MediaFromDanteToTheLostAndFound

Jack Foley Day - A Disordered City / Read by Jake Berry

2010-06-05T20:15:00.000-07:00

A Fresh Look Back at Right Now

2010-05-23T13:32:00.001-07:00

A TIME-HONORED tradition: Stand outside a movie theater with a camera and microphone and poll the audience members for their reactions. What did you think of the film? A grandmotherly woman makes a face and waves her hand in disgust: Revolting! Idiotic! A middle-aged gentleman, stout and respectable, takes a more tolerant view: This is a movie about how young people live today, he says, a movie made by young people, and he is generally in favor of young people. But a sober-looking, well-dressed younger fellow demurs. “I don’t think it’s very serious,” he says dismissively.

This little scene of impromptu amateur film criticism — or market research, if you prefer — occurs in Emmanuel Laurent’s new documentary, “Two in the Wave,” about the filmmakers François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, whose friendship was a driving force and a central fact (as well as, eventually, a casualty) of the French New Wave. Those people outside that Parisian cinema in 1960 have just seen “Breathless,” Mr. Godard’s debut feature, starring Jean Seberg as an American exchange student who teases, loves, protects and betrays a French hoodlum played by Jean-Paul Belmondo, who smokes and runs his thumb pensively over his lips. Some of the patrons are baffled, some enthusiastic, some noncommittal, a mixed bag of responses that seems a bit deflating. Aren’t they aware of the historical significance of what they have just witnessed?

Is it possible now, 50 years later, even to imagine seeing “Breathless” for the first time? Mr. Godard’s film quickly took its place among those touchstones of modern art that signified a decisive break with what came before — paintings and books and pieces of music that have held onto their reputation for radicalism long after being accepted as masterpieces, venerated in museums and taught in schools.

Somehow, the galvanic, iconoclastic force of their arrival is preserved as they age into institutional respectability. So even if you were not around to hear, let’s say, the catcalls greeting Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” or to unwrap a copy of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” smuggled over from Paris in defiance of the postmaster general, or to examine Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain” or Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans when they were first exhibited, the works themselves allow you to place yourself among the brave vanguard who did. And even if you did not see “Breathless” during its first run at the dawn of the ’60s, surely every frame carries an afterimage of that heady time, just as every jazz note and blast of ambient street noise on the soundtrack brings echoes of an almost mythic moment.

At the same time, though, such legendary status can also be a burden, weighing down what was once fresh and shocking with a heavy freight of expectation and received opinion. There is perhaps no episode in all of film history quite as encrusted with contradictory significance as the cresting, in 1959 and 1960, of the Nouvelle Vague. It was a burst of youthful, irreverent energy that was also a decisive engagement in the continuing battle to establish cinema as a serious art form. The partisans of the new — Truffaut and Mr. Godard, along with comrades like Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer — were steeped in film history. Before taking up their cameras they had been critics, polemicists and self-taught scholars, and yet, like other aesthetic insurgents before them, they attacked a reigning style they believed was characterized by unthinking and sclerotic traditionalism. And their drive to reassert the glory of French cinema was grounded in an almost fanatical love of American movies.

Mr. Godard, who had made a handful of shorts before turning to a true-crime scenario that Mr. Truffaut had been working on, was perhaps the most extreme and paradoxical figure in this movement, and would go on to become a prolific and polarizing filmmaker. He would pass through a period of intense, if not always intelligible, political militancy in the late ’60s and early ’70s before settling into his current status somewhere between grand old man and crazy uncle of world cinema. His most recent feature, “Film Socialism,” showed up at the Cannes Film Festival last week, though the director himself did not, offering as explanation for his absence a cryptic reference to the Greek financial crisis. He has, for as long as some of us can remember, walked the fine line between prophet and crank, turning out films that are essayistic, abstract, enraging and intermittently beautiful and issuing variously grandiose and gnomic statements about his own work, the state of the world and the future of cinema.

But that is now. Back then it was surely different. An immaculate and glowing new print of “Breathless” will be shown, starting Friday, at Film Forum in Manhattan, and while no restoration can scrub away the accumulated layers of history, its anniversary can be taken as an invitation to take a fresh look. What if, instead of seeking out an artifact of the past, you could experience the film in its own present tense? Not, in other words, as a flashback to 1960, enticing as that may be, but as 90 minutes of right now.

That kind of time travel is part of the special allure of movies, and “Breathless,” precisely because it so effortlessly, so breathlessly, captures the rhythms of its time and place, erases the distance between the now and then. And yet even as Mr. Godard and his cinematographer, Raoul Coutard, record the sights and sounds of Paris with documentary immediacy, the images are infused with an unmistakable nostalgia. This is not something a latter-day viewer — perhaps besotted by secondhand memories of vintage cars circling the Place de la Concorde or pretty young women selling The New York Herald Tribune in front of cafes — brings to “Breathless.” Rather, the film’s evident and self-conscious desire to tap into a reservoir of existing references and associations is a sign of its director’s obsession with other movies.

You don’t have to recognize this film’s overt cinematic allusions to be aware of its indebtedness. When Michel (Mr. Belmondo) pauses in front of a movie theater to admire an image of Humphrey Bogart, he is confirming what we already know about him, which is that he is a cinematic construct, a man who has perhaps seen too many movies invented by another man who has spent his adult life doing almost nothing else. As a satellite orbiting the twin suns of the Paris Cinémathèque and the journal Cahiers du Cinéma, Mr. Godard was an ardent champion of the Hollywood directors whose reputation as artists is one of France’s great gifts to America and the world. Nicholas Ray, Samuel Fuller, Fritz Lang — and perhaps above all Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchock: these were not just influences on “Breathless,” but axioms in its universe of meaning.

The phenomenon of movie-mad moviemakers is a familiar one by now. The young American directors of the 1970s — including Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Peter Bogdanovich and George Lucas — used to be identified as members of “the film generation” because they had grown up compulsively watching movies, assimilating genre conventions and shot selections that would become the raw material of their own work. Twenty years later, Quentin Tarantino, whose production company is named after Mr. Godard’s 1964 film “Bande à Part,” would refresh and extend this tradition of film-geek filmmaking. Mr. Tarantino’s career consists of a series of genre pastiches and homages that manage to feel startlingly novel, esoteric formal exercises that are nonetheless accessible pieces of popular entertainment.

“Breathless” was there first. Which is to say that it was already late. Seen from its most unflattering angle, it is a thin and derivative film noir. A generic tough guy steals a car, shoots a policeman, sweet-talks a series of women, hobnobs with his underworld pals and tries to stay a step ahead of the dogged detectives on his trail. His poses and attitudes seem borrowed, arising less from any social or psychological condition or biographical facts than from a desire to be as cool as the guys in the movies.

The wonder is that he surpasses them, and that “Breathless,” quoting from so many other movies (and shuffling together cultural references that include Faulkner, Jean Renoir, Mozart and Bach as well as Hollywood movies), still feels entirely original. It still, that is, has the power to defy conventional expectations about what a movie should be while providing an utterly captivating moviegoing experience. A coherent plot, strong and credible emotions and motivations, convincing performances, visual continuity — all of these things are missing from “Breathless,” disregarded with a cavalier insouciance that feels like liberation. It turns out that a movie — this movie, anyway — doesn’t need any of those things, and that they might get in the way of other, more immediate pleasures. You are free, in other words, to revel in the beauty of Paris and Jean Seberg, the exquisite sangfroid of Jean-Paul Belmondo, and the restless velocity of Mr. Godard’s shooting style. And style, for those 90 minutes, is — to phrase it in the absolute, hyperbolic terms Mr. Godard has always favored — everything.

In a way, that skeptical young man was right: “Breathless” is not serious. It is a lark, a joke, a travesty of everything earnest and responsible that the cinema can (and perhaps should) provide. Is it a love story? A crime story? A cautionary tale or an act of brazen seduction? All of these things and none of them. It proceeds entirely by its own rules and on the momentum of its director’s audacity. That music! Those tracking shots that seem to snake through the streets of Paris in a single sprint! That long scene — almost a third of the movie’s running time — in which the two main characters laze around in a long postcoital seminar, talking about love, death, literature and music while the camera floats around them.

“Breathless” is a pop artifact and a daring work of art, made at a time when the two possibilities existed in a state of almost perfect convergence. That is the source of its uniqueness. Much as it may have influenced what was to come later, there is still nothing else quite like it. Its sexual candor is still surprising, and even now, at 50, it is still cool, still new, still — after all this time! — a bulletin from the future of movies.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/movies/23scott.html?ref=arts

An Eye on America Is Also Under Watch

2010-05-11T03:37:00.001-07:00

ANY journalist working in a war-torn or politically unstable region knows the risks and headaches of the job: threats to personal safety, difficulties of access, interference from authorities. For the documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, who has now made one film in occupied Iraq (the Oscar-nominated “My Country, My Country”) and another in the volatile Persian Gulf state of Yemen (“The Oath”), there is the added complication of being, she believes, on a United States government watch list.

Flying home to New York in 2006 from a film festival in Sarajevo, Ms. Poitras was stopped while changing planes in Vienna and questioned by security agents there. Since then she has traveled to Yemen repeatedly to work on “The Oath” and, by her count, she has been stopped for questioning more than 20 times; whenever she arrives home from a trip abroad, customs and border-protection officials are waiting for her plane, she said.

When going to the Berlin film festival in February to show “The Oath,” Ms. Poitras said, airline agents at Kennedy Airport told her she was not authorized to board the flight; she was only allowed on after her lawyer made a few well-placed calls.

For security reasons the United States government does not say why people are on the watch list, or even confirm that they are on it. But Ms. Poitras said she thinks it is the frequency of her trips to the Middle East and the associations she has made in the course of making her films that have raised concerns.

All that time she has spent in the danger zones of Iraq and Yemen have produced two of the most searching documentaries of the post-9/11 era, on-the-ground chronicles that are sensitive to both the political and the human consequences of American foreign policy.

“My Country, My Country” observes the prelude to the 2005 Iraqi elections through the eyes of a Sunni doctor seeking a seat on the Baghdad Provincial Council. “The Oath,” which had its premiere at Sundance in January and is now playing at the IFC Center in Manhattan, again uses what Ms. Poitras calls a “micro-macro” approach, “following an individual story to look at the bigger questions.”

Her intended focus was the American detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, and her initial idea was to document the homecoming of a released prisoner. She started her search in Yemen, the home of a significant number of Guantánamo detainees, including the most prominent of them all, Salim Hamdan.

Captured in Afghanistan in November 2001, Mr. Hamdan had worked as a driver for Osama bin Laden since the mid-1990s. He was the first person to stand trial under the military tribunals that the Bush administration devised after 9/11 and that the Supreme Court, ruling in the case Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, later found to be a violation of international law.

In Sana, Yemen’s capital, a local journalist helping Ms. Poitras asked if she wanted to meet Mr. Hamdan’s family. She found herself in the living room of a voluble man in his early 30s who went by the nom de guerre Abu Jandal (his real name is Nasser al-Bahri). Without looking for him, Ms. Poitras had stumbled upon an ideal subject for her film: “Someone who intersects in so many ways with the post-9/11 universe,” she said.

Abu Jandal once worked for Al Qaeda, serving as a bodyguard for Mr. bin Laden and running guest houses in Afghanistan for new recruits. It was Abu Jandal who enlisted Mr. Hamdan on a jihadi mission in the mid-’90s, and the two men became brothers-in-law when they married sisters at Mr. bin Laden’s urging.

It took patience and persistence to get the kind of access to Abu Jandal that Ms. Poitras wanted. “He wouldn’t say no, but dates would keep getting pushed,” she said. She shot the film over two years, making a dozen trips to Yemen and waiting for days or weeks until he was ready to meet. Sometimes a monthlong trip would yield a mere four or five hours of footage.

Abu Jandal is not exactly publicity shy. In “The Oath” Ms. Poitras incorporates clips from his television appearances, on “60 Minutes” and an Al Jazeera program, and shows him being interviewed by Robert F. Worth, a reporter for The New York Times. But while it was not hard to get Mr. Jandal to talk, Ms. Poitras also wanted to shadow him in everyday settings. In “The Oath” he is seen holding court with young radicals, praying with his son and chatting with passengers in his taxi.

Ms. Poitras said she constantly wrestled with the contradictions of Abu Jandal, who has renounced terrorism but still supports the goals of Al Qaeda, and with the idea of making a film about a religious extremist who is so charismatic. While most political documentaries are only too eager to tell the viewer what to think, “The Oath” keeps the expectations and sympathies of audiences in provocative flux.

In the largely progressive world of American political documentaries, Ms. Poitras said: “I knew I was making a film that wasn’t going to be easily messaged. It doesn’t fit into an easy story, something we can rally around and use as a symbol of what’s wrong with the war on terror.”

Abu Jandal’s troublesome charm is both a crucial part of the story and a central conundrum for the storyteller. “You have to show the charisma to understand how this organization works,” Ms. Poitras said, referring to Al Qaeda. “But it also feels like you’re playing with fire because you don’t want to be a mouthpiece for him.”

Another difficulty was in figuring out how to tell Mr. Hamdan’s story alongside Abu Jandal’s. While Ms. Poitras filmed him in Yemen, her co-cinematographer, Kirsten Johnson, was at Guantánamo Bay, following his brother-in-law’s trial. (Ms. Johnson also shot the exterior scenes in Yemen; she and Ms. Poitras won the best cinematography award in the documentary section at Sundance.)

Off limits to the filmmakers, Mr. Hamdan is the specter who haunts “The Oath.” His letters to Abu Jandal are heard in voice-over, accompanying ominous shots of barren Guantánamo landscapes. Cameras were not allowed in the courtroom, so Ms. Johnson’s approach was to “spend as much time as I could at the trial, and then carry that with me out into the world,” she said, looking for visual analogues to evoke Mr. Hamdan’s condition. (On the stand Mr. Hamdan, who had been held in solitary confinement, described the sensation of “growing eyes” all over his body.)

Ms. Poitras described the making of “The Oath” as “a constant process of negotiation,” with Abu Jandal in person and then again in the editing room as she and her editor, Jonathan Oppenheim, pored over the raw material.

“Usually you see two sides of people when you’re looking at footage, and they seem fairly integrated,” Mr. Oppenheim said. “I would see 8 or 10 people in Abu Jandal.”

With its surprising reversals and deferred revelations, not to mention an antihero who doubles as an unreliable narrator, “The Oath” draws on storytelling methods more often associated with fiction than with documentary. During her ample downtime in Yemen, Ms. Poitras said, she read Don DeLillo novels, including “Mao II” and “Libra,” which had explored the horror and mystique of terrorism long before 9/11. And while editing, she had in the back of her mind the streamlined moral film thrillers of the Dardenne brothers.

“He’s a complicated protagonist and, in a sense, he’s irreconcilable,” Ms. Poitras said of Abu Jandal. “The film was very much about constructing a mystery around who this guy is. There’s a constant questioning about his motivations.”

Ms. Poitras has yet to settle on her next project, but there will be less international travel involved. She sees “My Country, My Country” and “The Oath” as the first two parts of a trilogy that she plans to conclude with a documentary about domestic surveillance or the 9/11 trials.

Whatever it is, the next film will try to confront, on home turf, the original trauma of 9/11 that ripples through her Iraq and Yemen documentaries. “I really think they’re movies about America,” she said, “and I want to wrap it up here.”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/movies/09oath.html?ref=movies

Walter Sear, an Audio Engineer With a Passion for Analog, Dies at 80

2010-05-09T20:30:00.000-07:00

Walter Sear, an audio engineer whose steadfast devotion to pre-digital recording technology led him to maintain a studio with vintage, analog equipment, a risk that paid off in recent years as musicians like Norah Jones, Wilco and Wynton Marsalis flocked there for its rich natural sound, died on April 29 in Manhattan. He was 80 and lived on the Upper West Side.

The cause was complications of a subdural hematoma, or bleeding from the brain, after he injured himself in a fall, said his daughter Julia.

At various times Mr. Sear was a professional tuba player; a designer, importer and dealer of specialty tubas; a composer of film soundtracks; and an electronic music enthusiast who advised Robert Moog on the design of his Moog synthesizer, the instrument that revolutionized popular music beginning in the 1960s.

But to more recent generations of musicians, Mr. Sear was best known as the owner of Sear Sound, a studio on West 48th Street in Manhattan that, guided by Mr. Sear’s intransigent ear, has for decades resisted the conversion to digital recording equipment.

The studio is renowned for its lovingly maintained gear, including a console built by Mr. Sear and an extensive collection of microphones powered with vacuum tubes — the glowing glass bulbs that contribute to the often-cited “warm” sound of analog audio — instead of solid-state transistors.

Among the musicians who have recorded at Sear are Ms. Jones, Mr. Marsalis, Steely Dan, Wilco, Lou Reed, Joanna Newsom and Bjork. Bono and the Edge of U2 were recently there working on music for their long-delayed Broadway musical “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark,” according to the studio manager, Roberta Findlay.

Analog equipment, like cassette tape decks, records and reproduces sound as continuous wave forms. Digital equipment converts audio information into sequences of numbers that approximate those waves, but to analog advocates like Mr. Sear, those digital approximations can sound crude and cold by comparison.

“There has been a serious deterioration in the quality of recorded sound since the 1960s, which continues to get worse to this day,” Mr. Sear wrote in the late 1990s in a wide-ranging six-part critique of the music industry, “What Have They Done to My Art?,” which is posted on Sear Sound’s Web site, searsound.com.

Walter Edmond Sear was born in New Orleans on April 27, 1930, and moved to Jackson Heights, Queens, with his family when he was a year old. His father studied mechanical engineering but could not find a job in that field because he was Jewish, so he and his wife worked as clothing dealers to South American department stores, Mr. Sear’s daughter Julia said. She survives him, along with his wife, Edith; another daughter, Shana Sear Gaskill; and three grandchildren.

Mr. Sear, trained as a tubist, graduated in 1951 from the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and began playing in orchestras and music halls. But he also studied mechanical and electrical engineering, and he was an inveterate tinkerer. He invented a new form of valve for the tuba and had a Belgian factory manufacture the new tubas for him to sell.

In the late 1950s he struck up a friendship with Moog after writing to him to order parts for a theremin, the whistling, no-hands instrument best known from science-fiction film soundtracks. Moog’s first synthesizers were bulky and impractical, but according to Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco’s book “Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer,” Mr. Sear was one of a handful of colleagues in the mid-1960s who persuaded Moog to make the device more musician-friendly by adding a keyboard. Mr. Sear became Moog’s synthesizer dealer in New York. Moog died in 2005.

Sear Sound opened in 1970 in the Paramount Hotel on West 46th Street and in 1990 moved to its current location on 48th Street, a space that had once been used by another famous studio, the Hit Factory. Mr. Sear built much of the studio himself, and over the decades acquired a trove of analog gear, including decommissioned tape machines from Abbey Road Studios in London that had once been used by the Beatles. Mr. Sear maintained all the equipment and was a regular sight at the studio until March, when he fell on his way home from work.

Digital technology began appearing in recording studios in the late 1970s, and by the time Sonic Youth went to Sear Sound to record its album “Sister,” in 1987, analog equipment had fallen out of favor. Lee Ranaldo, one of the band’s guitarists, said in an interview on Tuesday that the studio had some of the cheapest rates in town. But the band was still captivated by the quality of the sound recorded there, and by the passionate and cantankerous character Mr. Sear.

“In the ’80s and early ’90s he was a lone voice in the wilderness, saying you’re going down the wrong path — recordings are sounding worse and worse,” Mr. Ranaldo said. “And he stuck to his guns. It took a long time for him to come around to allowing digital recording gear into his studios, and when he finally did bring it in, he still kind of kept it in a corner.”

Nowadays, vintage equipment and analog audio — including vinyl albums — have come back into vogue, and Sear Studio is in high demand, with scant availability and rates to match.

Sonic Youth most recently mixed its 2006 album “Rather Ripped” there, but Mr. Ranaldo said it has gotten harder and harder to book at Sear Sound. “We’re priced out of the place,” he said.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/arts/music/07sear.html?ref=music

Diphtheria Epidemic in Haiti

2010-05-08T07:17:00.000-07:00

Why is this on a media blog? Imagine a country where your children are dying one after another. Would you have time for a story about a film, or a a piece of art, a piece of music?

ep·i·dem·ic /ˌɛpɪˈdɛmɪk/ Show Spelled[ep-i-dem-ik] Show IPA
–adjective
1. Also, ep·i·dem·i·cal. (of a disease) affecting many persons at the same time, and spreading from person to person in a locality where the disease is not permanently prevalent.

Fred Frith: Mapping the Further Reaches

2010-05-07T01:20:00.000-07:00

So much so, in fact, that the discontinuities between that band's albums will always be more pronounced than their continuity. Any notion of music in a state of flux that this might imply has been indicative of Frith's work in the decades since that band split up. Now that he can be realistically considered as something of a musical polymath, Frith continues to push at the boundaries even while he maps out his own singular musical territory.

All About Jazz: Even if an opinion is informed entirely by the subjective evidence of music on record, it's still apparent that Henry Cow was working a seam of that must, perhaps inevitably, be called progressive rock quite unlike anyone else. To what--if any--degree was that uniqueness the product of conscious decision making, or was the process not conscious at all?

Fred Frith: It's never really that simple, is it? The balance between having a strong sense of direction while not really having a clue what you're doing has always been kind of central to where I live musically. I think we were simply getting on with the things that interested us at the time, touched by any kind of music that we found exciting and alive. We pretty much did anything we felt like doing, and incorporated ideas from any source that seemed fruitful or interesting, musical or otherwise.

AAJ: Nearly all of the band's music on record was, until relatively Recently, put out by Virgin Records. Did the company think they were going to make money on the band?

FF: The people Richard Branson asked to run the creative side of the label were an adventurous bunch, and I think they were hoping to bring music that they liked to a broader audience. When Tubular Bells [released by Mike Oldfield in 1973] took off, it must have seemed like they were onto something. We were lucky to be able to develop in the shadow of that success, because it ensured that the adventure continued, at least for a couple of years, until Richard started to understand that this wasn't going to actually make him any serious money. But they gave us their full support for three studio LPs, and with generous conditions--meaning that we could spend unlimited time in a state of the art recording studio, and really learn how the studio worked, and how we could work in the studio. The only thing I've ever experienced that was comparable was when I recorded my first film soundtrack for Peter Mettler in the studios of the National Film Board of Canada, and they gave us six whole weeks. That, and the first three Henry Cow records, represents the longest amount of time I've ever been given to work on single projects. In the Sunrise days, we would do a whole record from conception to mix in a maximum of two weeks. Now, I'm lucky if I get one.

AAJ: In common with a great many musicians it's apparent that you haven't just arrived at a musical reference point and stuck with it. As a multi-instrumentalist, that maxim might be said to be more pronounced but how did you arrive at your vocabulary on the guitar?

FF: I don't think I've arrived anywhere yet. I'm still traveling. I use whatever vocabulary is most suited to the conversation I'm having, and I'm certainly not interested in having the same conversation over and over again. Which means that the resources at my disposal are always (hopefully) continuing to develop and evolve, as the need arises. When you learn a language you can only become fluent by discovering who you are in that language. Music is the same for me. I have to learn who I am in whatever context I'm working.

AAJ: Precedents weren't exactly thick on the ground when you first started playing solo improvised guitar, and it's clear from the evidence on record that you had already worked out a vocabulary for that setting. Were you aware of such figures as Derek Bailey, Keith Rowe and Hans Reichel at that time, and if so, to what extent would you cite them as influences?

FF: I bought the first AMM record in 1969 and it had a big impact on me; made me listen differently. I saw Derek perform in 1971, and after Guitar Solos (Fred/ReR, 1974) came out, Hans introduced himself by sending me one of his records. Derek and Hans became good friends. Keith was more complicated because I never actually saw him perform anything except revolutionary songs until I played with him in the early '80s. My awareness of him was more political--he used to try and get Henry Cow to join the Workers Revolutionary Party, and I didn't feel very drawn to his music at that time. The person who really influenced me was none of the above, but Barre Phillips, whose first solo double-bass record set me on the path to becoming a serious improviser and also gave me a hint as to how I could approach the instrument in a "total" way.

AAJ: In common with later bands from the pre-punk and punk eras-- This Heat and The Slits, for example--it could be argued that Henry Cow was political in its very being; a creative collective, to be sure. To what extent was there continuity between the band's musical and social outlook, and did one flow inevitably from the other?

FF: It was all pretty much permanently intertwined and in a constant state of flux. We argued constantly and about everything--musical, social, political...gastronomic! Sometimes the arguments were friendly and constructive and sometimes they were neurotic and personal, and sometimes rather desperate. I've no idea how we were able to sustain our energy for so long, except that we were almost psychotically creative. Seeing the DVD from Switzerland that we released as part of the box set was a revelation to me--I remember it as a very dark period in our life, tense and nerve-wracking--and yet the energy fairly crackles off the screen, and we're unbelievably tight. It was reassuring. In the end, all you can say is that we couldn't really have done it any other way than creative collectivity, musical and political engagement of the broadest kind, and a large helping of love and respect when the wind was blowing in the right direction.

AAJ: Georgie Born [bassist with Henry Cow in the band's latter days] has gone on record identifying the mid-1970s as "a darkly fecund era in the soul of British culture." Although it's pretty apparent what has happened politically in the intervening years, can you think of some present day examples of collective action in musicmaking you can empathize with in that regard?

FF: Well, AACM is still going strong, and I have the deepest admiration for Muhal Richard Abrams and the movement he started, for example. Actually, I see communities of like-minded musicians and sound artists springing up all over the place, and it's not so much about "bands" as about united fronts...

AAJ: One of the things that is now a hallmark of your work is your willingness to diversify and not simply to straddle the divide between composition and improvisation. Has this resulted in you considering music more as a whole or in having an appreciation for labels or compartmentalizing?

FF: Labels are useful up to a point. They give a general idea about certain kinds of commonalities, but I suspect that they're often more an identifier of the people who are on the receiving end than the ones who are busy doing it. When I hear the words "progressive rock" I think first of the people who identify themselves as "progressive rock" fans. I've always done a lot of different things and all my musical activities tend to inform each other in various ways. Sometimes I'm more involved in one kind of activity, sometimes in another. And sure, it makes up a "whole" when considered as an accumulation of things that I do and have done. But music is an impossibly rich and diverse field, constantly mutating and developing and changing. Even if you come up with a useful label it will already have spawned sub-categories by tomorrow. You can't be hip any more by knowing the latest thing because it's already over.

AAJ: Has working with a rock band [Cosa Brava], decades after the Henry Cow split, provoked the remembrance of things past or does it mark another step on the way? Perhaps it's a mixture of both?

FF: Everything I do is as likely as not to invoke remembrance of things past. How could it not? All music is about memory. And don't forget that I have been involved in a lot of bands since Henry Cow: Aksak Maboul [1979], Art Bears [1979-81], Skeleton Crew [1982-86], Keep the Dog [1989-92], The FF Guitar Quartet [1996-99], Tense Serenity [1996-97], Massacre [1980-82 and 1998-present]. Cosa Brava is part of a continuum that exists long past Henry Cow days. It's actually a very different kind of experience. All the musicians in Cosa Brava read music fluently, as well as having a rock attitude to putting together songs, and it's that particular combination that makes what we do possible, the idea of composing parts in the way I would for a classical ensemble, knowing that they can be performed at a very high level, while simultaneously containing the seeds of their own deconstruction. That approach began with the Guitar Quartet--well, it began with Henry Cow really--but in a way we were positing the electric guitar as a classical ensemble and now, of course, there are lots of electric guitar ensembles, so it obviously worked. Cosa Brava is not referential in the same way. For me the central focus of the group is melodic and narrative.

AAJ: How does solo improvisation compare with working in a group? Presumably there can be continuity between the two despite the very different demands of setting.

FF: I view them very differently, on the level of theater as much as anything. Being alone in front of an audience is a very different kind of experience for both parties. And your relationship with the material is different. There is nobody to have a musical conversation with, so obviously it changes your attitude to vocabulary, to take up where we left off before...

AAJ: Amongst other things in the course of your musical life you've been given the opportunity to compose for the Rova Saxophone Quartet and Ensemble Modern. In the same way as with your work as a solo improviser and with groups, is it easy to reconcile the specific discipline of composition with the different preoccupations and discipline of the improviser?

FF: It was very fortunate for me that I began to write for others with ROVA, because I knew them pretty well already, and they are all stellar improvisers, so there wasn't anything to reconcile--they already had a very good understanding of the territory in both cases and indeed were precisely interested in the points where the two disciplines intersect. I've written some of my best work for them because of that fact.

Ensemble Modern was a different story. They had and still have very little collective experience of improvisation and are, for the most part, rather suspicious of it--even if there were and are some very good individual improvisers in the group; the late Wolfgang Stryi being, of course, one of them, and I miss him. My approach to writing for them was quite different, balanced between what I wanted to learn from them as a composer and what they wanted to learn from me as an improviser. It finally was very successful--our recording won awards--but it wasn't an easy process, and I probably ended up getting more out of it than they did. I've been able to apply what I learned to other composing projects with other classical ensembles but somehow I don't think they've done much improvising since Traffic Continues (Winter and Winter, 2000). Whatever the truth of the matter, it was a wonderful opportunity for me to enter into a world I didn't have much direct experience of. They're fantastic musicians, and were very welcoming, which I've always appreciated.

In the end it's all about people--I like to work with people, not instruments, which means that the most important thing is to develop deep working relationships with musicians you trust, and who trust you, without either of you necessarily knowing where you're going. And the same is true whether the music is improvised or composed, or however else you want to describe it. I feel it when I'm working with Cosa Brava, and also with Arditti Quartet, and it's what makes life exciting and fulfilling.

AAJ: Given that you hold down an academic post (professor of composition at Mills College in Oakland, Calif.), would it be true to say that you've found all the musical contexts you've worked in to be equally stimulating and do you hope that things will stay that way in the future?

FF: Not equally stimulating--that would be a tall order--but if I'm learning something then it's all good, in the end, right? I love teaching at Mills, partly because of its history of support for and investment in experimental approaches--the fact that Henry Cowell, Harry Partch, Lou Harrison, John Cage, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Xenakis, Berio, Pauline Oliveros, Anthony Braxton, Alvin Curran and so many others have passed through here tells its own story--but mostly because of the students who come here, who tend to be the kinds of musicians and sound artists who don't quite fit anywhere else, and who come from all over the world to be here. That makes for a stimulating community to say the least.

AAJ: Has your association with Mills College been a happy and fruitful one?

FF: My colleagues and I are stretched pretty thin sometimes but it's been a very good 10 years, and I consider myself lucky and privileged to be here, to hear so much great work, and to get a glimpse of what the future of music will look like. So, yes, absolutely.

AAJ: It could be argued that, as a band, Henry Cow was fortunate in getting Dagmar Krause as a singer. How important is it for you that a musician or singer has a distinct identity? If indeed it is important can you give some examples of people whose work you admire in this regard outside of those you've already recorded with?

FF: I don't know of any musician who doesn't have a distinct identity though they may not always be in touch with it.

AAJ: Given that you play a variety of instruments, to what extent are you aware of their different characters and sonorities and to what extent does such knowledge inform how you utilize them?

FF: Very aware, and it informs my use of them profoundly.

AAJ: With particular reference to your work as an improviser, how important is the passing moment to you? Is it important that, to use the Beckett maxim, you leave a stain upon the silence?

FF: Improvising is impossible without being constantly in the moment. Beckett also said "Some soft thing softly stirring soon to stir no more," which is kind of a similar idea...

AAJ: Do you feel as engaged as you have at any other arbitrary point in your career with the mechanics of making music? As someone who it seems has consciously concerned himself specifically with the vocabulary of the guitar, to what extent is this still the case, if indeed it ever has been?

FF: I'm fascinated with acoustic guitar right now, after making To Sail To Sail (Tzadik, 2008). I feel as if I have a lot of work to do to understand it, to get to grips with the possibilities. But in the end the mechanics is always less interesting than what is being expressed.

AAJ: Would you say that modernism is still a sustainable proposition in the sense that music can perpetually be seen to be moving forward, as opposed to being merely a rehash of what's gone before?

Selected Discography

Cosa Brava, Ragged Atlas (Intakt, 2010)
Fred Frith, Nowhere / Sideshow / Thin Air (Fred/ReR, 2009)
Fred Frith/Arte Quartett, The Big Picture (Intakt, 2009)
Fred Frith/Arte Quartett, Still Urban (Intakt, 2009)
Henry Cow, The 40th Anniversary Henry Cow Box Set (ReR Megacorp, 2009)
Fred Frith, The Happy End Problem (Fred/ReR, 2008)
Fred Frith, To Sail To Sail (Tzadik, 2008)
Fred Frith, Eleventh Hour (Winter and Winter, 2005)
Fred Frith, Clearing (Tzadik, 2001)
Fred Frith/Ensemble Modern, Traffic Continues (Winter and Winter, 2000)
Fred Frith Guitar Quartet, Ayaya Moses (Ambiances Magnétiques, 1997)
Massacre, Killing Time (Celluloid Records, 1981)
Fred Frith, Gravity (Ralph Records, 1980)
Henry Cow, Western Culture (Broadcast, 1979)
Art Bears, Hopes and Fears (Recommended Records, 1978)
Fred Frith, Guitar Solos (Caroline Records, 1974)
Henry Cow, Unrest (Virgin Records, 1974)

Source: http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article_print.php?id=36321

A Breather for Moyers; Next Step Is Unclear

2010-05-03T02:47:00.000-07:00

Bill Moyers Journal,” first broadcast in 1971, came to a close on Friday, with Mr. Moyers warning viewers that “plutocracy and democracy don’t mix,” as he compared past eras of populist insurgency to the present moment in America.

“Now we have come to another parting of the ways, and once again the fate and character of our country are up for grabs,” he said from his desk in New York.

Given those stakes, it might seem like an odd time for Mr. Moyers to sign off from PBS. The end of the “Journal” is a milestone both for public broadcasting and for Mr. Moyers, whose explorations of corporate power versus people power were unlike anything else on television.

Those close to Mr. Moyers, 75, say he is not fully retiring but merely catching his breath after three tiring years of weekly deadline demands. His next step is unknown, even to him, they said.

To his viewers Mr. Moyers and the “Journal” represented a rare place on television where experts, academics and public interest advocates could talk at length about public affairs. True to form, the final broadcast opened with a case study about community organizers in Iowa.

