Archive Page 2
The Switch
This is purely an administrative post. If you friendly beasts happen to be looking for the creative writing page that was attached to noirnicole, it has moved to a new location at textualkenosis.wordpress.com. There will be a few changes to this site in the upcoming months and I hope you cultural connoissiers stay with me throughout those renovations.
Thank you, Comrades.
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Introduction: Wallpaper
As always, I try to bring you, the three whole people who actually read this thing, the latest in my musical obsessions. Blahg audience, this is Wallpaper. Wallpaper, this is an underprivileged blahg audience. Now that the formal introductions have been dispensed with, here is Wallpaper’s music video for their song T-Rex:
Call me crazy, but I laughed myself senseless on this one. Equally crazy is how well this format translates to live performances; this act killed it at Bottom of the Hill. Their video blogs are also quite entertaining:
You either love ‘em, or you hate ‘em. My advice to you is: don’t be a hater; spread the love.
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Well it’s about two years tardy but I finally read Eric Lott’s The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual and I’m here to tell you it was quite a ride. Briefly, this work criticizes left(ish) intellectuals for reproducing the errors of their Cold War progenitors in attacking and marginalizing radical academics when they ought to be sticking it to The Man and the Right Wing pseudo-clerisy of the type who mainly inhabit the hothouse confines of thinktank biospheres. Written in a theoretically fluent yet informal style– intermittently scathing and flippant– DLI examines the work of liberal “public intellectuals” such as Todd Gitlin, Paul Berman, and Cornel West, all of whom according to Lott, in their varying ways, excoriate or neutralize a politics farther to the left than their own. This tendency to rein in the radicals can be seen as contiguous with the efforts of an earlier generation to impugn those of a socialist stripe as accomplices to totalitarianism– that all-comprehending category of political demonology whose sole purpose is to delegitimate Liberalism’s Others. Though this particular point is not the core concern of DLI– indeed, it is scarcely developed beyond the book’s introduction– it functions to stake out the battlespace, so to speak, and gives a sense of urgency to Lott’s project.
The turn to nationalism, the abandonment of race as a central problematic of American history and culture, and, in general, the sold-out flaccidity of ostensibly left-wing social critique are the tin-cans Lott wings his words at. Gitlin, who is fairly notorious in some circles as the buttoned-down former SDS president converted to the flag of our fathers by nineelevenchangedeverything, comes in for a fairly severe salting which seems appropriate given his apparent nostalgia for a white male left untroubled by the commands and demands of that bette noir “identity politics”. Gitlin is only one of the more recognizable members of a chorus who holds that the primary contradiction of American life is class and the left has lost sight of that fact at the cost of its effectivity. True enough in some sense, Lott implicitly allows, but not good enough: as CLR James once said, for Black people race is the category through which class is experienced.
For the uninitiated Lott’s arguments will seem dangerously close to hair-splitting, as when he chastizes Michael Eric Dyson for vanilla-fying his chops to get down with the NPR crowd or when Eric Sundquist comes in for gentle reproval for a “nationalist gaze [that] produces certain occlusions, which ought to prove cautionary to future cultural studies of race.” In terms of the latter, Lott’s point is that Sundquist’s impressive To Wake the Nations fails to account for the “aesthetic force” of African-American cultural production, missing the down-stroke of spontaneity which is the signature of that tradition. Coupled with this blindspot Lott discerns a near-ineffable “race-radical” “smugness toward the past.”
Still, in a mediascape dominated by the barks and whistles of unreconstructed neo-imperialists and the pasteurized “outrage” of totally bourgeois liberal tokens, Lott’s criticisms are bracing, funny, and educative. Of special note is DLI’s bibliography, which is minor trove of works-cited for ascendant scholars of American culture. You could do considerably worse than to chase down many (not all) of these titles, as they provide a signpost toward productive study. Lott’s own influences– from CLR James to Michael Rogin and Edward Said and Harold Cruse are all worth checking out– as is his first book Love and Theft, whose title was notably clipped by that trickster Bob Dylan.
