Piri' Miri Muli'

What's up for two more days, v.3, I mean three more days

2012-01-25T23:13:00.013-05:00

I should type a bit about the Roberto Matta Echaurren show while it's still hanging out with us; if you are in the NY metro area, have a pulse, and sometimes like it when people draw pictures, every Matta show is a major event and and every phase of his work is of singular significance. Here are works from 1988 on, with the notable exception of 1975's large scale "L'homme descend du signe," from the most figurative phase of his career:

It may be hard to see on the web repro (one more reason to see the 13' 5-3/4" x 27' 4" masterpiece) but there are white lines found around the painting, set apart from perspective, of figures, demotic and unintelligible writing, which aren't found in his earlier phases and but are in the later works in the show, perhaps picked up from Polke and/or Twombly in a way that heightens the effect of "seeing through," inspired by Duchamp who credited Matta for "the discovery of regions of space until then unknown in the field of art." Matta painted numerous alternate versions of Duchamp's Large Glass. On the lower right hand corner Matta appears to reference the capillary tubes of the Large Glass' lower left hand corner, of which Duchamp had derived the tubes' shape through chance operations, which here instead of dangling malic molds connect to empty boxes, which have the three dimensional aspect of the "parasols - drainage slopes - sieves" in the lower half of the Large Glass and the shape of the "halo of the bride - draft pistons" of the upper half. An ascension to the vertical dimension is suggested on the left in a step ladder of spinal bones leading upwards to a being enclosed by a rib cage, which combined with the other elements of the work speak inversions within a previously codified though never explained language and extend out into new dimensions.

Matta was possibly the most theoretically driven painter in art history, and his works from the Eighties show how the act of applying paint to the canvas repeatedly allowed him to realize the scope of what he originally envisioned. When Artaud saw the Balinese theater, he sought to replace the psychological with the metaphysical, citing the conventions of psychological drama, but for Matta (as Artaud eventually agreed) these are not contradictions. Matta originally went to Paris to study architecture with Le Corbusier and viewed that which is built as an extension of human psychology, imagining architectural structure that derived from the range of human emotions - 1991's "Cosmos Mental":

Balinese drama, presenting what Artaud described as a "blend of explosions, escapes, passages, and detours in all the directions of external and internal perception (which) constitutes a supreme idea of theater.. this revelatory aspect of matter, which seems suddenly to scatter into signs in order to teach us the metaphysical identity of the concrete and the abstract.. carried to the nth power.." derives from pre-Hindu animist beliefs, that all matter possesses a soul, and that the above mirrors the below, like when Caravaggio's Baptist looks down (right) at the Nelson Atkins while Leonardo's points up. Breton wrote in 1944 "..in the person of Matta.. everything which is seen at first sight and no longer with second sight tends to be formulated on the principle of total animism. This animism, tracing its path through Lautreamont and Rimbaud, has continued to mature since romanticism, where it may be observed at its infantile stage... What endures is the conviction that nothing is in vain, that everything that can be contemplated speaks a meaningful language which can be understood when human emotion acts as interpreter. For anyone who has eyes to see, all these aspects are open, not just open to the light like Cezanne's apple but open to everything else as well, including the other opaque bodies; they are constantly ready to blend together, and only from this fusion can be forged the key which is the only master-key to life."

Animists on the island of Pulau Sumba believe that the sky and the sea are engaged in a cosmic battle, but right after this essay of Breton's, Matta replaced the horizon line in the 1940s with dimensions corresponding to what he called conscienture, the painting of consciousness. The time dimension is represented is works like this 1999 canvas "Architecture du temps (un point sait tout)"..

On the Pace website is his "Oëramen (La conscience est un arbre)" in which the animals radiate in a night scene mingling with disembodied organs as an illustration of conscienture. M'Onde - a large bird with unintelligible texts coming out of its mouth - I can't find pics any of his mosaics online but there are (not in this show) large scale mosaics - at the first of two Matta shows I've seen in Paris was a large scale "Creation of the Earth." The enthusiasm around Matta that shows like this provoke will hopefully lead to a touring retrospective, as to match up his early work with his 70's canvases and later works would revisit what he did to NYC in the 40s.

