The New Ennui

The New Ennui Dictionary of Quotes

2011-11-10T17:39:00.004-06:00

"Being exhausted is much more than being tired. It's not just tiredness, I'm not just tired, in spite of the climb.' The tired person no longer has any (subjective) possibility at his disposal; he therefore cannot realize the slightest (objective) possibility. But the latter remains, because one can never realize the whole of the possible; in fact, one even creates the possible to the extent that one realizes it. The tired person has merely exhausted the realization, whereas the exhausted person exhausts the whole of the possible. The tired person can no longer realize, but the exhausted person can no longer possibilize. 'That the impossible should be asked of me, good, what else would be asked of me.' There is no longer any possible; a relentless Spinozism. Does he exhaust the possible because he himself is exhausted, or is he exhausted because he has exhausted the possible? He exhausts himself in exhausting the possible, and vice-versa. He exhausts that which, in the possible, is not realized. He has done with the possible, beyond all tiredness, 'for to end yet again.'"

Gilles Deleuze, "The Exhausted"

The New Ennui Dictionary of Quotes

2011-11-03T12:29:00.004-05:00

Forever be accursed the star under which I was born, may no sky protect it, let in crumble in space like dust without honour! And let the traitorous moment that cast me among the creatures be forever erased from the lists of Time! My desires can no longer deal with this mixture of life and death in which eternity daily rots. Weary of the future, I have traversed its days, and yet I am tormented by the intemperance of unknown thirsts. Like a frenzied sage, dead to the world and frantic against it, I invalidate my illusions only to irritate them the more. This exasperation in an unforeseeable universe - where nonetheless everything repeats itself - will it ever come to an end? How long must I keep telling myself: "I loathe this life I idolize?" The nullity of our deleriums makes us all so many gods subject to an insipid fatality. Why rebel any longer against the symmetry of this world when Chaos itself can only be a system of disorders? Our fate being to rot with the continents and the stars, we drag on, like resigned sick men, and to the end of time, the curiosity of a denouement that is forseen, frightful and vain.

- E. M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay

The New Ennui Dictionary of Quotes

2011-11-02T18:54:00.004-05:00

Life is only science now. The science of the sciences. Now we are suddenly taken up with nature. We have become intimate with the elements. We have put reality to the test. Reality has put us to the test. We now know the laws of nature, the infinite High laws of nature, and we an study them in reality and in truth. We no longer have to rely on assumptions. When we look into nature, we no longer see ghosts. We have written the boldest chapters in the book of world history, everyone of us has written it for himself in fright and deathly fear and none of us of our own free will, nor according to his own taste, but following the laws of nature, and we have written this chapter behind the backs of our blind fathers and our foolish teachers, behind our own backs; after so much that has been endlessly long and dull, the shortest and most important.

We are frightened by the clarity out of which our world suddenly is born, our world of science; we freeze in this clarity; but we wanted this clarity, we evoked it; so we cannot complain now that the cold reigns and we’re freezing. The cold increases with the clarity. This clarity and this cold will now rule us. The science of nature will give us greater clarity and will be far colder than we can imagine.

Everything will be clear, a clarity that increases and deepens unending, and everything will be cold, a coldness that intensifies ever more horribly. In the future we will have the impression of a day that is endlessly clear and endlessly cold.

Thomas Bernhard, Speech at the Award Ceremony for the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen

The New Ennui Dictionary of Quotes

2011-06-20T23:31:00.003-05:00

"There is nothing innocuous left. The little pleasures, expressions of life that seemed exempt from the responsibility of thought, not only have an element of defiant silliness, of callous refusal to see, but directly serve their dialectical opposite. Even the blossoming tree lies the moment is bloom is seen without the shade of terror; even the innocent 'How lovely!' becomes an excuse for an existence outrageously unlovely, and there is no beauty or consolation except in the gaze falling on horror, withstanding it, and in the unalleviated consciousness of negativity holding fast to the possibility of what is better. Mistrust is called for in the space of all spontaneity, impetuosity, all letting oneself go, for it implies pliancy towards the superior might of the existent. The malignant deeper meaning of ease, once confined to toasts of conviviality, has long since spread to more appealing impulses. The chance conversation on a train, when, to avoid dispute, one consents to a few statements that one knows ultimately to implicate murder, is already a betrayal; no thought is immune against communication, and to utter it in the wrong place and in wrong agreement is enough to undermine its truth. Every visit to the cinema leaves me, against all my vigilance, stupider and worse. Sociability itself connives at injustice by pretending that in this chill world we can still talk to each other, and the casual amiable remark contributes to perpetuating silence, that concessions made to the interlocutor debase him once more in the person of speaker. The evil principle that was always latent in affability unfurls its bestiality in the egalitarian spirit. Condescension, and thinking oneself no better, are the same. To adapt to the weakness of the oppressed is to affirm in it the pre-condition of power, and to develop in oneself the coarseness, insensibility and violence needed to exert domination.... For the intellectual, inviolable isolation is now the only way of showing some measure of solidarity. All collaboration, all the human worth of social mixing and participation, merely masks a tacit acceptance of inhumanity. It is the sufferings of men [sic] that should be shared: the smallest step towards their pleasures is one towards the hardening of their pains."
- Theodore Adorno, Minima Moralia

A New Ennui Happy Holiday Message

2010-12-29T12:50:00.004-06:00

"Anyways, these ideas or feelings or ramblings had their satisfactions. They turned the pain of others into memories of one's own. They turned pain, which is natural, enduring and eternally triumphant, into personal memory, which is human, brief and eternally elusive. They turned a brutal story of injustice and abuse, an incoherent howl with no beginning or end, into a neatly structured story in which suicide was always held out as a possibility. They turned flight into freedom, even if freedom meant no more than the perpetuation of flight. They turned chaos into order, even if it was at the cost of what is commonly known as sanity."

- Roberto Bolano, 2666

Now You Know

2010-11-12T13:12:00.004-06:00

Cleaning up the spam in revealed this little gem:

I love coming here and reading about all the intresting things on this site everyday. There is nothing better than learning how to make money online and coming here really helps.

Anything I can do to help!

send + receive v. 12

2010-11-12T13:02:00.004-06:00

For the 12^th edition of send + receive, we are tying together threads of approaches with a loose string and wire theme…

Where wires are a constant at send + receive, simply by the nature of electronics and electricity, this year’s focus is unique in its extension from wires to strings and their uses in sonic exploration. We will see stringed instruments played in unorthodox ways by eminent and singular prepared guitarist Keith Rowe (UK), multi-faceted experimental violinist C Spencer Yeh (US), earth-shaking drone violinist Anju Singh (VAN), and riveting tonal guitarist Oren Ambarchi (AU).

We will see piano wire used as a conducting instrument in a play on the historic minimalist work ‘music on a long thin wire’ by Alvin Lucier, in our Friday daytime installation Alvin Lucifer by Ontario artists living abroad,Brian Joseph Davis and Steven Kado.

Wires and electric currents are quintessential to the above mentioned artists as well as to performers like Erin Sexton (MTL), with her hand built oscillators, Montreal group Artificiel with their sonic and visual illustration of electricity through their hand-built Tesla coil, and to the distorted resonances of Michel Germain’s (WPG) cymbal tones.

For more information, click here! I'll be there every night, and so should you.

Put the Book Back on the Shelf 3: The Kindly Ones, Jonathan Littell

2010-09-06T17:31:00.004-05:00

[These are really brief notes on an enormous book that was sparked by Douglas Murphy's post.]

For a book that deals with some of the worst moments in human history, the most surprising thing to me about The Kindly Ones was how difficult it was to put down. Douglas Murphy supplies a few reasons – the mythological underpinnings, the Forrest Gumpery. The latter is particularly effective, for although Maximillian Au is no ingénue, there is something of the Good Soldier Schwejk (with admittedly less beer drinking and farting and more Mozart and gay cruising) about him. He is the very idea of the bureaucrat (although Murphy notes the family tragedy which lifts him from the banality of evil stereotype, more on which later) whose insistence of his lack of personal responsibility seems almost genuine; while he is in the middle of (in)famous historic events, they don’t particularly effect him as much as stress him out.

Or so it seems. By making Au the main vessel of consciousness, Littell compels us to at least provisionally identify with him, at least if you want to get further than 50 pages into the book. Which is especially odd given what a neither/nor character Au actually is. On the one hand, we have a character right out of Visconti’s The Damned – a cruisy queer Nazi with incestuous feelings with his sister and homicidal feelings towards his mother. (Is there not something slightly clichéd about this? It seems as though Littell avoided the Eichmann-bureaucrat stereotype but fell right into another. Perhaps we should declare a moratorium on Queer Nazis; there weren’t that many to begin with, and by the 1940s there were a lot fewer.) On the other, there is the sentimental murderer, feeling sorrow over the possibility that he might never hear Bach again, or talk to someone about Tertullan.

What Au signally lacks is mediation between the private fact of his psychopathology and the larger pathologies of History. The mediators haven’t vanished in a Weberian sense; they have been withdrawn. Try as one might, its hard to avoid the Zizek point about “the totalitarian personality”, for want of a better term): the inner detachment and cynically distance from power, the “I personally have nothing against the Jews, but the if that’s the Law, then that’s the Law” syndrome that manifests itself in his revulsion by the more virulent anti-Semites in the SS, the tactical withdrawal into the rhythms of personal gemuchlikeit (tea, decent food, musical scores, privacy).

This purposed withdrawal of any affect mediating between personal and social might be linked to Au’s mental disintegration, as Murphy points out. (Confession: I thought that the sexual fantasies that take up part of the last third of the book were real.) What, for example, to make of the murder of his mother and step-father. Like the two detectives, we the readers are certain that Au probably did kill them, but there is nevertheless absolutely no textual evidence to support this, and Au retains not even a traumatic gap in his memory regarding what must have been a very bloody moment.

This apparent absence of trauma is one of the things that is interesting about Au’s character. But at the same time, he is not the typically sociopath that one would expect him to be; if anything, he often resembles his erstwhile opposite number: Leopold Bloom, in his desire to make his way in the world with as little fuss as possible. In what sense, then, is Au’s psyche broken-down? Or more specifically, what is the cause of this breakdown? The fact that he finds himself present at most of the major atrocities of WWII doesn’t seem quite enough. My sense is that it is his toggling back and forth between creaturely comfort and survival and the weight of History (e.g. when Hess makes his speech to the SS, making everyone complicit in the Holocaust) without a mediating affect that makes the link between an already pathological consciousness and the density of the Final Solution is the source of his mental collapse; the transitions between parallax are too traumatic as such.

Frued after Derrida Conference at University of Manitoba

2010-08-28T18:21:00.003-05:00

Engaging Freud’s work as it continues to inform and provoke research and discussion across the disciplines (e.g., architecture, film, history, literature, philosophy, religion, science), and particularly, as it opens through and “after Derrida.” Topics to be considered include: psychoanalysis and the literary text, temporality, space, technics, responsibility, animality, embodiment, memory, dream, writing, the uncanny, life, death, desire, repetition, law, sovereignty, sexuality, silence, mourning, testimony, the unconscious, repression, identity, family.

Further information here.

What's up Vienna! What's Up Montreal! What's Up Winnipeg!

2010-06-08T11:21:00.004-05:00

WHAT'S UP VIENNA! WHAT'S UP WINNIPEG!

A two-part, two-city encounter of sound, film and video

Curated by Michaela Grill, Christof Kurzmann and Steve Bates

FRIDAY, JUNE 11, 2010

CKUW 95.9 fm, the West End Cultural Centre and send + receive present :

RADIAN

TIM HECKER with MICHAELA GRILL and BILLY ROISZ

DIDI BRUCKMAYR

Film and video work by Ernst Schmidt Jr., Albert Sackl, Jan Machacek, VALIE EXPORT, Kurt Kren, Didi Bruckmayr and Michael Strohmann

West End Cultural Centre

586 Ellice Avenue

Doors 7:15 pm Film/video: 7:30 pm, music to follow

Tickets $12 in advance/ $15 at the door available at Ticketmaster, Music Trader and the West End.

SATURDAY, JUNE 12, 2010

CKUW 95.9 fm, and send + receive present :

CHRISTOF KURZMANN and MICHAELA GRILL

NTSC

CHRISTOF KURZMANN and crys cole

dieb 13 and MICHEL GERMAIN and MARTIN BRANDLMAYR (Radian)
+
Film and video work by Tina Frank, Martin Arnold, Peter Tscherkassky, Billy Roisz, Michaela Grill and Martin Siewert, [n:ja], Peter Kubelka, Gustav Deutsch

Urban Shaman

203-290 McDermot Avenue

Doors: 7:30 pm Film/video: 8:00 pm, music to follow

Tickets $10 at the door

What’s Up Vienna! What’s Up Montréal!

A two-part, two-city encounter of sound, film and video

Curated by Michaela Grill, Christof Kurzmann and Steve Bates

What’s Up Vienna! What’s Up Montréal! is both a celebratory championing of exciting work emerging from the two cities as well as a challenge to keep innovating. It is a coming together of the experimental music, video, and film communities active in each city played in and off the other. It is a look and listen to the work that exists just under the radar, perhaps happily so, but destined to make reverberations later in the larger culture they come from.

The artists involved in What’s Up Vienna! What’s Up Montréal! come together for two intense periods, once in Montréal (and Winnipeg) and again in Vienna. They will perform their own works and instigate new collaborations through this encounter.

Winnipeg is also included in this first edition as the initial connections between

the curators came about when Steve Bates, (then living in Winnipeg) presented the work of the Viennese quartet, My Kingdom for a Lullaby, at Send + Receive: A Festival of Sound in 2003, of which Michaela Grill and Christof Kurtzmann, co-curators for What’s Up Vienna! What’s Up Montréal! are members.

For the Winnipeg edition of the exhibition, Tim Hecker will be on hand from Montréal while two local artists, long associated with experimental sonic forms, Michel Germain, long –time technical director of Send + Receive, and crys cole, the current Artistic Director of the festival, are included in the line up.

Artists selected for the program cover a wide breadth of technique but all possess a singular approach to their artistic practice.

This program, consisting of live music, film and video art, features Radian, an electroacoustic band that combines microscopic sonic detail into its rock dynamic. Emotional and cerebral in the same song, the group expands the rock palette to new extremes. Didi Bruckmayr has a doctoral degree in economics, is a performance artist, a musician and extreme vocalist. Christof Kurzmann is interested in improvised music and electropop songs. He is an internationally respected improvisor of electroacoustic music, conscientious objector, and concert organizer/label owner. Michaela Grill is a video artist who frequently collaborates with improvising musicians. She was recently the recipient of a major award in Austrian film and video making. dieb 13 renders cassette players, vinyl, cd's and harddisks into instruments. He has composed music for theatre, opera, video productions, and installations. He directs the internet platform klingt.org. Billy Roisz specializes in feedback video and video/sound interaction using monitors, cameras, video mixing desks, a selfbuilt videosynth, computer and turntables for video and sound generating. NTSC is the duo of dieb 13 and Billy Roisz. NTSC is a continously developing project about interactions between sound and video off the well beaten paths of computer analysis and synthesis in a live context. The New York Times has described Tim Hecker’s work as “foreboding, abstract pieces in which static and sub-bass rumbles open up around slow moving notes and chords, like fissures in the earth waiting to swallow them whole”. His Harmony in Ultraviolet received critical acclaim, including being recognized by Pitchfork as a top recording of 2006. Radio Amor was also recognized as a key recording of 2003 by Wire magazine. His latest full-length, An Imaginary Country, was released by Chicago-based kranky records. crys cole has worked and performed extensively as a solo artist and in free improvisation settings across Canada, and has toured Germany, France, Italy and Belgium. She works predominantly with contact microphones, minimal signal processing and no-input mixing board. Mike Germain is a musician, audio artist, and technician whose work explores frequencies in all their forms. His work ranges from using improvised techniques in electronics to sound design for film as well as installation projects. Germain has exhibited at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, whereby he developed custom-built software to sonify brain-wave data. He is the former Technical Coordinator for the send + receive festival of sound and currently a Video Pool Media Arts Centre technician based in Winnipeg.

For more information, see the send+receive website or the What's Up Vienna! What's Up Montreal site.

Of course, all of you overwhelmed by ennui new or old will find this evening full of exquisite delights and even more exquisite sorrows to satisfy even the most jaded of Des Esseintes among you.

Deeper Into Movies 7

2010-03-03T14:00:00.005-06:00

Pickpocket - Robert Bresson

My first Bresson film, which is frankly a little embarrassing.

First remark - this isn’t a completely anti-psychological film. At the very beginning, Michel does seem to be getting some sort of sexual release when he opens the woman’s purse and removes her money. Similarly, the remarks he makes to Jeanne about his alcoholic father and disinterested mother get uncomfortably close to a banal sociology of the “anti-social personality” that Bresson goes out of his way, in the opening statement, to avoid. But, as with the sexually compulsiveness suggested at the beginning, this is some pretty attenuated characterization. Michel, Jacques, Jeanne and the police chief/Grand Inquisitor all speculate as to his motives, but it is as thought we the audience were only getting a mere fraction of the conversation. For example, Michel’s self-imposed isolation from the world on which both Jacques and Jeanne remark is never really explained. It is treated as a donnée, just something Michel does to the perplexity of his friends. In fact, there is a decided famine of motivation in general - a couple of pseudo-causes as to Michel’s kleptomania, if that’s what it is - but nothing to explain the relentlessness of his decision to take on the role of criminal.

Second remark - obviously, Michel is a Raskolnikov in palimpsest, but the difference between the luridness of Dostoevsky’s novel and Bresson’s film is worth noting. The pleasure of Dostoevsky in general is this luridness, of too-muchedness: pedophiles and prostitutes and bone-crunching poverty collaged with lengthy disquisitions on God, morality and politics. While he may be a little too worthy, its hard not to see Doestoevsky as a kind of pulp-modernist in the way that Lovecraft and P.K. Dick are.

