Flag Stud

I don't always drive into tornadoes but when I do 40 is not enough

When its shell breaks, the egg slides, lead by the yolk, to settle in the low point of the pan. The albumen spreads. As the heat takes to the pan, the albumen finds its edge and begins to cloud white. 

There's a man I see on the train infrequently.  When I do see him, I have trouble looking away from him. His forehead bulges forward. He wears thick glasses.  I can't tell if he can see me. His eyes don't appear in the glass of his lenses. I have yet to spot his eyes. Behind his glasses his skin is dark, as if bruised. 

Beside me there's a sleeping woman. Her mouth is open. The Gucci insignia is set into the periwinkle nail of her ring finger. Versace glasses. Braids. Skirt suit.

People on my car keep their eyes closed. Some bear pillow marks on their cheeks. When a young man walks into the middle of the car and complains that he looks around the ring fingers of the people of New York and  no longer sees any engagement rings, the people on my car stir.  He's moved into their room. He's speaking in a fluid non sequitur that grows in its anger. I've heard him before talk about the billions of dollars he has, how Jay-Z speaks directly to him. His sneakers are white, dirty and near collapse at the heel.  His voice is broad enough to allow no one to feel it directly but it becomes so loud it's impossible to ignore. The nuisance of an alarm clock.  The faces wrinkle as they cannot slap it back to snooze. 

I have pink eye. 

I woke up with my right eye sealed shut. I strained to open my eyelid. The best I could do was open it a quarter of the way and the room looked soft, glaucous until I made my way to the sink and massaged my eye open, cleaned it then admired the swollen lid in the mirror- what a shifty look it gave me having one eye more open than the other.

Of the few who appear awake, a middle aged black woman in a t-shirt that reads "I don't always drive into tornadoes but when I do 40 is not enough" is writing in an oversized composition book. She has it in her lap and appears to be using it for landscapes. I remember not to check her face after I read her shirt. I look away without looking up, without measuring the pieces of her I can see.

Foreground/Background

Foreground/Background

As a rule, I do not stop on the street if someone is trying to get my attention, which may be why on this occasion I decided to stop.  The man I saw peripherally had been well-dressed.  He wore a turban and beard with a long moustache.  I assumed he was a sikh and because of his watch that he worked in the tech industry.  He had said, "Sir, you are going to be lucky." and he made a gesture that indicated something about the length of my forehead and the space between my eyebrows told him this.  At first, I thought he was lost and in need of directions, but he proceeded to tell me that my the last two years of my life had been a struggle.  He said this without any preface and with such confidence that it threw me off.  I was still expecting the request for directions when he told me that my mind was like a butterfly-- fluttering everywhere, but never staying in a single place.  Even at night, as I slept, it took long journeys. At the same time, I keep my heart too open.  I say too much.  I need to learn to guard my heart, but July was to be the month.  The struggles I endured over the last two years were about to end. I remained, despite having a limited time, to see where this was going.  It was an original approach and the man's dress, demeanor and confidence did not point towards the usual direction of a street encounter with a stranger in New York.  He asked if he could read my palm and while he did so he balled up a piece of paper then placed it in my hand then asked me a series of personal questions.  I asked him his name.  He said, Yogi.  I gave Yogi a few of the answers he wanted, smirking when he asked something I did not want to say.  The paper he had placed in my hand came from a small pad he kept within a leather case with his PDA and a picture of what I took to be a holy man, because it resembled an orthodox icon in its execution, but showed a smiling man with long black hair, a yellow line on his forehead and dot between his eyebrows and a single hand raised in blessing.  While I answered, he wrote my answers on his small pad.  He asked what I desired for the future.  I said peace and prosperity.  He had difficulty understanding this part, so I repeated it for him two more times and I watched him write words that appear phonetically similar to the words I just said, but in reality were closer to pears and property.  I let him know that I was short on time and he said okay, he was done with his questions.  He asked if I had anything I could give him as a sign that I believed my luck would change.  At this, I smiled, more broadly than the man in the icon in his PDA, and he could tell he was revealed in this moment, but he did not ask directly for money.  "This is by far the most original interaction I've had on the street," I told him and gave him a dollar, which he set over the face of the icon in his leather attache. He then asked me to look at the paper in my palm, but bumped my wrist, as if by accident.  The paper was so light, it dropped by our feet and I reached down to pick it up.  Written on the the paper were the answers to each of the questions.  I asked him his name again and he said, "Yogi.  But you will not remember it. Remember instead that July will be your lucky month, that your struggles are over." I wished Yogi good luck as well then walked away.  

