Notes Against The Industrial Sublime

The pedagogical function of the visual and literary arts is of a long and distinguished lineage. This should go, one would think, without saying. What is one to think, then, of the rather disingenuous and obscurantist rhetoric surrounding the work of photographic artist Edward Burtynsky? Certainly, it’s not hard to find: Burtynsky’s own commentary for the recent documentary film concerning his work Manufactured Landscapes involves an inordinate amount of “objective” hedging that flies in the face of the most fundamental and obvious implications of his images themselves; the film also includes an almost painful “bonus” interview with Burtynsky and film director Jennifer Baichwal in which they both tie themselves in knots in the denial of any ideological context in which to locate the film (which is, of course, an ideological context in itself). And the commentary included in Burtynsky’s latest book of photographs (also rather confusingly called Manufactured Landscapes) also includes the sort of elegant and erudite critical mystifications that John Berger, in his landmark Ways of Seeing, identifies as being in the service of the power relationships implicit in the art works themselves. Much of this process of critical deflection concerns the fairly obvious “dilemmas” raised by the fact that the viewer responds to Burtynsky’s artfully shot and framed scenes of environmental exploitation and despoliation as aesthetically beautiful. This frankly banal observation is an apparently insoluble paradox, and is located by critic Mark Haworth-Booth within the context of the industrial sublime tradition of landscape painting and of a lineage of landscape photographers concerned with capturing “man’s interventions in landscape space” (36). Haworth-Booth, however, takes at face value the formulation that scenes of industrial processes and their environmental degradations can indeed invoke the sublime; he accepts without qualification the notion that the sublime, which in Burke’s definition is nothing less than an exalted state of being provoked by our confrontation with the vastness of nature, can indeed be manufactured by scenes of industrial interventions. Surely, this question has been by no means settled. If anything, the sublime involves a perception of scale far beyond that of global capital and its attendant processes; the fact that our existential responses to wilderness and industry as concepts are subject to this sort of categorical error might be more accurately subscribed to that colonization of consciousness characteristic of postmodernism—how else to explain the conflation of the terror roused by the realization of our own mortal insignificance in the face of The Infinite with the pleasure we take in pretty pictures? Who has the most to gain from this conflation/formulation of industrial society with The Infinite, and might not it be in the service of the mystification of the more general sense of powerlessness we intuit as subjects of (post)industrial society? Isn’t this categorical confusion simply another symptom of the ongoing colonization of culture by capital, in which the Wildnerness as that which was catagorically beyond culture is now subsumed within culture? Aren’t our responses to and definitions of beauty simply the byproducts of cultural convention, the result of our own processes of acculturation? Aren’t the ideologies of the dominant culture in fact rendered transparent via the normative function of aesthetic value and its critical enforcers? Shouldn’t one important question concern the ideological processes that have at this historical juncture indoctrinated us to find manufactured landscapes aesthetically pleasing? Is it enough to be vaguely troubled by these images? Why are his director, his critics and Burtynsky himself incapable of articulating the simple call to action implicit in his photographs? Is didacticism the greater crime here? If it’s simply a question of avoiding a sort of crass or vulgar didacticism, one can surely do so without refusing to acknowledge an ideological reading of works which make explicit the exploitive nature of the system of social relations into which we are all born, and in which we shall remain enmeshed until we die, unless some sort of fundamental change is enacted. Because this is what this is all about, isn’t it? All of this liberal/ bourgeois waffling about the creative and interpretive limitations of didactic (i.e. explicitly political) art really is a cover for a very specific set of qualms and equivalences concerning a very particular range of politically-charged discourse and it’s potentially revolutionary implications. (Author Harold Jaffe makes a very similar argument concerning self-censorship in contemporary American letters in his recent essay “The Writer in Wartime” found in his collection Beyond the Techno-Cave.) And I use the term bourgeois specifically to refer to Burtynsky as a member of the newly emergent creative class, as fully invested in the processes, modes of organization and transparent ideologies of global capital as is Rem Koolhaus (though Burtynsky’s instincts, it must be said without qualification, are far more sound.) Finally, and this is a tribute to Burtynsky’s art and to him as an artist, the critical community surrounding his work aside, the implications of his photographs are so direct, so immediate and so profound as to undercut the attempts to mystify the social dimension of his work. The fact that one of his images now graces the dust jacket of George Monbiot’s climate change polemic Heat needs no explication or qualification; it’s a simple acknowledgement that Burtynsky’s images underscore our own growing awareness that we must, on a structural level, change the way we organize our societies; that such change is inevitable to our own survival to that of the myriad other species with which we share this earth, these oceans and skies; and that time is running short.