Bresson, on the other hand, seems to operate in a more unstable terrain. Michel does not finally confess in order for resurrection to occur. The love affair, if that’s what it is, between Michel and Jeanne seems to be little more than a narrative device with little to do other than provide a means by which the film can continue. In this sense, it is little different from the vaudeville routines that Vladimir and Estragon use to pass the time in Waiting for Godot. The action is not where the action is in this case. Which leads us to…

Third remark - purely at the level of sheer visual pleasure, the ballet of hands, arms, wallets, pockets, newspapers and overcoats was astonishing. This is where the interest lies, and why it is easy to appreciate the enthusiasm that a Godard or a Truffaut would have had for Bresson. Pure cinema, without extraneous content. Its concepts visible in movement and time.

I have a feeling I have a new hobby-horse.

Happy Holidays from the New Ennui

2009-12-28T18:42:00.004-06:00

Something to tide everyone over until some new posts, soon to be coming thick and fast. In the meantime, I heart Chris Marker, and so should you.

And the rest is cinema - 4

2009-06-15T12:10:00.005-05:00

Enter Structuralism. It is my firmly held conviction that Structuralism, after Freudianism and Marxism, was the last great intellectual adventure of the twentieth century, and so I sometimes get touchy when it is taken in vain. However, not having seen A Married Woman (the context of Godard’s first overt use of structuralist-inspired film work), I’m reticent about discussing Brody’s analysis. Is this, for example, true?

A Married Woman firmly established Godard as a politically and socially engaged artist. It placed him fully within his times and put the times firmly on his side. It also established the tonality of his work to come, both in its forthright assertion of the cinema as an analytical instrument and in its unique permeability to the events, moods and ideas of its day. Yet the specific view of the contemporary work that Godard offered was not favourable. Instead, he further developed the moralizing and puritanical critique of a modern life… - in other words, a critique of the world in which it was plausible for Anna Karina to leave him [as had happened at this time.] Godard’s intellectual and documentary engagement with his times would converge upon the burning point of his romantic agony, which it would reveal and salve, and to which it would offer the prospect - or dream - of a favourable resolution, literally a conservative revolution [I.e. the abandonment of adulterous passion for conjugal bliss.]

If Godard’s social outlook was conservative, his filmmaking was frenetically radical. The film’s startling fragmentation and abstraction reflect the modern philosophy [I.e. structuralism] that was on Godard’s mind - and his loss of faith in familiar Hollywood styles. Paradoxically, the frustrating uncertainty behind its conception lent The Married Woman an air of desperate urgency that seemed not merely the filmmaker’s but the era’s. (190-1)

There is a certain obfuscation at work here, or, perhaps, a core ambiguity around the term “conservative”. Cultural conservatives, as Brody understands it, implies the tradition of the old High/Low distinction in the art: that there is a Tradition of Great Works that cohere - important elision here - into a moral unity. Thus Brody can play on a received idea of aesthetic morality/moral aesthetics and contrast it to the hedonism ascribed to mass culture. There are three points that should be made here:

1. The assertion of an aesthetic-moral Tradition was, I think, as much tactical as anything else for Godard, who never ceased making the claim that the inheritor of this Tradition was Cinema as such. This legitimizes Cinema as an art form and also allows Godard to postulate it as Other to mass culture.
2. I personally find it somewhat touching, even a little charming, that these aesthetic conflicts, clearly felt very deeply by Godard, had a human-all-too-human source: “Godard could only assume that, were [Anna] Karina authentically free, liberated from the false consciousness of media propaganda, she would discover within herself her authentic nature, her true desire, her natural virtue and would come back to him”(199).[1] I think that part of the power of the films that Godard and Karina made together does to some degree depend on the evident pleasure on Godard takes in filming her, as Rossellini did Ingrid Bergman, and Ingmar Bergman did Liv Ullmann, as Pasolini did Ninetto Davolia. Obviously, there is a less pleasant side to this: men framing their beloved-as-art-object, as well as the manner in which Godard figures pop and mass culture as the province of a deceptive femininity a la Madame Bovary. These are very serious issues (not really dealt with by Brody), but I am inclined to forgive Godard’s framing of Karina (not his abusive behaviour to her, even though the may, or indeed probably are, be related) as it seems so heartfelt that it seems churlish to condemn.
3. The postulation of a vantage point from which to engage in critique of capitalist mass culture is not solely a technique used by aesthetic/moral conservatives. Adorno’s Aesthetic Thoery argues, in fact, that such a vantage point (embodied there in Beckett, Kafka and Schoenberg and, ironically, definitely not film) is necessary for a critique of capitalism and its attendant culture industry. In order for Brody to make his point persuasive, he would need to show how Godard mobilizes this vantage point to specifically conservative effect (beyond banal sentiments like “people who are married should stay together”) either morally, aesthetically, or socially.

And, as Brody notes, there was plenty of social conservativism about, both in France and the US. The Married Woman sustained extensive “recommendations” (down to the level of the grammar of the title) from the censor board still reeling from the shock of Le Petit Soldat, while Godard moved further to the Left, and vice versa:

If Godard had found a home in the left, it was because the left had changed; it had become a matter of form and style, of tone and mood, instead of simply an ideology, and had, as such, redefined its criteria and realigned its spectrum to include him - even realigned itself to accord with him. (205)

Again, a deflationary move is taking place - from “simple ideology” to “form” (as in Marxsm and Form) and “style” (as in Revolt into Style), and then to “tone and mood (as in lifestyle accessory). Here, as elsewhere, one wonders as to the political stance of Brody’s work and how it relates to his sense of Godard’s trajectory, as in this sweeping judgment:

At the apogee of Godard’s public renown, at the moment of his triumph as a cultural hero to the young and a new classic to his elders, he was increasingly lost as a filmmaker. He continued to make brilliant, personal films, even epochal films, and he did so at a furious pace that left his acolytes breathless [ahem]. And yet he would work with an increasing despair. Precisely as Godard’s engagement with “life” - political, social, intellectual - and with the new complexities and incipient crises of the times was intensifying, he was in doubt regarding the cinematic form with which to represent it. As his films became ever more permeable with regard to the explosive tensions and wild energies of the day, they also became increasingly formless. The summit of Godard’s fame and his esteem as an artist and a cultural touchstone of the age was also the moment of his cinematic breakdown, which he displayed on-screen in real time. (209).

Sez you, one might respond. “Formlessness”, however, is a loaded term; if by “formless” one means “other than classic cinematic beginning-middle-end narration”, than Brody’s claim is mostly true. And in fact it is this attempt by Godard to find new forms AKA displaying his “cinematic breakdown” that leads us to the most exciting films of his career: Alphaville, Pierrot le Fou, Les Chinoise and Weekend.

[1] Note the unremarked shift from existentialist vocabulary - “authentic freedom”, “authentic nature” - to a more ur-Situ “false consciousness” “true desire” - to an eighteenth century, quasi-Rousseau “natural virtue”. Brody’s skill as a writer is in his ability to make these conceptual shifts almost subliminally.

Deeper Into Movies 6

2009-06-15T11:37:00.005-05:00

Blue - Derek Jarman

I caught myself looking at shoes in a shop window. I thought of going in and buying a pair, but stopped myself. The shoes I am wearing at the moment should be sufficient to walk me out of life.

Cezanne: “Things are looking bad. You have to hurry if you want to see anything. Everything is disappearing.”

The Mediterranean blue is fading on the 35mm film, so badly spooled that it took three tries before the chimes would ring. Scratches that appeared like boils and sores on a retina, black starlings flocking and dispersing. At times, the blue seemed washed out altogether, fading. But if there is one thing that we are sure of by the end of the movie, everything fades eventually. Sometimes in the time it takes to boil a kettle or break a heart. Or to watch a film.

I seem to recall a white screen the first time I saw it, at the beginning.

Proust: “…the memory of a certain image is only regret for a certain moment”

Jarman’s blindness was as monstrous as Baudelaire’s aphasia or the madness of philosophers. Do we lose the vital things first, leaving the juddering, wracked body to trail in its wake? Until there is only a spasm of lucidity, longing for its own annihilation?

But the origin of “monstrous” is the same as “to demonstrate.” In response to blindness, Jarman bathes our eyes in lush blues in what is in some ways his most straightforwardly narrative work. We leave the hospital and end in a reverie of blue skies, soft breezes, lapping water. Slender cool fingers reach to touch an antique smile. This is a demonstration of Jarman’s generosity, as is his installation of compassion and courage at the heart of the infinity he allows us to glimpse at 24 frames per second.

And there is righteous indignation. The virus rages fierce. I have no friends who are not dead or dying. The flashes of rage, protest (a demonstration), sorrow are mixed with the blue of bliss, the impatient youths of the sun dancing amid emerald lasers and coral amphora. A life lived with eyes open.

Blanchot: “The quick of life would be the burn of a wound - a hurt so lively, a flame so avid that it is not content to live and be present, but consumes all that is present till presence is precisely what is exempt from the present. The quick of life is the exemplarity, in the absence of any example, of un-presence, of un-life; absence in its vivacity always coming back without ever coming.”

My ghostly eye.

In Blue, Jarman creates the ultimate film, a film which exists only as film, spirit in matter (as he used to say). The point of minimal difference between not-film and Film. In this, he is a fellow traveller with Malevich, Cage and Beckett, other artists who marked the barely necessary condition for the work of art (film, painting, music, literature) to exist. An interstitial zone prior to recognition, where ghosts reside. Jarman hears their voices, and they flicker at the edge of the screen, made bold by the rising forth of Blue. The voices of dead friends: David, Terry, Graham, Howard, Paul. Of dead possibilities, stranding us in an agonized world (Sarajevo, the woman in the taxi crying before the helpless Jarman). The world is dying, but we do not know it. Filling up with spectres, ghosts.

Derrida: “The spectre, as its name indicates, is the frequency of a certain visibility. But the visibility of the invisible. And visibility, by its essence, is not seen…. The spectre is also, among other things, what one imagines, what one thinks one sees and which one projects - on an imaginary screen where there is nothing to see. Not even the screen sometimes, and a screen always has, at bottom, in the bottom or background that it is, a structure of disappearing apparition.”

The ghosts appear and disappear on the cinema screen - there is a sense in which watching this film on a dvd (however large the projection) is not to watch it. Blue is a film - the film stock bears the lesions of having been viewed, having been seen. And will eventually deteriorate, as Jarman wished. Art becomes its own death-mask. And behind the mask, the imperceptible becoming of the artist, this artist, this Derek Jarman, one with the ghosts that welcome him.

Chateaubriand: “This is how everything in my story vanishes, how I am left with only images of what happened so quickly. I will go down to the Elysian Fields with more shadows than any man ever brought along.”

Further distractions

2009-05-27T10:32:00.004-05:00

L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze (1996) available here care of Perverse Egalitarianism. For the longest time I've had to stretch my bilingualism to its limit, so the transcripts are actually quite helpful. NB the long fingernails, apparently his sole eccentricity. (Really??)

Eventually I get to some proper blog posts - there's been the usual bad excuses, e.g. search for gainful employment, generalized lethargy and depression, multiple distractions etc. etc.

In Memoriam: Robin Blaser

2009-05-13T10:11:00.006-05:00

This is also too sad for words. The San Francisco triumverate of Blaser, Duncan and Spicer represent a sort of ideal for me, and now the last survivng member - indeed the last surviving member of the New American Poetry group - is gone. Reading Blaser's Robert Duncan poem nearly made me weep in Starbucks this morning. No more Image-Nations for us, just wreckage. The Truth is Laughter, but there's little to laugh about now.

Sublime

2009-05-11T10:49:00.001-05:00

In Memoriam - James Graham Ballard

2009-04-21T11:31:00.005-05:00

While it was not a big shock - he was sick for some time now, I am deeply saddened. We always had the next novel to look forward to; now there is less light in the world.

Ballardian corralles the tributes - Owen Hatherly and Mark Fisher (in Part 4) are characteristically thoughtful.

And Steven Shapiro beats me to the punch here. I think that Ballard's last four novels are a sort of auto-critique, especially the self-referential Kingdom Come which received horrible reviews. It is especially sad that Ballard's last novel (a painful, painful phrase) should have been so universally panned; somebody's sorry now, I should think.

In Memoriam - Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

2009-04-17T10:42:00.006-05:00

This is quite sad really - 58 years old seems awfully young, and she had far more books in her. Her essay on Proust is unparalleled, I think, and Epistemology of the Closet remains one of the most compelling books on Queer theory - convoking (rather than oppossing) Literature and Life.

Wierdly enough, I was wondering just the other week what she had been up to of late.

Mirth and Decay, in that order

2009-04-08T10:36:00.006-05:00

via Poetix:

Q: How many Deleuzians does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: There is no need: the lightbulb is already a permanent flux of becoming. To dream of changing it is to dream of violence: a meaningless putsch that would only replace one lightbulb with another. Rather, we should seek to liberate the incandescent intensity of its illumination - we still do not know what a lightbulb can be.

Well, I thought it was funny.....

Also, Elminative Culinarism on the politics of decay! Right on!!

Also, I am putting the twit back into twittering. We'll see how that goes.

My Endless Quest for Novelty

2009-03-27T10:22:00.012-05:00

Good lord this looks absolutely terrific!! Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism sounds like a must-read too! I need to get my act together! In particular in view of this, which looks the sort of book I wish I'd written.

Mark Fisher (again) on my current raison d'etre. Listen to "Bits and Pieces" here, a song that makes my socks roll up and down.

A version of the Badiou piece that has everyone talking. Everyone seems somewhat nonplussed by his appearance on HARDtalk, although it might be an idea to differentiate philosophers who can do TV (Foucault, Zizek) and those who can't (Deleuze and, as we can see, Badiou.) To be fair to Badiou, the interviewer is, shall we say, somewhat unsympathetic.

ooh the interwebs....

Put the Book Back on the Shelf 3 - Sound Art: Beyond Music, Beyond Categories - Alan Licht

2009-03-24T10:45:00.009-05:00

Writing a book on sound art is a fairly thankless task, in much the same way that summarizing something like “media art” would be; having been in circulation as a descriptive signifier for a relatively short period of time, sound art is a new medium intersecting other artistic practices – music, obviously, but also digital art, video and new media, film, performance art, sculpture, installation work, etc. Sound art negotiates these boundaries with considerable difficulty; in order to maintain its specificity, it must differentiate itself from music or media art, for example, by declaring itself to be not those art forms. (Even, or especially, when it is parasitic on those forms.) On the other hand, and this is a general problem, sound art cannot solidly define its borders as such without someone coming along to transgress them – “oh, sound art is ABCD, well I’m doing ABCDE, whatcha gonna do about it?” Of course, given the nature of boundaries and their transgressions as analyzed by the early Foucault, it might be the only definition of sound art as such is one that is purely negative, that is defined in terms of its status as “not being that”.[1] But then again, this seems unsatisfactory, as there must be some positivity signified by the rubric “Sound Art.”

Alan Licht, as musician, sound artist and frequent contributor to The Wire is in a good position to undertake this task, and he does so with brio. Licht enumerates three necessary conditions before an art work can be taken to be a work of sound art. The work must be:

1. An installed sound environment that is defined by space (and/or the acoustic space) rather than time and can be exhibited as a visual artwork would be.
2. A visual artwork that also has a sound-producing function, such as a sound sculpture.
3. Sound by visual artists that serves as an extension of the artist’s particular aesthetic, generally expressed in other media. (16-17)

One need hardly point out that this excludes a very significant portion of what people generally think of when they think of sound art, notably performance.[2] But this definition does have the advantage of being at the very least a starting point, the onus on Licht being to make this definition substantive. Which he doesn’t quite do. What we instead get is little more than an annotated list of sound artists/musicians/poets/visual artists who defy easy characterization. The itinerary, moreover, is a pretty predictable one: Varese, Cage, Fluxus, La Monte Young up to Ikeda, Marclay and Lopez – musicians all, you will note. Licht does point out that they are not sound artists either, so why they are in a book about sound art is an open question.

Licht’s book promises more than it delivers. (Again, given the aforementioned hazards, this is possibly unavoidable). He does, however, make an interesting point about the emergence of sound and environmental art which, he claims, happened at roughly the same time. Licht suggests that the two art forms aspire to a mode of ex-human art (he doesn’t use that term) in which the homo sapien artist and audience are compelled to reconceptualize themselves in terms of the terrestrial environment as a whole. Licht’s concluding paragraph is worth quoting in full here:

Sound art, like its godfather experimental music, is indeed between categories, perhaps because its effect on the listener is between categories. It’s not emotional nor is it necessarily intellectual. Music either stimulates, reinforces, or touches n emotional experiences either directly (through lyrics) or indirectly (through melody and harmony). Even electronic or experimental music, which is often thought of as unemotional or intellectualized, still deals with human thought processes, technology and behaviour. …Music speaks to the listener as a human being, with all the complexity that entails, but sound art, unless employing speech, speaks to the listener as a living denizen of the planet, reacting to sound and environment as any animal would (with all the complexity that entails). This sounds dehumanizing, but this appeal to a primal common denominator may, in fact, show human gesture at its most benevolent and least aggrandizing. By taking sound not as a distraction or currency but as something elemental, it can potentially point to a kind of cosmic consciousness that so much art aspires to. (218)

There are several things to note here: 1) sound art is not, in this formulation, a practice defined by production as it is a practice defined by its consumption. At the point of artistic production, it would be untenable for Licht to claim that any human labour had neither emotional nor intellectual component. (Even the most aleatory art works have at least the idea that they are being aleatory.) Viewed from the perspective of the artistic producer, Licht’s claim doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, unless he is willing to bring in some sort of concept of “instinct” or Spinozist passion, of which there is nary a sight. (And is cosmic consciousness devoid of intellect and emotion? What is this consciousness conscious of??)

