Twenty % Tippers - Part 3

This is the third Twenty % Tippers flyer that I collected from a C train subway platform. If after reading the flyer's amusing copy you want a free CD, you can get it here.

While still at the University of Chicago I was approached by Ernest de Koven Leffingwell, a Ph.D. in geology, who offered me the job of anthropologist with the soon to embark United States Polar Expedition. The team was impressed by my essay contributing to the theory of grammatical gender titled "English Loan-Nouns Used in the Icelandic Colony of North Dakota," which first appeared in Dialect Notes, 1903. The major backers of the expedition came from the Geographical Society, which believed in the possibility of an undiscovered continent up in the Arctic Ocean. In the name of U.S. commercial and cultural interests, the expedition agreed to transport thousands of wax cylinder recordings by the U.S. music group Twenty % Tippers to the nothern-most Eskimo population, thus beating the competing Finnish expedition, which was transporting thousands of wax cylinder recordings of their country's cultural representative, the music group Classic Jew-Haters. If we could get the Twenty % Tippers recordings to the Eskimos first, the U.S. would thus capture the coveted nothern-Arctic market, making our nation's music number one with a bullet in this enigmatic region.

Meeting up with the United States Polar Expedition the following year at the whaling harbor at Herschel Island, just west of the delta of the Mackenzie River in northwestern arctic Canada, we continued north-easterly on the thirteen-ton gasoline schooner Duchess of Bedford, Captain Joseph Bernard master. The weather was forbidding, delays mounted, and in time food became scarce. Problems ensued as members of the Duchess of Bedford made alcohol out of the ship's flour and sugar, causing not only drunkeness but a shortage of supplies. Soon Captain Bernard complained about tonnage, threatening to jettison the crates holding the thousands of wax cylinder recordings of the Twenty % Tippers. de Koven Leffingwell then ordered that I lead a small contingent and take our chances over the winter ice, pulling a week's supply of food along with the several crates of Tippers music cylinders. Off we went. At first our team had luck catching a kind of scaly fish referred to as "connie" by the Hudson's Bay traders, whose name came from the French l'inconnu, "the unknown" fish. Eventually there was not enough food for our party of six, and we ate what we could scrounge, including the tongue of a beached bowhead whale, four years dead. There was scarce food for our dogs, and we ourselves, weakened by our inadiquate diet, often had to pull on the sleds. By the time we were fortunate enough to reach a Tuktoyaktuk Eskimo village near the Arctic Circle, we had been reduced to eating strips of bear skin dipped in oil. To our dismay, the village was grossly littered with scores of Classic Jew-Hater recoding cylinders which the Tuktoyaktuk Eskimos lacked the equipment to play. The Finnish team had beaten us.

After wallowing in an initial sense of failure, the idea came to me that we could simply announce to the world the capture of the Eskimo listening market by the United States team. Who would know otherwise? Now the race was on to beat the Finnish expedition back to the nearest telegraph office, hundreds of miles away, at Athabaska Landing. We began to race southward, across the mountains to the Yukon and down to te United States government wireless station at Eagle City, Alaska. In our haste, we abandoned the countless crates filled with Twenty % Tippers recording cylinders in the middle of nowhere. I must assume they remain there still, ready to be enjoyed - although for the life of me, I don't know why our backers hadn't instead decided on wax cylinder recordings of Nora Bayes singing "Has Anyone Here Seen Kelly", for the Ziegfeld Follies of 1907. Now that's music!

Twenty % Tippers - Part 2

This is another Twenty % Tippers flyer I found on a C line subway platform, promoting their free CD. Once again I'll write it out so that you can enjoy the text:

"The best time of your life," the parents kept whispering as we nervously scanned the local playground, vaguely aware of the strange world awaiting on the periphery: gangsters in snappy clothes lying at the bottom of the East River, Portuguese sailors in the Indian Ocean driving the dodo bird to extintion, Japanese soldiers torching the Shanghai Commercial Press Company, China's largest repository of classical history and literature, epediomologist Ernest Wynder painting the backs of mice with cigarette tar distillate to see how many would develop cancerous tumors. Autumn came and saw us dressed in bizarre tin foil and macrame outfits and deposited into the Third Avenue Ragamuffin Parade. Sometimes a creaky old black and white movie came on tv, pale lovers rendezvousing under the gazebo at the chime of midnight. Gee, maybe adult life wouldn't be so harsh after all?

