Archive for February, 2011
>In the windowless Brain Center
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Veronica Gaylie recounts a memory test with her mother @ Geist.
In the window less Brain Centre the doctor sits across from us.
“You had an appoint ment for a mem ory test two years ago. Why didn’t you show up then?” he asks.
My mother, a Glaswegian, the research sub ject, replies, “Well, I am never late. I always keep my appointments.”
“I guess you for got,” says the doc tor. We smile just to be polite. He stares back coldly. (No irony in the brain world.)
The doc tor says, “I am going to say three words. And then I am going to ask you a ques tion. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” my mother replies.
The doc tor says, “Shirt. Honesty. Brown. What is the middle word I just said?”
“Oh, well,” says my mother. “It is a very good per sonal qual ity to have. Sorry, I can nae remem ber. Emm … Honesty is the best policy?”
The doc tor tries it another way. “Humility. Honesty. Modesty. Please name the second word.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )My mother low ers her eye brows. “Ach. I wouldnae choose. I believe in all of them.”
>Immaculate repression zone
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| Adam Pretty @ Lens Culture |
Jules Boykoff on art, profits, and anti-Olympic activism @ New Left Review.
Walking along east Hastings Street in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver one crisp January morning in 2010, I came across a perplexing set of white panels on the outer flank of the refurbished Woodward’s building. The panels featured an explosion of repudiation: stark, black-lettered phrases like ‘HELL NO’, ‘I SAID NO’, ‘NO BLOODY WAY’, and ‘NO WAY JOSÉ’. Four placards simply read ‘NO’. Later I learned that this was a site-specific installation by Vancouver artist Ken Lum for Simon Fraser University’s Audain Gallery, challenging a ‘2010 Winter Games By-law’ passed by the City of Vancouver in the run-up to the Olympics. The by-law outlawed placards, posters and banners that did not ‘celebrate’ the 2010 Winter Games and ‘create or enhance a festive environment and atmosphere’. The ordinance criminalized anti-Olympic signs and gave Canadian authorities the right to remove them from both public and private property.
The following month I returned to Vancouver to see how anti-Olympic organizing was taking shape. Strolling near the Olympic Village in the days before the Games, one encountered a contradiction-laden mélange of genial sports enthusiasm and ostentatious surveillance state. The place was teeming with sprightly tourists, athletes, Olympics officials and journalists with cameras and press badges swinging from their necks; awash with teal, one of the perky, focus-group-tested colours of the 2010 Winter Games. At the same time, it felt like entering some sort of immaculate repression zone. Officers from the newly formed Vancouver Integrated Security Unit—headed by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and comprising more than 20 policing agencies—hunkered together on every corner and patrolled the bustling footpaths around the False Creek inlet. Surveillance cameras were pegged to poles at regular intervals around the perimeter. Helicopters whirred overhead. CF-18 Hornet fighter jets zinged by. Ersatz Christo and Jeanne-Claude-style banners, also in Olympic teal, enveloped chain-link fences that channelled people into permissible zones while concealing chunks of so-called public space.
>Leaving important things behind
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Veronica Collins remembers her sister’s absence and presence @ This Great Society.
I was twenty-one. I was twenty-one and locked in a bathroom in the Vancouver International Airport. I was twenty-one and locked in a bathroom in the Vancouver International Airport and holding a hand-crocheted blanket to my chest and crying as if someone had died.
Deborah was going away for a year. Just a year. Three hundred and sixty five days are not that much for sisters who have known each other for nineteen years and seven months. But I was locked in a bathroom stall and crying as if someone had died.
She was a first-day of July baby. I was a last-day of February baby. She pulled funny faces in photos from the ripe old comedic age of two or grinned wildly as if she had a gleeful secret. I – the eldest child – tended to stand with my feet together, my hands together, the corners of my mouth turned up, my eyes trained dutifully at the center of the camera. Veronica-and-Deborah. Veronica-and-Deborah.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )There was a small gap. And then Rose-and-Joy. Later there would be Stephanie. Later there would be Heather. We were a crew. A gang. A formidable fortress of sisters, skinny arms-around-shoulders, against the challenges of time and change, and the tests of growing up with an overflow of ideals and faith and heart.
>Music has broad shoulders
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Gregg Williard remembers the childhood comforts of movie soundtracks @ Artocratic.
If I said I used to hear particular music all the time, I expect you’d nod with recognition. Maybe, if you’re from my generation, you’d recount how you used to spin Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” or Miles Davis’ “Round About Midnight” until the worn needle skated clean off the vinyl on a dust bunny cloud. Or more recently you’ve programmed your iPod to repeat some Arcade Fire song for 80 hours of obsessive to autistic easy listening. Then I’d say, well, it was even worse, and you’d reassure me that, hey, you’d been there too, maybe citing one of the TV commercial jingles that have jujued generations. Or themes from the ’60s and ’70s such as The Brady Bunch, The Addams Family or Green Acres. Everyone has their own sound worm war stories, right?