In Treasure Island, the reader does not encounter Ben Gunn until the latter half of the book, when the crew has reached the island upon which he was marooned by Captain Flint.  Whatever happens in the first half of the book, Ben Gunn remains in the distant background on the island completely unaware of what is happening in the foreground, that his rescue is growing more imminent.  Likewise Jim Hawkins, Squire Trelawney, and Dr. Livesey are completely unaware of Ben Gunn's existence, just as they are unaware of the true nature of their cook or a good portion of the crew upon their ship.  The mutiny prepares the reader for the reality of Ben Gunn and when we do meet him, we are not confronted with the fact that his isolation has been a predication of the adventure that has come so far, it is placed upon the actions of Captain Flint who marooned the man years before. His remove from the mechanics of the story that preceded him are so perfect, that the characters have been either entirely ignorant of his existence or so perfectly mute to the possibility that he becomes a physical stand in for the unknown quotient within each character, the embodiment of the unspoken and of the unknown.

The life of a solitary castaway has always struck me as a kind of zen koan.  If a person exists in total isolation, do they still exist?  It goes back to that notion of publicity--- whether we learn to speak of our inner life or leave it there unfulfilled, do we require evidence to know it's there?  If we never learn to speak of it, it remains only a possibility and not yet a reality.  But if a castaway could be real and possess thoughts and follow actions, what proof would he or she require that they still existed outside of their hunger, their boredom, their loneliness?  The castaway is placed just at the utter end of human experience. Whatever record a castaway leaves of their experience, whether out of a habit of consolation bred to break up the monotony of the days or out of the hope of discovery, it becomes the inverse of that latent inner life. The record of the castaway's reality becomes a possibility, posited on the accident of discovery--  a person that was real and whose experiences were irrevocably apart from the rest of ours.  That is, there's always the possibility that someone will find a small island in the Pacific and on that small island written on the walls of a cave, the sign of a life, or within the cave just a small pile of remains judged to be human, modern and in the muteness of the walls a story too grim to imagine, or a testament to time spent alone.        

  

Christ was born a millennium before the Montefeltro chapel was built. This image foregrounds the duke's devotion by depicting Christ within his presence.  This is an early example of a political devotional painting, where the Duke's patronage to the church is the painting's main  subject.  The infant in the center of the painting, along with a number of assembled luminaries are examples of an historical/temporal vanishing point. The logical concerns of both time and space are erased in order to bring a historically and spiritually symbolic moment into the foreground. We ignore the implication of anachronism because devotional scenes became common throughout the Renaissance, but the irruption of the infant Jesus, like the Kool Aid man of early proportional painting, served as a spiritual reminder of the magic of transubstantiation, where sacramental bread becomes the body of Christ. 

One of the interesting things about franchises is that they provide the visual promise of sameness. In this way they break apart distances.  If you want McDonald's, you'll go to the one that's closest-- unless you know that one to be particularly bad. The idea being that the visual similarity of a fast food chain creates a broken landscape, where every few miles or every few hundred feet, depending upon where you live in the world, you will find the reminder of that thing you once ate and may crave and you can be assured of its similarity to the one you ate before and this, though the similarity belies a whole universe of rules that must be followed by the owner and staff of the restaurant, is another vanishing point, a four dimensional one meant to create a kind of parallel continuum where a particular flavor or mouthfeel can be found within a regulated, well-maintained space. Through franchising rights, blueprints and zoning laws, this continuum is executed so that a thing you desire, a thing you tasted before or encountered on TV, can be as convenient to your current location as possible. A point of reliance, a piece of food taken out of time and space, underwhelming when unwrapped, but eaten just the same. 

  

She Got the Ruins of Him (IPoS,tHL Part 9)

I started this post considering the expansive style Proust deploys throughout In Search of Lost Time as a hedge against the callousness of history, writing as a cultural biodome for the society and manners all but wiped out by the first World War. Writing for posterity.

In The Recognitions, when asked to forge a Fra Angelico, Wyatt Gwyon answers that it would be impossible. Fra Angelico painted on his knees.  Gaddis, in his letters, mentions that he wrote The Recognitions to be the last Christian novel. When coupled with his obsession over what he saw to be the loss of techne or the technical prowess earned and defined by genius to the ease of mechanical reproduction (will someone turn off that fucking player piano), I get the sense of his historical comment: that man, in losing his connection to god, loses that which can enable the best in men, that is divine inspiration.  When abutted against J R, the historical moment is characterized further as we edge deeper into entropy, we don't just lose inspiration, but we lose its fruits, we ultimately lose the ability to discern the truth.

In reading some of the press around Karl Ove Knausgaard, I have begun to think of his work, My Struggle, as fitting in this place of entropic expansion, where a bowl of corn flakes can carry equal weight to the death of a father, the exact place of anxiety where every moment must be recorded to show it is both everything and nothing, the terrifying place of historical disappearance.  His recent piece in the Times Style section of all places discusses the meaning of fame in the face of a culture that emphasizes and rewards sameness. I'll have to bar myself from completing this prolonged post until I've had my chance to read his books, at least the first, but this I am prepared to say: There are no modern ruins outside of the moment.

