arts criticism as history lesson.
“How much history can be transmitted by pressure on a guitar string?” - Robert Palmer
The most powerful kind of artistic criticism, Jane Dark implies, should be dialectical: approaching art “not as an aesthetic object but as a historical process.”
“This uncovering,” Dark writes, “is done exactly so as to reveal the impress of social conditions on the reputedly but not actually objective or autonomous philosophy or text.”
of polka dot mania.
In Yayoi Kusama‘s 1968 film, Self-Obliteration, the polka dot becomes the vehicle for speedy, joyous, maniacal obsession turned to madness.
Throughout the film, Kusama paints polka dots on anything and everything, as if she might turn the world into one giant clown costume. It makes for a quintessential 60s document: what at first seems festive and light (let’s paint polka dots!) grows darker, more sinister, and more troubling as the film progresses; what at first seems to open up possibilities by film’s end is so fragmented and fractured that it leaves one dizzy, almost nauseous.
The polka dots at first seem like points of white light on the way toward a new future, peepholes into a new way of seeing things. Kusama’s obsession is thrilling: self-obliteration might lead to self-realization.
But by film’s end, one is not so sure. Denuded, shed of all norms save for the obsessive desire to connect the dots, those flashes of white light start to become black holes.
Images: Yayoi Kusama.
of wearing your art on your sleeve.
Nothing comes close to the magic of the phonograph record album sleeve, not the miniscule CD booklet, not even the band website (though that has its own special allure). Part art, part commerce, a summation of the music inside and a shrill advertisement to get you to buy the record, album covers continue to matter as much to listeners as the latest free MP3 download.
Melanie Schiff’s artwork, featured on CR previously, explores the magic of an iconic Neil Young album, but the phenomenon is much more widespread (link courtesy of Blog Riley).
Image: Melanie Schiff.
a radio show catches the tooth fairy in action.
Sharon Bar-David and Iris Yudai’s The Magic of Falling Teeth, which aired on Re:Sound #84 (scroll down to February 2, 2008, click on the headphones icon, and scroll to the last third of the audio stream), catches the culture of a certain stage of childhood.
There is a kind of warmth that hums around the voices of mother, father, and children, a sense of communion, a gathering together around the ways our mortal bodies change — and with them our sense of what is important changes too.
It’s something close to sentimentalism, but with teeth.
Image: tooth-fairy.org
news photograph as film still.
This photograph, on the cover of today’s New York Times, is remarkable for its cinematic evocations.
(Photo: Emilio Morenatti/Associated Press)
It emphasizes the unreal quality of actual street protest as glimpsed through the lens of mass-mediated representation. This must be a movie set, we say, away from the tear gas special effects and the coils of barbed wire.
The man in the photograph is also set in a liminal space. We might think of it as the border zone of globalization, the no man’s land between tradition and modernity, the boundary between difference and universality. For a middle-class reader in America, the lawyer leaps forward from there to here, from the third world to the first, from one of them to one of us. It is as if he is striving to leap out of the photograph itself, to jump through the portal of the camera lens. And keep his suit unruffled in the process.
Where will he land?
reflections on the end of the wire.
The Wire, RIP.
In its final season, The Wire continually poked meta-fun at those who called the show a Dickensian social drama. Every time a character used the phrase, David Simon and fellow writers seemed to be implying that viewers needed to shift focus from sentimentalized character stories to a systemic critique, from the neoliberal focus on individuals to a radical analysis of larger systems.
The lesson of the show always seemed to be that save for a few miracles, systems ate individuals alive, especially any individual who fought against the logic of the larger system. In a way, this is “Dickensian” since Dickens wrote novels that were as much social allegories as character studies.
(Photo: HBO)
But the moral of many a Dickens novel was that some improvement in the larger system could occur when individuals changed their ways. The Wire seemed much less certain on this point. Individuals either got eaten alive by larger systems, struggled to be outlaws against those systems, or became refugees from the system’s barbed-wire coils.