2011-12-31T15:20:00.004-05:00

Ah the SUVs and industrial emissions that bring sunny new years like these. There was only one day a while back when before dawn I stood there thinking that the sun might not come up, because I was far from the clocks and had nothing else to obsess over but more importantly, I didn't need pity, the sun's. Kerouac and Petrarch both say that's why the sun comes up. You know it's coming when you need the pity.

2011-12-28T06:00:00.008-05:00

I began to mention while writing about Turner's Sea Monster how the elements of the St. George and the Dragon story seem to have crossed north into the Adriatic Sea from the Ionian, combining the python slain by Apollo in Delphi (above, left) with the story line of Theseus slaying the Minotaur at Knossos (right), and how the 8th to 10th Centuriy barbarian attacks in Amasea, Turkey gave inspriration to the sea monsters slain by Venice's patron saint Theodore. In the late 17th Century, the epic figure Gjergj Elez Alia became the subject of Albanian songs which were influenced by the Bosnian equivalent Alija Djerzelez, believed to be inspired by a 15th Century Ottoman military commander of the Hungarian Succession Wars. Baloz, Gjergj Elez Alia's adversary, is alternately described as a Northern marauder and a sea monster: in Robert Elsie's translation of the ballad "Rumour was spreading and it became known that/ A swarthy baloz had emerged from the ocean" and as with the Minotaur, women are sacrificed to it until the protagonist slays it.

The Bosnian, Serbo-Croat language ballads of Alija Djerzelez, possibly influenced by the bugarštica tradition of ballads that have been traced to the 15th Cenutry, are no longer sung in their original form, but the Albanian Songs of the Frontier Warriors, incorporating the story of Gjergj Elez Alia, have been passed on by an oral tradition and retain their popularity. As Elsie says "While the Bosnian Slav epic seems to have died out as a living tradition, the Albanian epic is still very much alive. Even as the twenty-first century marches on, one can still find a good number of 'lahutars' in Kosova, in particular in the Rugova highlands west of Peja, and in northern Albania, as well as some rare souls in Montenegro, who are able to sing and recite the heroic deeds of Mujo and Halili and their thirty 'agas,' as part of an unbroken oral tradition. One can safely assume that these elderly men constitute the very last traditional native singers of epic verse in Europe."

For whatever reason I came upon what I believe are these ballads on Christmas night as they have just been uploaded onto Youtube in recent years. This one and this one mention Gjergj Elez Alia on their Youtube title, and incorporate the two-stringed çifteli which has in most cases replaced the one-stringed lahuta, the Albanian version of the Greek lyra that gave its name to lyric poetry. Both those videos are compelling traditional renditions of an orally transmitted vocal range, but the nationalistic significance of the Songs of the Frontier Warriors can be seen in two videos with more than 200,000 viewings, in which a pair I believe is called Beqa and Muja performs in military fatigues with what appears to be rooms filled with Kosovo Liberation Army soldiers, full of user comments celebrating the Kosovar Albanian cause.

..these songs seem to have the same melodic structure as the Gjergj Elez Alia songs..

Milman Parry's theory of oral-formulaic composition derives from trips Parry made with Albert Lord to the region in the 1930s, in which they recorded over ten thousand texts in both Serbo-Croatian and Albanian. The fact that only the Albanian songs remain suggest their cultural isolation since World War II may have played a part in preserving the oral traditions. Parry and Lord put forth the notion that repetitions of verses in Homer's epics meant that these songs could shed light on the oral tradition of Homeric poetry, which has been contested by others, but this is what remains of the orally transmitted epic in Europe.

