A Shout In The Street

What Lies Beneath the Pavement?

2011-12-12T08:33:00.001-08:00

Revolution requires acts of imagination. In order to turn away from the world as-it-is, one must be able to envision, even if only in an inchoate way, that another world is possible and that this potentiality is, in and of itself, worth fighting for.

During the 1968 Paris uprising, a popular spray-can dictum asserted "Those who lack imagination cannot imagine what is lacking." Another, more poetic, and ultimately more powerful, had it: "Beneath the pavement, the beach!" The sand--revealed by pulling up the paving stones to use as projectiles--suggested either another world, or another dimension to this one.

If creativity is firepower in the contest of imagination, however, the first victory has gone not to the dissidents but to the bankers. For our current decade and its predicaments, we could update the slogan quoted above to: "Beneath the wheat, the banks!" It is the bankers--by which I mean any of the technocrats that constitute the financial sector--who have successfully re-imagined the world. They have effectively invented a new reality in which finance is separate from the actual economy (even commodities futures are now merely abstract financial instruments) and politics separate from the people (in a technocracy, the elected government is obsolete if not irrelevant).

To win this contest it is necessary to turn again, to revolt against the bankers' revolution. We must be even more imaginative, even more inventive. Those that can dream the future will take power in the present. "Occupation" is a good start--to give significance again to everyday space and thereby everyday life--but it is only a beginning. We must demand of ourselves total acts of imagination and unprecedented poetry: works of living, feats of being. We must transform the very world, inside and out, with breathless displays of daredevil creativity.

This creativity need not be bounded by works of art, even those that are situational, relational, or activist as the case may be. Acts in and of themselves can be creative. Every step, conceived and executed correctly, can be poetry. The street is a blank slate and our every movement can be a phoneme in a new language that will describe a new reality.

Occupy the pavement and then dig deeper. The city is thin and its skin is penetrable. There is water underground.

Mark So Appreciations V: END ROAD WORK / NO PARKING / BOB LOVES BETTY (2011) for Liz

2011-09-07T12:08:00.000-07:00

A tape plays in a room. The tape is mostly blank except for frequent, irregular interruptions--short spurts of recording.

The sounds suggest that the tape was made while on a walk, pausing occasionally to hit the record button. The reason for turning on the tape player at a given point is unclear--why here and not there?--but there is an overall consistency to the experience. Though no rule as to its construction is easily discernible, a sense of limitlessness is produced by even the implied presence of limitations.

As Mark So said of this work, "the field is always present;" it does not have to be created. It can be invoked with minimal gestures, such as interruptions--in this case, the sounds from the tape interrupt the sound of the room itself, thereby bringing it to awareness. Even a cut can elucidate the field. Akin to the "zips" in a Barnett Newman painting, the interruption provides a measure or a post against which to experience the expanse.

This is negative time. Just as positive space in painting is complemented by negative space, So has found a way to use stripes of negative time to produce an awareness of the vastness of positive time. Put another way, by foregrounding the presence of nothing So produces an awareness of being.

Other than the sounds themselves, the title is the only other information we have about the piece--END ROAD WORK / NO PARKING / BOB LOVES BETTY (2011) for Liz. Just as the sound does, the title produces an image (an awareness, an idea) with great economy, by utilizing absence as a descriptive tool.

***

The tape was created by So as a performance (or perhaps many performances) of his score nothing which can be used (As clouds reappear after rains) [for Eileen Myles]. All of the absences presented by the tape are present in the score as well. It is interesting that even without seeing the score, the listener can in a sense hear it in the work itself--as absence.

Like the music it produces, the score is elegant and spare. Part of his ongoing Ashbery series, So places a pair of quotations from John Ashbery's poem, "The Thousand Islands", which double as both epigraph and performance instruction.

A promise of so much that is to come,
Extracted, accepted gladly
But within its narrow limits
No knowledge yet

[...]

But your
Idea is not continuing—a swift imperfect
Condensation of the indifference you feel
To be the worn fiber and bone which must surround you
For the permanence of what's already happened in you.

The original poem--its language fragmented and decontextualized--is repurposed, swatches of Ashbery's words applied like torn paper in a collage: pieces of poem implying a whole.

So's own instructions--"an impulsive recording of nothing—/brief and fleet/[maybe repeated"--are situated between and to the right of the two Ashbery passages. Visually, it is nearly in the interstice between them, turning the ellipsis itself into a tacit instruction. And there is one further elliptical collage: the title is pieced together from fragments. "nothing which can be used" completes the dangling "No knowledge yet". The logic of the score is constellar, nonlinear.

Like the performance it is meant to prescribe, the score is a collection of ellipses, fragments and zips written with such economy that it makes a currency out of absence.

Poetic Realty: The Films of Alexandra Cuesta

2011-08-01T08:09:00.000-07:00

“The image is a pure creation of the mind. It cannot be born of a comparison, but from the bringing together of two more or less distant realities. The more distant and true the relationship between the two realities, the stronger the image will be and the more emotional power and poetic reality it will have.” —Pierre Reverdy. “L’Image,” Nord-Sud. No.13. March, 1918.

Diary-like, first-person footage made with a point-and-shoot camera chronicles a day in Beirut. Everyday occurrences—listening to music in a car, walking down the street—are thrown into sharp relief by a single cut. The explosion itself is not photographed, only its aftermath: a running crowd, billowing smoke, broken glass and, later, a television informing us that, in fact, this is the explosion that killed former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. The film ends with a truly simple image that, in context, is breathtaking: looking out the window of a small plane as it ascends, we see Beirut from a distance. The very ordinariness of the shot—its simple, even banal beauty—feels extraordinary in contrast to the events that precede it. It is literally transcendent.

This is Alexandra Cuesta’s second film, Beirut 2.14.05 (2008). Although it is in some ways the hardest of her three films to grasp, it is also the clearest illustration of a principle that runs through all her work. Cuesta cuts declarative images and concrete sounds together in such a way that they evoke an emotional response. Though her films are strictly observational, they construct a poetic reality that, while present in the camerawork itself, is largely accomplished in the editing.

In her first film, Recordando el Ayer (2007), the images break cleanly from one composition to the next by way of hard cuts. Moving freely in and out of buildings, from shots of individuals to near-abstract depictions of light, with no overt motive besides the logic of feeling, a portrait of a neighborhood and its inhabitants comes slowly into focus. One senses that in this work, accuracy regarding a sense of place is paramount to any other documentary concerns.

The sound, in contrast to the image, flows in a nearly unbroken wave from the beginning to the end of the film. As a listener, you begin to drift the way you might while listening to the freeway or the sea. Cuesta told me she wanted to make silence out of sound, something even quieter than silent film. In so doing, she reveals to us the beauty of things we thought we knew, things we ceased to notice because they are so common. It is the din of our everyday experience, foregrounded.

The imagery in her films is equally attentive to what might otherwise go unnoticed: the play of light through the perforated steel of a bus pavilion or reflections falling from an elevated train. Likewise, she chooses to photograph in spaces that are underrepresented or otherwise overlooked: an Ecuadorian neighborhood in Queens, New York and a corridor of east/west space defined by public transportation in Los Angeles. Both films—Recordando el Ayer and Piensa En Mi (2009), respectively—illuminate and dignify their underprivileged subjects. Cuesta’s camera is respectful, at times even reverential; her portraits of individuals are intimate yet also reserved. There is an agreement, it seems, between subject and photographer—an unspoken bond whose presence is powerfully felt.

Although these portraits are important, Cuesta’s cinema is not unique for its images of the underprivileged but for its evocation of the world in which they live, a world that is defined by a different sense of time. Failed systems and their attendant agony run parallel to the time that the affluent take for granted. Like the presence of the third-world within the first, interminable waiting and dysfunctional services coexist with the comparative instantaneity of the automobile, the internet and the iPhone. Cuesta’s strategy for her third film, Piensa En Mi, makes this clear. The “space” she chooses to photograph is not a neighborhood, but a bus line running east to west and back again. The bus moves through the upper-class neighborhoods of western Los Angeles, but remains separate: two spaces coexisting without commingling.

Space, or our experience of it, is defined by our relationship to time. The pedestrian and the bus-rider alike live in another reality defined by waiting. If you find yourself in the flats of Los Angeles—standing in the road, waiting for the bus’ silhouette to crest the horizon, able to see for more than a mile—you are in time, not moving through it. Cuesta’s films conjure the dream-like reality of just such a moment that stretches into the distance, where time and space are one. Her films are portraits of places where you can feel time. And so, for all of its documentary qualities, Cuesta’s work is eerily elusive—the effect of the films closer to reverie than reportage. Watching Piensa En Mi is like daydreaming while looking out the bus window—at once, near and far, objective and abstract.

Cuesta uses a cinematic form free from the strictures of description, where the cuts produce feeling in lieu of continuity. Mark Rothko once remarked that “feelings have different weights”; in Cuesta’s editing, the relative weight of one shot collides with the lightness of the next to produce not an idea, but an emotion. Cutting from a close-up to a wide open space, from a detail of light to a long shot, the contrast creates an opening—and in the interstice, a feeling can form.

The differential between the two shots is generative: two realities, distant and true, coalescing in an image. Therein lies the strength, emotional power and poetic reality of these films.

Ai Weiwei detained

2011-04-04T08:27:00.000-07:00

The Guardian UK reports that Ai Weiwei, the most renowned living Chinese artist, has been detained by police.

Before boarding a flight to Hong Kong, he was detained at immigration. His assistant was also detained. Ai's studio has been surrounded by plainclothes police and is thought to have been raided. No one can get in touch with Ai and posts about him on Weibo, a Chinese microblog similar to Twitter, are being deleted.

Asked about Ai, an airport police spokesman said: "I do not have the obligation to tell you the information. You may have got your information wrong; even if it is right, you have to go through certain procedures to make inquiries, not just make a phone call."

The Guardian reports that Ai had previously been relatively free from this type of harassment because of both his family and his international reputation.

Too Early, Too Late

2011-03-19T21:15:00.000-07:00

Marc Lynch's post on all that's riding on the military intervention in Lybia may be the most sensible thing I've read on the situation yet. Fears that the Obama administration reacted too slowly seem not only unjustified, but myopic. The United States simply cannot intervene in an Arab conflict unilaterally ever again, nor can it credibly or sustainably send a land army into Africa, the Middle East or Asia. This latter assertion is not my own, but secretary of defense Robert Gates'.

The line that the President is "dithering" plays too well into one of the many competing narratives not-so-quietly emanating from the conservative camp that indict the Obama administraition no matter the actual facts. This particular trope is Obama as Hamlet, the president whose equivocations preclude action. In reality, military intervention should never be entered lightly and haste guarantees failure. Marc Lynch patiently explains why.