Mr. Moyers, a press secretary for President Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1960s, was first the host of the “Journal” from 1971 to 1981 (with one hiatus). He worked for CBS and NBC on separate occasions, but most of his professional career has been with PBS. He was the host of the weekly PBS series “Now” between 2002 and 2004, but left to write a book and produce documentaries.

Mr. Moyers resurrected the “Journal” in 2007, and since announcing the program’s end last November, he has made it clear that he was leaving on his own terms. PBS asked him to stay for four more months while it prepared a replacement for his time slot, and he agreed. (The new show, “Need to Know,” begins next Friday.)

Mr. Moyers did not respond to an interview request over the weekend. In a blog post last month he said: “There are some things left to do that the deadlines and demands of a weekly broadcast don’t permit. At 76, it’s now or never.”

At a farewell party on Friday night Mr. Moyers recalled that the former CBS News anchorman Walter Cronkite once told him that he “made a terrible mistake retiring at 65.” He added, “I have had 10 more years than Walter to commit to journalism,” according to several staffers who were there. Amid a backdrop of financial misdeeds and bailouts, the dominant theme of the 2007-10 “Journal” was corporate power.

Judy Doctoroff O’Neill, an executive producer of the “Journal” and the president of Public Affairs Television, the production company of Mr. Moyers and his wife, Judith, said, “We really tried to look at how corporate power is affecting our democracy, but also the efforts of people to take back the government and have it be the government of the people.”

That has been a major theme of Mr. Moyers’s journalism career. In his final weekly broadcast he said that “democracy only works when we claim it as our own.”

Neal Shapiro, the chief executive of WNET.org in New York, said that Mr. Moyers “gave voice to the voiceless in a way that PBS is charged with doing.”

Mr. Moyers has long been a controversial figure. In a column in the May 10 issue of The Nation, the media columnist Eric Alterman called Mr. Moyers the “last unapologetic liberal anywhere in broadcast television.” Conservative critics have long accused Mr. Moyers and his programs of being one-sided.

“To our critics,” he said on Friday’s finale, “I’m glad you paid attention; the second most important thing to journalists is to know we’re not being ignored.” (The only thing more important, he said, is independence.)

The “Journal” was financed on a year-to-year basis by foundations and one corporation, the Mutual of America life insurance company. Mr. Moyers has not yet sought funds for new projects, indicating that he “has not been thinking about what’s next logistically,” Mr. Moyers’s executive assistant, Karen Kimball, said in an e-mail message on Sunday. “He has said that he intends to take the next three months to finish the move, take some deep breaths and read.”

Ms. Doctoroff O’Neill said, “I’m pretty confident that after a bit of a break we’ll figure out the next project that makes sense for us.”

Some of the “Journal” staff members will work for “Need to Know.” A few will move to the new offices of Mr. Moyers’s production company. Others are looking for new jobs.

“It’s a hard time to be going off the air because there’s a lot of work to be done,” Ms. Doctoroff O’Neill noted, citing topics like “inequality, financial reform, health reform, war.” She added, “We’re hopeful that ‘Need to Know’ will keep the pressure on.”

At a dinner for underwriters of the program on Saturday, she said she observed that about 1,000 people have been employed by Mr. Moyers’s production company at various times.

“That means there are a lot of people who have been shaped by Bill’s brand of journalism,” she said, “who know it’s our job to uncover and not just cover.”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/03/arts/television/03moyers.html?ref=arts

Muddy Waters Interview on Old Grey Whistle Test in 1972

2010-05-02T03:59:00.000-07:00

.....

2010-05-02T02:18:00.000-07:00

The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench - a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side."
- Hunter S. Thompson

Steven Van Zandt Told Springsteen That 'Born to Run' 'Sucked'

2010-05-01T18:07:00.000-07:00

Steven Van Zandt has claimed he told Bruce Springsteen that his 'Born to Run' album "sucked" -- and Springsteen then challenged him to improve it.

The guitarist, who has been collaborating with Springsteen since the mid-'70s, told Uncut magazine's one-off publication 'Bruce Springsteen -- Ultimate Music Guide' that he criticised the legendary LP during its recording process, reports NME.com.

But Springsteen promptly told him to make it better -- with Van Zandt more than happy to take a stab at it. He explained, "All I did on 'Born to Run' were the horns on '10th Avenue Freeze-Out.' I was just in the studio, hanging around. He said, 'What do you think?' and I said, 'I think it sucks.' And he said, 'Well, go f---ing fix it, then.'"

Van Zandt continued, "So I went and fixed it. People came to the Bottom Line (New York venue) basically to laugh at us. And a funny thing happened -- we f---ing blew their minds."

The album, released in 1975 and featuring classics like title track 'Born to Run' and 'Thunder Road', was ranked 18th in Rolling Stone magazine's 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time.

Source: http://www.spinner.com/2010/04/29/bruce-springsteen-steven-van-zandt-born-to-run-sucked/

Neil Young Working With Daniel Lanois on New Album

2010-05-01T17:58:00.000-07:00

Old bandmate David Crosby has spilled the beans on Neil Young's latest solo project -- and it seems the Canadian troubadour could be going stadium rock, at least if his choice of producer is any indication.

According to Crosby, Young is recording with super-producer Daniel Lanois -- most known for his connection with U2 -- and is "having a great time talking music with him and just relating to him."

As well as manning the mixing desk a half-dozen times for the Irish megastars, Lanois produced Bob Dylan's 'Time Out of Mind' and a couple of Peter Gabriel discs.

Source: http://www.spinner.com/2010/04/30/neil-young-new-album-details/
The new Young effort will follow up 2009's 'Fork in the Road,' and may feature a Crosby cameo, if his ex-CSNY cohort gets his way. "I said to him, 'If you want a harmony, I'm volunteering,'" Crosby told Rolling Stone. "He said, 'You know, if I need one you'll be the first guy I call.'"

The former Byrds singer also says that the January 2010 death of filmmaker L.A. Johnson, who produced a number of Young's concert films and had a long-time friendship with the singer-songwriter, could have a big impact on the direction of the new album. "I think that Neil's been a little lonely for someone to interact that way, because his best buddy died and that just really left a hole there," explained Crosby. "The guy's paid an awful lot of dues, man. I suspect this will be a very heartfelt record. I expect it will be a very special record."

A Man Who Stopped Time to Set It in Motion Again

2010-04-27T14:13:00.000-07:00

Eadweard Muybridge, photographer of nature, is captured in 1872 in the Grant Mariposa Grove at Yosemite.

Technology moves fast, art slower. You could say that art is still catching up to Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904), a pioneer of stop-motion photography and early filmmaking.

In “Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change,” at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, you can see how Muybridge himself got up to speed with industrialization, mechanization and the other radical changes of the late 19th century.

His impact on the 20th is difficult to overstate. The writer Rebecca Solnit, in her 2003 biography, called Muybridge “the man who split the second,” aligning him with the inventor of the atom bomb. Cultural signposts as diverse as Francis Bacon’s paintings and the performance-capture technology of “Avatar” can be traced back to the trotting horse that Muybridge photographed on a racetrack in Palo Alto, Calif.

In the Corcoran’s thorough and absorbing show, organized by its chief curator, Philip Brookman, that horse doesn’t appear until the final couple of galleries. But you can see Muybridge’s ideas about time and movement develop in richly layered landscapes, panoramas and sequential views of buildings under construction.

Born Edward James Muggeridge in the market town of Kingston upon Thames, a few miles southwest of London, Muybridge ventured to San Francisco around 1855 and made his name as a bookseller. After an 1860 stagecoach accident left him with a major head injury, he recuperated in England, where interest in photography was growing fast, and there he took up the camera. He returned to San Francisco as a photographer, one of many trying to capitalize on the market for Western landscapes.

There, he made famous and powerful friends, including Leland Stanford, the politician and railroad magnate whose collection of racehorses he famously photographed. Muybridge became a celebrity himself when he was tried, and acquitted, for the 1874 murder of his wife’s lover. (The head injury played a role in his defense.)

Along the way, he changed his name from Muggeridge to Muygridge and finally Muybridge (pronounced MOY-bridge); Edward became Eadweard (pronounced Edward). On his business cards and in advertisements for his studio he called himself Helios, the sun god from Greek mythology. The moniker was a clever reference to “sun pictures,” early photographic prints made in sunlight, but it also branded him as a traveling, outdoor photographer. The logo on his stationery showed a winged camera.

His early works are mostly stereographs (two-part photographs that give the illusion of three-dimensionality when seen in a special viewer, or stereoscope; the museum provides glasses that perform the same function). Like other stereographers, Muybridge exploited the technology by seeking out views with sharply receding perspectives.

In other ways, though, Muybridge distinguished himself from the competition. Whether surveying the Yosemite Valley or the booming city of San Francisco, he looked for unusual vantage points and played up discrepancies in scale. In “The Astonished Woodchopper,” one of his most theatrical images, a man with an ax confronts a giant sequoia.

He also wasn’t above using special effects: printing pictures extra dark so that they appeared to have been exposed under moonlight, or adding clouds from a second negative. Some of these tricks were standard practice for 19th-century photographers, but they may come as a shock to viewers who think of Muybridge as more of a scientist than an artist.

He seems to have been comfortable with both disciplines. And as Ms. Solnit argues in an eloquent catalog essay, there was a lot of crossover between the two: “Muybridge was as much an artist for scientists as he was a scientist for artists.” She notes that the painter Albert Bierstadt adapted compositions from Muybridge’s Yosemite photographs, just as the geologist Clarence King studied them for traces of glacial activity.

His album “Yosemite Views,” made with considerable effort and at great expense, is certainly stunning. Muybridge carted a mammoth-plate camera up and down the steep cliffs to look for vertiginous angles that would separate his album from an earlier one by Carleton Watkins.

He paid special attention to Yosemite’s waterfalls, which appear as milky, vaporous cones because of the images’ long exposure times. As the filmmaker Hollis Frampton has written about Muybridge’s work, “What is to be seen is not water itself, but the virtual volume it occupies during the whole time-interval of the exposure.” As it happens, the Yosemite album dates from 1872 — the same year that Muybridge began his experiments with Stanford’s prize racehorse, Occident.

More modern and striking is a series he made a year earlier: a government commission to photograph lighthouses along the Pacific Coast. The subject was tailor-made for him, from the cliffs rising hundreds of feet above the sea to the beacons whose technology seems with hindsight to anticipate that of moving pictures. These are some of Muybridge’s most gorgeous and versatile images, in tune with 19th-century Romanticism and 20th-century Structuralism alike.

But Muybridge wasn’t just a landscape photographer, he was also a photojournalist — one who, more often than not, worked for powerful interests. In 1873 the United States Army commissioned him to document the Lava Beds in Northern California, where war had broken out between the Modoc Indians and the government. His photographs were meant to assist the Army in moving troops through the inhospitable terrain, but some were published in magazines and newspapers. (In one, marketed as “Modoc Brave Lying in Wait for a Shot,” the subject was, in fact, a member of a neighboring tribe who worked as a scout for the military.)

The government gave Muybridge access to major building projects like the San Francisco City Hall and the city’s branch of the United States Mint, which he photographed at various stages of construction. And the Pacific Mail Steamship Company commissioned from him a series documenting coffee production in Latin America meant to reassure foreign investors with its orderly and hierarchical depictions of labor.

His most significant connection was undoubtedly his friendship with Stanford. It’s enshrined in Muybridge’s mesmerizing “Panorama of San Francisco,” shot from the rarefied precipice now known as Nob Hill, where Stanford was putting up an enormous mansion.

Yet the facts of Muybridge’s elite patronage were at odds with the democratic potential of his chosen medium. He seemed to understand this, especially in his later years when he marketed his locomotion studies to the masses at events like the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893.

Materials from those studies — photographs, books, letters, patent models — are packed into the show’s final three galleries. Also here is Muybridge’s only surviving Zoopraxiscope, a device he invented by adding a spinning glass disk to a lantern slide projector.

The Zoopraxiscope can’t be operated by visitors, alas, but a digital projection animates some of Muybridge’s well-known photographs of animals, men, women and children in motion. The men run, jump, wrestle and pour buckets of water on one another. The women do some of these things, but they also wash and iron clothes. Many of the sequences are antic; more than a few are erotic, or homoerotic. They’re art, science and popular entertainment, and they’re what people think of when they think of Muybridge.

But, for me, the show’s defining moment was a single still image — a photograph from 1872 of Muybridge sitting in front of a giant sequoia. It seems to encompass geologic and human time, eras and instants, the rings of the tree and the horse circling the track.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/arts/design/27muybridge.html?ref=arts

Henri Cartier-Bresson: Big Picture

2010-04-27T01:58:00.000-07:00

With 300 or so photographs, "Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century," a new exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, is, as Ed Sullivan used to say, a really big show. No doubt, nothing less would do to represent the vast scope of an artist Richard Avedon called, with just the slightest exaggeration, "the Tolstoy of photography."

But six years after his death at the magnificent age of 95, Cartier-Bresson proves that you can be one of the most famous names in photography and still be one of its greatest enigmas. For a few years in the 1930s, he was a fiercely dedicated avant-gardist, making pictures that were powerfully strange. Yet after World War II, he somehow became one of the biggest mainstream photojournalists, working for magazines that liked pictures to be plainly legible and not too subtly nuanced. And let's not even talk about inscrutable. (See pictures from the Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibit.)

Born near Paris in 1908 to a prosperous family of thread manufacturers, Cartier-Bresson once hoped to become a painter. As it turned out, his gifts in that department were modest; no less a judge than Gertrude Stein took one look at his work and suggested he join the family business. Wealthy enough to do nothing in particular, he drifted for years, studying with the middling painter André Lhote and hanging on the edges of the Surrealist movement. Though his formal education ended at 18, he was a classic aesthete, bookish and art-obsessed, with fine-boned features and skin so fair that in Mexico a girlfriend gave him a Spanish nickname meaning "beautiful man with face the color of shrimp."

He was tougher than he looked. In 1930 he abruptly abandoned the stale confines of bourgeois civilization for the more primal realms of French colonial Africa. (Even in this, he was playing the artiste: think Gauguin in Polynesia or Rimbaud in Abyssinia. Among the French, the flight to primitivism was something of a creative-class tradition.) In the Ivory Coast, he lived for a year as a hunter, selling to villagers the game he killed. And without quite thinking of himself as a photographer, he also took pictures. (See pictures by Bruce Davidson.)

It wasn't until his return to France in 1931 that Cartier-Bresson made a crucial realization: through photography, he could achieve the goals of the Surrealists he so much admired. The MoMA show, which runs through June 28 and then travels to Chicago, San Francisco and Atlanta, is a career-spanning retrospective. But while Cartier-Bresson's Surrealist phase would be just a brief moment in that career, it was a crucial one.

MoMA's chief curator of photography, Peter Galassi, who organized this show, produced a brilliant little Cartier-Bresson exhibition in 1987 that made explicit the importance of Surrealism to the photographer's early work. Cartier-Bresson never joined the movement in any formal way and didn't even care much for the work of Surrealist painters like Salvador Dalí and René Magritte, who he thought simply illustrated contrived paradoxes. What excited him was the Surrealist attempt to bypass the rational faculties as a way to glimpse a deeper reality. In their struggle to circumvent the conscious mind, the Surrealists tried hypnotism, free drawing and automatic writing. It was Cartier-Bresson's great insight that his Leica was the most automatic instrument of all. If a photographer simply gave himself over to the chance encounters of the day and captured them at the right instant, a snapshot could drive straight to the heart of the uncanny. All the obsessions of Surrealist fantasy — shock juxtapositions, erotic concealments, dismembered anatomies — were at large in the ordinary life of the streets.

As his biographer Pierre Assouline once put it, in those years Cartier-Bresson used his camera "as a Geiger counter," a machine to register the secret pulse of the world. And there's certainly a whole world of crackling enigmas in Valencia, Spain, 1933, made at a bullring. On the right, a man's disembodied head signals to us from his frame within a frame. At center, a broken 7 presides in a semicircle that seems to emanate from his glasses. And at left, another man peers into a dark threshold. All it took to find these things was a click.

The Globetrotter
Cartier-Bresson worked most intensely under the spell of Surrealism for just three years, from 1932 to 1934. For the next three, he virtually stopped taking pictures while he dabbled in filmmaking. But by 1937, right after his first marriage, he took a job as a photographer for the leftist Paris daily Ce Soir, work that bent him to the disciplines and conventions of deadline journalism. He didn't like them much. When he left that job in 1939, with World War II looming, he left the world of salaried employment for good. By June of the following year, he was a prisoner of war in a German labor camp, where he languished for three years before escaping. (See pictures by blind photographers.)

Cartier-Bresson emerged from the war committed at last to the idea of himself as a photographer. His roots in Surrealism may have made him an unlikely candidate for the pivotal role he would soon play in the emergence of magazine photojournalism. But along with the photographers Robert Capa and David Szymin, known as Chim, he became a founding member of Magnum — one of the dominant photo agencies in the years when plush weeklies like LIFE and Paris Match paid big money for pictures. As Galassi points out in the show's catalog, of the great figures of early modernist photography — including André Kertész, Edward Weston and Walker Evans — Cartier-Bresson "is the only one whose work blossomed so fully after the war."

How did he make this unlikely transition? No doubt it helped that he learned to rely less on the complex geometry of his earlier work and moved toward a more direct style. What you also get less often in pictures from his later years is the mesmerizing oddity of those from the '30s. In a Cartier-Bresson from, say, 1960, you feel that you're seeing a recognizable world through an exquisitely attentive eye. In the earlier work, you're seeing another world altogether. (Read: "Marcel Duchamp: Anything Goes.")

Yet he never entirely let go of that world. Even in the 1950s and '60s, a whiff of the surreal persists. How else to describe the artificial sky filled with artificial planes in World's Fair, Brussels, 1958? And it's unmistakable in Torcello, Near Venice, 1953, where the spiked prow of a gondola reads the dial of an arched bridge, while also bearing down on a running girl who is nearly identical to a figure in Giorgio de Chirico's Melancholy and Mystery of a Street, a painting the Surrealists revered.

Until he put down his camera in the 1970s to devote himself to drawing, Cartier-Bresson almost never stopped traveling. He was at the scene of some of the most important stories of his time — India in the final days of the British Raj, Beijing just before Mao's army entered. But his greatest gift was for pictures that didn't report anything more newsworthy than the erotic storm system of bodies in Coney Island, New York, 1946, or the domestic bliss of Bougival, Near Paris, 1956. An image of a man being greeted from the threshold of his houseboat by his wife, baby and dogs, it's a tour de force of art-historical synthesis. The collage-style juxtaposition of figures, the abrupt changes of scale between the man and what he's seeing: it's all very modern. But the supple line of the man's torso could have been drawn by Bronzino, while his wife and baby gently summon the long tradition of the Madonna and child — which is apt, since this may be the most succinct picture of heaven ever made. If it's true that Cartier-Bresson was the Tolstoy of photography, it's because he knew that the great pulse of his time flowed through the humblest places.

Source: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1983814,00.html

Alan Sillitoe, ‘Angry’ British Novelist, Dies at 82

2010-04-26T00:55:00.000-07:00

Alan Sillitoe, a British writer whose two early works — a novel, “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning,” and a short story, “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner” — drew attention to the seething alienation of the postwar working class in England, died on Sunday in London. He was 82.

His son, David, confirmed the death to The Associated Press.

Mr. Sillitoe, who grew up desperately poor and left school at 14, had a long and prolific career, and he spent much of it plumbing the privations of his childhood for material. He published more than 50 books — including poetry, essays, travel writing and fiction for both adults and children — along with a handful of plays and screenplays. But he never repeated the acclaim or the influence that accrued to his first works of fiction, which were published in the late 1950s and led critics to group him with the so-called angry young men, writers like Kingsley Amis, John Braine, John Wain and the playwright John Osborne who were also describing characters in revolt against the British class system.

Unlike some of his contemporaries, however, Mr. Sillitoe wrote about people who were more concerned with defying the elite class than joining it. Arthur Seaton, the frequently drunk, amorally libidinous 22-year-old factory worker in “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning” (1958), sees the world as an us-against-them proposition. His strategy for living is to hoard the pleasures of the moment, to turn life into a perpetual Saturday night in a barroom and a bedroom and fend off the responsibilities of Sunday morning. (The 1960 film was a star-making vehicle for Albert Finney.)

Smith, the narrator of “Loneliness,” a 17-year-old thief who had been sent to a reformatory, is similarly opposed to the straight and narrow. When he proves to have a gift for cross-country running and becomes a favorite of the institution’s governor, he continues his rebellion by purposely losing a race, stopping just short of the finish line as the flummoxed and appalled governor looks on. The moment — later captured in a 1962 film directed by Tony Richardson and starring Tom Courtenay and Michael Redgrave — was a perfect symbol of the divide between the classes. The governor thinks he has lost; the runner thinks he has won.

“Cunning is what counts in life, and even that you’ve got to use in the slyest way you can,” Smith says at one point. “I’m telling you straight: they’re cunning, and I’m cunning. If only ‘them’ and ‘us’ had the same ideas, we’d get on like a house on fire, but they don’t see eye to eye with us, and we don’t see eye to eye with them, so that’s how it stands and how it will always stand.”

Alan Sillitoe was born in Nottingham, England, on March 4, 1928. His father was a laborer, often unemployed, and frequently violent. The family often moved to avoid the rent collector.

As a teenager he worked in a bicycle factory and as an air traffic control assistant. In the Royal Air Force he served as a radio operator in Malaya. He began to write during a recuperation from tuberculosis.

“I was 20 years old when I first tried to write, and it took 10 years before I learned how to do it,” he once said.

His survivors include his wife, Ruth Fainlight, a poet; a son, David; and a daughter, Susan.

Mr. Sillitoe often wrote with a political outlook sympathetic to the working poor, and much of the criticism of his work after “Saturday Night” and “Loneliness” complained of its being bogged down in philosophical heavy-handedness. He spent much of his life traveling, and his novels frequently contrived to transport working-class Englishmen to foreign lands.

In “Key to the Door” (1961) the lead character (Arthur Seaton’s brother) joins the military and is sent to Malaya, and in “The Death of William Posters” (1965) a man escaping the drudgery of a marriage finds his way to Algeria, where he becomes a gun smuggler. More recently, Mr. Sillitoe published “Gadfly in Russia” (2007), a collection of four decades of writing about Russia.

Mr. Sillitoe’s other books include several forays into far-flung literary genres. One, “The General” (1960), is an allegory about art and war that concerns a symphony orchestra on a train that is seized by an enemy army; “A Start in Life” (1970) is a pastiche melding the grit of modern Nottingham with the picaresque tradition of the 18th century; and “Travels in Nihilon” (1971) is a satirical fantasy set in a fictional nation where self-indulgence and self-expression are lionized.

In 1995, he published an autobiography, “Life Without Armour.”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/26/books/26sillitoe.html?ref=arts

Henry Rollins & Amanda Palmer, Hammer Conversations

2010-04-24T05:22:00.001-07:00

Hunter S.Thompson at the NYS Writers Institute in 1997

2010-04-18T21:31:00.001-07:00

Plastic Bag

2010-04-14T22:40:00.000-07:00

Mindwalk

2010-04-08T12:51:00.000-07:00

John Cassevetes promoting Opening Night

2010-03-15T01:00:00.000-07:00

Paul Auster

2010-02-16T18:47:00.001-08:00

Lou Reed’s ‘Machine’: Now More Strings, Less Metal

2010-02-13T00:18:00.000-08:00

Fireworks Ensemble performing "Metal Machine Music," a 1975 work transcribed by Ulrich Krieger and Luca Venitucci, at Miller Theater.

A real-time, chamber-music performance of an inhumanly generated composition: that was Lou Reed’s “Metal Machine Music” as played by the Fireworks Ensemble at Miller Theater on Friday night.

Mr. Reed recorded his 1975 album “Metal Machine Music” (RCA) by leaning guitars against amplifiers, cranking them up until the feedback screamed, playing melodies amid the sonic melee and layering and manipulating the results, including changing the tape speed of some parts. Then he chose four segments for 16-minute LP sides.

It sounded like a riot in a shortwave radio factory: a fusillade of sustained, pulsating and scurrying electronic tones that adds up to a hyperactive drone, as consonant as the overtone series. It was proudly anticommercial and defiantly arty. It was Minimalistic process music at rock volume, an impersonal wall of sound. Now, 35 years later, it also sounds unexpectedly merry.

Ulrich Krieger had the bizarre idea of transcribing that thicket of tones to be played by live musicians. It took considerable time and the help of a partner, Luca Venitucci, to analyze the welter of information; they had finished only three of the four sections when the transcription had its premiere in 2002. Now they have four. At the Miller Mr. Krieger directed a 16-member, amplified ensemble of strings, winds, guitar, accordion, piano and percussion, though there was no conductor. The music is in proportional notation, played to a clock; a violinist periodically stood up to signal.

The transcription changes everything. It corresponds to some of the more perceptible events of the original: sudden dropouts and surges of certain registers, rhythmic throbs, the squeal when a high overtone suddenly appears, the suggestion of a melodic moment. But the original “Metal Machine Music” has no narrative line, no direction. It simply, and wildly, exists. There are few intentional phrases or interactions between parts, and no sense of ensemble. That’s what humans bring, no matter how conceptually disciplined.

On the album “Metal Machine Music” sounds frenetic. In performance the Fireworks Ensemble musicians were just that, with the string players in the front row sawing away at nearly constant tremolos. (One violinist’s bow trailed a hank of loose horsehair less than halfway through the piece.) Yet their combined efforts brought out something richer and more meditative than the album. Each of the four sections became an endless tremolo chord, oceanic and Wagnerian, with recognizable instruments adding dabs of melody and glimmers of allusion: a Celtic accordion phrase, a brass fanfare.

The music was still unremitting; there were a few walkouts. It was also electrifying, a perceptual overload, with notes fluttering at points all over the frequency spectrum and tiny inner parts peeking out. The transcribed “Metal Machine Music” no longer reflects its title. Now it’s more string than metal, and it’s flesh rather than machine. It’s a world away from the original in both execution and intent; it’s social rather than solitary, respectful rather than irritating. But in its own much more formal way, it’s just as maniacal.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/09/arts/music/09fireworks.html?ref=music

19th-Century Concept, With a Few Upgrades

2010-01-31T00:25:00.001-08:00

PAT METHENY, the jazz guitarist, has lately spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about robots. Actually, that’s putting it mildly: he has been downright obsessed with robots, and with getting them to do his bidding. “I haven’t slept more than four hours a night for six months now,” he said one day last fall at a makeshift rehearsal space in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn, the former home of a Byzantine Catholic church.

Wearing a T-shirt and faded jeans, his tousled mane tucked under a baseball cap, Mr. Metheny stood before a 14-foot-high, 35-foot-wide wall festooned with musical instruments: an imposing, circuit-wired one-man band. The contraption itself seemed byzantine, all the more so when it sprang to life in a mechanical whirl: beaters tapping cymbals, levers gliding over strings, mallets cascading across a vibraphone.

Mr. Metheny closed his eyes and hunched over his guitar, bringing a human touch to “Expansion,” the centerpiece of his new album, “Orchestrion” (Nonesuch). With its shifting tonal center and fluttering groove, the tune combined aspects of post-Coltrane jazz and Brazilian pop with cinematic breadth. So beyond the obvious technical feat — thousands of moving parts, executing a programmed score — the performance dazzled on a basic level. Mr. Metheny and the unmanned orchestra were making his kind of music.

“This is something I’ve literally been dreaming about since I was 9,” said Mr. Metheny, who, at 55, has three gold albums and 17 Grammy Awards to his name. Easily one of the most enterprising jazz musicians of his generation, he has worked in an array of settings, from folkish duos to boppish trios to the heartland sprawl of the Pat Metheny Group. But robots were a new wrinkle, and Mr. Metheny seemed eager to explain himself. He did so in the midst of preparations for a grueling tour, which kicks off on Monday in Champagne, France, and concludes with shows at Town Hall in Manhattan on May 21 and 22.

Mr. Metheny, who grew up in Lee’s Summit, Mo., traces his intrigue with musical automation to an antique player piano in the basement of his grandfather’s house in Wisconsin. Later he learned about orchestrions, the pneumatically driven mechanical orchestras that flourished in the 19th century, before the advent of commercial recording. Though impressed by the Jules Verne-ish mechanisms, he was struck by their musical limitations. “I thought, ‘Why couldn’t it be something else?’ ” he said. “Honestly it struck me as such an obvious thing to do. I’m kind of stunned nobody’s really approached it.”

Voluble and amiably intense, Mr. Metheny gives the impression of a restless intellect governed by quiet discipline. He first made his name as a teenage prodigy under the wing of the vibraphonist Gary Burton, who consulted on the orchestrion’s mallet selection. “I’ve learned never to underestimate Pat,” Mr. Burton said. “He makes things work that most of us wouldn’t dare to try.”

The progressive current in Mr. Metheny’s music runs deep. His albums, notably with the Pat Metheny Group, have pushed the envelope not only in terms of early-adopter synthesizer use (an interest shared with his founding partner in the band, the keyboardist Lyle Mays) but also with regard to harmony, texture and compositional form.

Along the way he became a gear-head touchstone. In the 2009 Mike Judge film “Extract” a pair of guitar store employees reverently drop his name in an inept flirtation with a customer. A different sort of geek might be drawn to “Orchestrion,” given its whiff of Victorian futurism, a hallmark of the steampunk aesthetic. “There’s an awful lot of overlap between what Pat is doing and what we do as steampunks,” C. Allegra Hawksmoor, an editor at Steampunk Magazine, said in an e-mail message. (Asked about that subculture, Mr. Metheny seemed wary: “It’s not really on my radar.”)

Style, in any case, has rarely been the prime motivator for Mr. Metheny, who earnestly uses the word “research” to describe the music-making process. He said “Orchestrion” was especially valuable because it led him to new methods, a new frame of possibilities. “The record is a viable portrait of what I’m hearing right now,” he said, “and I wouldn’t have gotten to that result any other way.”

It was about five years ago that he began to sense that the technology for a modern orchestrion was in reach. Mark Herbert, his longtime guitar technician, had designed a mechanical instrument with solenoids, which employ electromechanical rather than pneumatic energy. Bells went off for Mr. Metheny, who already owned a Disklavier, the solenoid-powered piano made by Yamaha.

His interest led him to Eric Singer, a Brooklyn engineer and musician doing similar work with a confab he called Lemur (League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots). Among Mr. Singer’s breakthrough inventions was a guitar-bot, which resembles the junky droid in the movie “Short Circuit” but works remarkably well as a musical device. Soon Lemur had been commissioned to build an orchestra. “Being Pat Metheny with his grand vision, he wanted one of everything,” Mr. Singer said.

What complicated the assignment was Mr. Metheny’s high standard for dynamics. Each instrument needed to be not only hair-trigger responsive to his signals but also capable of a range of volume. The robots receive their orders from Mr. Metheny’s computer, on which he runs two different software programs — or, no less effectively, from his guitar or keyboard. (He said he plans to incorporate some robotic free improvisation on the tour, as a counterweight to his intricately plotted compositions.)

In the end Lemur created most but not all of the rig. Mr. Herbert provided at least one solenoid guitar, while Ken Caulkins, who has done animatronics work for Disneyland, made some pneumatic pieces, including an electric bass. A Chicago pipe organ company created two cabinets filled with jugs and bottles, to be played with blasts of air.

“Everything came in months late,” Mr. Metheny said of the instruments, which began arriving last March, along with a daunting challenge. “There’s some hardcore technical reasons why most mechanical music doesn’t groove that hard,” he said. “And I thought, ‘Man, if it should be able to do anything, it should be able to do that.’ So one of my first tasks was to go through, solenoid by solenoid, and find out how each one felt the beat. And then figuring out software compensations for that latency. That took weeks.”

Then there was the music, some of which he had composed ahead of time.

“None of it worked,” he said. “It didn’t feel good, it didn’t sound good. It wasn’t happening.” So he went back to Square 1. “I very quickly had to find out what they were good at,” he recalled, referring to the robots. “What can they do, what can’t they do? And there’s a whole bunch that they can’t do. But I kind of wrote for their strengths.”

Remarkably, “Orchestrion,” recorded in October, shows few traces of herky-jerky compromise. “Entry Point,” the first tune completed, is a study in subtle undulation. “Spirit of the Air,” with its percussive pulsations, recalls both Steve Reich and vintage Pat Metheny Group albums like “Still Life (Talking).” The album’s only truly awkward moment occurs in “Soul Search,” during a flirtation with swing — not a robot strength, it turns out, even with cymbals on loan from Jack DeJohnette.

But then there’s the shimmering, labyrinthine title track, an overture of palpable ambition. “A percussion ensemble could play it, and I hope one will someday,” Mr. Metheny said. “But it would require the world’s greatest virtuosos practicing for two months.” (Of course the humans would then play it better, he clarified.)

He acknowledges but deflects the megalomaniacal implications of the work. “A big part of my interest as a bandleader has been in trying to discover and illuminate my favorite potentials in each setting,” he said in a follow-up e-mail message. “This is a setting with lots of potential, but not many reference points. In fact, basically none.” In the same message, which exceeded 1,800 words, he compared “Orchestrion” to the Stevie Wonder album “Music of My Mind,” in which Mr. Wonder played nearly every instrument himself. “This is exactly that — but live,” he said.

Steve Rodby, the bassist in the Pat Metheny Group, and an associate producer of the album, made the same analogy. “To me this record is so much more about Pat than it is about the robots,” he said. “It has this intrinsic liveliness — I almost said ‘lifelike quality’ — that comes from the fact that it’s not sampled instruments. It’s real sound in the air, and Pat’s in there improvising.”

In that sense the live “Orchestrion” experience is bound to overshadow the album, provided Mr. Metheny’s road crew can sustain it. During a second visit to the church, issues of transport — for a solo tour with eight and a half tons of equipment — were a pressing concern.

“I anticipate this tour as being a deeply character-building experience,” Mr. Metheny said. (At any mention of potential malfunction he knocked on the wood floor.) Leif Krinkle, a Lemur robot builder, was inspecting equipment nearby, as was David Oakes, Mr. Metheny’s technical director of many years, who will run the tour.

“Some of these things aren’t done being built,” Mr. Oakes said. He pointed to one input mechanism. “That’s hardly road worthy: a two-by-four with wires taped to it. And it’s not like I can call up and order a Fender Twin case for these. Every case has to be custom designed. I’m building them myself.”

Mr. Metheny interrupted from across the room. “Leif’s never heard this,” he called, cueing up “Expansion,” his showcase piece. And for the next eight or nine minutes the room once again filled with movement and sound, every bit as uncanny as before. Bringing the tune in for landing, Mr. Metheny looked up expectantly.