What's up for two more days, v.2, I mean one more day

2011-12-23T01:30:00.008-05:00

Because the Saturday gallery hours are being eliminated this weekend so that the tent cities in the urban centers can be cleared out by authorities and replaced with sculptures of a manger in a gated community with a baby in swaddling clothes, my Two Days Left column culled from wanderings a few days ago has been reduced to a One Day Left, which means you have only tomorrow to see the haunting images of the Iraqi Halim Al Karim in his NYC debut at Stux (530 W 25th), who says "the main challenge for me is to identify and stay clear of the historical and contemporary elements of brainwashing" and "nobody in Iraq hasn’t lost somebody or at least part of their own character." From the gallery press release: "During the Iran-Iraq war, Halim’s family was forced out of their home in Baghdad. Halim was unwillingly conscribed to serve in the Iraqi military during the first Gulf War, which the artist describes as, 'a fearfully lonely and harrowing journey.' Halim Al Karim soon escaped the military and sought refuge in a rock-covered hole in the southern Iraqi desert. He attributes his physical and emotional survival to an elderly Bedouin woman who brought him food and water, as well as educated him about mysticism and gypsy customs. Aided by this wise and kind stranger, the artist retreated to a deeply meditative state that enabled him to distance his memory from the atrocities of war. He emerged from seclusion on occasion, refusing to disclose his whereabouts to his friends or family for fear of jeopardizing his family and his own safety.

".... Hidden ... incorporates the Sufi concept of 'al-batin' in Arabic, one of the ninety-nine names of Allah that denotes 'truth' when recited. The series references the artist’s perspective that humanity is best preserved from brutal acts of violence when an inner focus is maintained and hidden from view. A number of works within the theme are covered with a tightly stretched sheer scrim of white or black silk; this compositional device represents a transcendental portal to the subconscious, where the serene human form latently lies protected underneath." (pdf)

As to whether you should check out Nan Goldin's Scopophilia show (522 W 22 Street) all you need to know is that it has been banned from a Rio de Janeiro museum because of works like this one, that one, this one and that one, utilizing the Baudelarian method of juxtaposing paintings at the Louvre that she photographed during off hours with the contemporary folks from her own photographic oeuvre. Piri' Miri Muli' readers are accustomed to theoretical concepts mentioned here in passing becoming trendy in a year and a half's time but this approach more likely drew some inspiration from Chris Marker's project over the last half decade about which he noted “Cocteau used to say that at night, statues escape from museums and go walking in the streets," one painting making it into both shows. Goldin takes the technique in an expanse of directions and adds a slide show recounting the stories of Narcissus and Theseus.

2011-12-14T21:19:00.001-05:00

to see
by day

then not so
much at night

then more
then less

not to stop
not will

2011-11-29T22:47:00.001-05:00

In Wild Strawberries the dreams are a ripoff of Maya Deren's - a Piri' Miri Muli' exclusive I think - and this conclusion to the evening nap was a ripoff of that. I was to receive an award and was fitted in a cross between a hussar's uniform and a toucan - which I was convinced was a dig at me except as I walked around the apartment complex I saw others with the same outfit. I had a hooded sweatshirt that was hanging out of the uniform but couldn't find my apartment to take it off and leave it there. I started to walk around and then got very lost, to the point where I would need to take a bus back, I was soon in a country town, and there was a garden on a hill with steps with labels but they were for the plants, above the garden was signs and banners for the post office, school, and hospital, and I saw that there was one for the mausoleum which was perfect because I could navigate by mausoleums, except here the mausoleum wasn't for anyone in particular it was just a mausoleum which makes my mausoleum navigation system inoperable. So someone who was with me suggested hiring a bicycle excursion to Vermont and back, since when it returned we would get directions back to the award ceremony, no impulse to ask any directions outside profit motive, and in the carpeted new unfurnished office of the tour guide we were given corn chips but this large growling dog parked underneath us and wanted all the corn chips, was given a lesser corn chip but wanted ours, this dog was I suspect the anthropomorphic incarnation of my concerns from earlier in the afternoon.

2011-11-17T17:52:00.002-05:00

When Kant heard the news of revolution, he interrupted his walk. Goethe continued his. How pretentious of them both!