Tashi Wada: Alignment

2010-12-06T08:18:00.000-08:00

Tashi Wada’s greatest asset as a composer is his clarity. His best compositions are almost entirely transparent, so that even if you are unfamiliar with theories of just intonation or the history of experimental music composition, you can often perceive the shape and direction of a Wada piece from its inception. Alignment, Wada’s first LP, is no exception. There is a directness to its form that allows one to apprehend its shape in time almost immediately.

James Tenney—a clear influence on Wada even more than La Monte Young or Tony Conrad—once said that in his own music you knew where it was going even if you didn’t know what it would sound like when you got there. This could be a description of Alignment itself, an 8 violin canon in just intonation whose movements through a dense, descending scale create a clear, compelling shape in time with a full sound that is at once organic and extraordinary. Alignment presents a tonal richness and complexity unlike any available to more traditionally tempered compositions. The scale structures the piece and the structure is the piece itself.

The violins move sequentially through the first 128 pitches of the overtone series, transposed into a single octave. The result is a movement through harmony and dissonance that speaks to the physicality of sound—the music becomes audibly tighter, more tense, as the tiered movements through the scale cause certain frequencies to pull upon one another. It also relies upon and draws attention to the ability of the mind to perceive several planes of information simultaneously, for as the canon progresses, certain tones come into alignment with one another, while others simultaneously phase into dissonance, harmonies and their opposite sounding at the same time, existing in parallel and moving past one another as though on separate tracks.

As an object, the record itself is conceptually neat. The sides of the record, “Direct” and “Retrograde,” are inverse to one another and the act of flipping the record essentially reverses the action of the 8 violins, making them move out of the alignment they had only recently attained. The end of each side suggests the beginning of the next—a musical ouraboros both infinite and already complete. Though the recordings are essentially the same—only their ordering is different—the effect is astonishingly dissimilar, a study in the pyscho-sonic effect of ascending versus descending tones. What’s more, mastered at 45 rpm, it is essentially two records in one: for faithful reproduction it should be played at 45, but 33⅓ offers another, extended and altogether different listening experience.

Any writing on Alignment would be incomplete without ample praise for Marc Sabat’s impeccable performance. Sabat is one of the foremost performers of experimental music in the 21st century; his renditions of Morton Feldman and James Tenney have made him legendary in the experimental music community. His mastery of microtonal violin music is in full evidence on Alignment, where he plays all 8 parts. Sabat’s control, stability and directness are integral to the dry, precise warmth of the recording, the effect of the sound inseparable from his performance.

“Music should be as direct as possible,” Wada once told me. Clarity of composition, fullness of sound and the directness of effect make Alignment as convincing a sonic argument for this dictum as one could ever imagine.

That's Not News

2010-11-07T19:28:00.000-08:00

Blow up your radio.

Sonic Youth: Halloween

2010-10-30T09:47:00.000-07:00

Click here for a video of Sonic Youth's ethereal masterpiece. Happy Halloween.

Uncommon Knowledge: Mark So’s Text Scores

2010-10-16T09:28:00.000-07:00

Mark So’s music comes out of a tradition, if it can be called that, of experimental music that sees the essential instability of words on a page as fertile soil in which to cultivate indeterminacy. This strategy of writing music with text, rather than traditional notation, leaves ample room for interpretation on the part of the performer. In fact, interpretation—usually an abstract concept somewhat anterior to the music itself—is absolutely integral to the performance of a text score. Music written with words does not end with interpretation; it begins with it.

Common knowledge tells us that a traditionally notated score is an ideal form to which every performance aspires. The interpretation of the text, in this case notes on a page, by the performer is a regrettable, if unavoidable consequence of the written notation turning into sound. The text, then, is sacred and the sound profane. Indeterminate text scores avoid this distinction between sacred and profane, taking the composition out of the realm of ideal forms and into the real by potentializing it, that is, by making it subject to the conditions under which it will be performed. This includes, but is not limited to, the will of the performer and of the listener. In effect, when speaking about the performance of an indeterminate text score, it is not entirely accurate to use the word interpretation anymore. Performing an indeterminate text score is not a simple act of reading, it is a creative act in and of itself. In a sense, the performer writes the text that will live in the world (the performance) as they read the text that lives on the page (the score).

The difference between the two forms of notation is the difference between potential and potentiality. The traditionally notated score exists before it is performed: it is potential music on the page that becomes actual by being performed. The music that the text score makes possible, on the other hand, does not exist before it is performed: it can exist or not exist and therefore has potentiality. It has the ability to be music, which means it could also not be music. The text score can remain not-music, whereas the traditional score is already music; it cannot be or not be and therefore does not have potentiality.

So’s music has this ability to be or not be. He is certainly not alone in this endeavor—in fact, he told me he is often accused of borrowing too heavily from other composers—but over the course of a few years and a few hundred pieces (he is prolific beyond compare), he has aggressively pursued a line of inquiry only superficially similar to the others. Many of So’s influences have a spare style that makes use of ample silences and denies ornamentation. Like an international style building, the elegant lines of the structure are all the more visible because of its transparency. So’s music often goes beyond even this spare aesthetic, the lines of the music stretched so thin as to almost drift away.

To borrow an idea from Gilles Deleuze’s and Felix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, So creates rhizomes—in this case, listening situations that are non-hierarchical—often by distorting an extant strategy to the point that it is transformed. Speaking of Glenn Gould, Deleuze and Guattari write, “There are no points or positions in a rhizome, such as those found in a structure, tree or root. There are only lines. When Gould speeds up the performance of a piece, he is not just displaying virtuosity, he is transforming the musical points into lines, he is making the whole piece proliferate.”[1] Just as Gould can stretch a score over a half-tempo (as in his performance of Schoernberg) or turn it into lines by playing it twice as fast (his Bach), So turns the previous composers’ structures into lines by stretching their strategies. In So’s hands, an otherwise stable structure can be stretched to the limit—beyond the limit—until it fundamentally transforms, like copper spun into cobwebs.

And this is audible in the music itself: for there are not just sounds and silences, the sounds are stretched over the silence, just barely there. They do not supercede the silence; they are parallel to it, moving along with it. And at times, impossibly, even the silence itself can be stretched too thin. The piece breaks and you are simply, profoundly in the room or in the environment. The tightrope snaps and you can no longer pretend to float above or beyond the world. There are often moments of great beauty in a So piece, but there are never moments of transcendence. As a listener, you are ineluctably in the present, wrestling with it.

Many of Mark So’s recent works derive from his insights while reading the poetry of John Ashbery. An Ashbery poem often elides logic while slipping gracefully between the erudite and the vernacular. In the slippage, an otherwise unattainable, unsayable truth can appear. In his few verbal statements on his work, Willem de Kooning often remarked on the importance of glimpsing and that his paintings were attempts to fix the act of a glimpse—in other words, to destabilize the static object of a painting by putting time back into it. He achieved this by covering and recovering the canvas quickly, scraping it down at the end of each day and starting from the traces, the stains, on the next. So’s scores, slippery as soap on vellum, also allow for this kind of glimpsing, but it is an aural/intellectual glimpsing as opposed to a visual/visceral one.[2] And So’s music destabilizes static perception; it is not enough to hear, not even enough to hear silence, you must begin to hear hearing, to glimpse your own glimpse, to experience yourself experiencing something, even if only for a moment. Sounds, silences and your experience of them overlap and interpenetrate.[3]

But this interpenetration is not harmonious; it is disjoint. John Cage made it his project to reveal that music could be any sounds in any order. This involves an equivalence—one thing is like another—that negates value judgment. So goes further: any sounds in any order, but instead of an equivalence between them, there is a radical disparity. Cage famously made an enemy of harmony, but in a sense, he used silence in all of his pieces after 4’33” as a kind of harmony—the sounds of the environment always “fit” inside a Cage piece. In So, the silences are dissonant. There are layers of silence and they are in contrast if not outright contest.

This involves a level of attunement on the part of the listener that few works require of their audience. One is keenly aware that one is uncomfortable, and the discomfort brings you closer to the world. Rather than hearing a cliché, even a clichéd silence, you actually hear. You begin to perceive hearing itself.

This is not about ascending to a higher level or attaining a reality that is beyond illusion. So’s music is all surface, but it is deeply involved with the surface. For the surface itself, his music reveals to its listener, is the given world. To look beyond the surface is already to be involved in a kind of romance, a transcendentalist game. For So, reality is not to be reached or attained; it is appearance. Reality is what appears during the performance.

Speaking of So’s music in terms of reality makes it sound heavy, but it is the opposite; it is gossamer. It is weightless. So’s music is a transparent skin stretched over the surface of the real. Like a stocking with a run in it, it reveals both skins as skin and as such, is both attractive and repellent, illusion and disillusion at once. The skins themselves are several—layers of tissue covering over layers of tissue ad infinitum. There is always something more that is out of sight, but it too is just tissue. There is no realer real, only layers upon layers of paper thin densities to be pulled apart until they drift away—layers of tissue covering the body of the world, itself no more than another accumulation of tissue.

Achieving the heightened attention required to discern these tissues of sound and silence from one another is a voluntary act on the part of the listener. The music presents the situation, but it does not “induce” this or that state of consciousness. It is not meditation. It is radical freedom: pure potentiality. The listener is presented with the choice to hear nothing or to hear hearing itself. She may choose not to hear at all (“there’s nothing happening”), or hear her ability to hear. So creates this situation out of tissue thin layers: taught, porous skins all stretched over one another at once and over time.

[1] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1987), 8.

[2] de Kooning’s famous dictum “Paint so fast you can’t think” is a strategy for fixing the glimpse. So writes quickly as well, but it is not explosive. It is slippery without losing a certain precision and is more akin to Ashbery than de Kooning in this way. So’s music is not intellectual in the sense that it is not meant, first and foremost, to be heard; it is sensual, it is thinking through the senses. We might say, “Listen so slow you can’t think.”

[3] “…even with a thought/ The rack dislimns, and makes it indistinct,/As water is in water.” William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, (Barnes and Noble: New York) 1187.

The image is from an ongoing performance of Mark So's The Casual Drift. It may be seen by appointment. Email: mbrookshire [at] gmail.com

poetry and truth 2

2010-09-16T08:03:00.000-07:00

"Oh, Death" by Charlie Patton in 1934:

poetry and truth

2010-09-14T02:43:00.000-07:00

"The art of the superior artist is to restore, by means of conscious operations, the integrity of sensuality and the emotional power of things."

(A quote on a poster I saw in Toronto attributed to John Cassavetes; further investigation revealed it is actually from Valery. Either way, it's damn fine.)

