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

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