Soon we were hustled through a series of antiquated brick schoolhouses to receive a lopsided education stressing home economics, jumping jacks, long division, driver's ed, and upon graduation found ourselves working a series a dreary day jobs in places you'd refer to as nowhere or nothing, taking orders from a boss always named Mr. Paris or Mr. London, unseen behind a frosted glass door, discussing revolving letters of credit with smiling bankers, screaming furiously into the telephone at ungrateful family members. On lunch breaks we spoke over and over of being born at a very fortunate sliver in time and narrowly missing compulsory military conscription, marvelling at our dumb luck again and again , our cheeks bulging with turkey meatballs, cheese triangles, sausage roll-ups, pickled eggs.

Outside of these day jobs, we drifted in and out of relationships with those as emotionally blindsided as ourselves, and upon reaching a certain age, married whoever we were keeping company with, like musical chairs when the recording stops. Due to our marked weaknesses and the absence of adults to ask a single question of, those who became closest to us were hurt profoundly.

But then there was the music, which was totally our own, distant from that was referred to as the music business or the business of music. We came up with original songs, slowly, cautiously, in one instance taking seven years to complete a four-line stanza. the music had to be good as it was the truest part of ourselves, the part we hoped would stanch a culture forced upon us without consent - cheap credit cards, breast implants, tuna salad without a trace of tuna, hysterical canned laughter, corpses floating down the Euphrates, university accreditation, bench-clearing brawls, an entire society of sore winners and sore losers.

We didn't know how to reach you, but hoped you might feel the same way. Meanwhile, we constantly scribbled notes on the backs of fast-food napkins and gas station receipts and in the patches of white-space from trash magazines, practicing what we'd tell you if and when we were to ever meet up.

Twenty % Tippers - Part 1

While taking the C train downtown, I found a series a flyers taped up along the 14th Street station platform. They were all promotions for the Twenty % Tippers, a quirky NYC band that may or may not be making a comeback, and their latest CD that you can get free.

While long copy isn't usually advisable for a band flyer, it works brilliantly here because waiting for a train leaves many of us with nothing better to do than read, especially when the writing is this good.

Since the type is too small peruse, I'll reproduce it here:

It was not a good time for the arts. We barely worked at all, and could not obtain a commission to present our songs during the five-day festival of Minerva. The atmosphere was grim and deteriorating daily. An occasional lyrical collaborator of ours, primarily a writer of Atellan farces, had just been burned alive in the ampitheater for penning a line which had an amusing double-entendre. Another collaborator, best known for the short poem in hexameters titled "Reply to Brutus' Eulogy of Cato," was accused of homosexual relations, both active and passive, with Mnester the comedian, and, as punishment, was sewn up in a sack with a dog, a cock, a snake and a monkey, and cast into the river. All pantomime actors and their hangers-on had been expelled from the city. People could now be executed for carrying a coin bearing Augustus' head into a lavatory or brothel. Foreign kings were detained in the capital - Maroboduus the German, Rhascuporis the Thracian, Archelaus of Cappadocia - all of whose kingdoms had lately been reduced to provincial status.

We survived on meager payment from the occasional private concert given on Sunday afternoon in the quarters of a wealthy family originating from Aricia, which boasted many ancestral busts of senators. Woe to us, the payment from these private concerts was made in barley bread instead of the customary wheat ration. While we played for varying members of the family, others congregated in the anteroom and gesticulated violently, plotting an attack on the Senate House to kill as many senators as convenient, bickering and accusing one another of incompetence for a recent failed attempt in which the ringleader did not give the agreed upon signal of letting his gown fall to expose the shoulder.

We waxed reflective on more prosperous times. Gone were the days when out great patron and protector held sway, and we were paid handsomely for our performances: ten pecks of grain and an additional ten pounds of oil, fresh hand-pressed cheese and green figs of the second crop. Back in those days of vanity, we would find the time to soften the hair on our legs by singeing them with red-hot walnut shells. Who among us cannot recall our great benefactor, resplendent in his glory, the abolisher of the half-per-cent auction tax, attending the garrison Games and throwing down javelins at a wild boar let loose in the arena? On the discovery of his passing, because of the dark stains which covered his body and the foam on his lips, poison was greatly suspected. With his death announcement, the populace threw their household-gods into the street, and princes shaved their beards as a token of profound grief. Not knowing how to survive in this difficult environment, we debated whether to consecrate all our songs jountly to Neptune and Mars, and cautiously venture far back into the wild interior, with the intention of subsisting there indefinitely. How else could artists such as we hope to practice their craft in such godless times?