“It was nice to hear it as music,” Mr. Krinkle said, “rather than seeing every little thing that needs to get work done.” There was a meaningful pause.

“Looks like a big to-do list to me,” Mr. Oakes said, not joining in the ensuing laugh.

“Me too,” Mr. Metheny agreed. But he was beaming.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/arts/music/31metheny.html?ref=arts

Howard Zinn 1922-2010

2010-01-28T15:24:00.000-08:00

The Mathematical Mind of Iannis Xenakis

2010-01-25T18:57:00.001-08:00

Iannis Xenakis (1922–2001) was a polymath, a man given to many disciplines including engineering, music, architecture and mathematics. Best known for his avant garde music, Xenakis used the mathematical rules of the natural world to explore the spacial texture of sound, color and architecture. Described by Milan Kundera as "the prophet of "insensibility," his musical pieces had the ability to both unnerve and enrapture his audiences. At the core of his work was his study of mathematics and science, disciplines that he used to explore the visual and sonorous origins of art. A collection of over 60 works on paper by Xenakis including pre-compositional sketches, architectural drawings and graphic mathematical notations are on display in the exhibition Iannis Xenakis: Composer, Architect, Visionary at the Drawing Center in SoHo.

Xenaxis was born in Romania to a bourgeois Greek family. At a young age he was educated in European art and music, although his formal studies led him to a degree in civil engineering. At the outbreak of the Second World War, Xenakis joined the armed Greek Resistance. After surviving an injury that caused him to lose his left eye, he arrived as a refugee in Paris in 1947 where he became an apprentice in the atelier of Le Corbusier. Quickly rising to prominence in the studio, he collaborated with the famed architect on major projects in Chandigarh, India and Lyon, France, where he designed the undulating glass surfaces of Sainte Marie de La Tourette.

After establishing himself with some stability at the atelier, Xenakis began to explore a passion for creating music. Although his first compositions were originally met with disdain by the composer Arthur Honegger, he found a mentor in Olivier Messiaen who instructed a number of members of the musical avant garde including Pierre Boulez, Luigi Nono and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Just as Russian constructivist Kasimir Malevich rejected representation for geometric abstraction at the beginning of the twentieth century, Xenakis and his contemporaries looked to move beyond the serial harmonic framework of classical music. In 1954, after years of obscurity in the musical community, Xenakis completed his first large-scale work, Anastenaria. The final movement of the triptych, Metastaseis, was characterized by a completely unique approach. When performed for the first time at Donaueschingen in 1955, the piece created a "sound cloud" that consisted of an aural mass built with the strings in the orchestra so overwhelming that it was almost palpable.

In 1958, Le Corbusier, entrusted Xenakis to take charge of the design for the Philip's Pavilion at the Brussels World's Fair. The structure, designed using hyberbolic paraboloids, inscribed the sweeping curves of Xenakis' early aural symphonies into actual physical space. Although successful as an engineer, Xenakis left the studio of Le Corbusier in 1959 to focus on music. He continued to write symphonies that attempted to express complicated mathematical ideas such as probability theory and Markov chains. His interest in the geometric mass of sound led to a fascination with theoretical spaces, including optical architecture. In the 1960s and 1970s, Xenakis started designing site specific spectacles known as polytopes that combined elements of sound, color and performance to transform sites, such as the ruins of Persepolis, into otherworldly electro-acoustic realms.

At the very center of Xenakis' work was his hand, the tool that he used to transform the flat surface of paper into the three-dimensional musical, architectural and optical manifestations of his multi-faceted genius.

Source: http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-opinion/news/2010-01-25/iannis-xenakis/

One Singular Auteur, Through Another

2010-01-16T23:02:00.001-08:00

STEVEN SODERBERGH’S modus operandi is that no film he makes is like anything he’s made before. The one exception has been the “Ocean” series, which from first (“Ocean’s Eleven”) to last (“Ocean’s Thirteen”) was designed to make money and did. But once Mr. Soderbergh could add that particular genre of moviemaking to his résumé — in Hollywood, the franchise is a genre — he put it aside and returned to being the consummate anti-auteurist auteur, bouncing from the guerrilla epic “Che” to the coolly soft-core “Girlfriend Experience” to the comic corporate exposé “The Informant!”

Speaking by phone from Los Angeles, Mr. Soderbergh observed that his career would have been easier if he had been able to make himself into a more marketable brand. Instead, he said with some relish, he’s like that “imported mustard that you buy at Trader Joe’s.”

His latest movie will not be any help in the branding department. It is his smallest and most modest feature-length work, one in which his hand is nowhere evident, except in his refusal to employ the rules specific to its genre: the documentary biopic. The subject of the film, “And Everything Is Going Fine” — which has its premiere next Saturday at Slamdance in Utah — is the monologuist-writer-actor Spalding Gray.

Some months after Gray’s death (a presumed suicide by drowning) in 2004, Mr. Soderbergh had heard that Kathleen Russo, Gray’s widow, was interested in making some kind of documentary about her husband. Mr. Soderbergh, who had directed the film of Gray’s monologue “Gray’s Anatomy” (1996), told Ms. Russo he’d like to be involved.

“Kathie thought there was something to be done with all the material that was left,” he said. “I knew from the first that I was never going to shoot anyone talking about him, as there would be in a conventional documentary, but I thought there might be some place for his journals, either read by other actors or as text on the screen. I paid to have 25 years of them transcribed before I became convinced it had to be, literally, just his voice.”

Over the course of three years Mr. Soderbergh and his editor Susan Littenberg distilled about 15 hours of film and video recordings of Gray’s performances, his television interviews and home movies of his childhood and his life with Ms. Russo and their children. The resulting 90-minute collage opens with a clip from his first monologue, “Sex and Death to the Age 14,” and ends with a faded image of the infant Spalding wrapped in his mother’s arms.

“Steven told me that he wanted Spalding to tell the story, as if it was his last monologue,” Ms. Russo said by phone from Sag Harbor, N.Y. “And I think he accomplished that.”

The title, “And Everything Is Going Fine,” is lifted from a comment Gray repeated like a refrain during one of his performances and reflects the way all of his monologues immediately plunge you into a drama in process. “I looked at his work as a stream that you can step into at any moment and sort of get what’s going on,” Mr. Soderbergh said. He said he stepped into Gray’s stream of consciousness himself when he saw Jonathan Demme’s 1987 film of Gray’s best-known monologue, “Swimming to Cambodia.”

“When I saw ‘Swimming,’ I had the sensation that I assume a lot of people did: that my mind works like that too. The constant spinning and digressing and organizing seemed so genuine. I identified with the struggle to filter experience in such a way that it at least seems to make sense, which is an ongoing, sometimes futile process.”

While Gray’s body of work is the inverse of Mr. Soderbergh’s, in that all of his monologues are part of on continuing autobiographical impulse, Gray’s achronological storytelling has had an influence on Mr. Soderbergh’s most formally ambitious films like “The Limey” and “Che,” which collapse memory and prophecy into an extremely active present.

After reading Gray’s 1992 roman à clef “Impossible Vacation,” Mr. Soderbergh offered Gray a role in his third feature, “King of the Hill,” partly because he wanted to know more about how Gray’s mind worked. “And Everything Is Going Fine” has a clip of Gray describing the phone call during which Mr. Soderbergh asked him to be in the movie.

Mr. Soderbergh told Gray that, like the protagonist of “Impossible Vacation” (a barely disguised version of Gray named Brewster North), the character he wanted Gray to play was ruled by regret. Mr. Soderbergh also told him that the character commits suicide, which, as Gray recounted it, clinched the deal.

“What’s so bizarre in all this,” Mr. Soderbergh said, “was the central role suicide played in his life.” Gray’s mother committed suicide when she was 52, and his work is haunted by his memory of that act and his fear that he would be compelled to repeat it. “It’s right at the core of the work, and it’s discussed in such a wide-ranging way,” Mr. Soderbergh said. “And maybe that’s what frightened me when I heard about his accident.”

In 2001 Gray was in a car wreck that fractured his skull and crushed his hip. “You didn’t have to be a genius,” Mr. Soderbergh said, “to know that Spalding’s equilibrium was very precarious, and I was really scared that this would weaken his ability to sort things out in the way that he always did, by working.”

Mr. Soderbergh said he shared what he described as Gray’s need “to keep making art in order to get out of bed in the morning.” So he felt an admittedly irrational fear that what Gray suffered would somehow “splash onto him.” His anxiety was so great, he said, that he never made contact with Gray after the accident.

“I was totally absent in a way that is inexcusable to me,” he said. “And this entire movie is in part an act of contrition. The irony is that I spent the better part of three years immersed in something I tried to avoid. But as Spalding would say, ‘What are we to do with any of this except make a piece of art?’ ”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/movies/17soderbergh.html?ref=arts

Eric Rohmer, New Wave Filmmaker, Dies at 89

2010-01-11T13:45:00.000-08:00

Eric Rohmer, the French critic and filmmaker who was one of the founding figures of the internationally influential movement that became known as the French New Wave, and the director of more than 50 films for theaters and television, including the Oscar-nominated “My Night at Maud’s” (1969), died on Monday. He was 89.

His producer, Margaret Menegoz, announced his death in Paris, Agence France-Press reported. Relatives said he had been hospitalized a week ago but gave no further details about his condition, the news agency said.

Aesthetically, Mr. Rohmer was perhaps the most conservative member of the group of aggressive young critics who purveyed their writings for publications like Arts and Les Cahiers du Cinéma into careers as filmmakers beginning in the late 1950s. A former novelist and teacher of French and German literature, Mr. Rohmer emphasized the spoken and written word in his films at a time when tastes — thanks in no small part to his own pioneering writing on Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks — had begun to shift from literary adaptations to genre films grounded in strong visual styles.

His most famous film in America remains “My Night at Maud’s,” a 1969 black-and-white feature set in the grim industrial city of Clermont-Ferrand. It tells the story of a shy, young engineer (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who passes a snow-bound evening in the home of an attractive, free-thinking divorcée (Françoise Fabian).

The conversation, filmed by Mr. Rohmer in a series of carefully but unobtrusively composed long takes, covers philosophy, religion and morality, and while the flow of words at times takes on a distinctly seductive subtext, the encounter ends without a physical consummation. But a bond is formed between the two characters that movingly re-emerges five years later, when they meet again in the brief postscript that closes the film.

“My Night at Maud’s” was the third title in his “Six Moral Tales,” a series of films that Mr. Rohmer began in 1963, though for economic reasons it was the fourth to be filmed. In each of the six films, a man who is married or engaged finds himself tempted to stray but is ultimately able to resist. His films are as much about what does not happen between his characters as what does, a tendency that enchanted critics as often as it drove audience members to distraction.

“I saw a Rohmer movie once,” observes the Gene Hackman character in Arthur Penn’s “Night Moves” (1975). “It was kind of like watching paint dry.”

In his private life, Mr. Rohmer was reclusive if not secretive. “Eric Rohmer” was, in fact, a pseudonym, one of several that he experimented with early in his career. According to “Who’s Who in France,” he was born Maurice Henri Joseph Schérer in Tulle, a city in southwestern France, on March 21, 1920; other sources give his birth name as Jean-Marie Maurice Schérer and place his origins in the northeastern city of Nancy.

After publishing the novel “Elisabeth” under the name Gilbert Cordier, he moved to Paris in 1950, where he began frequenting the ciné-clubs of the Latin Quarter, making the acquaintance of four other young cinephiles with whom his career would remain intertwined: Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol and Jacques Rivette. With Mr. Rivette, he founded a short-lived film magazine, La Revue du Cinéma, but when that initiative collapsed after five issues, he joined the reviewing staff of Les Cahiers du Cinéma, a publication that acquired a fashionable notoriety for the violently iconoclastic reviews of the young Truffaut.

In 1952, Mr. Rohmer made his first attempt to direct a feature film, to be titled “Les Petites Filles Modèles,” but the project was abandoned when its producer declared bankruptcy. No footage is known to exist. Not until his Cahiers colleagues began to enjoy a measure of success as filmmakers — the term La Nouvelle Vague (The New Wave) was coined by a journalist for L’Express in 1957 — was Mr. Rohmer able to mount another long form production. But “Le Signe du Lion” (1959), a moody tale of an American expatriate who finds himself down and out in Paris, did not capture the public imagination the way Truffaut’s “400 Blows” and Godard’s “Breathless” did, and Mr. Rohmer returned to editing Les Cahiers, a job he held until 1963.

Mr. Rohmer’s real breakthrough came in 1962 with the 26-minute short “La Boulangère de Monceau” (“The Bakery Girl of Monceau”). Filmed in 16-millimeter black and white, it was the first of the “Six Moral Tales,” based on fictional sketches he had written, he later said, long before he dreamed of becoming a filmmaker.

After a second short film, “La Carrière de Suzanne” (1963), Mr. Rohmer returned to the feature length format with “La Collectionneuse” (1967), the fourth episode of the series but the third to be filmed. The story of a young woman (Haydée Politoff) who systematically collects lovers, the film won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival and restored Mr. Rohmer’s place in the front rank of the New Wave. The series continued with three more features: “My Night at Maud’s,” “Claire’s Knee” (1970) and “Love in the Afternoon” (1972).

After experimenting with two stylized period films, “The Marquise of O ...” (1976) and “Percival le Gallois” (1978), Mr. Rohmer initiated a new series, “Comedies and Proverbs,” with the 1981 “La Femme de l’aviateur.” The six films in this group were illustrated traditional sayings or quotes from celebrated authors (from La Fontaine to Rimbaud), and were largely built around the flirtations and fickle emotions of young people, and incorporated, notably in “Le Rayon Vert” (1986), a new element of improvisation.

Mr. Rohmer undertook a final series, “Tales of the Four Seasons,” with “Conte de Printemps” in 1990, this time providing a philosophical love story for each season of the year. The series ended with the exquisite “Conte d’Automne” in 1998, in which Mr. Rohmer moved beyond his focus on youth to tell a movingly autumnal story of a widow (Béatrice Romand) with a teenage son who finds love in an unexpected place.

Mr. Rohmer’s late career found him moving happily among small projects for television (including “L’Arbre, le Maire et la Médiathèque,” 1993), an early experiment with digital technology (“The Lady and the Duke,” 2001), and a true-life spy story (“Triple Agent,” 2004). His final theatrical film was the 2007 “Astrée and Céladon,” a retelling of a 17th-century love story with magical overtones, filmed in a self-consciously academic style that suggested the paintings of Poussin and Fragonard.

He is survived by a younger brother, the philosopher René Schérer, and by a son, the journalist René Monzat.

In opposition both to the intensely personal, confessional tone of much of the work of Truffaut and the politically provocative films of Godard, Mr. Rohmer remained true to a restrained, rationalist aesthetic, close to the principles of the 18th-century thinkers whose words he frequently cited in his movies. And yet Mr. Rohmer’s work was warmed by an undercurrent of romanticism and erotic yearning, made perhaps all the more affecting for never quite breaking through the surface of his elegant, orderly films.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/12/movies/12rohmer.html?hp

Boulez’s Gentler Roar

2010-01-10T05:56:00.000-08:00

IN a maroon turtleneck and loose-fitting gray suit, eyes on his score, Pierre Boulez took turns one late August morning here rehearsing the soloists for “Répons.” Written in 1981 for six soloists, chamber orchestra and live electronics, it is the first major work he wrote using the electronic-music institute in Paris, Ircam. But it has rarely been performed, just a few dozen times.

Now Mr. Boulez had young musicians from the Lucerne Festival Academy on hand. Intimations of jazz, Balinese gamelan, African drumming and Japanese music floated from welters of rapid passagework. “You are freer there, so to speak,” he reminded the harpist where the score mandated improvisation.

“No, no, no, no,” he gently chided one of the pianists, adding, consolingly, “It’s difficult also for the conductor, believe me.”

It sounded nearly impossible, not least when the six soloists finally played together before the rehearsal broke. Intense complexity created waves of impenetrable sound.

And yet.

It was still somehow clear that what sounded impenetrable would gradually yield up its shape, order and sense. There was a metaphor in this for the whole of Mr. Boulez’s career-long embrace of new music.

On Saturday evening he conducts the Vienna Philharmonic in works by Schoenberg, Webern and Mahler at Carnegie Hall. Daniel Barenboim, who will conduct two other concerts with the orchestra (including music by Mr. Boulez on Sunday), is Mr. Boulez’s soloist for Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto.

It will be a homecoming of sorts for Mr. Boulez, who as Leonard Bernstein’s unlikely successor, directed the New York Philharmonic. He has been proving to New Yorkers ever since what they gave up.

He is the last great exponent of European modernism from the generation that emerged after the war. Born in Montbrison, in the Loire, the charmed and charming son of a wealthy factory engineer, a mathematics student turned musician, he attended the Paris Conservatory, where Olivier Messiaen helped introduce him to serialism. An agent provocateur for serial music before graduating and a master of hardball polemics, he caused even anxious luminaries like the aging Stravinsky to feel the need to earn his approval.

“I like virtuosity, although not for the sake of virtuosity but because it’s dangerous,” was Mr. Boulez’s description of “Répons” when we sat down to talk for a few hours after the rehearsal. By danger he meant that music, to be worth anything — which is to say to be new — can’t stick to safe ground but must entail some risk and effort.

“If you want to have a more interesting life, you will make some effort,” is how he put it. “It’s about the organization of one’s life. I am still shocked that so many people are not more creative, by which I mean more demanding of themselves.

“The main question we need to ask ourselves is: Do I try to be necessary to the evolution of language? Do I try to be original? And being original means using the tools necessary to be original, not just having the desire to be original.”

He was thinking then of John Cage, with whom he had been friendly until they fell out, painfully for Cage. Mr. Boulez, having an entirely more rarefied (some might say angrier or more mandarin or richer or more academic) notion of avant-gardism, decided that the bohemian Cage didn’t have the necessary tools.

“Tools are important,” Mr. Boulez repeated. “Mallarmé chastised Degas for writing poems. He said, ‘You can’t just have an idea that you want to write poems. Poems are made out of words.’ ”

New Yorkers of a certain vintage will recall how, back in the 1970s, Mr. Boulez exasperated some Philharmonic subscribers, old-line critics and not a few of the orchestra players content with the standard fare, by stressing new music, making clear that he wanted to shake up the whole symphony orchestra routine and, in many ways, simply by not being Bernstein. He staged new-music performances in various corners of the city to take music to young people where they lived (“guerrilla actions,” he now calls them). He also organized “rug concerts,” for which seats were removed from what was then called Philharmonic Hall and players shared the floor with the audience, lounging on cushions.

In retrospect these were breakthrough events, but Mr. Boulez was fighting an uphill struggle. He arrived already burdened (or burnished, depending on one’s perspective) by a reputation as a fierce champion of the most complex postwar scores, which to him clearly held no challenge. His candor and openness disarmed skeptics.

Even so, predisposed against his agenda, detractors insisted on finding him cold and effete, notwithstanding his endless efforts to talk about and make more accessible the music he was advocating, and even though, whether performing Mahler, Messiaen or Mozart, he could conduct with sumptuousness and brilliance and an elegant, almost moral clarity.

More than 30 years later the American symphony orchestra subscription system is still pretty much ossified, if not dying. In retrospect, hiring him was a major gamble by the Philharmonic. His leaving was a historic opportunity squandered.

But that was then. He is 84 now, an elder statesman and globe-trotting maestro of the world’s leading ensembles who, despite a tireless energy, says he plans to cut back on conducting soon to spend more time in Paris and at his house in Baden-Baden, Germany, composing. “An affable, even mellow presence,” is how Alex Ross described Mr. Boulez in The New Yorker when he came to town for some performances a decade ago, although by affable and mellow Mr. Ross meant “like Brando’s Don Corleone.”

This was funny, except not quite fair. These days Mr. Boulez is reserved but approachable, forthcoming, reflective and, to a remarkable degree, without vanity. For him it’s about the music, only the music. The rest is noise.

“I don’t apologize for being on the barricades,” he said, recollecting his early days during the late 1940s and early ’50s, when he wrote a notoriously pitiless obituary of Schoenberg, conspicuously booed Stravinsky’s music in Paris in 1945 and declared that any musician who had not experienced, as he infamously put it, “the necessity of dodecaphonic music” was “useless” because he is “irrelevant to the needs of his epoch.”

“Like a lion that had been flayed alive,” was Messiaen’s description of the young Mr. Boulez.

“You never get results if you aren’t fighting,” Mr. Boulez now says. “I understand better other points of view, although I still may fight against them.”

Mr. Barenboim phrased it another way when we talked one recent afternoon: “What makes Pierre a towering modernistic figure is that he has managed in his life to move between revolutionary moments and evolutionary moments. When revolution was necessary, he was there, courageously, to lead it.

“But he is a great strategist. And he doesn’t overestimate himself. He is too intelligent to stick to beliefs or opinions when they are no longer necessary. I remember him coming to my concert in Paris once and being very disparaging about Bruckner. But then, 15 years later, there he was conducting Bruckner himself, not out of weakness but because his thinking evolved.”

Mr. Barenboim recalled observing Mr. Boulez lead Schoenberg’s “Pelleas und Melisande” with the BBC Symphony in the early 1960s.

“I sat with the score during the rehearsal,” he said. “At the beginning there is quite a lot of chromaticism, and at a certain point there was a chord out of tune and Pierre said, ‘No, no, this is sharp, this is flat.’ I was amazed.

“As a pianist I had no idea how he heard all that. I mean, when I thought my piano was out of tune, I just called the tuner. So I asked Pierre how he did it. I was starting to conduct, and I wanted to know if this was something I could learn.

“Pierre said: ‘You have to have the courage to say what you hear and think when you conduct. Either the player will correct you and say it’s not me out of tune, it’s the second oboe, or you will be right. But in any case you will learn. Don’t put your ego above the music. Do what you have to do for the sake of the music, and only in that way will you make progress.’ ”

“It was the remark of a man without ego,” Mr. Barenboim added. “And a great lesson for me on musical terms and human terms.”

One evening Katharina Rengger, project director of the Lucerne Festival Academy, made a similar point. Mr. Boulez was about to conduct Janacek, the sort of composer he disdained years ago. Ms. Rengger talked about his open mind, how the young musicians at the academy loved working with him, how he was planning a kind of 24-hour center, where anybody could come to hear music, hang out, make music, an alternative to the formal confines of the usual concert hall.

“Maybe part of the revolution for Pierre has been to find his own way,” she said. “For him making music is a process that never stops. It’s always focusing on the future.”

Back in the 1950s and ’60s, Mr. Boulez was a key figure at the summer school at Darmstadt, Germany, where young modern composers, stifled during the war, pressed for a new international style. Nationalism and populism rankled after the Nazi regime. Serialism’s obdurate, abstract, quasi-mathematics implied a semblance of cultural rationalism, unattached to nationalist ideas, a fresh start, musically speaking. But it soon came to represent the new orthodoxy. And Mr. Boulez was among its principal ideologues.

That said, no single serial technique emerged from Darmstadt. Mr. Boulez’s own music moved from serial rhythms, durations, attacks and dynamics to improvisation, chance, electronics, world music.

“Serialism is long dead,” he said. “It was killed by the same people who wrote it.”

All of which is true. That said, the composer Hans Werner Henze remembered in his memoirs that the Darmstadt School saw music as “a glass-bead game, a fossil of life,” and “any encounter with the listeners that was not catastrophic and scandalous would defile the artist.”

But Mr. Boulez prefers now to stress how Darmstadt, and by extension the whole postwar European milieu with which it was connected, “was about young people who wanted to meet one another from France, England, Poland, Germany,” he said. “Everything seemed more urgent after the war. People who had lived discreetly under Hitler, sustaining new music behind closed doors, finally had a chance to make music, so there was also a new freedom. Discussions were almost frantic. There were many different opinions.”

“We were accused of being dictators because we performed what we liked,” he continued, “but in those days in Paris, I remember putting on maybe four concerts a year. Now, with so many new music concerts everywhere, the situation is lighter. But there is also less at stake with each event. The danger is, to the contrary, that there is not enough urgency.”

About how times have changed, Mr. Barenboim said:

“Pierre doesn’t need to be an ideologue anymore. Once something is achieved, there is no need to insist on it. He said opera houses should be burned, but basically he was trying to turn the musical world into something more progressive than what it was. It was the same as Debussy writing on his visiting card, ‘French Musician.’ Debussy was looking for an alternative to Central European music. So he had to be radical at a certain moment.”

Not that the flayed lion is now a lamb.

“Performers aren’t audacious enough today,” Mr. Boulez also told me. “They think audiences won’t respond to what’s unfamiliar. But to provoke — in the good sense — is the performer’s role. It’s not just to give one more concert.”

“That’s not culture,” he said. “That’s marketing.”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/arts/music/10boulez.html?ref=arts

Still Present by Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, Finnish Composer, and my friend

2010-01-03T06:16:00.000-08:00

Small Museum Captures a Rare Chagall

2010-01-02T02:51:00.001-08:00

The London Jewish Museum of Art is a scrappy young institution, created in 2001 and camped in rented space in St. John’s Wood, off the beaten track of London’s art world.

But over the last nine years the museum has been diligently trying to forge a reputation for itself, adding more than 100 works to an already substantial collection that grew out of that of the Ben Uri Gallery, a Jewish artists’ society founded in London in 1915.

So when David Glasser, one of the museum’s chairmen, was perusing a Paris auction catalog a few months ago, he found it hard to believe what he saw: a previously unknown 1945 gouache by Marc Chagall. It was one of a small group of images Chagall made in direct response to the Holocaust, after he and his wife had fled France in 1941, after the German occupation and after he had begun to learn the details of the Nazi atrocities.

The gouache on heavy paper, which Chagall signed and titled himself lightly with a pencil in Russian — “Apocalypse in Lilac, Capriccio” — employs one of his familiar motifs, an image of a crucified Jesus, which he used as a metaphor for persecuted Jewry. But this crucifixion, painted in New York, where Chagall settled for several years, is one of the most brutal and disturbing ever created by an artist primarily known for his brightly colored folkloric visions.

“Apocalypse” shows a naked Christ screaming at a Nazi storm trooper below the cross, who has a backwards swastika on his arm, a Hitler-like mustache and a serpentine tail. Another small figure can be seen crucified and a second being hanged, and a man appears to be poised to stab a child. A damaged, upside-down clock falls from the sky. The darkness and directness of the work may have been a response not only to the war but also to the death of Chagall’s wife, Bella, a year earlier from a viral infection that might have been treated if not for wartime medicine shortages.

Chagall, who lived to be 97, always kept the work for himself, and two years after he died, in 1985, his son, David McNeil, sold it to a private collector in the South of France, near where Chagall died. There it remained, out of circulation and missing from the vast literature that grew up around Chagall’s long career.

Mr. Glasser, a retired executive and art collector, decided that the London Jewish Museum of Art, which had recently acquired significant works by painters including Frank Auerbach, David Bomberg and Mark Gertler, needed to do everything in its power to buy the painting, whose estimate was modest, 25,000 to 35,000 euros (about $36,000 to $50,000), in part, he thought, because the work was selling in Paris and not in London or New York, but primarily because it was so obscure and so ominous.

“Who’d want to have this on the wall in their house?” Mr. Glasser said recently. “But as a piece of history, it is hugely important. And for us, we considered it a magnificent opportunity.”

Within hours he wrote an application to the Art Fund, the 106-year-old philanthropy that helps British institutions acquire works and that had provided assistance in the purchase of several of the museum’s recent additions to its collection. The museum — whose advisers include the sculptor Anthony Caro, the architect Daniel Libeskind, the Paris dealer Lionel Pissarro (a great-grandson of the painter) and Nicholas Serota, the director of the Tate — had privately estimated that the work could sell for as much as 300,000 euros (about $430,000).

The fund received the request on a Monday, and by Thursday had dispatched one of its trustees, Wendy Baron, an informal adviser to the London Jewish Museum of Art, to Paris to see the gouache in the showroom at the Tajan auction house.

“It was very powerful, a knockout,” Ms. Baron, an expert on modern British art, said on Thursday in a telephone interview. “In fact, I was very worried in the sale room to see other people looking closely at it.”

The fund agreed to provide up to 100,000 euros (about $143,000) to help the museum win the work if competition materialized. But in the end, at a poorly attended sale in late October, Mr. Glasser was able to buy it for 30,000 euros (about $43,000) with money provided by one of the museum’s benefactors. After remaining silent about it for several weeks amid worries that France might decide to use its pre-emption laws to void the sale and keep the work for a French institution, the painting, 20 by 14 inches, was shipped to London.

And beginning on Thursday, it will go on public display for the first time, at the Osborne Samuel gallery in Mayfair, before moving into the museum’s permanent collection at the end of the month. In going on view, it will become another of the notable publicly exhibited examples of Chagall’s wartime imagery, like the “Yellow Crucifixion” from 1943, at the Georges Pompidou Center, and the “White Crucifixion” from 1938 at the Art Institute of Chicago.

“Although in many of his works Chagall had reacted to events in Germany, he usually did not depict them but used symbols — such as the crucifixion, a Jew holding a Torah, a mother protecting her child or a falling angel — to suggest what was happening there,” writes Ziva Amishai-Maisels, a Chagall scholar and professor emeritus at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in a catalog to accompany the exhibition of the painting. “Although he still used some of these symbols in ‘Apocalypse,’ he combined them with the reality of the Holocaust in a manner that was very rare in his work. This and the way he depicted the conflict between the Nazi and the naked Christ make this a unique work.”

Ms. Baron, of the Art Fund, agreed. “I think it is really a tremendous coup,” she said, “to get it for this collection and for the country.”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/02/arts/design/02chagall.html?ref=arts

William Burroughs reading, Art now: A day of contemporary art, July, 1989

2009-12-30T19:24:00.001-08:00

Kronos reunites with former cellist in Berkeley

2009-12-28T21:28:00.001-08:00

In December 1998, Joan Jeanrenaud played her last concert as cellist of the Kronos Quartet and left the ensemble early the next year. After 20 years, the Kronos without Jeanrenaud seemed unthinkable. The only woman in the group, she was not only a captivating, eloquent musician -- as well as a willowy beauty -- but she also provided the ensemble its casual, avant-garde fashion sense, which revolutionized the look of classical music.

Jeanrenaud, however, had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and maintaining the Kronos’ extensive travel schedule was no longer possible. For those who knew of her illness (she didn’t make it public at the time), the specter of Jacqueline du Pré, the brilliant young British cellist whose career was tragically ended by MS in the ‘70s, seemed ominous.

But the news hasn’t been nearly so bad. Jeanrenaud has been able to continue performing, and many composers with whom she became friends during her Kronos years have lined up to write new pieces for her. She has also found her own creative spark and become a composer of note in her own right. Now she is being asked to write pieces for a new generation of hip, young string quartets. Last year, her CD “Strange Toys” was nominated for a Grammy.

And Sunday night here at Hertz Hall, as part of UC Berkeley’s Cal Performances, she reunited with Kronos for the first time in 11 years. A new string quintet by the controversial Russian composer Vladimir Martynov was commissioned for the occasion.

She walked on stage with a cane, but the moment the cellist sat down with her old colleagues (violinist David Harrington and John Sherba and violist Hank Dutt) she seemed at home. She also appeared slightly the mother hen to the ensemble’s young cellist, Jeffrey Zeigler, who was born in 1973, the same month that the original (pre-Jeanrenaud) Kronos was formed in Seattle.

Still, since this was a classic Kronos concert, there was little room for sentimentality. The evening began with two quartets by feisty young composers from the Brooklyn scene, where the distinction between classical music and pop has all but vanished, just as Kronos prophesied it eventually would more than three decades ago. The program ended with a recent work by Terry Riley using weird homemade instruments.

But the premiere of Martynov’s “String-Quintet (Unfinished)” was the big event. The 63-year-old Muscovite is a Kronos favorite, but he is otherwise little appreciated in the West. His extraordinary opera “Vita Nova,” premiered this year, was, I thought, unfairly trounced by British and New York critics who disapprove of his nihilist appropriations of other composers.

In the new quintet he turned his attention to Schubert’s C-Major String Quintet, noting in his program note that its so-called “heavenly lengths” are no longer long enough for the 21st century. An obstinate composer if ever there was one, he proposes they be prolonged forever.

Although only 21 minutes long, “Schubert-Quintet” is a start. He gives the impression of time stopping by haltingly reconstructing the C-Major Quintet with original Schubert fragments that repeat over and over, as if Martynov simply can’t let go.

There are major rewards for the patient listener, especially in the delirious lushness of string textures. Jeanrenaud and Ziegler played throughout as one rich, super-cello, coddling the quintet in the lap of sonic luxury.

The two works that began the concert – Bryce Dessner’s beaming post-Minimalist “Aheym (Homeward)” and Missy Mazzoli’s entrancingly soulful “Harp and Alter” – were commissioned for an outdoor concert in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park last summer. Both use electronics, and Mazzoli’s includes gorgeous sampled vocals by Gabriel Kahane.

Riley’s “Transylvanian Horn Courtship,” which was written last year and received its West Coast premiere Sunday, is nearly as curious as its title. It was written for new instruments based on the principle of the Stroh violin, or horn-violin, patented in 1899. A brass bell, instead of the normal wood resonating chamber, was employed to produce a louder volume of sound.

For Riley’s new work, the artist Walter Kitundu created a string-quartet set of Stroh-type instruments, applying the principle to the viola and cello for the first time. Riley then tuned them down half an octave, creating a mournful, raw sound from the slack strings.

The experiment didn’t completely work, since the lowered instruments have a limited tone range. They were appropriately atmospheric for Riley’s Indian-inspired drones. But for the livelier sections he relied on the ensemble’s standard instruments, which were further enhanced by electronic looping effects.

The quartet ends with a moment entitled “Keep Hands Up Close to the Face Before the Knockout Punch,” and that is what happened. Harrington broke a string just as it began. Riley’s was apparently one knockout punch too many in a memorable occasion that had already produced several.

Source: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2009/12/kronos-reunites-with-former-cellist.html

Vic Chestnutt dies, a tragic loss

2009-12-26T00:23:00.001-08:00

Vic Chesnutt, a singer-songwriter whose music dealt with mortality and black humor, died on Friday in a hospital in Athens, Ga., a spokesman for his family said. He was 45 and lived in Athens.

He had been in a coma after taking an overdose of muscle relaxants earlier this week, said the family spokesman, Jem Cohen.

In a two-decade career, Mr. Chesnutt sang darkly comic and often disarmingly candid songs about death, vulnerability, and life’s simple joys. A car accident when he was 18 left him a quadriplegic, but he has said that the accident focused him as a musician and a poet.

