four-thirty-three

I.

From The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), lines 19-42

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu.
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?
‘You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
‘They called me the hyacinth girl.’
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Od’ und leer das Meer.

____________________

II.

Two poems by Jelāl ad-Dīn Rumi (1207-1273, translations by Coleman Barks)

———-

My worst habit is I get so tired of winter
I become a torture to those I’m with.

If you’re not here, nothing grows.
I lack clarity. My words
tangle and knot up.

How to cure bad water? Send it back to the river.
How to cure bad habits? Send me back to you.

When water gets caught in habitual whirlpools,
dig a way out through the bottom
to the ocean. There is a secret medicine
given only to those who hurt so hard
they can’t hope.

The hopers would feel slighted if they knew.

Look as long as you can at the friend you love,
no matter whether that friend is moving away from you
or coming back toward you.
[from Kulliyat-e Shams]

———-

Pale sunlight,
pale the wall.

Love moves away.
The light changes.

I need more grace
than I thought.
[from The Rubaiyat]

____________________

III.

“Don’t Change Your Plans” by Ben Folds Five (from The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner, 1999) file deleted

“I like boring things. I like things to be exactly the same over and over again.” [Andy Warhol]

I’m in San Francisco at the moment visiting Casey.  So far, the cultural highlight of the trip (aside from drinking in the Castro; my friend gingerbeer and I went out and had a couple of drinks on Monday, and I made a special trip back there last night to have a Tom Collins at an establishment charmingly named “Daddy’s”) has been a special exhibition at the de Young museum in Golden Gate Park: Warhol Live, which explores the artist’s interests in music, film and dance.

My favorite part of the exhibition: the room which showcased the choreographer Merce Cunningham and composers John Cage and Terry Riley as influences on the artist.  Warhol is more famous for his association with rock and pop stars (Lou Reed, John Cale, Mick Jaggar, Nico), so it was really special to see Cage and Cunningham featured as a part of the show.

In that room:  Two silkscreens of Cunningham by Warhol, with film of one of the choreographer’s works.

The Warhol films Sleep and Empire.

Two more silkscreens: Green Coca-Cola Bottles by Warhol and Texan by Robert Rauschenberg (side note: Rauschenberg’s late 40s/early 50s paintings were John Cage’s inspiration for 4′33″), intended to show the influence of musical minimalism (with its focus on repetitive cells) as an influence on those artists.

Andy Warhol, "Green Coca-Cola Bottles" (1962)

 A photo of John Cage and Andy Warhol (which I was unable to find on Google Images, sadly).

Terry Riley’s seminal minimalist composition In C (an excerpt, as the full piece can be an hour long—Casey just said, “Yeah, that song kind of makes me want to kill myself.”) was playing the entire time.

I spent half an hour in that room, bathing in the music, watching the Warhol films for five minutes at a time, counting the Coke bottles, meditating on Warhol’s “boring things” quote as a koan, and trying to arrive at the empty place that all of the artists and musicians who were featured attempt to evoke through their work.  It was the closest feeling to “church” that I’d experienced in a long time.

(That’s a sentence I never thought I would type.)

This blog is named for 4′33″, John Cage’s famous “silent piece” and a work with which I’ve been mildly obsessed ever since reading Cage’s book/manifesto Silence as a college freshman.  Today, iTunes offered part of 4′33″ as a free download.  Which, of course, is awesome.  If you have iTunes, download it here.

Granted, it’s only the first movement (one minute and forty-six seconds).  I imagine you’ll have to pay if you want movements two and three, although you should probably know that the musical material in the rest of the work is rather derivative of that in the first movement.

I just became acquainted with the fine German word Wehrwirtschaft while simultaneously reading a book article on Sebald that kaiserin is writing and a blog post titled Iraq: Deaths Rise, Pretense We Care Fades (which brought the word into stark relief for me).  I looked it up to try and get a fuller sense of its resonance in the original German, and happened upon an article from TIME Magazine published in May, 1939.  Three things struck me as I started to read it:

1.  TIME was so much more well-written then.  Jesus.

2.  No mention of the Nazis’ racism.  I’m not one to argue that the United States shouldn’t have gotten involved in WWII, but the perception that “We fought Germany to save the Jews” always struck me as specious (a little bit like the Bush administration telling us that we were going into Afghanistan in part to “free the Afghani women”).  Obviously, Jewish Americans as well as European expatriates took the racism very seriously—50% of American Jewish men between ages 18 and 44 served in the Armed Forces despite encountering racial prejudice there—but that wasn’t a major concern for Americans; Japan was considered the major threat with Hitler almost an afterthought, and America was fairly anti-Semitic then.

3.  It’s stunning to read the last page and realize that the reporter doesn’t necessarily see war with the Third Reich as a foregone conclusion.  I leave comparisons with current events as an exercise for the reader.

Cindy Sherman, "Untitled Film Still #5" (1977)

One of the many reasons I love Los Angeles: the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.  People who roll out the tired, “LA has no culture” trope can sit on it, Potsie-style; we’re not New York or Berlin, but there’s excellent stuff going on here.  The newish Broad Contemporary Art Museum (which is on the LACMA campus) is particularly rad, in no small part because they often display work by my favorite photographer, Cindy Sherman.

