The SynchBoardLips Are Like One Pink
Friday, 07-Apr-2000In response to:
"Working together to find the best Episode 1 synch..." & "Here are the albums I've tried:
PF-Saucerful Of Secrets/PF-Obscured By Clouds/David Gilmore-David Gilmore" by Dave T.216.88.24.134 writes:
Dave T:
I hope you don't mind me temporarily disrupting your thread here to bring some related/tangential material to light. It is essentially a recreation of a 1997 post my cousin Booker T. made on this board as a reply to, what was in my opinion, a rather convoluted and vague new-age type mythology someone named Gaelen was trying to develop around the Pink Floyd album *Obscured by the Clouds.* (the details of which I will not go into here...in fact I don't remember) It also contains reference, oddly enough, to Dave Gilmour's solo album you also mention above. Here it is:
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The SynchBoard, November 24, 1997:
Gaelen, I want to point out a connection you may have missed about your developing Obscured Mythology concerning L. Frank Baum, specifically one of his non-Oz books called SKY ISLAND (1912). In this book, three American characters, Cap'n Bill, an old sailing man, and two children named Trot and Button-Brite, are accidentally whisked into the sky via a magic umbrella to an "island" hidden in the clouds (or "obscured by the clouds"). This island is divided into two regions, colored blue and pink. All the people and things in each region are shades of these respective colors. It is up to the three Americans, during the course of the story, to unite the two kingdoms of blue and pink by reestablishing proper rulership to each. At the very end of the story, they are able to leave Sky Island with the refound magic umbrella. The last thing they hear upon departing is the famous Pink Band, the national band of the Pinkies, loudly playing in celebration of their successes.
This story could be important for several reasons. First it comes in the only real gap in Baum's Oz series (books about Oz were written almost every year from 1904 to his death in 1919), at a point where the author tried to permanently escape the wonderland kids had come to adore. He was unsuccessful because the non-Oz books SEA FAIRIES and SKY ISLAND, composed in this gap, never sold as well. This seems connected with Pink Floyd's own attempted escape from their name after THE FINAL CUT, and with the same results (for example, Dave Gilmour's solo album not selling nearly as well as any of the Pink Floyd albums before it). Thus the members of Pink Floyd, like Baum, found it necessary to revert to recording under the name that had an established track record. Only the estranged Roger Waters missed out on the resulting financial windfall.
Also interesting is the fact that the name Pink Floyd originates, through Syd Barrett, in a combination of the names of two blues musicians Pink Anderson and Floyd Council, although Floyd ironically pioneered a brand of rock that strayed quite far from these blues roots. Furthermore, we have the concept of "patching" mentioned in SKY ISLAND, a severe but common punishment meted out by the evil Boolooroo (despot ruler of the Blue People) in which two bodies of offensive blue subjects are cut in ½, with the dissimilar halves joined together to make two new bodies. This resonates with the name origin of Pink Floyd, in that we have a similar patching of the 1st names of Pink Anderson and Floyd Council. Note these are also 2 "blue men".
While all this could be grounds for some type of intent theory where Barrett borrowed ideas directly from Baum's SKY ISLAND (Barrett was a noted lover of children's books, and the 1st Pink Floyd album, PIPERS AT THE GATES OF DAWN, takes its name from a chapter in Kenneth Graham's WIND IN THE WILLOWS), a better theory may be that the Pinkish elements of SKY ISLAND come from some type of direct resonation or gestalt inherent in the respective evolutions of Oz and Pink Floyd, perhaps connected with some type of predestined Dark Side of the Moon-Wizard of Oz (movie) connection. If so, it could be connected with the Baum coat synch of the Oz movie mentioned in another of my posts.
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Then this post goes on to outline a rather awkwardly written riddle that didn't work very well at the time. However, I would now like to present it again in greatly edited form, if only to complete Booker's past train of thought along these lines:
(1) Find the triangle Helen-White-Cleveland in any U.S. Atlas.
(2) Within the implied boundary, also locate a Pink and a Blue.
(3) Find a matching Pink and Blue in the U.S. which relates to the following quote."Helen is more and more interested in colour....after I had told her that a carnation that had been given her was red, she puckered up her mouth and said, 'Lips are like one pink.' I told her they were tulips; but of course she didn't understand the word play."
The degree of difficulty in this riddle is admittedly about 9.8 out of 10.
As I will hopefully demonstrate soon when I get more time, this old post (actually a composite of 3 old posts) connects with new material concerning Darwin McGlumphy and his "Farrah Faucet is a Martian & Other Half Truths" site, as well as a related site called "The Kitchen Synchs".
Apologies again for the interruption Dave!
baker b.