The Secret Agent

NOTE:  An unpublished ms submitted to Prof. Sorenson, Fall 1987.  Perusing it now, what with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent War on Terror, it seems particularly apt as a contemporary critique.  The fanciful title must have been suggested by some good weed.

THE HERMENEUTIC HEURETICS OF CONRAD'S SECRET AGENT

In principle what one of us may or may not know as to any given fact can't be a matter for inquiry to the others.  --The Professor (Chapter 4)

A bit of newspaper with a few lines of print on the suicide of a nameless woman twists its way through the gusting dust and debris of a desolate Soho street:  "An impenetrable mystery seems destined to hang over this act of madness and despair."  (Chapter 13)  A week earlier, while the headlines shrieked at every street corner of a powerful explosion in Greenwich Park, two men, a "Doctor" and a "Professor,"getting drunk within the din of the Silenus, likewise had to admit  "some mystery" amid the debris:  a charred hole at the root of a tree, a man's body blown to pieces.  "The rest's mere newspaper gup," one of them says.

These men are distinguished from the average gup-consumer by the fact that they are intellectuals;  they believe they know something others don't.  One of them, in fact, had provided the chemical device for the explosion, while the other was the erstwhile comrade of the man who plotted its detonation.  They think of themselves, moreover, as active participants-- agents-- in the historical flow, unlike the faceless crowd:

... the mass of mankind mighty in its numbers... numerous like locusts, industrious like ants, thoughtless like a natural force, pushing on blind and orderly and absorbed, impervious to sentiment, to logic, to terror, too, perhaps.  (Chapter 5)

This mass of mankind sustains itself on mass-media "treacle," and it is most often seen milling about  street-corner ideology troughs, the news vendors.  As it happens the two intellectuals are continuing a debate, posed a month ago, which they will attempt to settle at a third meeting ten days from now.  The subject of their discussion, the central issue of the novel, is precisely the efficacy of propaganda-- more properly, of Science-- upon human history.

The terms of the argument cover the gamut of radical theory.  At one extreme lies the non-consequent, passive historical determinism of the "ticket-of-leave apostle" and former apprentice locksmith, Michaelis, who views humanity as the object of the material world:

History is made by men, but they do not make it in their heads.  The ideas that are born in their consciousness play an insignificant part in the march of events.  (Chapter 3)

At the opposite pole stands the anarchist Professor, a student chemist and a pathetic, a human bomb whose cosmos consists exclusively of his own, self-obsessed subject.  (The "old terrorist" Karl Yundt holds a similar position, but lacks the "force" to undergo the refinement of such an utter break with the human race.)  Finally, somewhere near the apex of the argument, the Doctor, a failed medico, imagines a synthesis between the subjective and objective factors of history.

Lately the news has been full of an International Conference on terrorism to be held in Milan.  This is to be a great tribunal of public opinion, the fulcrum for the actions of secret agents, including the nominal Agent Delta, alias "Mr. Verloc," who mutters that he is "in the habit of reading the daily papers" and even fancies that he understands what he reads.  Yet his superior-- and nemesis-- Mr. Vladimir contemplates an act "of destructive ferocity as to be incomprehensible, inexplicable, almost unthinkable  as a lever to rally corpulent, bourgeois, "natural-born British subjects," the very likenesses of Mr. Verloc himself, to the defense of European Civilization.

The text most of these characters inhabit and perceive is black and white, arranged in straight lines, uncomplicated causes and predetermined effects.  Grey, however, is an ominous uncertainty, a lack of clarity, a chimera.  Mr. Vladimir regards from his disdainful distance "a grey sheet of printed matter" with its "F.P." logo and crude hammer-pen-torch imagery.  "A charabia every bit as incomprehensible as Chinese," he sneers.  "Isn't your society capable of anything else but printing this prophetic bosh in blunt type on this filthy paper?"  (Chapter 2)

The society "F.P." to which he refers is the Future of the Proletariat, of which Mr. Verloc is vice-president and whose grey propaganda rag is edited by the same Doctor who will presently be arguing  a point of political theory with the Professor, over a red-and-white tablecloth at the Silenus.  To the Professor, the laws of history are motivated not by propaganda, but by another sort of "F.P." altogether:  the Force of Personality.  Curiously, neither of them appears to think remarkable a certain pink hue in the pages of the daily newspaper lying open in front of them both; in a world perceived in cool blacks, whites, and grey, only the trashy mass media appear to reflect the heat of living events.

The Mystery:  a finely-shaded detective story, an essay on epistemology, frames the text of The Secret Agent.  Paradoxically, the more the text seems to solve this mystery, the more it appears to lose its grip upon the solution. At one point, text "explodes" in a simultaneous constructing and deconstructing, yet for the most part it is static, talky, and cluttered with everyday peculiarities.  On its surface we are allowed to witness only one "extraordinary" event, the anticlimactic murder of "Adolf Verloc," narrated in a strange, matter-of-fact fashion; the rest is perceived through other media:  news reports, dialogue, interior monologue, and a certain amount of authorial second-guessing.  As a result, we are paradoxically intimate with the Secret of each character, but at the same time distant enough to view all of them as the objective components-- victims, as well as agents-- of a process we are privileged to contemplate at much wider vantage.  In effect, we are scientists examining the results of an experiment.

Naturalism in red and shades of grey:  The Secret Agent is a social experiment gone awry, for there are really no straight lines here.  A multiplicity of parallel correspondences dissolves at the point of infinity into a circle as perfect as a woman's gold wedding ring.  There are only circles , from absolutism through capitalism to anarchy and back to absolutism.  The social machine generates its own doom, a Secret Agent, who/ which touches off an explosion that cracks the very structure of the text, causing it to redouble violently upon itself.

The most obvious dislocation is the creation of a time warp:  the explosion is enacted twice, redoubling its force, in the public scene with the Doctor and Professor and again with Inspector Heat's intrusion into the privacy of the Verloc home.  Within each character, shards of memory are jarred loose in flashbacks (e.g., Verloc's in Chapter 2, Heat's in Chapter 5, the Assistant Commissioner's in Chapter 6, etc.).  The text flashes in unmistakable parallelisms, systemic repetitions, and reversals of character and scene.  Its suborbital systems are unstable, eccentric, endlessly repetitive mirror image within the slivers of text sent flying by the explosion at the root of a Tree at the edge of pastoral eternity, the threshold of of knowledge.  Everything and everyone is turned inside-out, base and superstructure,  subject and object, police and criminal, yet the text remains within the larger pattern of the fabric of historical reality; nothing is really out of control here.