However often I see New York City destroyed on screen, whether it's the remains of the Statue of Liberty in Planet of the Apes, or whether it's the eagles on the Empire State Building gushing water in AI, or the weed-ridden Times Square in I Am Legend, or the towers of the Time Warner Center in Cloverfield, or the intergalactic melee at the close of The Avengers (how much fun is it to watch the Hulk shred aliens and city scenery both in that scene?), or yes the Empire State Building again getting decimated by the alien laser in Richard Ford's Michael Bay's Independence Day, I wonder what it is I'm being asked to consider.  We are entertained by the prospect of our own destruction so regularly that it takes on a Buddhist character of non-attachment rather than as a tragic Cassandra-esque prediction. It brings to mind as well the habit of thought Herman Kahn proposed in On Thermonuclear War, that by bringing ourselves to imagine the worst, we can overcome the fear of it. As recently as a decade ago in India, there was a support group for women who had suffered domestic abuse. The women would sit together and visualize themselves receiving beatings, horrible beatings at the hands of their spouses, fathers and brothers. In doing so, a number of them found the strength to stand up to the abuse, to stop it. After September 11th, I remember wondering how long it would be before New York City could be destroyed again on screen. It would allow us to return to a sense of normalcy.

What is it about NYC that we're so thrilled to see it destroyed? The impersonal city filled with its invulnerable skyscrapers, it's like a great uncle with a face full of cigars shouting for you to knock him one on the chin. Come on, tough guy, come on! By watching its perpetual destruction we are reminded of its importance, its singularity.  We are fragile because of its importance, its centrality to everything, we can't help but to heap more importance on it, add more authority to the place, imagine it as the place where all old world arguments dissolve into currency, the central totem of the New World amnesia.  Of course, New York City has been erased. The idiom of each street runs: Duane Reade, American Apparel, Chase, Starbucks, Payless Shoes or Rite Aid, Dunkin Donuts/Baskin Robbins, pizza place, Virgin Mobile store, TD Bank, Radioshack. I have to pay attention to the street signs. It's amazingly easy to ignore where you are when your street turns into a corridor of chains. The ruins we leave will be like a labyrinth of ice.

Almost two years ago, I got to work about an hour early so I could walk up the street and watch Christian Marclay's The Clock. They were showing it at the Lincoln Center atrium and I got there early enough that I didn't need to wait in line.  I walked right in and found a seat.  They had set up a provisional theater in the atrium, behind dark curtains you crossed through. I sat alone. Marclay edited together a twenty-four hour film made up of shots of clocks from thousands of movies, edited together to become a working clock.  Each scenario I saw occurred within the span between 8 AM and 9 AM and despite showing a kind of pluralism-- the imaginations of hundreds of film makers, the actions of thousands of actors separated by decades, by film stock, by technicolor, split up by the minutes in the day but unified in their purpose-- they were all there to count the time. Each time a clock appeared on screen, it was like the true star of the film had just appeared.  I sat enthralled. Time was passing me by. I was late for work.

Bat Conlon has a forehead like the Merrick's retriever... (William Trevor, The Piano Turner's Wives)

It may be a fair question-- was art more beautiful when god was central to the artist's pursuit?--but it is only fair if it shows us a way forward. In other words, how do we account for the effect of what was once deemed divine inspiration. Part of it seems coeval with the faulty belief that morality can't exist without religion, but the part that is deeper, the question as to what informs great art, because great art still happens and whether that constitutes a true difference between people, a talent that would set aside one person or give that person power or special vision over others may be irrelevant. I think of Rimbaud, the fed up poet turned arms dealer. Perhaps there's a fine line. The best writers are just borrowing our words.
____

Back in the winter of 2006, I visited Beijing.  I was informed then of the rapid changes that the city was realizing in order to host the Olympics.  Whole neighborhoods were evacuated then leveled, the people relocated, sometimes officially sometimes not.  There was an international shortage of cement and cranes due to the amount of construction happening in Beijing.  It was February and a lot of people burned coal to stay warm.  There was so much dust in the air that when I chewed gum (with my mouth shut) the gum grew gritty. The changes that were happening meant little too me, though I registered the appropriate culture shock that a government could so indispose its citizens without there being some kind of reciprocity-- and there may have been but I didn't hear about it.  Instead, I heard about how the Beijing branch of Hooters set to open prior to the Olympics had stacks of resumes from college graduates fighting over the open waitressing jobs.  In tips alone, the job could provide a middle class life in a country where there was still no sign of a middle class. I think about this in relation to a line I read recently in Jack Gilbert's A Brief for the Defense:

If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction, 

we lessen the importance of their deprivation.

We must risk delight...    

It struck me first as sentimental and a little reckless. Gilbert positions these lines after speaking of women in Calcutta laughing in spite of their pain, but as I considered it against the hardness of Gilbert's other poems, the sentiment went away.  It is just the way we live now. We risk delight.