Exploited

This essay by Joshua Clover in a recent issue of Film Quarterly, is a good example of the sort of thing I feel is important to critical writing--the ability to locate a work (a film, a novel, a record) within a broader context; specifically, the necessity to read a text within a web of definitive social realities. Especially germane here are Clover's comments on Soderberg's The Girlfriend Experience, which move effectively from the purely formal aspects of this film to its (and our) milieu: Sasha’s and Chelsea’s affectless affect, the film’s thin idea—these are matched by the relentless flatness of the film’s style, from the acting to the HD videography, all cool surfaces without heft. It’s like a long YouTube clip. Such banality may itself be rhetorical, a way to try to understand the emotional blankness of the new life made by immaterial labor, the truth of which is not the nifty shit forthcoming in the future, but the missing experience of now. It’s the world that got flat; we’re just working in it. And this may be why the immanent economic catastrophe, rifted with hysteria and panic, is nonetheless the most charismatic figure in the film: a social crisis and vast destruction, at least it’s a kind of change, a kind of awakening from the blankness of sleep, an awakening whose script might elude the ever-hovering technicians . . . the slightest potential for futurity. (article was originally cited at the blog Infinite Thought.)

Under Occupation

This passage, from James Meek's recent LRB review of British novelist David Peace's new novel Occupied City, caught my attention: We’ve become so used to American and Irish novelists polishing their sentences till they glitter with ingenious similes and wise passions that the notion of another kind of poetic prose, one where the poetry is in the larger structure rather than word by word, seems alien now. But that is what Occupied City is, and perhaps the novel as collection-of-poems-and-prose is where a novelist takes shelter during the periods when the prose can’t seem to take the weight of the stories any more. It doesn’t always succeed, and it is not easy to read, but what it is trying to do is ambitious. The rhythms of its framing passages are poets’ rhythms; its repetitions are choruses. Ash for hair, soil for skin, among the flakes and the sod We defy the fire and the rake, the spade and the grave The grave in the earth, the grave in the sky In the abyss of the sky, in the abyss of the earth Your earth, your sky. Not our sky, not our earth not here, not now Now into the heights, we fall, into the depths . . . It seems to me that one reason younger writers might become interested in formal innovation is because often "the prose can’t seem to take the weight of the stories any more." In my case this was, and still is, true.

Walking In A Moving World

ONE HOUR SIXTY MINUTE CIRCLE WALK ON DARTMOOR 1984 English land/conceptual artist/sculpture Richard Long's recent retrospective at the Tate Museum is discussed at Revolutionary Boredom, excerpted here: "In terms of artistic production...more interesting....is how [these works] produce an artwork from such immaterial practices. Not only do they attempt to represent a walk, a fleeting experience in itself, but they represent that walk via experiential factors rather than reference (as in a regular map) to solid and identifiable objects like trees or castles or whatever. Most typical of this category is the ‘textwork’, usually a list of observations, feelings or conditions from a walk. The status of one of Long’s textworks is complicated, as it presumably has some personal meaning to Long himself yet remains only suggestive to the observer. Most of the details – including the date and place included on each work – are irrelevant and unverifiable. What these textworks comment upon is not the walk itself, nor the place walked, but the relationship between experiential moment and material representation." Beyond the originality of Long's art (and its transitory nature), what interests me here is the notion of a text commenting in some unique and immediate way on "the relationship between experiential moment and material representation." This insight can be generalized to a great many modernist and postmodern practices, and relates to many of the narratives/discourses we might consider innovative. In terms of form, Long's "textworks," collected here, can be seen as a form of concrete poetry, (though they also remind one of Francis Ponge's "object" poetry, in their refined consideration for the evocation of specific moment) and could be of considerable interest to students of writing. (Note: Richard Long was one of the many sixties artists surveyed in Suzaan Boettger's comprehensive Earthworks: Art and Landscape of the Sixties.)