Alfred Hitchcock's Sabotage, a  retitling of Conrad's novel 

"... The mind and the instincts of burglar are of the same kind as the mind and the instincts of a police officer...  Products of the same machine, one classed as useful and the other as noxious, they take the machine for granted in different ways, but with a seriousness essentially the same.   

-- Chief Inspector Heat, Chapter 5

The Machine of the Secret Agent is a mechanistic world of cogs and wheels spinning inexorably toward a shattering explosion.  It is a universe of tinny player pianos, purring gas jets, ticking clocks, carving knives set carelessly upon kitchen tables, bells jangling over shop doors, and whirling galaxies refracted through the lens of the Greenwich Observatory.  Its inhabitants are secret agents and secret police simultaneously, taking blind stabs into the mystery of history; they both cause and react to the movement of their cosmos, but their observations of events are bizarrely distorted, refracted through the lens of personality.  While they sometimes perceive intimations of the Machine's heuristic depths, its fundamental truths, they do so only sporadically, at odd moments, unwillingly.  We see this in Mr. Vladimir's pungent remark, "Unhappy Europe!  Thou shalt perish by the moral insanity of thy children."  Of a fateful back-alley encounter between the Professor and Chief Inspector Heat, the narrating voice insists, "It was in reality a chance meeting."  Later on, in a universe where nothing-- and thereby everything-- is left to chance, Inspector Heat grimaces sardonically at the vagaries of fate as a bit of charred cloth conceals itself within his mind.  Again and again, the ritual of recognition is enacted and effaced.

Life..., in this connection, is a historical fact surrounded by all sorts of restraints and considerations, a complex organized fact open to attack at every point; whereas I depend on death, which knows no restraint and cannot be attacked.  My superiority is evident.

--The Professor, Chapter 4

From our "readerly" vantage beyond the rim of the hermeneutic circle, within which all points of view are transparent, we behold the Professor's "superiority" as the reverse image of his sense of physical and social inferiority.  Unaware of his own inner psychological pinball, he is nonetheless a shrewd "outside" observer oppressed and revolted by the crush of humanity.  Prophet of "the perfect detonator," thumb on his ill-concealed pneumatic squeeze-bulb, the Professor is indeed a padlocked pantry of explosives in an anonymous one-room flat.

The source of his power, he realizes, is that his psychopathology is completely open to the guardians of law and order, for his is the philosophically pure anarchism of the raging id.  A déclassé intellectual, the "mad dog" spawn of Western Civilization, the Professor posits the Force of Personality to explode the façade of conventional morality, order, and rationality.  He anticipates happily the day when citizens will be shot on the street in an open police state.  He is the Hammer of our hermeneutic.

The Professor's functional counterpart is Mr. Vladimir, the renegade aristocrat, who primes the entire narrative sequence leading to the social explosion.  He is linked to the Professor in the causal chain, but only indirectly, as by a mysterious black box:  Agent Delta (not the sort of detonator he had in mind).  Mr. Vladimir, too, is the victim of paranoid delusions of grandeur:

Descended from generations victimized by the instruments of an arbitrary power, he was racially, nationally, and individually afraid of the police.  It was an inherited weakness, altogether independent of his judgment, of his reason, of his experience.  He was born to it.  But that sentiment... did not stand in the way of his immense contempt for the English police.  (Chapter 10)

Two-faced Mr. Vladimir is truly a split personality (a "Hyperborean swine... what you might call a gentleman"); a clean-shaven "dogfish... a noxious, rascally-looking, altogether detestable beast").  His public charm at the Great Lady's salon conceals the vile heart that beats within his inner chamber at the embassy.  Confessing his secret loathing of the nation and class whose hospitality sustains him, Mr. Vladimir nevertheless takes it upon himself to act as their historical proxy by plotting an attack on rationality itself, by exploding the bourgeois belief in the democratic sacred cow of Science.  He, like the Professor at the other end of the social spectrum, is that stranger in our midst, the savage end-product of civilization.

Nothing that happened to [Michaelis] individually had any importance.  He was like those saintly men whose personality is lost in the contemplation of their faith.  His ideas were not in the nature of convictions.  They were inaccessible to reasoning.  (Chapter 6)

The role opposite the Hammer is played by patient (in both senses) Michaelis, the author cum celebrity cum hermit.  The Pen in our equation, he is ironically unable to write the language of "consecutive thought."  His utopian idealism ("Capitalism has made socialism, and [its laws] are responsible for anarchism...  Then why indulge in prophetic phantasies?")  renders itself precisely into a "prophetic fantasy," an act of pure contemplation, because it lacks a Subject, a conscious historical agency.

At the beginning of his political career, the locksmith's arrest produced a bunch of skeleton keys, a heavy chisel, and a short crowbar (but no hammer!)  The "ticket-of-leave" apostle remains the perpetual prisoner of innocence, a still, small voice from the country wilderness.  As a disconnected superego, he occupies a small upstairs room above the orphan Stevie on the morning of the explosion, an ironic counterpart to the brutal "lost" father.

Stevie, still an ego in formation, becomes the Torch in the F.P. hermeneutic.  The departure of Mother to the invalid home leaves him with surrogate parents, the Verlocs.  "Poor Stevie" is left alone to solve the mystery of the cosmos with pencil and paper in "coruscations of innumerable circles suggesting chaos and eternity" on Mother's kitchen table (down two steps from the cozy parlor walled off from the sleazy shop opening onto the mysterious world of the street.)  Within the Verloc family, life poses no mystery at all; there is "good," there is "poor," and there is "beastly," as long as he can keep these categories distinct and pristine in his mind, Stevie can be at peace within himself.   Outside the circle of the family, however, the identity "Stevie" does not exist:  to all but Winnie, he is a mere cipher, a fair-haired lad, a degenerate, a smoldering address label among scattered bits of flesh and bone.  At the textual center of The Secret Agent the Verloc family self-destructs in the successive disappearances of "Stevie," "Winnie," and "Adolf."

From a certain point of view we are here in the presence of a domestic drama.  