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Tags: american culture, criticism, politics
Music of the Now, For the Future
It’s coming on summer. Oh, yes it is. I can feel the train a comin’, and it’s fueled by restless, pensive coal leaving in its wake a trail of thick black tempestuous melodies–veritable rays of lurid, soothing aches and jives. Which is not to say the lighter fare has entirely disappeared from the landscape. No, oh no, my friends. This is the summertime, where the livin’ is easy and the musical horizons are as variegated as they are attainable, for a change. San Francisco is oozing with rhythmic temptations in the months to come:
- June 18: The Fratellis at The Fillmore
- June 19: The Dodos at The Independent
- June 20: Toy Soldiers at Bottom of the Hill (attending)
- June 24: Robert Francis at Cafe du Nord
- July 6: We Are Scientists at The Independet
- July 15: Citay at Cafe du Nord
- July 17: Ride the Blinds at Bottom of the Hill
- July 19: Earlimart at Cafe du Nord
- July 22: Grand Ole Party at Bottom of the Hill (attending)
- July 23: The Duke Spirit at Bottom of the Hill
- July 24: The Paper Sons at Cafe du Nord
- July 29: Rocky Votolato at Bottom of the Hill (attending)
Although this is clearly a mere smattering of concerts, and one obviously cannot account for the specifics of individual palates, I’ve done my best to select and suggest those which I personally savor.
In particular, if you like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, but wished Karen Oh’s voice was a little smoother, less abrasive and polished with an infusion of sultry blues: Grand Ole Party is a show you shouldn’t miss; this band and their album Humanimals has found an incessant repetition on my iPod: “Look Out Young Son” is raunchy in the most delicate of ways, with it’s simple beats that keep driving you and the song forward getting under your skin in a way that will make you ache to move. Suffice to say, I saw these guys at Bottom of the Hill some months ago and they brought the house down. Plus, the lead singer is also the drummer: awesomely seductive combo.
Moving on, Rocky Votolato is the man who set my feet to the pavement; he’s the man who inspired me to correlate the music in my head to the abstracted hues in front of my eyes at the very tip of my fingertips and nose. There’s something modestly epic about the banal, emotional topics he sings about. Yes, his music is melancholic sometimes to its own detriment, but this neo-folk genre has its time and its place, and Votolato inhabits his musical space admirably. Although I haven’t seen him live yet (and his youtube posts leave me a bit skeptical about the strength of his vocals on stage), I’ve heard nothing but good reviews from my people who have previously attended: we will see come July.
In brief, some bands to look up in your spare wanderings on Facebook and Myspace are the following:
Peck the Town Crier, “Underwear”: this is a white boy’s version of Sir Mix Alot’s “I Like Big Butts;” Goes down smooth with a bottle of Corona and shrimp tacos.
Texacala, “Skull Mountain”: fuck yes. That’s all I have to say. This is a strangely arousing, bad-ass broad. Thank you, Texas.
Thao Nguyen: if this girl gets some air time, she’s gonna hit and imbed herself in the car stereos of teenage girls all over this big rock-candy country. She’s got the chops, she’s got the pith: bubbly with a little bit of Hawaiian soul.
The Dodos: they’re just plain good. Plus, they offer you a chance to see how many instruments your attuned ear can actually identify. Although not the most intellectual in the lyric department (not un-intellectual, mind you), this is music that is arranged in an interestingly intelligent way. Go see their show in San Francisco; from my experience, this is the kind of music that translates well to a live format.
From the Clay: two words–good, free downloads. Not to discourage you from buying their album (which I highly recommend), but it’s rare to find a group who will put up decent songs for free. They’re quirky. They’re music is so beautiful it’s almost ugly, precisely because they don’t go for the obvious melodies and rhymes. Magnificent. This is one of my current obsessions: a little bit country, a little bit rock n’ roll, a little bit blues.