“It was only after I broke my neck and even like maybe a year later that I really started realizing that I had something to say,” he said in a recent radio interview with Terry Gross.

Discovered in the late 1980s by Michael Stipe of R.E.M., who produced his first two albums, Mr. Chesnutt has been a mainstay in independent music, collaborating with the bands Lambchop and Widespread Panic.

In 1996 his songs were performed by Madonna, the Indigo Girls, Smashing Pumpkins, R.E.M. and others for “Sweet Relief II: The Gravity of the Situation,” an album that benefited the Sweet Relief Musicians Fund, a nonprofit group that offers medical support for musicians.

His survivors include his wife, Tina Whatley Chesnutt; a sister, Lorinda Crane; and nine nieces and nephews.

Recently Mr. Chesnutt had had a burst of creativity, releasing two 2009 albums, “At the Cut” and “Skitter on Take-Off.” In the song, “Flirted With You All My Life,” from “At the Cut,” Mr. Chesnutt sings about suicide, which he had attempted several times. Written as a breakup song with death, it expresses a wish to live:

“When you touched a friend of mine I thought I would lose my mind

But I found out with time that really, I was not ready, no no, cold death

Oh death, I’m really not ready.”

Source: http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/25/vic-chesnutt-singer-dies/

A Documentary is Just a Feature Film In Disguise: An Interview with Werner Herzog

2009-12-23T22:17:00.000-08:00

Above: Werner Herzog looks into the camera's mouth of madness while Nicholas Cage contemplates insanity on the set of The Bad Lieutenant

Around the time Tom Waits simultaneously released his albums Alice and Blood Money, he was regularly asked why he was putting out two titles at once? His common reply: “If yer gonna fire up the griddle, you might as well make more than one pancake.”

Werner Herzog seems to have taken a cue from Waits (it’s not hard to imagine the two getting along) with the release of his first two productions in the United States since 1978’s Stroszek. The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, a madman’s delusional romp and bayou fever-dream that revolves, reeling, around Nicolas Cage’s highly entertaining—even genius—performance, came out last month. It was followed yesterday by the release of My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, based on the true story of an adult son who kills his aged mother, running her through with a sword at the neighbor’s house before retreating back home across the street where a day-long stand-off with the police ensues. Among its distinctions? A creepy and creeping American suburban surrealism spun by a cast including Michael Shannon, Chloë Sevigny, Willem Defoe, Grace Zabriskie, Udo Kier, and Brad Dourif (who puts in noteworthy performances in both of the new movies)…not to mention David Lynch as executive producer. Both films feature Peter Zeitlinger’s virtuoso hand-held camerawork which comes across, as pointed out by a friend, like its own character, a documentary filmmaker who has inserted himself invisibly inside the shooting of a feature.

A lot of discussion leading up to the release of The Bad Lieutenant focused on the legitimacy of a “remake” of Abel Ferrara’s 1992 classic of a similar name. However, a quick look at Herzog’s version confirms his repeated assertion that the two movies are connected by name alone. Herzog has different fish to fry than remaking another auteur’s work, and viewing The Bad Lieutenant alongside My Son suggests a committed subversion of the American police procedural. At the center of The Bad Lieutenant is Cage, Extreme Actor. His performance is so incrementally demented and even appears so physically pained that it could challenge a tag-team of Ann Savage’s outer-space femme-fatale in Detour and Max Schreck’s still-blood-curdling portrayal of the vampire Count Orlok in the original Nosferatu. Cage has successfully created a monster. Yet at the same time, he’s also yielded an iconic figure of schizoid frontier “justice” while wading through Herzog’s flotsam-and-jetsam location choices. In a keenly chosen theatrical gest, whenever Cage opens his jacket ostensibly to display his badge of authority, all he’s really flashing is his gun, his force. It's a repeated physical encapsulation of the character's true motivations that seems both funny and chilling every time.

Madness is more mundane in My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, and leaves more questions unanswered. Less frantic, but ultimately more unsettling, the film opens as Willem Defoe’s character, a homicide detective, reports for duty to a fresh crime scene only to realize too late that he’s already talked with the murderer (Michael Shannon) in the gathering crowd before letting him slip away. As the fiancé and another friend of Shannon’s appear at the crime scene to lend their assistance to the case, we are filled in on contextual information about Shannon’s madness through numerous flashbacks that depict unmistakable warning signs, as well as unmistakably Herzogian staged shots. Yet from these set-pieces, with their ecstatic imagery, we always return to the standoff in the streets of suburban San Diego, waiting for Shannon's next move. Cage’s performance is a fireworks show, always surprising. Shannon, we know more convincingly after each flashback, is a bomb still waiting to go off.

In spite of The Bad Lieutenant being unequivocally and self-consciously more hard-boiled, wearing its neo-noir status on its sleeve, My Son is the first Herzog film I can think of to use this film noir staple: a flashback structure itself emphasizing a world out of order and a mind out of sorts. The apparatus itself is disoriented and decadent having taken on the burden of standing solitary witness to Shannon’s deterioration while all other characters surrounding him appear oblivious to the very clear warning signs he regularly displays. The man is undeniably plagued by visions. “It was dreamed unto me…,” Kaspar Hauser would say. But My Son seems even more closely linked to Herzog's 1976 Heart of Glass, a film I’d wager as commonly agreed upon by fans and foes alike as Herzog’s most ornery feature (more Ordet than Aguirre), a film about seers and the visions that haunt them, regularly cutting away from the already static action of the film’s narrative to obsessively contemplate panoramas of time-lapsed landscapes. Or in the case of My Son, a lingering dessert-table tableau spontaneously struck around a bowl of unnaturally black jello. Or a crowded marketplace in central Asia. Or a woodland cabin inhabited by a midget in a tuxedo with no further explanation. The Auteurs spoke to Herzog over the phone to try to get some answers.

***

Werner Herzog: Where are you physically?

Ben Simington: I'm in New York, in Brooklyn.

Herzog: Oh yeah, okay, I'm in Los Angeles.

Simington: There are a lot of aspects of the two new films that seem like they might be new to you—they are the first screenplays, I believe, that you are not the sole author of, they're your first features in the U.S. in 30 years, since Stroszek, and they both seem to be the first explicit American genre films that you've done, the film noir and the police procedural.

Herzog: Film noir I've done before, with Even Dwarfs Started Smaller (sic), Nosferatu, whatever. But of course much of it is new terrain, I'm always out for new horizons, new alliances, new actors, the collaboration with people, for example, who are from the stable of David Lynch, new actors like Michael Shannon, Willem Dafoe, Chloe Sevigny...the screenplay of The Bad Lieutenant, a good amount was written by me, or changed, modified. It's not that I'd just take a screenplay from someone. And My Son, My Son was a screenplay co-writer with a friend of mine.

Simington: My Son, My Son feels more like an ensemble piece, and The Bad Lieutenant seems really driven by a single performance by Nicolas Cage.

Herzog: No I disagree! Nicolas Cage would be no man's land without the very strong chemistry and texture of the supporting cast, he would be nowhere! It's the same as with Humphrey Bogart, who'd be in no man's land without Ingrid Bergman.

Simington: Both films deal with characters who are going mad; in The Bad Lieutenant we know from the get-go what has motivated Cage's madness, while in My Son, My Son we see the flip side of the coin where there's no concrete explanation of Shannon's mental illness. How did you go about structuring two films that show different sides of insanity?

Herzog: I wouldn't emphasize the mental illness so strongly. Sure, in My Son, My Son there is an element of mental illness, but there is also something else, something other, something inexplicably scary about the story. If it's all explained by mental illness I wouldn't care very much for a story like that. I met the real man who committed the murder, who will spend 8 1/2 years in a maximum-security mental institution for the criminally insane. I met him and he was really…you could tell he was not right in his head. There were things like he wanted to be crucified on national television live, and he was upset that it wouldn't happen. There was real madness there, and I don't harp on it. I do not want to play with it too strongly, then all explanations come down to "it was insanity, period," which is not the case.

Simington: You mentioned working with David Lynch, who executive produced My Son, My Son. Beyond working with Grace Zabriskie, who has been in several of Daivd Lynch’s films, what sort of involvement with Lynch did you have?

Herzog: Not much, you shouldn't overdo it. We somehow plotted to make films with fairly low budgets but with great stories and the best of the best of actors, almost like putting out a manifesto, that's how filmmaking should be done responsibly, where you would be in profitable terrain fairly early on. As we liked each other and respected each other's work very deeply we were talking about projects and he said do you have a story and I said yes, and David asked "when can you start?" and I said "tomorrow!." [Laughing] So he said it would be great if he could protect the film and he could have a look at the production, but he never interfered, he never showed up on the set or was there during editing or anything. It's something else, some sort of a spark that ignited a project that was long dormant. His main role was throwing a match onto a powder keg.

Simington: What attracted you to the characters played by Cage and Shannon?

Herzog: There are two sides. One side is the character as they exist in the screenplay, in the story. In both stories, for me, something that I felt was familiar. And second, the caliber of actors. Michael Shannon is an extraordinary talent, and you can tell right away. I saw that long before he got the Oscar nomination, I even invited him to join me on the set of The Bad Lieutenant. I didn’t have anything big to offer him, he was there for two or three days; I asked him to look at how I work and how I function, that I'd like to warm up with him as he would have to carry the central role of my new film on his shoulders. I think it was good that we had at least a few days time to warm up with each other. Five months later he got the Academy Award nomination and I really felt proud for him.

Simington: Do you think these two characters inhabit a similar world?

Herzog: I think they're quite different, otherwise Nicolas Cage would have played both parts; or Michael Shannon would have played the bad lieutenant as well. I'm always good in casting; or, let's put more solidly (it sounds like being conceited)—I think I've not made major mistakes in casting throughout my life as a filmmaker.

Simington: A question about the look of your movies...Peter Zeitlinger's cinematography really shines in both The Bad Lieutenant and My Son, My Son. He's been a major collaborator of yours for years now, shooting with you since Gesualdo. How do you communicate with him about what you want in your frames?

Herzog: Well, I have a sort of short hand communication with him by now, but it has always been quite brief and clear because I have such a clear vision of what I want to do. I start to work out a scene with him first, the kind of movement, the kind of camera position and things like that, and it goes very quickly. I think my footprint is very strong in all my films with him, but it was the same with Thomas Mauch who did Aguirre and Schmidt-Reitwein who did many others like Nosferatu. You can tell there's always a certain handwriting in it.

Simington: Has your relationship with Zeitlinger changed over the years as you've moved to larger or different productions?

Herzog: I've made much larger productions before, for example Nosferatu and Fitzcarraldo, so these two recent films, The Bad Lieutenant and My Son, My Son are much smaller productions as a matter of fact. But—how can I say? We have a very physical approach to cinematography. There's a clear understanding between him and me. He actually got into filmmaking because he had seen The Enigma of Kasper Hauser, which was such a strong experience for him that he decided to become a cinematographer. He would be, for example, the only one who, when we are shooting and something doesn't feel right, he'd put the camera down and say, "Werner, this scene doesn't have a rhythm." He's the first cinematographer to tell me that, and he's totally right because he senses it physically. I think he's a wonderful collaborator, physically very strong, I mean strong like an ox!

Simington: You've said before that you "direct landscapes," that you direct spaces. New Orleans and Louisiana as a whole are cast very well in The Bad Lieutenant, and San Diego has a very real sense of place in My Son, My Son. What was it like shooting in both locations?

Herzog: New Orleans, I mean New Orleans after Katrina, has a big role; it is obvious it would play a bigger role than just the backdrop. San Diego isn't that essential to the film [My Son, My Son], it could have happened in Minneapolis or Boise, Idaho, but a kind of suburbia close to the Mexican border is something that translates into the film, and when you speak of directing landscapes I have some wide locations in Peru on the Rio Urubamba, and I also shot in Central Asia, a very, very strange dream sequence, a very essential piece in the film.

Simington: Speaking of dream sequences and subjective camerawork, those scenes you speak of in My Son, My Son remind me of Kausper Hauser’s dreams, both somehow are related, too, to Nicolas Cage's hallucinations with the iguanas.

Herzog: That is all stuff I filmed myself. I wouldn't allow a cinematographer to do that in such a case, I'd do it myself. Central Asia, for example, I did myself, in My Son, My Son. The iguanas had to be a completely demented way of seeing the world, that only the bad lieutenant full of drugs would see, that no one else would see, so in cases like that I take over the camera.

Simington: In The Bad Lieutenant press kit Nicolas Cage mentions a Cortez project you brought to him several years ago.

Herzog: There are sometimes projects that are not really doable; in this case it was a production that would cost around $100 million, and you make a film like that only if your last film has made domestic growth, box office growth, of $250 million, then you can make a film like that. It was 14 years ago or so, but it was very clear early on that the film was not going to be made, and I can live easily with that.

Simington: Do you have any other projects that are in the pipeline right now?

Herzog: About 5 feature film projects and 3 documentaries. It's not that I am working on them, but that they are pushing me. I never search around for projects, they come to me like burglars in the night.

Simington: So you don't necessarily feel a different impulse to make a documentary or a feature?

Herzog: No, I don't care, it's all movies for me. And besides, when you say documentaries, in my case, in most of these cases, means "feature film" in disguise.

Source: http://www.theauteurs.com/notebook/posts/1329

At 94, She’s the Hot New Thing in Painting

2009-12-20T02:18:00.000-08:00

Under a skylight in her tin-ceilinged loft near Union Square in Manhattan, the abstract painter Carmen Herrera, 94, nursed a flute of Champagne last week, sitting regally in the wheelchair she resents.

After six decades of very private painting, Ms. Herrera sold her first artwork five years ago, at 89. Now, at a small ceremony in her honor, she was basking in the realization that her career had finally, undeniably, taken off. As cameras flashed, she extended long, Giacomettiesque fingers to accept an art foundation’s lifetime achievement award from the director of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

Her good friend, the painter Tony Bechara, raised a glass. “We have a saying in Puerto Rico,” he said. “The bus — la guagua — always comes for those who wait.”

And the Cuban-born Ms. Herrera, laughing gustily, responded, “Well, Tony, I’ve been at the bus stop for 94 years!”

Since that first sale in 2004, collectors have avidly pursued Ms. Herrera, and her radiantly ascetic paintings have entered the permanent collections of institutions like the Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and the Tate Modern. Last year, MoMA included her in a pantheon of Latin American artists on exhibition. And this summer, during a retrospective show in England, The Observer of London called Ms. Herrera the discovery of the decade, asking, “How can we have missed these beautiful compositions?”

In a word, Ms. Herrera, a nonagenarian homebound painter with arthritis, is hot. In an era when the art world idolizes, and often richly rewards, the young and the new, she embodies a different, much rarer kind of success, that of the artist long overlooked by the market, and by history, who persevered because she had no choice.

“I do it because I have to do it; it’s a compulsion that also gives me pleasure,” she said of painting. “I never in my life had any idea of money and I thought fame was a very vulgar thing. So I just worked and waited. And at the end of my life, I’m getting a lot of recognition, to my amazement and my pleasure, actually.”

Julián Zugazagoitia, the director of El Museo del Barrio in East Harlem, called Ms. Herrera “a quiet warrior of her art.”

“To bloom into full glory at 94 — whatever Carmen Herrera’s slow rise might say about the difficulties of being a woman artist, an immigrant artist or an artist ahead of her time, it is clearly a story of personal strength,” Mr. Zugazagoitia said.

A minimalist whose canvases are geometric distillations of form and color, Ms. Herrera has slowly come to the attention of a subset of art historians over the last decade. . Now she is increasingly considered an important figure by those who study her “remarkably monumental, iconic paintings,” said Edward J. Sullivan, a professor of art history at New York University.

“Those of us with a passion for either geometric art or Latin American Modernist painting now realize what a pivotal role” Ms. Herrera has played in “the development of geometric abstraction in the Americas,” Mr. Sullivan said.

Painting in relative solitude since the late 1930s, with only the occasional exhibition, Ms. Herrera was sustained, she said, by the unflinching support of her husband of 61 years, Jesse Loewenthal. An English teacher at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, Mr. Loewenthal was portrayed by the memoirist Frank McCourt, a colleague, as an old-world scholar in an “elegant, three-piece suit, the gold watch chain looping across his waistcoat front.”

Recognition for Ms. Herrera came a few years after her husband’s death, at 98, in 2000. “Everybody says Jesse must have orchestrated this from above,” Ms. Herrera said, shaking her head. “Yeah, right, Jesse on a cloud.” She added: “I worked really hard. Maybe it was me.”

In a series of interviews in her sparsely but artfully furnished apartment, Ms. Herrera always offered an afternoon cocktail — “Oh, don’t be abstemious!” — and an outpouring of stories about prerevolutionary Cuba, postwar Paris and the many artists she has known, from Wifredo Lam to Yves Klein to Barnett Newman.

“Ah, Wifredo,” she said, referring to Lam, the Cuban-born French painter. “All the girls were crazy about him. When we were in Havana, my phone would begin ringing: ‘Is Wifredo in town?’ I mean, come on, I wasn’t his social secretary.”

But Ms. Herrera is less expansive about her own art, discussing it with a minimalism redolent of the work. “Paintings speak for themselves,” she said. Geometry and color have been the head and the heart of her work, she added, describing a lifelong quest to pare down her paintings to their essence, like visual haiku.

Asked how she would describe to a student a painting like “Blanco y Verde” (1966) — a canvas of white interrupted by an inverted green triangle — she said, “I wouldn’t have a student.” To a sweet, inquiring child, then? “I’d give him some candy so he’d rot his teeth.”

When pressed about what looks to some like a sensual female shape in the painting, she said: “Look, to me it was white, beautiful white, and then the white was shrieking for the green, and the little triangle created a force field. People see very sexy things — dirty minds! — but to me sex is sex, and triangles are triangles.”

Born in 1915 in Havana, where her father was the founding editor of the daily newspaper El Mundo, and her mother a reporter, Ms. Herrera took art lessons as a child, attended finishing school in Paris and embarked on a Cuban university degree in architecture. In 1939, midway through her studies, she married Mr. Loewenthal and moved to New York. (They had no children.)

Carmen Herrera at work. She has painted for six decades, and since her first sale in 2004, collectors have avidly pursued her.

Although she studied at the Art Students League of New York, Ms. Herrera did not discover her artistic identity until she and her husband settled in Paris for a few years after World War II. There she joined a group of abstract artists, based at the influential Salon of New Realities, which exhibited her work along with that of Josef Albers, Jean Arp, Sonia Delaunay and others.

“I was looking for a pictorial vocabulary and I found it there,” she said. “But when we moved back to New York, this type of art” — her less-is-more formalism — “was not acceptable. Abstract Expressionism was in fashion. I couldn’t get a gallery.”

Ms. Herrera said that she also accepted, “as a handicap,” the barriers she faced as a Hispanic female artist. Beyond that, though, “her art was not easily digestible at the time,” Mr. Zugazagoitia said. “She was not doing Cuban landscapes or flowers of the tropics, the art you might have expected from a Cuban émigré who spent time in Paris. She was ahead of her time.”

Over the decades, Ms. Herrera had a solo show here and there, including a couple at museums (the Alternative Museum in 1984, El Museo del Barrio in 1998). But she never sold anything, and never needed, or aggressively sought, the affirmation of the market. “It would have been nice, but maybe corrupting,” she said.

Mr. Bechara, who befriended her in the early 1970s and is now chairman of El Museo del Barrio, said that he regularly tried to push her into the public eye, even though she “found a kind of solace in being alone.”

One day in 2004, Mr. Bechara attended a dinner with Frederico Sève, the owner of the Latin Collector Gallery in Manhattan, who was dealing with the withdrawal of an artist from a much-publicized show of female geometric painters. “Tony said to me: ‘Geometry and ladies? You need Carmen Herrera,’ ” Mr. Sève recounted. “And I said, ‘Who the hell is Carmen Herrera?’ ”

The next morning, Mr. Sève arrived at his gallery to find several paintings, just delivered, that he took to be the work of the well-known Brazilian artist Lygia Clark but were in fact by Ms. Herrera. Turning over the canvases, he saw that they predated by a decade paintings in a similar style by Ms. Clark. “Wow, wow, wow,” he recalled saying. “We got a pioneer here.”

Mr. Sève quickly called Ella Fontanals-Cisneros, a collector who has an art foundation in Miami. She bought five of Ms. Herrera’s paintings. Estrellita Brodsky, another prominent collector, bought another five. Agnes Gund, president emerita of the Museum of Modern Art, also bought several, and with Mr. Bechara, donated one of Ms. Herrera’s black-and-white paintings to MoMA.

The recent exhibition in England, which is now heading to Germany, came about by happenstance after a curator stumbled across Ms. Herrera’s paintings on the Internet. Last week The Observer named that retrospective one of the year’s 10 best exhibitions, alongside a Picasso show and one devoted to the American Pop artist Ed Ruscha.

Ms. Herrera’s late-in-life success has stunned her in many ways. Her larger works now sell for $30,000, and one painting commanded $44,000 — sums unimaginable when she was, say, in her 80s. “I have more money now than I ever had in my life,” she said.

Not that she is succumbing to a life of leisure. At a long table where she peers out over East 19th Street “like a French concierge,” Ms. Herrera, because she must, continues to draw and paint. “Only my love of the straight line keeps me going,” she said.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/20/arts/design/20herrera.html?_r=1&hp

Jim Harrison: The Masculine Mystique

2009-12-19T13:57:00.000-08:00

Don’t be fooled by the trout, the dogs, the pickup trucks, the whiskey, the cowboys and Indians, and the war stories. Beneath the rugged trappings of Jim Harrison’s manly fiction hides the tensile, scorch-proof frame of the red-hot romance, whose heroes are totems of an idealized, brute masculinity. In the feminine version of the genre, the heroines typically possess awesome powers of desirability. In Harrison’s spin, the male leads aren’t much to look at (usually), yet they possess awesome powers of desire. Whether a whippersnapper of 12 or a “geezer rancher” in his 70s, the Harrison hero unfailingly sparks the ardor of any girl or woman he encounters, even when he’s sick, drunk and drugged, having his teeth pulled, passing kidney stones or dying. He doesn’t mind if a woman is a few decades older than he is or half a century younger; whether she’s a king-size Lakota divorcée pushing 60 or a “miniature” young nurse with a boyfriend. Nor does he care if she’s cruel or kind, married or single, straight or gay. Whoever she is, if she’ll have him, he’s up for the job.

Harrison’s new collection, “The Farmer’s Daughter” — a title redolent of Merle Haggard or off-color barroom jokes or both, depending on your referents — contains three stories that feature, among their sprawling casts, several lusty adolescent boys (including one with a clubfoot and one who’s a werewolf); an aged rancher, who, at 73, on his “last conscious day” of life, gingerly gropes a 14-year-old girl who curtseys in thanks; and a handful of men in their prime, including a depraved country fiddler, a vegetable farmer, a piano-playing Mexican botanist and the author’s best-known character, a hapless, oft-jailed, half-Indian “kindly fool” named Brown Dog (B.D. for short).

B.D.’s picaresque adventures first appeared in 1990 in Harrison’s “Woman Lit by Fireflies,” re-emerged in several later collections and here resurface in the story “Brown Dog Redux,” which finds B.D. as benighted and bold as ever. He regards himself as a champion of womankind because he’s “greatly drawn to women with none of the hesitancy of his more modern counterparts who tiptoed in and out of women’s lives wearing blindfolds, nose plugs, ear plugs and fluttering ironic hearts.” Also, when contemplating what he reverently calls the “sacred muffin,” B.D. is capable of “clapping in hearty applause.” Fair enough — but when he jokes to a lesbian whom he’s got in his sights that “they used to say that if a girl is big enough she’s old enough,” he loses some crossover appeal. Harrison’s Montana and Upper Peninsula Michigan make fine playgrounds for old men, but the terrain isn’t terribly hospitable to women of any age.

Nevertheless, Harrison, like Brown Dog, seems to worship the female sex, in his way. In the title story of this new book, he chivalrously seeks both vigilante and poetic justice for his precocious heroine, a tall, busty teenager named Sarah, who grows up in the 1980s in rural Montana, “where the passage between girl and woman is a short voyage.” Neglected by her taciturn father and abandoned by her “inane” mother, Sarah hunts antelope; plays Liszt like a prodigy; reads Dickinson, Faulkner and Henry Miller; daydreams of a career in metallurgy; and sunbathes semi-nude to turn on her “best friend,” a septuagenarian codger with a heart of gold. She feels a little sheepish about it, but then, there aren’t any high school heartthrobs within lassoing distance, and a girl’s got to whet her allure on someone.

“Sarah wasn’t mentally comfortable with the biological aspects of life,” Harrison writes reproachfully but kindly, like a literary Euell Gibbons. Still, after joining 4-H to pad her teenage-friend base, she soon finds grounds for her mental discomfort. After spending an innocent afternoon boozing and skinny-dipping with new pals, she drops by a rodeo where an evil horse hauler dopes and abuses her. After the attack, Harrison depicts her in a canyon, on a boulder, privately mourning her woes. “She began inevitably to look at males as another species,” he writes. “Not that she could summon up any special admiration for women.”

However well-motivated the author’s pity, however imaginative his ventriloquism of Sarah’s inner monologue, the portrait that emerges doesn’t feel age-appropriate; it recalls those medieval paintings in which the artist painted the child as a diminutive adult, with eerily progeriatric features. In a spirit of self-preservation, Sarah decides she has “no choice but to become prematurely older and austere,” and devises a scheme for vengeance. In 100 pages, the farm-girl Lolita turns Clint Eastwood — two fantasies in one. But when chance throws her in the path of an amorous 35-year-old aesthete, she gets another crack at Lolita. “I’m older than you in most ways,” she tells the man. However many ways there are, none of them are legal.

“Brown Dog Redux,” still bawdy but more believable, continues the quest of B.D. — the Upper Peninsula’s Chippewa Odysseus — to find a humane living environment for his stepdaughter, Berry, who suffers from the double burdens of fetal alcohol syndrome and encroaching adolescence. Berry can’t speak, but she communes with nature, cooing like a dove, calling crows and bonding with snakes and other wild creatures — she’s a child of the forest. In a previous story, B.D. transported her illegally from Michigan to Canada to keep her out of an institution for the disabled in Lansing. In Toronto, enlisting the help of a Lakota social worker called the Director, B.D. indulges his customary lip-smacking appetites as he looks after Berry’s welfare, chowing down on corned tongue and brisket, pork steak, fried T-bone, fatty rib steaks (“his favorite cut”) and a hearty menu of feminine flesh — Deidre, Nora, Gretchen and the Director, among others.

As he rides the bus back to the United States, confusing the “roar of the bus engine with that of a female bear he used to feed his extra fish when he was reroofing a deer cabin,” B.D. dreams of the engrossing exertions of fishing, of dancing at powwows (“a state of being carried away that reminded him of the pleasure of being half-drunk rather than fully drunk”) and of the “landscape he called home, dense forests of pine, hemlock, tamarack and aspen surrounding great swamps and small lakes.” When he’s not on the bus, he lives in the moment, caught up in the meat of the day and the heat of the night. He “felt lucky,” Harrison writes, “that he could resolve his own problems with a couple of beers and a half dozen hours of trout fishing and if a female crossed his path whether fat or thin, older or younger, it was a testament that heaven was on earth rather than somewhere up in the remote and hostile sky.” Flush with the uncomplicated enjoyment of his physical being, Harrison’s hero fills three dimensions and more — on occasion exceeding the confines of his character to recite Longfellow to wow a lady or take in a National Geographic special on Siberia, flatteringly reflecting his creator’s interests.

In the third story, “The Games of Night,” Harrison employs magical elements to make his themes more palatable. When the unnamed 12-year-old protagonist is seduced by a lubricious seventh-grade classmate, the author tenderly records their underage play. A little later, during a bird-watching expedition to Mexico with his ornithologist father, the boy is bitten by both a wolf and a hummingbird. Through a mysterious transformation — like the one in which Peter Parker turns into Spider-Man — he becomes a demon lover, and satisfies his new cravings posthaste with a sensual, willing, older, married woman. After their tussle, he fortifies himself by feasting on a bowl of tripe. Not that long before, the boy, like the farmer’s daughter in Montana, had felt oppressed by the demands of physicality. “I was getting my nose rubbed in the animality of people,” he fretted. But if there’s one thing Harrison knows, it’s how to teach his characters to share his sensual hunger and relish their role in his supernaturally charged natural world. Whether his readers can tuck in with similar gusto is a question of taste — and perhaps of glands.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/20/books/review/Schillinger-t.html?ref=books

Back From Vacation

2009-12-18T20:02:00.001-08:00

Advice from the Editor: When on vacation, never play Chess on a glacier with a sherpa that knows the only trail back and is a little bit sensitive about his knight and rook. Also, when inhaling the morning air at 14,000 feet always, always make sure...

Schubert and Beckett: Footsteps in Snow

2009-12-05T19:33:00.000-08:00

MAPPING the no man’s land between poetry and music may be impossible, but exploring it is not. “One Evening,” at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College from Wednesday through Friday, tries to do just that, weaving poems and prose of Samuel Beckett into Franz Schubert’s song cycle “Winterreise” (“Winter Journey”). The songs are performed by the tenor Mark Padmore and the pianist Andrew West, the Beckett text by the actor Stephen Dillane.

Last week, at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, Mr. Dillane appeared in the theater piece “Four Quartets,” which juxtaposed the set of poems T. S. Eliot considered his masterpiece with Beethoven’s Opus 132 String Quartet, Eliot’s acknowledged model. Though most of the links in “One Evening” seem more intuitive than direct, “Winterreise” is known to have haunted Beckett throughout his life.

Like “Four Quartets,” “One Evening” is a presentation of Lincoln Center’s experimental New Visions series and was shaped by Katie Mitchell, a director renowned for symbiotic fusions of live performance and video. Examples include her chamber adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s novel “The Waves” (at the National Theater in London and at Lincoln Center) and a titanic staging of Luigi Nono’s opera-cum-Communist manifesto “Al Gran Sole Carico d’Amore” (Salzburg Festival).

In the New Visions pieces Ms. Mitchell is operating on a more intimate scale, with technology at a minimum. “Four Quartets” did without electronics completely, and the architecture of the piece was simplicity itself: first the words, then the music, all connections to be established in the ear of the beholder. “One Evening,” though it, too, forgoes Ms. Mitchell’s signature video trappings, is predicated on an all-encompassing sound design.

“There are just some microphones,” Ms. Mitchell said recently from London. “The idea in ‘One Evening’ is for the audience to imagine a young man walking through the snow across a changing landscape. That’s the basic aural experience. You literally hear footsteps, breathing. The songs and the poems are the thoughts in his head.” (This scenario is precisely that of Schubert’s song cycle.)

Mr. Padmore likens this project to a radio play. “In Katie’s work there’s always an emphasis on making things,” he said recently from his home in London. “You see us creating this sound world, using quite a range of objects: wind machines, twigs, leaves, a thunder sheet. All three of us onstage take turns. The soundscape is the thread that runs through the whole piece.”

Wrapped in that envelope of naturalistic sound the Beckett material drops into the sequence of “Winterreise” at irregular intervals, much as Schubert’s songs may be presumed to have drifted through Beckett’s mind. The biographer James Knowlson has shown in “Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett” that Beckett alluded to the songs often, in ways both overt and oblique.

Wisps of Schubert’s song “Der Tod und das Mädchen” (“Death and the Maiden”) are heard in the radio play “All That Fall” (first broadcast in 1957). Beckett’s last television play, the evanescent “Nacht und Träume” (“Night and Dreams,” first broadcast in 1983), takes its name from another Schubert song and incorporates a snatch of the melody, first hummed, then sung to its nostalgic German text.

The literary critic Miron Grindea once wrote that the notoriously morose Beckett considered Schubert “a friend in suffering.” Yet the affinity goes only so far. Beckett would have found nothing in Schubert’s melancholy to feed the gallows humor that was as integral to his art as his misanthropy and gloom. There are few laughs, if any, in Schubert. In Beckett there are many of all kinds, from howls to snickers.

Schubert’s contemporaries were baffled by “Winterreise,” but he predicted they would come to love these songs more than any of his others. Whether or not the prophecy came true in his lifetime, it was borne out in Beckett, who listened to the cycle over and over in a recording by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Gerald Moore, “shivering,” as he once wrote, “through the grim journey again.” Today he would have had hundreds of other interpretations to choose from, including a new one from Harmonia Mundi by Mr. Padmore and the top-flight Schubertian Paul Lewis.

That embarrassment of riches has Mr. Padmore concerned. As a noted lieder specialist, he has often sung the Schubert cycles in conventional fashion. This time his aim is to reach out to the vibrant, intellectually curious crowd he encounters when he attends the theater.

“One great spur to me was Beckett’s play ‘Eh Joe,’ with the camera on Michael Gambon’s face as he simply listened to a woman speaking in voice-over,” Mr. Padmore said. “That was the kind of world we wanted to explore. We wanted to take ‘Winterreise’ away from the Rolls-Royce quality of the recital hall and put it into the rougher theater environment.”

Hence a slightly battered upright piano in place of the expected concert grand. What’s more, with British and American audiences in mind, Mr. Padmore insisted on singing in English rather than the original German. He is relying on diction, microphones and sound design to put the words across. There will be no titles.

Purists will bridle at some of these innovations. More scandalous still, certain songs have been dropped, and others will be spoken rather than sung, without accompaniment. Though the settings in question show Schubert at his sparest (surely a mode Beckett would have found congenial), Ms. Mitchell did not sanction such depredations lightly.

“The idea came from Mark,” she said. “I thought that if he, who knows the music so intimately, wanted to try it, it was something we should consider, for balance, as part of the overall structure.”

In London, Mr. Padmore reported, there were walkouts and a review in The Times that wrote off the approach as dangerous and silly. “I know as well as anyone that ‘Winterreise’ needs nothing added,” he said. “But we’re coming to the end of an era. Without new motivations for listening and performing, the point comes when we’re just hearing different performances of the same thing. This version of ours won’t please everybody. For me, and I hope for new audiences, it’s very exciting.”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/arts/music/06schubert.html?_r=1&ref=arts

Kris Kuksi, Recycled Sculpture

2009-11-29T01:50:00.000-08:00

The beautiful thing about upcycled materials is that the end results often bear no resemblance to the original items. Such is the case with sculptor Kris Kuksi’s toy sculptures, which are constructed out of old toys, statues, and mechanical parts.

