This is an excerpt of an essay originally performed at Solaris (Berlin) in 2024, as part of the Berlin Project Space Festival. It was later revised for forthcoming publication.
On January 30th, 1977, the composer and free jazz maestro Ornette Coleman reunited with the bassist Charlie Haden to record a duet album for Artist House Records. The label, founded that same year, was named after a loft at 131 Prince street in the newly fashionable SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan, which Coleman had purchased and meticulously renovated two floors of in 1969. Artist House represented a confluence of long-time aspirations for Coleman: after years of moving between temporary accommodations, he had finally made a home for himself, and a space artists to practice and perform in outside of the typical environs of the avant-garde art and jazz circuits.
The resulting record, Soapsuds, Soapsuds was positively, if unremarkably received. In Coleman’s discography, it sits between two more notable entries: 1977’s Dancing in Your Head, and 1978’s Body Meta, the first full-length album with his new fusion band Prime Time. Dancing in Your Head and Body Meta could also be thought of as two attempts at materially expounding on Coleman’s ‘Harmolodics’, a collaborative, democratic, mutable organizing principle that can be applied to all creative acts, but in music is expressed as providing harmony, melody, rhythm, and phrasing an equal position in a composition’s fabric. In Harmolodics, space and time are delineated within the present moment, through the formation of and equal emphasis on an artist’s own personal logic. Soapsuds, Soapsuds is considered a lyrical early manifestation of Harmolodic theory.
Curiously, the first and most frequently discussed track on the record is a rendition of a TV show theme song by Earle Hagan, itself an adaptation of Charles Earl Kingston’s 1965 composition, “Premiere Occasion”. The TV show in question is the short-lived soap opera satire, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, then in its second season.
Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman starred Louise Lasser in the title role of a white, working-class housewife from Ohio. The show is an uncanny departure from the topical kitchen-table comedy genre that its creator, Norman Lear helped to popularize in the early 1970s with hit TV shows like The Jeffersons and All In The Family. Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman is not so straightforwardly funny as those shows; in its embrace of suspended plot lines and schmaltzy psychodrama, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman more squarely parodies a soap opera. With each episode, finds Mary Hartman facing increasingly alarming events unfolding around her with vacant anxiety, outwardly expressed mostly through advertising platitudes and self-help jargon.
In the first episode, Mary Hartman welcomes a young reporter into her kitchen, who is investigating the mass-murder of a neighbourhood family—barn animals and all. Hartman answers his journalistic questions with lumbering non-sequiturs about how her and her husband met in high school, and whether her soup is too spicy or not spicy enough (the reporter, playing the urbane taste agent to Hartman’s apparent proletarian blandness, answers the latter with a deadpan not spicy enough). Later in the episode, Mary Hartman’s entire family—husband Tom, daughter Heather, mother, sister, and father—are called to the police station to answer for Hartman’s grandfather, soon revealed as the town pervert (‘the Fernwood Flasher’).
Mostly barren of either music or laugh tracks, and hobbled by the show’s relentless production schedule, episodes often appear improvised, if sometimes entirely unrehearsed: blocking is clunky, words are stumbled over, protracted silences pervade, and characters have a tendency to stare at each other searchingly for what should happen next. Events lumber and swirl around Mary Hartman, but for Mary Hartman, those events are merely microtones in an ambient hum, intervals indistinguishable from the waxy yellow buildup she can’t seem to remove from her kitchen floors, an errant flight path, or a distant war.
Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman was an instant success, with Louise Lasser, once a niche New York actress and the ex-wife of Woody Allen, suddenly becoming a household name. Suffering from extreme exhaustion over the course of production, Lasser soon began to spiral into depression, experiencing the onslaught of a psychotic break. The boundaries between Louise Lasser and Mary Hartman were beginning to blur. In the Spring of 1976, Lasser was arrested in Los Angeles on charges of possessing about $8 worth of cocaine, after refusing to leave a boutique without a dollhouse that she wasn’t able to pay for. Months later, Mary Hartman repeats a similar dollhouse incident in Fernwood, Ohio. Morbidly aware of being tethered to her TV alter-ego, Lasser and Norman Lear decided that Mary Hartman’s psychological agony should be eked out slowly over several months, culminating in the first season’s finale. Mary was to be slowly asphyxiated, but would seek no blame from her surroundings. Lasser’s making of Hartman was, in her words, in pursuit of a “big hole of blankness”, inextricably linked to Lasser herself, but a corner of herself that she couldn’t quite see around, and so could only render through a mirroring effect of relentlessly, and rapidly developing Mary Hartman’s character on screen.
Soon, Mary Hartman’s cheery coping mechanisms begin to devolve into sporadic oscillations of dread. As the first season winds to a close, and the melodramatic story arcs play out, Mary Hartman begins to appear possessed, intermittently fawning over her daughter Heather and shivering uncontrollably. She writhes in acoustic agony whenever an airplane flies over her house—an affliction that no one around her (except her handsome and sensitive closeted gay neighbour) seems to take notice of.
Lasser herself pitched the plot of Mary Hartman Mary Hartman’s first season finale to Norman Lear with a 12-page letter: Mary Hartman is invited on the David Susskind show—a popular real-life live talk show—to introduce a made-for-TV-documentary that she was randomly selected to star in as a “typical American consumer housewife”. The season finale aired on July 1st, 1976, right after the nightly news, which would have been largely occupied that night by the hijacking of Air France flight 139, intercepted on its way from Tel Aviv to Paris, and then flown to Entebbe, Uganda, where hostage negotiations unfolded. The hijacking was initially undertaken by two members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – External Operations, a branch of the secular Marxist-Leninist revolutionary organization known at that time for pioneering plane hijackings as a form of resistance. They were joined by two Germans associated with the Revolutionäre Zellen and Die Röte Armee Fraktion. They were later joined by more PFLP operatives on the ground in Uganda, where they found support from the Ugandan president, Idi Amin. Much later, in 2007, documents unsealed by the National Archive in the UK asserted that Shin Beit, the Israeli Secret Service, was also involved in the hijacking, with the probable aim of undermining the PLO and preventing French and US American rapprochement to Palestine. The hijacking and hostage crisis was widely condemned by the PLO, the Arab League and several Arab countries at the time as tarnishing the reputation of the Palestinian resistance, by undermining diplomatic relations with friendly countries.
In their demands, the hijackers called for Israel, West Germany, Kenya, France, and Switzerland to release fifty-three freedom fighters, forty of whom were Palestinians imprisoned in Israel. Shortly before the July 1st release deadline, Israel agreed to negotiate, and 100 hostages were released following the controversial segregation of Israeli and non-Israeli nationals—a decision reportedly unilaterally taken by one of the German hijackers, Wilfried Böse, which would subsequently lead to the expulsion of the PFLP-EO’s leader and hijacking mastermind, Wadi Haddad, from the organization. Three days later, the Israeli military conducted the so-called Entebbe Raid, in which the 102 hostages were freed. In the process, 45 Ugandan soldiers, all of the hijackers, and four hostages were killed, and large swathes of the Entebbe airport, including several military aircrafts, were destroyed. Benjamin Netenyahu’s brother, Yonathan, was the only Israeli military casualty. The Entebbe Raid is frequently cited in Israel as a daring military accomplishment. At the time, the Egyptian government called the raid a “terrorist theatrical demonstration”. Following a UN security council debate waged by the Mauritian Prime Minister against Israel’s belligerence in Uganda, and Israel’s assertion of the right to self-defense, only the United States explicitly concluded that Israel had followed International Law during the operation.