Toy Soldiers: go see this band at Bottom of the Hill. There is a movement afoot in music: all the best are coming out of the middle of the country–Ohio, Pennsylvania, etc.– not necessarily the coasts that have dominated for so long–Seattle, Los Angeles, New York, Portland, San Francisco. Maybe isolation is key here, or perhaps their distance from the soothing waves of the ocean. Frankly, I don’t know but hopefully I’ll see you at the concert.
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Current Obsessions
Here’s a sampling of artists who have just crossed my path:
Here are some clips:
Melody Gardot: Sweet Memories
Paper Rival: You’re Right
AA Bondy: When I Was Young/American Hearts
Here is a sampling of my great musical loves:
Cat Power: He War
Nat King Cole: Stardust
The Black Keys: Strange Times
Just saw Tarsem’s The Fall. I am completely obsessed: the soundtrack, the visuals, the lead actor-Lee Pace; I have been swept off my feet by this movie.
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La Nature (Miss Eve Fairfax): Rodin, Miss Fairfax, and the Pessimistic Amour-Propre of Progress
It is almost too easy to adopt the affectations of cynicism and disdain after years of interacting with others—other people, other places, other objects; the unadulterated drudgery of everyday existence infiltrates us too much not to register permanently. Yet this peculiarly human ability to allow the macro and micro elements of our surroundings to encrust us with inscriptions—to continually make us anew—is exactly what allows us to form intimate connections with the very things that are, in some respects, mutilating us with pessimism. This rampant cynicism—perhaps the predominant characteristic of our present—is crippling in many ways, but it is also what impels us to take nothing at face value, to search for obscure signifiers or the ever elusive proverbial Truth of a given discourse. Although it is comforting to imagine that this trend is purely an affliction of the present—one that found no space in the hearts and minds of previous generations—in order to romanticize what came before, it is a frothy farce dreamed up in order to hold onto our future fantasies; which is to say, Parisians in the nineteenth-century had similarly bleak conceptions of their surroundings.
True, this cynicism can be disheartening if excessively focused on, but it is also why we have the ability to access the deeper facets of art; the variegated textures of human emotions and the spectrum that they run allow an intense and personal introspection to occur. Often, what is transparent, what makes itself obvious to us on first inspection, is unable to keep our attention for very long—a tendency which is addressed by Charles Baudelaire in Chapter 35, titled “Windows,” in his collection of prose poems, Paris Spleen:
Looking from the outside into an open window one never sees as
much as when one looks through a closed window. There is nothing
more profound, more insidious, more dazzling than a window lighted
by a single candle. What one can see out in the sunlight is always less
interesting than what goes on behind a window pane. In that black or
luminous square life lives, life dreams, life suffers.[i]
We cynics enjoy the hunt, the restless search for movements in the shadows that give life—the process of living—its depths, and although we are loathe to admit it, this is precisely what affords us a modicum of hopeful adventurousness in an otherwise dreary and pessimistic existence because the unknown offers us endless possibilities. Simply put, the right work of art can serve as the vessel for our hopes and fears—our innermost emotional currents—and ease us out of the world, if only for a moment.
For these reasons, Auguste Rodin’s sculpture La Nature (Miss Eve Fairfax) is reticent with everlasting intrigue. In many ways, the melancholy physical presence of the sculpture itself presents the cynic with enough romanticized validation of his or her hard-earned pessimism to invoke a visceral reaction. Permanently residing in a sun-drenched rotunda of the Legion of Honor, Miss Fairfax is a power with which to be reckoned; there is nothing more emotive than the juxtaposition of the raw and the refined in one piece and she practically begs to be interpreted. Rising out of a slab of marble that resembles a bell-curve overlaid with strips of homemade alabaster pappardelle noodles, she is a haunting, enigmatic enchantment who is almost too fragile to be looked at directly. The texture of the stone base that holds her is in stark relief to the flawlessly smooth portions of her skin Rodin allows us to see, which makes her seem all the more delicate and rare; one cannot help feeling like a truant voyeur in her presence.