Bullshit

2010-09-09T16:11:00.000-07:00

That this is disappointing is an understatement:

Among other policies, the Obama national security team has also authorized the C.I.A. to try to kill a United States citizen suspected of terrorism ties, blocked efforts by detainees in Afghanistan to bring habeas corpus lawsuits challenging the basis for their imprisonment without trial, and continued the C.I.A.’s so-called extraordinary rendition program of prisoner transfers — though the administration has forbidden torture and says it seeks assurances from other countries that detainees will not be mistreated.

Mark So Appreciations IV

2010-08-29T08:50:00.000-07:00

Performing Marmarth (2010) from Rick Bahto on Vimeo.

Infinite flexibility would be a liability in an indeterminate score. For, as Robert Smithson once said, "all legitimate art deals with limits. Fraudulent art feels that it has no limits. The trick is to locate those illusive limits." The score is a dialectic: it is freedom created by the imposition of limits; infinity must be delimited to be infinite. And just as there are different orders of infinity for numbers, so it is with freedom itself. Mark So's scores represent a very special kind of freedom.

Openness in the score is visible/sensible as openness in the performance. This is not formlessness, but rather permeability as a form. Porousness is the word that most often comes to mind when thinking of So's music. So writes the holes that make the music. Carl Andre once said, "a thing is a hole in a thing that it is not." And this is true; Smithson's non-sites prove it. But this is dialectical: a is not non-a. So writes holes within holes: N-dimensional porousness. a is non-a is not a is not.

So's score marmarth is a good example. Most of the instructions are parenthetical, the only seemingly "solid" one being: "the Little Missouri River." And, both as an object and an instruction, it is itself fluid, unstable, mercurial while at the same time modest and specific--it is both "little" and located. The music, then, tends towards landscape, but the personalized landscape of a Polaroid, not a panorama.

So writes this muted, modest mutability so deeply and with such economy that the performance itself need not even be "musical" in the traditional sense for us to sense the openness in the form. The score imposes limits--the Little Missouri, not the Mississippi--but there is an order of infinitude within those limits. One can now have a musical experience that does not necessarily come out as music, that is, not necessarily as sound. Rick Bahto has made an extraordinary performance of marmarth on super-8 film. The holes are there; the score is in tact. The music is open and beautiful and subtle as wind in the cottonwoods.

Victory!

2010-08-04T17:44:00.000-07:00

...for now. Today, a U.S. judge struck down Proposition 8--the proposition banning gay marriage that passed in 2008--but it is expected to be appealed. The Los Angeles Times reports:

"The ruling struck down Proposition 8 as a violation of federal constitutional guarantees of equal protection and due process... Higher courts defer to trial judges on issues of fact, but still could determine that Walker was wrong on the law. Walker has temporarily stayed his order until Friday, giving Prop. 8 backers time to file appeals and seek a long-term stay. The decision would appear to delay any resumption of gay marriage in the state."

After

2010-07-04T04:50:00.000-07:00

SMITHSON NAUMAN GRAHAM MORRIS LOUIS AYCOCK
MISSCOCKAUTHORMYRUHRSOILNOMANISAMANGA
MICKCOLORAUTHORSOMYHUMANASSMANARISING
ICLINGTOOMYHUMANISMOHARKACRASSSOURMAN

David Harvey

2010-07-03T13:41:00.000-07:00

Hat tip: Michael Pisaro/Greg Stuart

Mark So Appreciations III

2010-06-29T06:44:00.000-07:00

"I think that painting is a permanent part of art, just like drawing is, because we have the kind of hands that we have, because we have the kind of eyes that we have. We’re always going to have drawing, and by extrapolation, painting. It’s a consequence of what we are as organisms. Painting and drawing cannot disappear from serious art, cannot 'die,' as they say. They can go through all of the complex changes and developments that they have gone through because they are permanent. And therefore drawing is a kind of touchstone for all pictorial art, regardless, because it won’t and can’t be replaced with anything else. Painting as a medium and form can't change very much. So that makes it very interesting and very open too. If it were not so simple and flexible and beautiful, it would be changing technologically, but it’s too right just as it is to change, and so, it’s going to stay there. I’m very involved with painting, always have been and always will be, not particularly because I want to paint, but because it is the most sophisticated, ancient practice." -- Jeff Wall

And we will always have music, performed by people in front of other people, but it may not sound like music, it may not look like music. But it will be music because of its form and because of its effect. Music asks us to use our ears and our body differently than when we speak, when we read or when we watch a film. Music puts our ears in our body and allows sound to open directly onto the body, bypassing the verbal mechanisms in our brain--or if not bypassing, than amplifying them to the extent that they undergo a fundamental transformation. This is why, for instance, Bob Dylan's lyrics on a page are less powerful than they are in his songs. On the page they are only words, but as music, they are words that open onto the body.

Poetry is language approaching music, but there is a limit. And like a mathematical limit, it can be approached infinitely, but it cannot be surpassed. If it is too musical, it is not poetry. But what is the limit for music? Rhythm is not a limit. Harmony is not a limit. Even the intentional making of sounds is not a limit.

Music is a listening situation, a situation where we listen, even to words, with our bodies. How far can that situation be extended? Can we listen with our eyes?

I believe that in some of his newest pieces, Mark So is asking us to listen with our eyes. He is writing music, but it doesn't look like music. Just as painting, for Wall, is the only thing stable enough to register the changes of history without transforming as a medium, So's music is the only thing stable enough to register his radical changes. Mark So does not make installations or sound sculptures or happenings or any other hybrid art; he makes music. That is, he creates listening situations by having people perform in front of other people at an appointed time for a certain duration, etc. But the performance may not be the making of sounds, the performance may be a directing of attention to sound that is present, or to light or to sound and then light, sound and then sound--a stratification of perception, a musical experience of being.

"The philosophy of the work is implicit in the work and is not an illustration of any system of philosophy." -- Sol LeWitt, in "paragraphs on conceptual art"

Mark So Appreciations II

2010-06-21T20:56:00.000-07:00

"I'm surprised when the work appears beautiful, and very pleased. And I think work can be very good and very successful without being able to call it beautiful, although I'm not clear about that. The work is good when it has a certain completeness, and when it's got a certain completeness, then it's beautiful." -- Bruce Nauman

"between transparency and white opacity there exists an infinite number of degrees of cloudiness... One could call white the fortuitously opaque flash of pure transparency." -- Goethe, as quoted in Gilles Deleuze, Cinema I, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1986) 95.

Mark So Appreciations

2010-06-07T08:57:00.001-07:00

I would like to write about Mark So's music, but I’m not sure how to do it. I have written and rewritten many things over the past two weeks, trying to find a final form for an essay I would like to give to him as a sort of gift, an appreciation. Mark's music is important to me, and I would like to tell other people about it, to start a conversation about what it does and how it might be doing it. I want to try to understand it without diminishing it. I want to elucidate my appreciation of what I have come to realize is an enormous accomplishment without closing the window on further thought.

But like a backwards film of foot steps in the sand, I keep picking up my traces as I go. I am writing, rewriting and unwriting my appreciations and have little to show for it—and less to give to Mark.

So, instead of a finished essay, I would like to present my appreciations as they evolve, to continue to change them but leave a trace of my meanderings as I wander through the gossamer labyrinth that is Mark So's music.

Below is a letter that I wrote to Mark which I am putting here with his permission. It is the beginning of my thinking about his compositions.

Montage Theory

2010-06-02T08:38:00.000-07:00

Wasn't Born to Follow

2010-05-30T12:48:00.000-07:00

For Dennis Hopper, who died on Saturday:

That's Not News

2010-05-16T08:20:00.000-07:00

It is a fact that there is something happening everywhere, all the time. There are 6 billion people on the planet populating nearly 200 sovereign nations on 7 continents surrounded by 5 oceans.

You work for NPR. The problem you face is deciding what to cover, what to invest your limited time and attention to. Too much is happening to be truly comprehensive. You must choose what stories live and what stories die, knowing that your choices have real-world consequences for the subjects who receive or fail to receive your attention. Surely, there are so many stories begging for interesting, intelligent, responsible reporting that you could not waste a single minute, a single line, a single word, in your effort to untangle the complicated knot of all human endeavor.

Or, you could use up 6 precious minutes on mind-numbingly inane bullshit.

Am I being too harsh? After all, don't you have to include lighter fare so as not to overwhelm the weekend listener? This steaming heap of windbreaking journalism aired after 7-and-a-half minutes of the Sunday puzzle with "puzzlemaster" Will Shortz.

The Pill

2010-05-11T08:41:00.000-07:00

In all of the hoopla surrounding the 50th anniversary of the invention of oral contraception, I was surprised not to hear any mention of Loretta Lynn's feminist masterpiece, "The Pill." Politics never sounded so sweet:

The consequences of Lynn's political actions were real; she was shunned for a time from commercial country radio.

Another lesser known folk-feminist anthem--Lynn's "Don't Come Home A-Drinkin' (With Lovin' On Your Mind)"--addresses alcohol-related domestic violence without the usual disempowering narrative of victimization.

William Lubtchansky

2010-05-06T13:11:00.000-07:00

Arguably the greatest living cinematographer, who worked with Jacques Rivette, Straub/Huillet, Godard, Claude Lanzmann, and many more, William Lubtchansky has died at age 72. It's impossible to overlook the particularities of his work: he never shot a project too commercial and he was extremely adaptive. The inky black and white images for Philippe Garrel's Regular Lovers or Straub/Huillet's Class Relations; the lush, sun-baked color of Godard's Nouvelle Vague; the subtle, somber, desaturated Shoah; the theatrical, surrealist, and modernist touch to each of his collaborations with Rivette: Every shift to each maker distinct and elastic. Entirely the work of an author, facilitating the vision of his collaborators.

Tracking shot from Noroît from Film Brain on Vimeo.

Garrel stated that "we (William Lubtchansky) worked together like musicians, really: we had dialogues, like a jazz band that keeps improvising on what had been written. Whoever felt like playing, played first." This type of collaboration is all but lost in cinema. An immense loss of an idiosyncratic, irreplaceable figure.

Los Angeles In Theory and Practice

2010-05-02T19:52:00.000-07:00

My essay on Thom Andersen's Los Angeles Plays Itself is now online, in the May issue of Bright Lights Film Journal.