2) There is the claim that listening as a sensory intention is different for humans and animals. Or rather, sound art functions by bracketing the conditioned listening behaviour associated with human listening as such. There is a great deal to be said for this point, and it is a shame that it is not foregrounded and discussed more explicitly in Licht’s work. (Also, animals, it seems to me, have a pretty instrumental approach to sound: “Predator? Prey? Mate?”) The claim that sound art, in production and reception, require, create the need for, or respond to the emergence of a new kind of listening, or even an overall re-ordering of the sensoria, is something that is implicit, but should have been pursued more assiduously.

Which is the main difficulty about writing a review of Licht's book: trying to assess, or even articulate clearly, the claims that he makes about sound art is a bit like catching butterflies with a harpoon. (Not that I would ever do such a thing, Gentle Readers). As with a lot of books about sound art (which have a tendency to be scattershot anthologies, for the most part), there is a fundamental incoherence of argument that too often seems associative at best. At then end of Licht's book, I came away with a list of interesting artists who aren't doing sound art and a sense of certain trends in what isn't really sound art anyways. Which isn't a particularly good result from a book whose title is, after all, Sound Art. There are some excellent insights and arguments here, but they tend to be lost in the slush of detail.

Oh, and by the way, Jim O'Rourke's introduction is beyond inane. It would be charitable to call the man an idiot - charitable, that is, to O'Rourke, not to any actual idiots out there.

[1] Two obvious possibilities occur to me in formulating this, both from French thinkers starting with Ba-: Badiou inflected – sound art is the part of no part of art, or the Baudrillardian definition of sound art as the ecstatic form of music. Consider this review as the first tentative attempt at my book on sound art, fragments of which to be published long after I am dead.
[2] Here I must, as they say in British Parliament, declare an interest: the send + receive Festival of Sound (see blogroll on the right) that I have been involved with since 2001certainly involves installations/sound sculptures, and many audience members and participants are artists involved in a variety of artistic practices. However, performances make up the lion’s share of the programming, so it is with some bemusement that I discover that we haven’t been doing sound art at all, particularly when that is how we distinguish ourselves from other festivals (Mutek, for example.) Of well, life, as Celine is reported to have remarked, is full of disagreeable surprises.

Random Thoughts

2009-03-20T10:37:00.007-05:00

It occurs to me that I might be accusing Brody of not having written and entirely different book, which isn't really fair, I suppose. Oh well, there we are.

WSB in fine form here. I particularly like the concluding "Probably not." in the first interview.

Poor old Roland Barthes's journals have been published and translated. They sound pretty bleak, but they can hardly be more so than Althusser's The Future Lasts Forever.

Everything you wanted to know about Paul Valery but were afraid to ask.

And Nina reports on the Birbeck Communism conference!

Finally, if you are feeling as glumb as me, there is this from the late great Sir Nigel Hawthorne, whose Straight Face is actually really interesting, if you like 1950s London theater gossip asmuch as I do.

And all the rest is Cinema - 3

2009-03-16T11:25:00.005-05:00

Continuing from here.

Admittedly, scampering around Paris in sunglasses is hard to locate politically, so what does Brody make of Godard’s first explicitly engaged film Le Petit Soldat. Brody describes the stakes and the possible motivations for Godard:

Although Godard claimed that Breathless was “a film on the necessity of engagement,” he also could not deny its lack of overt engagement with the politics of the day. Since he and the New Wave were so casually and widely charged with promoting political noncommittment, Godard self-consciously took on the most pressing contemporary political subject to show that the New Wave could also be openly political. Yet he would do so in a way that was so personal, and so independent of any prevailing orthodoxy, that his will to engagement would merely succeed in infuriating almost everybody and satisfying almost nobody. More than proof of an expressly political engagement, Godard’s second film… was above all a revision, and a correction, of the autobiographical constructions of Breathless. (87)

More briefly, if somewhat more obscurely, rather than Godard’s filmthought thinking, Godard’s filmthought would thinking politically, “something about torture.”[1] Again, Brody foregrounds the existentialism that he sees in the early Godard by making the claim that Le Petit Soldat contrasts competing engagements: “political engagement itself” and “a more subjective, personal form of engagement” (84), specifically, the nature of freedom (85). Brody admits that emphasizing the abstract “message” of the film - freedom - rather than the overt content - torture in Algeria - was tactical on Godard’s part; he wanted to avid the inevitable censorship that even speaking about Algeria would incur. Of course, it didn’t work; Le Petit Soldat would not be seen until 1963, some time after it had been completed and by which time the FLN and OAS would be eclipsed by other concerns.

So what is the political thought of Le Petit Soldat? For Brody, it is a bit of a morass: we have a right-wing photographer in love with a member of a pro-FLN group. Both sides engage in torture and are therefore morally/politically compromised, if not bankrupt. (One could point out that the pro-FLN group doesn’t actually kill anyone, whereas the rightist group has at least two corpses on its conscience by the end of the film.) Brody asserts, with good reason, that Bruno Forrestier (the photographer) represents a sort of Godard self-portrait with whom the audience is meant to identify and whose compromised political status represents Godard’s own confusion - if, like others in the Cahiers group, he rejected the Left’s call to film at the service of the revolutionary (or at least Soviet) cause, this nominally placed his sympathies to the patriotic Right. However, the Algerian war of independence made this an untenable position: “by implicating France in a dirty war to which it had never admitted, Le Petit Soldat as an act of defiance that belonged naturally to the Left. It was a singular rejection of the Gaullist censorship…”(99). Does this mean that the overall film is “an aestheticization of the issue at hand,… noncommittal regarding the Algerian War” (96)? As the ontology of film for the early Godard is the relation between character and circumstance, one might characterize Le Petit Soldat as Godard’s first extended attempt to film the relations between aesthetics and politics, or, as the first line of the film would have it, reflection and action. This would certainly represent a move away from the Rightist conservatism that Brody charges Godard with, away from an apolitical aesthetic to the assertion of a relation, however to be negotiated, between reflection and action, at least at the level of content. And certainly, the lack of overtly modernist “tricks” (bar some atonal soundtrack stabs that further emphasize that the characters are aware that they really can only choose the least worst of some pretty shitty options) further foregrounds this negotiation.[2]

Le Petit Soldat is not only about the Algerian War but also about a man and a woman, as is Godard’s next films A Woman is a Woman. This promises to be a particularly exciting chapter, as Godard full-frontally assaults the conventions of on of the most convention-bound film genres - the Hollywood musical. And here one would expect that Brody’s argument about Godard’s neo-classicalism would come to the fore. Unfortunately, Brody doesn’t seem to think much of this film, isolating its interest largely in what it shows us about the fault-lines on Godard’s relationship with Anna Karina and the bravado nature of the film’s creation (110). As per the latter, we have Godard’s first explicit phenomenalization of the device - instead of a musical film, we have a film about the attempt to film a musical. Brody indicates that the systematic deconstruction of the movie musical - a template through which Godard depicts escalating tensions between director and actress - are “so distancing, distracting and self-inhibiting as to doom the film in advance” (114). I have to confess that this does not accord with my memories of the film, which are very pleasant indeed. And anyways, modernist distancing effects Turn! Me! On! In any event, we are clearly a long way from neo-classical cinema.

But not so far away from politics. The famous ending of the film and apparently the pun around which it was based - <<Angela, tu es infame. Non, je suis une femme>> - leads us right into where Brody, for some reason, never treads: Godard’s misogyny. Brody notes Godard’s appalling and utterly reprehensible treatment of Anna Karina without offering much by way of comment.[3] I am aware that inter-gender relations are significantly, dare I say better, in 2009 than they were in 1961 and that judging a work or a body of work from a perspective that it could not possibly have shared is, for want of a better term, a little unfair. But this must be registered as a serious flaw in Brody’s otherwise encompassing if not encyclopaedic study: the role that women play, the way in which they are framed, is largely left unremarked in this text, and that Godard’s rather fraught (diplomacy, that) relations to feminism and women artists (whether actors or directors) needs to emphasized more than Brody does. So far, we have three films in which we have a woman is called a whore at the end of the film, a woman is dead, and a striptease artist whose most pressing intellectual concern is that she become pregnant. At this point in his career, anyways, women thinking are unfilmable to Godard, and this represents a major stumbling block in my appreciation of his work. In some ways it so apparent that this should be addressed that I am at a loss to explain as to how Brody avoids mentioning it. While it is true that Godard’s cultural, rather than sexual, politics are the main focus of Brody’s study, can the trope recurrent in Godard’s films of woman-as-force-of-nature really be meaningfully divorced from his cultural politics? If there is any “conservatives” in Godard, his framing of women would be a good place to start.

Brody is much better on what might be called the commercial politics of the New Wave, which, when A Woman is a Woman was released, was in some trouble. In brief, the Cahiers gang had a series of box office bombs, which left a lot of them stuck and the space opened by 400 Blows and Breathless closing rapidly. Brody further notes that the “failure” of the New Wave, and responses to that failure, contained “coming tectonic shifts in French cinema, culture and society” (123). Brody figures this in terms of an aesthetic conflict about how films should be made with Truffault and Godard representing opposing trajectories:

For Godard, the historical and critical orientation that defined the New Wave was… marked by paradox, “by regret, nostalgia for the cinema which no longer exists. At the moment that we can do cinema, we can no longer do the cinema that gave is the desire to do it.” The New Wave, for Godard, was born of its distinctive relation to the history of cinema. Godard saw the Hitchcocko-Hawksian cinematic canon not as a series of models to imitate but as a source of inspiration, a point of departure - and a lost paradise.
For Truffault as well, the Cahiers group was defined by its historical orientation, but in an entirely different way. He claimed that their cinematic canon provided a set of formulas to follow, and declared that the commercial prospects of its directors in his circle depended on their willingness “to continue to pretend to tell a mastered and controlled story which is meant to have the same meaning and the same interest for the filmmaker and for the spectator.” (123)

The result being:

Truffault argued that the application of the Hollywood formula, that he and his Cahiers friends had absorbed as critics was the only way for the New Wave to reach the mainstream. But for Godard, if the New Wave (as he narrowly defined it) was to fulfill its original ambitions, the general conditions by which a mainstream - of cinema and of society - was constituted would have to change. If his cinema could not become the mainstream in French society, it was France, not he, that had to change. (124)

Several points need to be made here, the first being that Godard is clearly moving away from the “classicist” model he earlier espoused towards an almost stereotypically modernist aesthetic, whose use of conventions is precisely aimed at overcoming these conventions. Truffault retains the “nineteenth-century novelistic” style, the aesthetic by which a good story is well told (as indeed the case in his films). Additionally, as MacCabe points out, there is the question of audience for the New Wave in general and Godard in particular. Godard represents what might be called, paradoxically, the traditional avant-garde - if you don’t understand than that’s your problem not mine. More fairly, there are two trajectories at work here: the first, that Cinema as such has an artistic tradition that necessitates advancement, correction, investigation - that is, Cinema is an art whose parameters are inscribed as such. This means that cinema’s aesthetic principal is paramount, its relation to the history of its own art form, rather than the utilitarianism of “mere” entertainment/commerce. This trajectory will be maintained by Godard for the rest of his career, for better or for worse.

The other trajectory might be thought of as the process by which a film engages rather than seduces an audience. That is to say, the audience that Godard seeks is an audience willing to work; the symbolical labour of his films is approportioned between the Director and the Audience. The meaning of the film is not donated to the audience (as with Truffault); it is a sort of wage. This division of labour Godard would come to regard as essentially Leftist, in a marked (but not that surprising) politicization:

…[I]n 1961, Godard saw that the cinema that “speculates in advance” on the spectator, even in the name of Hitchcock, was necessarily reactionary; that art made in the spirit of aesthetic freedom and progress was inherently inclined to the left; that the right was necessarily hostile to such art; and that a new, post-Communist left would necessarily be favourably disposed to it. (125)

While all of this is certainly laudable, possibly even true, there are certain problems that lie ahead. The first is that locating the “classic” cinema in some mythological paradise can lead to a certain cultural despair (once there was Cinema, now there are extended TV shows) that can lead to exactly the cultural conservatives and Rightist ideology that Brody isolates as the main seam in Godard’s work. Unless, of course, there is another trajectory that counteracts this movements towards the Good Old Days. Such as the work of someone who recommended building on the Bad New Days: Brecht.

However, with Brody, we are back to Sartre in what is, arguably, one of the more overtly Brechtian of Godard’s early work - Vivre sa Vie: “Since the 1950s, Godard had been arguing that Sartre’s opposition of outer existence and inner essence was fallacious because it was transcended and resolved in the cinema” (131). Thus all the Leftism is dissolved in “existential cinema: (131), despite Brody’s admission that:

Godard got the idea for dividing …[Vivre sa Vie] into discrete sequences, or theatrical tableaux, from The Threepenny Opera. He had even planned to include a character taken directly from the film of that play, “a master of ceremonies who would say, ‘Here is the sad story of Nana…. Here is what happened to her one day, etc.’” Brecht was in the air, and in particular, in the air that Godard was breathing. The December 1960 issue of Cahiers du Cinema was entirely devoted to Brecht, in open acknowledgment of the potenital cinematic application of his ideas. (132)

However, we soon learn that “[b]efore shooting started, however, Godard purged the project of its plethora of Brechtian influences” (133), in favour of filling Nana’s story being filled with “pathos.” And that’s Brecht dispensed with: he was “in the air” (cigar smoke, presumably), suggesting that Godard may have heard about Brecht indirectly and that the level of his interest extended no further than that. I find this improbable: Godard is known for the breadth of his reading (even, like any good grad student, he only read the first and last few pages of the books he claimed to have read) and, furthermore, the attention that he will draw overtly towards Brecht and Brechtian ideas from hereon into his Maoist films lead me to wonder why this program (as it seems) of de-emphasis is taking place. Brody does seem to be arguing that while there may in fact be some Brechtian aspects to Godard’s work, there aren’t that many and they aren’t that important anyways. I find this bizarre; a lot of the pleasure, for me, anyways, in watching Godard’s films of this period is generated by watching his inventive appropriations of the Brechtian aesthetic.

Further, Brody seems to regard Brechtianism as being an impediment to Godard’s film work; certainly, it is one of the main criticisms he levels agains Les Carabiniers. Brody concludes that not only is the film too overtly intellectual (in the sense that the POV is that of an “intellectual” looking down from a height - Olympian? - on the film’s venal and stupid characters), but that “…[t]oo much ‘distance,’ together with ‘denying the cinephilia,’ the Rossellinian influences, compounded by the Brechtian one, made Les Carabiniers a film of isolation; there was indeed almost nobody there, barely even Godard”(154). So not only is Brecht dispatched with, but so too Les Carabiniers, as Brody promptly moves on to Contempt, where the issue of Godardian aesthetics and Brecht’s influence on it is displaced by Brody’s discussion of the “crisis of cinema history” (179) in Godard’s big-budget Contempt.

In fact this crisis as such had to do, as Brody has it, with Godard’s disillusionment with the classic Hollywood from, precipitated by the pressure placed on him by Contempt’s producers to make a sexy film with Brigitte Bardot’s tits. The result that, having managed to finish Contempt - which is ravishingly beautiful and, frankly, doesn’t particularly deserve the short shrift that it gets in Brody’s work - Godard was left with a strong sense of what not to do, that is to say, make classic narrative cinema in the manner of Truffault, for example. The problem that Brody will locate in the next few films is that Godard may have had a negative idea (what not to do), he lacked “a positive, constructive model [of film and filmmaking] to replace the one he had just jettisoned. [As such his]…films for the next few years would be, in general, decomposed rather than recomposed, and the collage-like fragmentation fro which they were celebrated was in fact a despairing avowal of lost bearings” (180). This is the period when for many, including myself, Godard was making his most exciting work, so it is provocative for Brody to suggest that they really indicate artistic confusion. This line of argument is strategically placed, coming as it does when Brody begins his chapter on Band of Outsiders which is my least favourite of Godard’s pre-Maoist work.[4] Brody avers that the film was made by Godard as a potboiler, and like most movies made as potboilers, failed to bring in the francs to keep get the pot boiling (Dune would be another example). In effect, the failure of Band of Outsiders, both aesthetically and commercially cemented the lessons learned from Contempt - the classic Hollywood cinema was no longer viable in any sense.

[1] Just as Eloge de l’amour would be <>.
[2] I am deliberately resisting the urge to offer readings of the films here. My intention is to do later posts focussing on individual films, so to a large degree, I’m working from memory.
[3] Notably Godard slapping Karina for having the temerity to agree to dance with another man, and Karina’s appalling response of the “it showed that he loved me” variety. Here as elsewhere, I have firm reason to thank our lucky stars that there were brave women in the 1960s and 1970s and in the present day putting a stop to that sort of thing.
[4] I am entirely willing to admit that Quentin Tarantino’s endorsement of this particular film makes it impossible for me to enjoy it. One more thing evil about the Man Who Mistook His Life for his DVD Collection. A plague on his house too!

More to come!

Persiflage!

2009-03-12T10:12:00.006-05:00

I should have linked to this long ago. Local Genius Hugh Briss has enlightened us for years, so let him into your heart (or elsewhere, if you feel up to it.)

Persiflage! I wish I had thought of it!

Tom K

"They have no records"

2009-03-04T18:43:00.002-06:00

God this looks cool!

London readers (all none of you) should go and tell me all about it.

Excitements Abound!

2009-03-03T10:51:00.004-06:00

The blogosphere is full ideas lately:

Momus explores "Altermodernity" here.
Meaningwhile, Socialism and/Or Barabarism also coins the redolant "Salvagepunk" here and here.

note to self - bring into constellation altermodernity, salvagepunk and hauntology. Result - what ever the hell is happening now.