Partially entombed as she is, Miss Fairfax seems an unwilling participant in a charade that was scripted by the foreign hands of the maker that holds her still, like a doll suspended on display. Although her hair is painstakingly coiffed in an Edwardian up-do reminiscent of the Gibson girls who adorn so many Coca-Cola ads from the early twentieth-century, what appear at first glance to be rustically manicured braids, but which in actuality are ears of wheat, erupt from the crown of her head and serve as a sort of a second anchor to her relatively unprocessed base, as if her marble cocoon was not already substantially weighted for the purpose of holding her on view. It is no wonder the portion of her breast that is covered by the largest portion of marble is one in the same with that which houses her heart. It is her face, however, that signifies her immobile condition the most. The aristocratic overtones of her features are unmistakable, from her delicately prominent yet proportional chin, nose and cheekbones to her perfectly arched brow. Yet, there are two features that speak to a deviation from the typically placid existence of an patrician: her lips and her eyes.
Miss Fairfax’s mouth and gaze are, perhaps, the most compelling aspects of the entire piece. Her voluptuously restrained lips are set in a pensive, serenely determined position, and there is an ever so slight protruding of her upper lip, suggesting the delicate presence of an overbite; they seem to indicate an untapped intelligence with which few women of her time were credited. It is her eyes, however, that are able to hold the cynic in rapt attention. Her eyes concomitantly reflect nothing and everything—she is at once blind and all-seeing. Rodin saw fit to leave the smooth marble orbs of her eyes unmolested—choosing to delineate neither her irises nor her pupils—creating a woman who focuses on nothing in particular while surveying and digesting the entirety of what lays before her. The effect is haunting and perversely attractive, a combination that draws the cynic towards her like a moth to flame, or rather like a masochistic voyeur to a train wreck. We can almost feel the piquant desolation that vibrates behind those paralyzed, snow-white eyes as they bore straight through us.
Is the despair that she communicates to us the result of Rodin’s ability to capture the pith of his tragically beautiful muse, or merely the product of our own emotional projection crafted by a fervent cynicism that is crying out for an artistic equivalent? This is a difficult question to answer because it necessitates a discussion of both the sculptor and the sculpted as well as the distorted nature of our sight as viewers. “Not only do we see solely what we are prepared to see, but we see what we want to see. The gaze carries with it the double ballast of our preconceptions and our desires.”[ii] Which is to say, we are deceived by what we see simply because we wish so badly to see it. In many ways this is the product of empathy, the desire for something or someone to understand the difficulties we encounter as we trudge through our lives, which is also a desire to observe another person wading through their life at the same pace—the clichéd “Misery loves company.”
One could say that I have given Miss Fairfax an unduly dreary emotional patina based on a pervasive personal pessimism that has accrued after twenty-three years of concurrent disappointments, but this interpretation is somewhat diluted after hearing the story behind the sculpture. Although I already attributed her with a melancholic aura before knowing the lineage of Miss Fairfax herself or her commissioned sculpture, her biography and the traits that brought Rodin the distinctions he so deserved as an artist only further validated my interpretation.
At the forefront of this is the woman herself, and thus shall our analysis begin. Miss Fairfax was born in 1871 near York, the daughter of a colonel in the Grenadier Guards and the sister of two brothers who went on to become a farmer and a professional military man, respectively. Although not the “petite dark girl” her mother had wanted for a daughter, Eve was quite accomplished as a cricket player and an equestrian, and quickly acquired a modicum of local fame for these feats. Upon the death of her father in 1884, however, it became imperative that she marry well in order to maintain the comfortable lifestyle to which she had become accustomed—a fact her mother obsessed about after she had been presented to Queen Victoria at the tender age of 17 and did not receive any immediate proposals of marriage. In fact, it was not until after her mother had died and she was in her late twenties that she became engaged to a local Yorkshire banker and widower with three children, Ernest William Becket—the future second Lord of Grimthorpe.[iii]
As a probable wedding gift commissioned by her fiancé for 22,000 francs in February of 1901, Miss Eve Fairfax first posed for Rodin in the spring of 1901 and then continued her sitting in 1903 after a hiatus due to a combination of temporarily insufficient funds and her inability to travel to Paris. The sculptor and his muse quickly developed an affinity for one another. Rodin noted her “genuine greatness,” and was very much taken with the “generous turn of her wit as well as her body.”[iv] He famously described her as a blend of Diana the Hunter and a satyr, even going so far as to note that “even when [she does] not speak, [her] gestures, [her] restrained expression and desirable movements…touch the soul of the artist.”[v] Miss Fairfax, coincidentally, coquettishly tempted him with little quips: “With me as your model one will see what a marvelous man you are.”[vi] In fact, their connection proved strong enough to compel Rodin to present Miss Fairfax with a slightly modified rendition of her sculptural doppelganger—despite never receiving payment—when she parted ways with her husband-to-be.
