2/27/09

Sign Of The Times (Part 1)

2/23/09

The End Of An Era (Seriously)



Having worked as a film programmer in recent years, New Yorker Films was the staple distributor for the most acclaimed foreign films, namely the newest Jia Zhang-ke, Philippe Garrel, or Apichatpong "Joe" Weerasethakul. Their decades long devotion to single filmmakers and film movements continues to awe. Their film library holds an immaculate treasure trove, from Straub/Huillet to Chantal Akerman.

So, the news today that New Yorker was ending its forty-four year run as this country's most austere film distributor marks this as a turning point in film viewing as we know it. Who will pick up the slack, after the closures of Warner Independent, Red Envelope, Paramount Vantage, and Tartan Films, all just last year? One wonders if this is a product of our deepening recession or part of the ongoing problems distributors face, which includes global piracy, instant access to once difficult and esoteric material, sluggish advertising, and uncooperative, demanding theatrical outlets.

While the theatrical system sorts itself out, it's worth thinking about what we're losing in the process: well curated, film-loving distributors, who need to take chances to survive. In my eyes, New Yorker released the best film of 2008; who will release this year's best film?


Rock, Infinite Regress and the Distended Present


Inside the museums
Infinity goes up on trial.
Voices echo, "This is what
Salvation must be like after a while."
--
Bob Dylan

Hail, hail rock and roll.
Deliver me from the days of old.
--Chuck Berry

Rock and Roll will never die. Rock and roll is here to stay. The reason? It bends time and space, distorting the present moment so that it stretches into infinity. Ironically, it also usually comes in two-and-a-half minute packages.

But the addictiveness of the pop single is part of the way that rock and roll distends the present. The repetition of the song and its lingering afterimage as a tune stuck in your head is an ever-swelling moment that cannot sustain itself. It is detumescent at the same time that is ascendant. The effete rock star playing the phallic guitar creates a plateau--an elevated plain without a peak or a climax--a perpetual present that is always already succumbing to the vacuum of the past. The present contains the past within it: it is becoming-past, a gyre whose center cannot hold.

In his treatise on modernity, known as The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin writes:
Every epoch... not only dreams the one to follow but, in dreaming, precipitates its awakening. It bears its end within itself and unfolds it--as Hegel already noticed--by cunning. With the destabilization of the market economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.
As it is for epochs, so it is for smaller units of time. Each moment is already the one to follow and the one that came before. This aporia is compounded by the fact that these moments are not discrete. Time is not divided; it is a continuous substance. The song contains its future demise. The record is worn out before you've even played it. The pop song's sugar is already dissolved. It pushes the present into infinity, but it is hyperactive, working itself to death. Pop songs are like batteries: they hold a charge, but they are disposable.

Songs not only exist in time (that is, over time), they affect time. That is, music affects our perception of time and it is at least possible to argue that time is both a necessary condition for and a product of perception. (Is it that time would not exist without us to perceive it, or that time is just the language in which we understand the world?)

But not all time is created equally. As a box contains an object, so does a folk song contain time within it. These songs are passed from player to player, down through the generations, acquiring wisdom that no individual effort ever could. Like a stone that has been worn smooth by the running of a river, the folk song is formed slowly, affected by every pair of hands, every voice and every instrument that it passes through. Its shape is the shape of centuries of use. Compared to the disposable pop song, born in an orgasmic bang that is already a little death--the pop song is gone before it even arrives--the folk song exists in geologic time.

The Coo Coo Bird, as Greil Marcus has written, is a song about a bird that has never existed in America. It is an English folk song that came across the waters and went to seed in the Appalachians. By the time it reemerges in Clarence Ashley's brilliant 1927 recording (included in Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music), the coo coo bird "warbles as she flies,/but she never hollers coo coo 'til the fourth 'a July." Bird song marks the passage of time, and yet the bird does not exist. Even Ashley's rolling, looping banjo is an ever-evolving present. Inside this moment, all moments reside.