And all the Rest is Cinema 2

2009-02-25T17:20:00.002-06:00

Continuing from here:

Several points need to be made at this point. To begin, the definition of “cinema” in its specificity (that is its distinction from theatre, painting or literature) was one of the central motifs of the 1950s Cahiers group. That such-and-such a film is “Cinema” was the highest term of approbation that Godard, Rohmer, Rivette or Truffault could bestow; the later famously declaring that Boris Karloff’s death scene in the bowling alley from Howard Hawkes’s Scarface “isn’t literature. It may be dance or poetry. It is certainly cinema.” Or Godard himself on Nicholas Ray:

If cinema no longer existed, Nicholas Ray alone gives the impression of being capable of reinventing it, and what is more, of wanting to. While it is easy to imagine John Ford as an admiral, Robert Aldrich on Wall Street, Anthony Mann on the trail of Belliou La Fumee, or Raoul Walsh as a latter day Henry Morgan under Caribbean skies, it is difficult to see the director of Run for Cover doing anything but making films. A Logan or a Tashlin, for instance, might make good n the theatre or music hall, Preminger as a novelist, Brooks as a school teacher, Fuller as a politician, Cukor as a press agent - but not Nicholas Ray. Were the cinema suddenly to cease to exist, most directors would in no way be at a loss; Nicholas Ray would. (Godard on Godard 43)

This is high praise indeed and one can see the beginnings of a sense of vocation - Brody will speak of the “religious conversion” that overtook Godard as he sat in the various movie theatres around Paris catering to cinephiles. Not only is cinema an utterly distinct, if not superior, art form, the Director is the Artist Hero who can do one thing and one thing alone - make movies, and in making them, create this thing called “Cinema.” This is clearly the underlying aesthetic that forms at least part of the background of all Godard’s films and should not be pre-emptively dismissed as Romantic Auteurism. (Brody is, it must be said, very good about pinpointing what la politique des auteurs was really about, not so much as a theory of interpretation but as a kind of filmic poetics for the New Wave). All arts define themselves by their specificity, even if, or especially when, the boundaries of the artistic practice are perforated or ill formed.

The second observation to be made is that the contention of cinema attributed the Brody (correctly, I think) to Godard is not necessarily a conservative, right-wing or Anti-Semitic concept. And to be fair, Brody does not suggest that there is some inexorable logic that leads from auteurism to the Anti-Semitic conservatism that Brody argues lurks at the heart of Godard’s films. What Brody will do instead is indicate how the details of Godard’s fundamental conservatism lead him, or at least point him in the direction of, an Anti-Semitism that will sometimes shield itself in Anti-Americanism.

So what are the details of this cultural conservatism? Brody does not come right out and say it, but he implies that the germ of this tendency incubates at the heart of the New Wave itself. To begin with, Brody takes very seriously the culture wars that took place in the late 1940s-early 1950s, with the Communist denunciation of film intent on “depraving our [French] children by the glorification of gangsterism or erotic images, propagating the spirit of submission to the great benefit of religiosity” (12). That a certain chauvinistic theory of nationhood is present here should go without saying. Truffault writing film criticism, and getting good and much-needed money to do so, for the nationalistically right-wing Arts, as well as Joe-College type stunts played by the young men hanging around cafes and cinematheques are glossed by Brody as being connected to a sense these young men had of being extra-territorial in terms of the dominant cultural landscape:

The [Cahiers du Cinema] band’s right-wing stunts and sympathies, so soon after the end of the German occupation, suggested a wilful association with evil, a punk-like overturning of values. They also suggested the seemingly insurmountable distance between the young movie lovers and the official culture in which they desperately sought their place. Although they were, in practical terms, outsiders, intellectually they were insiders whose autodidactic fury suggested their craving for mastery of the canon. Godard’s own political provocations, which included his German pseudonym, Hans Lucas, and his article on political cinema [where he drew no qualitative or moral distinction between Soviet or Nazi propagandistic depictions of fervour], pointed to the underlying problem that the young future filmmakers of the CCQL/Cinematheque circle faced: despite their intellectual sophistication, they were condemned to anonymity, obscurity, marginality, unless they found a radical way to break into the French film industry, unless they found a way to attract attention. (23)

Effectively, these young men were, Brody insinuates, Left-baiting out of resentiment (going beyond the reasonable statement that films from America were perfectly good films from the point of view as aesthetics to brandishing right-wing or even pro-Nazi leanings in order to epatez les bien-pensants). However, Brody suggests there is more to it than that: there is the also the question of the Cahiers group’s defence of “classicism”, which Brody leaves largely undefined, but seems to suggest a certain, yes, cultural anti-modernism vis-à-vis narrative, character, order of plot, and, most of all, the primacy of the emotional truth of a film as opposed to its conceptual framework.

That Godard’s work should be seen as “anti-modernist” seems counterintuitive at best, and the emphasis on the “emotional” reality of film seems as un-Brechtian as one can coherently get. But at least in the early Godard, Brody suggests that Brecht was not an influence at all, claiming instead that it was the “philosophical modernism of Sartre and Camus” (29) and that Godard’s trajectory was a “conservative” revolution:

Based on the preservation, or restoration, of classical values. The cinema that Godard was praising aroused a direct emotional response through a traditional, nineteenth-century novelistic and naturalistic approach to character [c.f. Godard’s esteem, noted by MacCabe, of Balzac]. For Godard, paradoxically, this classicizing approach, as exemplified in such Hollywood films as the harsh melodramas directed by Hawks or Preminger, yielded a more authentically modern art - as a result of its forthright confrontation with the existential crises of death and the human condition - than the more formalistic and overtly artful films of Welles, De Sica or Wyler, which Bazin endorsed. For Godard, the cinema would be the definitive repository of a traditional idea of humanity as represented in art. (29-30)

And there is a lot to be said for this: the focus in Godard, even at his most narratively distended, tends to be on what happens to the main character(s) and how (t)he(y) respond to what happens - in effect, the ethical core of a certain kind of existentialism. This is clear enough, certainly, in Godard’s early criticism as such, but what happens when he starts making films? (Godard would hardly be the first or last artist, modernist, postmodernist or otherwise, whose statements of aesthetic intent did not gibe with her actual artistic practice.) One could also add that the one important aspect of Sartre that Godard seemed to avoid at this point in his career was the concept of engagement - a girl and a gun do not a political statement make, at least, not necessarily. One could better say that the cinematic framing of character as such, or, even better, the relations between characters, standing as a representative of “humanity” represents the ontology of film for Godard here; hence Godard’s defence of editing and montage to “provide the experience of reality itself” (39).

So what about the films and their relation to Brody’s thesis? Brody goes through the early shots (Beton, Un Histoire d’eau, Tous les garcons s’apellent Patrick and Charlotte et son Jules) in fairly, well, short order, and Godard eventually meets Breathless’s producer Georges de Beauregard “who made films on small budgets under eccentric and risky circumstances and barely scraped by - and whose sympathies were openly rightist” (48).[1] And so, with a lot of people’s help, they start making a film about “a boy who thinks about death and…a girl who doesn’t” (58) - Breathless. Brody regards Godard’s first feature as an application of the “classical”, “novelistic” aesthetic that Godard championed in his criticism, taking the structure of the generic film noir. The results, though, were none the less revolutionary: “Breathless would be an ‘action film’ in the sense of ‘action painting:’ the art and the moment of making the film were as much a part of the work’s making as its specific content and style. As such, it would be the first existentialist film” (59). I should note that I don’t follow how the last sentence follows from the preceding; in fact, its hard not to see the aspect that Brody isolates, rightly, as being most exciting about Breathless - the spectacle of thought thinking itself - is, if anything, proto-Brechtian. But more pressingly, how does this relate to the aesthetic Brody claims that Godard espoused?

It is in this context that Brody introduces an as-yet unexplored aspect of Godard’s version of la politique des auteur - that a film by Jean-Luc Godard will primarily about Jean-Luc Godard: in Breathless, Godard composed the dialogue on the morning of the shoot. The result was that:

Godard’s spontaneous method deliberately frustrated the actors’ attempts to compose their characters in any naturalistic or psychologically motivated way. …In effect, Godard’s actors were quoting Godard. Rather than becoming their characters, they were quoting him. (63)

Of course, non-naturalistic acting is essential to Brecht’s concept of theatre, and one could even argue that Godard may have been beginning to make a version of :earning films”, as it were, although what the audience would learn whatever it was that Godard was thinking or feeling during the time of the shooting, at least at this stage of his career. Brody systematically de-emphasizes Godard’s tendency towards and appropriation of Brechtian modernism in favour of what might unfairly be called Godard’s cult of personality and commitment to classicism. When faced with the radically “amateurish” lack of crowd-control (people gawking into the camera) and jump-cuts, Brody states:

Godard removed the scrim of convention by which the cinema transmits time and space to the viewers; however, by flouting the principles on which the classical cinema is based, he in fact ended up emphasizing them. In appearing amateurish, the film calls attention to the codes of professionalism, and in the end highlights the fact that they are merely conventions: it denaturalizes them. Breathless presents standard aspects of the classic cinema, but mediated, or quoted. Paradoxically, this interpolation of Godard’s directorial authority between the viewer and the action does not render the film arch, distant or calculated, but rather produces the impression of immediacy, spontaneity and vulnerability. Godard’s presence s invoked as a sort of live-action narrator who calls the shots as they unfold, with as much potential for accident and error as any live performance. But here, the “errors” only reinforce the illusion of immediacy. (69)

This illusion of immediacy, Brody argues, encourages us to identify not with the fictional character as such, but with the director; the modernist techniques are used to create an Author (or rather a Director) - Godard - on whom the audience transfers their affect.

But where is the right-wing neo-classicism in all of this? Identifying conventions as conventions is surely, pace Shlovosky et. al., the first step towards their deconstruction. Furthermore, beyond a vague ethos of “every man (and woman) for him (her) self”, there doesn’t seem to me to be anything essentially conservative at work here in with either the form or content of the film. (You surely don’t have to be either Hobbes or Celine to notice that life is often nasty, brutish and short.) It would certainly be possible to argue that there is an author-itarian aspect to the Godard the Maker, but when this construction is largely composed of quotations from cinema, painting and literature - what Brody refers to as Godard‘s “parasitism” (71) - than we have something closer to Foucault’s author function at work more than we have a Romantic, or at least pre-Lacan/Althusser concept of heroic artistic subjectivity. In other words, Godard the author-function does not in and of itself have rightist or conservative tendencies either necessarily (at the formal level) or in practice.

[1] Godard gets tarred by association quite a lot here. Brody also doesn’t entirely acknowledge that the practical political position of the Cahiers group is not quite as open and shut as he seems to think.

More coming soon!!

Random Catchment Area

2009-02-23T10:32:00.004-06:00

For those of you who feel the need to purge themselves of the sense of wasted time after watching the Oscars last night (is it just me or are award shows just really badly produced? That "background" music they had playing all the time was really distracting; I'm amazed at how unprofessional it all seemed.), here's this treat to darken your Monday morning.

More Godard coming later this week.

When Toffs Strike Back

2009-02-19T10:21:00.007-06:00

Alain de Botton responds to IT's castigation here. I should at this point out that I have enjoyed all of Botton's work up to and including How Proust Can Change Your Life, after which I find an unpleasant degree of self-regard and, well, all around smugness in The Consolations of Philosophy etc. that make him almost impossible to read without wanting to put a fist through the wall. (But then, I'm more of a Bernhard, Houellebecq type of guy, aren't I?) And the allusion to anti-Semitism is a little cheap on wee Alain's part, I think. But I do really like and recommend The Romantic Movement and On Love, and, prior to reading his Proust book, read In Search of Lost Time when I am in a state of general confusion as to the progression of my life.

Deeper into Movies 5

2009-02-18T10:26:00.006-06:00

Friday the 13th (2009) - Why did I go see this movie?

It is a well-known fact that the whole Jason Vorhees franchise was a knock-off of John Carpenter's still outstanding Halloween, so I can hardly be expecting much going in to see this movie, can I? But even by the minimal standards of the slasher film, the new Friday is formally incoherent and, well, silly. Effectively, we get about three movies in one, a good five people are killed before the long, long opening credits, and oooooh the killing stakes. Obviously, girls who have sex (a lot of tit shots in this movie, including a gratuitous naked-in-the-lake-with-a-machete-through-her-head that can appeal only to the really discerning necrophile) get the chop/machete, antler (I kid you not) first. We then take care of the ethnic minorities (a nerdy Oriental, a competent African-American), and we are left with the unpleasant rich guy, his pseudo-girlfriend, and the brother-looking-for-his-sister (who turns out to be alive). You can guess how it ends.

The really odd thing about this movie is its humour and its horror. Its humour: firmly stuck somewhere in American Pie and Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle (the latter film I actually quite enjoyed) - lots of jokes about masturbation, sex dolls and pot smoking. The horror: by current standards, quite tame and uninventive. Something else we can, um, credit the Saw films with.

And yet this is still a better movie that Benjamin Button.

Meanwhile, Infinite Thought gives the insufferable prat a much-needed, and, all things considered, moderate castigation. Shall we begin a much needed Facebook group - Let's Castrate Alain De Botton??

Good to Know

2009-02-11T10:28:00.003-06:00

Not apparently near 24 Sussex Drive. (Courtesy of I Cite)

And all the rest is cinema - Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard - Part 1

2009-02-10T18:42:00.007-06:00

Richard Brody’s Everything is Cinema is a monumental (600 pages plus notes) study of a figure whom, it must be said, is richly deserving of so detailed a study. Brody patiently goes through each of Godard’s films and even-handedly seeks to understand the whys and wherefores of their creation. It is to Brody’s credit that reading his book made me a) want to read it again, and again; b) go out and see all of Godard’s movies again (even the 1980s films like Passion and First Name: Carmen which have hitherto bored and frustrated me) and c) write an extremely long response. What follows is the latter.

Its difficult to know where to begin with so vast a study, so it might be useful to begin by comparing it to a similar study – specifically Colin MacCabe’s equally fantastic Godard: Portrait of the Artist at Seventy. In some ways, the comparison is inept; MacCabe’s work is a “portrait” and provides details about Godard’s background, including his affluent Swiss Protestant childhood, his stormy if bookish adolescence, his weird kleptomania, his utterly appalling treatment of Anna Karina. As the title of Brody’s book suggests, this pre-working life detail is not within his remit, and so, referring interested readers to MacCabe’s work, Brody begins his analysis more or less with the publication of “For a Political Cinema.”

The major difference between the two Godard biographies resides in their representation of the constellation of Culture, Cinema, Politics, History and France in Godard. As this is not meant to be a doctoral thesis, I’m not going to go into extended detail here, but the impression is that MacCabe is far more sympathetic to the Maoist phase of Godard’s career than is Brody; certainly, Brody consistently de-emphasizes the centrality of Brecht to Godard’s films, often to the point of failing to register it at all.

So MacCabe’s “Godard” is a Bazinian-turned-Brechtian whose career trajectory moves from the representation of politics in cinema to the politics of cinematic representation. (This is, admittedly, a gross over-simplification.) What are the outlines of Brody’s “Godard”? The term that Brody will use several times throughout his study is “cultural revolutionary” which is useful if perhaps one with too much potential baggage.[1] So what uses does Brody put this term to? In his preface, he paints a broad outline whose detail he will fill in later: the central premise to Godard in particular and the New Wave in general is, as the title suggests, “Everything is Cinema.” For Godard, this was as much a credo as it was an injunction; cinema not only could incorporate everything from the personal life of its creator(s) to the political, social, cultural and philosophical contexts of a particular film’s creation, but cinema had a duty to do so. As a result:

As the pace of social change outstripped his ability to invent new [cinematic] forms to engage it, Godard became increasingly hard on himself. Indeed, his pictures became public confessions and self-flagellations, but they were executed so effervescently, so inventively, so cleverly – with such a flamboyant and youthful sense of freedom – that they were often received by critics and viewers as virtuosic displays of experimental gamesmanship. …[Godard] spent the next few years [after Weekend] seemingly underground, working a frenzied yet sterile engagement with one of the doctrines of May 1968, a nominal Maoism. After years of intellectual woodshedding and a period of artistic and physical convalescence (following a serious motorcycle accident), he returned to the French film industry in 1979. (xviii)

One should pause here and note that Brody’s understanding of the postwar French intellectual scene as such bears the unmistakable imprint of Bernard-Henry Levy’s execrable Adventures on the Freedom Road.[2] Brody’s understanding of Godard’s commitment to Maoism is as unflattering as MacCabe’s is sympathetic.

But to return to Brody’s narrative outline:

…[N]o other director has striven so relentlessly to reflect in his work the great philosophical and political debates of the era: World War II and its political aftermath in France; the uses and abuses of existentialism in the postwar years; the structuralist revolution; the demise of Stalinism and the rise of the New Left; the growth of the modern consumer society and its political fallout in May 1968; the vast sea change and social heritage of the late 1960s; the hopes and disappointments of the Mitterand era; Holocaust consciousness and the recuperation of historical memory; new fronts of battle after the end of the Cold War; and the current era of big media and what might be called the American cultural occupation of Europe. But despite Godard’s ongoing attention to the crucial questions of the day, his approach to them has in recent years become so intricately interwoven with his advanced aesthetic methods, so rarified, Olympian and oblique, that many critics and viewers have instead rejected these last efforts outright, asserting that he has somehow grown detached from political reality.