This mutual admiration led to a bevy of rumors after the commission was cancelled as a result of Miss Fairfax’s dissolution of her engagement to Lord Beckett. Some speculated as to the nature of her relationship with the man who transferred her likeness into bronze and stone: was there an unwanted pregnancy in which Miss Fairfax was cast as Rodin’s mistress? Others attributed the 1904 separation to Beckett’s illicit affair with a young girl he claimed to be his god-daughter. There was also the matter of his dwindling monetary affairs, which would have made it socially suicidal to marry a woman with neither a dowry nor some sort of monthly stipend. Regardless of motivation, Miss Fairfax was once again unattached and unattached she remained until her death in 1978 at The Retreat in York where she ended her days penniless and alone, a beneficiary of the kindness of relative strangers who tolerated her prideful senility. It is this melancholy ability to forge her path regardless of prevailing societal sentiments—ones which deemed an unmarried woman past a certain age something to pity and scorn—which instills the statue with its emotive aura; despite the fact that she was presumably happily engaged to a man who adored her enough to capture her likeness, forevermore, in marble and bronze, this forlorn quality emanates from her apparently overriding her pre-marital bliss.
This can be accounted for in the confounding genius of Rodin and, more specifically, the way in which he interacted with his creations and their muses. Rodin once said, “The truth of my figures…instead of being merely superficial, seems to blossom from within to the outside, like life itself.”[vii] He took his time to let the “beauty and character” of a given study “work upon [his] soul,” to “germinate,” and this is precisely the method which allowed him to capture the hidden undulations of Miss Fairfax’s deeply rooted, pessimistic doubts about her marriage—and perhaps life in general—that were apparently harbored at the time of her sitting, whether or not she was aware of them.[viii] In other words, he considered his craft to be indubitably serious for it was “a moral act,” which is to say “it could express one’s whole sense of being in the world.”[ix] The passion that is exemplified by this statement is also seen in other elements of his creative process and artistic mantra. His work was permeated by a vivacious sexual frankness, and “the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea (the sculptor falling in love with the figure he had carved) had vast resonance for him.”[x] He envisioned the marble as if it were truly flesh, alive to the touch and able to linger on the senses and thus was able to capture the being beyond the flesh in ways his contemporaries were unable to mimic.
But how does a moralizing, erotically charged sculptor and the marble outgrowth of his brief affair—whatever form it actually took—with this beautifully tragic British muse reflect Paris at the dawn of the twentieth-century? The city of Paris was undeniably beautiful at the time Miss Fairfax was immortalized—as she remains to this day—yet that beauty was and is underscored by a liminal sadness derived from an incessant attempt to rectify the gap between what Paris wants to be and what she is in actuality; the phantasmagorical city of lovers, seen through the lens of the denizens who are rooted to its streets by lineage or memories, becomes the receptacle of life’s dehumanizing disappointments and not the stuff with which dreams come true.