Covering a Distance of 356 Feet

In the Recognitions,Wyatt Gwyon expresses the rarity of a moment of pure perception when relating his experience of seeing Night Fishing at Antibes. That scene has stuck with me and every now and then when the barometric pressure is right and I haven't over-eaten or gotten drunk, I feel clear-eyed and I think of this painting.

Sci-fi

The universe is a shadow, an absence so massive it is beguiled by the force of its own casting.   

We think of the big bang as a single event, as a moment where everything was collapsed into an infinitesimal dot.

Though I'm free to consider the possibility that the universe did not begin under the conditions of symmetry, that there were an array of bangs that cast out massive overlapping differences across the universe. 

But if I consider the single event and I think of the prospect of infinite expansion under the conditions of the laws of thermodynamics, that all matter as we know it has always existed and will always exist and will only undergo changes, I'm inclined to think of distance as the shadow of time. That is distance and time are both the vectors describing the expansion of that little dot, where the big bang is the zero state and the outer edge of the universe is its present-- we exist somewhere inside it, a dizzied mote swirling somewhere in the shadow, capable of defining a separate present.

The experience of the universe is force, matter and absence. Time and space both undergo customizations when they are attached to human experience, specializations. When we perceive time, we perceive our own mortality.  When we perceive space, we reckon our own smallness or borrow the world's largeness.  Our perceptions are attuned to radiations and emanations aged by their crossing of space. We cope with these gaps in various ways, but our senses function as relays and our experiences relay our energies. The planet is a prism, a cloud chamber, where the forces of space and time are slowed and bent by our living. We don't have to accept the indifference of the universe, we only have to understand it. 

Have you ever been to Ohio?
Side view of the Wright Brothers glider courtesy of the Library of Congress

Stairway Treads

At work, our stairway is covered in a black industrial tread with raised black dots to lend the treadless sole of the work-appropriate dress shoe extra grip.  Our stairway is also our fire stairway, so it serves a dual purpose and the only break in the functional repetition of the bland wall and bright rail are inspirational posters, placed at the occasion of a new floor.  If you are like me and tend to miss a step, your eye is likely pointed at the stairs for the most part and so lost inside the march of the raised black dots that cascade ever downward.  It seems like Robert Smithson's definition of a non-site, a place of pure dislocation without any identity.  Smithson, an earthworks artist, used the term pejoratively to describe the housing and commercial development booms in the late sixties and early seventies-- that continue to the present and were first signified by the mini-mall and now extend to the big box store.  But where those stores are at least partially clothed in their purpose and it can take a good half hour before I'm dwarfed by their exhaustive supply and choices, the functionality of the stairway treads overwhelm me almost immediately, to the point where I second guess taking the stairs. I feel out of place and have to stop myself from running down the stairs, even when I do, the repetition I find at the next floor is almost as disheartening as starting back at the top where I began.  There's an airlessness in the stairwell.  It's pressurized in case of fire and there's an industrial fan hidden away somewhere to suck away smoke in case it enters. For some reason today I was in the stairwell and I didn't feel the need to rush. I let the illusion that I was nowhere stand and I walked as slowly as I could and I found myself comforted by the procession of raised black dots. I let my eyes go soft and I felt for a few moments that the tread had dropped away and that I was floating down on a cushion of dots.      


Roll 'Em

A reel-to-reel projector, if turned upside down, becomes a small car. 

Portrait of Rose Covarrubias, Mexico by Edward Weston

Bad Art

One measure of bad art is the distance of the art from the artist.  Bad technique.

Another measure is the distance of the artist from the viewer.  Bad engagement.

Both measures are usually blocked by our own embarrassment because these distances come across like bad pick up lines.  We hold it against the artist because he or she could not manipulate us. 

The pleasure we take from bad art is entirely fed by our notion of the artist's shame. The artist should be shamed to make better art, but then we couldn't measure their distance from our ideal.   
     

Wax Hanks

Traveling

Traveling

Over the past four weeks, I have slept in five different rooms broken by intervals of sleeping at home. I woke up in the night last night and for a moment felt completely displaced, as if my identity was still asleep. In that moment, my impression of my room, my bed and myself were entirely out of sync. Even though it was dark, I saw bright white walls. For a second my senses were useless- there was an impression, a certainty that my brain refused to let go and in the moment I felt like no one. The sensory displacement of a dream, the creature of my dreams for a moment became me. It vanished slowly over the following minute as the blood climbed into my brain and dilated the channels of my normalcy, my home. This happens from time to time and I recall as a child feeling terror in the moment of displacement. The memory of that terror tinged the momentary relish I took in this departure with a sense of power.  The strangeness of my adulthood. I find deep pleasure in the conquest of my old monsters, but then what is the right power to assign old pains? If I can hold them with the calipers of my current peace should I pass their carapace over fire to see the colors they turn- should I make a spectacle of those pains to show they are now nothing to me? Or let them rot and revive in time in the lobes of my brain, maybe show up as insuperable traumas in my later dementia?