According to Kuksi’s artist statement, his work is “feeling that he has always belonged to the ‘Old World’. Yet, Kris’ work is about a new wilderness, refined and elevated, visualized as a cultivation emerging from the corrupt and demoralized fall of modern-day society. A place where new beginnings, new wars, new philosophies, and new endings exist.” That place is apparently also quite macabre and grotesque.
In any case, Kuksi’s mindblowingly detailed toy sculptures remind us that trash and discarded materials can be refashioned into nearly anything we want.

Source: http://www.inhabitat.com/2009/11/19/kris-kuksis-recycled-toy-sculptures-will-scare-the-kids/

Debussy’s Homage to Poe, With the Blanks Filled In

2009-11-26T02:09:00.001-08:00

What should be done with the unfinished works left behind by master composers at their deaths? This question has long dogged musicians and scholars of later eras, and the debate goes on. Maybe the proper way to respect the masters is to leave their incomplete scores alone. How can we presume to know what an ingenious composer might have intended?

On the other hand, some of these scores are tantalizingly close to being performable. When there are enough sketches, composers and scholars have often tried to fill in the gaps and produce a playable version of a piece. The composer Friedrich Cerha’s completed Act III of Berg’s “Lulu,” which Berg died before finishing and orchestrating, has been embraced by many prominent musicians, including James Levine, who will again conduct the three-act “Lulu” at the Metropolitan Opera in May.

My choice for the most frustrating case of an unfinished work by a master composer is Debussy’s opera “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Debussy’s libretto, adapted from Baudelaire’s translation of the Poe short story, survives incomplete, and the musical score exists only in meager sketches of certain scenes for piano. There are scant indications of basics like tempo and dynamics.

There is simply not enough of Debussy’s “Usher” to work from, and few have tried to finish it. None of which stopped Opéra Français de New York, in partnership with the French Institute Alliance Française, from presenting what was promoted as the American premiere of “a rare double bill of two works by Debussy” last weekend at Florence Gould Hall.

The 60-minute multimedia production, “Debussy and Poe: The Devil in the Belfry & The Fall of the House of Usher,” which I saw on Saturday, included not just performances of scenes from “Usher,” based on Debussy’s sketches, but also spoken dialogue and fragments of music (played on piano) from another, even less complete Debussy opera based on Poe, “The Devil in the Belfry.” Without enough of Debussy’s music, even in sketch form, to fill out an hour, “Debussy and Poe” was padded with four songs and a piano prelude by Debussy.

Still, on its own terms, “Debussy and Poe,” created by the directors Jean-Philippe Clarac and Olivier Deloeuil and the music director and pianist Jeff Cohen, was a dark, moody and intriguing theatrical amalgam, performed by a small cast accompanied by Mr. Cohen. A quasi-abstract set designed by Rick Martin evoked a spooky library at the Usher house.

For those of us who revere Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande,” first performed in Paris in 1902 after a nearly 10-year gestation, it is exasperating to have only that unorthodox and mesmerizing Debussy opera. Refined, intellectually cagey and ahead of his time in his comprehension of the unconscious, Debussy was a master of indirection, veiled emotions and psychological subtext. To him, most of what passed for opera was dramatically obvious and musically crude, with too much action and too predominant a role for music.

In Maeterlinck’s haunting “Pelléas et Mélisande,” a landmark play of the Symbolist movement, Debussy found a literary work that inspired him to a new kind of opera. Little happens onstage as the story, set in a vaguely medieval setting, unfolds. Mélisande, a secretive, fragile young woman lost in the forest, is found weeping by Golaud, a sullen widower, a grandson of a king. Golaud takes Mélisande home and marries her, only to see his mysterious wife and his impetuous, handsome younger brother, Pelléas, fall hopelessly, and fatally, in love.

The characters’ inner turbulence, the real story, is conveyed through Debussy’s sensual orchestral music. With its wayward harmonic language, milky colorings, avoidance of dramatic flourishes and spacious pacing, Debussy’s music illuminates the unconscious in ways that spoken dramas and more conventional operas can hardly match.

In Poe’s “Usher,” Debussy felt he had found another source suited to exploring the unconscious and the macabre. Strangely bonded and sickly siblings, Roderick and Madeline Usher, live reclusively in the family mansion, a house that they come to believe is almost alive and bent on their destruction.

Debussy worked intermittently on “Usher” for 10 years. In 1908 Giulio Gatti-Casazza, the enterprising director of the Met, secured the rights to present “The Devil in the Belfry” and “Usher” as a double bill of one-act operas. Debussy cautioned Gatti-Casazza not to get his hopes up, saying, “I am a lazy composer” who sometimes “requires weeks to decide on one harmonious chord over another.” Nothing came of the project. Debussy died in 1918.

During “Debussy and Poe” it was impossible to know how closely the music was drawn from Debussy’s sketches. The production began with the sturdy baritone Michael Chioldi, in spectral pale-faced makeup, singing an intensely subdued Debussy song, “Le Son du Cor S’Afflige” (“The Sound of the Horn Wails”). Then, as Mr. Cohen played fleeting piano sketches from “The Devil in the Belfry,” two young and attractive singers, the baritone Phillip Addis and the soprano Ariadne Greif, as the Usher siblings, spoke dialogue from “The Devil in the Belfry,” looking like children hiding in the corner of the house library, using flashlights to read a forbidden text.

This episode segued into the first two scenes of “Usher,” accompanied by piano, in which Mr. Addis and Ms. Greif were joined by Mr. Chioldi, playing a controlling family physician; David McFerrin, a baritone, as Roderick’s concerned friend; and Alexander Blaise, an actor, playing another friend. As the work progressed, the other Debussy songs and a piano prelude, “Des Pas sur la Neige” (“Footprints in the Snow”), lent substance and connective music to the sketchy work, which concluded with the final scene of “Usher” and Madeline’s death.

In some ways “Debussy and Poe” was a tease, a dramatic patchwork of their work. I was willing to go along and accept it as a mix of sources and speculation. Still, I left wondering what might have been.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/26/arts/music/26debussy.html?ref=arts

The Voice That Helped Remake Culture

2009-11-23T20:31:00.001-08:00

Louis Armstrong, a k a Satchmo, a k a Pops, was to music what Picasso was to painting, what Joyce was to fiction: an innovator who changed the face of his art form, a fecund and endlessly inventive pioneer whose discovery of his own voice helped remake 20th-century culture.

His determination to entertain and the mass popularity he eventually achieved, coupled with his gregarious, open-hearted personality, would obscure the magnitude of his achievement and win him the disdain of many intellectuals and younger colleagues, who dismissed much of what he did after 1929 as middlebrow slumming, and who even mocked him as a kind of Uncle Tom.

With “Pops,” his eloquent and important new biography of Armstrong, the critic and cultural historian Terry Teachout restores this jazzman to his deserved place in the pantheon of American artists, building upon Gary Giddins’s excellent 1988 study, “Satchmo: The Genius of Louis Armstrong,” and offering a stern rebuttal of James Lincoln Collier’s patronizing 1983 book, “Louis Armstrong: An American Genius.”

Mr. Teachout, the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the chief culture critic of Commentary magazine, writes with a deep appreciation of Armstrong’s artistic achievements, while situating his work and his life in a larger historical context. He draws on Armstrong’s wonderfully vivid writings and hours of tapes in which the musician recorded his thoughts and conversations with friends, and in doing so, creates an emotionally detailed portrait of Satchmo as a quick, funny, generous, observant and sometimes surprisingly acerbic man: a charismatic musician who, like a Method actor, channeled his vast life experience into his work, displaying a stunning, almost Shakespearean range that encompassed the jubilant and the melancholy, the playful and the sorrowful.

At the same time, Mr. Teachout reminds us of Armstrong’s gifts: “the combination of hurtling momentum and expansive lyricism that propelled his playing and singing alike,” his revolutionary sense of rhythm, his “dazzling virtuosity and sensational brilliance of tone,” in another trumpeter’s words, which left listeners feeling as though they’d been staring into the sun. The author — who worked as a jazz bassist before becoming a full-time writer — also uses his firsthand knowledge of music to convey the magic of such Armstrong masterworks as “St. Louis Blues,” “Potato Head Blues,” “West End Blues” and “Star Dust.”

During his lifetime Armstrong performed with virtually everyone, from early jazz pioneers like Sidney Bechet, Joe Oliver, Bix Beiderbecke, Johnny Dodds and Kid Ory, on through more recent masters like Leonard Bernstein and Johnny Cash. His freewheeling incandescence as both an instrumentalist and vocalist would influence not just every trumpet player to come but also countless composers, bandleaders and singers as varied as Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday.

“Even before his face became known to the readers of newspapers and illustrated magazines — and, later, to filmgoers and TV viewers,” Mr. Teachout writes, “Armstrong was the first jazz musician whose voice was heard by large numbers of people. In this way he emerged from behind the anonymity of the recording process and impressed his personality on all who heard him, even those who found most instrumental jazz to be unapproachably abstract. It was the secret of his appeal, and he knew it. So did the many singing instrumentalists who followed in his footsteps, hoping to lure some of the same listeners who smiled at the sound of his gritty tenor voice, which deepened as he grew older but was always as recognizable as a fingerprint.”

Although Armstrong’s life story has been told many times before, Mr. Teachout does a nimble job of reconjuring the trajectory of Armstrong’s experience, which coincided with — or was in the vanguard of — so many formative events in 20th-century Afro-American history, from the Great Migration that brought many Southern blacks North to cities like Chicago to the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and ’30s. He recounts the travails of touring that Armstrong experienced in a still segregated South, to his acclamation in Europe in the ’30s and ’40s and the mainstream American success he finally achieved in the ’50s.

The reader gets a dramatic snapshot in this volume of Armstrong’s life on the mean streets of New Orleans, where he grew up, the illegitimate son of a 15-year-old country girl, among gamblers, church people, prostitutes and hustlers; his adventures in gangland Chicago and Jazz Age New York; the rapid metamorphosis of this shy, “little frog-mouthed boy who played the cornet” into the most influential soloist in jazz; and the long, hard years on the road, crisscrossing the United States dozens of time, playing so many one-nighters that he often came off the stage, in his own words, “too tired to raise an eyelash.”

In addition, Mr. Teachout does a fluent job of explicating Armstrong’s apprenticeship under Joe Oliver and Fletcher Henderson; his seminal work with the Hot Five; and the key business roles played by his wife Lil and his mobbed-up manager, the former boxing promoter Joe Glaser, in shaping his career.

As Mr. Teachout astutely points out, Armstrong’s trumpet playing, like his singing and copious writings (including two published memoirs and countless letters, which he pecked out on a typewriter he brought with him on the road), was the means for Armstrong to reflect on all that he had witnessed. “I seen everythin’ from a child comin’ up,” he said once. “Nothin’ happen I ain’t never seen before.”

“When I blow I think of times and things from outa the past that gives me an image of the tune. Like moving pictures passing in front of my eyes. A town, a chick somewhere back down the line, an old man with no name you seen once in a place you don’t remember.” This belief in music as a deeply felt and personal expression is one reason Armstrong avoided using musical terminology when speaking about his work and it’s one reason he said that he disliked bop (like other cooler, more modern forms of jazz), complaining that it “doesn’t come from the heart,” that it’s “all just flash.”

Boppers and avatars of the cool, in turn, rejected Armstrong’s desire to entertain the audience — to mug and clown on stage. And yet even Miles Davis, who in rejecting Satchmo’s crowd-pleasing ways went so far as to turn his back on the audience, acknowledged that the history of jazz radiated out from Louis Armstrong: “You can’t play nothing on trumpet,” Davis said, “that doesn’t come from him.”

Source: http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=788068676541698049

Margaret Atwood: Once In August

2009-11-21T17:17:00.001-08:00

Ladies and Gentlemen, Leonard Cohen

2009-11-21T17:06:00.000-08:00

Filming a Friendship, Founded on Film

2009-11-20T03:42:00.000-08:00

VILMOS ZSIGMOND and Laszlo Kovacs, whose cinematography would help change the look of American movies in the late 1960s and 1970s, first met in 1953 on a Budapest street corner near the Academy of Drama and Film, where both men were enrolled as cinematography students. Three years afterward — on Nov. 11, 1956, a week after Soviet troops poured into the city to crush the Hungarian uprising — they ran into each other again on the same corner.

“The Russian tanks were going up and down the street,” recalled Mr. Zsigmond, 79, in a recent phone interview to promote the documentary “No Subtitles Necessary: Laszlo & Vilmos,” an account of their long friendship that will be broadcast Nov. 17 on “Independent Lens” on PBS. “I said, ‘Laszlo, you know the Arriflex camera, you have it up in the film school in college.’ He said, ‘Yes, that’s where I have it.’ He knew what we were about to do.”

Mr. Kovacs got the camera and some 35-millimeter film stock. The two men roamed Budapest, surreptitiously recording over an hour’s worth of film of the crackdown, then smuggled the undeveloped negatives out of the country via rail to Vienna, jumping off the train 10 miles from the Austrian border and finishing the journey on foot. Their imagery joined the collective record of that grim period, appearing in newsreels, TV reports and documentaries throughout the next half-century.

After the revolution the men moved to Hollywood, paid their dues shooting low-budget horror, action and biker films, then graduated to higher-profile assignments, eventually collaborating with some of the most influential directors of the 1970s, including Robert Altman and Steven Spielberg. Their association lasted until 2007, when Mr. Kovacs died of pancreatic cancer.

Mr. Kovacs, whose filmography included “Easy Rider, “Five Easy Pieces” and “Frances,” had a style simpler and more forceful than Mr. Zsigmond’s, whose work on movies like “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” “Deliverance” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (for which he won an Academy Award), was more lush and impressionistic. But their artistry came from a similar, shared place. “The whole story, you could write a book about it,” Mr. Zsigmond said, laughing.

The director of “No Subtitles Necessary,” the cinematographer James Chressanthis, who studied under both men in the 1980s, thought so too.

“The story about them during the revolution” were widespread in Hollywood, he said. “But you always heard different pieces of it, different versions of it. Beyond the fact that they were great cinematographers, there was this whole back story that hadn’t been definitively told.”

During the 1986 production of “The Witches of Eastwick” — which Mr. Zsigmond photographed, with Mr. Chressanthis serving as his assistant — Mr. Kovacs stopped by for a visit. “When I saw them together, I realized that this was a remarkable story that people needed to hear,” Mr. Chressanthis said. “But 20 years intervened.”

The one-two punch of Altman’s death in 2006 and the onset of health problems for Mr. Kovacs ultimately spurred Mr. Chressanthis and his co-producers to bring the two men together again — this time in front of a camera — and have them tell their tale.

The result is a movie about a friendship between men who shared certain unusual, difficult experiences, and how those experiences shaped their art.

Mr. Zsigmond described his and Mr. Kovacs’s feel for light and shadow — which they developed together on earlier, low-budget efforts, productions on which one man often served as the other’s assistant — as “poetic realism.”

“It came out of being a couple of guys who had to leave Hungary in a hurry so they didn’t get killed,” he said. “It came out of coming to America and shooting all these movies that were all very low-budget — we called them ‘no-budget movies’ — with very small crews and very small lights. Laszlo and I figured out pretty quick that if you shoot something at the right time of day, it’s going to look gorgeous without any additional light, and that if you do need additional light, you try to make the light look real, not ‘lit.’ I hate movies where the light looks phony.”

Mr. Kovacs’s battlefield-tested resourcefulness and affection for his adopted country’s landscapes informed the look of Dennis Hopper’s 1969 counterculture smash “Easy Rider.” The film was distinguished by trippy lens flares, mournful firelight and tight close-ups of motorcycle riders and their machines, which Mr. Kovacs captured while being towed in the back of a sandbag-stuffed trailer. The whole feature was shot with a camera on loan from Mr. Zsigmond.

Even after the men had risen to the upper echelons of their industry, they continued to act and think like low-budget filmmakers. The documentary’s anecdotes include an account of how Mr. Zsigmond “flashed,” or briefly exposed, the negative of Altman’s “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” to create that movie’s decayed-boozy visuals, and how Mr. Kovacs, while shooting Bob Rafelson’s “Five Easy Pieces,” constructed a much-needed camera brace out of a termite-riddled branch he’d found in the woods near the set.

One can see traces of the men’s idiosyncratic personalities showing up more vividly in Jerry Schatzberg’s 1973 feature “Scarecrow,” a road film about the deep friendship between hobos played by Al Pacino and Gene Hackman. Mr. Zsigmond says the film’s warm light and embracing widescreen images of American landscapes were inspired by his early years with Mr. Kovacs, when they were adrift in a beautiful but forbidding new land.

“When we came to America, we had to stay together just to survive,” Mr. Zsigmond said. “It was like being brothers, that’s what it was.”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/arts/television/15seit.html?ref=movies

Arthur Rimbaud Documentary

2009-11-19T21:09:00.000-08:00

Johnny Cash—the Man in Black & White

2009-11-19T06:14:00.001-08:00

Reinhard Kleist's brand-new graphic novel, Johnny Cash: I See a Darkness (Abrams Books), opens with a vintage Caddy (license plate "HELL") barreling past a neon sign on the outskirts of Reno. Without a word, its surly driver—the Man in Black himself—makes his way to the strip, where he spots a short, wealthy, sleazy-looking man walking into an alley with a prostitute and proceeds to fill him with lead. In the scene's final panel, the killer is inside an armored bus, pulling up to the gates of Folsom Prison. Get it? I shot a man in Reno / Just to watch him die.

The Berlin-based artist has fun with this concept in his well-researched biography of the late country star, segueing into pen-and-ink depictions of Cash hits like "Big River," "Cocaine Blues," and "A Boy Named Sue" (which unbeknownst to me was penned by Shel Silverstein). Kleist uses a different, faux-tribal drawing style for "The Ballad of Ira Hayes"—a choice that reflects his interest in Cash's views on soldiers and war, an interest that also emerges in a studio scene with Bob Dylan.

If you caught the 2005 Cash biopic Walk the Line, with Joaquin Phoenix (the wrong actor as far as I'm concerned), you'll recognize the basic outline: The Depression-era upbringing amid cotton fields in Arkansas, where a neighbor kid teaches young J.R. Cash to play guitar. The horrible mishap that befalls his brother Jack. The Air Force service in Germany. The courtship and marriage to Vivian Liberto. The settling down in Memphis and forming a band. The record deal, tours with Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis, leading to a devastating addiction to uppers. The public disgraces. And, of course, the forbidden love with June Carter, whom he eventually marries.

But Kleist creates a fresh narrative, too, with side stories and small details you won't find in the film. Notably, he follows the character of Glen Sherley, a Folsom inmate who monitors Cash's career closely from behind bars and writes a song that Cash ends up using when he performs at Folsom in his big 1968 post-rehab comeback. In the book, as in the film, the Folsom sessions stand out as the dramatic peak. But there the movie ends. Kleist fast-forwards a quarter century, to 1994 and a solo recording session with rap producer Rick Rubin at Cash's cabin. By this time, Cash is an Old Man in Black, and through his chatter with Rubin we learn what became of Sherley after Cash helped get him sprung.

Artistically speaking, Kleist is a master of the genre who has spent much time studying Cash in all his facets—see his sketch gallery at the book's conclusion. He experiments with composition enough that the eye is never bored, and in just two pages of silent pictures, he manages to express the agony of drug withdrawal as viscerally as any words could. Kleist does his homework, taking seriously his duties not simply as a graphic artist but as the biographer catering to a newer generation of fans, those first drawn in by Cash's covers of artists like Danzig, Beck, and Soundgarden on Rubin's American Recordings and its sequel, Unchained. Like Rubin, and the late Cash himself, Kleist found a way to push an old story in a new direction.

Source: http://www.motherjones.com/riff/2009/11/music-monday-johnny-cash-man-in-black-and-white

Art Against the Inevitable in Sudan

2009-11-17T14:26:00.000-08:00

THERE is a demand and a prayer made in each of Ibrahim El Salahi’s designs. This pioneer of Sudanese modernism has fused the diverse traditions of Sudan to make an art that is universal in its importance. His monumental painting The Inevitable (1984) is an uncompromising condemnation of civil war and injustice. The comparison with Picasso’s Guernica is not misplaced: indeed, the painting can be seen as an African counterpoint to it.

Born in 1930, El Salahi trained in Sudan and at the Slade in London, before travelling through Europe and returning to his home country to become a professor and Minister of Culture. He was one of the early members of what is now called the ‘Khartoum school’, which tried to define a cultural identity for the nation after the end of British colonial rule.

Sudan is one of the most ethnically and linguistically diverse countries in Africa, and the early Khartoum school stressed this inescapable plurality. The grouping of poets and literary critics who called themselves the ‘School of the Desert and the Jungle’ recognised that their Sudanese heritage is a synthesis of these landscapes. The poet Salah Ahmad Ibrahim puts it unequivocally:

Liar is he who proclaims: I am the unmixed, the pure pedigree.
The Only. Yes!, a liar!

El Salahi’s early pictures are decorative versions of Koranic verses. After time away from his homeland, the artist felt estranged from Sudan, and so travelled throughout the country, looking again at the patterns in handicrafts and the local landscape. In the early 1970s, his art takes on the crimson colours of the Sudanese earth. El Salahi’s calligraphy spirals and unwraps into patterns, and finally into representations, maintaining the rhythm and structure of the Arabic alphabet, whilst also introducing the mask-like faces from the country’s southern culture. His paintings become peopled poems.

The result is a re-appropriation of the African traditions which influenced early European modernism and cubism, re-infused with their spiritual significance. El Salahi has on occasion defended himself against the charge that representation in the arts is not Islamic: “Islamic scholars say there is nothing at all to restrict you from reproducing the human image. In a way, it’s a kind of prayer too, because you are appreciating God’s creations and trying to think about them and meditation on His creativity”.

In 1975, El Salahi was imprisoned for six months without trial under the dictatorship of General Numieri, accused of anti-governmental activity. Deprived of even pen and paper, El Salahi secretly drew designs in the sand during his daily 25 minute exercise break, protected by other prisoners, and quickly erasing his work as the guards approached. Upon release, he went into exile in Qatar and Oxford. After this time, his paintings lose their earthly colours and are almost always expressed in black and white, pen on paper. By now, El Salahi had abandoned all distinction between design and representation.

The Inevitable is El Salahi’s reaction to his time spent in prison: the canvas is divided into nine separate sections that represent the different periods of time incarcerated, and act as a condemnation of the civil strife which ravaged the country after the end of British rule. Arabesque and Coptic motifs underlie and structure pained and distorted faces. Sheltering curves upsurge into rebellious arms and fists. The flood of white-space is channelled and complicated by the black ink.
Unforgettable in many of El Salahi’s later works are the hypnotic eyes which pose unavoidable questions to the viewer. In ‘Funeral and Crescent’, for example, where under an Islamic crest of a moon the huge emaciated faces of the cortège seem to carry the corpse on their own, every joint of a body is spiralled into an eye. In the simply named ‘Faces’, eyes and ears and noses and mouths all swirl deliriously outwards toward the viewer. In The Inevitable, eyes are either shaded-out into black voids, or are averted from the viewer. Only a soldier keeps a sideways watch on us. The picture is machine-like, sharp and cold. For there is a demand and a prayer made in each of El Salahi’s designs, and in this picture the questions posed are the same, but here the responsibility is even greater: who will dare to look at this? Who will dare to do something to avoid The Inevitable?

Source: http://www.theliberal.co.uk/issue_11/artsandculture/visualart_milanese_11.html

Officials to restore birthplace of Robert Johnson

2009-11-15T00:01:00.001-08:00

JACKSON, Miss. – The mystery surrounding bluesman Robert Johnson's life and death feeds the lingering fascination with his work.

There's the myth he sold his soul to the devil to create his haunting guitar intonations. There's the dispute over where he died after his alleged poisoning by a jealous man in 1938. Three different markers claim to be the site of his demise.

His birthplace, however, has been verified. The seminal bluesman came into the world in 1911 in a well-crafted home built by his stepfather in the Mississippi town of Hazlehurst.

Now, 71 years after his death, local officials want to restore the home in hopes of drawing Johnson fans and their tourism dollars to Copiah County, about 100 miles from the Delta region that most bluesmen called home.

Johnson's life and music have been the subject of multiple books. And producers are shopping a script in Hollywood about him penned by Jimmy White, the screenwriter for the Academy Award-winning film, "Ray."

"It's amazing that after all these years, people still talk about Robert Johnson on the level that they do," said the bluesman's grandson, Steven Johnson.

Johnson's influence can be heard in the works of numerous artists, from Muddy Waters to Eric Clapton, who covered 14 of the bluesman's songs on his 2004 album, "Me and Mr. Johnson."

The house is an important piece of Johnson's legacy, said Grammy-winning pianist George Winston, who will headline a fundraiser for the restoration Monday at the Belhaven College Center for the Arts in Jackson.

"Everything with Robert is mysterious, but the more we can demystify, we can get down to the truth," said Winston. "He was an inspired musician. He took a quantum leap." The story goes that Johnson didn't play all that well at first, then left town for awhile. When he returned, his music had undergone a transformation.

"He came back and everybody couldn't believe how well he played," Winston said.

That's likely what gave rise to the soul-selling rumor, a transaction purportedly taking place at the crossroads of U.S. 61 and U.S. 49 in the Mississippi Delta.

Johnson's birthplace was verified in a letter from his half-sister years ago, said Janet Schriver, executive director of the Copiah County Office of Cultural Affairs.

The 1,500-square foot home now owned by the county has fallen into disrepair, but it still bears evidence of craftsmanship. Johnson's stepfather, Charles Dodds, was a furniture maker and a prosperous landowner. The house had a double-parlor, a long front porch and a pump that allowed water to flow into the kitchen, a modern convenience unheard in most homes occupied by blacks in the early 20th century, said Schriver.

Schriver said the county is trying to raise $250,000 for the restoration project, which coincides with efforts to get Johnson's life story to the screen.

White was commissioned by HBO about three years ago to write the script, but the production company's management changed and the project was scrapped, said Cathy Gurley, who handles publicity for the Robert Johnson Blues Foundation.

HBO confirmed Thursday a project had been in development, but subsequently producers were allowed to take it elsewhere.

Gurley said "we're currently shopping the project."

White, who is based in Santa Monica, Calif., said he was moved by the "sheer genius" of Johnson, who was self-taught on the guitar.

"He was so good that he would literally turn his back when they were recording him. He didn't want the other musicians to see his fingering technique," White said.

A restored Johnson birthplace would offer his latter-day fans something rare: a tangible relic linked to the long-dead musician. Few personal artifacts from Johnson's life remain. Only two photographs of Johnson are known to exist, one known as the "studio portrait" made for Johnson by Hooks Brothers Studios in Memphis, Tenn., and the other referred to as "the dime store portrait" or "the photo booth self portrait" taken by Johnson himself.

White spent months researching Johnson's life and interviewing other blues artists, including David "Honeyboy" Edwards, who knew Johnson. Little known in their prime, outside of the audience for "race music," the bluesmen created an enduring musical legacy.

"As a writer, it was exciting for me because nobody has been able to crack the code of how to tell the story of a blues singer from that era, especially the legendary one who sold his soul to the devil," White said.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091112/ap_en_ot/us_bluesman_s_birthplace

Lost Chaplin film discovered in $5 can bought on eBay

2009-11-12T18:02:00.000-08:00

When Morace Park bought a can of nitrate film on eBay for $5, he was surprised to discover that it contained footage of Charlie Chaplin.

The inventor was utterly astounded when his friend John Dwyer, a former member of the British Board of Film Classification, told him that he had discovered rare footage of the performer, and possibly an unknown Chaplin work. Unlike many nitrate films, the contents of this 1916 can were still intact.

The unearthed film, called Charlie Chaplin in Zepped, features footage of Zeppelins flying over England during the First World War, as well as some very early stop-motion animation, and unknown outtakes of Chaplin films from three Essanay pictures including The Tramp. These have all been cut together into a six-minute movie that Mr Park describes as "in support of the British First World War effort". It begins with a logo from Keystone studios, which first signed Chaplin, and there follows a certification from the Egyptian censors dating the projection as being in December 1916. There are outtakes, longer shots and new angles from the films The Tramp, His New Profession and A Jitney Elopement.

The main, animated sequence of the film starts with Chaplin wishing that he could return to England from America and fight with the boys. He is taken on a flight through clouds before landing on a spire in England. The sequence also features a German sausage, from which pops the Kaiser. During the First World War there was some consternation that the actor did not join the war effort.

Mr Dwyer persuaded Mr Park, from Henham, Essex, that they should make a documentary about the discovery and their attempt to unearth the story behind the movie. The filmmakers enlisted the British director Hammad Khan – whose first feature Slakistan, about slackers living in Islamabad, is in post-production.

Mr Park and Mr Dwyer raised £120,000 from friends and family to finance the shooting. The project, currently known only as The Lost Film Project, follows the duo as they visit locations associated with Chaplin. Their journey began in Henham then they visited several locations in London frequented by Chaplin, as well as Potters Bar, Hertfordshire, the site of one of the big Zeppelin crashes.

In the past week the men have been in San Francisco, riding the world's largest Zeppelin over the city, and Niles, Fremont, home of Chaplin's Essanay studios. They are currently in Los Angeles, where they met and showed the footage to Ric Robertson, the executive administrator of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The filmmakers are staying at Montecito Inn, the hotel that Chaplin built for his friends to stay in. They have also been in contact with the Chaplin family.

The filmmakers organised a transfer of the nitrate film on to a DVD, which they have been using to show footage of the film to Chaplin experts.

Mr Park said that most of the questions being raised are about the astonishing animation sequence and whether Chaplin himself was involved in the creation of the film.

Film historian Simon Louvish, author of Chaplin: The Tramp's Odyssey, cast doubts on whether Chaplin would have been involved in its creation.

"There are a number of these compilation films around, and in Senegal there were a number of films that had been cut together by other people using Chaplin footage," said Mr Louvish. "Keystone Pictures was going bust at the time and footage from these Chaplin films was freely available.

"This is less so of the Essanay films. Chaplin by 1916 was signing multimillion-dollar contracts and was very aware of the copyright on his films.

"It would be no surprise though if someone in Egypt, which was under British occupation at the time, decided to use one of the world's most famous figures to support the war."

Source: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/lost-chaplin-film-discovered-in-5-can-bought-on-ebay-1815748.html

new blog, LectureAndLearn

2009-11-11T21:14:00.000-08:00

Another new blog that features what I spend quite a bit of my time doing. I watch and listen to lectures online. This new blog is a way of achieving an archive and presenting those that i find. The interests are varied like the education I have prescribed for myself since escaping "higher education".

http://lectureandlearn.blogspot.com/

Soddoma: Cantos of Ulysses

2009-11-06T22:49:00.000-08:00

Through the slave quarters and to the river below, cross sections of freshening earth…

1. Shaft scene

Syphilitic skeletons borne in blood menstrual pillars of Sodom coitus breath scars thorns milk interprets the scrotal consummating corpse labia drunk and made holy clitoridectomies penis sheaths paleolithic barriers scavenging decomposition narrow receiving bowl.
Bushmen read the koka shastra, wandering wombs dilate the reproductive cycle…

2. Venus in furs

Hedged yogic castration, umbilical suckling male hymen ejaculatory ducts the membranous urethra pastoralists, conjugated estriols feminized (double castration) dislect of deep incised consumption an infant’s sexual attributes cranial/uteral childbirth masturbation swallows.
Whaling asps three miles by four, heavens corpse spinal venerated. It’s flaccid genital beard, (it’s) (madness to be confined-Rimbaud)

3. Coffin birth

Menstruation (ovum) migration explicit breath sutras tenderness, thick wash rape (decay) copulation abortifacients peyote insufficient mitochdrial DNA homologue of the penis (masculine machinery) the debauchery of an open wound herded to the dead.

4. Flesh allows sins without the body

Departing drew squalor copula weightless heat sweating petals de-centered borne wallow plurality of unrecorded raindrops rhythms tastes screams branches nausea erections vomiting animal bearers agony clutter the pineal eye
A smell is monogamous; intimate doctrine of a menstrual matter.

5. The absurdity of rigor mortis

Blood bathed lips of a reptilian beings drag Basilidan stones spreading the dust from her ribcages to make another opening in her entrails (the presence of unnecessary practice – peremptory expulsion) the jaws of the clitoris are pried open by hideous animals (ecstasy excludes the worker) inundated with hair.
In a time if war the mountains…having nothing, baring all, we ate the dead.

6. When confronted with conflict the mind re-enters the body; you are going where the smell is coming from.

Vertebras exposed misshapen fingers beat abdomens earth flash rises an intersex scrotal sac (divided) of freshly labes burning shitting expiating hesitation dilacerated forehead emanating from the mouths of disemboweled children which have come to signify bread human bridges of decomposed odors draws the flesh in mummification raised shoulders head down ochre resin the surface of the bone circulation of infection mineralized deposits inorganic tapeworms the vertical diameter of the head the breadth of cremation grooves worn into the pubic bone spina bifida occulta proliferations of forensic anthropology ask when will rape be as pure as birth?
The species of half-sex neuropsychological orgasms of the anal gene, spliced chromosome not noticed in mutation.

7. Whether goest thou…

Ejaculating the blood spray of the lotus consummating the decomposition of the corpse the rapist’s paradox, the pelvic grasp easing milk from the prostrate hair menstruation vaginal dreaming; ingredients; the silphum bone of a Namibian woman hardened impulse that collapses to repulsion retracting the narrative to transparency, it’s surgical augmentation lit by phallic lamp-arching tusks hybrid of distinctive strains grave blood a pregnant mare incites a doctrinal aria of machinations, of language – anima/animus
What is heaven without the significance of blood? Man and his beliefs must be in excess!

8. Blood house

Malignant roots necrophilous traits excoriations of physiognomy the immune system is unresponsive to foreign tissue until electricity is accompanied by the fear of drowning monologues of EKG readouts cosmogony commotion carnis enzymes human secretions reliquiae cibi the collecting of hair fingernails urine feces dead skin pedagogical serum unclothed bodies are often confused as being undisturbed until you look under the skin, whores are usually the cleanest bodies pulled from the river hand to vein mouth to cunt phallocentrism

9. I believe, so I cannot

Indigent numerology purity humility behaviorists recrocity pails full downstream consensual pre-scientific confinement the occipital lobes sinsemilla weighing departure a season in hell unrelated ecstasies smeared lingams bone fragments cognitive distonic transmutation glass variants decomposed absentia burial
Bestiality; rhythms of the unborn – flesh of the flesh

10. Fresh water beds (subject to birth), thus to the profane…

Urinating kisses necessity in suffocating silence buttocks bruised in blood and sensuality passages through bodily death diatonic coils currents of starvation re-absorbed hymns of the Rig Veda a drenching of meat, shifting the collapse of a consenting body the deep percussion of fist against skin a Urethran Oresteia a swaying fragrance unasked unsaid an odor a pile of earth made holy
The throat is a brothel, it is illiterate, and it is innocence

11. As for my sins (for Allen Ginsberg)

I’m a predatory species, a certain despondency; bred for dying the mouth opens and it squares the circles the circle the nature of deceit there are limitations to death the real threat is my own mind the size of the water gasping breaths quiet immersions glimpsed eternal anal concealment surveillance in the pubic beard, NAMBLA subtlety woke out of breath, vying prophet speaking in tongues, as for my sins.
Psychagogues; studies of the body are linked to the undead. Are the undying really the unborn?