Maggie's Partially Buried Wood Farm

2010-04-12T11:59:00.000-07:00

Image: from Part One of Partially Buried in Three Parts, by Renee Green, courtesy Renee Green

"'History is thorough, and passes through many stages when she carries a worn-out form to burial. The last stage of a world-historical form is its comedy. The gods of Greece, who had already been mortally wounded in the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus, had to yet die again--this time a comic death--in the dialogues of Lucian. Why does history follow this course? So that mankind may take leave of its past gaily.' Karl Marx Der historiche Materialismus: Die Fruhschriften, ed. Landshut and Mayer (Leipzig), vol. 1, pp. 268 ("Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie"). Surrealism is the death of the nineteenth century in comedy." Walter Benjamin. Arcades Project. [N5, a2] trans. Eiland, Howard and McLaughlin, Kevin, 1999.

Bob Dylan is the death of Marxism as comedy.

"But you see, the Dadaists, they're setting up their own religion. They think that everything's corrupted by commercialism and industry and bourgeois attitudes. I think it's time that we realize that there's no point in trying to transcend those realms. Industry, commercialism and the bourgeois are very much with us. This whole notion of trying to form a cult that transcends all this strikes me as a kind of religion-in-drag, you might say. I'm just bored with it, frankly. I think it's a desperate attempt. And then they try to transcend their own movements and all this sort of thing. So there's this kind of latent spiritualism at work in just about all of modernism. Each sect is claiming a higher transcendence, and they're all warring with each other in some sort of world. The art world is a world alienated from the larger world because it disdains its own work. There's this guilt even about being an artist. At the bottom, I see Duchamp basically as a kind of priest of a certain sort, who's turning urinals into baptismal fonts... "

...

"Communism doesn't interest me. Eventually China will become bourgeois."

--Robert Smithson in conversation with Moira Roth, 1973

Roth, Moira. "An Interview with Robert Smithson." Robert Smithson. Eds. Butler, Cornelia and Tsai, Eugenie. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004.

Click to Access

2010-04-02T15:26:00.000-07:00

Click to access Renee Green's sprawling thought map, Code: Survey, created for the CalTrans District 7 headquarters in Los Angeles.

Green's work includes the incredible and encyclopedic Import/Export Funk Office, currently on view at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. Bennett Simpson, an Associate Curator at MOCA, discusses the Funk Office here.

The River

2010-03-14T13:43:00.000-07:00

Mr John: “We should celebrate that a child died a child. That one escaped. We lock them in our schools, we teach them our stupid taboos, we catch them in our wars, we massacre the innocents. The world is for children. The real world. They climb trees and roll on the grass, close to the ants […]” - from Jean Renoir's The River [c/o Senses of Cinema]

Turn It Up

2010-03-02T08:43:00.000-08:00

"All legitimate art deals with limits. Fraudulent art feels it has no limits. See, the trick is to locate those elusive limits. You're always running up against those limits, but somehow the limits never show themselves. So that's why I say that measure and dimension begin to break down at a certain point." --Robert Smithson, in conversation with Patricia Norvell

William S. Burroughs, Wong Kar Wai, Guided By Voices--what do these artists have in common? They take a trope or a truth and amplify it, distorting it beyond reason into something extraordinary. By forcing the codes of the genres they work in, by pushing them to the limits, they reveal the limits of the art itself. Rock'n'roll--an adjective as well as a noun--reveals structures; you can see how well the building was made by making it shake.

Likewise, we love to see ourselves reflected in the revealing mirror of other cultures. Like a Japanese t-shirt of the Statue of Liberty whose caption reads "Liberty True!", these distortions have the power to clarify our understanding of ourselves. A genre is already a kind of distortion, but further amplified through a foreign perspective, it can have the revelatory power of rock'n'roll.

State of the Art

2010-02-05T16:57:00.001-08:00

That's Not News

2010-01-27T17:27:00.000-08:00

For part 3 in a series devoted to shaming NPR into doing its job, I submit for your disapproval a story called Root for Home Team with MLB Grass Seed.

Most damning quote:

ROBERT SIEGEL: I went online and looked at pictures as best I could of Fenway Park and Wrigley Field... I just couldn't see much difference between the grass at those two ballparks. Is there?
MR. JOHN PRICE: You know, these Major League Baseball groundskeepers just are at the, you know, top of their game. They do an incredible job with these fields. And so, you know, between the looks of the two parks and the kind of Scotts grass seed they use, there's not a lot of difference between those two.

Growing at Your Own Speed

2010-01-24T13:14:00.000-08:00

For a young artist, it is as important to study the lives of other artists as their work. One has no idea how to proceed and is looking about desperately for a clue. Of course, every artist is--as every life is--different. There is no one way.

The early, seemingly predetermined success of a Picasso, a Basquiat or a Brakhage can be quite unnerving to a young stumbler. Stories of late-bloomers are both welcome and necessary for those of us whose actual achievements have not yet aligned with our ambitions. As such, Hollis Frampton's memories of his own artistic development are comforting:

"I didn't find it a picnic to be a photographer, through the sixties, not because photography was disregarded, although of course that was true, but because my predicament was that of a committed illusionist in an environment that was officially dedicated to the eradication of illusion and, of course, utterly dominated by painting and sculpture. At that time I didn't understand how luxurious it was to find myself alienated in that way. Nothing is more wonderful than to have no one pay the slightest attention to what you are doing; if you're going to grow, you can grow at your own speed." --Hollis Frampton

"Works of art... teach, move and delight."

2010-01-18T16:09:00.000-08:00

Circles of Confusion, a mini-retrospective of the work of Hollis Frampton presented by Los Angeles Filmforum and Khastoo Gallery in conjunction with Art Los Angeles Contemporary at the Pacific Design Center, will screen from January 21-February 7. A full schedule is available here.

After the screenings, many guest speakers--including David James, Erika Vogt and Yvonne Rainer--will consider the impact of Frampton's films as well as his writing. I will participate in one such discussion at the Pacific Design Center on Saturday, January 30 at 2:00 pm.

Frampton's rich film work is as relevant now as ever. The problems he considers and attempts to solve in his films have not left us. In this audio recording, Frampton discusses cinema with Ken Jacobs and students at what was then known as the State University of New York at Binghamton.

"I seek whatever... feeling you can intensely construe for yourselves."

Part 2 of the recording can be found here.

Help Haiti

2010-01-14T19:38:00.000-08:00

Before humanity can come to grips with the cataclysmic loss of life in Haiti, there are many places where one can go to financially assist the devastated region. Here are some of them:

Doctors Without Borders
Partners In Health
American Red Cross
Yele

I don't pray, but for those who have lost loved ones, my sincerest condolences.

Merry Christmas (from Douglas Sirk)

2009-12-24T10:05:00.001-08:00

On the Art Economy

2009-12-17T15:53:00.000-08:00

"Since the U.S. economy shrank, artists, being luxuries, got less money. The poor, the middle class and the very rich don't buy contemporary art. The middling rich buy it and support the museums. They don't want to buy when money is tight. Art is not defined by the purchaser. Artists make their work according to the circumstances and it's their force that gets it made. My work is made for me, not for anyone, certainly not for the rich. It's up to me to see that it exists. Visual art is a small, strange activity resistant and often irrelevant to much in the U.S. Art is not 'elitist', except that some artists are better than others, and it is not cultural decoration for American imperialism."

--Donald Judd, from a letter to Irving Sandler; 24 January, 1973

A Conveyor Belt Worldview

2009-12-11T19:31:00.000-08:00

Sans the music, this is absolutely stunning.

Front Page

2009-12-09T22:12:00.001-08:00

That's Not News

2009-12-08T17:07:00.000-08:00

For this, the second installment of a new series in which I attempt to shame NPR into doing its job, I submit a story called, Amid Scandal, Tiger Woods Merchandise Loses Luster.

Most damning quote:

[The action figures] were all selling for about 33% off and--maybe even more revealing--had been moved to certain parts of the stores that were not for prominent or high selling products.

The Smell of American Exceptionalism

2009-12-07T06:08:00.000-08:00

Ed Ruscha's Chocolate Room, 1970-2004, will be on view at MOCA until May 3, 2010.

Chocolate Room by Ed Ruscha is an installation made of prints, silkscreens to be precise. It is, according to his catalogue raisonné, Nestle's chocolate paste silkscreened onto paper. There is no image, per se, just the rich surface of chocolate-covered walls and the smell that emanates from them.

Because of my job, I have had the good fortune to visit the work in its current form many times over the past few weeks. It has changed remarkably in that time, the butter fats in the chocolate apparently coming out of their colloidal suspension to create crystalline structures most often described as floral.

This degradation, to me, is in some ways the subject of the work--not just the interrogation of print-making by using non-archival organic "ink" to produce not an image but a surface, but the rapid decay of the materials themselves hinting at the unsustainability inherent in the "American way of life." That the room is coated in industrial milk chocolate speaks to American-style excess, that it was created during the Vietnam War, to American Exceptionalism.

The smell begins before you can see the work. It calls to you. At first, it is wonderful: a room full of chocolate! But the smell is not just powerful, it's intense. What starts out as subtle can become overwhelming, even a little sickening. The longer you stay, the more you feel like you have eaten too much chocolate.

It is gorgeous. The work is not only a wry pop masterpiece--It's chocolate! Silkscreened!--but a precise, if flip, critique of American Exceptionalism. For what could be more American than a world covered in chocolate, an industrial product symbolic of the post-war plenitude engendered by American enterprise--as well as its hidden costs, such as the slave-labor used to harvest cocoa? And while America was busy carpet bombing North Vietnam, wouldn't a room papered with chocolate bring to mind that other air campaign against Communist encroachment, the "candy drops" that became famous during the Berlin airlift?

According to MOCA's website, curator Henry Hopkins invited Ruscha and others to make prints for the American Pavilion at the 1970 Venice Biennale, but many declined in protest of the Vietnam War.

During the Biennale, protesters etched anti-war slogans into the rich brown surfaces of Chocolate Room, leaving the work to stand as a spontaneous anti-war monument, which Ruscha ultimately considered more effective than non-participation in the Biennale. In the summer heat, the heady smell of chocolate was particularly overwhelming and attracted a swarm of Venetian ants, which ate away at the work.

But, of course, Chocolate Room is not a protest piece. It is too canny for that. It is also, like all the best pop-art, a work of existential realism, showing us "something so obvious no one had noticed it, something that therefore demanded acknowledgment." If America, or at least one twisted ideal version of it, is like a thin layer of chocolate covering everything, then much of what is great about it is also what is rotten about it.

Now, nearly 40 years later, we are escalating yet another war without apparent end, where victory is hard to define and our presence ever harder to defend. The wars have changed, but the chocolate smells the same.

That's Not News

2009-11-29T07:33:00.000-08:00

A new series in which I attempt to shame NPR into doing its job.

First in the series, "At this Church, Parishioners Wear Collars, Too," a story about dogs in a church.