Dreams of animals

Very early this morning, my two young sons and I saw six (!) large raccoons in our yard. Our house abuts a greenbelt. We live less than a mile from the ocean; thus, the area is densely populated, but there is some open space, un-terraced hillsides, etc. There is our greenbelt, and racoons would be able to forage water here, which they like and need. It’s just remarkable that, if they do live here, we’ve never seen these animals before. I called my sons to the patio window; we watched as the racoons gathered by the tall Black Pine across the way, conferred briefly, and then hustled in single file across the vast green of the lawn. Spellbound, my sons are young enough to appreciate the racoons in themselves, they haven’t yet lost their inherent fascination with, and love for, animals in their own right. I read recently that up until age six, 80% of the dreams of children concern in some way animals. After age six these dreams decrease rapidly in frequency. I now dream of animals rarely, and when I do, they often assume a totemic cast, signifying, it seems, some area of experience now denied me.

Outside was nothing

"Punk," because it indicated such a wide variety of modes of expression, was always an unstable signifier. Certainly, to my mind, it was always easier to explain what punk was not; "that's not punk" being one of the operative clauses of the period. Moreover, since circa 1990, which marked the period in which punk was appropriated into the official culture as a style stripped of its radical cultural/political implications, "punk" on this level, has ceased to have any intrinsic meaning beyond its historical connotations. So that, given the above, I'd rather focus on whatever it was that punk meant/means to me as an individual. At this point, it would be customary to demonstrate my credentials on the topic: a long, annotated list of shows attended and records purchased; a demonstrable, detailed insider's knowledge of the key players and major events; an easy familiarity with the appropriate slang and jargon (easy answer: there really isn't any); and a strong, succinct opinion, one way or the other, on Lipstick Traces and the use of "London Calling" in a Jaguar commercial. Here I'm half-mocking the insularity of the punks, as well as the ease with which this sort of "street cred" can be faked (all of which was well-spoofed by The Tubes [of all people] in "I was a punk before you were a punk"). But this phenomena, I'm guessing, is characteristic of any underground, marginalized cultural movement. There was a very real sense in that being a punk was all one had, and so this identification was valued seriously and intensely by those that shared in it. Which leads to a consideration of punk as an exclusive (but not, of course, in the sense of catering to the wealthy) social grouping. The nature of this exclusivity might certainly be seen, anthropologically, as universally determinant, to varying degrees, in any social grouping. It is interesting to note that Western societies, at least according to their official cant, now privilege inclusiveness and diversity as being among their celebrated "values." But what is proffered in reality is access to a diffuse, transparent, invasive, superficial and banal cultural milieu that at essence can only muster the anonymous consumer as its primary site of subjective identification. This is your reward for blending in with the melting pot: you get to buy stuff at the mall and be infotained. So there is a very real sense in which the socially exclusive nature of punk can be seen as an oppositional strategy in relationship to the bland material enticements and specious ideology of the official culture. That said, based on my own experiences with the San Diego hardcore punk scene during the 1980's, I can offer the observation that I've never been involved with a more diverse group of people. Not only was the scene itself factionalized; politics, attitudes, aesthetics and behaviors were varied literally beyond belief. Often the only thing anyone seemed to have in common was their shared code of identification. Paradoxically, the uniqueness and fragility of punk as social identity was reinforced by prevailing market forces. Many among the first wave of punk bands in New York and England in the mid-to late 1970's were signed to major record labels in attempt to cash in on the latest "teenaged" music trend. The majority of these bands had relatively small sales and this, combined with their radical form and content (and the band's own irreverent, indeed venomous attitudes towards the labels themselves), led to them being dropped by the majors. The host of younger bands forming in the wake of the first wave were subsequently ignored by the major American labels. So that, for any punk band forming after this period, there was the very real knowledge that prospects for commercial success (or even a living wage) were slim at best. At that point, any band identifying itself as punk did so out of enthusiasm and commitment (and a strong dose of foolhardiness). What arose in reaction agains these restrictions was the formation of an underground network of independent record labels and promotional tools, often formed and managed by the groups themselves, operating at barely self-sustaining profit levels. At that point, to be a punk was to be commercially marginalized and culturally untouchable. This led to a very precise and concrete awareness that the identification as a punk was reinforced by real world conditions: it was not simply another prefabricated lifestyle to be donned and then discarded in a leisure class search for self identity. It was instead an existential choice fraught with some personal peril and invested with tremendous meaning generated by the participants themselves. It was, in a word, freedom. Subjectively, how it all felt, was this: when you became and shared in being a punk, this identity permitted the play of your desires, your politics, your aesthetics and provided a means of locating as a unique individual with in a dynamic, distinct social group. It was a spontaneous, intuitive group exercise in the creation of meaning. And outside of that...was nothing. So to see the whole thing co-opted in the early 1990's, sold out for a song on the strung out byways of yet another Lollapalooza tour, well, that was pretty fucking hard.