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On the David Susskind Show, Mary Hartman is presented to a panel of media experts, who, after watching the documentary of her day-to-day life, launch into a live analysis of Hartman’s portrayal as a subject helplessly dehumanized by the artificial imperatives of peak capitalism: a straight, white, un-educated wife and mother, awkwardly unaware yet acutely overwhelmed by the conditions of her consumption, her labor, and social status, neither fully cognizant of her own desires nor of the larger issues that live just beyond her body. According to the experts, no thought is Mary Hartman’s own, she is merely a repetition.
The experts bombard Mary Hartman with rapid-fire questions they expect no answer to: “do you feel this barrage of media exaltation to buy and buy and buy ultimately reduces the sensitivity of your personal life?”, asks one. Mary Hartman defends herself at first, asserting that she is neither incapable, nor a victim. But the depth she tries to muster starts to whither as she begins to convolute her sense of self with her sense of duty as a consumer and a patriot—one and the same. Overwhelmed, Mary Hartman enters into a verbal feedback loop. Things take a further turn when she blames factory conditions for her estranged husband’s impotence and alcoholism, an astute labor critique that she immediately regrets divulging on live television, imploring the camera to “erase, erase” while making swiping movements with her hands (a gesture that recalls a failed attempt at interacting with motion sensors, then a nascent technology). She does so, as if it were all already a simulation.
Exhausted by the accumulation of tumult in her life, Mary Hartman finally stares directly into the camera and repeats, with tears in her eyes, “it’s too much, it’s too much”. In the next scene, we see a frontal shot of Hartman in a hospital gown while her family asks questions to a psychiatrist off-camera. She has been committed to a mental health institution. Topically understood in the US at the time as a commentary on the mental health crisis of “nervous breakdowns”, particularly amongst white housewives, audiences were given to understand Hartman as unraveled by the cycles of minor catastrophe around her, yet unable to contextualize her own grief or anxiety, because she perpetually accepts the Faustian bargain of consumer normalcy that binds her to the vanilla chaos of her surroundings. As the camera slowly closes in on her face, Hartman begins to repeat her own name: “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman”. Finally, in a break of the fourth wall, the show’s creator, Norman Lear, stands in front of Mary Hartman’s hospital room beside a fictional TV news anchor, to announce that the last 26 weeks of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman can now be relived in half the time, with relentless best-of reruns playing on television while the second season is in production.
The scene at the David Susskind show was largely shot in one take, with Louise Lasser improvising her relationship to the fictional and functional TV cameras throughout. It was her magnum opus, the culmination of a minutely planned, slow-burn ruination; consumed by television, Lasser/Hartman’s rock bottom could only occur on television. In his essay Elegy for Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, published in the New York Review of Books in 1976, the composer and longtime collaborator of Igor Stravinsky, Robert Craft, called it “a deliberate confusion of medium and reality”: the casually cruel acceptance of violence and plight in scripted television mirroring the “growing acceptance of, and indifference toward, the increase of live horrors in our news programs.”
50 years later, such a critique would now be more aptly waged on social media, where the flattening of cataclysm, cuteness, and advertisement onto a single horizontal axis seeks to numb and stultify the breadth of human emotion. Rapacious accumulation of personal experience as ‘content’ further propels the frantic imperative to produce experience in the name of content. The resulting (and in corporate terms, desired) affective state doesn’t pursue meaning drawn out of attentive modes of perception, but simply expects passive gleaning of information attuned to basic sensory faculties: hearing, as opposed to listening; touching, as opposed to feeling; and seeing, as opposed to observing.
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I fantasize about the genesis of Ornette Coleman and Charlie Haden’s rendition of the Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman theme song, and write a fan fiction: Two old friends and collaborators, for so long the breath to the other’s footstep, turn on late night television. They’ve been rehearsing for hours, tinnitus has taken hold. The 11 o’clock news is just ending, and the screen image flips to a still life in front of a window: a table covered in family photos and kitsch: a porcelain pony, a lamp made of an old jug. A swarm of melodramatic string music rises from the picture, and with it, the voice of Mary Hartman’s mother calling her name twice, the second time with increasing shrillness. Coleman and Haden are participating in a nightly ritual shared by millions of other viewers in the US, strangely soothed by this parody of a woman anesthetized by the second-hand information she blithely consumes, and that consumes her in return.