Most damning quote:

"The question was raised by other people, you know, why dogs?... Not only are they important family members, but there’s more to it than that. They belong to God, too, by gum."

Why dogs, indeed.

Red State

2009-11-16T00:04:00.001-08:00

A popular Chinese t-shirt design offers further proof of Deleuze and Guattari's thesis that capitalism is schizophrenic.

(Hat tip: New York Times)

Art Objects

2009-11-11T11:06:00.000-08:00

Paul Zaloom's Meanwhile, an existential tragicomedy:

Ken Jacobs: Sign of the Times

2009-10-13T00:25:00.000-07:00

The Sunday edition of the New York Times had a great review of Ken Jacobs' work, including his newest piece for the Nervous Magic Lantern: Towards the Depths of the Even Greater Depression.

Did I mention that few are more gifted with titles than Jacobs? At his best--for instance, Ken Jacobs' Theater of Unconscionable Stupidity Presents Camera Thrills of the War--he is, arguably, second only to Mingus.

Ken Jacobs in Los Angeles

2009-10-09T17:57:00.000-07:00

Ken Jacobs, best known for rending space and time in his cinematic performances, digital videos and 16mm films, will be in Los Angeles for a full week of screenings and performances. If you have never seen a Jacobs film or his truly-indescribable Nervous Magic Lantern, buy a ticket, grab a seat and strap in. If you're already an admirer, now's your chance to catch up on the recent outpouring from this prolific artist.

Scott Foundas has a great review of Jacobs' new work in the LA Weekly. My own writing on Jacobs' cinema can be found here.

Toward The Depths of The Even Greater Depression, a Nervous Magic Lantern performance at REDCAT on Monday, October 12, at 8:30 p.m.

An evening of Jacobs’ new and recent work screens at the UCLA Film & Television Archive at the Billy Wilder Theater on Thursday, October 15, at 7:30 p.m.

The Whirled screens together with Aza Jacobs’ The GoodTimesKid at Los Angeles Filmforum at the Egyptian Theater on Saturday, October 17, at 7:30 p.m.

Anaglyph Tom (Tom with Puffy Cheeks) screens at Los Angeles Filmforum at the Egyptian Theater on Sunday, October 17, at 7:30 p.m.

Photo: Ken and Flo Jacobs in their New York City home.

Primitive Cinema

2009-09-30T00:06:00.001-07:00

Not exactly Benning, but funnier than Dvortsevoy.

A Benning Miniature

2009-09-24T08:11:00.000-07:00

James Benning's Fire & Rain, which is the trailer for the Viennale.

Refutation of the Trickle Down Theory of Healthcare

2009-09-09T12:12:00.000-07:00

We've been hearing a lot lately about how a public option would somehow be a stint on healthcare innovation. A competitive marketplace, some seem to think, is the best medicine no matter what the illness. A segment on PRI's The World shows the error in this way of thinking.

Really, Pat? Really?

2009-09-03T00:17:00.000-07:00

Contemporary Nazi sympathizers with a large media footprint are hard, but apparently not impossible, to come by. In this bit of revisionist history, Pat Buchanan claims that Germany never wanted war and even perversely implies that the genocide was the Allies' fault: "Hitler wanted to end the war in 1940, almost two years before the trains began to roll to the camps."

Which reminds of the time I inadvertently attended a Ralph Nader rally. It was actually a documentary that I was obliged to see for reasons I won't go in to, but you can probably imagine the crowd at a Nader-movie within spitting distance of the Pacific. It was not a subtle film; the audience booed and hissed, actually hissed, at every archival image of Ronald Reagan, who played the villain in this particular movie. Buchanan, however, was presented as an affable third-party candidate sharing Nader's pain. No hissing for Pat, the anti-Semite, just thoughtful nods and furrowed brows with one index finger over the lips. I wanted to stand up and scream, "Are you all mad?"

It was, if nothing else, a vivid reminder of the power that film form has over even well-educated people.

(Though at the end of the movie I felt like I had been hit repeatedly over the head, I politely clapped as is meet and right so to do when the filmmaker is in attendance; however, I did refuse to go to my feet when Nader himself made a surprise appearance. "Dear Lord, " I thought, "I hope he's not running for President again." Turns out he was.)

Film Goes From Big Sleep to Dreaming Big at LACMA

2009-09-02T08:37:00.000-07:00

The Los Angeles Times reports that The Los Angeles County Museum of Art plans to expand its film program--which it recently announced it was going to cancel--provided there are donors to support it. Director Michael Govan spelled out his ambitious proposal to the coalition of film enthusiasts known as Save Film at LACMA on Tuesday.

Govan hopes to raise money for the film program from donors and patrons, much as other departments are funded. His vision includes an expansion of the budget and the hiring of several film programmers with different areas of expertise.

The goal is to create an endowment between $5 million and $10 million; however, the consequences of failing to meet this ambitious goal are ill-defined.

As the Times reports, corporate donations will allow the program to continue until larger donations can be found:

Last Wednesday, LACMA received a donation of $150,000 from the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn., Time Warner Cable and Ovation TV in support of the film program. The money has allowed the museum to continue the series past its scheduled closing date in October. With the donation, the program has enough money to operate through the end of the fiscal year in June 2010.

"Grades for Reporters" Fail

2009-08-31T09:22:00.000-07:00

After a week of heated back and forth, it seems that Stars and Stripes, the military's editorially independent news source, has succeeded in shaming the Pentagon into canceling its contract with the the Rendon Group. The Rendon Group, a Washington-based PR firm, had been compiling background information on reporters for the Pentagon, including whether their past stories written while embedded with US soldiers were "positive, negative or neutral." Although the military denies that these ratings were used to determine whether or not embed requests would be granted, it seems clear that they were used in this way as late as May of this year.

In at least two of the profiles, copies of which were obtained by Stars and Stripes, Rendon clearly stated the purpose of the analysis was to help military public affairs officers determine what kind of coverage to expect from the journalist, whether to grant their embed request, and if that journalist could be steered toward “positive” coverage for the military.

NPR's On the Media had a segment devoted to the controversy this weekend:

Clarity On Torture

2009-08-27T11:13:00.001-07:00

Is Using A Minotaur To Gore Detainees A Form Of Torture?

Teddy

2009-08-25T23:30:00.000-07:00

Senator Edward M. Kennedy - 1932-2009

First As Tragedy, Second As Farce II

2009-08-12T23:32:00.000-07:00

Conservatives pick up Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals.

A Familiar Voice In The Health Care Battle

2009-08-12T19:00:00.000-07:00

Cracked Looking Glass

2009-08-12T08:17:00.000-07:00

Fox News recently impugned the NEA and by extension the entire stimulus plan for allowing $25,000 (out of more than $750 billion) to fund an art theater in San Francisco. It is not entirely clear from their report whether Fox is offended by the work the theater shows or the fact that it is in San Francisco:
http://www.foxnews.com/search-results/m/25551964/perverts-put-out.htm

The theater in question, the San Francisco Cinematheque, is one of the longest running and most well respected venues for experimental film in the country. The list of people involved with the Cinematheque over the years is a virtual who's who of West Coast experimental film: it's founding members, Bruce Baillie and the late Chick Strand, are widely considered two of the most important experimental filmmakers in California and former directors have gone on to head the cinema departments at major American universities and art schools. Likewise, the Cinemathque's exhibition history covers nearly every major American experimental filmmaker. In 1998, the Cinematheque collaborated with the Museum of Modern Art in New York on an unprecedented exhibition called Big As Life--50 programs of small gauge cinema (8mm and super-8) from the American avant-garde.

Below, you can hear the soundtrack that Fox News described as "so offensive... we could barely find anything in the trailer that was suitable to put on TV and we definitely cannot air the audio."

First As Tragedy, Second As Farce

2009-08-10T22:03:00.000-07:00

Tormenting The Poor

2009-08-08T21:01:00.001-07:00

Barbara Ehrenreich's Sunday column for this week's edition of The New York Times is an absolute must-read. Like her groundbreaking and controversial Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich simply and eloquently describes how cruelly the deck is stacked against the poor in this country, from minor drug violations that are exacerbated by lack of proper legal council to struggling to pay rents on minimum wage.

This column, however, explains how new laws, such as forbidding the feeding of homeless in public places, creates an atmosphere of intolerance to those not only without basic human needs, but to charitable causes which may help alleviate the problem. Where trillions of dollars bail out insolvent banks, gravely irresponsible insurance companies, and investment companies which haven't even thanked the American people for saving their trade, the poor, without sufficient work, shelter, food, or dignity are forgotten. The most damning revelation is in this short paragraph:

Some of the community organizers I’ve talked to around the country think they know why “zero tolerance” policing has ratcheted up since the recession began. Leonardo Vilchis of the Union de Vecinos, a community organization in Los Angeles, suspects that “poor people have become a source of revenue” for recession-starved cities, and that the police can always find a violation leading to a fine. If so, this is a singularly demented fund-raising strategy. At a Congressional hearing in June, the president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers testified about the pervasive “overcriminalization of crimes that are not a risk to public safety,” like sleeping in a cardboard box or jumping turnstiles, which leads to expensively clogged courts and prisons.

It never amazes how the poor, brought down by excessive debts, which sometimes just go to basic services like rent or (what is treated like an essential but is billed as a luxury) education are the last to rebound. and pay the biggest price for inequalities that the ruling class perpetuates. Then they're punished with "zero tolerance" laws passed by those who pretend poverty and inequality are nonexistent. If anything, this recession exposed one thing: how woefully unaware and unprepared the middle and upper classes are for the living conditions that most Americans call Everyday Life.

The above photo, titled Pan, is by esteemed photographer and friend Brian Carroll, from his Flickr photo stream.

Cinema Sleeps The Big Sleep at LACMA

2009-08-04T11:52:00.001-07:00

Last week, The Los Angeles Times reported that the Los Angeles County Museum of Art would shutter its film program, reducing the head of its film department from a full-time employee to a part-time consultant. In a statement defending his decision, Michael Govan, director of LACMA, declared it an effort to "rethink" the program rather than dismantle it. In order to save film at LACMA, it seems, he must first destroy it.

The response from the film community in Los Angeles has been heartening, but the loss of film programming at LACMA isn't just a problem for film enthusiasts. Some of the most significant artworks of the 20th century were forged in film. Unfortunately, knowledge of these achievements may be lost if museums do not continue to encourage an appreciation and exploration of the medium through theatrical screenings. DVDs are a blessing in many ways, but they cannot replace the experience of sitting in a darkened theater and seeing an artwork projected in its original medium. It's as though they would close the Louvre based on the availability of excellent slides.

