a friend of the family has just been released from her commitment to the marines -- she made it through most of boot camp but eventually decided this path was not for her. the letters she and i wrote -- the first time she and i had ever corresponded with one another in all our years of knowing each other -- were the pieces of writing that largely motivated me to start this blog; i had hoped to publish excerpts from our letters as a conversation on the arguments for and against military service in the U.S. that may still happen one day.
in her most recent letter, she answers a question i had asked about access to news media: zero access to media outside of the light fare magazines that recruits receive in care packages and share with one another -- cosmo, people, ok, etc. -- and a tv on which they watch fox news from time to time.
wouldn't it make sense to educate and expose soldiers in training to the world events with which they soon will be directly involved as`instruments of our foreign policy?
i understand it's boot camp and you're isolating recruits as a means of reinforcing their focus on the training alone, but come on. given our armed forces' recent track record of insensitivity to and, often enough, criminal targeting of the cultures and people among whom we're waging war and campaigning for alliances, you'd think a baseline priority would be trying to graduate better educated, more worldly soldiers.
so glad she's getting out.
June 14, 2009
Likely Pairings: Joe Frank & intuition
since i never bothered to convert to digital television, the radio's been on in my house a lot these days: mostly the classical station because i can't write when there are other words in my ears.
but the other night, i randomly landed on a radio program that juxtaposed audio footage of different speakers who, it became clear, has been recorded in phone conversation by whomever they'd been on the phone with. In between monologue samples and soundtracked behind them was this dreamy, slightly ominous and repetitive sonic landscape music. one woman very matter of factly told a story about a woman who had died, not, as you'd expect, from the physical trauma caused by a mass of some kind of sea larva that, after incubating in her body, had started emerging from her vagina, but from a head injury she suffered from falling and hitting her head sharply due to the shock of discovering what was happening to her. i think her mom or husband found her dead on the bathroom floor. this story may also involve the erotic use of a lobster, that being the initial route of the sea larva transmission; but i'm purposefully not fully remembering that part out of sheer horror. the absurdity of the story, the lulling music, and the eclecticism of the other audio samples that followed were stunning: "stunning" in that the effects were both shock and admiration, both recognition of truth and total disorientation in the face of the new.
so this is how i discovered joe frank for myself, one of the "icons of the last generation of radiophonic producers" (quoting stephen hill, who is himself an icon of radiophonic radio). a friend w/ deep knowledge of underground and private press music had mentioned frank to me a year ago (and introduced me to hill), but sometimes you're not ready to know things, you know? who knows how many choice recommendations - books, music, places, people - i've let slip due to inattention in the moment? this friend also published one of the rare interviews with frank that's out there, appropriately conducted over the phone, in 1994.
i've heard just one frank program, but it defamiliarized and provoked me in the way that only great art does. the first time i can remember feeling as riveted to a radio program was in the late 80's when i'd tune in to this wnyc produced radio program that aired from 1984-1988, kids america, and exist, for an hour, in an audioscape of campy characters and kid friendly pop hits in the format of an educational variety show of the kind that the 70's and early 80's perfected: other examples being the electric company, schoolhouse rock!, and, of course, sesame street.
in the aftermath of the digital television revolution, i'm really pleased that it's the radio that's blowing my mind these days.
i also like thinking of my (re)discovery of frank (i can't really count douglas's mention of him my first dicovery, though i did register his recommendation well enough to recall it, a year later) in terms of the exercises in intuition and coincidence that i'm practicing, in order to develop my intuitive resources. some people call it psychic ability, but until i can say that without even a small amount of skepticism or derision, i'm going to stick with "intuition," in which i do firmly believe. more on this soon -- but basically, the book i'm reading to work on all of this likens intuitive ability to a radio; it's got to be on and working to pick up all the signals that might be out there.
from what i know of frank's mysticism, it seems appropriate that my discovery of his work should inaugurate my entry into the world of the not-quite-rational and not-entirely-explicable.... radio on!!