I picture them chuckling and riffing, humming along and beyond the Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman theme song, breaking down its strange harmonics as they toy, not unseriously, with the theme song’s reworking. Maybe they’ve been reminiscing about Coleman’s landmark composition “Lonely Woman”, originally recorded with Don Cherry, Bill Wiggins, and Haden in 1959. Coleman composed “Lonely Woman” after he came across a painting of a rich, bored-looking white woman while on his lunch break from the department store where he worked at the time. He later recalled, in speaking about it with Jacques Derrida, that he had never encountered such solitude in his life.
People saw all kinds of things in Mary Hartman; guessing who watched the show was, apparently, something of a parlor game in 1976. There were sophisticates who appreciated it for its self-serious, uncanny humor, and there were working class midwesterners, who appreciated the show for its frank portrayal of lives that, for all intents and purposes, resembled their own. The country singer Kitty Wells released a song opining that while she sees herself in Mary Hartman’s scatterbrained world, recognizing all of the characters as her own family and friends, TV show falls short of her own stark reality. Mary Hartman may be working class, but she still has it “made”: the television rendering of working class life still provides a comfortable home for Mary Hartman, replete with brand new appliances and cleaning products. And then, presumably, there were viewers for whom no critique ought to be wielded over Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman; for them, the show simply held their attention at its woozily dissociative pace, its aesthetic cues pacifyingly recognizable.
Coleman and Haden’s interpretation of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman has been called parody of a parody. The quintessentially postmodern definition of parody, according to Linda Hutcheon, “is repetition with critical difference”: a doubling of authoritative surface over transgressive subterrain, in a way that ultimately subverts and legitimizes whatever it comments on. Norman Lear maintained that the relentless doubling up of Hartman’s name throughout the show was an ironic commentary on the repetitive nature of soap opera narratives. But Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman is much more so a dual subversion and legitimization of the ex-nominative known as the “American Way”, as well as its morbid counterpart, the “American Dream”—a concept Christina Sharpe refers to as a “continually re-animated, deadly occlusion”.
In Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, the greatest threat to the “American Way” is not just that it’s a total fiction of imperialist, heteropatriarchal racial-capitalism, but that the inundation of diluted information, sent to pacify and entertain people into a state of perpetual distraction, also distances them from their selves and their own beliefs, ultimately binding them to a caste-based status quo.
Such concerns exist in close proximity to Ornette Coleman’s Harmolodics. At the heart of Harmolodics is an emphasis on an individual’s need to hold and express a logic that is entirely their own within the workings of an ensemble. The survival of dominant societal beliefs, according to Coleman, comes at the cost of personal logic; to him, the uniformity of knowledge is a form of conditioning that determines constructions of race, class, and gender. Art cannot and should not be optimized as information in the form of content. The pursuit of the non-hierarchical is not about reducing information to a flattened plane, but to bring about an articulation of many distinct voices in unison.
Soapsuds, Soapsuds, in that sense, might be a meditation on the abolition of caste systems through the dramatic inner experience of human life, the fleeting frothiness of it, and the insignificance of a single body in relation to all of the information that it holds. Perhaps, the exponential shambles of public reality carries relative unimportance in relation to the scattered void of private experience. “Trends come and go, whether they are movements, ideals, products, inventions, eras” writes Daniel Lockwood in his 1976 book on the Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman phenomenon, “—but our inner reality, the selves we are and must live with, operate in a timeless zone”.
In his liner notes for Soapsuds, Soapsuds, Coleman writes,
“Information becomes information so we stay the same. We all know that a graveyard millions of years old is the study of archeology, not city planning. To save and give all information concerning all subjects one wishes to study would free all races from information genocide. What one does not wish to be known about them, only love and death remind them of what it is. Music tells these stories to all persons of age.”