All films suffer when not projected in their original format, but some of the best are not even watchable. Tony Conrad's The Flicker cannot be transferred to video; the perceptual effects that are the subject of the work are wholly dependent on the apparatus of the 16mm projector. It has been described as one of the greatest artworks of the 1960's. Without a theater to show it in, however, Angeleno museum goers will never know it even existed.

Meanwhile, one of Conrad's paintings, Yellow Movie 2/27-28/73, is currently on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art. At first I was delighted to see one of my favorite filmmakers' work exhibited. Upon second thought, though, I was disheartened that he should find it easier in Los Angeles to exhibit his paintings than his films.

It's true that other institutions do incredible work--the Academy Film Archive and UCLA Film and Television Archive both preserve and present remarkable restorations--but there is currently no art museum that actually collects film, making this city, richer in terms of film history than any other, one of the poorest in terms of museum-led appreciation.

But if the outlook for a serious consideration of film looks ugly, the film buffs themselves haven't exactly helped.

Since the first article, the pages of the Los Angeles Times have been a beachhead for the assault on Govan. Describing the merits of one screening series at LACMA in an opinion for the Times, Richard Schickel wrote: "If nothing else, you could have found in it the roots of the French New Wave -- a phenomenon I'm sure even Govan has heard about." Schickel also chose to open his opinion piece with a curious lede: he begins by denigrating a show of contemporary Korean painting, describing it as "an ugly, off-putting exhibition" that panders to the Korean community in Los Angeles. Not exactly the smooth-talking sales pitch that might win over a director he characterizes as "a culturecrat in a smart suit."

In an even stranger turn, Times film critic Kenneth Turan determined that the best way to defend the film program at LACMA was to offend not only Govan, but film-makers and -lovers alike, writing, "if LACMA thinks attendance is bad now, just wait till its planned interim screenings of 'artist-created films' begin to truly empty its seats." Forgive me for being obvious, but it is hard to mount a defense of film as an art form if you consider films made by artists unwatchable.

The costs of a film program are real--equipment is expensive to purchase and maintain, the films themselves are delicate and skilled technicians are necessary for archiving, preserving and projecting them--but the benefits are enormous. Countless artists, from Edward Hopper to Ed Ruscha, have been affected by film culture and at least one major American filmmaker claims to have learned everything he knows about cinema from the film program at the Museum of Modern Art. In fact, without LACMA's film program, Los Angeles will be the rare major world city without a museum-led effort to promote the appreciation of cinema and preserve its past.

Cultural institutions, especially those as important and well-funded as LACMA, have a responsibility not only to the past, but to the future. It's not just our film culture, but art itself that will be poorer for our loss when the film program at LACMA closes.

Anatomy Of A Sample

2009-07-20T19:52:00.000-07:00

The Dovers, What Am I Going To Do?

and then:
Atlas Sound ft. Noah Lennox, Walkabout

And That's The Way It Is

2009-07-18T18:09:00.000-07:00

R.I.P. Walter Cronkite

R.I.P. Employee Free Choice Act

2009-07-16T20:31:00.000-07:00

Read 'em and weep.

Now For Something Substantive...

2009-07-16T13:54:00.001-07:00

Is This It? [Part 2]

2009-07-15T21:12:00.000-07:00

The Washington Post claims that the "secret program" run out of the C.I.A. was nearing a new phase, or "a somewhat more operational phase." Whether the C.I.A. passed the program along to the Pentagon remains unanswered, however. The article also does not reveal what this program actually did, though many will infer that covert actions, namely secret assassinations in allied and hostile countries, were taking place under this program.

The Hurt Locker

2009-07-14T20:20:00.000-07:00

Since seeing Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker, I've more or less been at a loss for words. The film doesn't have the formalist chops to be instantly appreciated as art necessarily, but its bizarre structure, episodic and jagged, complete with wrenching set pieces at various moments of war battle, more than succeeds as an object of appreciation. In fact, The Hurt Locker, at this moment, stands alone as the first seemingly genuine film about the Iraq War to date (and quite possibly a masterpiece), which is to say not bogged down with using its characters as pawns for political purpose or portraying the war as anything but days and years of experienced existential dread.

Make no mistake, however, The Hurt Locker is deeply political, not needing to use horrendous policies like stop-loss to prove the horror of the war. Despite this, claims of the film's apolitical nature have popped up, and within reason, that point of view is understandable. To understand the purpose of Bigelow's careful and airtight politics is to askew the political discourse that preceded and proceeded the Iraq War, which itself was one of the most suffocatingly anti-intellectual moments in recent memory. Samuel Fuller, filmmaker and WWII veteran, said that "surviving is the only glory in war" and this is the essence of Bigelow's argument: the characters who do survive war are the true messengers. The dead, and there are plenty in The Hurt Locker, are the result of the lack of hubris and perhaps misunderstanding of the mission itself, which even the writers of the war couldn't get straight. A botched philosophy which can only be continued in people with survivalist tendencies and a rugged independence, divorced from the effects of war and the emotions one carries from it. Jonathan Rosenbaum hits the nail on the head:

This is a film whose most courageous character is shown to be myopic to the point of insanity when it comes to perceiving Iraqi people in his midst — or at least one Iraqi kid in particular whom he supposedly knows and has some fondness for. He’s so convinced that this kid has been killed by a terrorist that he can’t even see the kid greeting him. This kind of blindness surely implies something about American perceptions of the Iraqi people, the ones whom American soldiers have allegedly been fighting for. It even, I would argue, implies something political.

So, I hope to have more to say on this film in the coming months, but please catch it while you can.

Is This It? [Updated]

2009-07-13T14:05:00.000-07:00

There are still classified unknowns about this NY Times story about former Vice President Dick Cheney's involvement in covert intelligence programs in the CIA to either detain or kill suspected al-Qaeda operatives. There's speculation that it could be this Sy Hersh statement that global black ops took place, from Yemen to South America, presumably killing suspected al-Qaeda members, bypassing procedural requirements agreed upon by the UN and embassies in each country. All of this occurred without congressional or judicial oversight.

One hates speculating in times like these, but this requires a full investigation with an independent prosecutor. Yes, it may cost the Obama administration political capital or worse, but the truth most be revealed.

[Update]: The NY Times has a new story out today stating that the program Panetta cancelled was in fact an assassination operation. Where or when the assassinations took place, or if they did at all, remains unclear. The article reaffirms Cheney's closeness to this program and hints at the CIA's distance from it.

In addition, the article linked above by Sy Hersh apparently was a program run out of the Pentagon and not the CIA. It's unclear if these were separate or the same programs.

Further reading (and perhaps greater in detail than the Times article) from The Guardian.

Send Us Money

2009-07-13T11:15:00.000-07:00

From Felix Salmon's entry in this month's issue of The Atlantic:

If the Obama administration is serious about stimulating the economy and creating as many new jobs as possible, one choice is clear: it should announce a massive increase in federal arts funding... for every $30,000 or so spent on the arts, one more person gets a job, compared with about $1 million if you’re building a road or hospital.

And Salmon's analysis occurs just at the level of the individual artist. As mentioned in a previous post, Art with a capital A is an industry, just like Music or Entertainment. Federal money spent on art doesn't just subsidize the aesthetic investigations of the next Pollock, though that goal alone is both noble and necessary; it also creates work for art suppliers, art movers, crate builders, installation crews, gallery attendants, museum workers, security guards, art writers, bookstore employees and many more.

It's true that art often poses more than just aesthetic challenges to its viewers, the most (in)famous of which are sexual or political in nature. But politics is a part of every dollar spent anywhere. Why should we de facto subsidize only conservative groups, like banks, with our deficit spending by avoiding the arts? It doesn't add up.

What You Don't Know...

2009-07-11T23:51:00.001-07:00

The New York Times is reporting that former Vice President Dick Cheney personally directed the CIA to keep a still unidentified counter-terrorism program secret from congress for 8 years. This revelation comes after the current director of the CIA, Leon Panetta, killed the program immediately after learning of it in June.

CNN quotes an anonymous source: "When a CIA unit brought this matter to Director Panetta's attention, it was with the recommendation that it be shared with Congress. That was also his view, and he took swift, decisive action to put it into effect."

The program never went operational.

Poll Dancing

2009-07-09T17:54:00.000-07:00

New Live Poll Allows Pundits To Pander To Viewers In Real Time

A Quinnipiac University poll released on Tuesday has some declaring Obama's reelection prospects in 2012 dead in the water. Daily Rasmussen Reports polls show Obama's numbers slipping, all to the immense pleasure of people like Matt Drudge. So, do recent polls have any footing? Nate Silver doesn't seem so convinced. There are few pollsters really crunching these numbers as data showing true vulnerabilities for Obama. So why do Fox, CNN, and MSNBC commentators feel that not only is the honeymoon over for Obama, but he's going to return from the G8 to a nation of burning torches and pitchforks?

All of this has to do with the economy, but like the President stated when first taking office, the job numbers are the last to recover from our Great Recession. This will take time. If conservatives such as Joe Scarborough think these numbers, as well as backdoor health care bill debating shows Obama potentially facing a Republican blowout 2010, I ask: what about 2009 is like 1993 besides nothing? The debate in the MSM is built solidly along The Next Election and nothing more.

"Self-Hating Jews"

2009-07-09T14:26:00.000-07:00

Though the claim that Bibi Netanyahu referred to Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod as "self-hating Jews" remains unconfirmed, aside from the very reliable Haaretz article, it points to a greater issue that American Jews face. It's expected, in Israel and in conservative Jewish circles, that American Jews must support Israel as it is, at all times, unconditionally. Since the Obama administration has demanded that Israel halt settlements on the West Bank, it's a dirty little secret that conservative Jews blame Obama's race for this tectonic shift in policy. However, looking at the cabinet that Obama has assembled, there are many notable Jewish members such as Emanuel, Axelrod, Larry Summers and Peter Orszag. How to explain the audacity of these Jews to challenge Israel? This is where Bibi's comment is key: you must hate yourself and heritage if you defy the ruling class conservatives in Israel.

Protestors Return to the Streetes of Iran

2009-07-09T11:27:00.000-07:00

Live Blogging from Nico Pitney, Andrew Sullivan and The Lede.

Deportee (Plane Crash at Los Gatos)

2009-07-08T10:14:00.000-07:00

Bob Dylan and Joan Baez sing a song by Woody Guthrie.

Uighurs Rise Up Using Internet To Organize

2009-07-07T11:25:00.000-07:00

Hundreds of Uighurs in Urumqi, China have taken to the streets in what began as non-violent protests that turned bloody after a brutal police crackdown and over a thousand arrests.