Paris, however, was also the capital of the Avant Garde and as such her demagogues became the figureheads of Progress while remaining the guardians of the aesthete. Rodin “seldom carved his own marbles, never cast his own bronzes, and he turned his models over to assistants so that they could be done in a gamut of sizes”—in essence commodifying his art during an era that stressed technological advancements as a means of furthering the humanities;[xi] and if the modern age is characterized by an expectation of artists “to give us new insights, sometimes at the cost of disregarding traditions, rules, and the most cherished artistic canons,” then Rodin becomes the quintessence of modernity with his ability to showcase art as a marketable good.[xii] Art and commerce merge into one, as they did at the Expositions that anteceded the 1901/1903 sitting that produced La Nature (Miss Eve Fairfax), and this juxtaposition is found in Rodin’s “fixation…on the expressive force of the no finito, the sculpture as unfinished block,” and the jarring presence of the exquisitely gentile beauty frozen in a practically raw geological upsurge.[xiii]
Perhaps the most important facet of this discourse, however, is the trope of “amour-propre” or “self love” that seems to typify Paris, within which Rodin and Miss Fairfax become veritable exemplars of their age. Rodin, in the way he bestows all of his adoring energies on the very things he creates, is reserving the best affects of his love for himself. Similarly, Miss Fairfax appear to have been incapable of loving anyone beyond herself, and—if Rodin’s depiction truly captures her lonely essence—suffered accordingly for that inability. What is crucial for our study here is how this sculpture, in the way it buttresses the raw and refined in one concise formation and the way its coconspirators—Rodin and Miss Fairfax—embody the bifurcated reality of Paris, which is at once resplendent in her ornate decorum and hideous in her self-flagellating dismissal of the very people who daily wipe the dust off her intricate metaphorical mantle.
But then again, this is all a consequence of the convoluted nature of sight. I, much to my parents’ chagrin, am a writer, and as such I often imagine things which are not there. Yet I am also a pessimist whose cynicism often ostracizes me from the very elements of my surroundings that could stave off the corrosive perfidy of those characteristics. In Miss Fairfax, however, I found a silent partner to my troubles: someone to alleviate the burdens of the life I have lived and the life that is still on my horizon. I visit her often, and each time I do it is less surprising to me that the “word ‘morgue’ is traced to the ancient French verb morguer, to stare with a fixed, questioning gaze.”[xiv] Which is not to say I have lived a particularly tragic or difficult life, but hardships are proportional to the inexperience of easy living and the hiccups are often magnified in a higher, more frightening resolution than legitimate catastrophes when you tend to sentimentalize and mourn the minutia of your humble existence, as I do.
I will also admit to the fact that I tend to wear my cynical heart on my sleeve, because, frankly, it thrives on new material; I am an optimistic pessimist continually in search of the next Next. Yet I continually return to Rodin, in general, and La Nature (Miss Eve Fairfax) in particular, and I believe this to be for reasons more aptly summated by Baudelaire:
Dreams! Always dreams! And the more ambitious and delicate
the soul, all the more impossible the dreams. Every man possesses
his own dose of natural opium, ceaselessly secreted and renewed,
and from birth to death how many hours can we reckon of positive pleasure, of successful and decided action? Shall we ever live in, be
part of, that picture my imagination has painted, and that resembles
you?[xv]
I am proud to say I come from a long line of dreamers and artists, people who prefer to paint the world in which they wish to live because they are somehow comforted by the notion of personally organized chaos, as opposed to that which is prescribed for them by the State, by their spouses, by precedence. Does it make our lives harder than they have to be? Absolutely. Would we have it any other way? Absolutely not. And if my dreamed of dreams led me to the precipice of an immortal marble moment—as Rodin led Miss Fairfax—with no one but myself to bear witness to or propel the ascent, the pleasure would be all mine to hold and I would waste not an ounce of my “natural opium” on the unforgiving elements of my world that placed this cynic’s crown upon my head—amour-propre incarnate, amour-propre as catharsis. And there I would sit, an early twentieth-century Parisian who had not the distinction or good fortuned to be born in Paris at the dawn of modernity.
[i] Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen (New York: New Directions, 1970), 77.
[ii] F. Gonzalez-Crussi, On Seeing: Things Seen, Unseen, and Obscene (New York: Penguin, 1972), 51.
[iv] Judith Butler, Rodin: The Shape of Genius (New York: Yale University Press, 1992), 385.
[vi] Butler, 385.