Hold everything dear

In writer John Berger's collection, Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance, nothing is wasted. So when on page 85 Berger directs us to Pasolini’s obscure documentary montage La Rabbia (Rage), we follow… "La Rabbia, I would say, is a film inspired by a fierce sense of endurance, not anger. Pasolini looks at what is happening in the world with unflinching lucidity. (There are angels drawn by Rembrandt who have the same gaze.) And he does so because reality is all we have to love. There’s nothing else. His dismissal of the hypocrisies, half-truths and pretences of the greedy and powerful is total because they breed and foster ignorance, which is a form of blindness towards reality. Also because they shit on memory, including the memory of language itself, which is our first heritage. Yet the reality he loved could not be simply endorsed, for at that moment it represented a too deep historical disappointment. The ancient hopes which flowered and opened out in 1945, after the defeat of Fascism, had been betrayed. The USSR had invaded Hungary. France had begun its cowardly war against Algeria. The coming to independence of the former African colonies was a macabre charade. Lumumba had been liquidated by the puppets of the CIA. Neo-capitalism was already planning its global take-over. Yet despite this, what had been bequeathed was far too precious and too tough to abandon, the ubiquitous demands of reality were impossible to ignore. The demand in the way a shawl was worn. In a young man’s face. In a street full of people demanding less injustice. In the laughter of their expectations and the recklessness of their jokes. From this came his rage of endurance." At time when our media/political establishment is engaged in equivocations regarding the practice of waterboarding, it follows that narratives which mystify the fundamental injustices of the current, global dispensation (which are, as any Palestinian schoolchild can tell us social, political, economic and historical in nature) must be held to account, for we, like Berger, have no time to waste; we have only time for family and friends, for the for the children that suffer in innocence, for the poor, for the dispossessed, for animals harvested for food cruelly and wastefully, and for narratives that, in however small a way, resist the dominant culture. Many might disagree, but my feeling is that cinema (and fiction), at this historical juncture, must count for something. I wonder whether we might still engage the films that matter, films like The Passenger, like La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc, like Radio On, like Lombardi’s Ojos Que No Ven, like Chris Marker’s Le Jette, like anything by Bresson, like Roeg’s Walkabout, in terms that abide, rather than mystify.