Bullshit Matadors

Where are the shits of yesteryear? 

Last summer I walked into the Park Avenue Armory to see Paul McCarthy's White Snow. Of the things that installation accomplished in me, a temporary detente with my epic body shame may have been the most significant. I stood at the entrance and stared for a good half hour before venturing in further. Over the entrance hung three enormous screen. In glaucous and saturated shades a number of pseudo dwarves in college sweatshirts were waking from a nap in the forest. They burped, they casually masturbated, they moaned and groaned. Then they Heigh-Hoed. My eyes moved from screen to screen since each held a different scene. Once they reached home they were greeted by White Snow, played by Elyse Poppers, who brought a party kit with her and seemed to be on hand to entertain. I wandered into the installation and found among the sets the remains of the party that was about to happen on screen. There was a dirty smell and flies and a stained carpet and dummies that doubled for corpses of White Snow and Walt Paul- McCarthy's Disney inspired alter ego in this piece. 

Past the sets stood a forest of polystyrene painted brown possessing the uncanny morphology of three story shits. The forest platform split for a path I followed. The forest floor was just above my head and a cross section of foam core could be seen buttressing the fake shit trees and in the middle of the shit forest sat a three-quarter scale replica of McCarthy's child home. The armory itself is immense and cavelike. The sound from the films played through speakers mounted above in the rafters. Groans and shrieks and giggles that blew out the balance on the sound system echoed through the main hall where the piece was installed. 

Along either wall smaller sculpture and then beyond doors into cavelike chambers where films showed. In one of these cavelike rooms I sat beside a sixty something year old man in Ferragamos. He was accompanied by a woman equally well turned out and of similar vintage.  I sat beside them on a bench and watched the screen, smaller than the ones hung out in the main hall and only ten feet away. The film was of White Snow and Walt Paul engaged in a mommy-son domination fantasy. Walt Paul walked on his knees. His eyes darted with mischief. White Snow ordered him around the set. She washed his mouth out with soap and told him how disgusting he was. The man in his Ferragamos snapped pictures with his phone as White Snow disrobed. The scene was guttural, primal and horrifying, but played on the edge of pathos so deftly, where I felt deeply for Paul McCarthy and even more deeply for Elyse Poppers, who stood up to all of the harsh physicality McCarthy demands of his performers, who through out the collected films stands as the consistent point of focus and control, who carries so much of the work with unnerving portions of force and charm and how deeply the whole piece played with the viewer- the monstrous size of the installation, the hours and hours of available film- the whole work there to overwhelm the viewer to give a sense of bottomlessness and yet at the same time to show every gesture, so it would seem that McCarthy himself reached the bottom.



In February, I attended a screening of Matthew Barney's River of Fundament at BAM. Like White Snow the piece featured a recreated home and used shit as its central focus. The recreated home was Norman Mailer's and it floats on a barge over a river of shit, the river you have to pass to be reborn, to trick nature, as Mailer is reborn three times in the movie, as Barney is reborn in the form of his Masonic apprentice from Cremaster 3. The movie is uneven, but it is most compelling in its first hour and half as it follows the participants in a wake for Norman Mailer, including a cross section of sixties intellectuals, film makers, writers, a pharaoh, his retinue, the lesser participles of Mailer's Egyptian spirit and a number of gods. In the opening sequence, Barney has figured out the pacing, blocking editing and adapting of Mailer's source, Ancient Evenings, while simultaneously establishing the objects that will be transformed over the course of the film. There's a purposefulness in the pace where we see Salman Rushdie hanging out by the pig that's being roasted for the wake, as we see the LA car dealer/evangelist cutting silver grey lines as if they were coke then rendering them in a miniature blast furnace into a tiny shovel that then dissolves when swizzled in his drink. There's some beautiful music then there's just wind- there are musicians who play the steam radiators of the reconstructed home. The first hour was the only time I saw Barney beat his own films, succeed in a way his old films failed. That's not to say there weren't compelling parts later, but they were detracted by the woodenness of the scenes that were shot live as performances- the LA car sequence being the one stand-out as well as the rendering of the golden Osiris-mobile in a towering blast furnace in the rain. That latter as part of an homage to James Lee Byars (who wrote his 100 questions during a residency at Herman Kahn's Hudson Institute). When Barney's at his best, he is only in competition with himself. Having seen and been a fan of the whole Cremaster cycle, this work seemed redundant in places and borrowed heavily from Alejandro Jodorowsky and Joel Peter Witkin (NeverSFW btw) at times. 