[vii] Robert Hughes, Nothing If Not Critical: Selected Essays on Art and Artists (New York: Penguin, 1992), 132.
[viii] Butler, 385.
[ix] Hughes, 132.
[x] Ibid., 131
[xi] Ibid., 132.
[xii] Gozalez-Crussi, 130.
[xiii] Hughes, 131.
[xiv] Gonzalez-Crussi, 70.
[xv] Baudelaire, 33.
Bibliography
Baudelaire, Charles, Paris Spleen, New York: New Directions, 1970.
Butler, Ruth, Rodin: The Shape of Genius, New York: Yale University Press, 1993.
Gonzalez-Crussi, F., On Seeing: Things Seen, Unseen, and Obscene, New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2006
Hughes, Robert, Nothing If Not Critical: Selected Essays on Art and Artists, New York: Penguin, 1992.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_20040228/ai_n12768506, May 15, 2008.
http://www.rodin-web.org/works/1903_fairfax.htm, May 13, 2008.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1372095/Lady-Serena-James.html, May 16, 2008
http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibitions/rodin/the-late-portraits,22,AR.html, May 16, 2008.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sardonicnell/2389304579/, May 13, 2008.
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What we have in this city, in this life, is a series of doors. Each choice which leads to a door becomes the seed of a tree that branches outward and encases our personal interpretations of a city in individuated, uniquely variegated vines. The physical manifestations of these journeyed choices are sidewalks, and the ones we choose to tread–our vines–lead us to specified doors, which are the locations we find ourselves in, and “the seed,” the birthing place exists in the precise coordinates of where we stand at the beginning of our journey–our home base; or “the seed” can be fragmented out and expanded by allowing an inclusion of our daily beginnings all the way up to the hourly (or even down to the minute or the second) decisions.
A city’s sidewalks are the root of a psychogeographical mapping of emotive urban landscapes; it is what we literally connect with, concrete to sole to soul the reverberations of which allow us the relational exchange that enables this project; it is what facilitates our emotive journey, and in one sense it also physically mirrors it. Sidewalks are neither perfectly straight nor free from flaws, and they are often overlooked as an accepted necessity purely a function of the logarithms of life, of the human condition–merely a cog of infrastructure. Likewise, the paths that we choose are curved or, at the very least, unevenly graded and each negative experience such as losing a first love, the passing of a friend, the emergence of a foe–the weathering elements of our existence, put cracks on the surface and sometimes the pith of our metaphysical sidewalks.
Simply put, sidewalks get us where we want to go–they’ll get us there–and yet they are also what we become as we get there.
How do we soundtrack this discourse? There are songs about traveling–songs that use apropos terminology such as ramblin’, rolling, and the like–which are easy to apply since they explicitly address movement.; obvious connections, however, are not what concerns me: any schmuck can correlate Dean Martin with the Italian enclave in North Beach. In lieu of the obvious, approaching the notion of personalized sidewalks and the scenery they take us past through the lens of Erik Satie provides us with the correct tempo and the appropriate mind frame for psychogeographical intellection; these songs act as a kind of metronome to our remapping experience.
Janne Mertanen plays Satie, Gnosienne No. 3
Satie, Gymnopedie No. 1
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Music About Our Moment
This is a song by Simple Kid called “Average Man.” As a nation that seems to specialize in mediocrity, a ballad about the average seems to be an interesting dissection of identity. Highly underrated artist.
I love this man. This is a song by John Frusciante called “The Past Recedes.” He is responsible for every single part of his albums; he is all things at once. At one time he was at the brink of collapse (the same old drug infused story) and it seems his solo career brought him back. Think of this song in relation to the obsessive cultural need to catch a glimpse of the celebrity minutia, and the larger focus on minutia in general, which the video addresses with different visual snippets of the home. He is a multi-faceted artist who does not get the recognition he deserves.
This is “Young Men Dead” by The Black Angels. From Vietnam in the 1960s to Iraq in the 2000s; “search and destroy” to “shock and awe.” We are the makers of history and this is the soundtrack to it; who knew it would come from Austin, Texas.
