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June 30, 2009
he's right you know Last fall, Michael Tomasky included the following footnote in a book review: . . . Go to the Google Maps homepage, with the view set on "map." In the search bar, type in Whitesville, WV. You'll be automatically directed to a close-in view of that town. Next, zoom the view out two clicks. Now change the view from "map" to "satellite." Tomasky's review covered a few recent works about the the mining industry in the USA's Appalachians. He summarized Michael Shnayerson's account of the impact of journalist & author Penny Loeb's groundbreaking 1997 exposé of the environmental effects of mountaintop mining. The text of Loeb's original piece is here. U.S. News & World Report published it with some never-before-seen (by the general public, anyway) and apparently horrifying aerial photos of post-"removal" mountains. Tomasky's footnote begins with the words: Today, anyone with a computer can have a look. The Google Maps image to which his search instructions lead is here. [More from the eternal reading backlog . . . ] June 29, 2009
hold back the night Baudelaire knew its dangers: Twilight excites madmen. -- I recall that I had two friends who were made very ill by twilight. One of them was driven to disregard all bonds of friendship and all politeness, savagely abusing the first person to come along. I once saw him throw an excellent chicken at a head-waiter, because he thought he read some sort of insulting hieroglyph in it.[Je l'ai vu jeter à la tête d'un maître d'hôtel un excellent poulet, dans lequel il croyait voir je ne sais quel insultant hiéroglyphe.] Prior to reading the above, TiR thought that it was the only one who had done this with a chicken. June 26, 2009
"Once upon a time . . . and they lived happily ever after." How many books or children's stories ever actually began and ended with the above pair of phrases? How widespread was this supposed storytelling tradition, really? Where did the tradition begin? How far back does it go? To what first text? After all, every cliché starts somewhere, right? And sometimes it starts for a good reason, or as a brilliantly innovative solution. This itself is a platitude. Did the pair of phrases overthrow some earlier, now forgotten pair of then-hackneyed narrative gambits? Or is the pair in some sense as old as human language and cognition -- whatever that might even mean? [What a naive, unanswerable & stupid question.] As if recovery of the initiatory moment might somehow shed light on the problem that the forumla was invented to solve [e.g., a problem like: When asked to explain or tell the story of something, how on earth can we ever decide where to begin? and when to stop talking?]-- and perhaps continues to solve. . . . As for the first phrase, "once upon a time," Herodotus reports (or if you like, "reports") use of it, in some translations: I did hear, indeed, what I will now relate, from certain natives of Cyrene. Once upon a time, they said, they were on a visit to the oracular shrine of Ammon, when it chanced that . . . The phrases pop up with regularity in 19th century English language texts. Walter Scott, for example, tosses the former into Waverly. Meanwhile, an 1875 book review (see p. 308, herein) instantiates use of both phrases, as the author of the work under review purportedly "took them down verbatim," in compiling the oral tradition and folk tales of the Venetian comari. Who knows when and how it all started? Moreover: Who cares? Maybe no one. Other than TiR -- which sometimes blithely congratulates itself on its supposed courage and enlightenment in trying to take a pickaxe and shovel to the foundations underneath the clichés it lives by/atop, only to tap the edge of what seems to be a vast, subterranean complex, on which our feet are planted, of interlocked clichés about or supportive of the first, more superficial clichés. When we uncover this horror, we usually chicken out and stop digging, but continue to sift shovelfuls of sand back and forth, for a while anyway. Pointless activity, perhaps (someone will say, because the old biases and blindspots will be exchanged only for new & probably worse ones), but at least it keeps us off the streets. [Those last eight words: what a cliché!] ======================================================= The above nonsense = triggered by a passage in a two-year old essay, recently excavated from the bottom of TiR's no-bottom-having reading backlog, about "how growing old shapes aesthetic vision," by Nicholas Delbanco, here, as follows: This impulse to embroider truth, to "tell a story" or lie for a living seems, year by year, more difficult to manage and childish to sustain. Even that enchanting preamble, "Once upon a time" grows dull, and the postscript, "They lived happily ever after" is -- not to put too fine a point on it -- absurd. . . . June 23, 2009