(video by new zealand youtube user "heraldstreet" - thanks!!)
food: lentil, blueberry & watercress salad. and a pluot.
music: 102.1 KDFC & "Roadrunner" by the Modern Lovers
art: 94.1 KPFA Joe Frank "tales from the urban jungle"
text: the psychic pathway
but the other night, i randomly landed on a radio program that juxtaposed audio footage of different speakers who, it became clear, has been recorded in phone conversation by whomever they'd been on the phone with. In between monologue samples and soundtracked behind them was this dreamy, slightly ominous and repetitive sonic landscape music. one woman very matter of factly told a story about a woman who had died, not, as you'd expect, from the physical trauma caused by a mass of some kind of sea larva that, after incubating in her body, had started emerging from her vagina, but from a head injury she suffered from falling and hitting her head sharply due to the shock of discovering what was happening to her. i think her mom or husband found her dead on the bathroom floor. this story may also involve the erotic use of a lobster, that being the initial route of the sea larva transmission; but i'm purposefully not fully remembering that part out of sheer horror. the absurdity of the story, the lulling music, and the eclecticism of the other audio samples that followed were stunning: "stunning" in that the effects were both shock and admiration, both recognition of truth and total disorientation in the face of the new.
so this is how i discovered joe frank for myself, one of the "icons of the last generation of radiophonic producers" (quoting stephen hill, who is himself an icon of radiophonic radio). a friend w/ deep knowledge of underground and private press music had mentioned frank to me a year ago (and introduced me to hill), but sometimes you're not ready to know things, you know? who knows how many choice recommendations - books, music, places, people - i've let slip due to inattention in the moment? this friend also published one of the rare interviews with frank that's out there, appropriately conducted over the phone, in 1994.
i've heard just one frank program, but it defamiliarized and provoked me in the way that only great art does. the first time i can remember feeling as riveted to a radio program was in the late 80's when i'd tune in to this wnyc produced radio program that aired from 1984-1988, kids america, and exist, for an hour, in an audioscape of campy characters and kid friendly pop hits in the format of an educational variety show of the kind that the 70's and early 80's perfected: other examples being the electric company, schoolhouse rock!, and, of course, sesame street.
in the aftermath of the digital television revolution, i'm really pleased that it's the radio that's blowing my mind these days.
i also like thinking of my (re)discovery of frank (i can't really count douglas's mention of him my first dicovery, though i did register his recommendation well enough to recall it, a year later) in terms of the exercises in intuition and coincidence that i'm practicing, in order to develop my intuitive resources. some people call it psychic ability, but until i can say that without even a small amount of skepticism or derision, i'm going to stick with "intuition," in which i do firmly believe. more on this soon -- but basically, the book i'm reading to work on all of this likens intuitive ability to a radio; it's got to be on and working to pick up all the signals that might be out there.
from what i know of frank's mysticism, it seems appropriate that my discovery of his work should inaugurate my entry into the world of the not-quite-rational and not-entirely-explicable.... radio on!!
(video by new zealand youtube user "heraldstreet" - thanks!!)
food: lentil, blueberry & watercress salad. and a pluot.
music: 102.1 KDFC & "Roadrunner" by the Modern Lovers
art: 94.1 KPFA Joe Frank "tales from the urban jungle"
text: the psychic pathway
January 10, 2009
November 17, 2008
Dance: AXIS Dance Company
i always leave museums wanting to make things, and now that i'm learning the basic grammars of ballet and modern, i watch dance performances and want to dance around during intermission. during the performance, it feels like my legs pay even closer attention than i do, tensing in sympathy with the people on stage. literally on the edge of my seat.
Axis Dance Company performed in Oakland this past weekend and celebrated their 20th anniversary. it was my introduction to physically integrated dance -- choreography intended for dancers with and without disabilities -- and Axis is the founding company in this field.
so i was really self-conscious about my visceral response this time: the usual identification with the dancers (could i do that?? how did she do that?! i want to try that!!!), but also an awareness of new limits and new parameters. it's hard not to watch dancer rodney bell (in the photo above, with Sonsherée Giles) -- super strong and gestural from the waist up, immobile from the waist down -- and not think about physical limitations.
but then, i guess, dance is all about physical capacities and limitations: making the most athletic gestures against gravity look effortless, ritualizing movement so we see bodies anew. so what i liked best was when bell danced without the aid of his wheelchair, along the stage floor, moving with immobile legs.
i've always said dance is great for seeing amazing bodies doing amazing things -- seeing Axis, i'm confronted with the narrowness of what i've considered beautiful, strong, amazing. i think about how dance endlessly multiplies the body's abilities, and forces you to turn your limits into your own language. i guess my language has something to do with trying to go en pointe at 32. o, gravity!