Is it any mistake that many of the best psychedelic bands of the 60's had a direct connection to folk and its electric cousin, country music? Rock and roll is the electrification of folk music and in this way it is folk plus capitalism, a modern art for the ancient guitar. By mutation, the folk song evolves into a commodity and thus becomes subject to fashion and currents. (There is nothing more quintessentially American than looking at a wooden instrument that is literally thousands of years old and saying, "not bad, but it'd be better with 120 volts running through it.") Hit songs are a kind of fashion and fashion is a kind of Futurism. The slow forming oral history of the folk song becomes an attenuated, electric instant, a revolving present that propels you into the future at the same time that it denies time. This is the distended present: an infinity that exists in an inherent repetition that, like an amped-up version of Benjamin's monuments of the Bourgeoisie, is gone before it arrives.



In his brilliant and labyrinthine, psychedelic masterpiece, Opposing Mirrors and Video Monitors on Time Delay, Dan Graham creates a distended present through the use of infinite regress and video feedback.

Two mirrors face one another on opposite walls of a gallery. A camera on top of a video monitor faces the mirror, but sends its signal to the opposite video monitor. One combination of camera and monitor is in "real time," while the other is on a five-second delay. (The monitors also face the mirrors, so that the cameras photograph the image of the other camera and then send them to the other monitor, ad infinitum). The opposing mirrors create an infinite regress and the feedbacking video monitors also create an infinite regress inside of, but separate from, the infinite regress of the mirrors. There are mathematical proofs that demonstrate the existence of multiple, coexistent orders of infinity, but Graham is able to demonstrate this fact phenomenologically; there is an immediate understanding that in the gallery, space and time are extending infinitely (without actually extending at all--it is, at once, both real and phantasmagoric). Time spreads along on an axis perpendicular to the direction that it usually flows in. Each moment extends indefinitely: eternal return. Like the best rock songs, this participatory work is a drug-trip-without-drugs, an electronic trance-machine. It is no mistake that this actual, perceivable distension of the spatio-temporal plane also feels a bit like science fiction, for Graham has literally created a time machine, one that extends the present into infinity.

Here is Graham discussing the future contained in the past, the science fiction of 19th century painting, and the religiosity of rock music:



For Graham, "Teenage Heaven"--only briefly alluded to here, but elaborated on in his incredible video-essay Rock My Religion--is the infinite present represented/occupied by post-war Youth. This is a new kind of youth characterized by teens as super-consumers: a consumer class divorced from productivity. They exist only to buy and to be. As Tom Wolfe pointed out in The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby, teens are essentially dandies; their lives are devoted wholly to aesthetics. For Wolfe, these super-consumers may be denim-and-t-shirt clad Beau Brummels, but for Graham they are angels (two very different visions of heaven on earth). The teen angel exists only to consume, and as such is directly connected to the forever-new of Fashion. As Benjamin notes in The Arcades Project: "Newness is a quality independent of the use value of the commodity. It is the source of the illusion of which fashion is the tireless purveyor. ... art's last line of resistance... coincide[s] with the commodity's most advanced line of attack... ." Capitalism and modernity are one.

In one of the most amazing moments of the documentary Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey, Brian Wilson describes the people for whom he wrote his music as "children of god." For a time, the documentary appears to break down; Wilson's definition is infinite. "Not rapidly approaching thirty" is as close to a number as he gets in trying to define the age of his intended audience. What he is actually describing is something more spiritual, not a "target audience," with all of the violence that implies, but a congregation. He is talking about Graham's teen angels: the timeless, androgynous, polymorphous perversity of youth itself, beyond good and evil:



But "Angel of the Morning," beautiful as it is, is still mired in the pre-feminist sex-politics of the so-called "sexual revolution." She's an angel because he gets to leave (birth control as miracle). This song also clearly demonstrates the sex-without-climax plateau of "pop" music: he's already left before they've even consummated their relationship. Again, as in Benjamin's monuments of the Bourgeoisie, the ruins of the relationship are contained in its beginning. The song is only about the attraction and the denouement; the love itself, like the man, is curiously absent. This particular order of infinity is eternal return (this is the condition of modernity). They are always about to, and have always already, consummated their love... and he's already gone. For in this song, left and will-leave are one.