-Aragon, Treatise

2011-11-15T00:04:00.000-05:00

such a
i
r as arms-

wind re
ading me
th-moon
light

2011-11-09T00:46:00.011-05:00

Videos from Saura's Fados are starting to pop up, like this which starts with Grândola until Chico Buarque's head pops up and sings the Brazil-themed "Fado Tropical": "this land will fulfill its ideal/ and still recall an immense Portugal," interspersing both songs with footage from Portugal's Carnation Revolution.

Grândola, which signaled the start of the Carnation protests when played on the radio after midnight, is here matched with pictures from the Arab Spring:

Caetano Veloso, who once told a stadium that mass aversion to experimental literature was "a sphinx," here sings the Amália Rodrigues classic "Estranha Forma de Vida" ("strange life form/ my heart..") with Amália's eye pictured on the back wall. Rodrigues, who adapted lyrics from poets like Pedro Homem de Mello and David Mourão-Ferreira to music, wrote "Estranha Forma de Vida" originally as a poem:

Amália's version from 1961:

I have been gradually posting the Saura-Vittorio Storaro videos from a while back that I watch repeatedly and was watching this one today. Alosno (Huelva province, Spain) is 248 miles from Cadiz, closer to the Portuguese border than Seville, 381 miles from Lisbon, really in the middle of nowhere but close enough to Portugal to be influenced by fado in subject matter and song structure while the melody and percussion are firmly flamenco. Storaro switches from low key lighting to high contrast for "and the break of day" as Nietzsche didn't say in Daybreak: She filled my glass while she spoke of three winters ago and for five nights and days.

2011-11-03T19:31:00.001-04:00

Wednesday night when the texts want
a function they grab one we stopped
where Neither Fashion Nor Denial on
her grave was mourned from a chariot
above the ghosts of the loggers still
sawing away the antlers on the empty
picture frames eating soup marked
for export I asked him to paint the bus
orange and now it's an orange the
cadets moved the mountain I think
of Dean Moriarty but speak of the
function again where the mountain
had been in the shade marked below

its function like the floating pages
disguised as leaves am to cover
the footprints those i don't know

or they were racing on tv sets
when the children were counting logs
west to east and back again water
is branded like tear drops on the backs

glass that isn't there seen through
the mountain down by by way it

2011-10-28T16:52:00.012-04:00

I'd never seen Liberty Plaza Park absent of Occupation, so I have no idea whether it looks large on a normal day, but it has the aura of a delightfully crowded sardine can that makes walking into a constant conversation and negotiation and will not show a yard of empty space any time soon. Hovering above it is the red, large scale sculpture Joie de Vivre by Mark di Suvero, one of the most politically engaged artists of his generation. In the 70's he said "I left the country because of the Vietnam War. We say democracy, and then the United States is guilty of something like Chile. That's incredible." Recently he reflected "The 60's scene was an idea of liberation, was an idea of struggling against this military industrial complex that's still ruling our economy."

di Suvero designed the Peace Tower in Los Angeles in 1966 (left), financed by Rauchenberg and Stella amongst others, which so enraged locals that the artists had to defend it physically, with Irving Petlin at one point reduced to brandishing a broken light bulb. Participants included Guston, Golub, Spero, Hesse, Judd, Motherwell, Nevelson, Rosenquist and many other luminaries. The project was revisited at the 2006 Whitney Biennial with di Suvero collaborating with Rikrit Tiravanija, who had attempted to build a tower in Central Park for the 2004 Republican National Convention.

di Suvero recounted in 2006 why he didn't speak at the recent dedication of Liberty Plaza Park: “They’re not going to let me talk,” Mark di Suvero, 72, said genially, explosively, from his studio hard by the river in Long Island City. “Nah, they’re scared. I got arrested during the [Republican] convention for saying Bush lied. I was one of the oldest people that got hauled in. You should have seen how the cops treated the young girls.” In the city where hovers the legend of Rothko withdrawing his commissioned paintings from the Four Seasons because, as the story goes, he "believed his panels would hang in a boardroom which would be visible from an employees' canteen, that they would be accessible to ordinary office workers.." di Suvero may have wondered back then what sort of audience his sole Manhattan public sculpture would have, until this fall when the best audience he could ever have hoped for convened below it.