12. The rhythm of the prey managed through paths of bone; allows some conditions to breathe.

Massive confinement addresses the conscience a theater of atrocity texts sober recited states all science is God, God does not exist obsession dictates ritual excavation of past mastery healing seizures migraine delta malignant roots of necrophilous traits reliquiae cibi succubi incubi ascension reawaken the form of life.
The external world has nothing to tell, it’s not a disorder it’s an opening a growing together of undoing

13. Head instead of body, a stone burnt halo of worms

Sodomized with urine feces in the brow death twice beaten manuscripts scared onto the tongues of man hunted erotic half skull spinal ropes of pure masturbation ropes made from the pubic hair of Christ black fruit cruel mud the true origin of foreskin that human smell his mouth dripped laughed again smooth muscles discrepancies excremental ejaculation intestinal composites half-remembered incest balancing writhing a counter recording rectum scratching muffled gray urine decay encrusted doors lubrication pushing her mouth into the blindfold glass cavern eye socket condensation discretion
Briefly humid fingertips spreading delicacy, internal muscles

14. Skin recedes, flesh peels

Curious emergence the agonizing receptive position the crushing weight nectar stretched slightly her breath preserved on his belt abject slaves shoulders bent pushing her mouth into the blindfold are animals really ignorant of taboos overlying tissue anus curvature craniofacial identification hollow cast anatomical points rectal incisors alter cremation purified with wine practical uses of graves discontinuity of being the gulf of death mainsprings animalcula orgiacal eroticism plethora of the genital organs habitual reserve interred field notes hair fociles toxicology preservation of blood evidence the striking of vows
Veneral orgasms, a preconscious reductionist velocity

15. Any sign of being: sidereal bodies

Anumalous monism postulate retinal unconscious naturalizing hemorrhagic nerve endings recoiled bleeding escophaged lining malnutrition normal vomiting of early infancy fecal incontinence intravenous lines vascular dementia middle temporal lobe structures surgical ablation unilateral spatial neglect motoric immobility conjunctival injection brief psychotic disorder schizoc affective sexual dysfunction lubrication swelling response sensory bondage infantilism oxygen depriving bulimia nervosa postual tremors premenstrual dysphoric disorder agonist medication constricted thought insertion dysarthria predisposed abscess orgasmic disorders syphilis meat racks bathhouses ecology of anal intercourse
Anchoring the apocalypse (archaic records – sexual antiquity)

16. Sloth

Vaccination contaminated blood nasal census, transmutation counting of pubic hairs uteral lacerations erogenous mixtures phosphorescent congestion her thighs rubbed with blood ankles bound to the wrist face sprayed, pussy filleted ashes bridled death stroked by penetration unwinding of the ceiling guttural mirrors magnified blond raven rubs her ass in my face I sleep, I eat, I drink decomposed my cock like a thorn impales her blood gives way to cartilage to bone if I can’t kill you, I’ll breed you earth bent to the pplow an orchid drinks from the serpent black and reflectent cunnlingus, raw sleep the margin of flesh unqualified embalming fragments of pregnancy an imbalanced mixture pressurized contagious hemophilia a perceiving body of primitive speech purged of paternal soil multilingual dysentery intravenous transmidible agents quarantine exhortations posthumously hanged puncture contagious blood the fetus predates the abdominal wheel
Subordinations to nature, betrothed laboring breaths and the ferocity of silence

17. Semen dries, efficacy of prayer

Agrarian societies ritual androgyny irregularities of creation putrefying male consumption flailed unclean intimacy calculus of bodily secretions sodomite, hysterical growth cycle mountagnard rosary when hair gives way to flesh the vaginal chambers of my brain blesses the wine with my spent cock swallowing the poison sac practioners of dissonance with a voice that has no tongue desecrated by an abyss that limits to the last breath the properties of sound buggery at the Sabbath a mercenary of thought locked down burning a child ingesting its skull ataraxia a deviation of nature peering at death through anal protusions oral decay the power of the animal that kills and refuses to feed his young that eats his young is pure he drinks of the waters that pour from hell consumed of sickness half conscious of sudden pain thickening screams smell the distance trembling, undulating, backwash of castration unprecedented chaos a laughing hymn of exhaustion listening posts set in the abdomen certain bodies lecture esoteris doctrine disembodied corpses are weighed and transported these abstractions of matter are no longer Bodhisattvas their physical manifestation burned unto consumation the hunger is mine their eyes synonymously endowed, liquefied spititus mercurialis, mystagogues of humidum radicale albino sparrow a littoral species paths acted its natural contents the genitals of either sex the palmer reflex the mucosa of the lower lip the pedagogical domain solidarity of substances
Dreams dissected, impregnated the pulmonary chamber

18. Yahweh, covered with hair; the progenitor of the sweat-born child

Explanatory respiration contrary of undirected thought speech delivered breech abstention of male’s ejaculation visualized liquor the phalangeal circulation embroidery that leaps irreconcilable behavior that demands the bowels be bled postulated pain divorces sound its overlapping change that is analogous to birth is not comprised of pitch only that of the effort the reburial of milk proteins of prehistory is unearthed accidentally by psychagogues
When we bleed why do we not bleed urine? In an autopsy when the lungs are examined, why do they not find milk? When the feet are cut off, why doesn’t that sense of balance shift to the hands?

19. Light extends to the darkness

I loaded the skins the deep percussion of fist against skin I turned Shepard’s lumber great sacks of flesh the remaining bones piled in the monastery candles deep in the petrified ice stones opening to excrement, excrement to ash the ash I will ingest entering into Laos I can sense the flames…why am I still alive
Never forget it was the Garden of Eden that grew the apple. I tmay not have delivered the apple into her hands but it did hide the seed.

20. Winter in Laos

In my brain washing decapitated head ash and bruising hair once as minutes bone vein thorn hungry finger skin Shiva’s steps inhalation drawing mud cap shorn washing cock in honey a buried library of semen swallowing circling contortions a grave of hair black raised veins open to the teeth inscribed hibernation burnt dried oils of cock zero syntactical pubic forms of closing hands swallowing dilation mouth husks elongated unnatural defecation smearing hymns buttocks skull testicle anorexia stomach fucked for blood murals loosened and bound masturbation cellar lingam jaw finger rose spade scales baskets of loin pelvis scythe Mahatma Buddha Jesus fuck floor urine mother father birth renunciation hallucination gravel thigh walls mattress ammonia vomiting constriction perfumed sedition gesture of cracked stain a confusing of shoulders the hairs on convulsion inwitted mulatto absorption hurling spinal fellatio a parasitic interracial hemorrhage the belly’d quill malarial excrement yaqui hookah mescalito mantis subcutaneous sarcophagous shuddering acceleration urinating in the Ganges firstborn ashes inches of stomach foreskin of the nostril a riverbed caked in burlap ovens of boiled rust the coils of mongoloid cannabis rose burst cremated hair calcified muscle matter roughened bone muscular appendage saliva placenta
Piercing pains in the hands, coldness in the mouth, the mind is in too much pain to go on.

21. Awareness of broken skin and the swarming of decay

The death it was concentrated in the mouth vacuity sweating from an obscure orifice the corpse knows only one thing ugliness is not dying decomposition a miserable excess the soul of a dying animal bred with the feces of the dead produces a cycle of transformation its potency applicable to the husbandry of the kundalini my soul encased in your breath of my words
Exonerating mouth cathedrals

22. Hands asleep crawl the eyes

What we need is a knowing thoughtful ecstasy of death an unquenchable sanatoria, a precious and thundering somoditical crematorium, a depth of skin these abdominal excretions show a prophetic willingness of nature turn their skin aware, nothing
A glassening inhalation

23. Mud smoke; aumgn

Her legs open to a faint heartbeat dying of thirst with straps across your feet; when hair gives way to flesh filth is migratory the precipitated nostril
Blood fear

24. Aboriginal fear

The sefrirotic tree a dying winged flood replicas of swarming crouching bird-like plunging nudes into flames darkness unsculptiral monotonous terrain ravings in grotesquely brutal sequence anthropomorphic resurrection mirror-eyed ecstasy summoned aboriginal monoliths swung from genitalia blown from blood hearts of erections augmentations of shitspeak
10050 Cielo Drive, I feel dead now

25. Four-sided blade

A chest ripe with intestines opens like the Sarawak chamber sore eyes that inhale appear like blackened buckets the light opening into darkness the smells narrowed the abscessed layers of skin has relieved the shoals to collapse this once inaccessible grotto now becomes open and dry
Black and semen drenched, two bodies seem to have been grabbed by wire, ever tasted blood? Sexuality the domain discipline the blown hair of a wound
Exaltation of the mother’s milk, umbilical impropriety
30. Sunken cheeks, infatuated with the body
The rain room is filled with possessions the dumpster is abridged stream hinged on a drowned distance of blood a hardened pederastic vision shifting up through the nakedness exclusive to the rigour wiped from the lips
A taste oriented ejaculation
31. Convulsions (inaudibility)
Hurling spurts of thick blood molested lying cold in soap morning like a hymn warming like cock sweat agitated by flesh hallucinations feed the entrails removing the lesions and then swallowing them the dying dead motion with their tongues for water
29 metallic bodies inserted into pubic areas, gender is an illusion
32. Horn cloth
Anointed with oil burned flesh ripped pregnant and retching diarrhea washing back into her face she was eventually exhumed most of her body little more than a greasy smudge police investigators found a severed head of an adult male in the womb others were extensively mutilated and left in repose

- Chris Mansel

Source: http://surrealistcity.blogspot.com/2009/11/soddoma-cantos-of-ulysses-by-chris.html

Gary Snyder

2009-11-04T22:16:00.001-08:00

Picnic in the Park with Leonard Cohen

2009-11-03T20:33:00.001-08:00

Sequenced Chaos: Reviewing the work of Yu-Wen Wu

2009-11-02T11:47:00.000-08:00

You quickly learn, at a museum of naval history, that there is art, and then there is marine art, a particular genre of painting that derives, not so much from the love of saltwater in its life- and danger-dealing aspects, but as commissioned expressions of ownership and power over vessels and fleets. At their best, paintings of raging seas, icebergs, and atmospheric effects in ranges of blues and oranges may rise to Turneresque heights, but ship imagery fixes them to a mundane plane.

By contrast, Yu-Wen Wu's practically monotone images of water in various forms, applied to compositions meant to evoke the experience of music, fall squarely on the side of pure art. In Suspended, A Song Cycle, an exhibition of wall-mounted mixed media works on panels, Wu manipulates selected visual effects of water and other fluid environments as elements to make artworks that are visual (that is, silent) musical compositions. The simple pictorial means and their reserved appearance yields surprising depths of meditative expression. The exhibit is on display at the Danforth Museum of Art in Framingham, Massachusetts, and has been extended through November 1st.

Wu, who was born in Taiwan and came to the United States at age seven, has taken thousands of photos of ocean waves, recording the time and the latitude and longitude of each. She applies them onto panels, printed on a thin paper that enables her to layer them up without permitting surface incident to interfere, minimizing edges. Sometimes a flattened wrinkle reveals the process of application, where it has been smoothed with a blade under a unifying matte of (presumably) acrylic medium. Creases and scratches on the surface are appropriate to the imagery, and are not displeasing evidence of craft. Technique at its best is puzzling, and we try to figure out the process.

Rectangular coordinates organize the surfaces. The photos, cut and butted up against each other, often repeat the same image. Their borders are disguised with the hachure and scratches that you see on photographic reproductions of the late 19th Century, before darkroom techniques and airbrushing, before Photoshop. The waves are made contiguous with brush strokes of gray and transparent whites. A handful of images could expand into an infinite field, but Wu limits that with the size of the panels and by applying perspective.

Echo is a large diptych of two squares containing a gray photograph of waves in Boston Harbor. It is immensely soothing to sit in front of, like a peaceful moment in a ferry crossing to a place that's waiting for you. Wu divides the photograph into strips that she pastes back together, preserving the whole image in the center, fragmenting it near the edges. She repeats three strips on left, right, and bottom, expanding the space and the moment. She adjusts the strips vertically or horizontally by different amounts with simple linear perspective.

Heraclitus wrote that you can't step into the same river twice. You may also have heard that you can't step in the same river even once. You can't take a photograph of water and preserve a singular form. No matter how short the exposure, it is always flowing; there will always be a degree of blur. This applies to fire, cloud, and the galaxies in deep space. Every photograph is a record, not only of its subject, but of time.

Music is traditionally the art of time. In the six panels of Glass Concerto (a reference to composer Philip Glass), music manuscript paper provides a linear framework for wave and galactic images. Music paper is a sign of music; rows of staves are a visual cue to reading time, an opportunity to serialize, to track. At extreme left, the copied music sheets include the coil-binding perforations that indicate the beginning. It's hard not to think of the suite of discrete panels as movements, since it is titled Concerto, and the last one is labeled "Coda," the tail of a composition. But they are art compositions, and not music. The eye is free to stroll back and forth, pause to examine, or jump back, which is never an option for the ear.

Four of the six one-foot-tall panels are divided vertically once or a number of times, and photos of regional Atlantic waves appear, repeat, and alternate with or without the horizontal staff lines. The photos are extrapolated into a larger perceptual space by overlapping copies. Wu disguises their edges with paint.

The waves of Glass Concerto were photographed in New York and New England waters. Wu has located them by latitude and longitude, which is to say, where they are relative to fixed points on land. Even when you know exactly where you are, the surface of the wave is moving up and down, currents are shifting, and the molecules themselves are swishing and sliding. Although Wu identifies the waters specifically, water behaves in the same ways under similar conditions everywhere. It's a universal constant, the material of the globe's greatest area, the oceans.

Dark, ominous, gelid, moody, even Brahmsian, the first panel starts with empty music sheets on the left. On the right, a wave of complex and elegant form has been broken up, reproduced, and recemented. It extends across the panel as in time, the repetitions reinforcing its form as they fix its motion.

People love to watch and listen to waves. Whitman sat on Long Island surf beaches to orchestrate his verses. Bach's great waves of notes recurring and rebuilding are sufficient to themselves; Disney's "Toccata and Fugue" in Fantasia is self-parodying. Mendelssohn's Fingal's Cave builds on waves. Looking at the first wave in Glass Concerto, it is hard not to think of Fingal's Cave, and the cave itself, where ocean waves crash deep inside a gigantic aperture in an island of basalt columns, called Staffa ("Staves" in Norwegian). You can only reach it in fair weather in a fishing boat serving tourists part-time, but suspended in an Air France jet, you can look into it from 24,000 feet.

"Galaxy," the second movement of Glass Concerto, is a diptych, a very dark square joined to a very light square. Wu has brushed the dark square vertically and horizontally with red-black and blue-black. It sparkles like fresh rock. The outer edges are thickened in a way that suggests a removal of paint along with its application. A horizontal band across the bottom may be a gratuitous allusion to Brice Marden's gray encaustics. The lighter side has a large round structure which could be an elliptical galaxy seen in negative, or it's an ovum. The black-and-whiteness of this element distracts from the rest of the panels, arrangements of gray waves and music paper. The black square is a hole in the wall. The coda that concludes it is a photograph of galaxies in deep space, black with elliptical diaphanous colored drops.

The black square will remain a challenge in modern art, and one of its problems is cliché. Hard to believe, but standing in front of an Ad Reinhardt black square painting at MoMA, visitors still fume about the decline of painting, even though the colors tinting the black have become easier to perceive after 50 years.

From the Book of Dreams refers to the film strip, an archaic variety of slide show on a celluloid scroll. Wave photos from the Aegean Sea appear around, between, and behind cylindrical forms. They are columns of absent information, vertical bands of black blending episodically to green and yellow, curiously unnatural neutered colors, sapped or bleached, neither plant nor mineral, deeper and greener than lichens, less sour than tarnish—that nondescript green you get from adding yellow to black. In their vague, industrial ordinariness, they perform multiple compositional duties. While they derive from artifacts of photographic process, the effect is architectural. The columns provide a sense of presence as well as passage, contrasted with the waters behind and in between them, a manipulation of spatial sensation, an expanse crammed between pillars, at once a feeling of looking out and being in—claustrophobic, or that metal band your dentist clamps around a molar.

This piece, which curves around an inside corner of the gallery walls, also has a coda, and like that of Glass Concerto, it is a square, about two-thirds of the height of the long panel. It is a picture of clouds with the sun illuminating its margins. (A cloud does not have a surface or edge. A cloud is suspended in the air.)

Cyclical Cycles is a complex framed drawing, a frieze of a discontinuous sequence of Hawaiian crashing waves in a frame, the whole underlined by a long panel of sky photos, clouds changing over time. The drawing is an elongated grid of lines in pencil on the back of a translucent paper. The wave photos, in groups tinted vaguely violet or blue, are also fixed to the back and seen through it, veiled. Wu has drawn diagonal lines across the front surface of the page, interrupting and offsetting them where they meet the horizontal lines. The offsets add an apparent perspective thickness to the piece, but they are more like vectors that intersect bands moving at a different speeds, or faults that enable the mid-oceanic ridges to expand across a spherical surface. They imply an analysis of motion, space, and time, whether artistic or scientific.

Artistic license seems to have governed the arrangement of a row of sky pictures on a panel hung beneath the framed image in Cyclical Cycles. One square is set apart from the rest of the row, and the whole of them may or may not be the same width as the drawing inside the frame.

Some of the works in the exhibit are on board, with wooden edges. They present a more finished effect than the bright white stretched canvas edges of others. All of the works are the same thickness, which seems neither thick nor thin, but ordinary, ready-to-paint. The third dimension is apparently irrelevant to the individual artworks. It does not distinguish between purely surface or wall object. The imagery requires that the off-white surfaces not wrap around the edge of the panels, but be flat on the surface. However, the flat white fabric edges are almost repellent in their resistance to visual or tactile response. The paintings on boards with white-rubbed wooden edges are more inviting.

In the Form of Snow and Spray is a nearly nine-foot-long celebration of water, an especially musical composition. Illuminated snowflakes are blurs of white, like stars in the little galaxy of your backyard at night. Its second panel is a filigree of churning foam, the aftermath of a crashing wave. The finale is a spray of water coming apart in air, like leaping fountain waters, or fireworks, or expanding sound itself.

Music used to be divided between abstract and programmatic, as art was divided between representational and abstract. Experiments of the last 50 years have changed dichotomies to polytomies, now that we have art designed not be produced, music written not to be played or heard, and combinations of the many.

Yu-Wen Wu's works are handsomely produced, elegant, thoughtful, and moving. Their combination of simplicity and artful containment of chaos projects an immediate sense of meditative serenity. They are sensually pleasing, and suggest scientific and philosophical truths. The images become something other—allegories of sound or mathematics. While Wu states that they are about suspended time, we're also suspended in the planet's fluid elements, bobbing on the surface, surrounded by the air, always wandering in the second and third dimensions, the whole ball of flux whirling in a sequence of orbits in a restless universe.

Source: http://www.artseditor.com/html/features/1009_suspended.shtml

Something in the Air

2009-11-01T13:52:00.000-08:00

German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk talks to Erik Morse about the 20th- and 21st-century phenomena of chemical warfare, designer ventilation and high-density urban living

The most celebrated and controversial German philosopher since Jürgen Habermas, Peter Sloterdijk has established an academic career confronting the darkest traditions of 20th-century European ideology. President and professor of the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe in Germany, his first book, Kritik der zynischen Vernunft (Critique of Cynical Reason, published in 1983 and translated into English in 1988), remains the best selling philosophical work in the German language since World War II, but it was his controversial polemic on the language of genetic engineering and biopolitics in a lecture he gave in 1999, ‘Regeln für den Menschenpark’ (Rules for the Human Park), that brought him to international attention. It also marked the philosopher’s distinctive turn toward a Heideggerian approach to Postmodernity, identifying the question of ‘Being’ as bound up with the technologies of architectonics and anthropogenesis.
Between 1998 and 2004, Sloterdijk composed his magnum opus, the 2,400-page Sphären (Spheres) trilogy. In its three sections – ‘Bubbles’, ‘Globes’ and ‘Foam’ – Sphären narrates a Western history of macro- and micro-space from the Greek agora to the contemporary urban apartment. With the technological advancements of the 20th century – most represented, according to Sloterdijk, in the use of airborne terrorism and interior ventilation – traditional maps of geometric space have been greatly redesigned, unveiling heretofore unexplored strata: atmosphere, environment and ecology. In a show of puffery, Sloterdijk declared that the Sphären project was the rightful companion to Martin Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (Being and Time, 1927) and the book that Heidegger should have written. With Semiotext(e)’s publication of Terror From the Air in March this year – translated from Luftbeben: An den Wurzeln des Terrors (Air Trembling: At the Roots of Terror, 2002), the introduction to Sphären III – English-speaking readers have had their first glimpse of Sloterdijk’s opus on Postmodern space. This year Polity published God’s Zeal: The Battle of Three Monotheisms, a study on the origins of conflict between Judeo-Christianity and Islam, and Derrida: An Egyptian was published by Wiley.
ERIK MORSE What role do you think literature plays in explicating what you call ‘sphereology’ – the study of the human need for interior space?
PETER SLOTERDIJK I’ve always felt that there is a split in the European tradition between the language of philosophy and the language of art and literature that is based on the suppression of atmospheric knowledge. Similarly, until recent developments in space photography, conventional maps omitted information about the atmosphere. My ambition was to bring the atmospheric dimension back to the perception of the real. My essay Terror from the Air was extracted from Sphären. It is called ‘Air Trembling’ in German, and is the introductory part of the third volume of the Sphären trilogy. Everything in these works is about the reconstruction of atmospheric perception.
EM One of the fundamental arguments in Terror from the Air is that classical warfare ineradicably changed with the German deployment of chlorine gas during the second battle of Ypres on 22 April 1915. It is your contention that, with this first use of chemical warfare, a new kind of ‘atmo-terrorism’ has been released upon the world, one in which the environment rather than the body is attacked. However, terrorism as a style of warfare has been present in the West as far back as the first encounters between European armies and indigenous or tribal groups: for example, night-time raids, camouflage and hit-and-run offensives. How are these examples distinct from the use of gas in the battlefields in 1915?
PS It’s ‘only’ a technical difference. As Clausewitz [Carl von Clausewitz, 1780–1831, Prussian military theorist and strategist] demonstrated in his book, Vom Kriege [On War, 1832], in every war there is an element of excess, of montée aux extrême [rising to the extreme] – every war accelerates towards something worse. In all kinds of war, the temptation is very strong not only to fight against the enemy one-to-one but to destroy its environment – to make the fateful step from the duel to the practice of extinction. In the 20th century, montée aux extrême has developed a new technical means, such as chemical warfare. This is what I suggest in my essay on modern warfare.
EM Who coined the term montée aux extrême?
PS René Girard. He published a book on Clausewitz, Achever Clausewitz [Finishing Clausewitz, 1997]. I think Girard is the most important theorist on the competitive behaviour of human beings.
EM In his book Le Part Maudit [The Accursed Share, 1949; published in English, 1991], Georges Bataille discusses life originating from the heat of the sun. How do you think the fear of weapons of mass destruction in the atomic age changed our traditional perception of the sun from life-giver to ultimate destroyer?
PS I feel quite close to Bataille when he says that life on earth in general, and human life in particular, depends on this absurd generosity from the sun. However, his theories are affected by a certain blindness – he ignores the positive aspects of the greenhouse effect (which I use here in the original sense of the term), without which the heat of the sun could not be absorbed adequately and the surface temperature of the Earth would be minus 15 to minus 18 degrees centigrade, which is unlivable for most biological life forms. So, emphasizing the positive aspects of the sun alone is an error if it is not combined with a discussion of the atmosphere. On the one hand, we have civilized and cultivated ourselves through the use of atmospheric modifications thanks to modern air-conditioning, but, on the other, employed atmospheric terrorism. The classical study of the sun, or heliology, makes the assumption that there is a strong analogy between God and the sun; the sun as the physical manifestation of God. But we have to take into account that the deepest ambition of the 20th century is the ‘victory over the sun’ – the title of one of the most important works of art, in my opinion, to come out of the Russian revolution – a Futurist opera staged in 1913 by a group of artists called ‘Soyuz Molodyozhi’ [Union of the Youth]. The production team included Aleksei Kruchenykh, Mikhail Matyushin, Velimir Khlebnikov and Kasimir Malevich. The opera explored the idea that the Earth will become a sun and, therefore, independent. This is the end-point of the atmospheric movement of modern times – that as long as the Earth is dependent on an outside source, the dream of human autonomy will never be fulfilled. But if we succeed in creating an artificial sun on the surface of the Earth, then we’ll become independent, a God-like race, the masters of the universe. And, at least symbolically, there is a link between the dreams of the Russian Revolution and the American physicists who managed through the Manhattan Project to create an artificial sun. The fire of the atomic bomb dropped by the Americans on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the only time this terrible weapon has been employed on the battleground, which proves the 20th century to be the age of atmospheric warfare. Nothing can be like it was before – this is the connection between Hiroshima and Auschwitz and Ypres.
EM Moving from Bataille to another 20th-century theorist who is of central importance to your work, I’m interested in how you apply Gaston Bachelard’s ‘myths’ of air, water and fire into ‘sphereology’.
PS In that he was one of the authors who privileged the rediscovery of the atmospheric, Bachelard certainly played a role in my thinking. In my younger days I read him, but when I wrote the trilogy, aside from a few quotations from his book L’air et les songes [Air and Dreams, 1943], he wasn’t central to my thinking. Although we share a certain predisposition toward the phenomenological tradition and also a combination of the psychoanalytical and phenomenological aspects, the emphasis in my work is very different from his.
EM Do you think the German and French academies have more respect for Bachelard’s work than the American academy, where he is not part of the philosophical canon?
PS Bachelard deserves respect as a classical author. I cannot comment on the politics of the American academy, but his writing should not be missing from the canon.
EM Many recording and sonic technologies were developed in tandem with military research. I’m curious if you think technologies such as magnetic tape, wireless transmission, radar and sonar contributed to an environment of ‘atmo-terrorism’ where human speech becomes lost in the vast matrix of the airwaves.
PS We have created an artificial sound environment that has no parallel in the history of human societies. Until the 19th century, voices had to be produced and perceived in situ – the source of sound had to be quite close to the receiver. It is only through radio technology that the phenomenon of long-range acoustic communication has been made possible and through sonospheric coherence that Postmodern reality is created. World War I was a print war – the mobilization of soldiers could only be achieved through print technology, which is relatively close to radio technology, in that reading means to hear or hallucinate voices from different speakers – for instance, you hear the voice of the German emperor who sent you to the Front. There is constant movement from the Gutenberg world to the radio world: the world of waves and the world of print are systematically linked by a common feature, which, to put it in classical terms, is actio in distans – action at a distance.
EM How would you characterize the movement from print to communication via airwaves to the condition that Paul Virilio terms ‘telepresence’ – a set of technologies which allow a person to feel as if they are present, to give the appearance that they are present, or to have an effect at a location other than their true location. Is that yet another progression?
PS It is a kind of chain of causality. The Emperor in Rome will put his signature on a document that will be read on the periphery of the Empire, in, say, Alexandria. The distance from Rome to Alexandria is 2,000 kilometres but the soul of the reader, the receiver of this order, is prepared to perform exactly what the author has commanded. In this way, the world of the written commander prepares for the world of the airwaves.
EM How do we apply these rules for communication in the classical age to the so-called ‘hypermodern period’ when the speed of the message has been accelerated to a point at which it appears omnipresent or telepresent?
PS The power of the message presupposes that the synchronization of the sender and receiver has been pre-established to prepare the receiver for a position of obedience towards the message. Now, the proliferation of communication has resulted in the weakening of the message.
em Is there a direct link between the failure of the ‘message’ and the way people now communicate in metropolises, apartments and skyscrapers, for example?
PS Certainly. Urbanization is the main feature of contemporary culture. In the third volume of Sphären, I deal almost exclusively with the relationship between urban communication and the luxurious functions of modern life.
EM Do you equate all forms of modern communication in urban space to a kind of advertising à la Walter Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk [known in English as The Arcades Project, Benjamin’s unfinished collection of notes assembled between 1927 and 1940 that reflect on the various lifestyles and dwellings of post-revolutionary Paris]?
PS The Sphären project is about the creation of a specific human interior. On a metaphysical level, the meaning of my theory is that human beings never live outside of nature but always create a kind of existential space around themselves. Urban spaces are a humanized environment where nature is completely replaced by a man-made reality. This can provoke a kind of alienation; a sense of loss within cities that you might normally expect to feel in nature. In the third volume of Sphären, in a long chapter titled ‘The Foam City’, I try to describe these multiplicities of modern life in terms of foam-making – all individuals are living in a specific bubble within a communicating foam.
EM For those readers who are unfamiliar with your theories of bubbles and foams, what do you see as the fate of the traditional house in this larger progression or digression of dwelling in the 20th century?
PS My ‘foam city’ is a theory of living in an apartment. An apartment is obviously a place that contains the means of communication to link you with the outer world, yet it is also a spatialized immune system. It immunizes you against the influences of the outer world but it simultaneously links you to the Mitwelt [‘social world’], which is a form of ‘connected isolation’ – a term coined by Thom Mayne, an American architect, in the early 1970s. ‘Connected isolation’ could be a Heideggerian concept. It is probably one of the most profound concepts that has ever been developed within modern architectural theory because it contains a judgment on the modern way of life. I don’t believe in Heidegger’s hypothesis of modern times as the time of homelessness. What I see is a transformation in all these traditional complaints about modern homelessness into a language of immunology. For me, practical metaphysics has to be translated into the language of general immunology because human beings, due to their openness to the world, are extremely vulnerable – from a biological level, to the juridical and social levels, to the symbolic and ritual levels. We are always trying to create and find a protective environment. The task of building convincing immune systems is so broad and so all-encompassing that there is no space left for nostalgic longings. This is an ongoing task that has to be performed and theorized with every technique that is available. There is no way back.
EM In this new ‘foam city’ has Benjamin’s classical description of the flâneur been made obsolete?
PS I have quoted Benjamin in a very positive way. In some of the most interesting parts of Passagen-Werk, he develops the idea that the bourgeoisie of the 19th century created these artificial interiors. And so when the world became globalized, the bourgeoisie in their salons wanted to absorb everything that is exterior into this interiority. According to Benjamin, the art of the bourgeois form of life was, in the 19th century, the effort to neutralize everything that is exterior and to create an interior that contains the totality. And that is what the arcades are all about. In the arcades, in the passage, the whole world of production – the whole world of trading and exploring – is neutralized and re-presented in the presence of the commodity. The commodities bring these outer totalities into the apartment of the bourgeoisie. Between the ocean and the apartment is the passage; the arcade where all these goods can be bought.
EM You have made the distinction in past interviews that between, for instance, 19th-century Paris and late 20th-century Los Angeles, there is a shift from the arcade to the shopping mall and the stadium, in the space of these ventilated hyper-interiors.
PS Yes. But between the modern shopping mall and the primitive arcade of the early 19th century, there was a step that is very symbolic. This is the London Crystal Palace, which is for me the major symbol of the Postmodern construction of reality. [A cast-iron and glass building designed by Joseph Paxton to house The Great Exhibition of 1851. It included 14,000 exhibitors from around the world, displaying examples of the latest developments in technology.] Because the power of interiorization here reached a kind of historic maximum, I chose it as the title for my most recent book on Postmodern capitalism: The Crystal Palace. In German the title is Im Weltinnenraum des Kapitals [the big interior of capitalism]. Weltinnenraum is a word borrowed from Rainer Maria Rilke who, in a poem from 1914, created a vision of a fantastic space in which everything communicates with everything else. In his vision of pantheistic communication, everything is produced by psychic powers, whereas in the Weltinnenraum of capitalism, the communicative force is money.
EM Finally, when you speak of a symbolic immunology, it’s difficult not to discuss a literal spreading of disease as well, such as the most recent phenomenon of the swine flu outbreak that was defined as a potentially global exterminator, particularly in cities. So you begin to see the results of space becoming more dense and people living in closer and closer quarters, where there is a rising fear of a single strain of disease or one weapon wiping out civilization.
PS That is quite correct. Because people feel very strongly that their private constructions of immunity are endangered by the presence of too many constructions of immune spheres which are pressed against each other and destroy each other. That is why in the United States there is a new type of discourse that encourages obscene forms of speech. For instance, the new term, ‘toxic people’, came from the USA and is invading Europe today. This means things are going wrong and the immune situation of Americans is collapsing.

Erik Morse is the author of Dreamweapon: Spacemen 3 and the Birth of Spiritualized (Omnibus Press, 2004) and, with Tav Falco, the upcoming Memphis Underground: A Dual Narrative of the Bluff City (Creation Books, 2010). His writing has been published in Arthur, Bomb, Bookforum, Filmmaker, Interview, Semiotext(e)’s Animal Shelter and the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

Source: http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/something_in_the_air/

Hints of Personal Trauma in Every Note

2009-10-30T08:54:00.001-07:00

The Austrian composer Alexander Zemlinsky didn’t attach a programmatic description to his String Quartet No. 2 (1915), but biographers have suggested that the work reflected tragic events in his life and the lives of those close to him. He was devastated when his student Alma Schindler rejected him and married Mahler in 1902. Several years later, the painter Richard Gerstl committed suicide after an affair with Zemlinsky’s sister, Mathilde, who was married to Schoenberg.

The remarkable young Escher String Quartet gave a bristling performance of the work on Wednesday at Alice Tully Hall, presented by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.

Pierre Lapointe, the group’s violist, writes that the first time he heard Zemlinsky’s quartet, he was “scared by its craziness.” This densely chromatic, symphonic and potently expressive piece seems to evoke the personal traumas of Zemlinsky’s inner circle, with an anguished polyphony of vehement discourse tempered with gentler, bittersweet interludes.