last wk's fave phrase was eine allgemeingültige Aussage erschwertrendered as from exhibition wall text, Pergamonmuseum June 05, 2009
g stein staged . . . in a rare production clearly not for the taste of everybody . . . "A Family of Perhaps Three" is from Stein's intensely "repetitive" phase of language, circa 1908-12 James Wagner seems absolutely correct in calling the staging a "miracle" tho we might be predisposed . . . . Are we alone in tending, when reading her headlong repetitive texts, to hear them as if narrated by a commanding, unified voice that we imagine to be Stein's own? For us, then, the effect was truly liberatory (of the lang., and the story -- Stein's grip finally shaken off? a matricide? or a vindication?) -- through the device of fissioning that voice through three performers [Similarly we once were knocked out by a student performance of lear with the King played by several women -- simultaneously] Moreovered on top of that was the chameleonism directorially encouraged from each performer -- with one often deploying the phrasing of a careful, reflective logician; another unafraid to play up the deep comic goofiness we often find in Stein; and a third with the astonishing sort of we-had-faces-then ability to, say, portray six distinct emotional or psychological states in a span of three seconds with eyebrows alone. All of which delightfully opens up and malleablizes the play of text on the page, in ways that cannot have been foreseen or imagined in the interior thrumming voice heard by the solitary reader. It's already clear enough that the early Stein's extended-play combination and repetition of a tight set of very few words can cause the sudden arrival or introduction of a new word into the set to have the jarring effect like the entrance onto a theatrical stage of a new character. As here, the feel would be like: livingbeingrememberingbeinglivingrememberinglivingrememberingbeingREGRETTINGrememberingliving... But the opportunity here is for the director & players to surprise us with their personal choices of emphasis and downplay. Which word unexpectedly becomes a throwaway line (e.g., here: "despairing")? Which proposition gets italicisized on stage via the pre-recorded sound of an LP needle rip or a deafening jet engine? The potential goes beyond drama class exercises -- i.e., how many different ways can you play or put fresh spins on a single line of dialogue? -- (though the usefulness of those drills becomes readily apparent) -- to point to the fluidity & multiple layers of Stein's language that otherwise might fly right past; viz.: "living" as "condition of being alive, or exhibiting life" vs. as "livelihood, means of subsistence"; etc. All of which = v. appropriate, for a staging that employs an ever shifting set of vintage, dressing room dividing screens (homage to Genet?): sight lines get blocked then open up, planes constantly shift, sisters get walled up together then apart -- as befits a family tale all about (as one might view it) the ever recombining yet slowly evolving interrelationships of closeness, separation, freedom, loneliness, claustrophobia, rivalry, dependence, disclosure, privacy, hiding, selective amnesia, secrets that "everybody knows" but no one discusses, mutual reliance, simmering resentment, and love. Oh those Steins. Finally: brilliant, sneaking into the hypercollaged mix, by the sound guy, of Mirah's "Dreamboat." What would Leo think? What would Alice? June 03, 2009
redemption in 2 minutes, 45 seconds Deserved thanks unto YouTube user & popscholarly blogger GeoSilverMore, TiR says, for contribution to the internets, for the time being at least, of the under-three minutes of 60s pop heaven that is the Vogues' "Land of Milk and Honey" (1966). The song appears approx. 7+1/4 minutes into a compilation video, here. We seriously flipped out for a little while over this record in spring 2008. As part of our engaged contemplation of its awesomeness, we of course gathered all the info about it that we could, as is our obsessive wont. We then filed away the research and did nothing with it, as also is our wont. The posting of the YouTube video, a month ago, gives us at last a flimsy excuse to sweep out our files a bit, by posting some links. On the songwriters: One of our first discoveries was that the record's songwriters, John Hurley and Ronnie Wilkins, were the same team responsible for the immortal "Son of a Preacher Man." Then we realized that the same pair wrote "Love of the Common People." On the production team: Cool, but what gave the record that sound? Not that any of the above necessarily explains the song's allure to us. On the one hand, for example, there's its great, great lyrics: a structured, three-act narrative that moves from abyssal isolation and nihilism