I wondered, by the end of the final season, if there was a kind of darkness at the heart of The Wire‘s critique. Did the show, ultimately, lack belief in the viability of democracy as a system?
In the final season, only the outlaws — McNulty, Freamon — were able to pursue justice, to make change. But the way they seek to make change was to lie. In this way, they paralleled Templeton, the liar at the fictional Baltimore Sun. But while Templeton lied for fame, McNulty and Freamon lied for justice.
Did the ends justify the means in their case? Is that what defines an outlaw: the use of the wrong tactics for a just end?
And what about the rest of society? Can we all be outlaws when a system goes to rot? Must we be?
The Wire asked these sorts of questions. Though it never developed the systemic pressures on the bosses of the Sun this season adequately, perhaps the implication of this lack of development was that the system stops where we begin: the audience absorbing the media, surveilling the lives of citizens, caught up in our own addictions to individuals’ stories while the system keeps beaming us into its gears and cables, never unleashing us.
That is, ultimately, a Dickensian approach: The Wire asked us to recognize and empathize with others, and from that recognition and empathy, to forge a democratic ethos that could forego institutional systems for some kind of deeper humanism.
Humanism as a kind of functional systemless system…
More blogging on The Wire:
on i’m not there.
Mystery is a traditional fact. – Cate Blanchett as Jude Quinn as Bob Dylan, I’m Not There
You need a Ph.D. in Dylanology to understand Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There fully. But even if you’re not part of the professoriat at the University of Bob, that doesn’t mean that you won’t find parts of the film achingly beautiful, especially the surreal Basement Tapes/Outlaw Richard Gere segment that comes late in the movie, when Jim James of My Morning Jacket and the band Calexico performs “Goin’ to Acapulco,” transforming the good-time throwaway number into a startling cry of purity and power.
And stay awake until the end of the movie, when Cate Blanchett’s brilliant last soliloquy explains what the whole shebang is about.
not a rock ‘n’ roll swindle: on joe strummer and the future is unwritten.
At the end of Julian Temple’s hagiographic documentary about Joe Strummer, lead singer for the Clash, self-proclaimed “punk rock warlord,” and so much more, Temple shows a Christmas card that Strummer sent out to friends right before his untimely death in 2002. It pictured campfires across the world, small gatherings of friends.
Strummer had adopted the idea of holding campfire gatherings and Temple’s film uses the same campfire concept in his film to celebrate Strummer’s life. The film also uses Strummer’s wide-ranging London Calling broadcasts on the BBC World Service to convey his sense of a global cultural politics.
Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten is worth seeing for anyone who dismisses cultural politics. Of course, Strummer’s politics were complex, even compromised. But the fellowship he created — the piercing humanism he was able to convey and shoot through to the heart — should be at the core of any politics worth its salt.
on the art of the podcast.
What is it that makes a good music podcast?
It’s something about the relationship between what was there and what is here, something about transport, something about the creation of feeling that results from this transposition.
After all, one meaning of casting is to throw. Another meaning is to form. And another, as if to suggest that something could come from nothing, is to contrive.
Listening to the Paste Magazine Culture Club or to the Daytrotter Sessions (technically a download not a podcast, but the experience is similar), one hears sound that was become sound that is.
There is something lost in the process, and yet, strangely, something gained. The sound flickers, casts shadows into shapes that were not in the original flame of noise. The transmission creates an energy than was not part of its original mission merely to recreate.
It’s better to listen to someone else listening than to listen yourself. That’s the difference between an Itunes track and a podcast. The re-presentation contains a present.
postcards from an exhibition.
Deep in the bins of antique shops across Chicago, postcards pile up, their edges fraying, their colors fading. They are lost in the shuffle.
But online, at the Chicago Postcard Museum, they take on a new sheen, small links into past correspondences.
For more on the Museum, check out last Sunday’s Hello Beautiful feature on WBEZ.