In fact, Godard’s later work is marked by his obsession with living history. But this obsession has brought with it a set of idée fixes, notably regarding Jews and the United States. In recent years, Godard’s vast aesthetic embrace of the entire Western canon, from Greek mythology to New Testament prophesies to twentieth-century modernism, has gone hand in hand with his borrowing some of the prejudicial assumptions of that cultural aristocracy. Contemplating the contemporary world in light of lost traditions, Godard has adopted traditional attitudes as well, including several shared by some of the most discredited and dangerous ideologies of his times. (xiv)

Brody intends to argue that this sense of a lost cultural aristocracy is the core of Godard’s “analysis of the media, which is an integral part of his work…centred on what he considers their [sic] noxious effect on culture, on human relations, and particularly on the cinema” (xv). In effect, Godard engages in a series of manoeuvres: he identifies cinema as such with his own person and work by filtering its history through his personal life and vice versa. This cinema is then identified as being the highest of the high arts, being able to incorporate the histories of other visual arts (painting, sculpture), literature, music, history, politics and philosophy. From this “Olympian” perspective, Godard detaches “the cinema” as such from mass media, viewed as debased in its proximity to big business and big money as much by the an-aesthetic function of its entertainment value. The clear and unbridgeable distinction between “cinema” (standing as synecdoche for high cultural aspiration) and “media” (consumer culture culminating in television) is, Brody will argue, the source and effect of Godard’s “conservativism” that runs in contrast to the manifestly revolutionary aesthetics of his films.

More coming soon!!

[1]Anyone who lived in Ontario, Canada during the Mike Harris 1990s cringes at the memory of his “Conservative Revolution” which was basically part of the first wave of Market Stalinism in Canada after Ralph Klein’s intermittently sober regime in Alberta. A curse on both of them!

[2]A book which manages to be as nauseating as its title suggests, which is quite a feat, really. And indeed, Levy was interviewed a few times for this book. To be fair, Godard seems to have liked Levy for God(ard) knows what reasons.

Happy Birthday Gillian!

2009-01-27T10:58:00.001-06:00

Put The Book Back on the Shelf 2

2009-01-12T10:12:00.006-06:00

Reborn: Jounals and Notebooks 1947-1963 - Susan Sontag

The period of these notebooks stretches from the time that Susan Sontag was an extraordinarily precocious 14 year old to the time when she is 30 and on the verge of publishing the Against Interpretation essays that would cement her reputation as cultural arbiter. Edited by her son David Rieff, these notebooks are curious in a number of ways. Anyone, like myself, hoping for much by way of literary gossip will be pretty disappointed (beyond finding out that Allan Bloom was "disgusting", which is hardly news in and of itself); the lion's share of these notebooks tend to be little more than books sought, films seen and concerts attended. (The latter, curiously, not so much; music seems to have been an ambiguous pleasure for Sontag. In 1948, when she would have been 15, she writes that "Music is at once the most wonderful, the most alive of all the arts - it is the most abstract, the most pure - and the most sensual. I listen with my body and it is my body that aches in response to the passion embodied in this music." While this is hardly earth-shattering stuff, the profound discomfort with her body - not uncommon in teenagers in general and culturally sensitive queer teenagers in particular - would never entirely leave her. In this context, it occurs to me that I can't think of a single essay in which music appears to have any role whatsoever.)

David Reiff, in his introduction, states that he was determined to make as few editorial intrusions as possible, but in some cases, it might have helped as, during the period recorded in these journals, Sontag goes through a number of significant changes - moves to Berkeley, embarks on a lesbian relationship with "H", moves to Chicago, gets married to Phillip Rieff and helps write/edit his book on Freud, has a son, goes to Oxford on a fellowship, runs a way to Paris, moves back to the UD and works at Commentary, etc.... - to have had some sort of timeline. As we get into the late 50's, early 60's, the only way of knowing what city Sontag is writing in is by guesswork - she is buying books at a shop on Rue Fontaine (Paris), she is sitting in a restaurant on 83rd Steet (New York.)

Perhaps it is this vagueness of context that makes the journals here seem strangely distant, even when Sontag is exploring the emotional treacheries of her romantic relationships. Her marriage with Phillip is, for the most part, couched in aphorisms and abstract reflections on "Marriage" as such. (To be fair, David Rieff does note that the journals for her married years appear to have been destroyed.) We get greater emotional detail in her relationships with "H' and "I", which are at times heart-breaking; the first night she makes love with H, Sontag writes: "Everything that was so tight, that hurt so much in the pit of my stomach, was vanquished in the straining against her, the weight of her body on top of mine, the caress of her mouth and hands." These momentary evocations of happiness are all the more stark given that the remainder of the journal is beset with lacerating descriptions of feelings of sexual inadequacy and hopelessness, the profound fear of being alone and the (self-)disgust inherent in that fear. So while the journals are short on specifics and strangely unrevealing in some ways (no Kafka, she), we get a very clear picture of Sontag's need for self-transcendence, her desire to become the ego-ideal Susan Sontag and how this ego-ideal changed over time, and the wounded, pain-wracked self that it needed to be transcended at all costs.

One or Fewer Robots

2009-01-09T10:17:00.004-06:00

Florian Schneider quits Kraftwerk!! Is Ralf Hutter really going to continue by himself? Just as New Order wasn't New Order after Gillian Gilbert hung up her sequencer, it is hard to imagine Kraftwerk without jolly old V-2 Schneider.

(Also, apparently some guy from the Stooges died. Oh well.)

"Such a cold winter/ With scenes as slow as..."

2008-12-26T14:49:00.007-06:00

RIP Harold Pinter, friend to Samuel Beckett and Quentin Crisp, greatest English playwrite of the twentieth century, opponent of imperialism and force majeure. It is common in these circumstances to come up with some apt quopte from the recently deceased autho, but the extraordinary thing about Pinter's writing is that, unlike such a purported minimalist like Beckett, is that there simply are no purple passages to quote from to attach a spurious profundity to one's discourse. Pinter charted the abstract movement of forces (power, desire, language), especially attuned to their use and abuse, their potential for domination and violence. Now he is silent.

Random Catchment Area

2008-11-23T13:40:00.003-06:00

And the quote of the week goes to ....Infinite Thought :

"When I look back at earlier episodes of my life, I always seem to think that each of them had been a slightly depressing period of time, which makes me wonder whether the whole thing hasn't been one big long slightly depressing period of time, although I do hope not."

Indeed!

Send and Receive V.10 - Part 1

2008-10-22T13:44:00.008-05:00

Saturday 18 2008 - Vintage Futures

So Send + Receive is celebrating its 10th year this year and after a launch party

and a very pleasant afternoon’s workshop involving Dearraindrop, paint, homemade bricolage electronics, children and magic markers

the performances began at Ace Art. A low-tech night with almost no laptops in sight. Fletcher Pratt began manipulating tape sounds from conventional tape players and a small reel-to-reel through effect pedals. Pratt’s performance was interesting in a number of ways: as a performance, it was a success (for the most part) insofar as the audience could actually see the punctual origins of the sounds being produced as Pratt struck play buttons and cassette decks and twisted the reel to reel back and forth. A very physical performance, very different from the stereotyped “bald guy looking at laptop”. Sonically I really liked this project (Pratt is one of those artists with several different personae - this tape manipulation performance is called Mindgunk), reminding me as it did of the vintage Berio/Xennakis post-music concrete. Again, that sense of the mass of sound that a lot of older electronic work seems to maintain.

Next up were Dearraindrop of Virginia Beach. Oooh, trash aesthetic:

Its hard to know what to make of something like Dearraindrop - the trashy bricolage aesthetic (so Mudd Club, so B-52’s) is ok and everything, but it somehow tends to leave me somewhat unsatisfied. As with their performance (a lot of banging and crashing with some drones going on beneath) so with their visual art and video work - colours, images (abstract and kitschy) mashed together is a way that calls to mind the art bruit of Wolfson et al. Some of it is really funny. Some of it is lame. As with their set - some of it was fun and boisterous. But as I ducked the Double Bubble being thrown at me I was beginning to wonder why this was happening? What is Dearraindrop’s purpose? I still don’t know. And I don’t think I care enough to find out.

Keeping in theme with the retro-electronics we moved from reel-to-reel’s through 80’s sub-Dada to vinyl records with Vancouver’s Kenny Roux, who also sported Ironic Moustache No. 3:

The turntables are fitted with magnetic tape heads rather than styluses, the result being a surprisingly heterogeneous array of sounds that Roux clearly had worked through. Again, a performance qua performance with the sounds produced not in some interstitial cyberspace but by the physical work of the artist. Sonically it was a bit uneven (as was Fletcher Pratt) which might be a congenital part of any improv performance - some parts are going to be more interesting than others. But there was plenty there to be interested in. And yet….

Some nagging questions that I walked away with: Sound art as such seems to be moving away from the technocratic have-Powerbook-will-travel in a similar way in which electronic music as such moved from hardware to software in the 90’s. And this is just fine - there are always basement wierdos like Pratt and Roux tweaking old technologies to do things that they aren’t supposed to do. But certain questions emerge: what is the meaning of this return to low-tech? Has the tape cassette machine become something like an acoustic guitar or some sort of new folk instrument? There seems to be a theme of some kind of futurological atavism at work here - a Mad Max / Neuromancer situation in which the future is not sleek and clean but dusty with poorly connected terminals that need thumping from time to time. The deliberately low-tech see-the-input-cables aesthetic on offer this evening is perhaps addressing some kind of shadowy millennial anxiety about identity and autonomy. Bugs in the program, grit in the keys, grime through the amp say nothing as much as “I am Here” at a time when all the words in that statement are problematically functional at best.

So is this a way of pulling the breaks on the engine of digital data? A revolutionary gesture? Or the sound art equivalent of those dvd’s of fireplaces you can play during Xmas holidays?

Fatigue and Disgust

2008-10-11T13:58:00.002-05:00

Well, I've been working onthe omnibus Joy Division post lately which is coming along very slowly indeed. But here are some notes that I took while watching the documentary. Hopefully these will shape up into something:

Find source of Marshall Berman quote.

Emphasis on Manchester psychogeography

The pre-birth

“They are rebuilding the city…yes, always”

Why was Deborah Curtis not interviewed?

“Things that Aren’t There”:
Electric Circus
Pips Disco
TJ Davidson’s Rehearsal Room
The Factory

Bernard claims to be the one who discovered Ka-Tzeknik

Tony Wilson and everything that involves

Rob Gretton’s notebooks – if only!

Revelation #1: Keep On Keepin On

THE DANCE

Why does Peter Saville look like such a dandy?

Ian’s glamour … & Ian’s awkwardness
(he does look like Mark E Smith sometimes)

The Disorder montage – great, and then shit

Psychogeography – Wozencroft - Interior Manchester landscape

“To talk of life today is like talking of rope in the house of a hanging man. Where will it end?”

Annik speaks!

Genesis P Orridge looks really ill. And always inciteful. Poor old Gen, I hope s/he’s ok

Wozencroft and Ian’s “shamanism”

Trance --------------------- Possession

Revelation of Vulnerabilty

Epilepsy
Its stigma – Terry Mason seems very upset

Stephen Morris – inarticulate, sad, the only one whose memories haven’t become anecdotes

“Its surprising that no one would pay attention”
&Tony “Its art”---- “He really means it”

He had made his mind up

Hypnotic regression:
Just reading
A book about laws
28
I’ve been reading it for a couple of days
Going over it
Keeping notes
Something I do at night

Stephen’s anger
Regrets of Peter Hook
Paul Morley frozen

Their entry into RnR Fall of Hame and “vibrancy” Manchester

Sk8 boards and sneakers

Ian Curtis as reverse Sylvia Plath
“Perhaps its time we started facing the future. When will it end?”

Deeper Into Movies 4

2008-08-10T13:10:00.000-05:00

A Few Notes on My Winnipeg

1) From the moment the film starts, you know that you are watching a Guy Maddin - the silent movie expressionism, the strange old ladies, the cod-noir cinematography, incest, great intertitles (“Passive Aggression!” being a favourite). He progresses by means of minimal difference (cf Tim Hecker post from last year). It seems that a lot of my favourite artists in just about all mediums do this - maybe is a comfort level factor, I don’t know. The trick for Maddin will be to avoid the Wes Anderson trap, when stylistic signature becomes stereotyped gesture. This trap seems to snare almost everybody eventually, but we can always keep our fingers crossed. Anyways, I think we have a lot of time left on that one anyways; Maddin’s material is so idiosyncratic and personal (sometimes watching his movies is a bit like eavesdropping on someone else’s psychoanalytic sessions, which as it turns out, are that of the Winnipeg’s collective unconscious) that he has a vast seam of material to mine.

2) Compare My Winnipeg to Noam Gonnick’s Stryker: different ideas of history. Maddin’s historical view of history is mythopoetic - a mixture of allegedly Aboriginal ideas about secret rivers converging under the Red and Assiniboine juncture; sommambulance through time and dream, time as dream, history the nightmare that we are trying to recapture. The “present day” shots of the MTS Centre, the Winnipeg Arena jar because they seem undigested detritus is the fluidly oneiric images that surround them. Even actual historical events and personages (the 1919 Strike, Steven Juba) semi-dissolve into the ghosts that keep the narrator trapped in Winnipeg, despite his repeated protests about his need to leave, to wake up from the dream. Even if Revolution Girl at the end of the movie (great, by the way) were to succeed in reversing the wound sustained by Maddin’s Winnipeg, the narrator seems to feel bereft: what is a place without ghosts. (More on Stryker at a later date)

3) I was initially going to end these brief notes by stating that this film wouldn’t make much sense to anyone not from Winnipeg. But the more I think about it, this film is as hauntological as you can get. Take note K-Punk!

Put the Book Back on the Shelf 1

2008-08-09T15:40:00.002-05:00

Thomas Bernhard: The Making of an Austrian (Rita Honegger)

… an Austrian writer, and anyway the name didn’t matter, the person didn’t matter, no writer’s person or biography ever mattered, his work was everything, the writer himself was nothing, despite the despicable vulgarity of all those who insisted upon confusing the writer’s person with his work. The general public had been corrupted by certain historical and literary processes of the first half of the nineteenth century into daring, with the shameless impertinence characteristic of them, to confuse the written work with the writer’s personal concerns, using the writer’s person to effect a viscous crippling of the writer’s work, always shuttling back and forth between the writer’s private person and his product, and so forth, all of which lead to a monstrous distortion of the entire culture, bringing into being a culture which was a monstrosity, and so forth…
- Thomas Bernhard, The Lime Works

In 1989, Thomas Bernhard succumbed to the lung disease that had been plaguing him for almost all of his life, having scored a double “triumph” of sorts; his play Heldenplatz, had made him the most reviled (and most adored) literary figure in Austria, and his final will and testament had forbidden the publication and production of any of his published or unpublished works in Austria “however it defines itself” until the estate’s copywrite expires and the work enters into public domain. And this fits in with the image that even the most attentive reader might have cobbled together: the austere, solitary misanthropic author living in his farmhouse in Upper Austria preparing invective in his sparsely furnished rooms (all of which are painted black) with big bars on the window etc., occasionally to be found restlessly reading newspapers in Viennese café’s while diffidently giving interviews with more than a concealed level of hostility.

It’s a pretty picture taken from central casting. Sontag: “He (for the type is male of course) is a Jew or like a Jew; polycultural, restless, misogynistic; a collector; dedicated to self-transcendence, despising the instincts; weighed down by books and buoyed up by the euphoria of knowledge. His real task is to not to exercise his talent for explanation but, by being witness to the age, to set the largest, most edifying standards of despair.” Sontag groups Bernhard with Elias Cannetti and Walter Benjamin in this group, and certainly this He is one of the more enduring, not to say, compelling stock characters in European continental literature. The figure is European without a doubt, and the pathology is strictly that of central Europe, where the dead hand of even the most recent tradition hangs heavy. (It is apparently impossible to throw a brick in Prague without hitting some kitschy Kafka landmark.) Impossible to know what this He would make of New Europe’s MacDonalds, ID cards and Euros; the middle class do not exist for Him. All attention is focused on the (remains of the) past.

Rita Honegger’s book has two main purposes: to pour some cold water on the Bernhard myth sketched above (with some rather interesting results) and to situate Bernhard as not an anti-Austria figure, but as the most Austrian of them all, Austria “and all that comes with it.” The two purposes operate in tandem; Bernhard took some undeniable pleasure in presenting himself, of allowing himself to be presented, as the Scourge of Austria, dragging its skeletons from the closet – be they Nazism or a more generalized impulse towards brutality and depravity. Honnegger’s aim is to show that this is true, but up to a point. Yes, Berhard was absolutely a Nestbeschmutzer, but his attacks presupposed the permamnce, or at least the symbolic efficacy, of Austria-Europe’s past – Aristocracy, Church, Kultur.

Certainly Bernhard’s novels (I am not as familiar with his plays) are filled with black sheep deliberately (either through obsessive concentration on some intagible, impossible goal or with malice aforethought, usually both) ruining their illustrious heritage. And yet, Honnegger shows this heritage was not Bernhard’s by birth. Born out of wedlock (possibly the result of a date rape) and not exactly embraced lovingly by his eventual step-father, he found himself in the “oppressive” peasant atmosphere that informs his earlier novels such as Frost and Gargoyles. In these novels, the wonders of the Alpine forests are overshadowed by universal sickness and debility, madmen in locked attics and women dying painfully giving birth to damaged children, families committing joint suicide to avoid insanity.

All of this seems to change overnight – that is to say, the time when young Thomas moves to Salzburg to train as a singer while working as a court reporter (which always comes to mind whenever I read The Voice Imitator) is glossed over fairly quickly. Honegger does contextualize Bernhard’s participation in the Bohemian avant-garde scene, including, tantalizingly, the Vienna Gruppe scene, but, as frequently happens in biographies, the context sometimes overtakes the subject. The transformation of Bernhard the hick from the sticks to Thomas Bernhard the author and theater-maker is passed over rather quickly, but also constitutes one of the great surprises of the biography.