to salvific, embodied contact and release, though the tug of the nihilism is much more vividly conveyed. Like "Son of Preacher Man," the concrete imagery is blended with enough generality (e.g., absence of gendered pronouns) to enable the listener to establish an immediate relationship with the story, through picturing it in the mind's eye while transposing it into their own experience. However, the drama here unfolds under a combat of moral forces that feels as if the outcome of the struggle carries almost Miltonian stakes. Yeah, sounds like teenage love. On the other hand, is it not a kinda flawed song, by some criteria? No bridge, not even an instrumental solo or break; nothing really to vary or change it up musically, except a modulation upward, before the last, redemptive verse. TiR nevertheless considers the record's main flaw, at the moment, to be that it ends too soon, or too abruptly. ["Why does the music have to end?" asked Warhol -- who would repeat-play the same 45rpm record compulsively while he worked -- in inspiration of MMM's final locked groove.] Unfortunately, none of the aforementioned sources clarify whether the Vogues' record was inspired by a similarly named, early 60s Broadway musical with Molly Picon -- -- as this Usenet post speculates. ========================================== Finally, our same worthy YouTube user's posting of Del Shannon's version of Boyce-Hart's "She" enables us to compare its virtues against that of the Suicide Commandos'. "Hey!" June 02, 2009
a hat-trick of FAIL By the standards of the nonEuclidean geometries of TiR's warped intellectual universe, Žižek achieves some kind of namedropping trifecta, in the realm of (what we could call) "epic fail theory," with the following paragraph, taken from a recent paper here: This is Lenin at his Beckettian best, foreshadowing the line from Worstward Ho: 'Try again. Fail again. Fail better.' His conclusion—to begin from the beginning—makes it clear that he is not talking about merely slowing down and fortifying what has already been achieved, but about descending back to the starting point: one should begin from the beginning, not from the place that one succeeded in reaching in the previous effort. In Kierkegaard's terms, a revolutionary process is not a gradual progress but a repetitive movement, a movement of repeating the beginning, again and again. from "How to Begin from the Beginning," NLR 57, May-June 2009 Of course, just when we think the melody is about to get interesting, the Ž-man, being himself, meanderingly modulates away from the above attention-grabbing trichord of proper names. ["Attention-grabbing"? A pity. However, naturally Žižek's job is not to figure out one possible cluster of TiR's recurring preoccupations, especially when even we cannot fix, figure out or articulate them for ourselves. Suffice to say that some of the following, TiR thinks, could be worthy blind alleys to experimentally stagger down, by way of ludicrous potential contributions to the burgeoning field of "FAIL studies" (or not): the increasing consensus that any participant in or observer of the 21st century global conversation should be literate in, hip to and ever-mindful of the phenomenon of Fail; May 27, 2009
tweedle dee that's what we wore -- in the winter we wore tweed coats -- also cheap -- at tier 3 which is where the real hang out was (posers were at mudd club) there was a sign at the coat check: "check your trendy tweeds here". Seriously. Basquiat was always there with his tweed -- above from page authored by one Thurston moooooore Sunday night past midnight novem 9 2008 western mass inserted into membership materials currently distributed by this fine org = reminisces re: empl there during the lisp st days May 12, 2009
from un collecteur to uncollector Novelist Joshua Cohen uses a new review of a few books about or by J. Zorn as a springboard into a wonderful digression about an estimable career -- a career we might call "international garbage man": [Walter Benjamin] was the first to consider seriously the activities of the Collector, whom he established as an emblematic urban personality, flâneuring through a rush hour's undifferentiated mass in desperate search of only one thing -- whatever other people miss. This person used to be Benjamin himself, and it used to be Marcel Proust, who collated and rewrote easily ignored, easily forgotten observations and overheard remarks into a novel that provided the deepest possible literary engagement with the surface reality of his time. The above makes some insightful linkages that tempt one ["one" = an arguably ludicrous & tiresome pedant, like TiR]to go back to the sources to test their support. Cohen also seems to invite us to wonder: Why did those two individuals collect things, back then? Why do "we" collect, if we do, now? How have the motivations