She's a compact little bundle of enthusiasm about seeing all the tourist spots. Not having Professor Duarte to haul them from church to church and natter on with delightful free-association about aedicular reliquaries, Spiderman, Carlo Maderno's twenty uncles and Lazio football, she has to do it all herself. And being in tourist mode myself as the weeks tick down (less than 18 days until my return) I am happy to come along.

As we walked into the gravelled forecourt, the sky an eye-piercing indigo, we can't help enjoying the little dash of bright sunshine that envelops us. It's bright, and the stucco facade of the great palace with its loggia and false-perspective windows along the piano nobile is even brighter. She points out some of the more idiosyncratic details, probably courtesy of another outsider artist so to speak, the melancholy Cavaliere Francesco Borromini. Except he had talent as well as madness.

He, his uncle Maderno and his rival Borromini all had their hand in this exuberant construction-project, and their collective genius harmonizes like a mixture of polyphony and improvisational jazz. Between the triglyphs are engagingly odd panoplies of helmets and shields and big-mouthed bony fish that could have come out of a Robert Ballard National Geographic special. Grimacing faces scream out from the sculptured eaves.

Liz is skeptical about most things and applies an Enlightenment rationalism to her beliefs, though it is a skepticism more refreshingly open than most modern dogmatic agnosticism, more Voltairean than Voltaire. And while she finds my tendency to be found in dark corners of churches amid the relics utterly puzzling, she still listens when I explain the hagiographic minutiae of St. Onumphrey or the real deal on the glorified body. (Quoth the Shaggs: It doesn't matter where you go / It doesn't matter who you see / There will always be / Someone who disagrees.)

It's alien to her, of course, but she admits that my world, however antidiluvian to her, exists. As a consequence, she usually has an interesting take on things. Like the Barberini.

The Renaissance Man Rap

We stepped into the cool dark open vestibule beneath the palace, enfolded in the niched curve of the apse, up into the open ovular stair-hall, starkly Borrominian, and back out into the light of the ramp into the garden. We paused before a bulky, muscular and fainly effeminate Apollo. "I love the Barberini! They were so in your face! They were the top family around here!"

I smiled approvingly. I tend to favor the Chigi myself, but I can be open-minded too.

"You know that version of Romeo and Juliet with Leonardo di Crap-rio, it's like that, the way they turned the Capulets and the Montagues into gangsters swerving around in big cars and acting as if they were lords of the earth, it's just like that!"

It sounded better the first time I heard it: but I think she might be on to something.

Considering Venice was so full of hired killers--and popular, idolized, dandyish ones at that with their own pop-mythos--at the same time the Barberini were strutting around Rome engaging in artistic gang warfare with the Farnese out at Caprarola--a brief descent into the tacky neo-baroque anti-baroque of rap thuggery is surprisingly on-point.

The Barberini's good taste to us today comes from their remarkable, exuberant, overweeningly prideful bad taste. They thought, in teeny-bopper parlance, they were all that. Di Craprio indeed. Caprio, Capra, Caprarola. Perhaps. That goat again.

At the very least, the Barberini knew what was good, and they liked it, even if they pumped it up with Cosa Nostra exuberance and murdered people in between acts of their masques. They didn't sit around listening to arbiters of taste pontificate about this, that or the other. Heck, they were the arbiters of taste and they loved it. They didn't support some sad proto-Shaggs with mandolins or chisels on the strength of their being touted or exploited by garreted weirdos in black turtlenecks over at the Jesuit College as being "groovy, man." Dude.

We went up Bernini's open staircase, wide and white with pristine stucco and deliciously cool from the sun, and went back down again when we discovered the ticket counter was downstairs.

And then back up again. And through a dozen rooms with lavish frescoed ceilings, past Madonnas both beautiful and astonishingly clumsy, splendid Bambini and ones painted with a remarkable, prune-purple ugliness. There were pink candy-floss palaces populated by quattrocento angels and stark broken-up ruins as a lonely backdrop to a drawn-faced St. Catherine and a sorrowful St. Sebastian. Another view of that military martyr made him have a face colored like mint-flavored cough-syrup, a casualty to pre-modern anatomy. And Holbein's flat, pig-faced Henry VIII stared down from one wall, all puffs and slashes and velvet. Every inch a king, and there's quite a few inches there.

The Triumph of Divine Providence

The crowning triumph was the great hall with its vast allegorical ceiling. I spent nearly forty-five minutes laying on a couch staring up into the clouds and gods painted overhead. It is a monument to astonishing family pride, perhaps justified by the feather in their bonnet which was the Papacy, but still a touch overwhealming nonetheless.

(Shaggs again: Oh, the rich people want what the poor people's got / And the poor people want what the rich people's got / And the skinny people want what the fat people's got/ And the fat people want what the skinny people's got/ You can never please anyone in this world).

While its focus is the great laurel-wreathed swarm of enormously fat heraldic Barberini bees, it's supposed to be the triumph of Divine Providence. The divine celebrated here is a distinctly pagan and unprovidential one. Clouds swirl and figures caper like swimmers in a vast aerial aquarium, while Divine Providence herself stands in shimmering gold beneath the Barberini escucheon. Around the corners great scrums of muscular ignudi support her, while extravagant, random bits of architecture prop up the edges, full of octagonal tondi and sheep skulls. Meanwhile, at one sid an enormously fat Silenus lurks bibulously in a green glade and a winged Saturn chews nonchalantly on one of his kids. Even he seems charming in this topsy-turvy weightless world, without the baggage of Goya gloom that would accrue to his gaunt figure in the next four centuries.

Perhaps the subject is Divine Providence after all: and I say this without sarcasm. For, that God could draw out such multicolored, exuberant, unintended wonder out of a seventeenth-century mafia family's bloated self-worth says volumes about the immutable wit and cleverness of the Deity. I'm serious.

And so we walked back under the warm sun. Liz went off to sketch and I thought of ways to stick more cherubs into my latest design project. And somewhere, someplace, maybe a Shaggs record, that compendium of the unintentional, was playing. Though I hope not.