The ensemble offered a passionate rendition, conveying the full spectrum of grief and turbulence in this 40-minute work of Wagnerian proportions. Each member of the group — Adam Barnett-Hart, first violinist; Wu Jie, second violinist; Andrew Janss, cellist; and Mr. Lapointe — played with a glowing tone and insightful musicianship, resulting in a characterful whole.

Many of Zemlinsky’s colleagues, including Schoenberg, deemed his sensual, late-romantic music too conservative. The program also included the Five Movements for String Quartet (1909) by Webern, a student of Schoenberg who helped persuade Mathilde to return to her husband.

Webern’s stark, spare piece, with its atonal language, is an important early work in the modernist movement, a dramatic contrast to the luxuriant scores that Zemlinsky, Strauss and Mahler composed around the same time.

The program was framed with refined interpretations of two works by Schubert, opening with the Quartettsatz in C minor (D. 703) and concluding with the String Quartet in G (D. 887). The ensemble’s full-blooded rendition of the last quartet was particularly impressive, with the first violin, cello and viola melodies played with sumptuous elegance.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/30/arts/music/30quartet.html?ref=arts&pagewanted=print

Dune Anti-Desertification Architecture

2009-10-26T12:56:00.000-07:00

Dune Anti-Desertification Architecture investigates adaptive (as opposed to mitigatory) strategies leading to the creation of a climate-conscious
architecture that responds to the extreme environments of tomorrow’s globally-warmed world. Highly speculative yet buildable, the scheme aims to find innovative solutions to combat desertification in the Sahel region of Africa, where sand dunes are currently moving southward at a breathtaking pace of around 600m per year, ruining the land and making it impossible for the inhabitants of this area to make a living or even stay in their homes.

The forced migration of desertification refugees is perhaps more threatening in Nigeria than anywhere else. With a population of over 140 million people, Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa, with serious desertification issues throughout its northern states. It was Nigeria’s former president, Olusegun Obasanjo, who initiated the anti-desertification Green Wall Sahara initiative in 2005. This pan-African scheme seeks to plant a shelterbelt across the continent, from Mauritania in the west to Djibouti in the east, in an attempt to stop the dunes from migrating. The trees are being planted right now.

An architectural response to this campaign would be to go beyond the mere planting of a mitigatory shelterbelt. Habitable spaces can be created in close proximity to the trees. By cutting through the sand dunes and digging down to find water and shade, an artificial oasis can be formed underground.

The sand is solidified using bacillus pasteurii, a microorganism with which professor Jason DeJong has turned sand into sandstone in a mere 1,400 minutes. This technology of organically cementing networks of sand dunes into habitable barriers that stop the desert from spreading has never been proposed before, but on hearing about this project, the professor was enthusiastic: “I do think the application you are talking about is possible”. I’m proposing anti-desertifi cation structures made out of the desert itself, sand-stopping devices made of sand: a poetic proposal that simultaneously works in a sustainable way with local materials and assets.

Source:http://www.eartharchitecture.org/

Book Excerpt: A Bomb in Every Issue

2009-10-25T03:23:00.000-07:00

Hunter S. Thompson, a pill-popping monkey, Black Panthers, and CIA dirty tricks: Scenes from the short, crazy life of Ramparts, the muckraking magazine that paved the way for Mother Jones.
—By Peter Richardson

In his absorbing new book, A Bomb In Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America (The New Press), Peter Richardson chronicles the rise and fall of Ramparts, the groundbreaking muckraking magazine of the 1960s and early 1970s. In its heyday, Ramparts was one of the nation's most influential—and controversial—magazines, known for its unique mix of leftist politics, exclusive reporting, and original design.

"Ramparts changed national media and politics, not only with its stories on civil rights, Vietnam, Black Power, and the CIA, but also by demonstrating that mainstream media techniques could be used to advance leftist politics," writes Richardson. "That precedent would fuel progressive journalism for a generation." Its influence lives on in publications such as Mother Jones, which was founded by three former Ramparts editors and has published reporting by many writers who cut their teeth in its pages. Below, a few excerpts from Richardson's book, featuring cameo appearances by several journalists who will be familiar to our readers.
**********************************************************************************

In May 1962, a magazine was born. Published in suburban Menlo Park, California, it described itself as "a forum for the mature American Catholic" focusing on "those positive principles of Hellenic-Christian tradition which have shaped and sustained our civilization for the past two thousand years." Its first issues debated the moral shortcomings of J.D. Salinger and Tennessee Williams. According to one designer, it looked like the poetry annual of a Midwestern girls school.

By 1968, the magazine had moved to the bohemian North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco, added generous doses of sex and humor, adopted a cutting-edge design, forged links to the Black Panther Party, exposed illegal CIA activities in America and Vietnam, published the diaries of Che Guevara and staff writer Eldridge Cleaver, and boosted its monthly circulation to almost 250,000. A Time magazine headline from that period—"A Bomb in Every Issue"—described its impact. Seven years later, it was out of business for good.

At its peak, Ramparts was both a platform and a seedbed for a generation of reporters, activists, and social critics. It contributors included Noam Chomsky, Seymour Hersh, Bobby Seale, Tom Hayden, Angela Davis, Susan Sontag, William Greider, Jonathan Kozol, and a young Christopher Hitchens, who wrote for Ramparts under a pseudonym, Matthew Blaire. More surprising, perhaps, was the magazine's Washington DC contributing editor—Brit Hume, now a Fox News host and anchor. Two Ramparts writers left to create Rolling Stone, and three editors decamped to found Mother Jones.

Ramparts wasn't The Nation, Harper's, or the Atlantic, whose histories stretch back to the days of Mark Twain and Henry James. At its flashpoint, Ramparts was something else altogether: the journalistic equivalent of a rock band, a mercurial confluence of raw talent, youthful energy, and showmanship. Its sheer incandescence blew minds, launched solo careers, and spawned imitators. It was born, lived, bred, and died. Because it was mortal, not monumental, genealogy may be more important than longevity in understanding its significance. If so, Ramparts should be judged not only by what it published, but also by the subsequent work it made possible. By this measure, it accomplished a great deal.

Because Ramparts folded in 1975, much of its influence must now be sought elsewhere: in scholarly histories of the CIA, in the nation's unending fascination with the Black Panthers, in the continuing success of Rolling Stone and Mother Jones, in the energetic repudiations of the New Left by some former staffers such as David Horowitz, and in the netroots and media reform movements of today. Although Ramparts published its last issue more than three decades years ago, its story is far from over.

• • •

By the mid-'60s, Ramparts had shed its early identity as a Catholic periodical and become an investigative and cultural magazine. In 1964, a young San Francisco journalist named Warren Hinckle became its executive editor. An eye-patch-wearing bon vivant with a showman's touch, Hinckle injected a new feistiness—and occasionally, chaos—into the once-staid magazine.

The big question in the office was whether or not Hinckle would appear that day. When he did, the energy level rose dramatically. But even when he was in town, Hinckle usually worked out of Cookie Picetti's, a North Beach bar located near the old Hall of Justice. It was a favorite spot for police officers and other law enforcement types, and some of Hinckle's left-wing colleagues were uneasy about drinking there. Hinckle typically silenced their protests by challenging them to name a decent left-wing bar. Managing editor Robert Scheer also objected to Hinckle's favorite spots, both in San Francisco and on the road, but not on ideological grounds; his main complaint was that there weren't enough women there.

The staff learned to function without Hinckle in the office, but occasionally a junior member was dispatched to find him. On his first day as a part-time office assistant, Reese Erlich was told to summon Hinckle to check final galleys. He found Hinckle lunching with advertising executive Howard Gossage at Enrico's, a North Beach bistro a few blocks away. When Erlich delivered his message, Hinckle replied, "Fuck you, kid." Erlich, who was awaiting trial for his antiwar protests in the East Bay, was unfazed; the Oakland police had been far scarier. "May I quote you on that?" he asked. When Hinckle assented, Erlich cheerfully shot back, "Fuck you, too." He was promoted shortly thereafter.

Hinckle's style was nothing if not kinetic. Staff writer Adam Hochschild recalled it this way:

He raced through each 18-hour day with dizzying speed. All action at the magazine swirled around him: a pet monkey named Henry Luce would sit on his shoulder while he paced his office, drink in hand, shouting instructions into a speakerphone across the room to someone in New York about a vast promotional mailing; on his couch would be sitting, slightly dazed, a French television crew, or Malcolm X's widow (who arrived one day surrounded by a dozen bodyguards with loaded shotguns), or the private detective to whom Hinckle had given the title Criminology Editor. Then would follow an afternoon-long lunch where Hinckle would consume a dozen Scotches without showing the slightest effect and sketch dummies of the next issue's pages on the restaurant's placemats. Finally he'd be off on the night plane to see new backers in the East.

In New York, the maelstrom continued. James Ridgeway's 1969 profile of Hinckle in the New York Times Magazine described his fantastical performances at the Algonquin Hotel.

In the dining room Hinckle would be recounting his scheme for a publishing empire, expanding Ramparts, starting one, two, or three radio and television stations, starting an author's agency, setting up teams of reporters who would get the goods on LBJ, NATO, the Pope, etc. Ramparts would publish books, set up book clubs, start a syndicate… If one dared to ask where the money was really going to come from, Hinckle would fall back into his chair and suck on a grasshopper while Scheer lunged forward. "What's the matter?" he'd say, "Got no guts?"

Hinckle's effect on his colleagues, especially younger ones, was dazzling. "Hinckle was amazing," said Michael Ansara, a Harvard Students for a Democratic Society leader and Ramparts researcher. "As an undergraduate, I'd visit him at the Algonquin. He'd start talking in the shower, continue the conversation while putting on his tuxedo, and then we'd be off for oysters with Abby Rockefeller." The company Hinckle kept was part of the glamour. "I once had dinner with him and Oriana Fallaci," Ansara said. "I was about eighteen years old. I'd never seen a woman like her, much less had dinner with her. He was the most cosmopolitan, flamboyant, creative guy I'd ever seen."

• • •

Ramparts reported stories that the mainstream press would not touch. In April 1966, Robert Scheer revealed that the CIA had secretly used Michigan State University to train South Vietnamese police and write the country's constitution. The expose led the agency to order a "rundown" on Ramparts. It eventually investigated 127 writers and researchers and 200 other Americans connected to the magazine.

As Ramparts dug into the less savory aspects of America's most powerful institutions, the staff suspected that the government was watching them. One of their colleagues, William Turner, confirmed that suspicion. Raised Catholic in Buffalo, Turner had joined the FBI, received training in wiretapping and burglary, and listened in on telephone conversations in the Bay Area. But he had run afoul of J. Edgar Hoover after objecting to the FBI director's characterization of Martin Luther King as "the most notorious liar in the country." Turner left the FBI after ten years of service, settled in Marin County, and wrote a piece about the bureau's failure to obtain convictions on civil rights violations in the south. After his Ramparts articles appeared, Hoover wrote about him in an internal memo, "It's a shame we can't nail this jackal."

Turner assured his Ramparts colleagues that the government was watching them. "Wiretaps are your tax dollars at work," he told art director Dugald Stermer. "If your phone isn't bugged, we're not doing our job."

There were other indications, too, that the magazine's adversaries were trying to undermine its efforts. Stermer was audited in two consecutive years, and when Turner arrived at the office the morning after Easter 1967, he found shattered windows, fire extinguisher goo covering the furniture, and an IBM Selectric typewriter lying askew in the toilet. Turner suspected that the CIA had ransacked the office but saw no signs of forced entry. Years later, Hinckle telephoned Turner from Cookie Picetti's; a former law enforcement officer and GOP official had just confessed to him about burglarizing the Ramparts office in 1967. Hinckle asked Turner to question his new acquaintance about his burglary story. "But he couldn't have done it," Hinckle added, "because Gene Marine and I did it." Hinckle and Marine, a staff writer, had trashed the office after a drinking session at Tosca, another North Beach bar. But the burglar claimed that his caper had occurred two nights earlier, and he convinced Hinckle by producing the editor's bar receipts from Cookie Picetti's along with some Ramparts files. He told Turner that right-wing organizations had sponsored the burglaries, and that the findings were shared with CIA agents.

Eldridge Cleaver was hired as a staff writer in 1966, and his writing for the magazine formed the basis for Soul on Ice. Cleaver joined the Black Panthers while at Ramparts. In one legendary incident, he invited Malcolm X's widow, Betty Shabazz, and her Panther bodyguards to the magazine's offices.

Cleaver heard a secretary's terrified announcement that 20 armed men were invading the office. "Don't worry," he told her, "they're friends." Huey Newton and a detachment of Black Panthers were providing security for Betty Shabazz. After wading through the office's hallways, which were clogged with curious staffers, Cleaver stepped onto the sidewalk and noticed that traffic was stopped, spectators were gathered, and police cars were approaching with sirens blaring.

Cleaver brought Shabazz back to his office and conducted a short interview. Meanwhile, Newton stood at the window with his shotgun, observing the scene on the street. By that time, a police captain and drinking buddy of Hinckle's had arrived. "We seem to have a tense situation," the captain told Hinckle. "What are we going to do?" Hinckle suggested that they urge everyone to relax and adjourn to Andre's for a drink. But the Panthers weren't in the mood for refreshments.

After Shabazz departed, Cleaver, Newton, and other Panthers lingered outside the office. One of the police officers directed the Panthers not to point their weapons at him. Newton stared at the officer, who undid the strap on his holster. "Huey, cool it man. Let's split, man," Bobby Seale implored Newton, grabbing at Newton's jacket on his right arm. "Don't hold my hand, brother," Newton told him. "I let go of his hand right away," Seale wrote later, "because I know that's his shooting hand."

As Cleaver and others looked on, Newton approached the officer. "What's the matter, you got an itchy trigger finger?" The officer made no reply. "You want to draw your gun?" Newton asked. The officer remained silent while his colleagues counseled him to keep his cool. "OK, you big, fat, racist pig, draw your gun!" Newton said, loading a shell into his shotgun. "I'm waiting." The other officers stepped out of the line of fire, and Cleaver retreated into the doorway of the Ramparts office. His first thought, he later wrote, was "Goddam, that nigger is c-r-a-z-y!" After a tense moment, the officer sighed and lowered his head. The spell was broken. "Huey almost laughed in his face," Seale wrote later, "and we started backing up slowly." The Panthers returned to their cars and left the scene.

• • •

The story that really put Ramparts on the map was its 1967 scoop that the CIA had been funding the National Student Association (NSA) and other domestic front groups. But the agency nearly beat Ramparts to the punch.

The head of the CIA's Directorate of Plans learned that Ramparts was preparing a story on the NSA's connection to the CIA. He put Richard Ober, a counterintelligence specialist, in charge of suppressing the story. After reviewing his legal options, Ober realized he couldn't prevent Ramparts from running its story and decided to focus instead on damage control. He planned to stage a press conference at which NSA leaders would admit to their CIA relationship and insist that it was over. The admission would make the Ramparts story look like old news when it appeared.

But Hinckle had his own informants in the NSA, and he discovered the CIA's plan before the press conference could be held. "I was damned if I was going to let the CIA scoop me," recalled Hinckle. "I bought full-page advertisements in the New York Times and Washington Post to scoop myself, which seemed the preferable alternative." On February 13, 1967, the day before the ads appeared, acting Secretary of State Nicholas Katzenbach wrote a secret memorandum to the White House suggesting that the State Department make a "bare bones" admission. Meanwhile, one of the student leaders confirmed the Ramparts story to Hinckle. A surprised Hinckle later wrote, "It is a rare thing in this business when you say bang and somebody says I'm dead."

Immediately after Hinckle's ads appeared, eight Congressmen, including San Francisco Democrat Phil Burton, signed a letter of protest to President Johnson. "We were appalled to learn today that the Central Intelligence Agency has been subsidizing the National Student Association for more than a decade," the letter said. "It represents an unconscionable extension of power by an agency of government over institutions outside its jurisdiction. This disclosure leads us and many others here and abroad to believe that the CIA can be as much a threat to American as to foreign democratic institutions."

• • •

Ramparts published articles by many up-and-coming journalists, including Seymour Hersh, Lowell Bergman, and Hunter S. Thompson. In 1967, Thompson stopped by the office for lunch with Hinckle.

In the end, Thompson's visit wasn't healthy for Henry Luce. When Thompson and Hinckle returned to the office after their lunch, they found Thompson's backpack open, pills of various colors strewn on the floor, and a deranged Henry Luce racing around the office. He was rushed to the veterinarian's to have his stomach pumped. An unsympathetic Thompson later wrote to Hinckle, "That fucking monkey should be killed—or at least arrested—on general principles." But Henry Luce remained at large until his penchant for self-interference became a distraction. "He kept jerking off, so he had to go," Hinckle said later. A sympathetic secretary took him home to Marin County.

Amid the hijinks, Ramparts was ultimately known for its solid, serious reporting on abuses of government power, civil rights, and the war in Vietnam. While establishment publications dismissed the magazine's radical politics, its journalism still had a profound impact on readers, such Martin Luther King, Jr., who read its graphic January 1967 photo essay on the American bombing of Vietnam.
That month, Dr. King left for Jamaica for four weeks of solitude and writing. At the airport, he bought several magazines and met his friend, Bernard Lee, for lunch. Lee later recalled that King reacted strongly to the Vietnam story.

When he came to Ramparts magazine, he stopped. He froze as he looked at the pictures from Vietnam. He saw a picture of a Vietnamese mother holding her dead baby, a baby killed by our military. Then Martin just pushed the plate of food away from him. I looked up and said, "Doesn't it taste any good?," and he answered, "Nothing will ever taste any good for me until I do everything I can to end that war."

King wasn't the only one moved by that piece; many staff members were in tears while working on the spread, and it gave art director Dugald Stermer nightmares. He later said it was "just about the nastiest job I've ever had."
When he returned from Jamaica, King spoke against the war in Los Angeles, but he saved his strongest comments for a speech at the Riverside Church on April 4, exactly one year before his assassination. King listed seven reasons for stopping the war and urged the U.S. government, which he called "the major purveyor of violence in the world," to end the bombing and set a date for troop withdrawal. "We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world—a world that borders on our doors," he concluded. "If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight."
After the speech, King was buoyant. Although he was criticized in the mainstream media, he was satisfied with his position. In his study of King during this time, David Garrow noted that he "finally made the moral declaration he had felt obligated to deliver ever since that January day when he saw the photos in Ramparts."

• • •
By the early '70s, Ramparts had hit hard times, financially and politically. Hinckle and Scheer were replaced by David Horowitz and Peter Collier, who took the magazine in a more narrowly ideological direction. "Ramparts started broad and anarchic, with lots of different perspectives," Lowell Bergman recalled. "But as with many organizations, the leadership slowly took control. They thought they knew better, and Horowitz thought he knew everything." In Collier's view, Ramparts peaked between early 1967 and Hinckle's departure at the end of 1968. During that period, the magazine embodied youthful enthusiasm: "It was like a movie where Mickey Rooney jumps up and says, 'Hey kids, let's put on a play!'" But by the time he and Horowitz took over, the magazine's moment had passed. "Everything else was epilogue," said Collier.
In December 1974, Betty Van Patter, a Ramparts bookkeeper whom Horowitz had recommended to the Black Panthers to help with their accounting, disappeared and was later found murdered. Her death, still unsolved but allegedly carried out by the Panthers, was a turning point for the magazine and much of its staff, particularly Horowitz, who would become a prominent neoconservative gadfy.

Ramparts published its final issue in August 1975.

Source: http://www.motherjones.com/media/2009/10/bomb-every-issue-ramparts-magazine-excerpt

Interview with Scott Walker

2009-10-21T06:37:00.000-07:00

In the sixties, he was part of the celebrated pop group the Walker Brothers - known as America's Beatles - but he rebelled against stardom and fled to a monastery before going solo. Since then, 'pop's own Salinger' has retreated ever further from the mainstream with each album. Now, as Jarvis Cocker, Damon Albarn and others line up to perform his work in a series of concerts, he tells Sean O'Hagan, in a rare interview, why he's happy to be a loner

Scott Walker was an only child and a nomadic one. His father, a geologist, travelled throughout America and the young Noel Scott Engel never had time to settle for long in one place. Born in Ohio in 1943, he lived in Texas for a time and then in California. 'I never made friends that easily,' he says, sounding not at all regretful. 'I don't mind being on my own because when you're on your own a lot as a child, your imagination grows. That is still the case with me.'

Wrapped up in his solitude, Walker can work on the lyrics of a single song for several years. On his last album, The Drift, a track called 'Cue' took six years to complete. 'It was the toughest song to write, but my most successful song lyrically,' he says, his mid-Atlantic tones soft but clear, his eyes half hidden beneath the peak of his ever-present baseball cap. 'It's sharp, it's angular, it all just chimes right. In that song, everything is exactly as I want it.'

'Cue', though, even by Scott Walker's recent standards, is a difficult song. The lyrics are dense and elliptical, the pace funereal and the atmosphere one of creeping anxiety. He delivers it in that doomy, semi-operatic tone that has long replaced the melodramatic flourish of his early solo albums. Featuring a chorus of wailing voices straight out of Dante's Inferno, it is not a song you would turn to for solace or uplift. It is, in fact, another of Scott Walker's musical excursions to hell. Can he appreciate why some of us find his later work wilfully impenetrable, too far out, in fact, to take in.

'Well, I never think that way,' he says, sighing. 'I think it sounds pretty normal so I'm kind of shocked when people say it's too much. For me,' he says, laughing, 'it's never far out enough.'

We are sitting in the bright, airy living room of his manager's spacious house in London's leafy Holland Park, the place where Scott Walker chooses to suffer through the few interviews he grants these days. While no longer as reclusive as he once was - Mojo magazine once called him 'pop's own Salinger' - he remains one of music's most famous loners. 'I'm not a recluse,' he says at one point when I ask him what he does when he is not making music. 'I'm definitely not that. I have friends and I go to dinner. I like people, but sometimes I can't wait to get away and be on my own again. I am solitary, though. I need to be for my work. That's the deal.'

Next week, he will break cover when the Barbican theatre hosts an ambitious series of concerts called Drifting and Tilting: the Songs of Scott Walker. The 70-minute programme will comprise eight songs taken from The Drift and 1995's equally challenging Tilt. Scott will be there each night, but not on stage, not singing. 'I'll help mix the live sound,' he says. 'I got spooked years ago about performing and never repaired the damage.'

In his place will be a succession of guest vocalists including Jarvis Cocker, Damon Albarn, Dot Allison, Gavin Friday and classical baritone Grant Doyle. A 40-piece orchestra will also be in attendance alongside Walker's studio group and a contemporary dance troupe. 'It will be a tightrope walk,' he says. 'There is never enough time to prepare these things, but if it's going to be a train wreck, it will certainly be an interesting one. There will be one or two surprises, too.'

Those surprises will not, alas, include performances of any of his older songs. There will be no 'Big Louise', in all its swooning sadness, no 'We Came Through' in all its galloping cavalry clatter, no 'Rosemary' or 'Jackie' in all their lovelorn glory. No Jacques Brel covers either, nor Walker Brothers hits.

'When we began discussing the event, it was taken as a given that Scott would not be singing and that none of his older work would feature,' says his friend and collaborator Michael Morris, co-director of Artangel, the arts company which specialises in ambitious, site-specific events. 'The performances will be dictated by the songs which are semi-operatic. The show will take the form of a semi-staged song cycle, almost like a lieder recital but a bit more dramatic. We're hoping,' adds Morris, 'that the audience doesn't clap between songs.'

In person, Scott Walker does not look like a living legend. His clothes are casual - faded jeans, denim jacket, trainers - and his manner diffident but charming. Throughout the interview, he sits perched, thin and bird-like, on the edge of a huge, floral-patterned sofa as if, at any moment, he might take flight. He looks much younger than his 65 years but his eyes, when I catch a glimpse of them beneath that pulled-down baseball cap, have a flickering intensity that speaks of deep unease. It is hard to imagine that he was ever a heart-throb who induced mass hysteria. For a moment, though, back in the mid-Sixties, the Walker Brothers, who weren't brothers at all, were known as 'America's Beatles'.

'Oh, it was amazing at first,' he says, smiling, 'but a little goes a long way. I was not cut out for that world. I love pop music, but I didn't have the temperament for fame.'

On their most famous song, and second No 1, 1966's 'The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore', he sang the prophetic lines: 'Loneliness is a cloak you wear, a deep shade of blue is always there'. He could have been describing his future self, both his personality and his music. The song was teenage heartbreak writ large and remains perhaps the most dramatic example of a certain strain of mid-Sixties pop melodrama, wherein everything - the music, the delivery, the production - was overloaded. It possesses what Johnny Marr would later describe as 'that gothic and beautiful gloom that was as much about England in the Sixties as was "Day Tripper"'.

The group imploded in 1967, with Scott frustrated to the point of breakdown by the formula into which their songs had fallen. His aversion to fame, and the fan hysteria that came with it, sent him running for the hills. He spent a week in a monastery in 1966, and the following year, there were reports that he had attempted suicide.

The Scott Walker who emerged on the solo albums that followed was a different kind of pop star, a crooner who veered between mainstream, Jack Jones-style balladeering and middle European angst. His hero was the Flemish chansonnier Jacques Brel, whose music he had been turned on to by a German Bunny Girl he had picked up at a party in the Playboy Club on Park Lane. 'I don't listen to Brel that much now,' he says, 'but in those days, hearing him sing was like a hurricane blowing through the room.'

By 1969's Scott 4, on which his own songwriting finally came to the fore, his themes were darker and a quote from Camus graced the sleeve: 'A man's work is nothing but his slow trek to rediscover through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.' The pop idol had metamorphosed into an arbiter of existential angst.

'It has always been a certain kind of European writer who has captivated me,' he says. 'It started when I was a drop-out from high school in California and read Sartre, who I don't care for much now, but back then he had a huge impact on my way of thinking about the world. And Kafka, of course. Those writers were my main sources alongside the European films I saw in the Sixties in an art cinema on Wilshire Boulevard, Bergman and Kurosawa and the like.'

Those solo records have influenced several generations of pop mavericks from Marc Almond and David Sylvian in the Eighties to the Divine Comedy a decade later. Jarvis Cocker is a fan and persuaded Walker to produce Pulp's 2001 album, We Love Life. Most recently, Alex Turner's other project, the Last Shadow Puppets, released their debut album, The Age of Understatement, which, despite its title, was a homage to Walker's orchestrated emotional melodramas.

He wrote Scott 4, he says, 'on drink', and fell into depression when it failed to sell like its predecessors. 'I snapped,' he says. 'The pressure was everywhere and, in my crazy imagination, I thought, "I'd better keep doing this just to stay in the game."' In desperation, he reformed the Walker Brothers, and the band had chart success again with the single 'No Regrets'. But his heart was not in it, at least until they went into the studio to record Nite Flights, their valedictory album from 1978, on which he let loose the full force of his teeming imagination.

At its centre is an extraordinary song called 'The Electrician', a symphonic ode to S&M that would not have sounded out of place on a Pasolini soundtrack. In the recent documentary film Scott Walker: 30 Century Man, an animated Brian Eno enthused about Nite Flights' sonic experimentation, while castigating the conservatism of most contemporary pop music. 'We haven't got any further than this,' he sighed. 'It's a disgrace.'

The album still sounds otherworldly and futuristic. After it, though, came six years of silence and, with 1984's Climate of Hunter album, the beginning of the enigma that is Scott Walker Mk3. Gone was the musical extravagance of old, replaced by a minimalist sound that bordered on ambience. Only half the songs had actual titles. On the first line of the opening track, 'Rawhide', he sang: 'This is how you disappear.' Then he disappeared again. Tilt was 10 years in the making, The Drift another 11. They both sound, in their emotional and tonal extremity, like nothing else in contemporary music.

'A lot of what I do is waiting,' he says. 'I begin always with the lyrics and they seem to take some considerable time. They have become more angular of late and now come in blocks of words. It's just a different way of writing. When I see the page and the lyrics, I see soldiers in a field. There's a lot of white space which represents me in a sense. It's an abstract way of putting it, but I see it that way visually.'

His songs, he says, are clear to him, but he does not like having to explain or analyse them. He admits, though, that his recent music requires a certain amount of effort and patience from the listener. 'I try to avoid cliché. I want to make it sound like nothing I have ever heard before,' he says, his low Californian drawl still detectable after a 40-year exile in Europe. 'All that guitar-based rock stuff - I just feel like I've heard it before so many times. It goes on and on and never seems to end. It's just the same narrow ground being worked over. It would drive me mad to have to work within those parameters.'

So he has gone the other way - into texture and dissonance. The music he makes with strangely tuned strings and off-key piano chords, is, he says, 'always dictated by the lyrics', which tend to be obscure and, at times, wilfully nonsensical. His songs often seem to be haunted by the darker narratives of the last century, by war, disease, displacement and genocide. 'Cue', for instance, seems to be about a bacterial plague carried by the 'flugleman' of the song's subtitle, a viral pestilence that spreads 'through the dormant wards and nurseries... in the lung-smeared slides and corridors'.

In the documentary, the most revealing insight into his work comes from his orchestrator, Brian Gascoigne (brother of Bamber), who says: 'He believes, and I take issue with this, that to convey a very strong emotion in the music, you have to be feeling it when you're making it. That couldn't be true because the people who are playing Bruckner and Mahler every night would be basket cases... after three of four hours in the studio, he is a basket case because he lives the thing with such emotion.'

How would Scott Walker describe his singular artistic sensibility? 'Essentially, I'm really trying to find a way to talk about the things that cannot be spoken of,' he says. 'I cannot fake that or take short cuts. There is an absurdity there, too, of course, and I hope that people pick up on that. Without the humour, it would just be heavy and boring. I hope,' he says, once more, 'people get that. If you're not connecting with the absurdity, you shouldn't be there.'

Scott Walker's late music, in its evocation of anxiety and horror, may, as Michael Morris suggests, be more comparable with the paintings of Francis Bacon than with any musical contemporary. His songs, if they can still be called that, are as far from the drift of contemporary pop as one could possibly imagine.

'Oh, I have long since stopped worrying about fitting in in any way,' he says, laughing. 'I'm an outsider, for sure. That suits me fine. Solitude is like a drug for me. I crave it.' Why, though, does it take so long to make a record, write a song? 'A certain amount of it is about making it difficult for myself. I'm not interested in traditional narrative, say, or in having pat endings to the songs. I want the sense in my music of a constant moving forward into an open future.'

Of late, though, his music often seems to be drifting towards the last final, awful silence. 'Perhaps,' he says, 'perhaps.' Does he ever, I ask, miss the old days, when his songs lasted three minutes, had verses and choruses and were easier to write? He laughs. 'Not really, no. I mean, back then, I could write a song like "Big Louise" in an evening. That would be good sometimes and, you know, I would do that if the lyrics demanded it.'

Could he ever see that happening again? 'No. I write a different kind of song these days. There's not a lot of harmony and there aren't the thick textures I used to use. It's generally just big blocks of sound, raw and stark. A big emotional noise.' Another silence. 'Essentially, I am attempting the impossible over and over, trying to find a way to say the unsayable. For some reason,' he says, laughing, 'that just seems to take a lot longer.'

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/nov/09/scott-walker-interview

Another new Blog

2009-10-18T23:34:00.000-07:00

There will not be constant posts here but when I find something that strikes me it will appear. Being a writer/poet I am always amazed with words in whatever form they come from.

http://interviewsfromthemedia.blogspot.com/

Oct. 16, 2002: Second Great Library Opens in Alexandria

2009-10-18T02:05:00.001-07:00

2002: The Bibliotheca Alexandrina is officially dedicated in the Egyptian port city of Alexandria. It is a conscious attempt, even down to its Latin name, to recreate the Royal Library of Alexandria, the largest library in the ancient world.

The library, which sits facing the Mediterranean Sea not far from the site of its illustrious ancestor, is actually a vast complex of scientific and cultural repositories. Besides the library itself, which boasts shelf space for roughly 8 million books, there are three museums (Antiquities, Manuscripts and the History of Science), a planetarium, a conference center, gallery space for art exhibitions, and a number of academic research centers.

The Bibliotheca Alexandrina is also the mirror site of the Internet Archive, which is housed thousands of miles away in San Francisco. In that capacity, the library’s role is to ensure the stability of the archive. It also affirms one of the library’s stated goals to be a player in the digital age.

Scholars at Alexandria University conceived the project in 1974, and it was quickly embraced by everyone from the Egyptian government to UNESCO. A Norwegian architectural firm won the commission to design the complex, with most of the initial funding coming from the Arab world. In the end, the project cost $220 million to complete, and Alexander’s metropolis (yes, that Alexander) could boast a handsome addition to its cityscape.

The striking architectural feature is the glass-paneled roof over the main reading room, which resembles a sundial tilting outward toward the sea. The walls are made of gray Aswan granite and bear inscriptions in 120 different human languages.

To stock the library and its various sprawling galleries, officials turned to the entire world. Most of its collection deals with antiquity, Mediterranean culture and the history of that region.

The original Royal Library of Alexandria was the foremost repository of scholarship for nearly 600 years before being destroyed by fire in the third century. Its founder, Ptolemy I, envisaged a gathering place for the world’s great scientists, scholars and thinkers. Like the modern complex, the Library of Alexandria housed not only a library (containing an estimated 700,000 scrolls), but science laboratories and research facilities as well.

For all its splendor, the new Bibliotheca Alexandrina remains an incomplete, and somewhat problematical, project. Much of the shelf space stands empty, because there aren’t nearly enough volumes available to fill it. At the current rate of acquisition and funding, it’s been estimated that it will take 80 years to fully stock the place. This has led to criticism that too much money was spent on the facility itself, without setting aside enough money to build the permanent collections.

As it stands, the library relies heavily on donations.

There is also the ever-present threat of censorship, because the Egyptian government is no particular friend of the free flow of information. The library’s current director, however, Ismail Serageldin, is a highly esteemed professor, sometimes referred to as “the most intelligent man in Egypt.” His background is in engineering, but he is a respected authority in many spheres, making him an international figure and a force for moderation.

Source: http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2009/10/dayintech_1016bibliotheca/

Misterioso No More: Book Debunks Image of a Jazz Giant

2009-10-16T21:40:00.000-07:00

Let’s say goodbye forever to an old jazz myth: Thelonious Monk as inexplicable mad genius.

Robin D. G. Kelley’s biography, “Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original,” just published by Free Press, is an omnibus of myth-busting. It holds the largest amount of helpful, uncaricatured information about Monk in one place and goes a long way to correct a reductive understanding of Monk as a person, if not necessarily Monk as an artist, that has persisted for more than 60 years.