                                                                  -- Assistant Commissioner (Chapter 10)

"Stevie," as we have seen, is exploded into space:  "No. 32 Brett Street."  Further along in the familial chain-reaction, "Winnie" explodes into time, transformed into the anonymous anniversary date, "24 June, 1879" inscribed within her wedding ring.  The central presence of ersatz Agent Delta, however, expires in stages:  "Adolf" ceases to exist as his blood spatters upon the floor beneath his parlor sofa.  "Mr. Verloc" goes next:  his bank account, the only thing that matters about him in the end, belongs to the fictional "Mr. Prozor."  The remaining corpse therefore bears no "real" identity.  "Agent Delta" must, for diplomatic reasons, remain an "open secret" between the House of Lords and a certain embassy.

Preventor/ detonator Secret Agent Delta (orthographically an upside-down V, a counter to himself and to Mr. Vladimir; in chemical formulae, the symbol of Heat as the catalyst in a reaction) is the most conventional bourgeois gentleman, the corpulent Mr. Verloc.   Mr. Vladimir is constitutionally compelled to humiliate such a man.  In turn, we witness the agony of "Adolf," whose oppressive days and fevered nights are lived in a necessary and inevitable obsession with his alter-ego, the face of whom appears in the very conjugal window of his soul.  This absence of identity is the Force Of Personality with a vengeance, for "Adolf" emerges, after all, as the "perfect detonator."

Identities are not stable entities within the historical dialectic of the text.  They are deceptive, sardonic subterfuges ("Professor," "Doctor"), generic or honorific titles of function ("Great Lady," "Assistant Commissioner"), formal sobriquets of relationship ("Mother," Comrade Ossipon"), and terms of endearment and / or entreaty ("Tom," Adolf).  Finally, there is the problematic identity of "Joseph Conrad," who wishes to call attention to this whole sticky business of names.

All the novel's positive values-- decency, culture, stability, humanism-- lie with the Old Regime of "the empire on which the sun never sets," the order personified by the Great Lady (who champions the ruined ex-convict Michaelis) and Sir Ethelred, the "Great Personage" who sponsors the nationalization of fisheries in the House of Lords "("the house par excellence, in the minds of many millions of men").  The gentry appear here as historical anachronisms.  There is "Toodles," Sir Ethelred's innocent squire (unpaid) who imagines his own identity as something which can endure "unchanged," and who, upon the whole believes this earth to be "a nice place to live on."  Sir Ethelred himself, the political counter to Mr. Vladimir, perceives himself a mover and shaker of the empire.  Yet he directs his efforts at "sprat" (of the herring family, the red variety), instead of "dogfish."  He does not wish to be bothered with details.  The Great Lady likewise is content to view the "surface currents" of social life, the sort who swim through her salon.  None of them care to risk their bearings in unplumbed depths.  The shattering penalty to be exacted upon the perfidious Vladimir, after all, shall be the suspension of his honorary membership privileges at the Explorers Club.  "They'll have to get a hard rap over the knuckles over this affair," Sir Ethelred proclaims.

The character most interested in getting to the bottom of this fathomless business is the nameless Assistant Commissioner.  A former colonial officer of the same empire, he prefers the well-drawn boundaries (white and black) between civilization and heathen insurrection to the endless stream of bureaucratic intrigue and paperwork of the bourgeois metropolis.  His relationship with Annie, his own "domestic drama," provides the secret impetus for his entry into the affair of the Secret Agent.  From the outset, he pursues the mystery, apparently disinterested, with "excellent hopes of getting behind it and finding there something else than individual freak of fanaticism."  In the end, however, he is forced to report, "What I mainly came upon was a psychological state," rather than the "logical" plot he had set out to find.  In the meantime, the "truth" of Agent Delta's secret confession is slipping into time and out of history.

"You revolutionists... are the slaves of social convention, which is afraid of you; slaves of it as much as the very police that stands up in the defense of that convention.  Clearly you are, since you want to revolutionize it."  --The Professor (Chapter 4)

The final chapter concludes the debate between the Doctor and Professor, and the Force Of Personality seems to have the last word, counterposed to the vision of Michaelis of "a world planned out like an immense and nice hospital" governed by the tenets of Faith, Hope, and Charity.  The Doctor, who now knows the scoundrel within his skin, is forced to yield to the Professor's prophecy, a world of "madness and despair":  "Give me that for a lever, and I'll move the world."  Yet in the coda that follows, as they separate to pursue their private demons, the Professor is no more certain of his argument than the humbug Doctor:  "He had no future."

We are left with a sort of sociopolitical Heisenberg Principle:  certainty dissolves, and the historical subject remains a mystery.   The social explosion ends in social paralysis.  We remind ourselves of La Belle Epoch and its literary lions, the Edwardian prophets of irony and pessimism in the entr'acte before the Great War, but we must also recall these years as a time of retreat for the international workers' movement with its fierce debates and isolated explosions, particularly in the failed Russian Revolution of 1905.  Hindsight permits us to see that event as a dress-rehearsal for the historic drama of 1917, but Conrad, in the last analysis, could not foresee the Future of the Proletariat stretching forward into this century.  The terms of his debate are those of Plekhanov and Bakunin, not Lenin or Fidel, who have had a great deal to say about the subjective factor in human history.

It comes as no surprise then that the working class itself appears so seldom in the text.  When not part of the passive, undifferentiated mass, workers appear only as greatly stereotyped figures, chiefly the casual (and slightly sinister) contacts made by the idiot Stevie:  the anonymous cabman and Mrs. Neale are portrayed as brutalized drudges, petty thieves, and chronic alcoholics.  Hence Conrad foresaw only continuous historical stalemate, the futility of class struggle.  For him the Future of the Proletariat awaits the initiative of an outside Secret Agent, a historical "accident" to obliterate the present and recreate it endlessly.

IN MY ROTATION:

a couple of items from a recent package I received from Hamilton Books/ Music:

• Captain Beefheart, Plastic Factory (GoFaster Records, 1966-73)

The first nine tracks were recorded from a radio broadcast from the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco, June 17, 1966.  Bonus tracks include broadcasts from various dates and places, from 1967 and 1968 (post- Safe As Milk, pre- Trout Mask Replica).  The final track consists of a Beefheart interview with John Peele in the U.K.

Sun Ra, The Early Albums Collection, 1956-1963 (Enlightenment 4-CD box)

Caveats:  As usual, there is no session or personnel information.  The year of release given here is often at variance with the information given in the Wikipedia entries, and many of Sun Ra's albums released during this period have been omitted.  The graphics here sometimes fail to match those that Wiki displays, no doubt because of the many reissues on different labels the albums have undergone.