M-A-R-X

Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö are a well-known husband-and-wife team of detective writers from Sweden. As a team they planned and wrote a series of ten novels (police procedurals) about the exploits of detectives from the homicide section of the Stockholm police department. They also wrote novels separately. For the Martin Beck series, they plotted and researched each book together, and then wrote alternate chapters. From the beginning, the pair planned the series as a sequence of ten novels, collectively titled The Story of a Crime. The novels revolve around a team of police investigators, led by Martin Beck. Roseanna (Roseanna, 1965) The Man Who Went Up in Smoke (Mannen som gick upp i rök, 1966) The Man on the Balcony (Mannen på balkongen, 1967) The Laughing Policeman (Den skrattande polisen, 1968) (Edgar Award, Best Novel, 1971) The Fire Engine That Disappeared (Brandbilen som försvann, 1969) Murder at the Savoy (Polis, polis, potatismos!, 1970) The Abominable Man (Den vedervärdige mannen från Säffle, 1971) The Locked Room (Det slutna rummet, 1972) Cop Killer (Polismördaren, 1974) The Terrorists (Terroristerna, 1975) Per Wahlöö described their goals for the series as to "use the crime novel as a scalpel cutting open the belly of the ideologically pauperized and morally debatable so-called welfare state of the bourgeois type." The series is noteworthy for how the lives of its characters change over the books. Beck gets divorced, Kollberg quits the force, a third detective gets killed. The leitmotif of the series, written from the authors' clearly defined socialist viewpoint, is to indicate how Sweden, as a country which champions social democracy, nevertheless has the same problems of inequality and crime as other capitalist countries. The political events of the times often play a significant role as backdrop for the plots, such as the Greek dictatorship, the Vietnam War, and so on. Because the authors intended the books as a critique of capitalist society, all the titles in the original edition were given the subtitle "report of a crime"; on purpose an ambiguous phrase. The final novel of the series,The Terrorists, was not finished when Per Wahlöö passed away in June 1975, so Maj Sjöwall had to finish it alone. During Wahlöö's illness, which eventually led to his death, he sat up writing day and night in order to finish the book before it was too late. The above is lifted from the Wiki entry. The grand finale of the series is memorable: Beck and his paramour, at home playing Scrabble, as Beck spells out, for the final line of The Terrorists, "M-A-R-X."

This opening of our minds was a subtle and yet painful process

Excerpts from the homepage of dolphin communications researcher and ketamine enthusiast John Lilly: ACCOUNTS OF DOLPHIN RESEARCH IN 1957 "If one works with a bottlenose dolphin day in and day out for many hours, days and weeks, one is struck with the fact that one's current basic assumptions and even one's current expectations determine within certain limits the results attained with a particular animal at that particular time. This effect, of course, is quite commonly found with one's peers in the human species. "This working hypothesis of an advanced capability raised our index of suspicion and in turn sensitized our minds and methods to new sources of information. It was this subtle preparation of the mental climate which allowed us in 1957 to listen to some rather queer noises that the dolphin was producing in the laboratory and to review them very carefully on the tapes. Because the possibility of a very large brain capacity and because of musings about the possible areas of achievement already realized in this species, but as yet undiscovered by us, our minds began to open. "This opening of our minds was a subtle and yet painful process. We began to have feelings which l believe are best described by the word 'weirdness.' The feeling was that we were up against the edge of a vast uncharted region in which we were about to embark with a good deal of mistrust in the appropriateness of our own equipment. The feeling of weirdness came on us as the sounds of this small whale seemed more and more to be forming words in our own language. We felt we were in the presence of Something, or Someone who was on the other side of a transparent barrier which up to this point we hadn't even seen. The dim outlines of a Someone began to appear. We began to look at this whale's body with newly opened eyes and began to think in terms of its possible 'mental processes,' rather than in terms of the classical view of a conditionable, instinctually functioning 'animal.' We began to apologize to one another for slips off the tongue in which we would call dolphins 'persons' and in which we began to use their names as if they were persons. This seemed to be as much of a way of grasping at straws of security in a rough sea of the unknown, as of committing the sin of Science of Anthropomorphizing. If these 'animals' have 'higher mental processes,' then they in turn must be thinking of us as very peculiar (even stupid} beings indeed.'' An account of the mimicry phenomena with Elvar and other dolphins: "The repeatedly painful and humbling part of this experience that we as human beings had felt that man is at the top: we are alone; yet here is an 'animal' which was entering into that which was peculiarly human; i.e., human speech. At no matter how primitive a level he was entering into it, he was taking Step 1. "To convey to you our sense of wonder and yet the sense of the uncomfortable necessity of continuously reorganizing our basic assumpltions is difficult. We gambled on Elvar's taking the first step and he did. (We haven't done as well with his delphinese language.) He impressed us with the fact that he took the first step to repair a gap of at least 30,000,000 years in a few weeks. He may be skipping some of the belabored efforts of the human race for the last 40,000 years to achieve our present degree oi articulate speech among ourselves. Maybe he is not skipping Maybe he is just beginning what Homo sapiens went through 40,000 years ago. And he first did it when and only when we believed he could do it and somehow demonstrated: our belief ta him." "These experiences illustrate the thesis that one can protect one's self by maintaining one's ignorance by belittling disturbing experiences? Or one can newly recapture sensitivity and be openminded (even painfully so) and discover new facts. Discovery, in my experience, requires disillusionment first, as well as later. One must be shaken in one's basic beliefs before the discovery can penetrate one's mind sufficiently above threshold to be detected A certain willingness to face censure, to be a maverick? To question one's beliefs, to revise them, is obviously necessary. But what is not obvious is how to prepare one's own mind to receive the transmissions from the far side of the protective transparent wall separating each of us from the dark gulf of the unknown Maybe we must realize that we are still babies in the universe taking steps never before taken. Sometimes we reach out from our aloneness for someone else who may or may not exist. But at least we reach out, and it is gratifying to see our dolphins reach also, however primitively. They reach toward those of us who are willing to reach toward them. It may be that some day not toa far distant we both can draw to an end the 'long loneliness,' as Loren Eiseley called it."