Yes. But. The music I heard wasn’t quite like any of that.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )It started on a Friday night at 10:00. I was eight years old. It was the first season of a new TV show called The Twilight Zone. I watched as the optical diaphragm of the CBS eye spiraled open, and heard the first tones of what would become a 40-year-long soundtrack to my life. Like I said, it was music of a very particular kind: not jingles or croons, not my sister’s rock ‘n’ roll or my mother’s classical standards. It was so different that it seemed to be something beyond music itself. It took me a long, stunned time before I thought to watch for the end credits and learn the name after “music by”: Bernard Herrmann.
>The cinematic novel
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Jose-Luis Moctezuma on Mariano Llinás Historias Extraordinarias @ The Hydra.
André Bazin, patron saint of film criticism, observes in his essay, “In Defense of Mixed Cinema”, that the reciprocal, progressive relationship shared by literature and cinema should serve as an advantage to the seventh art. If literature is conventionally regarded in the ascendant position, bestowing literary techniques and methods of narrative on the younger medium, then cinema has only proven to return the favor fourscore. The transmigration Hamlet made from Bill Shakespeare to Sir Lawrence Olivier was probably less unorthodox, certainly less controversial, than the subway ride it took to reach Stratford-upon-Avon via Thomas Kyd. Bazin writes, “While critics are apt to view with regret the borrowings made by cinema from literature, the existence of a reverse process is as accepted as it is undeniable. It is in fact commonly agreed that the novel, and particularly the American novel, has come under the influence of the cinema.”
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Bazin’s essay dates from the period in the late 40s/early 50s when cinema was going through a kind of midlife crisis (in which the technology which had given it birth also managed to accelerate its potential obsolescence). No longer in its “classical period,” cinema found itself under threat by television and the beginning of commercial media saturation, forcing it to find recourse in the development of cheap and fast genres (teen-age romances, horror flicks, drive-thru sized pictures), when it was not pillaging literature for convenient, ready-made scenarios that could be efficiently translated to the screen. Post-World War cinema could no longer feign aesthetic innocence or rely on the scenarios of “pure cinema” to sate the industrial demand for more pictures.
>How far down from ‘up’ we’ve come
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Ryan Sayre on the lost dreams of verticality @ 3Quarks Daily.
Elisha Otis was a solver of problems—practical problems involving bread ovens, steam engines, bed frames, and the like. Faced with the problem of safely bringing debris down from the second floor of his workshop, in 1852 he repurposed a railroad brake into an emergency elevator brake that would stop the lift cold in its tracks should the supporting cables snap. This small innovation opened an entirely new kind of space; a space we might call the ‘up’. ‘Up’ had of course always existed, but never before as a habitable territory. As a place for work, life, and leisure, ‘up’ would have to be imagined. While colonial powers in the early 20th century were busy stretching railroad lines across continents, urban engineers in cities like Chicago and New York were beginning to bend Otis’ elevator tracks ever further upward into uncharted verticality.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )For a short three to four year period in the late 1920s and early 1930s, New York City drove its skyline 70, 87, and then 102 stories into the air. The expedition marked a transformational moment in the city. During these few years city traffic was detoured skyward. The city’s profile was nearly flipped on its axis. The goal of city planners was to rationalize the city and the ‘up’ seemed like the most efficient direction to take a growing population. But rationalization and efficiency are never linear; the stories of buildings are marked by countless twists and turns.
>Our history is no longer ours
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Jason Farago reflects on the opera “Nixon in China” and the promises of the past @ n+1.
At the opera last week, first two boxes down from mine, then right in front of me at the bar, was the former governor general of Canada. As celebrity sightings go it doesn’t beat sitting next to Dr. Ruth once, but a head of state is a head of state. That was not what C. thought, though. “Do you know who that is?” I asked, and he did not miss a beat: “Unless she’s a member of the Politburo Standing Committee, I’m not interested.”
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Who could blame him? Who else matters? Much has been made lately of the transformed position of Tricky Dick in the American imagination, but what was really inconceivable for John Adams and his collaborators when they wrote Nixon in Chinain 1987 was that, by its Met premiere in 2011, the presidency itself would be approaching global irrelevance. It’s a funny, Egyptian-inflected moment, of course. And it’s perhaps unfair to consider the US (or the President specifically) only in apposition to the People’s Republic—though the Chinese setting of the opera seems almost overkill, as any work of art about America today would be about China by default. But as Nixon sings in Act I, while China lives in the present, in America “it’s yesterday night.” Perhaps the day is not far off when Barack Obama in Box 15 will excite C. just as little.
>Artists are whores
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Adele Bertei on art, the underclass, and truths in memoirs @ ArtSlant.