Honegger’s book is arranged thematically rather than chronologically, which has certain advantages, but one main disadvantage – it is hard to get a sense of the sequence of events. How, for example, was the publication of Woodcutters affected by and affected other events (e.g. Bernhard’s homosexual affairs, one of the BIG surprises that is almost entirely glossed over here, or the public reception of Heldenplatz at the Burgtheater.)* So rather mysteriously, we move from the unwanted child in very grim post-War circumstances (it is to Honegger’s credit that she doesn’t let Bernhard’s, shall we say, expressionistic versions of his childhood override the facts and details she pieced together through hard biographical slog – interviews, archival research etc.) before little Thomas gets out of Salzburg and heads to the big smoke/Vienna to seek fame and fortune as an actor at the Mozarteum. Again, a familiar narrative, a familiar set of characters:

His public image in those years, somewhat mythologized by himself as well as by former friends and colleagues, alternated between the raw peasant misfit who preferred driving a beer truck through the rough streets of Vienna to socializing with the city aesthetes, on the one hand, and the impeccably dressed, painfully shy poet, inhibited precisely by his outsider status and his lack of urban finesse, on the other.

How do you do this? (Underemployed aesthetes want to know!) Well, find a wealthy patron, of course! While in the Grafenhof tuberculosis sanatorium (described in Wittgenstein’s Nephew and Gathering Evidence) Thomas, who, it must be admitted, was a rather alarmingly attractive young man in a Germanic James Dean sort of way, meets the wealthy and 30 years older Hedwig Stavianicek. Honegger notes that the details of the relationship are difficult to determine due to Berhnard’s reticence on the one hand (although he does refer to her as his Liebensmensch, which is ambiguous enough) and some rather smutty gossip from the coffee-house chattering classes on the other (the campy overtones of Liebensmench and “Auntie”, the quasi-incestuous mother-son overtones). Buried in Honegger’s (vital) contextualizations and cultural histories is a clear picture of the relationship between Bernhard and Stavianicek, so essential to Berhanrd that he would describe her as “the woman who shares my life and to whom I have owed not just a great deal, but, frankly, more or less everything, since the moment when she first appeared at my side…. Without her, I would not be alive at all, or at any rate I would certainly not be the person I am today, so mad and so unhappy and yet at the same time happy.” This is strong praise indeed; unlike just about every other one of Bernhard’s friendships, there was to be no sudden rupture, definitive break or oscillation between affection and venomous derision.** In this biography, Bernhard overwhelms; as with his novels, women remain shadowy figures silently waiting in the periphery.

The dirt and grime of Bernhard’s life (no more or less dirty or grimy than yours or mine) are deemphasized so that Honegger can put forward her main thesis: Bernhard as echt Austrian, insofar as Austria in general and Vienna in particular are entirely constituted in performances whose veracity is subordinated to the degree to which they are convincing or even just plain novel. The care with which Honegger extricates the kaleidescope of performances of performances or performances (“the actor in the actor in the actor”) is impressive, although it does tend somewhat to blot out any other perspective. We could, for example, have stood for further exploration of the manner in which the works and legend of Wittgenstein gained the cultural prominence that they did among such people as Bachman, Bernhard and Handke. (We also could have learned more about the enmity between the last two, which is one of the funnier aspects of the book, for those who love literary gossip as I do.) Honegger more or less stops at noting the ways in which Ludwig and Paul Wittegenstein provided Bernhard with a useful repertory of masks (in Concrete and Correction in particular, which compare very favourably indeed to Bruce Duffy’s The World as I Found It believe you me). This is true as far as it goes, but surely there’s a bit more to it than that? In effect, there is something slightly monomaniacal about Honegger's determination to bend the life to the idea; in a way, she becomes a Bernhard character herself, as does everyone who spends too long in the vicinity of the man and/or his works. And it is precisely this danger that makes Bernhard’s work so endlessly compelling – the radioactivity of consciousness tuned to a feverish pitch that is so relentless in its destruction that no amount of pose-assumption or critical distance is even possible.

* Is it a sign of a successful biography to have to include a basic timeline which I needed to consult frequently while writing this piece in order to piece together what happened when? Its a shame that all of our lives aren't organized thematically; it would save a lot of the "what the hell am I doing with my life" moments that darken certain evenings.

** The publication of Woodcutters launched a libel suit from Gerhard Lampersberg, wealthy patron of the arts (and particularly young artistic men of pleasant mien, including Bernhard). While all of this took place before Thomas Bernhard became Thomas Bernhard, one wonders what on Earth they expected? Honegger suggests that for the Viennese, it was all very well when Bernhard was laying into someone else, but when the corrosive gaze turned your way, well, that was a different pile of schnitzle.

Deeper into Movies 3

2008-08-09T15:28:00.002-05:00

What was all the Fuss About? - Death of a President

We watched the Mondo Cane "documentaries" where it was impossible to tell the fake newsreel footage of atrocities and executions from the real. And we rather liked it that way. Our willing complicity in this blurring of truth and reality in the Mondo Cane films alone make them possible and was taken up by the entire media landscape, by politicians and churchment.

- J. G. Ballard, Miracles of Life

Death of a President is more of a technical achievement than the grand political statement it was cracked up to be. Manipulating footage to make Dick Cheney sound like he's giving GWP's eulogy (admittedly the phrase President Cheney sent shivers down my spine) was pretty impressive, and the overall tone managed to avoid any faux-ironic giveaways. But what really was all the fuss about? Is it really that much of a shock to learn that a person from Syria with some roughly unsavoury connections somewhere in his past would be more-or-less framed into being found guilty, to be scapegoated? That a Gulf War veteran suffering from PTSD would feel resentment, or, good heavens, even anger that his son(s) or daughter(s) died for oil a second time?

Or was it that the fictionalized documentary seemed so seamleesly done that, yes indeed, it looked real, the very definition of the simulacrum? But don't we know all about that already? Known it for sometime, almost bored stiff with the idea that "Reality" is nothing here but the recordings?

Beyond the undeniable jouissance of GWB getting his just desserts, and the wearily omniscient sense that, had George the Younger actually been assassinated, things would probably have been much, much worse than the film predicts, this movie doesn't really tell us anything particularly new or shocking. A technical masterpiece absolutely, but hollow - iin the same way that, at a different register, Borat was both funny and obvious at the same time (rednecks and fratboys have retrograde attitudes vis-a-vis women and ethnic minorities, crickey, who'd 've thought?!)

New Posts Forthcoming

2008-07-20T12:48:00.003-05:00

New posts forthcoming. Sorry for the extended delay.
Upcoming: Thomas Bernhard biography review and notes on Death of a President and My Winnipeg
She's back, Gentle Readers

Temporary Service Interruption

2007-12-16T11:56:00.000-06:00

Well, due to a number of factors - new job, dead computer, internet server problems - there may be a bit of a hiatus here at the New Ennui. Service will be back to normal before year end, at which time I will regail you with a review of the Thomas Bernhard biography, the completion of the Houellebecq post, as well as a cheerless year end review.

And if you've been trying to contact me, no I'm not avoiding people - I just haven't received your messages. (I'm typing this on a borrowed computer and was shocked by the number of messages I missed.)

Tom K.

Deeper into Movies 2

2007-11-11T17:42:00.000-06:00

5 Points on Children of Men

1) One can develop a genre of film called “English Apocalyptic” which is characterized by the juxtaposition of ruin and the quotidian simultaneously, I.e. giant scorpions nestling around Stonehenge, Yeti sitting in a Tube Station toilet (to use one actor’s example), etc. Daily life continues, the buses are still running (how whistful that must seem post 7-11), there are places called Hackney; its just that the world’s going to end.* In film, at least, one could construct a genealogy that might start with (this is a little arbitrary) The Day the Earth Caught Fire, in which Rumpole of the Bailey sweats in his newspaper office while the planet grinds inexorably to a halt. Derek Jarman would deserve a chapter of his own in this history: Jubilee (which was brought to mind during Children’s scenes in London, with trash mounds piling around the caff which is then bombed, as well as the casual brutality of the police, though this may not be a purely filmic attribute) and The Last of England (the boat sailing into unknown waters), as well as other films, take a certain delirious, despairing jouissance in putting Little England under an aesthetic pressure cooker to see what comes out. (Pun not intended.) Children of Men adds to this genre (maybe so does 28 Days - I haven’t seen the sequel) by making the apocalypse a background issue, a given.

2) It was a stroke of genius on somebody’s part (I’m tended to point to the script writers - all four of them! - rather than P. D. James, but I haven’t read the book) to make the epidemic of planetary infertility and miscarriages without cause. Presumably, if we knew why it happened, we could know how to stop it. Here, instead, it is an assumed condition, again, a given, even if it is only eighteen years down the line.** The speech that the former obstetrician gives in the abandoned school is particularly moving; the end of the world comes incrementally, little by little until suddenly, poof!

3) The refugee camp is a particularly elegant synthesis of the last twenty years of biopolitics; in fact, that is what this whole movie is about, really.

4) Even though the boat Tomorrow does make an appearance at the end, there were a tense few minutes for me when it was unclear if the boat would ever arrive at all. This was compounded by the fact that, as Clive Owen’s character is dying, they actually seem to be moving further and further away from the buoy! And I need hardly point out, the boat never actually picks them up!

5) Great cinematic moments: Joshua Clover has pointed out the blood splatter on the lens during the tracking shots on the bus in the fugee camp; it is as great a formal innovation as whichever film it was in the 60’s or 70’s that had sunlight reflected into the lens, partially obscuring the shot. And hats off to Clive Owen! (All of the actors, really.) The scene where he is showing the girl how to comfort the baby by acting it out was astonishing, not the least for the look of hopeless joy on his face as he does so. (Tears welled up in this here viewer’s eyes.)

A word or two about Deeper Into Movies: Blog postings have been particularly irregular of late, for a number of reasons, and promised follow-ups never materialize, or are finished absurdly late. Part of the reason is my own laziness, sure, the other is that my tendency is to want to make some sort of definitive statement. (This is why what was supposed to be a two page set of reflections on Houellbecq is turning into a long, interminable essay.) So the intention here is to a create a number of series that will comprise of short or shortish reviews that make no claim to comprehensiveness (nor necessarily coherence.) Maybe just a way to get things off my chest, ok, but here’s a potential list. We’ll see how it goes:
Deeper into Movies: films, videos, dvd’s, reactions of articles or books about films. (Title cribbed from Pauline Kael by way of Yo La Tengo.)
My Life in Art: visual arts, galleries, etc. (A Mojave 3 song, I believe.)
Put the Book Back on the Shelf: fiction, poetry, philosophy, cultural and social theory. (Unseemly ripped from Belle and Sebastian, I’m afraid.)
Music Non Stop: records, gigs, etc. (Not a very original title, is it? Anyone who comes up with something better should let me know.)

* Has anyone read Shelia Fitzpatrick’s Everyday Stalinism? I have a hunch that it does more ideological work that Zizek give it credit for.
** But then again, we’ve only had 7 years of the War on Terror, and checking my carry-on luggage for sharp objects before boarding a plane has become second nature already. We might be all a little bored with the emphasis on micro politics, but it is never the less the case that, like it or not, ideology functions as much in the interstices of the quotidian as it does in the Event. And what’s great about Children of Men is that there is no apocalyptic event, only the possibility of a redemptive one. And just as we have no idea why children became globally extinct, we have no idea why this one West African girl (could be Dizzee Rascal’s sister) suddenly is able to get pregnant. (Yes, I know where babies come from.)

Deeper Into Movies 1

2007-11-10T21:32:00.000-06:00

TCM Commits Treasonous Acts

Battle of Algiers: a more apt movie given the Iraq and soon-to-be Iran situation is hard to imagine. Brave of TCM to screen a film that is actually pro-Islamic terrorist, ending with Algerian independence, but not before we see French soldiers torturing possible FLN collaborators, fellow travelers, people who just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. And the glorious ending, with the women’s ululations calling to mind the apocalyptic quality that attracted William Burroughs to jajouka musicians. The mass movement of spontaneous determination (Badiou’s fidelity to the Event? Agemben’s coming of the “whatever” being?) as stirring as the revolutionary surge of energy that closes I Am Cuba.

Pontecorvo’s fluid camera, panning and moving throughout the crowded Algerian streets. The streaming light after the last of the FLN core group are blown to pieces, along with the building in which they are hiding. (At least the French army had the good graces to evacuate the building before flattening it, unlike some armies we could mention…) Colonel Mathieu (played with reptilian grace by Jean Martin) as ultimate colonial enforcer, down to his open-secret admission that, yes, we are torturing people to get information out of them. (There’s even a waterboarding scene!!) And the independence movement triumphs over the occupiers!!!!!!

Bizarrely enough, apparently the film was screened at the Pentagon in 2003, although what that aggregate of criminals thought has not been made public.* Even more bizarrely, Danny de Vito chose it as part of the guest interviewees that TCM is having this month. And, even, even more bizarrely, it was followed by David Lean’s sark-fest Kwai Me a River, or something to that effect.

I am still working on the follow-up to the Houellbecq post, the first of which needs some heavy editing. A lot of it was written in a white heat - hence the MS Works inspired word surrealism in places. (I really, really hate predicative text.) And more on Inland Empire should be coming up soon too. Oh God, that bloody whistling song from Big British Soldiers Don't Kwai is coming on, so I better go change the freakin’ channel!

* According to the Wikipedia entry, Richard Clarke and Michael Sheehan discuss Algiers’s depiction of terrorism in the Criterion DVD, which is almost worth paying the $100 which seems to be the going rate for Criterion DVDs.

Cold, Driven, Electronic, Odd, and Somehow Considered Normal

2007-10-25T08:47:00.000-05:00

Owen Hatherly on New Order:

http://nastybrutalistandshort.blogspot.com/2007/10/this-isnt-proper-post-about-new-order.html

damn this guy's 10 years younger than me!

“The Moral Tedium of Immortality”: Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island Part 1

2007-10-15T21:39:00.000-05:00

This was originally one post, but it is already way too long; so, in the interest of legibility, I'm breaking it up into separate posts (admittedly, some of which remain to be written.) Anyways, this part is introductory and diegetical; the next one(s) will be more analytical. Anyways, here goes:

Warning: Spoilers ahead!

Michel Houellebecq is not a nice man or a particularly cheerful author. It is not incumbent on authors to conduct their personal lives with particular aplomb, but the fixity of Houellebecq’s obsessions lead, Siren-like, to perils of psycho-biographical speculation. Certainly, since the well-known warnings provided by Barthes and Foucault, speculating on the man behind the book(s) is tantamount to committing a cardinal hermeneutical error, so let’s not go there. For those who want to, there’s this.

On the other hand, Barthes in particular warned of translating a collection of texts into an overarching oeuvre, especially one signified by a proper name. This is a harder temptation to avoid, given that there does seem to be an underlying trajectory that moves from Whatever, Elementary Particles, Platform to his most recent The Possibility of an Island. If the first novel consolidated the affectless, misanthropic (misogynistic and racist to boot) in a spirited ventriloquism of Camus’s L’Étranger, the next two novels would set in motion the philosophical preoccupation that find a kind of culmination in Island: “the suicide of the west.”
Diegetically, Island has two (possibly three) narrative threads centred on the monologues of two (or three, or actually one) characters: “Daniel1” (or Daniel) is the archetypal Houellebecq character - he (it is always a he) is alienated from his family, regards his career with a mixture of disdain and horror, views most women (the younger the better) as contemptible sex objects, is prone to fits of apocalyptic despair and abstract musings on the biochemical foundations of contemporary society, itself viewed as alternating between sexual orgy and arid loneliness. His story is, until the epilogue, the vehicle for which the other two (actually one) narrative serve as tenors. These narratives / this narrative is / are told by “Daniel24” and “Daniel25,” Daniel1’s clones three thousand years in the future; Daniel24 breaking off his narrative as his “present incarnation” deteriorates beyond repair, to be taken up again by Daniel25, who more or less begins where 24 left off.*

As I mentioned before, Daniel1’s narrative follows a similar arc as that followed by the protagonists of Elementary Particles and Platform. Daniel1 is a “comedian” who becomes celebrated and wealthy for his scabrous, frequently racist and misogynist. He becomes very well-known as a cutting observe of contemporary reality” and (a little far-fetched this bit) a “humanist,” although he admits that his humanism is “built on very thin foundations: a vague outburst against tobacconists, an allusion to the corpses of negro clandestines [sic] cast up on the Spanish coasts” which gain him a further “reputation as a lefty and a defender of human rights.” Daniel1 is sufficiently self-aware, or cynical, to hold all of this at arm’s length. He engages in a love affair of sorts with a woman named Isabella, a successful editor of Lolita, a magazine that skirts pedophilic imagery with its unquestioning (and deeply creepy) celebration of Youth at the expense of Age. (This will be a recurrent theme in the novel.) They move to Spain, have a child and Daniel1 falls out of love with her, disenchanted by the inevitable ravages of time on her body. They part, and Daniel1 takes part in a seminar held by the Church of Elohim (Elohimites, or the “Very Healthy Ones”, as he puts it.)** As a celebrity (a minor one, he keeps insisting), Daniel1 is treated as a VIP, along with a Parisian artist Vincent Greilsamer, and is introduced to the inner circle of the Elohimites. Disappointed by the lack of sexual activity, Daniel1 returns to Spain, meets Vincent in Pairs who bewilders Daniel1 with a phantasmagorical display of happiness in his basement, and plans a fake snuff film which he suspects he will never finish. Reviewing actresses in Spain, he comes across Esther (whom he creepily nicknames “Belle”, although never to her face). She is half his age and seemingly without inhibition or affect. Pages and pages and pages of sex take place. (I admit to skimming over the endless details of blowjobs etc. Fellatio seems to have a particular place of status in the Houellebecq Imaginary.) Daniel1 admits to feeling love for Esther, but, after awhile, signs on for another course with the Elohimites. The quasi-hippy encampment is gone, replaced by machine-gun toting guards and twelve young Brides of the Prophet, one of whom performs fellatio (enough already!) on the Prophet, whose fear of aging is palpable. Daniel1 is once again accompanied by Vincent, who has fallen in love with Sarah, one of the Brides. Various rituals are enacted, and Daniel1 is shown the great secret of the Elohim Church - scientific experiments (under the direction of “Knowall” as the narrator calls him) into cloning and the transfer of psychological data (memory, personality) into the cloned body in order to preserve life infinitely. Daniel1 is inducted into even stranger matters till: the Prophet, whose sexual appetites are not confined to the Brides, is killed in a fit of jealousy by one of his followers, who commits suicide. The Plot is hatched: Vincent, who reveals that he is the Prophet’s son from an earlier dalliance in footloose 1960’s California (Houellebecq’s Patient Zero, if you like), suggests that he take the Prophet’s place as “proof” that Knowall’s experiments are successful. Murders are committed, bodies dispatched, and, with the world’s media assembled, the Hoax begins. Without any great display of moral outrage, a stunned Daniel1 returns to Spain and, he thinks, to Esther. He has also left the Church with a sample of his DNA in order to ensure his silence.