As Picasso's 1946 Le Joie de Vivre portrait of Françoise Gilot rose above the nymphs and satyrs by the sea of Antibes, perhaps friends or descendants of the nymphs of Matisse's St-Tropez canvas 40 years earlier (below, currently being stolen from the Barnes estate), di Suvero's figure first rose above the sculptural nymphs on the Pont Alexandre III over the Seine. It then had a brief residence at Storm King, until its original Manhattan abode on the New York side of the Holland Tunnel. I may have driven past it countless times as I like to cross at Holland and then turn left up Broadway to drive through Soho, but I am always focused on the signs and traffic patterns to get into correct lane so I would conjecture that circle is not a prime exhibition space.

Unlike Dubuffet's nearby trees and, across the street, Noguchi's red cube, di Suvero's structure directs the eye upwards towards the skyscrapers that Ginsberg believed in the 50's were depersonalizing the city and dwarfing the potential of the individual "Moloch whose buildings are judgement!.. Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the streets as endless Jehovahs!" This function of a figure re-sized for the surrounding buildings is in contrast to its function in Paris and Storm King (below), but these days there is no shortage of nymphs and satyrs evoking an urban Riviera in the park. It has been roped off since a misguided young Canadian recently climbed it, prompting the police to summon the hostage negotiation team. Previous to that, it was a useful conference space, i.e. "Direct Action meeting at the red sculpture," and one amateur cartographer called it on an Occupied map the "weird red thing."

It would be interesting if di Suvero visited or participated in the protests in some way, except ... oops!.. his wife is in Bloomberg's cabinet... but luckily, as di Suvero said back in the day, "everything I have to say is in my sculptures and I'm stunned that you can't see it."

What's up for two more days

2011-10-20T20:49:00.012-04:00

I generally don't like to write up how wonderful and can't miss shows are right before (or after) they close but .. but what? Why? alright I won't

ok this Youtube doesn't do justice to the many faces and un-faces of the Nick Cave Soundsuits so you should get in there, what a wonderful can't miss...

more on 24th: The last Lari Pittman show at Gladstone had me typing and I like this one more - here where Titian would depict a lute player in the allegory of sight tradition, Pittman writes out the names of Iberian musical forms (fado, saeta, saudade, and the more Italian pavane) to represent sound and emotion, postcards of tourist locations (Monserrat 1757, Yellowstone 1878) to represent time and space, as well as references to psychological archetypes (anima, animus) in his in his DayGlo acrylic, cel-vinyl, aerosol laquer, and gesso.

The new internationally focused C24 opened with quite a good "Double Crescent" show putting artists from New Orleans side by side with artists from Istanbul, including Skylar Fein's reconstruction of the Vertov Telegram, believed to have been sent right after the murder of Rosa Luxemborg: "Down with the scented veil of kisses, murders, doves, and conjuring tricks! We need conscious people, not an unconsious mass, ready to yield to any suggestion! Long live the consciousness of the pure who can see and hear!"

26th: Do Ho Suh crafts a model of his pagoda-like childhood home in Korea crashing into an apartment dwelling in Providence, RI. Upon entering it it looks like a model of Federal architecture from a museum, but the interior dollhouses on the reverse side intricately show contemporary use of both upscale interiors and heavy metal crash pads beset by the catastrophe of Suh's house crashing into them.

29th: Leandro Erlich has lots of spacial dislocation fun with elevators at Sean Kelly.

As I am the core marketing demographic for Eve Sussman's Alphaville pastiche utilizing post-industrial and oil city visuals from Northern Russia (below), I quite liked it but didn't get the memo that the scenes are randomly generated and the film never ends, so I was sitting there a while waiting to see how it ends up until a very large and loud tour group (the first I'd ever seen in those parts) provided me the opportune rationalization to forgo the dénouement and epilogue I was awaiting in vain. Quite worthy of an extended gaze if you have the time. (pdf)

Up longer: the Black Mountain show til the 29th (chapbooks of Olson, Creeley, Blackburn, Duncan with his illustrations, plenty of paintings), Ashbery collages, Ilya Kabakov drawings (pdf), Indian masters, Lisette Model photos alongside a few drawings by Grosz, Dix and others (pdf), Fluxus.