White Snow and River of Fundament both reminded me of Makavejev's Sweet Film, especially his footage of the Viennese Actionists, who lived in a commune and followed the psychological guidance of Wilhelm Reich in practicing radical confrontations followed by recursions into infant play with vomiting, shouting and smoosh play. The point being the community accepts the human animal in its extremes with it's many urges- giving full expression to the unconscious, to undo the repression built into learning a social code.

The power of shit- as Mailer puts it: many a fine sentiment has been buried in shit. McCarthy's shit forest stands in for the uncanny passage of time, the shit of sentiment, of personal history and of forgotten time accumulated and confronted. Barney's shit stands for the horror of death but also the promise, the prospect and possibility of renewal and growth. I did walk away from River of Fundament thinking of the history of the human form in western art and how up until recently art refused to acknowledge that the body had holes and here we had Arrrrrrt (roll the R, alá Dalí) about shit- it may be progress towards something- self acceptance maybe? Though in Barney's case the acceptance maybe tempered with the somewhat delusional premise of the male artist's ego- maybe as long as we're looking at ideals we're only looking at shit and the real thing is always going to be you and I. It's always been the alchemist's trade to try to turn shit into gold. 

The same day I went to White Snow, I also visited James Turrell's exhibit at the Guggenheim. I laid on my back in the Guggenheim atrium for an hour staring up at Aten Reign- the colors shifting subtly up from floor to floor to the skylight and the color of the sky changing ever so slightly with the colors of the rotunda. It was the opposite of trompe l'oeil. It was a method showing the ways in which our eyes are constantly fooled, a way of showing the in born flaw in our perceptions. Our bodies, in other words, are designed to perceive illusions. It takes some thought to show that.

If we think of the telescope as Archimedes' lever that moved the world, Galileo's discovery as the first great realignment of modern European thinking where scientific reasoning showed that both faith and the climate of perception were faulty. I think now of the business of attraction and the bodies of supermodels actors and actresses, the illusion that our bodies can somehow become theirs- that their bodies are theirs - and that we can forget ourselves to become someone else for thirty minutes, for two minutes of thrilling numb tourism. It's anesthetizing and fraught and enough to make me consider Bridget Jones the epic heroine of our times. But I have a vested interest in moving away from body fantasies and the pseudosciences of appearance- aside from being on a diet, a friend let me know I look just like this criminal type:

At the close of White Snow there was a gift shop where the stunned and stumbling patrons could buy a piece of Snow White merchandise signed by Walt Paul for a ridiculous mark up. I almost broke down and spent $15 for a plastic-wrapped set of paper plates. After the sensory assault, I needed to have something to touch. I held off and stumbled forth to the subway, where I gripped the handrail and swayed with the car bumps and kept my eyes to myself.

Life in an Asymmetrical Universe

I may be the only person who adored The Counselor. It seems to have been panned universally. I'll give my spiel then I'll shut up. Cormac McCarthy helps edit theoretical astrophysicists books in his spare time. He practices a form of economy in his fiction that borders on psychic invocation. He found in the Cartels of Ciudad Juarez the moral core of our asymmetrical universe- as Warren Zevon puts it- the vast indifference of heaven. Though I'm still a hundred pages to go in 2666, it seems that he and Bolaño may have been in deep agreement here. There's something in this brutality and the indifference that allows it to occur that mirrors all the worst behavior of WWII but that points to a null in human behavior- an absolute empathetic zero bred by self-preservation for the indifferent and an absolute ruthlessness on the part of the killers. The violence in The Counselor and the near indifference towards audience comprehension ring with the coldness of that world, where our stand in- the poor Counselor - was in over his head from the beginning. If we don't see in the shape of contemporary society the pattern of this indifference and worry about what things may come, we may be equally lost.

Elegant Opposition, Inside Out, A Little Break (IPoS,tHL Part 8)

Elegant Opposition

Perhaps you know the person offering you a light is a martial arts master, perhaps you don't.  Perhaps you know that the offered match will approach with a physical precision and authority that will require a response, a minor contortion, but a move of equal elegance that preserves space and precludes any action further than a single gesture.  Perhaps you know you are being filmed by Wong Kar Wai and the fluidity of the camera will perfectly frame your action and the editing will assemble the scene in an equally fluid balance.  If you know this then you are Tony Leung and the fluidity of your movement can only mean you are playing Ip Man, the kung fu Zhivago, and that you are in the midst of redefining the idea of the kung fu movie and that you exist in one of the best records of motion put to film. But if you are this version Ip Man, the Ip Man who dulls a straight razor with a swipe from a single steel rod, who turns a two story fight with Gong Er (Zhang Ziyi) into a lighter than air Fred and Ginger number while retaining an edge of lethalness and you know that the strategy of living is in anticipation. Self-protection and self-preservation are slightly different than the mechanics of game theory, at least Ip Man's rendition of self protection. Within Ip Man's world, an opponent will adhere to a certain set of rules, that ruthless as the opponent may be, the object of the study of kung fu is to practice and not to fall back on a submachine gun, atomic warhead or other cheap tricks. There is a code of conduct, power built out of restraint.