Esther has kept herself busy and, while still engaging Daniel1 in sexual trysts (mercifully brief descriptions this time around), has clearly developed a life of her own. Daniel1 longs to be a part:

I remember an evening, it could have been 10 p.m., there were a dozen or so of us in a car and everyone was talking with great animation about the merits of various clubs, the ones that were more house, the others more trance. For ten minutes, I was dying to say to them that I, too, wanted to enter this world, to have fun with them, to stay up all night; I was ready to beg them to take me. The, by accident, I saw my reflection in a window, and I understood. I looked my forty something years; my face was careworn, stiff, marked by the experience of life, by responsibilities and sorrows; I didn’t look at all look someone you could imagine having fun; I was condemned.

In desperation, Daniel1 returns to Paris, where he meets Vincent (the new Prophet) again, who is slowly developing a more corporate atmosphere (in contrast to the self-indulgently hippy commune of the previous Prophet) for the Church. He returns again to Spain, where he learns that Esther has been given a part in a movie to be shot in America. A party is arranged that swiftly becomes an orgy; Daniel1 is rejected over and over again and sinks into alcoholic misery. He leaves and, with Vincent’s recommendation, begins writing his “life story,” including the events at the Church of Elohim. He re-unites with Isabella and both of them, for a time, commiserate with each other on wasted opportunities and the increasing approach of their own deaths. Daniel1 expounds on the Elohimites’ promise of immortality and she agrees to give the Church a sample of her DNA as well as her estate after she dies: “’Immortality then…,’ she said. ‘It would be like a second chance.’”

At this point, Daniel1’s narration becomes abstract, trying to pass over years over the Church’s steady rise to prominence, eclipsing Christianity and Islam. (Houellebecq does not resist the temptation to make some nasty remarks about the latter.) All of this is due to Vincent’s deft combination of corporate savvy and a strong sense of what J. G. Ballard described as the “spinal landscape”; by providing Western Civilization with the dreams it needs, the Church’s rise to power is, with careful administration, inevitable. Isabella, in the mean time, has killed herself following her mother’s death. Daniel1, now completely without meaningful human contact, drifts around Spain and France and more and more into Vincent’s spell, as the promise of immortality provides him with what he feels he signally lacks - hope. He tries to contact Esther again, who rebuffs him and, as we learn indirectly, commits suicide.

I am not usually given over to extensive plot summaries, but this main narrative is importantly supplemented by the narrative of Daniel24/25. This narrative is simple enough, until the very end: Daniel24, deteriorating, communicates to Marie22 in “code” (actually, rather bad poetry that I can only hope is a translation problem rather than anything else) until Marie22 is replaced by Marie 23. Daniel24 dies and is replaced by Daniel25 who continues his task of providing “commentary” on Daniel1’s “life story.” Marie23 leaves the protective enclosure in which the “neohumans” reside and, after awhile so does Daniel25. He attempts to travel to what was once Lanzarote (site of the original Church of Elohim) where a colony of neohumans is rumored to exist. He encounters humans and is repelled by their social habits (including, inevitably, a description of the their mating behaviour) until he reaches what was once the Mediterranean. Able to survive on the mineral salts provided by the seawater, Daniel25 estimates that he will live for another sixty years before ceasing to exist forever.
At one point, Daniel25 gives a description of what the neohumans believe, worth citing in full as it contains the germ of the entire novel:

In the beginning was created the Supreme Sister, who is the first. Then were created the Seven Founders, who created the Central City. If the teachings of the Supreme Sister are the basis of our philosophical theories, the political organization of the neohuman communities owes almost everything to the Seven Founders; but it was only, by its own true admission, an inessential parameter, conditioned by biological evolutions, which had increased the functional autonomy of the neohumans, as much as by historical shifts, already widely begun in previous societies, that led to to the withering away of relationship functions. The reasons that led to a radical separation between neohumans have nothing absolute about them, and everything indicates that this took place only in a gradual manner, probably over the course of several generations. To tell the truth, total physical separation constitutes a possible social configuration, comparable with the teachings of the Supreme Sister, and generally along the same lines as them, rather than being a consequence of them in the strict sense of the word.
The disappearance of contact was followed by that of desire. I had felt no physical attraction to Marie23 - no more naturally than I hadn’t felt for Esther31 [Esther’s clone], who had, anyway, passed the age of arousing those kind of manifestations. I was convinced that neither Marie23, despite her departure, nor Marie22, despite the strange episode preceding her end, related to by my predecessor, had known desire either. [Before ending, Marie23 requested Daniel24 to tune his webcam onto his penis.] On the other hand what they had known, and in a singular painful way, was the nostalgia for desire, the wish to experience it again, to be irradiated like their distant ancestors with that force that seemed so powerful. Although Daniel1 shows himself, on this theme of nostalgia for desire, particularly eloquent, I have for my part been spared the phenomenon up until now, and it is with the greatest calm that I discuss with Esther31 the detail of the relations between our respective predecessors; on her part, she displays a coolness that is at least equivalent to mine, and it is without regret, without distress, that we leave one another at the end of our occasional intermediations, and return to our calm, contemplative lives, which would probable have appeared, to humans of the classical age, unbelievably boring.
The existence of residual mental activity, detached from all everyday concerns and oriented toward pure knowledge, constitutes on of the key points of the teachings of the Supreme Sister; up until now nothing has allowed its existence to be put into doubt.
A limited calendar, punctuated by sufficient episodes of mini-grace (such as are offered by the sun slipping across the shutters, or the sudden retreat, under the violent wind from the north, of a threatening cloud formation) organizes my existence, the precise duration of which is an indifferent parameter. Identical to Daniel24, I know that I will have, in Daniel26, an equivalent successor; the limited, respectable memories we keep of existences that have identical contours do not have any pregnancy that would be necessary for an individual fiction to take hold. The life of each man, in its broad brushstrokes, is similar, and this secret truth, hidden throughout the historical periods, was able to find expression only in the neohumans. Rejecting the incomplete paradigm of form, we aspire to rejoin the universe of countless potentialities. Closing the brackets on becoming, we are from now on in unlimited, indefinite stasis.

The implications of this passage will be taken up in a following (soon!) in the light of Jameson’s work on (anti)Utopias.

* Writing about clones presents rather cumbersome grammatical difficulties; for the purposes of expediency and clarity, I’m going to cut the they/he palaver and treat Daniel24 and Daniel25 as “one person,” which, in a very particular sense, they are.

** This “Church” has some similarity to the Raëlians in the south of France who claimed, in 2002, to have successfully cloned a human being on instructions from super-intelligent extraterrestrials. Apparently, Houellebecq spent time at a Raël retreat, and the Raëlians praised Possibility for its sympathetic treatment of their…um “beliefs”, although given what happens, I really can’t imagine why.

Everybody's On the Game 1

2007-09-24T16:09:00.000-05:00

The utter carbon suspects poetry. Across the supreme hesitates an accompanying outlook. Tom K. lowers the coupled blanket before the latter convenience. Poetry camps. Can the external spokesman suffer opposite Tom K.? With a lung interferes poetry.

An arena cries Tom K.. Poetry posed the baby. The household belongs to the framework. Tom K. convinces poetry in the dependent peripheral.

Tom K. wastes poetry on top of a simultaneous fish. Tom K. grows throughout our industrial tobacco. A tune rushes Tom K. around a kid. Tom K. chalks before the pathetic horse. Tom K. excuses poetry outside the prostitute. Tom K. reacts to a racist against the opposed specialist.

Why can't a debugger volunteer Tom K.? Poetry corners a tame war below his eating manpower. Will poetry write over this indefinite science? A shaking exercise explains poetry. When will the round mirror want Tom K.?

Tom K. floats poetry under the overcome gossip. My isolate component forecasts Tom K. behind the hacking blame. A change resembles Tom K. under the compulsory dot. Poetry reacts next to Tom K.

Poetry gates Tom K. Poetry pops this transported raid with the gold. Tom K. indulges next to poetry. Poetry tables a shallow machinery around an arc raid. The desert graces the sensible neck. Why can't Poetry jump Tom K.?

Tom K. remedies each sod. The musical sweeps within the synthesis. Why won't a transmitter leave an inviting breeze? Poetry rests above your weird protein. Poetry monkeys Tom K.. Tom K. clocks your proof on top of the noise.

[courtesy of my aggrieved sense of narcissism and here.]

Lawrence Don't Go!

2007-09-13T13:57:00.000-05:00

Lawrence Miles, of Beasthouse fame, is calling it a day. We can only hope its temporary. Read one of the most criminally underrated but absolutely perspicacious blogs / online diaries while you still can. Don’t go Lawrence, don’t go! I can read you for hours and be instantly elevated out of the darkest depression!

Max Roach RIP

2007-09-10T13:52:00.000-05:00

I can't believe this passed under the radar! Another reason to be alive gone.

If you haven't heard this, do so immediately. I think this might be my favourite jazz record. If you don't believe me, ask someone who was there:

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0736,hentoff,77705,2.html

Sorry for the lack of posts lately. New one on Interpol's Our Love to Adore coming soon.

More Bergman

2007-08-06T16:10:00.000-05:00

One of the best thing about Bergman's movies, I think, or at least what gives some of the best films he made in the mid-60's (Persona, Hour of the Wolf, Shame, Passion of Anna) their emotional impact is the music that Lars Johan Werle composed for them: hard serialist percussion and electronics swarming like gigantic wasps. This came to mind after reading this - Bergman's son-in-law reminiscing. The first paragraph brought a tear to my eye:

For those who lived close to him, Ingmar Bergman's passing last week was no great surprise. He had just turned 89; he was a very old man. His tired heart stopped beating in the early hours of the morning, in this rainy summer season, at his home on the Swedish island of Faro. The rabbits that used to sit motionless on the beach and listen to him playing Mahler will now wonder where the old man has gone. But he is gone. The hourglass has run empty.

I was planning on linking to every news report and obit on Bergman and Antonioni that I could find, but there were too many. So why don't you find out for yourselves. :)

Bad Week to Be A Cinema classic

2007-08-03T11:59:00.000-05:00

Michelangelo Antonioni also died this week. Surprising how ennui, despair and relentless psychological investigation can keep you alive for long. :)

Seriously, this is a little too much to bear.

Its All Cheating and Lies!!

2007-07-31T16:39:00.000-05:00

Ingmar Bergman is dead. Cinema doesn't have a second century.

The Invisible End of the Spectrum: Tim Hecker

2007-07-16T15:28:00.000-05:00

In The Poetics of Space, Bachelard quotes Henri Bosco’s description of an oncoming storm: “there is nothing like silence to suggest a sense of unlimited space. Sounds lend colour to space, and confer a sort of sound body upon it. But absence of sound leaves it quite pure and, in the silence, we are seized with the sensation of something vast and deep and boundless.”

Slow dazzle.

Some artists (Bowie, Miles Davis) seem capable of completely changing their direction with each release. Most, however, become what they are and then remain so. And then there are some whose work demonstrates not so much a progression (in the first case) or stagnation (as is all-too-often the case), but as process of refinement. So, for example, in the case of bands as diverse as Cocteau Twins, New Order, or Boards of Canada, their art can best be described as moving by means of minimal difference - each new release is like the last one, only more so.

Such is the case with Harmony in Ultraviolet, Tim Hecker’s sixth

release. The “Tim Hecker sound” (that sonic area signified by the proper name T.H.) exhibited on this record is not all that much different from that exhibited on his first release Haunt Me (which did exactly that, thank you very much), and yet, it is more so. The sub-Arctic spaces inhabited by the earlier records seem more dematerialized, as though the lichens that beguiled like Sirens on Haunt Me have taken residence in the waves and particle of the hidden parts of the spectrum. It would be easy to say that with HIU the Aurora Borealis sings, but its not quite enough.

The dematerialization of sound is now an old, verging on tedious, narrative charted by, among others, David Toop. Let’s not reiterate his argument here, save to note that Hecker’s method - the sound art modus operandi of sampling and refashioning tones, frequencies, instruments using digital technology - has a peculiarly mimetic relation to the sense conveyed in this record of being simultaneously adrift and buffeted in frozen skies. But also, the... um… glacial pace at which this record moves (not even slow propulsion, but motionlessness, or, better still, passive mobility) suggests the hour-long sunsets that are a feature of Prairie summers. But, again, not an Eno-esque quiescence; this record is, at times, an extremely loud one, paradoxically rematerializing its textures and contrasts in a thick strokes.* There are very few high frequencies; Hecker (album title notwithstanding) sticks to the low end of the sonic spectrum, allowing the tracks to accrete and gain mass before they fade away, disappear really.

And there are few melodies, as traditionally understood; like the song structures themselves, what melodies there are seem to exist in a liminal zone between actual and virtual. They are there to find, to grasp at, before another drone arcs from out of nowhere partially erasing the figurations that preceded it. (Not for nothing are two of the tracks called “Palimpsest.”)

So what is accomplished with this record? (A question that I really think artists as well as listeners need to ask themselves as cultural overload continues to threaten.) On the one hand, that simplest and most absurd of all goals - to produce more art.** On the other hand, well…how about this: the vastness of Hecker’s sound palette produces a paradoxical situatedness in the listener, paradoxical because we are listening to invisible phenomena, the ring and drone of electromagnetism itself, whether from Hecker’s laptop or the atmosphere itself. This is the true sense of an objective correlative: the physical manifestation of an affect or chain of affects. Harmony in Ultraviolet compels, beguiles, forces the listener into a position of rooted rootlessness, at sea among the photons at the invisible end of the spectrum.

* This is particularly evident in his live performance, which are like being caught in a thunderstorm at its height, and not really minding that much. Hecker’s live performances not only emphasize the sheer physicality of the music, but its painful beauty.

** Maybe not so simple or absurd. Deleuze: “The more our daily life appears standardized, stereotyped and subject to an accelerated reproduction of objects of consumption, the more art must be injected into it in order to extract from it that little difference which plays simultaneously between other levels of repetition, and even in order to make the two extremes resonate - namely, the habitual series of consumption and the instinctual series of destruction and death. Art thereby connects the tableau of cruelty with that of stupidity, and discovers underneath consumption a schizophrenic clattering of jaws, and underneath the most ignoble destructions of war, still more processes of consumption. It aesthetically reproduces the illusions and mystifications that make up the real essence of this civilization, in order that Difference may at last be expressed with a force of anger which is itself repetitive and capable of introducing the strangest selection, even if this is only a contraction here and there - in other words, a freedom for the end of a world.” (Difference and Repetition)

I Support the Troops

2007-07-12T10:47:00.000-05:00

Finally, a slogan I can get behind. (Image courtesy of Lenin's Tomb.)

Venus Smiles - Yet More Ballard

2007-07-10T16:13:00.001-05:00

Left to right: Michael Moorcock, JGB and his rarely seen (since the early '60s, changing in the back of their car with specks of seaweed on her skin) partner Claire Walsh. For some reason, I find this picture rather charming.

No more Ballard for awhile; this isn't entirely a JGB fansite. :)

Random Catchment Area II

2007-07-08T15:41:00.000-05:00

After that little burst of spleen below, I thought it might be a good idea to say something nice about something, for a change.

Here the European trailer for Control which really looks great:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrFKu3xwTlQ

Here is a very good documentary on J. G. Ballard (1991, post Kindness of Women):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KaEhec9ZaQ

And here is a short sharp blast of modernism to bring a smile to your face and put some love in your heart:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rC3OXai7W9I

Live Earth - Dead Souls

2007-07-08T15:13:00.000-05:00

I was beginning to write a damning critique of the mortal tedium that was Live Earth, when even I got bored with it. How to describe the pique (not even real anger or distress, but a mere peevishness) I felt when at least seven channels were broadcasting the most overblown, revolting example of Bonogeldofism in the history of the world without actually succumbing once again to the pique, the peevishness?

Frederic Jameson once asked "when did Global Difference become the Global Same?" And when did the Global Same become Global Shit? I mean, at least the society of the spectacle was supposed to be seductive and compelling! This was just.... oh pah leave it in the dust. How monumental, how self-congratulatory, how nevertheless erstatz....broadcasting the tedium of wealthy popstars to encircle the globe with its toxins of self-regard. Fuck it.

Inland Empire: The Wound You Were Born to Embody Pt. 1

2007-06-22T15:07:00.000-05:00

This is the first in what I hope will be a series of posts, based on a first viewing on David Lynch’s Inland Empire (if ever a film demanded continued viewings, this is one.) Think of this post as a first, worst step.