2011-10-14T00:05:00.013-04:00

If you haven't heard, Bloomberg wants to clean up Wall Street and he's not talking about the SEC or the Department of Treasury doing it. Using the same tactic he used to disperse Bloombergville, he wants to evict everyone tomorrow at 7am for cleaning, and afterwards no one will be allowed to take sleeping bags, tarps, "personal items," or "gear" back into the park. The campers are of course willing to do the work themselves to bring about the worldly paradise seen on my Blogger photo. (Update: The cleanup was "postponed" perhaps due to good legal advice, the 300,000 name petition or the thousands (including Joris) that joined the campers this morning, or maybe Tim Geithner heard they were going to clean up Wall Street and put a stop to it.)

In Philly, where so far Mayor Nutter has had a more simpatico relationship with the occupation, allowing, for instance, tents, November 15 is the date which is looming: plans have been in the works to renovate the area around City Hall being occupied, and though they had previously planned to start the renovation in September, I suspect the Mayor and the unelected board that controls the neighborhood is not eager to postpone the work because of the tent city. Discussions amongst the protestors as to what to do are ongoing, but the nearby Love Park cannot accommodate the tents currently pitched. It appears if the Mayor doesn't delay the renovations there will be a confrontation of some kind.

I haven't been doing much camping out in general lately and I am home now. The last two days I have been able to combine my commutes with readings of legendary writers. Cecilia Vicuña was talking tonight about Régis Debray questioning her quoting him as saying revolution cannot happen without womens' liberation, so me being me I had to rattle off a list in the Q&A of guys who did say that (in my defense, there was also a question that I eventually remembered), or at least substituting "progress" for "revolution," although "revolution" was invoked by some on this list: Hegel, Goethe, Marx, Breton, Paz (and that's just the guys).. I don't think I said Kant but I think he did say so too, and most tragically I forgot to mention Fourier! So, Fourier too, Piri' Miri Muli' readers. (Update 10/14: Rousseau, too, can't believe I forgot him) And I had never met Jerome Rothenberg til yesterday. I'm working on an essay that involves him but I didn't get into that, explaining who I was by mentioning my short essay on his blog, but I of course didn't prep about that past essay so my first interactions involved me saying "you know the Russian guy" and then we named about six or seven Russian poets til I could come up with Velimir Khlebnikov. Before I could remember the name I thought maybe "the guy who wrote Victory Over the Sun" would work, except again I couldn't remember the title so I was coming up with "Antagonism With the Sun" and so forth. I have a lot of stories like that but of course if you feel comfortable telling them all then they're not that good.

What's up

2011-09-27T00:45:00.017-04:00

It is interesting that for both Dana Schutz and Daniel Richter, two figurative artists that have been noted in proximity with the phrase "the return of painting," James Ensor has been a primary inspiration.

Actually I recently found online an alternate oil version (left) to Richter's The Owner's History Lesson (right) from a couple years back:

I also suspect Schutz' influenced by Sigmar Polke, or that they both have internalized Guston in their own way. While Daniel's non-relation Gerhard strictly demarcates between the figurative and non-figurative, the line between the two becomes less clear in Schutz' canvases in ways that tend to work differently in each one, especially as she says she is moving from Guston to looking at Johns, Dubuffet and Charline von Heyl*. Since Giovanni Bellini conspired against the younger Giorgione there's also been a tight/ loose brush stroke dichotomy, both in figurative and Abstract Expressionism, with Caravaggio and Helen Lundeberg amongst others representing the hard-edge. Before Neo Rauch was known in the US, Arthur Danto used a critique of the hard edge to call Surrealism "retrograde," citing Magritte, the sort of statement like his prattle about "the end of painting" that he typically gets burned on.