Uighurs are a muslim people that make up an ethnic minority in China, but the ethnic majority in East Turkestan--the western, desert area of the vast country. The government has long been encouraging Han Chinese, who make up the ethnic majority in China, to relocate to East Turkestan. Han Chinese now make up the majority in Urumqi, capital of Xinjiang province, which is somewhat synonymous with East Turkestan. The New York Times reports, "Uighurs say that the Han tend to get the better jobs in Urumqi." And the government has long imposed oppressive restrictions on Uighurs practicing their religion.

As in Iran but a few weeks ago--in defiance of an oppressive regime and in spite of a state-run media and a communications blackout--the Uighurs have successfully used new media to organize their protests.

The New York Times reports:

Internet social platforms and chat programs appeared to have unified Uighur anger over the way Chinese officials handled [a] brawl in June, thousands of miles away in Shaoguan, Guangdong Province. There, Han workers rampaged through a Uighur dormitory, killing at least two Uighurs and injuring many others, according to the state news agency, Xinhua.

...

A call for protests spread on Web sites and QQ, the most popular instant-messaging program in China, despite government efforts to block online discussion.

The clashes, however, are not limited to Uighurs and the police; Han Chinese mobs have assaulted Uighur neighborhoods and Uighurs have responded with violence in turn. Police and paramilitary forces have fired tear-gas on both sides, reports the New York Times.

Rebiya Kadeer, head of the human-right advocacy group World Uighur Congress (and the person that the Chinese authorities blame for Sunday's protest), has written an opinion for the Wall Street Journal.

Wang Lequan, the Party Secretary of the "Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region" has blamed me for the unrest; however, years of Chinese repression of Uighurs topped by a confirmation that Chinese officials have no interest in observing the rule of law when Uighurs are concerned is the cause of the current Uighur discontent.

An excellent video summarizing the events of the past few days is available here.

Evidence of Torture Slated to Be Destroyed

2009-07-05T21:44:00.000-07:00

The Guardian reports that a photo--one that could potentially verify claims of abuse made by Binyam Mohamed, a British resident detained at Guantanamo--remains classified and is slated to be destroyed.

The image, now held by the Pentagon, had been put on his cell door... because he had been beaten so badly that it was difficult for the guards to identify him.
...
Mohamed said: "The authorities have consistently denied that I have been abused, and this is physical evidence that I am telling the truth, and they are not."

Independence

2009-07-04T09:16:00.000-07:00

Christmas In July

2009-07-03T13:30:00.000-07:00

Alaska Governor Sarah Palin resigns. But why? One would think that if 2012 were on Palin's agenda, keeping her current position would be key to a political future, proving experience and enhancing optics. Strange, per usual. Sully and TPM speculate further.

Also, the above video is a curious thing, no?

Your Daily Dose of Surrealism

2009-07-01T07:48:00.000-07:00

"Artistic imagination must remain free. It is by definition free from any fidelity to circumstances, especially to the intoxicating circumstances of history." --Andre Breton

Update: Well that didn't last long. We will repost the video if and when it reappears. Meanwhile, here and here are links to a discussion of the video.

Update II: An only slightly less surreal/offensive version has already resurfaced on YouTube user LauraVW's channel:

Our Long National Nightmare Is Over? [Update: Yes]

2009-06-30T12:44:00.000-07:00

The Minnesota Supreme Court rules that Alan Stuart Franken is the winner of the 2008 senate race.

But will Norm Coleman concede? Update: Coleman concedes.

150 Years For Madoff

2009-06-29T09:47:00.000-07:00

Bernard Madoff, the rogue financier who literally made billions of dollars disappear, received the maximum sentence allowed for his crimes today after a hearing that lasted only an hour and a half. Madoff had already pleaded guilty in March.

The New York Times reports that in handing down the sentence, Judge Denny Chin declared "no friends, family or other supporters had submitted any letters on Mr. Madoff’s behalf, attesting to the strength of his character or good deeds he had done."

An excellent Frontline documentary about Madoff details the scandal, including the many investigations that somehow failed to catch him. It provides a window, already closing, into a world of wealth that, like the stratosphere itself, is all but invisible.

Pride

2009-06-28T16:56:00.000-07:00

Just to add to Madison's post, here are some well written pieces about the significance of Stonewall:
Michael Hamill Remaley
Frank Rich
The Advocate
Lucian K. Truscott IV

Iranian Poeple Take To The Streets Once More

2009-06-28T16:01:00.000-07:00

Just this morning the Los Angeles Times declared, "The streets of Tehran are quiet once again." But what seemed to be extinguished has begun to burn anew.

The New York Times reports:

In spite of all the threats, the overwhelming show of force and the nighttime raids on private homes, protesters still flowed into the streets by the thousands on Sunday to demonstrate in support of Mr. Moussavi.

Mr. Moussavi, who has had little room to act but has refused to fold under government pressure, had earlier received a permit to hold a ceremony at the Ghoba mosque to honor Mohammad Beheshti, one of the founders of the 1979 revolution who died in a bombing on June 28, 1981, that killed dozens of officials. Mr. Moussavi used the anniversary as a pretense to call a demonstration, and by midday the streets outside the elaborately tiled mosque were filled with protesters, their arms jabbing the air, their fingers making a V symbol, for victory.

Meanwhile, many of the on-the-ground the sources of information have gone silent. Persiankiwi, one of most prolific and trusted of the Twitterers inside Tehran, has possibly been detained. Nico Pitney reports that another Twitterer claiming to be Persiankiwi has popped up, but no one could verify the authenticity of this claim. The Iranian authorities are known to have used Twitter and other forms of new media for disinformation purposes.

The disinformation campaign inside Iran continues with televised confessions; arrests of not only reporters, but Iranians working for British embassy; and even what the Los Angeles Times calls "the Orwellian twist taken by state and pro-government news media." Apparently Iranian news is reporting that Neda Agha-Soltan--the protestor who was fatally shot, her cell-phone-recorded image broadcast round the world--was a Basiji volunteer whose murder was arranged by the BBC.

40 Years Ago

2009-06-28T13:19:00.000-07:00

In honor of the 40th Anniversary of Stonewall, a quote from an earlier post by Kiljan Zane Pyry about the current state of the struggle for LGBT rights:

While other factions of the GLBT community have fought tirelessly to empower themselves and join the larger movement, there continues to be a co-opting and morphing that happens to the narratives of divergent bodies. For example, the conflict at Stonewall has become a national story of resistance for gay and lesbians. The Pride celebrations that take place in June are scheduled loosely around the anniversary of the uprising. What very few resources on the subject will reveal is that the people who fought against the police at Stonewall were primarily homeless transgender youth of color who were completely fed up with the impossibility of survival.

And an acknowledgment of that very history that we found in a surprising place:

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Jim Fouratt

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor

Mark Sanford

Did Justice Help Reelect Renzi?

2009-06-27T13:58:00.000-07:00

An article by Maurice Waas in The Hill provides even more evidence of how the Bush administration dangerously politicized judicial proceedings to benefit a Republican congressman running for reelection.

In the fall of 2006, one day after the Justice Department granted permission to a U.S. attorney to place a wiretap on a Republican congressman suspected of corruption, existence of the investigation was leaked to the press — not only compromising the sensitive criminal probe but tipping the lawmaker off to the wiretap.

...the disinformation leaked to media outlets in October 2006 had the desired effect: Renzi won reelection by the narrowest of margins.

(Hat tip: Scott Horton)

So You Want To Be A Rock 'n' Roll Star

2009-06-26T09:44:00.000-07:00

The Byrds, 1973:

A Quick Note On "New" Media's Effect on "Old"

2009-06-25T17:42:00.001-07:00

It first occurred to me during the coverage of the Iranian uprising, but it seemed too trifling a thing to mention in that context: new media--tweets, Flickr photos, YouTube videos, Facebook posts and blogs--have fundamentally altered the "old" print journalism, including its online incarnation.

A few clumsily-edited cut-and-pasted articles appeared on the New York Times website as it sought to constantly update its stories, not as events on the ground unfolded, but as they could be confirmed (a word unknown to the purveyors of instant punditry and para-reporting). Striking a curious balance between web-friendly, up-t0-the-minute coverage and classic, old-media due diligence, the Times kept revising its front-page stories on Iran in real time.

Presumably, this is part of a broader campaign to remain relevant in a blog-based news cycle fueled in part by the viral qualities of a "Web 2.0" world.

Today, trying to compete with this even-more-instant-than-TV news cycle, the Times rushed to publish a piece on the death of Michael Jackson. The article sports a sentence fragment--"A young cancer patient who claimed the singer had befriended him and then sexually fondled him at his Neverland estate near Santa Barbara, Calif."--and then this muddled message: "Mr. Jackson had been scheduled to perform a 50 concerts in at the O2 arena London beginning next month and continuing into 2010."

The rest of the article contains more stylistic slips: repetitious sentences, run-on sentences with clumsy conjunctions ("...and the ranch became his sanctum"), and other errors rarely seen in the ink edition of the Times.

It's a little thing, really, but one wonders how else the electronic news era will affect the ink establishment.

Long Live The King

2009-06-25T16:16:00.001-07:00

Media Blackout in Iran

2009-06-24T08:50:00.000-07:00

The New York Times reports that "hundreds of protesters clashed with waves of riot police and paramilitary militia in Tehran on Wednesday." Other reports place the number closer to a thousand.

The article continues: "It was impossible to confirm first-hand the extent of the new violence in the capital because of draconian new press restrictions on coverage of the post-election mayhem."

From an interview on CNN (via the Guardian's News Blog), an eyewitness account of Wednesday's brutal crackdown on the demonstrators at Baharestan Square outside the national Parliament building:

The black-clad police stopped everyone. They emptied the buses that were taking people there and let the private cars go on. We went on until Ferdowsi then all of a sudden some 500 people with clubs came out of [undecipherable] mosque and they started beating everyone. They tried to beat everyone on [undecipherable] bridge and throwing them off of the bridge. And everyone also on the sidewalks. They beat a woman so savagely that she was drenched in blood and her husband, he fainted. They were beating people like hell. It was a massacre.

Meanwhile The Tweets coming out of Iran, as aggregated by Andrew Sullivan of The Atlantic, have become increasingly alarming:

they catch ppl with mobile - so many killed today - so many injured - Allah Akbar - they take one of us

in Baharestan we saw militia with axe choping ppl like meat - blood everywhere - like butcher - Allah Akbar

Everybody is under arrest & cant move - Mousavi - Karroubi even rumour Khatami is in house guard

The New York Times reports that phone calls from Iran confirm the use of live ammunition at Baharestan Square. "Lalezar Sq is same as Baharestan - unbelevable - ppls murdered everywhere," one Twitter user wrote.