of the collector changed, if at all, between then and now? Thus, on Proust as a connoisseur of the overheard, we find in Swann's Way, early on Beneath the everyday incidents, the commonplace thoughts and hackneyed words, I could hear, or overhear, an intonation, a rhythmic utterance fine and strange. & on MP's possible self-identity as a collector, the narrator of Time Regained characterizes his method like this: In the same way, a collector who is shown the wing of an altar screen, remembers the church or museum or private collection in which the others are dispersed (as also, by following sale-catalogues or searching among dealers in antiques, he finally discovers the twin object to the one he possesses which makes them a pair and thus can mentally reconstitute the predella and the entire altar-piece). [Ugh! In what we know as the Arcades Project, WB kerplunks the preceding "altar-piece" bit into his section H, the "collector" section, and nudges the analytical ball further along to wonder about the whys of the collector, in his day: What is decisive in collecting is that the object is detached from all its original functions in order to enter into the closest conceivable relation to things of all the same kind. This relation is the diametric opposite of any utility . . . Well, not exactly, on that last point: WB elsewhere in the same section explains that "one may start" from an even earlier start -- the "start of the start"? We are told that we can "deduce" the following consequence [t]he positive countertype to the collector -- which also, insofar as it entails the liberation of things from the drudgery of being useful, represents the consummation of the collector from the premise below: Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it –- when it exists for us as capital. [Why? That last, capital-related connection above sounds a chord with a note that rings familiar to contemporary, übercynical ears. Nowadays, maybe we [or "we," or TiR, or us in our most exhausted & pessimistic moods, etc.best "understand" collecting when there's money to be made at it. We automatically ask: Can the collection be sold as a commodity? If not, can you at least compile your narration of how you amassed your collection, then sell that? OK, then the collection makes sense. That's healthy. [TiR could digress here into wondering about a dystopian future in which sickness or health come to be defined exclusively in terms of whether the attribute contributes to the agent's fitness for competition in the marketplace.] However, to the increased extent to which a collection will be entirely unmarketable to anyone ever, then collecting it appears to us as hoarding behavior, and pathological, unhygenic and incomprehensible. Nowadays, [or at TiR's lower, and more crabbed, claustrophobic and overly analytical moments]unless we catch ourselves in mid-thought, we tend mechanically to relegate any attitude or activity that betrays a lack of cynicism and calculation to the realm of the foolish, the just plain weird, or even the inhuman -- or TiR fears that everyone else has begun to see things this way, and can smell our sickness in not yet having gotten on board. So TiR has an increasingly hard time wrapping its ever narrowing, one inch mind around why Proust or Benjamin collected the "trash" they did (as Cohen would have it), especially if the trash could not be converted foreseeably at some point into a sellable commodity and someone else's treasure. To bridge several decades of historical distance becomes an increasingly unreachable imaginative stretch -- all the more so when only four months ago can seem like incomprehensibly weird ancient history. Were MP and WB special? Or were they typical, but fortunate enough to be collectors during a now bygone era of a generally less market-minded and commodity-obsessed collector environment? Who knows? Though TWA, for one, writing in the USA in the mid-40s, thought he detected a general shift to a new model of greed and, with it, a new kind of collector: [GoodGod! There are two kinds of greed. One is the archaic kind, the passion which begrudges nothing to oneself and others. . . . It comes to fruition in the miser. . . . The miser is related to the collector, the manic one or the great lover. . . . Now and then one still runs across them as curiosities in the local section of the newspaper. If TWA was correct, then today's collectors are three generations further along the descent he described. In a new work that seems to be the greatest, most recent contribution to the field of "collector studies," William Davies King suggests that uncomprehending others have often demanded him to justify his vast, beloved collections of "nothing" in terms of valuation that a market would understand: I was surprised to discover a few years ago that Wheaties boxes have become