In 1947 the photographer and occasional journalist William Gottlieb wrote an excited article for Down Beat magazine, suggesting that Monk — then 29 — was “the George Washington of be-bop,” although “few have ever seen him.” Several months later Blue Note issued a provocative news release with Monk’s first 78 r.p.m. record.

“A shy and elusive person,” it read, “Thelonious has been surrounded by an aura of mystery, but [it is] simply because he considers the piano the most important thing in his life and can become absorbed in composing that people, appointments and the world pass by unnoticed.” It went on, “Among musicians, Thelonious’s name is treated with respect and awe, for he is a strange person whose pianistics continue to baffle all who hear him.”

Monk’s records didn’t sell well immediately, but the myth did. In the years to come the character sketches of Monk snowballed into a generalized perception of him as aloof, mystical and somewhat childish. It’s a chicken-or-egg question, about Monk’s eccentric behavior versus how it was interpreted — but Mr. Kelley asserts that the “mystery” reputation became almost a professional liability. (In the late 1940s — while making some of the greatest recordings in all of jazz — he and his wife were destitute.) Monk sometimes tried to dispel the myth in interviews, but ultimately lost interest.

Nobody faults Monk for his musicianship anymore, and his harmonic language has been fully absorbed into jazz’s mainstream. But there are still questions. Why did his music sound that way, with crabbed chord voicings and brusque repetitions, somewhere between stride-piano-fulsome and bebop-jagged? Why did he come to a creative cul-de-sac in the 1960s, with so many indifferent performances and a falling-off in the output of new compositions?

What was the nature of his relationship with Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, or Nica, his friend and occasional patron from 1954 until his death in 1982? Why did he get up and dance in circles during performances? And what exactly was his psychological condition?

Mr. Kelley, who has spent this week and last in New York in a run of events surrounding the book’s publication, has a list of refutations to make. “The main ones,” he said in an interview this week, “are that Monk was disengaged and unaware of his surroundings. I argue that he was incredibly engaged with his family, friends and music; he was in the business.

Two, that he and Nica had anything but a platonic relationship. I argue that he wasn’t as dependent on her as it seemed. Three, that descriptions of him as childlike and taciturn were completely wrong.”

Possibly most important of all the perceptions to combat, Mr. Kelley said, “was that Monk was an ‘artiste,’ a reclusive personality.”

“He wanted to get a hit,” Mr. Kelley continued. “He wanted to make money. It wasn’t about fame; it was about a working musician who believes that you could take a pure piece of music and get people to buy it.”

To prove his points over the 14 years spent researching and writing his book, Mr. Kelley, 47, a professor of history and American studies at the University of Southern California, resolved to humanize Monk. He traced Monk’s family back to his 18th-century ancestors in eastern North Carolina. But he also took advantage of some of the newer public resources in jazz scholarship, as well as some of its private troves.

He spoke to every one of Monk’s surviving relatives who knew him to talk about his character in general, his reactions to specific events in history and his career. (Other writers and researchers had talked to members of the Monk family, but none to so many.) Their comments create the binding glue of the book, a composite of how Monk saw the world, how and why he engaged and disengaged with it.

Mr. Kelley had rare access to some of the home tapes of jam sessions and conversations made by Nica. For a recounting of Monk’s public reception, he scoured not just the American jazz press but also black newspapers and publications from countries including Poland, Japan, Sweden and the Netherlands.

And he found valuable information in some sources that have only recently come to light: the papers of Teo Macero, one of Monk’s record producers, and of Mary Lou Williams, the jazz pianist; and in the 3,000 hours of audio tapes made by the photographer W. Eugene Smith at a New York loft building where Monk rehearsed.

Mr. Kelley also took over the rental of a Monk family storage space in downtown Manhattan, containing old clothes, Monk’s LP collection, medical records and hotel bills and one of his original arrangements, written in pencil.

Monk’s son, Thelonious Monk Jr., acted as the gatekeeper to the family’s cooperation, Mr. Kelley said. But the key was Nellie Monk, Thelonious Monk’s wife, protector and day-to-day factotum, who generally did not give interviews, and took five years to be convinced of the worth of Mr. Kelley’s project.

“Without Nellie’s cooperation, I couldn’t have written the book,” Mr. Kelley said. She connected him with Monk’s cousins, nieces and nephews, and also with her own cousin, the psychiatrist Dr. Anna Lou Smith, who had helped Nellie with her own physical ailments. Dr. Smith knew about Monk’s history with Thorazine, which he had first been prescribed by doctors at Grafton State Hospital in Massachusetts in 1959, and she helped Mr. Kelley sharpen his understanding of Monk’s bipolar disorder.

In the fall of 2001 Mr. Kelley, then working at Columbia University, was struck by a car, breaking his leg and damaging his knees. He had to resort to teaching from his apartment sofa, and it took two years before he could walk without a cane. But it was during that period that Nellie Monk, he said, truly became involved in the project.

“Nellie’s sympathy for me ran so deep that every day she’d call me up and ask me how I’m doing,” he said. “She’d tell me about tea and juice that I should be drinking. Our connection centered around my healing. I became one of her patients.” She was nearing 80.

Mr. Kelley has one persistent regret. Ms. Monk had already talked on the record, but invited him over to her son’s house in June 2002 for what she promised would be a much more extensive interview on a Friday. She fell ill the day before the interview, and died of a cerebral hemorrhage the following Tuesday.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/17/books/17monk.html?_r=1&ref=arts

Carter Monroe reads Lunch

2009-10-14T00:26:00.000-07:00

Carter Monroe reading in Hickory

Chandler|MySpace Videos

Anna Deveare Smith, from 1992

2009-10-12T20:57:00.001-07:00

Anna Deveare Smith in Fires in the Mirror…, directed by Christopher Ashley, May 1992. Photo: Martha Swope Studios/William Gibson.

Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities, by Anna Deveare Smith, was performed to sold-out houses and great critical acclaim at the New York Shakespeare Festival from May until August this year. The work is part of a series developed by Smith called On the Road: A Search for American Character.

In the series, Smith creates theatre pieces out of interviews, performing all the interview subjects verbatim. She is interested in “where a person’s unique relationship to the spoken word intersects with character.” Each show has a diverse collection of women, men, and youths with varied points of view about current issues. Some of the interviewees are well known and others are not. Fires in the Mirror focuses in part on a racial conflict that erupted in Crown Heights, Brooklyn in August of 1991.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thulani Davis As we begin, Anna is describing a crisis that evolved when she got her students to work on the play Movie Stars by Adrienne Kennedy.

Anna Deveare Smith I had gone to find that play because being the African-American on the Carnegie Mellon faculty in 1979, the expectation was that I would find the play for the black senior who had not been cast the whole time she had been in school. But I really didn’t want to do a “black” play. I wanted to do a play that would have a racially mixed cast, and that would have race mixed in a way that I had never seen before. So I was shocked to stumble on Movie Stars, because it was exactly that. It played with persona, and with what many of us are afraid to play with as black people—the extent to which, in a real visceral way, white images have influenced our identities. And [Adrienne] is so honest about that, so clear, and so brave. That’s why I was attracted to the material, but it also put me in a crisis…

TD How did this come to a point of crisis?

AS I was having trouble with the text because (pause) it was very disturbing, almost like a bad dream. The structures I had for thinking about my own black experience were very different in meeting her text. And so I can remember going home one night, and I was very distraught, in a great loneliness about the whole experience. And I turned on the television, and turned the sound down, because I was now in the habit of watching TV with the sound down so that I could get used to splitting up action and gesture and speech—which I needed to do to direct the play. And Sophia Loren was on the Johnny Carson Show. The show was so strange.

First, there was a great deal of enthusiasm for Sophia Loren, but when she got on the show, it was clear that Johnny was uncomfortable; the audience was uncomfortable. There were no laughs. There was this big set-up for a present Johnny had for her, and she was encouraged to open it—which she did, quite slowly. It was a red garter. So then Doc starts playing this striptease music… There’s this big pause because she’s not responding. She obviously isn’t amused. Then she says, “Shall I put it on?” And Johnny says, “Oh my God, of course. Go ahead.” And she puts it on, and it’s real slow. It’s not funny; it’s really sexy. So everybody is disturbed. And everytime Carson tried to make a joke like, “Why don’t you tell us about how they called you stuci caldente when you were little…”

“Well, stuci caldente — it’s a skinny spaghetti but you shouldn’t laugh. I was very skinny because I had nothing to eat.” And so on.

And then Joan Rivers came on, and all of her humor was about Sophia’s looks and her breasts and Joan’s own lack of looks. “She asks for a glass of water; they are outside, stomping on grapes for her. Me, I ask for water and (spit), here!” Finally, Johnny says, “You shouldn’t treat yourself like this.” And [Joan] says, “No, no, I know I was not wanted. I know it.” “No you don’t, Joan. How do you know?” “I was born with a hanger in my ear.” Of course the audience loved it; they were peeing from hysteria and delight. Johnny was weeping he was laughing so hard. Then the Hines Brothers came on and tap danced.

I thought this show is about America. I don’t know why. The difficulty the audience had with Sophia’s magnitude and then the comfort with Joan’s exaggeration intrigued me.

A couple of months later, my friend Mary called me up and said it’s on again. I tape recorded it; I transcribed it, and this is when I became really interested in watching not what people say, but how they say it. Particularly when they run out of words. In the case of a person like Sophia Loren, when she runs out of words, she’s even greater because the real space is her physical space. And her physical space comes first; the words fit in to that. I remembered everything Sophia did. Whereas with Joan, I remember everything she said, and I don’t have a single image of anything about her appearance. See what I mean? And that just sent me down this way of watching talk shows all the time. Transcribing them and watching them for how people behave in the moment the interviewer questions their identity—usually it’s threatening.

And then I thought, well, why don’t I just start doing my own interviews and watch how people handle keeping a persona. What happens to language while they’re trying to do that, especially, if I construct interviews where I don’t ever threaten people, where I try to stay out of the way. And what I learned was that in an hour, which was the normal interview time, everybody does what I call “talking in poetry”—which is saying something only they could possibly say, in a way that only they could say it.

TD Everybody talks about how each of the people in Fires in the Mirror gave you something, revealed something about themselves. Do they do that because you leave them alone, or because they have an understanding that in the nature of the situation they should give you something only they could give?

AS See, I don’t know. Somebody would have to come watch my interviews. I don’t know what they do.

TD Do they perform for you?

AS People do perform in spite of themselves. You’ve seen that when you’ve done interviews.

TD But from watching the work, I would say that some of them performed for you. Or maybe that’s how they deal with any situation that could be threatening. And a one-on-one situation is fairly threatening if you don’t know the person. Your characters have genuinely, to me, performed for you.

AS Well, we don’t see the whole interview in the show, as you know. I’m using just one minute; I’m taking a corner of the page and magnifying it for theater. That might also be why there seems to be this greater truth; it may just be a magnified one.

TD Well, it also magnifies the characteristics of the character. Do you hear the things that you later select while you are interviewing them?

AS A lot of times I hear them. I mean, I heard Reverend Al Sharpton’s, “Me and James’ thang…” and that begins to dictate the way I look at the rest of the show. I heard: “Jewish people don’t drive vans over seven-year-old boys.” I remember we both heard together Conrad [Muhammad’s], “They are masquerading in our garment.” I mean, I heard it. And the fact that you heard it meant a lot to me.

TD Sometimes when I listen back to a tape, I hear whole sentences I never heard. So I know with this piece you’ve sometimes gone back two, three, four, five times and heard something else that somehow connected.

AS Well, up until now, I’ve edited and memorized under this awful gun of time. A lot of times there’s almost no tolerance for playing with something, so usually when I make the decision about what’s cut; it’s cut. In this experience, of having a longer run, I have had the chance to go back and listen to the tape. And maybe there was a line that was too complex to learn—you know, just rhythmically too complex to learn in the time that I had—but I can go back and hear it and add it now.

TD “They are masquerading in our garment.” Conrad Muhammad says that in reference to Jewish people. What do you think that means?

AS Well, I think that it means to look at the whole character and to look at what’s important to him. To look at his language. I’m sure that line is something that he’s heard before; that is part of a larger speech and thought. It probably came from Farrakhan, maybe Malcolm. I won’t pretend to completely interpret Conrad’s “Seven Verses,” I don’t want to diminish Conrad. But if this were just a flat text, I would say, well, the character is interested in clothing, I know that he is because of how he was dressed, how fastidious he was, how specific his clothing was, how he told me that the Muslims strip you down and take you from the bottom and don’t even assume that you know what kind of underwear to wear. They tell you how to be a man from there. He talks about why they wear the suit, why they wear the bow tie. And so the garment is an extremely important part of being a man, being in the world. A garment is an armor, I think, that the black Muslims wear to protect their manhood, to protect their integrity, to protect their humanity. And so part of that integrity, and that manhood, and that humanity is that to be the chosen is to have been given God’s armor. Armor because you are the most vulnerable, historically. According to him, there’s no way that the Jews are that, that they could have been that, given the historical evidence. And so they are pretending, they are frauds; they are wearing the clothes—they are pretending to be the chosen. They’re masquerading in the garments.

TD It’s a funny expression. “They are masquerading in our garments.” It seems to come from another era almost. Do you find that people that you interview, after you listen to them over and over, have a telling vocabulary? That there really are only a few central verbs or nouns that you start to lock onto? How does that work?

AS Everybody does have a central vocabulary, and frequently, it’s exactly that. It does sound odd; it does sound peculiar; it does sound like it comes from another era or is a broken thread. I have a friend who’s a weaver, and she talks about how she’ll deliberately break the warp thread, which is just a crazy thing to do. But she does that so her clothes have something individual about them. Everybody does that in a given speech. If we went through all the characters, we could find that. It’s something a lot of times you probably heard before. It could be something that Elijah Muhammad concocted because he’s the one who had them wear the bow lies, for example. It could be from a piece of literature. So when a person takes something—well, all language comes from elsewhere. Few of us really create words of our own. Babies do, and then the whole family will use that word with the baby for several years, like “wah-wah” for water. We are always trying to integrate new things we’ve heard from elsewhere that don’t really fit our own historical language. So that’s what our sign of ourself is…in picking up stuff and trying to fit it in.

TD It’s which stuff?

AS What do you pick up? What do you successfully integrate? But I’m interested in the stuff that stays bumpy. Sometimes the bump is fascinating, and sometimes it’s not

TD The intellectuals in the piece tend to try and think of metaphors. Angela Davis thinks of a metaphor for you, Ntozake Shange gives one and A.M. Bernstein searches for other metaphors for you. But the people in the “Crown Heights” section are much more in the moment, people who do not reflect as much. Even though they are reflecting, they are not professional reflectors like the people in the first half.

AS That’s right. That’s good. That’s exactly right.

TD The people involved in the incident tend to be more revealing in their language. Professional introspectives are more revealing to me in how they speak.

AS Although you know the rope that Angela uses, I wonder where that came from? I can’t find a trace of it really in any obvious way from her speech, or in the whole interview. Whereas with Conrad, we can trace it; we can find it, because he speaks about his clothing. Although she talks about slavery, and I’ve always thought that that rope speech means something about slavery. What’s good about intellectuals is the rhythm of their speech, but in terms of finding these bumps, it’s much harder.

TD Right, right.

AS I mean, that’s why we like the “bad boy” so much, because that logic is so sweet, and so clever, and so unique to him. He made that up.

TD They are not things you’d disagree with, but they are not things that you articulate, either. It’s necessary for them to tell us some things that should be assumptions: “We don’t kill seven year olds.” And in a way, the crisis in Crown Heights does that. It’s so intractable that you find people are telling you things that you should be able to assume and know about human beings. But it is as though, because I am the other, I know nothing is assumed about my humanity, so I’m going to tell you…from scratch.

AS First of all, I’m a human being. (laughs) Yes. (still laughing) In case you didn’t know that.

TD You’ve said that race is your work. I remember in rehearsal you said it casually: “Well, race is my work. This is what I do.” How did you mean that? Is race your work?

AS Yeah. It did come out of the circumstances of the work that I said it, but it gets…

TD I’m magnifying something, but in this case, I would say it was a “bump” of yours.

AS It’s a bump of mine. It’s a funny thing for me to say because I’ve tried so hard in my life, even when I was a kid, to have what I consider the different perspective on the race movement. Part of it was an effort to position myself, to find a place to be because I’ve always felt on the outside of it. I wasn’t fully an integrationist, and I wasn’t a separatist. I wasn’t comfortable with—I didn’t socialize completely with the black cliques at school. And I certainly didn’t completely socialize with the white cliques.

So I was on the outside, weaving back and forth and in and out. I had to find a way to be able to think about the reality of where I was because I didn’t feel I belonged anywhere. And maybe it’s not simple for anybody; maybe it’s a big fallacy, illusion that I have. But growing up through integration and then into the ‘70s, there were lots of pictures of groups of black people marching together and groups of white people marching. And I never was a part of a united thing—that’s just my personality—but it was very important to me to figure out what I thought. Obvious figures that we know in the history of race would say that. I would assume you’d feel like you’re in a band of people because it’s “we”—work. I just had to find my “we.” And all these years have been like that: standing on the outside; putting my foot in; and trying my best to be a “we” and feel right. But now I realize that even though that’s the way I did it, it was my work—that’s the work I was doing. I never abandoned it; I never did something else. I never pretended it didn’t exist. And maybe it’s every person of color’s work. White people don’t have to do this work, and many of them don’t. Racially, at least, many of them assume their place without question. Like gravity.

TD The reason I picked up on the line is because it resonated with me, and I thought, “Gee, race is my work too,” even when I didn’t set out to do that. And it becomes something you have to have some expertise in to survive, even if you’re really interested in astronomy.

AS Right. I would love to look carefully at the anatomy of someone who does not feel that they have had that experience.

TD A black person?

AS Yeah.

TD Do you see your work as a text? Something other people may perform later?

AS Yeah, probably. I don’t know if I’d go see it. (laughs)

(Smith explains that she could imagine doing “Fires” on alternate nights with another actor.) The person I thought of the other night is Sandra Bernhard. She would be perfect: a Jewish woman who’s quite different from me anyway, right?

TD This, in a way, goes back to the “race is work” issue; this is the kind of work I have not seen a white person do. There’s a fine line between what would be an incredible performance and what would be regarded as dangerous territory. When you have one actor doing it, that person becomes responsible, they have to do all of it, and they have to do all of it on a fine line. So I have been wondering, is this something that black people have to do first?

AS That’s where all the risk in the work has to be. We’ve already been through the time where black people do it first, and I think that it would be exactly shocking, and exactly dangerous, and exactly right to have a Sandra Bernhard, or a kind of Sandra Bernhard, do my show one night. It would be difficult for black people to watch her do black people, and maybe even more difficult, for white people to watch her do black people. But it may also allow people to express their difficulties. It’s my suspicion that some black people have trouble with me doing black men.

But it’s exactly these anxieties, these inhibitions that the audience really needs to confront. It was the only way that we could be when we went through this race work before, to say: We will take responsibility as black people to talk about our experience. We don’t want to hear from you. We have the authority here. You haven’t done this work. Okay, nobody wanted to do it. They wanted to pretend we weren’t here. We will take the responsibility of saying we were here. We don’t want to hear what you have to say. You don’t know. We know. So, we were typecasting white people, too. Now I think that that’s dangerous because the work so badly needs to be done that anyone who heartily wants to do the work carefully, should do it. It’s not a matter of allowing or not; they should not be silent. White people are a race. For us to take moral responsibility meant that it helped them continue not to do their work in race. Probably the ones who were doing their work the most vigorously were the racists like David Duke.

So I’m interested in trying to work through the difficulties of now having a dialogue with people ‘cause my experience in race is usually a monologue when it comes to being with white people. You know, if I go in to any administrator about how race could be better in the certain institution, usually, they’ll call the meeting they’ll want desperately to talk with me. But the meeting will begin with their arms folded over their chest, saying, “What can we do for you, Anna?” Not “What’s the problem?” “What’s your problem?” And it’s our problem. Twenty years ago, people said,”It’s your problem. It’s whitey’s problem.” But it’s our problem, all of us.

TD The thing that’s nice about the piece is that, even though all the characters are doing monologues, there is a quality of listening that you don’t have in those meetings.

AS Well, it’s because people really do get to speak uninterrupted—or there’s the illusion that they are speaking uninterrupted. Someone gets to say their fill, and the next person speaks. If jumbled it up and made a play out of it, Roz wouldn’t get through that whole thing without someone saying something. (laughter) Conrad, Leonard Jeffries—no—they wouldn’t get finished. And if you get in the way, if you don’t let people finish, it’s harder for them to get to the bumps. Unless, it’s a very skilled speaker: a person who gets so excited by controversy that it accelerates where the pulse comes from. Most people get frightened in that type of controversy; they close down and don’t open up. A Sharpton probably opens up. Angela probably opens up under fire—orators do—but most people don’t. So, that’s why we have to have a different way of listening, a different way of thinking of dialogue, and a different way of thinking of the race discussion.

TD One of the reasons that it seems like these pieces don’t come out of the theater that white people are doing is because they’re not thinking about it.

AS But don’t you think that we think about it a lot?

TD We think about it all the time. But for me it’s the “back wheel” that’s thinking about it for many hours of many days, just storing information in a matrix that’s there—call it “race”—it’s a whole network of thoughts.

AS Most of the organizations that we have are black organizations so that’s what we do talk about. I wonder, in your friendships with black people, how much do you talk about race? Or if you talk about it?

TD I do. And not in just my friendships with black people.

AS But with white people.

TD Asians, Latinos—all people of color. It’s a big subject in that friendship. And that may be partly an expression of who I am. Do you feel that other people, white people, can allow themselves to think about race deeply in such a way that they can build work out of it?

AS If they accept the fact that they are a race, absolutely. Absolutely. If they accept the fact that they are a race. But in as much as we are a minority, maybe this is a minority part of their experience—they have access to many more aspects of life than we do by dint that they’re privileged—this is a smaller part of their life, but I think that they can. Of course they can. It could be like if a white person, I would imagine, were to really think about—but this is the hardest work of all for both of us. If a white person who has a fascination with a black person, black artist, were allowed to think that through. I can’t tell you how many white people have told me that when they were little, they had a black friend that they were really fascinated with, and at some point, their parents took them away from that person. It’s always an awful moment in conversation for me when a white person tells me those stories. It didn’t used to be an awkward moment for me; I used to be genuinely interested because I’m interested in people’s personal histories. I’m a spy like that—I love that.

But I learned in college that those are warning signals, danger bells somehow. They would bring that up as a way of talking to me. And I think the reason it might come up as a way of talking to me is because there is an anxiety again of having an interest in me, to like a black person. And I think that acting always has to take people back to their original episodes that made inhibitions, to try to work those through so that they can have access to more of their own gifts and their voice. If a person were willing to and not inhibited about saying, God, I’m really fascinated with that person or attracted to that person. There are obvious reasons why that’s dangerous. If you’re fascinated, if you are attracted, you might get close. And when you get close, you’re going to get closer to the war that’s between us. The war that has never been fully fought. It’s a bloody war, and it could end in disaster. And I’m not just talking about intimate relationships in terms of one with the other, but to even do this work, you and I both know how bloody the war is. People have reason to be cautious, but I’m not going to be the person to say, “Don’t do it.” I’m not going to be the one to say,”You don’t belong here.” I’m absolutely not. I really want to see people try it, make it through the trenches with it.

Now the politics of it get complicated—and I guess this is why as colored people, we tend to be very cautious—if those people get to appropriate the race movement and see privileges we don’t have; it’s very hard. I don’t want to be really naive by implying that we can do anything without the power structures that give us opportunities, that give us money, that give us grants, that give us jobs. I don’t want to be that naive. But just talking about what the work is in the trenches, I wonder if we really can talk about appropriation, because I so firmly believe that we all have to do this work.

TD This goes back to what we were talking about in the beginning: how we try to find a language, and we do appropriate our language, in that pieces all come from somewhere outside.

AS That’s right. That’s right. You learn because of the process of being interviewed. The most wonderful thing I came upon was thinking about learning to speak—it also had to do with voice. I lost my voice while doing Fires and I had to write what I needed and wanted to say, and people would read back to me what I had said. It brought up all these really old feelings of when I was a little girl. At first I thought it was because my mother had read to me as a child. And people were much nicer to me when I couldn’t talk. Very nice. People at the bank, cab drivers—everyone wanted to help me. People who were normally nasty. One of the most intimate things that happens in your coming into the world is learning to talk. And I used to always ask my students that on the first day of class. I’d say, “What’s your name? Where you from?” I’d say, “Who taught you how to talk?” And they’d look at each other like ?do we have to go through a term with this fool?”

TD Do people know?

AS They seldom remember. They usually say, “Oh, I don’t know. I guess my mother.” I guess my mother. Sometimes people have very wonderful and clear memories of a specific person. Like one girl whose brother taught her how to talk. Another girl from Puerto Rico said, “I learned to speak English at Swarthmore.” I mean, I love that. “I learned to speak English at Swarthmore.” When you don’t have language, you are wanting to be in the world. You’re wanting to be something; you’re wanting to do something; you’re wanting to cause action. And you need this other person, who may have the most reprehensible way of being in the world or the nicest way of being in the world, to give you the keys to do that. And so I think it’s a phenomenal relationship. And that’s why when we get into rocky ground and we don’t have language, and there are a few people who are more articulate than others or who have developed the language; it’s very hard because it means that somebody has to back up and trust that person’s few words to begin to develop even their own syntax. Greg Tate told me in our interview that the problem in race work is that black people develop the language. So for white people to participate, they have to take on the language that we developed. I don’t know. It’s a compelling thought. I don’t know if it’s true or not. But I do know that to come into language to begin to speak and develop language, it’s this incredible, amazing trust that you have to have with the person who is giving you the basic words.

TD Well, white people developed a language about race, particularly outside of this country…where we’re not present. They have a language for it that objectifies us. And then in this country, the language that is “bad language,” that was developed by white people is language we’ve rejected.

AS The language—let’s not say all of it—that was based on hate is what we used to run from.

TD Don’t we have to be prepared to give up the language or share?

AS We have to be willing to go to the table; we have to be willing to walk in the construction site. All of us with chisels and construction hats on. Nobody can walk in a construction site without a construction hat. Nobody. That’s what I think.

TD A hard hat?

AS A hard hat.

Source: http://www.bombsite.com/issues/41/articles/1594

Deconstructing Cinema in Order to Reveal It

2009-10-12T02:17:00.000-07:00

from the article,

ONE Sunday last month, I visited the avant-garde filmmaker Ken Jacobs and his wife, Flo, in the top-floor loft they rent on Chambers Street in Manhattan. The plan was for Mr. Jacobs to show some work he will present during a weeklong series of programs in Los Angeles that starts Monday. As I neared the top of my four-flight climb, the walls became more cluttered and lived in, as if announcing the residency of the last bohemians in TriBeCa.

That evening, after some conversation and homemade sorbet, I watched a world of wonders unfold on a screen hanging from the ceiling. As the recorded sounds of city traffic and a distant voice filled the air, sharply etched black-and-white geometric shapes of undecipherable provenance begin to rotate on screen first right, then left and back, creating what looked like shifting whirlpools. Parts of the image pulsed and eased in and out of focus. I thought I was looking at oil on water, flowing lava, lichen, dying embers or a reference to 9/11, which had happened five blocks away. My eyes searched for something familiar. I tried to grasp the story. My eyes started watering, less from emotion than strain.

“I have no idea what I’m watching,” I scribbled into my notebook. I was more right than I knew.

What I watched was beautiful, hypnotic, mysterious and as close to a representation of three-dimensional imagery as I’ve ever seen without wearing funny glasses. It was pure cinema. As it happens, it was so pure that no celluloid had threaded its way through a projector. I hadn’t been watching a film, after all, or digital images, only light and shadow. Using an illusion machine of his own invention that he calls the Nervous Magic Lantern — an apparatus containing a spinning shutter, a light and lenses that he hides behind a black curtain when he isn’t performing what he calls “live cinema” — he had taken the experience of watching moving images back to its origins. We weren’t watching shadows on the cave wall, but we were close.

The Nervous Magic Lantern is a variation on a proto-cinematic machine, dating from the Renaissance or earlier, called the magic lantern, a device for projecting images. By the mid-17th century, it was popular enough that the diarist Samuel Pepys bought one “to make strange things on a wall.” Mr. Jacobs, a leading figure in American avant-garde cinema, has been making strange things shudder and writhe on screens for more than half a century. The germ for the Nervous Magic Lantern dates back to his earlier device, the Nervous System, a machine with two 16-millimeter projectors and a rotating shutter, on which he showed identical strips of film and with which he created optical effects, including an illusion of depth.

These manipulations were a continuation of a long preoccupation with cinema’s material properties as well as its effect on our heads and bodies. Born in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in 1933, Mr. Jacobs watched movies like “Greed” at the Museum of Modern Art with a high school pass, studied painting with Hans Hoffman and bought a camera with the idea of doing “combat cinematography in the streets of New York.” With Jack Smith, a film and performance artist, he did just that, shooting Smith frolicking in shorts like “Little Stabs at Happiness” (1958-60). Mr. Jacobs once described another of these films, “Blonde Cobra” (1959-63), edited from footage shot by Bob Fleischner, as a “look in on an exploding life, on a man of imagination suffering prefashionable Lower East Side deprivation and consumed with American 1950s, ’40s, ’30s disgust.”

With Smith in front of the camera, Mr. Jacobs also began shooting “Star Spangled to Death,” a 440-minute epic of passion and political rage created from an astonishment of found footage and live-action material filmed in a long, now almost unrecognizable Lost New York of mom-and-pop shops, shadowy back alleys and grubby streets free of corporate brands. “We were picking up on this culture of spontaneity in the arts,” Mr. Jacobs said. In a sense, Smith was the embodiment of this spirit, as liberated as a jazz riff or an Abstract Expressionist brush stroke. Mr. Jacobs, a relentless tinkerer, started making the movie in 1957, shot for a few years and presented it in different iterations; he finished it (or so he says) in 2003 and 2004.

He and Smith eventually went their own ways. Smith made “Flaming Creatures” (1963), a plot-free bacchanal and object of scrutiny in Susan Sontag’s 1966 collection, “Against Interpretation.” In 1964, Flo and Ken Jacob and the filmmaker Jonas Mekas were arrested for showing “Flaming Creatures,” which had been found obscene. Both men were given six months in a workhouse, but the charges were dropped. Mr. Jacobs went on to help start both the Millennium Film Workshop in New York and the film program at the State University at Binghamton, N.Y., where his students included the cartoonist Art Spiegelman. One inspiration for Mr. Spiegelman’s graphic novel about the Holocaust, “Maus,” in which Jews are represented as mice, came from Mr. Jacobs’s observation that in early cartoons mice and African Americans were often depicted similarly.

“It was ecstatic,” another student, J. Hoberman, the senior film critic for The Village Voice, said of Mr. Jacobs’s teaching. “It was like a volcano.” Mr. Jacobs would show students movies as they had never seen them, slowing them down through a special projector — sometimes frame by frame — for intense close scrutiny, much as he was doing with “Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son,” a film he was working on around the time. “We’d crawl through these movies,” Mr. Hoberman said of this slow-cinema approach, as Mr. Jacobs held forth in sterile lecture halls, showing a range of movies and discoursing on his loves (“The Bicycle Thief,” “They Live by Night”) and hates (most of Godard, Hitchcock). “His powers of analysis were phenomenal.”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/11/movies/11darg.html?pagewanted=1&hpw

Kibbutz Lotan

2009-10-11T18:10:00.000-07:00

Kibbutz Lotan was founded in 1983 in the Arava Desert in Israel, with the discovery of a significant source of groundwater. Lotan sits at a low point in a valley, hundreds of feet above an aquifer. Over the years, Lotan has become known for its example in sustainability, proving that an inspired group of people can create community and habitat in even the harshest of environments, by being resourceful.

Source: http://www.eartharchitecture.org/

CSI: Doodle – lie detection through art

2009-10-09T18:11:00.000-07:00

LIARS may fear polygraph tests and brain scans, but surely they wouldn't expect a simple drawing to give them away. It seems that how you draw a scene can help reveal if you really were there or just made the whole thing up.

No lie detector is anywhere near foolproof, and existing techniques, including polygraph tests and brain scans, have the added drawback of requiring specialised, expensive equipment, says Aldert Vrij, a forensic psychologist at the University of Portsmouth, UK.

Vrij wondered whether asking someone to draw a scene might work instead: as liars have not had direct visual experience of what they are describing, they might draw a scene differently to someone who was actually there.

To test the idea, his team sent 31 volunteers on a cloak-and-dagger mission in which they had to pick up a laptop computer from an actor posing as a secret agent, and deliver it to a second agent. The second agent then asked volunteers to describe how and where they had received the laptop and to sketch the location in detail. Half of the volunteers were told to answer this question with a lie and half told to tell the truth.

While many of the liars gave convincing verbal accounts to the agents, when their drawings were compared with those of truth-tellers, there were features that distinguished them (Applied Cognitive Psychology, DOI: 10.1002/acp.1627).

The first was who they drew: 2 out of 16 liars included the first agent in their drawing, whereas 12 out of 15 of the truth-tellers included that detail. Vrij suggests this is because the liars visualised a place they knew and simply drew this, neglecting to include the agent.

The second difference was perspective, with liars tending to draw the laptop handover from a bird's-eye perspective rather than a first-person one. Vrij suggests that while liars are adept at quickly coming up with a plausible verbal account, they find imagining spatial relationships between conjured-up objects more difficult from a first person perspective.

Liars tend to draw the scene from a bird's-eye perspective, rather than a first-person view
He reckons asking suspects to sketch scenes could help police determine who is telling the truth.

But couldn't savvy criminals learn these giveaways and avoid them? For example, liars in the know might start taking care to include people in their drawings.

Perhaps, but Maria Hartwig, a forensic social psychologist at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, who was not involved in the new study, points out that liars might be reluctant to add people as they might trigger further questions from police.

Researchers have yet to test the method on larger groups of volunteers to work out how often it mistakenly flags up as liars people who are telling the truth.

However, some police already do something similar. The Denver Police Department in Colorado has electronic white boards in its interview rooms, says spokeswoman Lieutenant Leslie Branch-Wise. The boards aren't intended to ferret out liars, she says, but if a suspect's drawing doesn't mesh with other details, investigators take note.

Source: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427293.300-csi-doodle--lie-detection-through-art.html?full=true&print=true