Stars over chaos

2017 marks the centennial plus ten of the birth of anthropologist and ecologist Loren Eiseley, who's popular writings helped to inspire the environmental movement. The following poem is from his collection "The Lost Notebooks of Loren Eiseley." AGAINST CITIES I have envied the hawk's breast enduring the great heaven; all wild wings and the stubbornness of rock yielding no foothold but to eagles. The serenity of stars over chaos is worthy remembrance and the peace of an old planet forgetting the troubled footsteps of men... I have envied even, at times, the stony security of a snail locked in his narrow house. But I have pondered and not understood earth that endures spoiled cities in preference to white deserts and the stars.

Forever contact

Last night was the 11th anniversary of the death of Carl Sagan. He was seemingly everywhere during the '70's and '80's, a popular media figure, affable and engaging. Even when stricken with cancer he continued his work of putting a human face on scientific endeavours, particularly space exploration. His novel "Contact" was adapted for a film starring Jodie Foster, with a remarkable ending sequence depicting the First Contact with an extra-terrestrial species in profoundly personal terms. While no renegade in the strict sense of the other scientists in this series of posts, it is important to remember Sagan's early contributions to global warming theory, and perhaps more importantly, his sense of priorities: science, for Sagan, was never an end in itself, but rather a means to understand and appreciate the mysteries of nature. The following is a tribute excerpted from the Carl Sagan site, found here: "His thesis included his discovery of the surprisingly high temperature of Venus and his correct explanation that it was caused by a runaway greenhouse effect. Early on he began to wonder what would happen if our own moderate greenhouse effect here on Earth were to intensify as it had on Venus. He became one of the first scientists to sound the alarm on global warming and other forms of inadvertent climate modification, including the potential consequences of a major nuclear war which he named "nuclear winter." It was nearly fifty years ago that Carl began his life-long research on the origin of life and the search for life and intelligence elsewhere in the cosmos. Back then, research on the latter subject was effectively a form of professional suicide. The scientific community viewed it as a subject beneath its dignity. Only a handful of courageous scientists, Carl among them, dared to jeopardize their careers by doing such research. Today as the numbers of newly discovered extra-solar planets steadily mount, the field of astrobiology flourishes. Even earlier, the notebooks he filled in his teens were suffused with a passion for the values of science and democracy. He viewed the error-correcting mechanisms built into both the methodology of science and into our constitution as being on a par with the domestication of fire, the invention of agriculture and writing; among the most precious innovations ever devised by our species. In this society dependent on science and technology, he thought that it was critically important for science to learn to communicate its insights, values and methods to everyone. At a time when "reputable" scientists rarely if ever ventured before the public, he was willing to risk his career for that also. One such effort, his 1980 "Cosmos" television series, has now been seen by a billion people worldwide. Parts of it will be broadcast in North America at 8pm EST on Christmas Day on the Discovery Science Channel. On Tuesday evenings at 9pm EST, starting January 8, 2008 the whole series will begin to run again. "Cosmos'" enduring world-wide appeal is another testament to his prophetic vision. He believed that science must always remain scrupulously faithful to the most rigorous possible methodological standards but that we shouldn't shrink from the spiritual implications of its insights. He dreamed of a civilization rooted in our dawning understanding of nature, where skepticism and wonder went hand in hand. He didn't want to humiliate or demean the believer. He was always ready to communicate."