part of the boom in sports memorabilia, and many of the older boxes have become precious. If I had my dad’s cereal boxes, my mother’s dolls, and a lunch box or two from my grade school years, I could summer in Gstaad, courtesy of those crazy collectors! However, Davies' approach as a collector is clearly out of step with the world in which we live. He writes: Again, the nothingness I cherish dovetails with the valuable goods discarded by others. I love it all. I love you for what you do not love, what you throw away. There's a paradox in that. I love you for your lack of love for what I love. Cute, but where's the margin in that? We suspect that Proust & Benjamin would join Davies, as collectors, on the scrap heap of today and its more "rational" collector model. Cohen and Davies tempt us into wondering whether they don't point towards the reigning paradigm of wealth creation in the 21st century: the collection of tiny, individually worthless bits that others have overlooked or discarded onto the garbage heap, into an aggregate worth selling. What qualties does it take, to make money as this new kind of collector? One quality seems to be patience. The patience is that of the stamp collector who knows, The stamps themselves may be of little value individually, but in combination they are keenly sought and valued accordingly. or of the book collector who says, [M]ost of the time now I view library sales simply as sources of books to sell as group lots. That is, books that are worthless individually (and passed over by the scan monsters) but do OK if grouped together as a collection and sold on eBay as a group lot. It tends to be more profitable for me than looking for the needle in the haystack. Another quality might be desperation. E.g. as necessary to strip or glean bits of gold, palladium, copper and other metals from discarded computer components in the garbage dumps of Ghana or Guangdong, for aggregation and resale. We could add to the list "imagination." However, TiR sometimes gloomily speculates that, for some (i.e., our inexcusably solipsistic self!), imagination and even thought, cognition, the thinkable, the limits of belief systems, etc. generally will threaten to become dis/replaced by "computing power," i.e., the precise flipside to the ever-expanding mountain of newly obsolete, digital-era debris just mentioned. Our half-baked ponderings go past the accumulative logic of the fashionable "Long Tail" concept and its buidling up of the One through the infinitesimal Many, by, for example, technological coordination of the minutiae of inventory control or the marshalling of the power of countless microinvestments. Beyond that, TiR scratches its slow, dumb head at the swirl that is systems trading, quant investing, black box models, algo trading, Fibonacci patterning, etc. and their iterative momentum, the seductiveness of an engine that promises to tirelessly compile the measurelessly small (to the unaided eye) and near-worthless, and alchemize the aggregate to build measureless riches. Last month, Prof. John Pfaff wishfully wrote: If the past year has taught us anything, it is that you generally cannot aggregate worthless things into something worthwhile. But who, really, has learned this? And, if so, how deeply (at least in the USA)? Especially when the mindset of today's collector alchemist has on offer the stability derived from the complementary idea of reverse-alchemy, i.e., that the chopping up of a large toxic mass, and the widespread distribution (or hiding) of its smaller particles, will eliminate the toxicity. One financial commentator has defined securitization as nothing other than "the 'slicing and dicing' of risk." From "collector" to "uncollector." Hence, a constant recycling churn: the collection of trash ==> the "cash for trash" phase ==> the redistribution of trash ==> and the garbage's eventual regathering, resale, and so on. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing. We suppose it all depends on who takes a cut at each step, in whose interests, and who gets caught holding the (plastic) bag (or living atop it). In an uncharacteristically theory-ish moment, someone once said, "The transformation of waste is perhaps the oldest preoccupation of man." TiR is tempted to reply: This may be so. Moreover, there do seem to be some contemporary collectors invested in the bet that the transformational churn will be a lucrative preoccupation in the decades ahead. However, our truest reply is: "Waste? May 01, 2009
today's TiR Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart prizewinner "Propaganda Van Girl" viewable here and here ("2.7 Times More Than Planned," 1988) espied in exhibition discussed here and here (prints collected by Nicholas Bonner) some links that pertain to Pyongyang's Mansudae Art Studio are here and here [May Day edition] |