Inside Out

Yukio Mishima once challenged his translator, John Nathan, that westerners could not understand Japanese culture. I'm not going to pretend to contradict Mishima, but the challenge has always bothered me, like the lyrics in Pink Floyd's Eclipse or David Hume's box. In each there's the premise of a closed system, and maybe less so with Pink Floyd, a trap of inscrutability, isolation or solipsism. But what I think Mishima was getting at was the role of individual in Japan versus the Western artist as individual. In traditional Japanese culture, what may appear as a performative or an aestheticization of a social role stems from a unification of mind, body and purpose, a formative concept that would recreate the western idea of the individual as belonging first to a society then to oneself. In this way the surface comes under a different kind of scrutiny in Japan. Where a westerner may speak of the performative as false, there it would be genuine, essential and indistinguishable from the act of living. I only go here to point out that fraught relationships with appearances have a cultural basis in the US that may not be found elsewhere in the world or get branded differently depending upon the inclusiveness of genuine difference and the strength of a central cultural identity that can be enforced. 

Mishima's work by and large portrays the point where the spirit outgrows the form. I think of the tortured acolyte who burns down the Temple of the Golden Pavilion because he cannot stand its beauty. Or the children who murder the eponymous sailor in The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea for choosing the beauty of a woman over the beauty of the sea. In a radio interview, Mishima once said that while most people believe themselves to be secretly evil, he knew himself to be evil. Mishima was in the generation that came of age in the years following the second world war. His ultimate act, haranguing the assembled troops of the Japanese Diet to rise up and embrace Japan's militaristic past and his subsequent death by seppuku, speaks to the paradox of the performed interior. There's a moment in his short story, Patriotism, when the protagonist commits seppuku and the author pauses to relay the vitality and color of the spilled intestines: the interior becomes another surface, a proof. In the case of Mishima, his message was met with jeers from the assembled troops, so it may be that personal myths die the hardest or it may be that he was one of the emperor's last casualties (though Kawabata also took his life a few years later in a much quieter manner and there was that soldier found in Guam in 1972 who still believed the war was going on).  

So often in art, the unspoken is the sign of the true self, the character finally tricked into a revelation. As in love or crime, confessions serve to drive the drama.  In that confessions uncover a secret, they work to gel the audience's perception of a character and so to tie them to their fate. In as far as we are defined by our actions, we undervalue the character of silence.  Silence is a shadow.  It's a quality born from an absence. The silent character is on the side of the image, in that every image is latent, an event to unpack either immediately in the case of icons, or eventually in the case of symbols. While visual memory can function without the aid of language, when we begin to tell ourselves what we are seeing, images become subject to the conditions of our abilities to describe.  As a movie fades to black and the silence hangs before the credits role, there is a kind of death that occurs for each of the characters in the film that preceded.  Their story has been truncated and so we consider it complete.  They live within a reducible truth. What we saw, or thought we saw, was all we have been told is worth knowing. But the image persists past the credits. The image recurs each time we see a cop and Mahoney or Tackleberry come to mind. In this way, they live in echoes each time their associated features of actions are invoked and we smuggle bits of reality back into our fantasies or project our fantasies on the world. But in silence, in primary silence, say in the scene between Nick Nolte and John Travolta in The Thin Red Line  or in the complex of unexplained images that pass in Inland Empire where the widening context of the film only works to retain the original complexity of the image, the opacity of silence may at times be the point, or if John Cage has his way, that demonstrated silence is an illusion and that the experience we point to as silence may occur in nature, it is less compelling than the psychological force of a silence imposed.      

I will be forgiven more than this when I am forgotten...
- Samuel Beckett First Love

A Little Break

I'm taking a little break from Proust to read 2666 by Roberto Bolaño (thanks in part to the excellence of The Savage Detectives and Richard Marshall's piece on it at 3AM).  I was reading the first book of the trio that come in my slipcased version at a local barbecue place. I sat at the bar, which is right next to the kitchen and prep area and one of the staff called me out on the book.  I was called out twice on the subway as well, by complete strangers who wanted to tell me how good 2666 is.  The guy at the barbecue place told me some advice he had heard from and interview with Bolaño, advice Bolaño had received from an older writer: work on one piece, only piece, until it is perfect then submit it everywhere under different titles.  Bolaño asked what he should do if it was accepted at more than one place and the older writer said he should publish it everywhere it gets selected.  But won't I get in trouble for publishing the same work in two places? Bolaño asked.  If it's got a different title, how are the stories the same? the older writer asked.  The guy at the barbecue place then told me how highly he regarded Bolaño and that Haruki Murakami was the other writer he was currently holding in equivalent esteem. Murakami is another writer, whenever I read his books on the subway, someone mentions how much they like him.  