All that being said, for me this is a worthwhile collection consisting mostly of music I've never heard.   More detailed comments appear beside each album included here.

• Jazz by Sun Ra aka Sun Sound (Sonet, 1956)

• Sound of Joy (Delmark, 1957)

• Super-Sonic Jazz (Saturn, 1957)

• Interstellar Low Ways (Saturn, 1959)

• Jazz in Silhouette (Saturn, 1958)

• The Futuristic Sounds of Sun Ra (Saturn, 1961)

 

• When Sun Comes Out (Saturn, 1963)

Sun Ra, "Brother from Another Planet"

• The Singles (Saturn/ Evidence compilation, 1955-1960)

lightly and politely:

• Sun Ra, Strange Celestial Road (Rounder, 1979)

• Various artists, Delmark:  55 Years of Jazz

The track listing below almost says it all.  Bob Koester

OUR CAR CLUB

KINKS BONANZA!  I replaced some rock items from the ELANTRA COLLECTION with these little masterpieces.

• The Kinks, Face to Face/ Something Else by the Kinks (Pye/ Reprise, 1966, 1967)

The Kinks, Lola Versus Power Man and the Moneygoround /Percy (Pye/ Reprise, 1970, 1971)

• The Kinks, Arthur (Pye/ Reprise, 1969)

NEXT:  Blackface Minstrelsy And The Birth Of American Mass Entertainment

Volume 1, Number 1, Page 1 of ESQ/ A LOOK BACK

NOTE:  This piece, very blandly titled, appeared as the lead article in the very first issue of Endless Summer Quarterly, August 1987.  I've copied it, with only a few changes, from the original dot-matrix printing off a word-processor called Bank Street Writer.

THE BEACH BOYS

No one who was in his teens in 1963 can forget the sonic whirlwind of "Surfin' USA."  It was as if Chuck Berry's classic rocker, "Sweet Little Sixteen," had been magically transformed from black-and-white to Technicolor.  Its polished blend of voices became the trademark sound of the Beach Boys:  the sweet falsetto lead of Brian Wilson perched atop the textured harmonies of brothers Carl and Dennis, along with the versatile Al Jardine in the middle ranges, all rounded out by the nasal whine of cousin Mike Love on the fast leads and bass parts.  Like no other band before or since, they made us feel like singing along.

For the suburban Sixties generation, they symbolized ourselves as we dreamed we should be, suntanned and barefoot in white Levis and Pendleton shirt, driving our GTO convertibles to the beach where there were "two girls for every boy."  They enacted and ennobled our search for kicks in their universe of "Fun, Fun, Fun," but perhaps even more significantly, they tapped the teenage heart with ballads of romantic longing and loss in such as "Surfer Girl" and "Don't Worry, Baby."  The Beach Boys were not just cousins, friends and brothers to themselves; they were also our own brothers in fantasy.  Always optimistic, yet equally vulnerable, they were our innocence.

Now they are our lost innocence.  Superseded in the Top 40 in the late Sixties, first by the British Invasion and soon after by San Francisco's psychedelic explosion, the Beach Boys quickly became not only passé, but outcasts in the brave new world of pop music.  America largely rejected the Beach Boys as an unhip relic of our now-despised middle-class roots.  In the curious symbiosis between the American public and its show-business idols, to be sure, we often perform the ritual of killing our gods.  The extraordinary thing is that the Beach Boys managed their own resurrection, mounting two major comebacks in the Seventies and surviving the dilemmas of commerce, art, drugs, and even death, to emerge in the Eighties as America's premier nostalgia act.  Their sheer longevity,  over a quarter century of rock and roll history, sets them apart from the usual run of superstars and places them among the very short list of immortals of American show business.

David Leaf's The Beach Boys and the California Myth (Grosset & Dunlap, 1978; revised edition Courage Books, 1985) was the first serious attempt to unravel the group's tangled history.  Exploring the dark side behind the band's sunny image, Leaf's work drew upon a thorough review of periodical literature scattered over more than a decade, in addition to the author's own interviews of participants, friends, and hangers-on.

At the center of Leaf's story is Brian Wilson, affectionately portrayed as a seemingly ordinary teenager who fell in love with the harmonies of the Four Freshmen and proceeded to translate them into the rock and roll idiom of the early Sixties.  Driven by their jealous and demanding father Murry Wilson, a small businessman and unsuccessful songwriter, the Wilson brothers grew up in suburban Hawthorne, California.  Brian, in particular, found refuge in the imaginary teen paradise of the California dream.  Beginning with the Beach Boys' first local success in 1961, Murry took over the management of the group and propelled them to national stardom by securing a contract with Capitol Records the following year.

Their string of hits, beginning with "Surfin' Safari," continued unabated through 1966, with the appearance of Brian's magnum opus, Pet Sounds.  Seconding and carrying to new heights the "Wall of Sound" conceived by Brian's mentor, Phil Spector, the album set standards of writing, performance, and production still unmatched in pop music.  In the formal sense, the album broke new ground as a loose narrative unified thematically with an avalanche of musical effects, discovering Brian's "pet sounds" in everything from string quartets to bicycle bells.  Signalling, in effect, the emotional boundaries of its creator's adulthood, Pet Sounds combined words and music in a manner somehow reminiscent of an earlier epoch of popular music; it expressed the questing, anxious, and uncertain private side of a generation that was beginning to prefer the public exhortations of Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones.  Paradoxically, while Pet Sounds signified the attainment of a new musical plateau for the group, it also forecast dramatically the end of their popularity.

At the same time, this chapter of the Beach Boys' story is that of Brian's prolonged creative breakdown.  In December 1964, overwhelmed by his professional and family responsibilities, Brian suffered an emotional collapse and began his twelve-year separation from the rest of the band.  He had worked at a backbreaking pace for three years, writing, teaching the group, arranging, and above all producing records (some eight LPs of Beach Boys material for Capitol, four of them in 1964 alone, not to mention a half-dozen "outside" projects.)