Cat's Paw

This week's theme: Whose what? (animal edition) cat's paw (cats paw) noun 1. Someone used as a tool by another. 2. A kind of knot used to connect a rope to an object. 3. A breeze that ruffles the surface of the water over a small area. [The first sense of the term comes from the fable in which a monkey uses a cat to pull roasting chestnuts from a fire. The monkey gobbles up all the nuts while the cat is left with a burnt paw. See Edwin Landseer's 1824 painting Cat's Paw: http://museumsyndicate.com/item.php?item=2992 The second sense refers to the supposed resemblance of such a knot to a cat's paw: http://images.google.com/images?q=cat's+paw+knot The origin of the third sense is unknown.] Today's word in Visual Thesaurus: http://visualthesaurus.com/?w1=cat's-paw -Anu Garg (words at wordsmith.org) "Prime Minister Tony Blair was reprimanded in the British parliament for his willingness to be the cat's paw of the U.S." Craig R. Eisendrath and Melvin A. Goodman; Shoot First, Talk Later; USA Today (Washington, DC); Jul 1, 2004. The above was sent to me via the email service A Word a Day (the third meaning of the term cat's paw is quite nice and is one I'd never heard before). Anyone, I believe, can subscribe for free for this service here: http://wordsmith.org/awad/subscriber.html Once one subscribes one is sent a word a day and it's definition, organized under a weekly theme. I recommend it highly.

Jump and go

Here's some live footage of Neu!, making it happen. This is, I'm guessing, somewhat rare. Neu! was very influential, as has been well documented. On their first two records you can hear much of what came later, in terms of underground music. This footage, to me, is indicative of a sort of penultimate glam--fun, texturally interesting, uptempo, experimental and emotionally precise rock music. Neu! also had the sense, at this juncture, of never not being current. Seeing them here, they might be representative on one of the more transparently compelling aspects of postmodern culture.

Orgone: field of charged desire

Wilhelm Reich (March 24, 1897 – November 3, 1957) was an Austrian-American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. Reich was a respected analyst for much of his life, focusing on character structure, rather than on individual neurotic symptoms.[1] He promoted adolescent sexuality, the availability of contraceptives and abortion, and the importance for women of economic independence. Synthesizing material from psychoanalysis, cultural anthropology, economics, sociology, and ethics, his work influenced writers such as Alexander Lowen, Fritz Perls, Paul Goodman, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, A. S. Neill, and William Burroughs.[2] He was also a controversial figure, who came to be viewed by the psychoanalytic establishment as having gone astray or as having succumbed to mental illness. His work on the link between human sexuality and neuroses emphasized "orgastic potency" as the foremost criterion for psycho-physical health. He said he had discovered a form of energy, which he called "orgone," that permeated the atmosphere and all living matter, and he built "orgone accumulators," which his patients sat inside to harness the energy for its reputed health benefits. It was this work, in particular, that cemented the rift between Reich and the psychoanalytic establishment.[3] Reich, of Jewish descent and a communist, was living in Germany when Adolf Hitler came to power. He fled to Scandinavia in 1933 and subsequently to the United States in 1939. In 1947, following a series of critical articles about orgone and his political views in The New Republic and Harper's,[4] the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) began an investigation into his claims, winning an injunction against the interstate sale of orgone accumulators. Charged with contempt of court for violating the injunction, Reich conducted his own defense, which involved sending the judge all his books to read, and arguing that a court was no place to decide matters of science. He was sentenced to two years in prison, and in August 1956, several tons of his publications were burned by the FDA.[5] He died of heart failure in jail just over a year later, days before he was due to apply for parole.[6] Read the rest of the Wiki entry here. Those interested in Reich might visit the Wilhelm Reich Museum homepage, here.

Heroes of the 20th century fade

The official commentary surrounding Castro's death was predictably obfuscatory and ideologically driven. As Galbraith once said, in one of his more frisky moods, "The only socialism permitted in American is socialism for the rich." That said, the official discourse refused to recognize two of Castro's singular accomplishments. The first is the remarkable emergency response network he developed and personally coordinated to mediate the effects of the increasingly ferocious, climate-change driven Caribbean hurricane season. The second involves Castro's embrace, in the collapse of the USSR and its oil subsidies to Cuba (and the attendant economic havoc), of the concept and processes of permaculture. Cuba now stands as a model of small and community farming, and is in this sense one of the most Green countries on Earth. We, of course, heard nothing about this on National Public radio.

