OPERATION ITCH produces political satire including the occasional political ad. Primarily, we produce THE HERMIT WITH DAVIS FLEETWOOD. The Hermit is for the seriously unserious, reverently irreverent, amoral moralists out there who are brilliantly original, yet with a post-modern awareness, are frustrated by the derivative nature of their creative output and critical thinking. Eye eee (or i.e., as it were): This introduction, the very manifesto of THE HERMIT WITH DAVIS FLEEWTOOD is a complete rip-off of a spoken word intro to the Nation of Ulysses song, The Sound of Jazz to Come. Of note here, or of footnote here, or perhaps of endnote here, but not any of those, but rather, here: The Sound of Jazz to Come was itself a kind of cover song, containing elements- or, at the very least, an homage, to John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme.
But I digress.
The spoken word intro to the Sound of Jazz to come (from the album PLAYS PRETTY FOR BABY; Dischord records, 1992), which I will continue to appropriate, or steal, in a moment, was spoken by Ian Svenonius or one of his sidekicks in a deadpan that puts the Blues Brothers to shame, with a wit as dry as James Bond martini, was also stolen- er- appropriated from a Norwegian- American sociologist Thorstein Bunde Veblen (1857-1929). I mean- shit, how PUNK is that? This, then, is the aim of THE HERMIT WITH DAVIS FLEETWOOD. Okay, derivative self flagellating, near bio confessional now complete, we continue. Or begin again. Whatever.
THE HERMIT WITH DAVIS FLEETWOOD is for the seriously unserious, reverently irreverent, amoral moralists and/ or those whose iconoclastic assault on the received pieties of America place them in the front ranks of social critics.
Like you. Like Davis Fleetwood.
What went into the making of THE HERMIT? There was his erudition, his job on an MTV reality TV show, now ten years past- a show notable in that it never aired, there is his stock of language, his lore in urban sagas, his ransacking of every literature. There is the precision with which he knows the homely and workday details of culture as well as the big abstraction, the ease with which he moves about in history from neolithic times to the report of the latest congressional committee. There is his wish to be, and the acceptance that it will never com to pass, Ian Svenonius circa 1991. And there only the slightest of winks as he simultaneously slings shit at the world, suffers your silly slings and arrows, and then, true to his Irish background- genetically predisposed to pugilism, he punches you in the gut with the truth. And this too, in various forms (traditional and not yet invented), is THE HERMIT WITH DAVIS FLEETWOOD. < less
United States of America
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