Sources
art: "The Art of Participation," SFMOMA
music: "Instrumentals Vol. 2, Reach One," Arthur Russell
film: Quantum of Solace, Jonathan Miller's Alice in Wonderland (1966)
food: Beard Papa green tea creampuff
November 14, 2008
Likely Pairings: Seurat & WC Williams
These things are intersecting for me right now, due to some reading I'm doing for the art history discussion section I have to lead on Monday, and for the dissertation chapter I'm working on. I don't have a coherent story to wrench them all together right now, but it has something to do with modernism and modernity, populism, class consciousness in art, and the epic impulse in painting vs poetry.
Georges Seurat, Dimanche après-midi à l'île de La Grande Jatte (1886)
From William Carlos Williams's Paterson, Book Two, "Sunday in the Park" (1948)
So during the early afternoon, from place
to place he moves,
his voice mingling with other voices
--the voice in his voice
opening his old throat, blowing out his lips,
kindling his mind (more
than his mind will kindle)
--following the hikers.
At last he comes to the idlers' favorite
haunts, the picturesque summit, where
the blue-stone (rust-red where exposed)
has been faulted at various levels
(ferns rife among the stones)
into rough terraces and partly closed in
dens of sweet grass, the ground gently sloping.
Loiterers in groups straggle
over the bare rock-table--scratched by their
boot-nails more than the glacier scratched
them--walking indifferent though
each other's privacy .
in any case,
the center of movement, the core of gaiety.
From T.J. Clark's The Painting of Modern Life (1984/1999)
"...[Seurat] wished the viewer to see a new version of Phidias's Panathenaic procession, with 'the moderns moving about the same way, friezelike, stripped down to their essentials.' The picture is epic, that presumably is what Seurat meant: large in scale and positive in its overall attitude to the events it chooses; concerned to give them definite form, and not afraid to repeat itself a bit in the process, or to relish the accidental intricacies thrown up by the hard, bright detail; certain, above all, that what was shown was somehow historical, a grand new ordering of the most important matters of the moment."
And... what the hell, why not?
Scene from Sondheim's "Sunday in the Park with George," Wyndham Theatre, London (2006)
Georges Seurat, Dimanche après-midi à l'île de La Grande Jatte (1886)
From William Carlos Williams's Paterson, Book Two, "Sunday in the Park" (1948)
So during the early afternoon, from place
to place he moves,
his voice mingling with other voices
--the voice in his voice
opening his old throat, blowing out his lips,
kindling his mind (more
than his mind will kindle)
--following the hikers.
At last he comes to the idlers' favorite
haunts, the picturesque summit, where
the blue-stone (rust-red where exposed)
has been faulted at various levels
(ferns rife among the stones)
into rough terraces and partly closed in
dens of sweet grass, the ground gently sloping.
Loiterers in groups straggle
over the bare rock-table--scratched by their
boot-nails more than the glacier scratched
them--walking indifferent though
each other's privacy .
in any case,
the center of movement, the core of gaiety.
From T.J. Clark's The Painting of Modern Life (1984/1999)
"...[Seurat] wished the viewer to see a new version of Phidias's Panathenaic procession, with 'the moderns moving about the same way, friezelike, stripped down to their essentials.' The picture is epic, that presumably is what Seurat meant: large in scale and positive in its overall attitude to the events it chooses; concerned to give them definite form, and not afraid to repeat itself a bit in the process, or to relish the accidental intricacies thrown up by the hard, bright detail; certain, above all, that what was shown was somehow historical, a grand new ordering of the most important matters of the moment."
And... what the hell, why not?
Scene from Sondheim's "Sunday in the Park with George," Wyndham Theatre, London (2006)
November 8, 2008
open source synergy
"What if every time that the consciousness of individuals surpassed the confines of present constellations of power in perceiving the concrete meaning of freedom, this were valued as a moment, however transitory, of the realization of absolute spirit? What other silences would need to be broken? What un-disciplined stories would be told?"
Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel and Haiti
these days it feels as if everything i'm reading, seeing and hearing is synergistically sparking off one another and it's all part of one big idea-universe. synergy describes a system where the collaborative outcome is greater than the sum of its parts. the "greater than" effect for me is the incredibly exciting feeling of existing in a coherent network of ideas and values and like-minded people -- i wonder if this is what it's like to find god and religion -- you suddenly understand that everything makes sense and is relational and even the things that don't make sense are still part of the larger sense-making system you've discovered.
it's a hegelian universe: the kind that's based on the concept of absolute spirit and everything being relational via synthesis, where rocks are just the lowest organization of spirit in a spectrum that stretches out to include the most enlightened, reflective creatures in the universe: maybe it's a person, but maybe it's an animal or a fungus -- we can't really know. hegel thinks it's a rationally self-reflective person, but i'm not so sure... C got me a shittake mushroom kit for my birthday, and it's producing mushrooms finally, and each day i mist this 6" x 9" x 8" mycelium cake and when i come home, those little mushrooms have doubled in size. i've also got this really happy and frantically growing fiddle leaf ficus that unfurls new leaves everytime I turn around -- i'm amazed at all this growing energy going on in my little living room, and then i have to remind myself that I'm a walking laboratory of catalysts and growing and decay, too.
today I attended a talk by Rick Prelinger, co-founder of The Prelinger Library, and Richard Rinehart, digital media director for the Berkeley Art Museum (BAM), part of the very excellent Takeovers & Makeovers: Appropriation, Fair Use, and Copyright in the Digital Age conference that just happened at BAM. really motivating and empowering manifestos for participatory culture and the liberation of art and art-making from the tyranny of concepts like originality and sole, copyrighted authorship. they're advocates for open source programming, the creative commons, and museums and archives as banks of material for public access and use. i've just re-read Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility" for the first time since college, and his call for the avant-garde to transform and adapt the apparatuses of production to alienate the ruling classes while enabling the proletarian masses to themselves create casts an encouraging light on the blogosphere, diy and maker-moment that we're in, where mccain doesn't know how to email but grade school kids are adept bloggers, hackers and piraters.
it's more fodder for feeling excited about making and writing a bunch of stuff, including this blog, and for seeing the world synergistically. once you catch onto a thread, you see the entire fabric differently.
case in point: the New Museum's online exhibition of Paul Chan's gorgeous 7 Lights series ("Lights" is supposed to be struck through but I can't figure out how to format that...) allows you to download the source file that's part of the range of materials Chan used to create these pieces. i wouldn't have fully understood the larger significance of this kind of accessibility without the constellation of marx, benjamin, and those talks that fired me up today.
watch 1st Light (strikethrough), which i first saw at the Whitney Biennial a few years ago, and the other six pieces. be patient! they're troubling and beautiful and worth the wait.
Sources
music: Evening Star, Fripp & Eno. Music for Films, Brian Eno
text: "The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility," Walter Benjamin
movement: ballet
Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel and Haiti
these days it feels as if everything i'm reading, seeing and hearing is synergistically sparking off one another and it's all part of one big idea-universe. synergy describes a system where the collaborative outcome is greater than the sum of its parts. the "greater than" effect for me is the incredibly exciting feeling of existing in a coherent network of ideas and values and like-minded people -- i wonder if this is what it's like to find god and religion -- you suddenly understand that everything makes sense and is relational and even the things that don't make sense are still part of the larger sense-making system you've discovered.
it's a hegelian universe: the kind that's based on the concept of absolute spirit and everything being relational via synthesis, where rocks are just the lowest organization of spirit in a spectrum that stretches out to include the most enlightened, reflective creatures in the universe: maybe it's a person, but maybe it's an animal or a fungus -- we can't really know. hegel thinks it's a rationally self-reflective person, but i'm not so sure... C got me a shittake mushroom kit for my birthday, and it's producing mushrooms finally, and each day i mist this 6" x 9" x 8" mycelium cake and when i come home, those little mushrooms have doubled in size. i've also got this really happy and frantically growing fiddle leaf ficus that unfurls new leaves everytime I turn around -- i'm amazed at all this growing energy going on in my little living room, and then i have to remind myself that I'm a walking laboratory of catalysts and growing and decay, too.
today I attended a talk by Rick Prelinger, co-founder of The Prelinger Library, and Richard Rinehart, digital media director for the Berkeley Art Museum (BAM), part of the very excellent Takeovers & Makeovers: Appropriation, Fair Use, and Copyright in the Digital Age conference that just happened at BAM. really motivating and empowering manifestos for participatory culture and the liberation of art and art-making from the tyranny of concepts like originality and sole, copyrighted authorship. they're advocates for open source programming, the creative commons, and museums and archives as banks of material for public access and use. i've just re-read Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility" for the first time since college, and his call for the avant-garde to transform and adapt the apparatuses of production to alienate the ruling classes while enabling the proletarian masses to themselves create casts an encouraging light on the blogosphere, diy and maker-moment that we're in, where mccain doesn't know how to email but grade school kids are adept bloggers, hackers and piraters.