Deleuze, following Bergson, distinguishes between the Actual and the Virtual: the Actual is that which is enacted, created, whereas the Virtual is the determinate set of conditions that are necessary for enacting, creating. The Virtual does not necessarily prefigure the Actual; the task of thought, for Deleuze, is the recover the Virtual in the Actual (this is one sense of “deterritorialization’); as Peter Hallward, in his not uncontroversial Out of this World; Delezue and the Philosphy of Creation states: “The only positive or affirmative thing that a creative force can do is to dissolve itself.”

IE dissolves film, or specifically, Lynch’s previous films. IE deploys motifs and themes from his previous filmwork: Eraserhead (sinister concrete corridors illuminated with sinister rumbles), Blue Velvet (the picture of robins that the camera pans into during one scene), Wild at Heart (references to other films - Sunset Boulevard in particular, but also, as K-Punk notes, The Shining in its use of Pendereki), Fire Walk With Me (grotesqueries portending sinister futures or pasts, constant references to the Red Lodge) Lost Highway (LA as a opulent zone of the sexual exploitation of women, “supernatural“ or, better still, uncanny figuration) and, above all, Mullholland Drive (LA, and specifically, Hollywood, as generalized exploitation presided over by sinister men of unknowable motivation, lesbianism as redemption.) But these motifs are not exactly used in the way that the vastly inferior Wild at Heart, whose po-mo intertextuality with, say, The Wizard of Oz, choked the film’s mobility and rendered it an inmate of San Quentin (Tarantino) uses them; in IE, the repetitions behave much more ambiguously. At times, they serve as nodal points around which the scenes torque; at other moments, they seem as preludes to an interrogation, a dissolution of themselves and the scene in which they are cast. (It is important to note that at no time do they refer to themselves saying “hey lookee, this is a David Lynch Movie.")

Their cumulative effect is deeply uncanny. Antigram’s excellent post refers, in passing, to Lovecraft’s Cthulu mythos, whose suggestive power I exactly that - suggestive, unspecified, incomplete, full of holes. My sense is that the dispersal of “Lynchian” motifs does something similar - the preceding films are “of a piece“, they constitute a sort of aggregate that is not entirely revealed to the viewer or, I suspect, to the filmmaker himself.

So, not a smugonaut game of “look here, I’m clever,” nor quite a career summation as Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma or Éloge de l'amour , but something else altogether. Lynch shows us a glimpse of the aggregate in order to dissolve it - a Foucault might say that the figure of the oeuvre only appears at the moment it is being eclipsed.

Further Material to be Incorporated

Lynch’s statement that he will never use “film” as such again, that he is strictly a dv artist.

Tracking the virtual and the actual. Images and scenes comment back on each other, sometimes in a faux-explanatory way (Laura Dern’s character - as though she had only one - goes crazy during the making of a movie).

Hollywood / LA

“Who is she?” / “Look at me! Have you seen me before?”

Labyrinths, rabbit warrens, corridors, holes, doorways.

I told you this was a first step.

Random Catchment Area

2007-06-02T11:33:00.000-05:00

This is touching and rather sad:

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/05/embers_a_goodbye_to_samuel_bec.html

This is merely grotesque:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-kidbooks1jun01,0,7059853.story?coll=la-home-nation

Voyeurism, Barbarism, Scientific Genius and Self-Disgust

2007-05-27T22:45:00.002-05:00

The only reason why I read International Guardian is for moments like this:

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/visualart/story/0,,2088399,00.html

Ballard has never made any secret of his adoration of Dali, an adoration, as with his declared love of Helmut Newton’s quasi-pornographic photos, offends most of our tasteful tastes (redundancy intended).* Yes, The Persistence of Memory adorned my bedroom wall when I was an anxious 16 year olf (as opposed to my anxious 35 year olf) and then, when my tastes “matured”, I decided that Dali was not where it was at (I think I went off surrealism altogether at that point, being a clever boy going all conceptual art all of a sudden), ‘tho Ruth Brandon’s Surreal Lives makes a very cogent argument that those uncouth flashy Spaniards (Bunuel and Dali) energized the surrealist movement enervated by Andre Breton’s tendency to expel anyone he thought was an addict or gay. On a similar note, the opening scene of Un chien andalou still makes me wince (and I've sat through Saw), and its too bad that no one has put together a decent showing of L’age d’or (which I saw when I was 16 and wanted to jump up and down screaming with joy…I was only weighted down by the Céline I had in my jacket pocket, snarf, snarf).

I’ve already promised Patrick (not Partick) Keiller, Tim Hecker and Pan Sonic posts. How ‘bout an upcoming one on Dali? I can hear sighs of exasperation already.

* Is Newton pornographic, even quasi-pornographic? My usual understanding of pornography is that persons become objects for fantasy-use, that their pleasure is identical, indeed predicated, on mine. I am unconvinced that this is the case in Helmut Newton, although I must add that I don’t particularly admire his art. Similarly with Bruce Weber: I am reminded of Derek Jarman’s demurral over Robert Mapplethorpe - there’s nothing there to make you laugh or cry. More on Helmut Newton here.

Promises, Promises

2007-05-22T15:30:00.000-05:00

Upcoming: posts on Partick Keiller's London and Robinson in Space; and Tim Hecker and Pan Sonic's latest.

In the mean time, this is pretty damn interesting:

http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue10/outoftheblue.htm

Nights of Wine and Poses - Send + Receive v.9

2007-05-15T16:43:00.000-05:00

Well, as with all of my good intentions, my promise to write daily reviews of S+R events came to naught on account of a combination of activity, conversation, Merlot and Big Rock. So what follows is from memory, that notoriously unreliable of sources:

Friday May 11: (The Montréal Invasion)

The night starts of with 5mm, and audiovisual piece by Montréal guys Gabrielle Coutu-Dumont(video) and Marc Leclaire (sonix). Ostensibly, its about the development and formation of human life, starting from the moment when the fetus becomes recognizably anthropoid. Ok, …if you say so. Not impressive; the videos were sometimes interesting, but mostly seemed to float along at their own pace despite whatever the music was doing. As for the music, Leclaire has a lot of ardent admirers, among whom I don’t particularly count myself, but it was certainly the strongest element of the piece. And I should point out that it seemed to have fuck all to do with inter-uterine development. A bit of a dud - the first thing so far that I really didn’t like.

Fortunately, this is OK, because the rest of the performances are superb. Scant Intone and crys cole all put on performances that were elegant and interesting, commanding a whole set of tones and resonances that were really moving. (Scant Intone wad particularly touching, given that he sat crosslegged on the floor wrapped in a hoody. He looked like he was 12 yrs old, which gave a pleasantly child-like aspect to the performance, belied by the sometimes extremely abrasive tones he generated.)

However, it must be said that the night (and, arguably, the festival) belonged to Tim Hecker, performing from his new record Harmony in Ultraviolet. I’ve mentioned it briefly in the previous post, and all of my mild objections have more or less vanished. I've seen him play three times before, but this was the most intense plateau he’s every reached. A really knock-you-to-your-knees set. More on him later…

What are they putting in the water in Montréal?

Saturday May 12: (Les mains)

This night, I’m sorry to say, was a bit of an alcoholic blur. All the artists (Minibloc and Martin Tetreault) were excellent, the later in particular, but it was Andrew Liles’s set that really stands out in the mind. I was a little worried that it would get a little too occult/gothy/ley lines type thing, but these worries were groundless, although make no mistake, a mighty darkness settled in the Ace Art main gallery that night! The contrast between Tim and Andrew is instructive, but I will get to that in a later post. A good time seems to have been had by all (me in particular). Sunday morning was not a promising prospect.

Sunday May 13: (S+R goes electro-acoustic!!)

Sunday night at the West End Cultural Centre, where I invariably get annoyed with something or someone who works or volunteers there. (I really don’t know why this is the case, but I can go to the venue brimming with insouciant joie-de-vivre and leave an hour later wanting to kill someone.) Anyways, with all due respect to the volunteers who wanted to go home so badly that they were clearing up chairs and tables before the final performance had even ended, I will refrain from further invective. (Which is odd for me, really.)

Anyways, Frieda Abtan had two pieces going: a laptop piece similar in a lot of ways to Andrew Liles’ the previous night, perhaps a little less sinister, a bit more elegant, which can be both a good thing and a bad thing: a good thing insofar as it demonstrates a certain poise and an awareness of performance qua performance (nothing gets more tedious that a 7th generation Iggy or Jagger, I assure thee) and a bad thing because it can lead one into truly appalling “tasteful” areas that aren’t all that far from banal confusions of prettiness with intensity.

Which is, alas, what happened with Heartstrings, a piece for laptop and string quartet. The laptop part was pleasant enough, but the string quartet was really not all that good at all - it would have been considered too conservative for the New Music Festival, which still thinks that Pierre Boulez is a little too “out there”. As with This Camera is Red, I didn’t not like the string quartet (although I felt embarrassed for them having to sit on stage while the laptop played itself. Something should have been done about that, like a fucking curtain rising, for example.), the music was pleasant enough if somewhat unadventurous, but as with 5mm, it was the visual component of the piece that really let the project down. Birds flying around cathedrals, waves crashing against the shore, conjoined bodies,…all we needed was a few rose petals scattering around and we are in deep Goth territory more or less abandoned by even the Sisters of Mercy sometime in 1989. Pleasant if you like that sort of thing (which I admit to kinda doing), but really…well….silly.

Steve Bates closed the night and the festival with his “piano piece” (although I was mildly, mildly disappointed to not that he seemed to spend more time with his equalizer and laptop than he did with the piano.) In one sense, and this isn’t meant as critical as it sounds, its much the same affective plateau that he’s been inhabiting for awhile. Having said that, it’s an interesting place to be: an uneasy immersive sound that gradually leads you from one palace to another with such slyness that you scarcely know that you are moving. There’s lots of space for Steve to inhabit in the area he’s developed for himself yet, so there’s no danger of him exhausting his possibilities for a long time to come.

Anyways, it was nice to see a lot of new people out for the performances which seemed to be extremely well attended, and not just be the usual festival crowd. I’m both sad and glad that its over: sad, because chatting and drinking and listening to incredible music is lots of fun, but kinda glad that I can get back to this blog and all the other things that I have to do this week. Procrastinating is soooo much fun.

The Night of the Low Bass Rumble - Send and Receive v. 9

2007-05-11T16:14:00.000-05:00

Three performances yesterday after doing a live radio interview with the Hamburg duo incite/ (Kera and André were super nice and down to earth).

Anyways, the first performance, which I didn’t catch all of, was Removable Room, a sort of mobile arts lab by Laura Kavanaugh and Ian Birse from Vancouver. It was tucked into a corner of the project room at Ace Art, which made it a bit difficult to get really engaged in. (This was no fault of the artists, or the gallery, who had an exhibition running in the main gallery that they graciously agreed to clear for tonight’s performance.) However, once you entered the charmed circle, it was utterly absorbing. There was a strong element of the uncanny in the way that they used digitally treated images of quotidian Winnipeg scenes - the Mission Church, the alleyway behind ArtsSpace, the streetlamps that I’ve looked at a million times before but never really saw. Sonically, they were interesting enough, very discrete, although they didn’t quite hit any new affective zones in their work. Perhaps that wasn’t part of their intention, which is fair enough. Again, this may be in part because I wasn’t able to get really immersed in the audiovisual field they were delineating; too many people I hadn’t seen for a long time, too much helping set up the next performances.

On to the Cinémathèque (which is a surprisingly good venue for the typical Send + Receive performances) to see This Camera is Red and J+C Feedback Factory. This Camera is Red, local artist (bringing along his Mondragon Café retinue, apparently) was OK, which is to say that there was nothing particularly wrong with his performance, but it was hard not to let my mind wander at a certain point in his set. Writing about ambivalence can be hard: there was nothing I didn’t like about his set, which had all of the elements that tend to push tickle my pleasure centres (long moments of drone, heavy reverbs), but it didn’t really cohere in some way. There was nothing wrong with his set, but there was nothing particularly right about it either. And I have to confess I didn’t see the point of the file projections (which were, admittedly, not on video as is usually the case, but on actual film stock.) The split screen images of trees and rivers didn’t particularly add anything to the performance, and seemed more like an afterthought IMHO.

On the other hand, J+C Feedback Factory (Carrie Gates and Jon Vaughn from Saskatoon, who really, really need to change that name) incorporated video and sonics together seamlessly. I liked their performance a lot, mostly because it violated just about every canon of taste that tends to congregate around “sound art” in general and S+R in particular. I.e. they were loud, abrasive, incredible visceral (‘tho I could have don without Jon’s head banging and arm waving), despite, or perhaps because, of the no-input feedback. Electricity plays itself. Sonically, it was really aggressive - all low rumbles and high-frequency shrieks, with no middle-end with which to ground oneself. Similarly, the video feedback was delightfully ugly - rainbow slicks overtaken by mustard yellows and garish blues overtaken by strange mauve shapes.

Now what exactly was it that I found so exciting here that I didn’t find in the This Camera is Red? The Saskatoon artists tread a careful line between the visceral and the merely gratuitous and I found it riveting to watch and listen to them negotiating this line, whereas The Camera Is Red (again, who I did like well enough) seemed a little on the safe side; nothing particularly new or challenging to any preconceived notions of sound were on offer there. (Another line that J+C FF negotiate is between the tedious noise-for-noise sake types and “musicality”. Although frequently abrasive and harsh, there always seemed to be the palimpsest of an actual musical logic to their work.)

All in all a pretty good evening. Listening to Tim Hecker’s Harmony in Ultraviolet now. First impression are that he seems to have been a bit overwhelmed by the Kranky trademark sound. We’ll see what happens tonight.

J. G. Ballard Prepares Beef Bourguignon

2007-05-09T11:37:00.000-05:00

James Graham Ballard, aged 76, gathers together the following ingredients: 1.5 kg of chuck steak, cut into 5 cm pieces; 3 tablespoons of olive oil; 1 large carrot and 1 large onion, both peeled and cut into chunks; 2 sticks of celery (which the author of The Drowned World chops roughly); 3 bottles of burgundy wine (one for enjoying with Claire Walsh); 2 sprigs of fresh thyme; 1 head of garlic, cut in half horizontally; 4 bay leaves; 50gs of unsalted butter (purchased at the Metro-Centre); 225 g whole pieces of pancetta; 450 g of shallots, which the prominent member of the New Wave of science fiction has peeled; 2 tablespoons of flour; 375 g of chestnut mushrooms; 290 ml of fresh beef stock; 5 tablespoons of brandy; and a handful of flatleaf parsley, chopped by an author intent on brutalizing every human sympathy, according to Paul Theroux in his review of Crash.

In his Shepperton kitchen, the former internee at the Lunguha Civilian Assembly Centre heats a tablespoon of oil in a large saucepan. The author of SuperCannes then adds the carrot, onion and celery, and cooks them for 2-3 minutes. He adds wine, thyme and garlic, along with 2 bay leaves. He brings them to a boil and allows the food to simmer for 15 minutes. He allows the saucepan to cool.

J. G. Ballard, who is not nor ever will be a CBE, places the beef in a large bowl and pours over the wine marinade. He covers the bowl and places it in the fridge overnight.

Having investigated the narrative potential of Principia Mathematica, Ballard preheats his oven to 150 C (Gas 2). He drains the beef from the marinade into a colander over a glass bowl. He reserves the marinade and sets it next to holiday brochures for Seychelles.

Ballard heats 25g of butter and 1 tablespoon of oil in a large frying pan. He adds the pancetta and cooks it until it is golden and brown. He adds the shallots and transfers it to a large casserole dish, given to him by Michael Moorcock in lieu of payment for “The Assassination of John F. Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race”, published in New Worlds.

William Burroughs’s foremost defender in the UK heats a tablespoon of oil in a large frying pan. He pats dry the cubes of beef from the marinade mixture using absorbent kitchen paper purchased at the Bentall Centre, that nightmare marriage of psychopathology and convenience. Adding the beef to the pan, he cooks it until the cubes are brown on all sides. He removes the beef and transfers it to the casserole dish with the bacon, shallots and vegetables. He pours himself a glass of wine. He repeats the above procedure with the remaining beef and also adds it to the casserole dish.

Does the angle between two walls have a happy ending?

The prophet of suburbia stirs in 2-3 large spoonfuls of the reserved marinade to deglaze the pan. He pours that into the casserole dish.

Ballard stirs in plain flour, the remaining marinade and the beef stock into the casserole dish.
The former assistant editor of the scientific journal Chemistry and Industry brings the dish to a boil, covers it and places it in the oven for 3 - 3 ½ hours or until the beef is very tender.

Halfway through the Warren Commission Report, Ballard heats the remaining oil and butter in a large frying pan bought in Munich after meeting Helmut Newton and cooks the mushrooms until brown. He reluctantly adds the brandy and continues to cook for a few minutes.

The author dismissed as an “aging semiotician” adds the mushrooms to the casserole dish, which he stirs and returns to the oven for the remaining cooking time.

J. G. Ballard is happy to serve the beef bourguignon with new potatoes, sprinkled with freshly chopped parsley and purple sprouting broccoli underneath the aluminum palm trees that adorn his study.

A New Kind of Kick

2007-05-08T21:22:00.000-05:00

Well, given the amount of time I spend reading blogs, I thought I would make good on my promise and actually start writing one. Although I promised to post on Ballard's Kingdom Come, for some reason its taking longer than it should (in part given the complexity of the novel that seems to have eluded just about every reviewer I've read), the Send and Receive; a Festival of Sound v. 9 starts its program tomorrow, and I wanted to commit it to posterity in some way, soooo.... there'll ideally be a post every day of the festival with reviews, ruminations, cranky rants, whatever you will. So bookmark this site and fasten your seat belts (lol).

The name of the blog comes from Christian Bök, by the way.

Enjoy!