Henceforth Brian would be the phantom Beach Boy, nearly always a presence, to one degree or another, in their recorded sound, but no longer a member of the touring band seen by the public.  When, in 1965, Bruce Johnston replaced him on the road, Brian was freed to create recordings that were, and still are, nothing short of astonishing in their imaginative range and daring combinations of timbre, rhythm, and melody.  Brian, inspired by and contributing mightily to the pop explosion of the mid-Sixties, set out to redefine the art of music.  "Good Vibrations," released in the fall of 1966, was to be the Beach Boys' first and only million-selling single and their entry into something new:  the notion, initiated by a fledgeling rock critical establishment, that contemporary pop music could stand as legitimate art.

Encouraged by the worldwide success of the record, Brian put his heart and soul into a new project, a body of work to change forever the standards by which pop music is judged.  After nearly a year of unprecedented experimentation in the studio, the next album, which was to have been titled Smile, sadly disintegrated under the pressures of group bickering, Brian's LSD intake, and a lawsuit against Capitol Records.  Never released, Smile has become perhaps the most celebrated and sought-after "lost" album in rock history and the single most significant turning point in the Beach Boys' career.

In The Beach Boys (Ballantine Books, 1979), Byron Preiss gives the most complete and detailed account of the musical content of Smile.  Such unfinished masterpieces as the breathtaking "Can't Wait Too Long," "Do You Like Worms?" (evoking the temporal span of America from Plymouth Rock to Hanalei), a four-part "Elements"suite of sometimes frightening mimetic power, and a superior, almost beatific rendition of "Wonderful," were recorded but never released.   Other material, released piecemeal over the next six years, provides a captivating listening experience in itself but lacks the cohesion and sometimes the production values implicit in Brian's original concept.  Excepting the handful of fanatics who have managed to obtain bootlegged copies of the abandoned studio tapes, the public could henceforth have only fitful and sporadic glimpses of the musical vistas surveyed by Brian Wilson in 1966.

At the age of twenty-four, Brian now understood the meaning of pop music success.  The golden boy of American music, he had become a commodity in the mass entertainment market; stretched to his limits, he broke.  Unfortunately, Preiss's book seldom dives beneath the surface to assess the tragedy of Smile.  While it remains the book for the Beach Boys aficionado, including song lyrics, dazzling artwork, a wealth of anecdotal material, and an extensive discography, the book deliberately veers away from the shadows darkening the group's career from the Smile era forward.

A more balanced and up-to-date account is provided in John Milward's The Beach Boys' Silver Anniversary (Dolphin-Doubleday, 1985)  Milward's book, while rivaling the lavish graphic production of Preiss's, manages both to simplify-- in the best sense of the word-- and deepen the story of the Beach Boys.  Based almost entirely on secondary sources, the book nevertheless succeeds as no other in communicating the tragedy of the Beach Boys-- in essence, the tragedy latent in the American success story and, in a larger sense, the tragedy of the American family.  Better than anyone else, perhaps, Milward understands the band's mystique and appeal, and he admirably recaptures the romantic mindset of the Beach Boys fan.  Milward also appends a usefully annotated selective discography, and it is this central role reserved for the Beach Boys' music that saves his book from becoming either maudlin or lurid.

Perhaps not so curiously, nearly all who write about the Beach Boys' music have dwelt upon their pre-1970 material at the expense of their later output.  While it would be pointless to deny their failure to match the consistent brilliance of Pet Sounds, Beach Boys records of the 1970s and 1980s, now almost entirely out of print Warner Brothers and Caribou/ CBS releases, without exception have their cosmic moments.  The best of these justify a faith in the transcendent and redemptive power of all great art.  Such miniature miracles as "'Til I Die," "Marcella," "Mt. Vernon & Fairway," "Had to Phone Ya," "Hey, Little Tomboy," "Good Timin'," "Male Ego," and nearly the whole of Sunflower and The Beach Boys Love You can stand comparison with anything else the band has achieved.  Many of the period's highlights were lovingly compiled on the 1981 Caribou collection Ten Years of Harmony, which provides a fitting complement to the double-platinum Capitol repackages Endless Summer and Spirit of America, the albums that reintroduced the classics of their youth to the 1970s.

Yet by all accounts the group responsible for this music's creation was in the worst of times.  Within the past decade and a half, the Beach Boys, individually and collectively, have undergone traumas that, in the final analysis, we would rather not know about in detail.  Unfortunately, the apparent aim of Steven Gaines's Heroes and Villains (NAL, 1986) is to reopen a lot of old wounds, for the book is bound by the sympathy, good taste, and discretion of a National Enquirer piece.  Having done scores of interviews with nearly everyone of significance involved in the Beach Boys' lives and careers, Gaines has chosen to dwell upon the bitter recriminations of ex-lovers, envious former associates, and spiteful relatives and to descend to the level of office gossip.  In musical matters, moreover, Gaines's many errors, both factual and judgmental, lead one to doubt the accuracy and fairness of the rest.  While the book contains much that is of interest and value, it manages, almost in spite of itself, not to shed any real light on the story of the Beach Boys.

As the teenage messiahs of the Sixties, they made it all seem so simple and natural, a life in the fast lane where the only dues one had to pay were broken hearts.  Between the flesh-and-blood debilitations of family strife and the dog-eat-dog carnage of the pop industry, the men from Hawthorne have since made heavy sacrifices, including the life of Dennis Wilson, who drowned ignominiously in Marina Del Rey three days after Christmas, 1983.  Bankruptcies, divorces, and the precipitate turns of the show business world have left deep scars within the surviving Beach Boys.  In particular, Brian's dirty laundry is now public property; his private agony stands in bizarre contrast to the image of the group he helped create in his youth and to his continuing musical invention, as inspired and dignified as always.

For the band as a whole, existence has taken on an almost schizophrenic appearance.  For many years now, their best work has languished in the marketplace, while their scattered entries on the charts have rarely been their best work.  The broad public continues to perceive them as comforting reminders of the heady, hedonistic Sixties.  The group, which once entertained anti-war marches in Washington, has received smiles and blessings from the Reagans and Bushes; the Beach Boys, in reciprocating, have made perhaps the greatest sacrifice of all.

Yet they endure, a great positive in a time fraught with cynicism and peril.  Brian Wilson, at the age of forty-four, appears at the Grammy Awards in Hollywood, the industry's elder statesman, squinting at a teleprompter and stumbling through his lines to award the Best Producer statuette to someone else.  Absent from his eyes now is the almost palpable fear that has clouded his visage in so many photographs.  He looks good now, trimmed down, beardless, and somehow still baby-faced in spite of the battle lines etched in over the years.  He shakes the hand of Jimmy Jam, the new center of attention, and tries to stay off-camera, yet Brian seems to dominate the time and space.  For better or worse, and in no small measure because of Brian and his mates, what was once pejoratively dismissed as "teen music" is now solidly in the pop mainstream of Western culture.  Once-provincial L.A. is now one of the world's great recording capitals, as befits this "Iowa by the beach" where the great American folk myth has at last come of age.