A while back, I took a class on globalization at the New School and the professor who was very much into Japanese culture mentioned this phenomenon of near universal Murakami reading on the NY subway system and the subculture he'd noticed of complete strangers talking to one another about Murakami. His opinion of Murakami was pretty low and he was more dumbfounded that New Yorkers thought of it as culture, but he also belittled Koyaanisqatsi for not supplying labels or any cultural information aside from the images, a move he believed to be intended to equalize all cultural differences and to negate them. In his class we watched footage of a tribe within the amazon that had been isolated for the length of its existence and was now part of a network of tribes in the amazon seeking a way to stop deforestation. As part of this footage, they showed a ritual the men of the tribe undertook to make themselves courageous which involved getting shit-faced on a fermented brew standing arm in arm in a line and chanting songs. When they watched the footage of themselves they asked for the documentarian to destroy it.  They didn't want the loggers to know the secrets of their courage.

When I was reading book five of In Search of Lost Time, I sat on the train beside a guy with an open laptop, who seemed to be taking up two seats. I moved into a window seat without really asking him to move, but he did and put the laptop more squarely on his lap and continued to work.  After a while he stopped and asked me if I was reading Proust.  He had just finished book five. He was reading it in French.  He was originally from Montreal and came to New York to advance his studies in neuroscience. He thought Proust's jealousy would make an interesting case study. We swapped some thoughts on Proust in a guarded conversation with extended silences. When we both got off at the same stop I said good bye. Though I thought about asking if he'd like to correspond further on Proust, I stayed silent and moved to the other side of the platform to await my train.         

The guy at the barbecue place mentioned that he thought Murakami's work functioned entirely through coincidence.  That coincidence was the engine that made the various pieces of Murakami's world work.  I agreed that coincidence was a strong feature in the works I had read of Murakami, but I also mentioned something about the space of the personal, which may have come out as a remark about personal space and may explain why he stopped talking to me, but what I meant was that Murakami's works all explore forms of the uncanny by way of interiority, the collapse of shared meaning in symbols or historical moments remade so they become unique and temporarily personal, the way a good daydream can pry a moment free from the grind. I recall an interview with Murakami where he states the Japanese word for different is the same as the word for wrong and his project seems to be finding the space for difference within contemporary Japan.   

Today on the train, I was reading the second book from my slipcased edition of 2666, The Part About the Crimes, when I noticed two 4 x 6 photos had been slipped inside the case of a poster advertising a health plan. Both of the photos that had been slipped inside the poster case were of the same woman, a fit black woman with a large afro, sitting on a couch in front of an elaborate case that held a few large bottles of alcohol, maybe magnums of champagne among cognac and sake, bottles I did not recognize.  On the floor beside the couch there were boxes, which made me think the pictures were taken in the store room of a liquor store or a back room in a club or lounge. One picture showed the woman on the couch within the room. The other showed the woman up close. The zoom had been used. The scene made me wonder about the relationship between the woman and the photographer.  Her right upper arm was slightly tensed and it showed good definition.  Her hairstyle and her clothes placed the photo from any time between the 1970's and the present, except she wore white high tops and the photo paper itself looked new, the edges of the photos appeared crisp and white. Her expression seemed neutral and her look didn't directly engage the camera. The photos had ben placed in the bottom corners of the poster frame, so they sat on either side of a commuter's hair.  The commuter was sitting in front of the poster looking down, maybe at my feet or past me into the central void eyes find on the train. The commuter's hair was a set of elaborate coils, professionally tended and she wore a raspberry skirt suit so she was likely on her way to work. My eye moved from the book, to the commuter's professional hair to the photos, to the afro in the photos and the toned upper arms. The part of the book I am reading describes a series of killings in Mexico. I was reading a description of one of the women that had been killed in a particularly violent way and it put a pall on the pictures and made me wonder why someone had placed them in the ad's poster frame on the train. The act itself is already strange, but people slide cards and tags and other images into the poster frames all the time.  The light in the photos was dim and muddy and the whole thing looked amateurish to the point of questioning why the photo was taken in the first place and in the second why it was printed and not digital. They would have been deleted if they had been taken on a phone. Instead they were left behind. At a certain point, the commuter got up and left the train, leaving her seat open for me.  I took it and looked from side to side at the woman in the photo flanking me on either temple, but the mystery stopped when I sat and I returned to my book.   

It makes no sense to expect or claim to 'make the invisible visible', or the unknown known, or the unthinkable thinkable.  We can draw conclusions about the invisible; we can postulate its existence with relative certainty.  But all we can represent is an analogy, which stands for the invisible but is not it.
...

Perhaps the Doors, Curtains, Surface Pictures, Panes of Glass, etc. are metaphors of despair, prompted by the dilemma that our sense of sight causes us to apprehend things, but at the same time restricts and partly precludes our apprehension of reality.

-from Gerhard Richter, The Daily Practice of Painting