Sherman is possibly best known for her Untitled Film Stills series.  Between 1977 and 1980, she took self-portraits which evoke films from a number of genres: foreign, noir, B-movies, old Hollywood.  Devoid of context but rich in signifiers, her film stills provide ample space for the viewer to create his or her own narratives.  It’s an amazing body of work, which has often befuddled critics (particularly male ones).  @BH pointed me toward an essay by geographer Doreen Massey (collected in Space, Place and Gender) in which she takes social theorist David Harvey to task for totally missing the point of Sherman’s work, and it’s a good encapsulation of both Sherman’s project and the ways in which it is misunderstood:

Moreover, it is not just a general socio-political point which can be drawn from Sherman’s photographs, but a specifically feminist one. Harvey says that he was shocked to find that all of these images were ‘of the same woman.’ It is an unintended admission, for that is precisely the effect they are supposed to have on the patriarchal viewer. [...] Sherman’s work conveys how socially constructed and how unstable ‘gender’ is, and how, indeed, the last few centuries of western thought has produced a ‘femininity’ which does indeed have a lot to do with self-presentation, in masks, for masquerade.

Finally, Harvey seems to object particularly to the fact that Sherman took these photographs herself (’the self-referential position of the authors to themselves as subjects’). Would it have been less disturbing had a man taken an authoritative picture of this woman? — like Manet painting Olympia, perhaps?  [Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender, 1994]

Below the cut: more of Sherman’s photographs from the series.

Read the rest of this entry »

I.

Franz Kafka, at age five.

____________________

II.

Kafka-related links from McSweeney’s:

Adjectives Rejected in Favor of “Kafkaesque”
Kafka at Camp: The Lost Diaries
Iris’s Metamorphosis
Gregor Samsa, Coach
Social Security Denies Gregor Samsa’s Disability Claim

____________________

III.

“Prague’s Franz Kafka International Named ‘World’s Most Alienating Airport’” (yeah, the embedded video breaks my layout, but this is a post about Kafka after all so fuck it):

I also think that women are excellent social critics, basically because we have nothing to lose, anyway. It’s like we’re not in a position of power, so we don’t risk a lot by being critical of it. [Laurie Anderson, 1983]

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, “an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology.”  I’m posting about Laurie Anderson, because of the innovative ways in which she has used and commented on technology (and because her work intersects with my interests: music, art, postmodernity, interdisciplinarity).

Possibly the most famous song by Laurie Anderson is “O Superman,” which inexplicably was a hit single in the UK in 1981.  Her performance is entirely mediated by technology as her voice is processed through a vocoder, and the lyrics are a commentary on American militarism (itself made possible by technological innovation).

Rather than write more about the song myself, I’ll refer folks to the wikipedia page linked above, this excellent essay by musicologist Susan McClary in which she writes about “O Superman” at length, and a blog post by composer Roger Bourland (which is where the score image I posted above comes from; you can also find lyrics at that site).

Because the embedded version of the video breaks my layout, you’ll have to go here to listen.  At 8+ minutes long “O Superman” is not your typical pop song, but it’s an amazing piece of music.

I.

Paul Klee, "Die Zwitscher-Maschine" (1927)

The scene evokes an abbreviated pastoral—but the birds are shackled to their perch, which is in turn connected to the hand crank.

Somewhere between nature and the mechanical, between the comic and the tragic, his birds “twitter” with a music that expresses how frail and vulnerable existence is, especially in the post-WWI modern world.

____________________

II.

“Birdhouse In Your Soul” performed by They Might Be Giants and The Tonight Show’s NBC Orchestra (with Doc Severinsen):

____________________

III.

A few of the people I follow on Twitter (the list is inexhaustive).  Feel free to suggest others, or pimp your own tweets.

@barbarahui
@bone433
@canislatrans
@gnatx
@kaiserinTweet
@maddow
@nietzsche_f
@Oblique_Chirps
@orangestitch
@summersumz
@susiebright
@tinydao
@TPHD

Also relevant: “Twitter gets you fired in 140 characters or less”

I.

René Magritte, "L'Art de la Conversation" (1950)

My favorite painting by Magritte is The Treachery of Images (referenced in this post).  But The Art of Conversation is amazing as well.  

____________________

II.

Michel Foucault on L’Art de la Conversation:

In a landscape of battling giants or of the beginning of the world, two tiny persons are speaking–an inaudible discourse, a murmur instantly reabsorbed into the silence of the stones, into the silence of a wall whose enormous blocks overhang the two garrulous mutes.  Jumbled together, the blocks form at their base a group of letters where it is easy to make out the word: REVE [dream] (which can, if we look a bit more closely, be completed as TREVE [peace] or CREVE [death])–as if all these airy, fragile words had been given the power to organize the chaos of stones.  Or as if, on the contrary, behind the alert but immediately lost chatter of men, things could in their silence and sleep compose a word–a permanent word no one could efface; yet this word now designates the most fleeting of images.  But this is not all: Because it is in dream that men, at last reduced to silence, commune with the signification of things and allow themselves to be touched by enigmatic, insistent swords that come from elsewhere.  Ceci n’est pas une pipe exemplifies the penetration of discourse into the form of things; it reveals discourse’s ambiguous power to deny and to redouble.  L’Art de la Conversation marks the anonymous attraction of things that form their own words in the face of men’s indifference, insinuating themselves, without men even being aware of it, into their daily chatter.

–Michel Foucault, Ceci n’est pas une pipe (1973), translated by James Harkness

____________________

III.

Après un Rêve (chanson for voice and piano by Gabriel Fauré [1865-1924], performed by soprano Reneé Fleming. Translation.)

Après un Rêve (violin) (performed by violinist Joshua Bell.)

[files deleted]

The whole point of this post is to make people cry.  (I’m pretty sure Casey will do so first.)

The Giving Tree (1973), animated short based on Shel Silverstein’s 1964 children’s story and narrated by the author:

This was the first book I ever read, at age 4 or so, thus giving me an unassailable excuse for whatever depression/martyrdom complex might afflict me today.

Also: The Giving Tree: A Symposium,a collection of thoughts on the story by a cross-section of American religion scholars.