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Jack Kerouac was a staunch conservative, religiously and politically; this is not the memory of him idolizing teenagers prefer to dwell on. I was hesitant to post this clip of William F. Buckley’s “Firing Line” because Kerouac is clearly drunk, but I believe it speaks to the issue of cultural memory. Kerouac, and the Beatnik revolution he helped to craft, is often lumped into the prevailing narrative of the 1960s: idealistic youths taking back control of their country through a combination of antagonistic lifestyle choices that ran the gamut of politics, music, drugs, sensuality, literature, etc. Although Kerouac and his Beatnik contemporaries brought the importance of fundamental freedoms to make many of these choices to the forefront of popular discourse, Kerouac himself was a devout (if forever lapsing) Catholic and much of his work focused on understanding his roots and what had compelled him to stray so far from them; it was an intensely narcissistic journey that was concomitantly fueled by a desire to intimately understand the American landscape at large and his canuck lineage.
As the video clip makes clear, even during the 1960s Kerouac seems to be referenced as some sort of cultural authority on the counterculture despite the fact that he obviously detests Ed Saunders, the token politically engaged hippie. Ed Saunders himself is interesting here; I’m particularly drawn to in his reaction to Kerouac offering to lick strawberry preserves off him, which had a slight homophobic tinge to it (he made sure everyone knew he was married). Here is another example of the pitfalls of collective memory; how can a left wing protester be macho? Also of particular interest to me is Kerouac’s opinion of the conflict in Vietnam, which is chalked up to a Vietnamese desire to import jeeps. For what is more American than a jeep and who wouldn’t want to start a war solely to receive mass importations of classically American goods. And then there’s Ginsberg, the ever loyal defender of Kerouac’s public persona, which should have its limits because that is also one of the reason collective memory surrounding Kerouac has been largely mislabeled: the myths that were created by the creators of myths whom he called friends.
So how does this relate to collective cultural memory? I believe people who are acculturated to the present form of liberals make the mistake of categorizing whole movements according to individual examples of leftist ideologies. Assumptions fill in gaps with which memory is riddled; we base assumptions on what we deduce from tangibles, things we can examine in our grasp. Add a tendency to romanticize the past and what is created is a generalized account of a post World War II counterculture that lumps two parties who had vastly different motivations into the same cultural movement (and onto the same stage). Anti-war protesters came in many washes and sizes replete with their own discriminating natures, as were the Beatniks; it is dangerous to forget that crucial factor.
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Tags: counterculture, hippies, Kerouac
Current Musical Obsessions
This is a group called Fleet Foxes who performed in San Francisco at Bottom of the Hill during the Noise Pop Music Festival, singing White Winter Hymnal. I’ve posted for you the recorded version, which is really clean, and a live version, which is a bit sloppier (as most live versions are) so you can have some visuals. The visuals are key here because I want to show those not fortunate enough to have already attended (or who may be contemplating attending) one of their shows how, given a combination of the right dosage of alcoholic beverages and a prime front row location at a small venue, can cause one to think the lead singer (with his melodious voice) is Jesus: a euphoric state sets in as even the most secular are swept up in a blissful listening experience. Also, they are remarkably good live and I believe a comparison between the two substantiates that statement.
This is Elliott Smith’s version of the song Thirteen; it’s posted because an artist never covers a song without purpose or agenda and I believe this song (and the video) speak volumes about his interior, about his exterior, about the state of the world after his departure and the state of his world before his departure.
Because Laura Marling, this impish, less animated and coked out British version of Courtney Love, has given us a contemplative excoriation of destructive men that appealed to me, and because the Alice in Wonderland angle is also interesting.
And last but not least, Baby Dee singing Safe Inside the Day on a chapter of Black Cab Sessions (which can be found on my Music blog roll. This is the epitome of authenticity: the man himself and his music; he is what he is, and this is merely one version of a song that seems to change melodic forms upon each performance, but still manages to retain it’s impact.
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Tags: folk, Music, pop
