No Sir, Orison!1975

Orison means prayer. The title of the film is a palindrome, that is, it reads the same backward or forward. The film grew out of the attempt to create a structure around my first original palindrome, "no sir, orison," written while working on WIDE ANGLE SAXON. "No sir, orison" is the answer to a question. The question soon revealed itself to be: "what's this, meditation?" Someone is praying in the aisle of a ... church? No, a supermarket. The prayer, perhaps asking for God's mercy on those behind the evil practices of the "plastic" food industry – people who have substituted disease-producing non-nutritive products for the God-given plants that were intended for human food – is a silent protest against the supermarket and all that it represents: manipulation and exploitation of a gullible public to increase the wealth of a powerful elite. The next element to be added was the song, a reworking of an anonymous 17th century song "praising" tobacco. The film might have been entitled "Practical Solutions to the Problem of the Supermarket." The protagonist is played by an artist who calls himself Hermen Euticalcircle, with whom I have collaborated on several live performances.