To all visitors: Kalvos & Damian is now a historical site reflecting nonpop
from 1995-2005. No updates have been made since a special program in 2015.
Kalvos & Damian Logo

Chronicle of the NonPop Revolution


 
The Essay
Show #101
101 Squarely Rooted Synergies
David Gunn
Theories abound as to why the number 101 is inexorably linked to music appreciation and sociology classes. The Theory of Relativity -- that is, the Theory of Relativity of Arturo Schopenhauer's tailor, Schlomo -- maintains that music is best appreciated in an environment relatively devoid of crows. When doubters placed 150 glassy-eyed children in a New York concert hall during a rehearsal of Rodion Shchedrin's "The Lady with the Lapdog" -- the tune, by the way, beside which I am presently chatting -- no, that can't be right; this is Daniel Lentz's "Is It Love," which sounds a bit like dog lip in Russian; hence the confusion -- anyway, after these kids had been locked in the concert hall for 30 minutes with music not entirely dissimilar to this creating lasting subliminal impressions on their dorsal cerebellum appendages, a big bucket of squawking crows was emptied in front of the second violin section, after which the reactions from the young audients were carefully recorded. Allowing for an error factor of plus or minus 9%, the results suggest that the children didn't give a hoot for the music with or without the crows. Upon learning of the outcome of this experiment, Schlomo grabbed the nearest set of quantum mechanical equations, removed the irregularly-shaped Bernoulli numbers, filled them with gasoline, and wired them to the ignition of the doubters' station wagon. Although the Bernoulli numbers failed to detonate, they did affect the car's computer system, indirectly causing the brakes to grab just as the doubters were parallel parking in front of the offices of the Functional Phenomenology League, after which they -- i.e. the doubters, not the brakes -- experienced the transcendental equivalent of a beheading. Schlomo, meanwhile, fled to Lapland, where he continued his research unfettered by doubters, crows, or relatives.

Number 101 is also the Motel 1984 room in which O'Brien and the Thought Police help guest Winston Smith -- through a kind of rodentine epiphany -- learn that 2+2=5, a precursor to the new math regularly practiced in alternative schools around the country today. The 101st subset of the Theorem of Spatial Diminution asserts that antimatter -- and its niece, Blanche Matter -- can and probably will reduce energy levels by absorbing frequency nu radiation, but in so doing will wind up trapped in an Algonquin Hole the size of Cleveland. And 101 is of course the atomic number of mendelevium, an element whose properties include extremely active elliptical nuclei, a pulsating reddish luminosity visible from space, as well as eight warehouses located just east of Atlantic City and a restaurant in Brussels called le flambeau oriange.

Schlomo's theory, gas-filled Bernoulli numbers, a bucket of crows, Blanche Matter, an Atlantic City storage facility, Russian dog lips, and a rodentine epiphany -- bizarre bunkmates indeed. But soon, with the help of various musical selections, clarity may rear its precognitively ugly head again and reveal the continuity of the bedfellows, all of which are ancillarially linked to the 101st episode of Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar, this portion of which contains no fewer than four examples of pluperfect harmonic coherence, bon radio. Other parts of the program may contain philosophic fragments suitable for discussion and dismissal, not necessarily in that order. But order is most definitely on the menu of today's show which -- while lacking half a host of the other than liturgical wafer variety -- will try to compensate through the use of deceit, chicanery and antimatters of fact, beginning as soon after the conclusion of this Lentz number as is bipedally possible, because the time to strike with the hot poker lengthens in the shadows.