The song is an ouroboros. Play it again and again. The record is a gyre whose center cannot hold. It will get stuck in your head, playing on a mental loop. Long live rock and roll.

2/22/09

Arctic

2/17/09

Immemory



I apologize for the light posting as of late. In the meantime, as I attempt to catch up, enjoy a delirious trip down memory lane with a Sesame Street segment permanently etched in my brain.

We Think It's Gassy

The Seeds play "Pushin' Too Hard":

2/14/09

They Keep Going and Going...

As of late there have been numerous elections or votes that haven't ended quickly. Here are some updates on their statuses.

Minnesota U.S. Senate Race
Republican Norm Coleman challenged the election results in court when the recount total landed in Democrat Al Franken's favor, by 225 votes. On Friday the panel of justices hearing the case ruled against Coleman's request to open and count some absentee ballots that he maintains should have been tallied. He had broken the types of rejected ballots into 19 categories. The judges tossed out the validity of 12 of those categories. But the battle continues. More here.

California Proposition 8
On November 5, 2008 a writ petition was filed with the California Supreme Court. The petition seeks to invalidate Proposition 8. The California constitution states that rights cannot be taken away from minority groups through the process of simple majority elections. The court will begin hearing arguments on March 5, 2009. For more information about the writ petition, and the plethora of groups and companies that support overturning Prop 8, click here.

Israel
This past week Israel held elections for Prime Minister and parliament. Kadima, the centrist party led by Tzipi Livni that is interested in negotiating peace with Palestine, picked up 28 seats. Likud, a right-wing party led by Benjamin Netanyahu that is opposed to peace negotiations, picked up 27. Overall, right-wing parties picked up more seats than centrists or left-wing parties. This means that the probability that Netanyahu will be Prime Minister is high. Already his party is negotiating with others in an effort to form a coalition. However, some right-wing groups have said that they are not interested in joining Likud. Livni is also hard at work building her own coalition. A definitive result is not expected for weeks. The outcome of these elections will most likely have a profound effect on U.S. policy in the Middle East. Keep up-to-date here.

Zimbabwe
On Wednesday Morgan Tsvangirai of the Movement for Democratic (MFD) party was sworn in as Prime Minister. Last year elections between incumbent head of government, Robert Mugabe and Tsvangirai, turned sour. Tsvangirai was ahead in the first round of elections, but subseqent rounds, widely thought to be rigged, went in Mugabe's favor. In September a power sharing deal was discussed, but not implemented until now. Mugabe is still president and maintains control over the armed forces. Tsvangirai is taking office amid desperate times in Zimbabwe. A cholera epidemic has killed over 3,000 people in the past year and inflation has left many with no way to secure their basic needs. Already there is evidence of frissures between the two parties. More here.

2/7/09

Hair Matters

One of my greatest disappointments on Inauguration Day was how much time was wasted talking about Michelle Obama's fashion. While I understand that fashion is an art form, just like video, sculpture, music, and many of the other mediums discussed on this blog, in the larger social context it plays a different role. Having been poor for the majority of my life, I know how easy it is to lose, or never gain access to, power, based on what your clothes look like.

Martin Luther King Jr. said that he hoped that one day all people would be judged on the content of their character and not the color of their skin. Because of my experience of being ridiculed and judged harshly based on what I'm wearing, I like to think that for MLK, fashion would not be a signifier for 'content of character.' For this reason, I was upset that on such a historically significant day, people cared about what clothes were being worn.

Last week Salon.com published an article by Erin Aubry Kaplan entitled "The Michelle Obama hair challenge." When I saw the heading I cringed, thinking that it was indicative of continued fascination with questions of fashion. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Hair has always been political, especially in relation to the African American community. (As an aside, I understand that fashion is also political, but there is a difference between clothes that we can take off, and parts of our body that we have for life).