Artists are whores, the lot of us, selling a bit of our souls in every work. And not unlike our sisters and brothers in the biblical sense of the word, we like to think we might offer our takers a glimpse of eternity. Even the most hermetic of painters, writers, performers and poets go a’whoring each time they bless their handlers to feed a work to the public for profit. Even the eensiest profit. Okay, less so for poets. But to say that memoir is whoring more so than any other art form is like saying the lifeblood of Picasso is absent from Guernica, or the avenues of Scorcese’s heart are not on display in Taxi Driver. All of great art, in a sense, is memoir, for is it not about personal truths and the way the artist sees? I was recently witness to Gordon Lish going on about memoir being cheap and whorish. “Write a memoir and you’re finished!”, he railed. I wonder what Nabokov would say to that? Although he commenced writing what would become his memoir Speak, Memory, and Lolita during the same period of time, the former debuted in 1951 followed by Lolita in 1955.The best of memoir can turn the experiences and memories of a life, of a particular vision into work that often takes us through a dark journey to ultimately expose the shimmering there which spellbinds us all.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Aside from not being fraudulent, why must there be literary rules at all concerning the way we tell our stories? An account of life is either compelling and well-writ, or it is not. Let the public judge, but give us more of what we need: stories about the people who make up the majority of this country. The workers, the dreamers, the fallen who demand their day with the beauty and heartbreak of their tales, despite the cultural hegemony (as in Gramsci, not Lenin). And in terms of memoir being cheap whoring, I don’t know a man who wears his pants down around his ankles as much as Mr. Lish, in his fiction and otherwise. Endearingly so at times (if the thought doesn’t horrify you), but, still.
>How do we explain a metaphor?
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| John Martino @ Cerise Press/ |
Geoffrey Heptonstall reflects on writers, readers, and how imagination helps us see @ Cerise Press.
There are two kinds of people in the world: those fortunate enough to have read Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris, and those who dwell in dark places. It is a book of the author’s responses to books and authors. But it is not simply another book about books. Literature is not an adjunctive commentary on life for Fadiman, but the genetic imprint of this curious condition of being human. When asked if she would help found Civilization (the Library of Congress journal) she agreed, amused and intrigued by the challenging title.
At Large and At Small followed, relating writing to life also, but in a different way. Ex Libris had books in mind. This later volume is concerned with the complex relations between writers, their lives when writing, and when not writing. The stumbling block for Fadiman (and for most of us) is that “great literature can be written by bad people.”
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )
She cites Ezra Pound’s fascism, and Byron’s incest. It may be argued that Pound’s nature disqualified him from political activity in an age of extreme conflict. An intemperate man of fixed opinions, he was a great, if bullying, editor of Eliot and Yeats. Pound could yeild his red pen without thought of the hurt a writer may feel about the discarded words. Human beings are not words on the page. As for Lord Byron, he wrote of dark, romantic deeds, then he lived them. It is well to remember the Prince of Darkness was a gentleman. Incestuous and licentious, Byron was rash even when he was heroic. It was brave to take up the cause of Greek independence from Turkish — and to die for it — but it was not kindly.
>Restored to reality all the world’s brutality
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| Radina Toeva @ F-Stop Magazine/ |
Ghania Mouffok on the absence of revolutionary optimism in Algeria @ Eurozine.
Ali Yahia is a lawyer and, at 90 years of age, both venerable and courageous. That all counts for nothing with the young recruits of the Algerian police, who don’t know his name and don’t recognize his face. They just brutally shove him out of the way. The “March for Change” on 12 February in Algiers turned out to be an opportunity for these police recruits to try out the new repressive techniques devised by a dictatorship that is henceforth going to have to look to its image. Obama is watching.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )
The demonstrators, numbering around two or three thousand, were treated to a veritable ballet by the boys in blue, a silent opera coordinated with near-perfect precision. For an overture, there was the arrest of the most determined or audacious of the demonstrators. Five or six bruisers, having picked out their victim, threw themselves on top of him, grabbed him and forced him to run, yelling “Run, run!” until they reached the paddy wagon parked a few yards away. All of this beneath the dumbfounded gaze of the demonstrators, who parted to let them through. Then it was the turn of the girls in blue, who, conscientious policewomen that they were, meted out the same treatment to the female demonstrators. Nothing had been left to chance. Around a hundred people were arrested in this way, at the speed of light, and although they were given a rough time, they were later released. No sooner had these lightning squads done their work than human dragnets of police officers began to advance, surrounding the rest of the demonstrators, kettling them and stopping them getting away. Each human dragnet was made up of about 100 members of the CNS, the Algerian riot police, with their transparent shields at the ready, wearing helmets and boots, armed with wooden clubs. In three rows, they advanced and withdrew, shoulder to shoulder, on every side, like the body of some giant, many-headed serpent, encircling the demonstration in a black hedge of robocops. Meanwhile, other police officers maintained a watching brief, using their short-wave radios to pass on intelligence about the slightest movement by demonstrators, so that the moment it was spotted they could be prevented from breaking out of this hellish circle. It was impossible to move. Despite this, what had been a march turned into a rally between the buildings in the 1 May Square and the bus stop.
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