Damnation as a scene of social collapse

I've recently seen a film by director Bela Tarr--Damnation. While I appreciated the film's decadent cynicism, and its sense of defeated existentialism, the thing I found most remarkable was a camera technique Tarr uses in virtually every scene of the film. It seems that always, when two figures are framed in a dramatic scene, Tarr pulls the camera back to pan across their surroundings. This forces the viewer to always regard the characters and their dilemmas in a larger, social dimension. No act, it seems, can be seen outside of its historical context (for Tarr here it's Hungarian society collapsing under the weight of Soviet occupation) It's a simple yet elegant technique--one I'll take with me. A good introduction to Tarr's major films can be found here

Radio on and on

Chris Petit's post-punk film Radio On uses its soundtrack to propel the narrative in ways that are evocative and memorable. For example, a long tracking shot at the film's beginning explores the nondescript, dimly lit apartment of protagonist Robert's brother, who has committed suicide in the bath. The camera finally comes to rest on a radio at the foot of the tub, on which David Bowie's "Heroes/Heldon" plays at high volume. Those familiar with "Heroes" will recognize the dialectic in operation here: the romantic, desperate bravado of the song's lyrics and delivery in relation to the context of the suicide itself. Later, Bowie's tune "Always Crashing in the Same Car" (a tribute to J.G. Ballard's novel Crash) plays while Robert cruises past a seemingly endless array of identical high-rise condominiums. The song ends strategically as Robert leaves this ultramodern, over-lit realm (the same high-rises can be seen, incidentally, on the cover of The Jam's LP This is the Modern World) to descend into the grim depths of nighttime Bristol, the site of his brother's suicide. Finally, towards the film's end, as Robert succumbs to his own disaffected despair he leaves his car in an abandoned quarry while Kraftwerk's static-laden Radioactivity blares on the car's tapedeck. But still, the film ends on a high note as Robert catches a train, fleeing this overdetermined and alienating landscape. This is an idyllic, panoramic scene (shot from overhead) of the station bordered to one side by the sea and on the other by the English hills, and I always imagine it with Kraftwerk's "Airwaves" thrumming urgently and lyrically (surely their most plaintive melody) along in the background, the low key vocals intoning simply, again and again: "When airwaves swing Distant voices sing."

After Altered States

I've recently succumbed to a vague impulse to see again, after a gap of 27 years, the film Altered States. As a younger man, I found the film entertaining, if rather overblown and somewhat pretentious. And I suppose all of that still applies. But this time around the film, I've realized, makes some fairly compelling claims on its viewers, and despite Ken Russell's (as ever) hoary, heavy-handed direction, Altered States feels in some ways credible, somehow authentic. I've read some of the old reviews of the film, and the fairly thorough Wiki entry, and was pleased to find that renegade scientist John C. Lilly approved of the film. In fact, Lilly alleges that screenplay writer Paddy Chayefsky may have seen the galleys for Lilly's book The Scientist, which describes very similar events surrounding Lilly's own isolation tank experiments. Lilly is, characteristically, high-minded about the whole affair. At any rate, I do recommend seeing Altered States (the Mexican magic mushroom scenes alone are worth the price of a DVD rental), and anyone can read more about the film here

Transmission

I bought a copy of Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures a few months ago to replace my lost LP (the UK first issue vinyl with textured jacket). Mine is the US release, but I assume it's a first issue because it reads "Factum 1" on the matrix, the matrix being the blank section of a vinyl record, between the record's grooves (the songs) and the label. At any rate, while I was squinting at the matrix of my new LP to determine its authenticity, I found a statement scrawled into the vinyl, in the matix: "I'm looking for a guide." It's appropriate, given their oeuvre--Factory Records; Post-Punk; their bleak prospects culturally, politically, economically. How difficult it was to get anywhere, meaningfully. Do we look to a guide; should we, given the status quo? The impulse tells us something about ourselves, our condition. Joy Division, performing the song "Transmission" from their LP Unknown Pleasures: https://youtu.be/6ZwMs2fLoVE