Just to balance this entry, here's my last missive to ESQ, dated September 5, 1997.  At this time, ESQ was edited and published from Charlotte, NC, by Lee Dempsey and David Beard.  Shortly afterward, it was Beard alone, and I was out of the picture.

Subject:  10th anniversary felicitations

Dear Lee & Dave,

As ESQ's tenth anniversary approaches, I share your pride in what has become one of the best fanzines ever, Beach Boys or otherwise.  Ten years ago, of course, this brainchild of Rick Edgil and Phil Nast was hatched in San Diego on a typewriter, a xerox machine, and a prayer.  As it happened, I had sent Rick an article, my first ever about the Beach Boys, in time to become the lead piece in ESQ's maiden issue.   (I still think it was the best one I ever submitted.)  Though I've submitted many since, I never kid myself:  as Rick and Phil found out, it's a lot easier to write for a fanzine than it is to run one.  I still wonder how you two do it, as I marvel at the fact that this is a 'zine that keeps on topping itself.  I have to think that Lee, with all he's invested in the trail of artifacts left by the Boys, must be teetering on the brink of bankruptcy!

Thanks a lot, fellas.  May all the waves you ride be Big Ones.

2021:  A LOOK BACK

FROM THE BEGINNING, ALBUM BY ALBUM

To return to my original topic:  What exactly was it about "Surfing' U.S.A." that made it much more than an imitation of Chuck Berry's "Sweet Little Sixteen"?  It had nothing to do with the new lyrics or the group's "technicolor" vocal arrangement.  The thing to understand is that Brian Wilson's restructuring of the tune placed the climax much closer to the end of the record.

In both tunes, the climax occurs during the instrumental break, with Johnny Johnson's brief piano spot near the middle of the tune, before a final verse.  Brian Wilson split his instrumental break between an energetic organ turn and a guitar solo, almost exactly like Berry himself would have played it, that punts the ball out of the stadium and over the clouds, followed only by a brief vocal tag into a quick fade-out.

How does a twenty-year-old kid like Brian know how to make such a crucial move?  He certainly didn't pick up the knack during his early piano lessons at home.

Upon reflection, it was that little shift in the song's structure that got me to understand that this record, this remarkable vocal performance, was for all time, not simply hitting its lofty sales goal for the spring and summer of 1963, not simply until the current twenty-first century situation of The Beach Boys vis a vis Brian Wilson.  Overall, it achieved that rare status of outlasting the men who created it in the first place and likely to continue living for a very long time ahead of us.

• The Beginning/ The Garage Tapes (Sea of Tunes 2-disc bootleg, 1961-1962)

• Lost and Found (?, 1961-62)

etc...........

BW timeline

A.  LEARNING

after years of vocalizing, co-creates the groups officially

upswing:  he unpacks and repacks the recording process in his own, unmistakeable musical image

IN MY ROTATION:

ANOTHER SHORT WORD FROM OUR SPONSOR, June 8, 2021:

Just the other day, I bought a new used Aiwa 3-CD changer/ dual cassette from a neighbor living just across Cline Avenue, in the Gates of St. John subdivision.  I'm still trying to learn how to operate this bad boy, but I've successfully managed to hear the latest musical acquisitions, in superior sound.

On the downside, however, it must be said that there seems to be no way to connect a turntable to this player/ changer, nor have I much patience for learning the basic procedures of operation, especially where the remote is concerned.

The likelihood is that I shall return to the old Sony unit with its receiver and use it until I finally can't stand it anymore.  I hope only that the Aiwa can outlast me.

Lightly  & Politely

OUR CAR CLUB:

A KINKS KORNUCOPIA

• Muswell Hillbillies (RCA, 197?)/  Everybody's in Show-Biz (RCA, 197?)

• Face to Face (Pye, 1966)/  Lola Versis Powerman & The Moneygoround, Part One (Pye, 1970)

• Gene Ammons, Gentle Jug (Prestige, 196?)

NEXT: Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent

Stop at the Radiant Radish!

NOTE:  The following is a review I wrote for Endless Summer Quarterly, published July 1993.  I've made a few small corrections along the way.

GOOD VIBRATIONS:  30 YEARS OF THE BEACH BOYS

This five-CD boxed set represents the most lavish compilation yet of archival Beach Boys material, but it is of necessity a compromise, an attempt to please both casual fans, who don't wish to purchase the entire range of their album reissues on CD, and dyed-in-the-wool collectors, who are all ears for stuff from their vast store of unreleased recordings.  At about six hours, the Good Vibration box collection runs broad and deep enough to succeed on both counts.  For the non-specialist, it provides the best coverage yet of the absolute cream of the Beach Boys' output, even including some surprises among the parade of hits, such as versions of "Surfin' Safari" and "409" remastered without fadeouts, as they were first heard as demos by the executives at Capitol Records.  All of the early '60s material, moreover, is presented here in mono, which atones somewhat for Capitol's sole inclusion of stereo masters among its album reissue series three years ago.

At the other end of the fan spectrum, over two hours of music previously unreleased, most of it not even in bootleg form, has made its way onto these discs, thanks to David Leaf and all those long-suffering folks who have spent years bugging Capitol to put out something besides yet another mere greatest hits repackage.  My one kick against this set is the fact that it was not released ten years ago, as it could have been with the exception of just two tracks.  While nothing can be done about that, I still have to wonder whether this release will do the band any good; as a long-overdue token of respect for the Boys, it may have indeed arrived too late.

Be that as it may, here are some impressions of the heretofore unreleased material distributed among the five discs.

DISC 1, covering the period 1961-1965, includes a judicious and revealing selection from the group's heyday.  The program violates chronology somewhat by kicking of with Brian's 1963 demo of "Surfin' USA, accompanying himself on piano.  (It has been written that Brian performed this tune in much the same manner for Jan Berry, who begged him to let Jan & Dean record it.  Instead, Brian gave Jan "Surf City" to play around with.)  The demo differs from the hit record a little in its lyrics and, more importantly, in the absence of the crucial instrumental break, but the unreleased blues instrumental "Punchline," included on this disc, was compressed into a single 12-bar chorus and inserted before the tag on "Surfin' USA" to build the perfect climax and release, that uncanny sense of form that is present on all the great Beach Boys records.