"Neither the establishment nor the nation will yield to pressure at any cost," Ayatollah Khamenei said on state television.

A compilation video of the unrest--as recorded by individuals using cell phones--is available here, from The Guardian.

"The Great Backlash"

2009-06-23T19:45:00.000-07:00

A well-argued if sometimes implausible argument for why 1979, not 1968 or 1989, was the epochal, sea-change year of the modern era (politically, culturally, economically), written by Christian Caryl for Foreign Policy.

"A Massive, Massive, Massive Police Presence"

2009-06-22T08:34:00.000-07:00

The New York Times is reporting that a massive police presence has all but silenced the opposition in Tehran. Roger Cohen, reporting from Tehran, writes that, "Elite riot police with thigh-length black leg guards, helmeted Revolutionary Guards in green uniforms and rifle-touting snipers composed a panoply of menace." A few hundred to a thousand protesters remain where, by some reports, there were once hundreds of thousands.

The unelected Guardian Council, charged with certifying the election, has declared that the election is valid "despite an admission... that the number of votes cast in 50 cities exceeded the actual number of voters."

The Times goes on to report:

Abbas Ali Kadkhodaei, the spokesman for the 12-member Guardian Council... said that a voter turnout in excess of the registered voting list was a "normal phenomenon" because people could legally vote in areas other than those in which they were registered. Nonetheless, some analysts in Tehran said, the number of people said to be traveling on election day seemed unusually high.

Could the voting irregularities be attributing to a massive voter movement campaign, busing in votes to all but guarantee the outcome?

Nate Silver, election analyst extraordinaire, thinks that the Guardian Council has essentially admitted to election fraud, but he doesn't consider the possibility of vote rigging by busing.

Roger Cohen perhaps sums up the emotions best:

I believe the loss of trust by millions of Iranians who’d been prepared to tolerate a system they disliked, provided they had a small margin of freedom, constitutes the core political earthquake in Iran. Moderates who once worked the angles are now muttering about making Molotov cocktails and screaming their lungs out after dusk.

Crimson Gold

2009-06-21T19:10:00.000-07:00

Battle w/ Police - Tehran, Iran - June 20th 2009
by mightier-than

The Meaning of Consensus

2009-06-21T08:56:00.000-07:00

Marc Ambinder has a great piece on President Obama's methods and possible reasons for the seemingly slow pace of change. It is a great reminder of just how much things have changed already--and how much more is at stake. Ambinder explains what he sees as Obama's methodology and the meaning of consensus:

It isn't simply that Obama feels constrained by political realities in Congress, although that's part of it. It's that he believes that the best way to accomplish the most change is to let Congress legislate and let the President build public support for the end product, which still conforms to the goals that Obama laid out during his campaign. Don't confuse bipartisanship with consensus; bipartisanship refers to outcomes, and the outcome here won't be liked by Republicans. Consensus refers to the process and to the way in which the public perceives the issue.

Does this explain the lack of movement on LGBT issues? Somewhat, but it still doesn't excuse the administration's recent actions and inactions. Especially since the vast majority of the public is already behind a repeal of the military's misguided Don't Ask Don't Tell policy.

Life and Nothing More

2009-06-19T21:31:00.001-07:00

For the Warriors, Whose Strength Is Not to Fight

2009-06-19T07:19:00.000-07:00

Bob Dylan sings "Chimes of Freedom" at the Newport Folk Festival in 1964.

Breathing Out

2009-06-18T17:50:00.000-07:00

...listen do you hear the darkness blowing?
something is passing in the night
the moon is restless and red
and over this rooftop
where crumbling is a constant fear
clouds, like a procession of mourners
seem to be waiting for the moment of rain.
a moment
and then nothing
night shudders beyond this window
and the earth winds to a halt
beyond this window
something unknown is watching you and me.

- Forugh Farrokhzad, The Wind Will Take Us

In the past six days, those who constantly refreshed their Twitter feeds and reloaded the #iranelection hash tags, turned the medium, Twitter and social networks in general, into the message. Thanks to, of all people, The Falun Gong, the Iranian state has been unable to disconnect its people from the world, even if, at times, Westerners projected a rosier version of the situation.

How to digest all of this? For one, Twitter and global digital interconnectedness aside, President Obama handled his first 3:00 A.M. phone call well. In a well written Op-Ed in today's New York Times, John Kerry wrote:

If we actually want to empower the Iranian people, we have to understand how our words can be manipulated and used against us to strengthen the clerical establishment, distract Iranians from a failing economy and rally a fiercely independent populace against outside interference. Iran’s hard-liners are already working hard to pin the election dispute, and the protests, as the result of American meddling. On Wednesday, the Iranian Foreign Ministry chastised American officials for “interventionist” statements. Government complaints of slanted coverage by the foreign press are rising in pitch.

We can’t escape the reality that for reformers in Tehran to have any hope for success, Iran’s election must be about Iran — not America. And if the street protests of the last days have taught us anything, it is that this is an Iranian moment, not an American one.

America, just this once, needs to back off. Surely suggestive tones can be inferred and tech-savvy millenials can imply who Americans side with. But bravado, backed-up by apocalyptic rhetoric and militaristic threats, are a thing of the past: a calm, measured quietude may be the best medicine.

If you, like me, have been scouring the internet for images and texts of this incredible moment, here are some very worthy ones:
- Well known to A Shout In The Street readers, Andrew Sullivan's blog for The Atlantic
- Nico Pitney at The Huffington Post
- An interview with filmmaker and Mousavi spokesman Mohsen Makhmalbaf
- Channel 4 news
- #iranelection on Twitter
- an excellent Bloggingheads talk with Reza Aslan and Eli Lake
- Revolutionary Road, an invaluable blog by Saeed Valadbaygi
- ahriman46's YouTube channel, in many ways a reblogging of previously posted videos.
- Tehran Live

Image at the top by Flicker user Hamed

Non-violence and New Media

2009-06-18T08:39:00.000-07:00

Considering the efficacy of the strategy of peaceful resistance used by Iran's demonstrat0rs, Yglesias writes:

The reality is that modern military technology makes it extraordinarily difficult to actually defeat a state on the battlefield. An [sic] dissident movement just isn’t going to be able to be able to [sic] blow up tanks and airplanes. Under the circumstances, strategic nonviolence is a vital tactic. If you were to try to fight the security forces—shoot some policemen, say—you’d encourage a more serious crackdown. It’s through nonviolent resistance that you heighten the psychological contradictions, and encourage the regime and its enforcers to blink. From the Velvet Revolution to Tiananmen Square to the Orange Revolution to what’s happening today in Iran, the brave dissidents are essentially daring the security forces to beat or kill them. The bet is that when push comes to shove, people in the Iranian security forces have some humane and patriotic instincts and will recoil from the idea of using mass violence against their fellow citizens. And it’s a terrifying bet. We’ve seen time and again that it’s a bet that often pays off, but as we learned in China 20 years ago there are no guarantees.

Yglesias is correct in recognizing that non-violence is often a more effective strategy than armed resistance, but he gets the reasons wrong.

It's not that non-violent demonstrators are daring security forces to not respond with violence, they are pushing them to act violently, revealing the illegitimacy of the regime and the severity of its repression. No one in Selma, Alabama believed that the white police--wielding clubs, tear gas and worse--were going to spontaneously see the error of their ways. The non-violent demonstrators had to push the police, through their very peaceful resistance itself, to act in such a manner that could not be mistaken for anything but brutal repression. The point is to create conflict that the world will find unconscionable.

It's important to note that the demonstrators don't necessarily create the violence; they create a situation in which it will be impossible to ignore the violence that has always been there, but was previously invisible.

In order for this strategy to work, however, you need a free press. Tienanmen Square didn't happen because the Chinese dissenters failed to create an empathetic response in the Chinese soldiers. Tienanmen happened because the Chinese regime assumed--correctly--that they could successfully use such a high level of repression without disturbing the balance of power. Today, barely anyone in China knows about Tienanmen. Someone I know, watching a BBC broadcast in Beijing on the anniversary of Tienanmen Square, saw the screen go blank at the first mention of the event. The program resumed as soon as the piece was over. Likewise, the Chinese regime remains perfectly content with the violent repression of the Tibetans and the Uighur people in the west. With no free press, there is no accountability.

What is so remarkable about the Iranian situation is that it seems new media have taken the place of the free press. Some foreign journalists are doing very good and very brave work, no doubt--Twitter alone does not a newswire make--but the flood of videos, photos and first-hand accounts has kept the movement very alive and very bright in the world's spotlight.

The Iranian dissidents have taught us all a lesson in non-violent resistance in the 21st century.

This post was written with the help of Emily Singer, based laregly on her reading of Walking With the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement, by John Lewis and Michael D'Orso.

Web 2.0 Counterattack

2009-06-17T18:18:00.000-07:00

It seems that Iran has launched a disinformation campaign via Twitter. A list of the possible spy-tweeters can be found at Twitspam.

(Hat-tip: New York Times' blog, the Lede, which has been an invaluable source of up-to-the-minute information during the Iranian demonstrations).

Twitter

2009-06-15T16:17:00.000-07:00

Overnight--and in 140 characters or less--Iranian protesters have changed the face of dissent.

http://twitter.com/mousavi1388/status/2184418876

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/06/livetweeting-the-revolution.html

Image by Flickr user hapal.

End It... Again

2009-06-14T17:19:00.001-07:00

Force feeding, although widely regarded as torture and a violation of Common Article 3 of the Geneva conventions, is still being practiced at Guantanamo Bay.

Here, Luke Mitchell asks the hard questions of Cynthia Smith, spokesperson for Dr. Ward Casscells, assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, whose term ended in April but has yet to be replaced.

How are we to reconcile an answer like this:

DoD takes very seriously its obligation to provide humane treatment, which includes protecting detainees’ physical and mental health and providing appropriate treatment for disease, guided by professional judgments and standards similar to those applied to personnel of the U.S. Armed Forces.

with a description like this, from Mitchell's article in the July issue of Harper's Magzine?

...Ahmed Ghap pour, an attorney with the human-rights group Reprieve, which represents thirty-one detainees at Guantánamo, told Reuters that prison officials were “over-force-feeding” hunger strikers, who were suffering from diarrhea as they sat tied to their chairs. He said in some cases officials were lacing the nutrient shakes with laxatives.

Where is everyone on this?

Pictured above: force feeding kit used at Guantanamo Bay. Pentagon photo in the public domain. Thanks to Wikimedia.

Kandinsky/Obama

2009-06-09T13:36:00.001-07:00

President Obama: Foodie

2009-06-08T21:20:00.001-07:00

The world, it seems, wants what he's having.