The article explores the relationship that Michelle Obama's hairdo has to racial identity. Issues of presentation, and to what degree minority bodies assume the look of the majority, have long been topics of discussion in minority communities. I've spent my own life dealing with the topic of hair. As a transsexual, my relationship to hair has had to do with ideals of sex and gender, rather than race, but the underlying significance is similar. (However, like clothes, length of hair can be changed fairly easily in comparison to its physical structure.) Do you conform your body to 'pass,' by removing signifiers that scare the majority, or do you embrace your cultural identity (and who defines that identity)?

The Obama's are now their own cultural phenomenon. Many people in the country look up to them, not only for their political prowess, but as an image of what America is. Their decisions will have profound influence over the dialogues and choices that people will make for years to come. This is why the question of Michelle Obama's hair is a very important one. If you are not well apprised of the issues at hand, I strongly suggest delving into this article. At the bottom of the article's first page are links to more of Kaplan's writing. I strongly suggest taking some time to get to know her work.

2/5/09

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2/4/09

Alistair Schneider

From Eurolunch, a new series by Alistair Schneider:


Hello.
Hello.
Would you like a Huiilmcraker?
Yes. This sounds good.

Do you like my rug table? It's called a Vilmhootsklerrkuuker-tablet.
Is nice.
Yes. I keep a rug phone right next to it for calls and to call.

Yes.

Would you like Smjkr spread for your Huiilmcraker?
Mmm.

It's right on the Vilmhootsklerrkuuker-tablet. Have two.

Oh thank you.

Good. This is nice.

2/3/09

Our Man In Commerce



President Obama's nomination of Senator Judd Gregg to lead the Department of Commerce today was something of a curious, bipartisan move, considering Gregg's desire to abolish the agency he's set to lead.

In 2004, Republican Gregg was challenged by Doris "Granny D" Haddock, a 94 year old pacifist, in an election year that was mostly disastrous for Democrats. That senatorial race is documented in Run Granny Run, a very decent and heartfelt time capsule of a film, embedded above for free, courtesy of SnagFilms.

2/2/09

The Future's Looking Bright: MOS Makes It Cooler

The New York Times reports that MOS, the architectural firm of Hilary Sample and Michael Meredith, recently won the Young Architects Competition, an annual competition sponsored by MoMA and P.S. 1 to transform the courtyard of P.S. 1 in Queens (Hat tip: Artforum). Designed to provide shade for P.S. 1's summer music series, the winning design, afterparty, uses thatch and a variety of chimney, cone and dome shapes to provide passive cooling. Click here to see a slide show.

MOS has a history of interesting projects that alter the way we think about and interact with urban and suburban spaces. Urban Battery, their winning entry for the flip a strip competition, refuses to just gussy up an outmoded strip mall. Set in Scottsdale, Arizona, Urban Battery addresses the energy needs of the strip mall and mitigates its most undesirable effects without trying to fundamentally alter its function. As the flip a strip description puts it: "The firm wanted to sustain the frank, lowbrow purpose of the strip mall, rather than 'gentrify' the genre. No money or energy was wasted on ancillary services or aesthetic flourishes."

Urban Battery
generates energy--an estimated 75,000 kWh per year--for the strip mall using wind turbines. Its most striking feature, the 300 x 300 ft. vertical screen, is really a vertical greenhouse: it is comprised of "thin glass channels housing a network of pipes, tubes, and algae" that filter the air, shade the mall and provide a source for biofuel. Elegant in both conception and design, it also serves as a smart solution to the strict anti-billboard zoning in Scottsdale, providing an attractive, green advertisement for the mall (as well as an advertisement for green technology itself).

In the very near future, it will be necessary to address the consequences of the world that we've created. Thinking about the way we create and use energy in conjunction with the way we create and use space seems like an excellent place to start.

You can see many more MOS projects by visiting their website.

The above images were created by and belong to MOS. Many thanks to MOS for providing them.

2/1/09

We're all Keynesians now



The above track, John Maynard Keynes, is available on Jeff Stambovsky's children's album, What Do You Know, Kid?, which is available here.