From about the same time comes a fragment of another demo, the ballad "Little Surfer Girl," a little more developed in its instrumentation but too tantalizingly brief to gain much of an impression of the complete song.  Then the program jumps back to the beginning with part of a living-room rehearsal of "Surfin'" done in September 1961, an  a cappella  rendition that apparently predates even the Hite Morgan audition included on the Lost and Found CD.  This song, too, was to undergo some important formal changes, straightening out the awkward rhythm at the end of the chorus.  Some of the chatter at the beginning shows another of the group's hallmarks:  bickering with each other.

One of the nicest surprises in this collection is the inclusion of the version of "Their Hearts Were Full of Spring" tacked on to the 1962 demo tape that signed the Beach Boys to Capitol Records, again underlining both the skill of the group in handling complex vocal arrangements and their vast debt to the Four Freshmen.  As an added treat, the booklet included with this release shows the tape box which contained the original reel of these demos:  listed, in addition to "Their Hearts," are two versions of "Surf & Safari" (is one of them an alternate take? a stereo master?), "Lonely Sea," and "Four-oh-nine." Apparently, "Their Hearts" was thrown in as an afterthought, with manager Murry Wilson at its conclusion, bragging about his boys to Nick Venet at Capitol.

"Their Hearts Were Full of Spring" (1980, Washington DC)

Further along in the Freshmen mode, Disc 1 offers several delightful radio spots and the previously unreleased "Things We Did Last Summer," a Jules Styne-Sammy Cahn evergreen arranged and conducted by Dick Reynolds for a television performance in 1963.  (It is not generally known among Beach Boys fans the degree to which Reynolds contributed to the success of the Four Freshmen, providing not only orchestrations, but also vocal arrangements for many of their best-known recordings.) It may very well be that Reynolds, uncredited, did the vocal charts for the Beach Boys in this particular project.

The final track on the first disc features "Hushabye," the beginning of a selection of outtakes from the 1964 Beach Boys Concert album, with the rest ("Surfin' USA,""Surfer Girl," and "Be True to Your School")  oddly presented on the final disc.  However, the greatest surprise, which almost got by me completely, is the unlisted appearance at the very end of a scratchy acetate recording of a multi-tracked Brian Wilson singing "Happy Birthday" to the Freshmen, done in the Freshmen's style, of course.  Unlike everything else in this set, it sounds as if it could have been recorded in a do-it-yourself booth.  But what a gas to end the disc on this note!

On DISC 2, the set moves into the territory bounded by "California Girls" (1965) and "With Me Tonight" (1967), a short slice of time that showcases Brian's phenomenal artistic growth.  Before getting to the meat of things, we hear "Ruby Baby," an outtake from the Party! album, replete with harmony riff and "oink-oink" chorus.  Another radio spot brings us to a selection of seven tunes from Pet Sounds.  (Here the casual fan loses out somewhat:  more than any other Beach Boys' album, this one suffers from not being heard in its entirety.)  Appended to this is a "new" version of "Hang On to Your Ego," with Mike (believe it!) leading off and an entirely fresh backing vocal on the chorus.

The disc (and the set, for my money) comes to its climax with the long-awaited release of Smile-- well, sort of.  In the first place, it should be apparent by now that there is not, nor can there ever be, a definitive issue of the Beach Boys' lost masterpiece, the making of which involved more than sixty sessions spread over eight months, not including the making of the smash single "Good Vibrations."   What eluded Brian in the end was the selection and sequencing of the music to match the broad sweep of his conception, precisely the problem of this box set's compilers.

Still, it would be hard to improve upon the logical presentation offered here.  "Our Prayer," unadorned by the overdubs that graced the 20/ 20 version, leads off the set as a short, spiritual introduction before we plunge into the great American saga with "Heroes and Villains" (identical to the version ("At threescore and five, I'm very much alive") first released as a bonus track on the Smiley Smile/ Wild Honey CD).  This is followed by a "Sections" episode, likely from the "Bag of Tricks" tape reel pictured in the  booklet, which kicks off with a thrilling rendition of "Bicycle Rider" and continues into a series of chants and variations on the theme.  The closing verses are identical to what has been erroneously named "Barnyard."  Then spirituality returns with "Wonderful" (how wonderful to hear this version in release at last!) and coalesces brilliantly with the homespun Americana suite "Cabinessence," in its 20/ 20 guise.

Most of the remaining Smile tracks are arranged to simulate the "Elements' suite proposed originally, but inexplicably "Fire" (aka "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow") is not included-- really a pity, because it would have given a sense of completeness to the whole thing.  Having not come up with anything else to serve as "Air," the set makes do with the sparkling, marimba-clad "Wind Chimes," dropping off unexpectedly into a riff that would later be used on "Can't Wait Too Long."  The "Heroes and Villains" motif is reintroduced with a marvelous cacophony, before dissolving into the harpsichord theme that would become "Cool, Cool Water" is next.  "Surf's Up," featuring Brian accompanying himself on piano, provides the perfect finale.

While not all of Smile has surfaced, within the limitations I've noted, it's fair to say that the long-lost album is finally available to us all, like the Children of Israel receiving the Ten Commandments.  I feel confident that Smile one day will receive the attention and recognition it deserves.

Can't Wait Too Long"


"H.E.L.P. Is On The Way"

DISC 3 surveys the territory between 1967 and 1971 with selections from the last Capitol albums and the early releases on Warner Bros/ Brother Records.  A handful of novelties stud this segment, including a short version of "Can't Wait Too Long."  This variant contains studio chatter in which Brian can be heard running down the lyrics of an entire verse, and the concluding segment is in stereo, with Carl's lead vocal isolated on one channel.  "Cool, Cool Water" is presented in a version originally slated for Wild Honey; it comprises the "Love to Say Da Da" theme only and lacks the super production values accorded the expanded version on Sunflower.  From the 20/ 20/ Sunflower  cusp, we get the first releases of "Games People Play," "I Just Got My Pay," and "H.E.L.P." (which ends with Brian's invitation to visit the Radiant Radish, his health food store in L.A.)   In addition there is "Fourth of July."  Composed by Dennis with Jack Rieley's lyrics, it seems to reflect the contemporary furor surrounding the government's attempt to prevent publication of the Pentagon Papers.  The Boys were never particularly convincing as social prophets-- at least not since the recorded "Pom Pom Play Girl," and this tune sinks under the ponderous weight of its message.