it's more fodder for feeling excited about making and writing a bunch of stuff, including this blog, and for seeing the world synergistically. once you catch onto a thread, you see the entire fabric differently.
case in point: the New Museum's online exhibition of Paul Chan's gorgeous 7 Lights series ("Lights" is supposed to be struck through but I can't figure out how to format that...) allows you to download the source file that's part of the range of materials Chan used to create these pieces. i wouldn't have fully understood the larger significance of this kind of accessibility without the constellation of marx, benjamin, and those talks that fired me up today.
watch 1st Light (strikethrough), which i first saw at the Whitney Biennial a few years ago, and the other six pieces. be patient! they're troubling and beautiful and worth the wait.
Sources
music: Evening Star, Fripp & Eno. Music for Films, Brian Eno
text: "The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility," Walter Benjamin
movement: ballet
November 6, 2008
beguine: pointe shoes & politics
because obama won, and then i bought pointe shoes, and these days i'm more politically informed than i've ever been in my life -- which is not saying much, but i'm trying -- i decided it was time to end the 5+ year ban i've had on blogging, and start my own repository of half-baked ideas to commemorate all these beginnings: the post-Bush era, my first steps en pointe, the very beginning of knowing how the world works.
it's part narcissism, but part optimism. some genuine things happened this past tuesday, amid all the political theater and performance: a whole lot of people turned away from one model of governance and towards another; a whole lot of people defied the story we'd been told about americans -- that we're anti-intellectual, racist, and fundamentally motivated by fear. while fears for our failing economy (and the end of capitalism) probably account for obama's wide margin of victory, each vote cast for obama was a rejection of the vulgar rhetoric of fear that characterized the mccain campaign's efforts to distract us from the coherence and pragmatism of obama's platform and principles. there's still a frightening and embarrassingly large community of american idiots who think obama is a muslim sociaist terrorist, and i hope that the turn this country takes towards behaving more honorably because of an obama presidency ends up being the biggest, bitter-est pill those bigoted foolios ever have to swallow.
which is not to say that we're on the road to becoming an ethical, social democracy. we're a corporatist superpower through and through, and the best we can hope for is some damage control in the short-term, and in the long-term, to model some better behavior for the large, geopolitical entities that've been making their ascendence in the world even as we've been in decline.
but i can't really say anything incredibly new, incisive or informed about the state of the world; Naomi Klein does it better, and reading The Shock Doctrine has inspired a paradigm shift in my thinking and being in the world.
ballet was the other inspiration for this paradigm shift. more on this, later.
Sources
text: Big Questions #11: Sweetness and Light, Anders Nilsen
music: "This is How We Walk on the Moon," Arthur Russell
film: The Times of Harvey Milk
food: Dagoba organic chocolate, "chai"
it's part narcissism, but part optimism. some genuine things happened this past tuesday, amid all the political theater and performance: a whole lot of people turned away from one model of governance and towards another; a whole lot of people defied the story we'd been told about americans -- that we're anti-intellectual, racist, and fundamentally motivated by fear. while fears for our failing economy (and the end of capitalism) probably account for obama's wide margin of victory, each vote cast for obama was a rejection of the vulgar rhetoric of fear that characterized the mccain campaign's efforts to distract us from the coherence and pragmatism of obama's platform and principles. there's still a frightening and embarrassingly large community of american idiots who think obama is a muslim sociaist terrorist, and i hope that the turn this country takes towards behaving more honorably because of an obama presidency ends up being the biggest, bitter-est pill those bigoted foolios ever have to swallow.
which is not to say that we're on the road to becoming an ethical, social democracy. we're a corporatist superpower through and through, and the best we can hope for is some damage control in the short-term, and in the long-term, to model some better behavior for the large, geopolitical entities that've been making their ascendence in the world even as we've been in decline.
but i can't really say anything incredibly new, incisive or informed about the state of the world; Naomi Klein does it better, and reading The Shock Doctrine has inspired a paradigm shift in my thinking and being in the world.
ballet was the other inspiration for this paradigm shift. more on this, later.
Sources
text: Big Questions #11: Sweetness and Light, Anders Nilsen
music: "This is How We Walk on the Moon," Arthur Russell
film: The Times of Harvey Milk
food: Dagoba organic chocolate, "chai"
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