DISC 4 might be considered the set's biggest weakness; attempting to cover the seventeen years between "Sail On Sailor" and "Kokomo," almost twice the span of the first three discs combined,  it barely manages to skim the highlights.  While the music of the '60s must predominate in a set like this, one cannot help but feel that the Beach Boys' output from the '70s and'80s has been slighted.  Unreleased material gets especially short shrift here, consisting of four tracks only, all from the mid-'70s:  a delightfully remastered "Fairy Tale Music" suite from Holland, crystal clear without Rieley's voice-over narration; "It's Over Now" and "Still I Dream of It," a pair of lovely, Dick Reynolds-arranged ballads from Brian's unreleased Adult Child; and "Our Team," an outtake from the M.I.U. Album enhanced by the presence of Marilyn Wilson and Diane Rovell.  But many gems equally worthy have been bypassed to make room for album cuts that sometimes seem mediocre in comparison.

A more thorough treatment of these years will have to await another release down the line.  Many fans, I'm sure, would be gratified to hear the original version of "Sail On Sailor" with Brian's lead vocal, or Dennis in concert performing the beautiful "Barbara," or Al's fanciful production of "Loop De Loop."  The rare 1974 single "Child of Winter" has yet to appear on CD, and many of its companion songs from the abortive second Christmas album a few years later deserve hearing, for they show the continuing vitality and creativity of the Beach Boys at a time when they operated on the margins of a pop culture grown repetitious and stultifying.

As if to make amends, DISC 5 compiles over an hour of odds and ends with the avid collector in mind.  Indeed, some of it seems to have been created specifically for inclusion in this release, such as the stereo versions which completely separate the vocal tracks from the instruments.  These, added to the backing tracks for I Get Around," "Dance, Dance, Dance,"  "Good Vibrations," "Heroes and Villains," "Surf's Up," and "Cabinessence," enable one to assemble a truly formidable extension of the 1968 Stack-O-Tracks release.

Besides these curiosities, the disc includes the demo for "In My Room," quite different in texture from the finished record, and lengthy excerpts from studio sessions for Pet Sounds and "Good Vibrations."  The "God Only Knows" segment is particularly welcome, because it culminates with an alternate version with Brian singing lead and a completely unexpected, thrilling tag, done a cappella.  Although I must admit my preference for the originally released version, how difficult it must have been to reject this one!

The remaining tracks are all live in concert recordings or rehearsals.  In addition to the 1964 titles already mentioned, there is the first public performance of "Good Vibrations" at Michigan State University in October, 1966, and a rehearsal of a newly-arranged "Surfer Girl" in Hawaii, 1967.  Can a Lei'd in Hawaii CD be in the offing?

All in all, Beach Boys fans have not received a treat like this in recent memory.  As their new releases in the '90s grow ever more formulaic and uninspired, it's nice to know that Capitol Records has awakened to the potential of their vast catalogue of unreleased performances, both in and out of the studio.  After more than twenty years of questionable releases and ill-conceived reissues, maybe there is yet reason to hope for something better.

IN MY ROTATION:

• Fred Neil, Bleecker &MacDougal (Elektra, 1965)

Except for Neil's album with Vince Martin, Tear Down the Walls, this is his first album under his own name.  It's an all-acoustic set with Neil and Pete Childs on guitar, John Sebastian on harmonica, and either Felix Pappalardi or Douglas H'atelid on bass.  All tunes but one were penned by Neil, the exception being "Water Is Wide," which to me is the album's centerpiece.  The tracks also include the title tune, the famous "Other Side to This Life," "Little Bit of Rain" (which became the title of an LP reissue), "Travelin' Shoes," "Yonder Comes the Blues" ("dressed in high-heel shoes"), the languorous "Handful of Gimme" ("... and a mouthful of much obliged"), "Gone Again," and a song covered by Roy Orbison, "Candy Man."  This album is perhaps not Neil's best, but it's nonetheless excellent, especially considering how thin his discography is.

LIGHTLY & POLITELY

• Bud Powell, Jazz at Massey Hall-Vol, 2(Debut/ OJC, 1953)

• Bud Powell, The Classic Recordings, 1949-1956; The Classic Recordings, 1957-1959 (Enlightenment, 2016 release)

For beginners and devotees alike, these two sets are a bonanza, sixteen Powell albums on eight CDs covering more than a decade of his recording career.   Apart from my usual complaints against Enlightenment sets, no session dates or personnel-- in these collections, no label information, either-- something is problematic about order of presentation, by album release dates rather than session dates.  The first set, indeed, encompasses recordings from 1949, but they appear on Disc 2 instead of at the beginning.  Powell's very first recordings under his own name date from 1947, but you won't hear it until the first disc of the second set.

The Blue Note sides collected in the first set (The Amazing Bud Powell, Volumes 1 and 2) present a particular problem, in that when they were first compiled on ten-inch, and later twelve-inch vinyl LPs,  they threw together music recorded in three separate sessions from 1949, 1951, and 1953, with differing personnel.  Much better here to have the Blue Note CD reissues, which organize the material in a more logical way.

For material originating from the mid-'50s forward, there is no such problem, as it was released at the time it was recorded; so the first set begins with music recorded in 1956, and continues in this way for all but Disc 2 to the end of the first set of four CDs.  Likewise, except for the first disc in the second set (released on the Roulette label as Bud Powell Trio), the music is presented in the order it was recorded, up through 1959.  The other music in the set first appeared, except for two albums on RCA, on the Blue Note and Norman Grand's Mercury, Norgran, and Verve labels.

The biggest gaffe, however, appears on the 1949-56 set, at the beginning of Disc 4, we hear the all-star quintet (Bird, Diz, Bud, Mingus, Max) portion of the 1953 Toronto concert, instead of the essential Bud Powell trio set that preceded it.

Exceptional value, though.  I wish these collections had been available forty years ago.

• John Lewis, The Wonderful World of Jazz/ A Milanese Story (Atlantic, 1960, 1961)

OUR CAR CLUB

• The Kinks Live at the Riviera Theater, Chicago (WXRT broadcast, March 1987)

NEXT:  An old Beach Boys piece for ESQ