The last time Schutz was up at Zach Feuer I thought I would go in reading as little as possible ahead of time to see if I liked her or not, and by the second long visit in two hours I was roasting marshmallows in Camp Schutz. I have noted here my interest in Daumier's dramatic tableaux, and my favorite Charles Demuth is the early illustrations, so you may have figured that I can't get enough of the dramatic tableaux, which Schutz serves up in large portions no two alike, historical dimensions with ambiguity that soaks its way into the brush stroke. Yau says "Schutz’s drawings begin in abstraction—a gouache band or ovoid stain, a thick or thin line in ink and dry brush, a stained field of black dots. Each linear addition brings further definition until finally a figure emerges," a method similar to Ernst's use of frottage and decalicomania to deal with the white canvas.

I mention this because she has a museum show in Purchase, NY (to go with a gallery show in Not-for-sale, NJ) of 42 works which opened this past Sunday, which will make its way to Miami and Denver.

Also, that Hesse girl is showing oils in Brooklyn, apparently the fiberglass isn't selling.

__________

I mentioned Dubuffet's writings recently on this blog but in the end I find them good for a painter and not for a writer, and he says at one point that painting is better than writing. He says that because he's a painter and he's not much of a writer, although he expresses himself thoughtfully and originally. Friends of Artaud say he thought writing was 'pigshit' because he was too drugged out to be Proust, which is true on some level, but it freed him up to escape the laws of writing and express something else. Art Brut's appeal to the economic base is its infantilism. Infantilism and bureaucracy can work together well. The Visionary Museum in Baltimore inevitably has begun to have shows of MFAs, just as the MFAs enforce infantilism in literature.

But this quote of his is interesting: "You think you control the things you're interested in and choose to hold dear; what if you are completely mistaken? What if the things you claim to like, that you are convinced you love, are actually and ultimately alien and indifferent to you, whereas other things, unsuspected, which you would be quite astonished to learn play a part in your life, were actually of prime importance, were essential movers in your existence? It's not out of the question. When people affirm their liking for this or that, be careful not to believe a word of it, since they know the least about their taste: the floor of a room, the head of a stairway - they claim they've never noticed them and hardly realize they even exist...

"The things we truly love, the things forming the basis and roots of our being, are generally the things we never look at. Wherever collusion is deep and an attachment is solidly established, the eyes and the conscious mind can mind their own business. Consciousness requires a certain distance... The conscious deals with the unfamiliar or inadequate experience: the moment we're deeply imbued, we're done with the conscious. The objects we isolate clearly within our field of gazing are those still foreign to us. As we grow to like them, they pass into, and no longer before, our eyes, and we are no longer aware of their presence."

__________

At the moment Wall Street has eclipsed Soho and Chelsea for the best art show in town and Piri' Miri Muli' wouldn't think for a moment to suggest otherwise. A video of two women participating in Occupy Wall Street getting pepper sprayed has gone viral, and police brutality of a more widespread sort is what induced the Sorbonne students to march in solidarity with the Nanterre students in May '68. In fact, I'm concerned that the shift of creative vitality from Soho and Williamsburg to Wall Street will lead to rising real estate prices that will drive out current Wall Street residents. Media coverage started to appear on Saturday with the usual columns framing arguments on behalf of the economic élites, taking the protesters to task for not having a specific demand. The march organizers had made the decision long ago to open the "occupation" to discussion over what such a demand would be, a welcome development in contrast to protest organizers that are wont to say "I need bodies," betting that such a process for a demand could constructively emerge. I would suggest this: public funding for elections. Protests for the overturning of Citizens United are sorely needed, as there is bipartisan opposition to the Supreme Court ruling among the rank and file of the two major parties and predictable apathy in Washington to pass the necessary legislation, but if/when it is overturned you're left with the same old campaign finance system that not only didn't work but made things like Citizens United and the Iraq War possible.

You can expect public financing of elections to cost a little more than what is spent on campaigns today, though it doesn't have to, but even if it does, the public can well afford it: 2-5 billion a year for all the races in the country. What we can't afford is all the candidates that take a bribe of a nickel from a corporation and pay them back a dollar of corporate welfare from the public funds - we've tried that for years and it got us a Super Congress for debt reduction, along with cuts in the Securities and Exchange Commission and similar agencies. Our congress with an historically low approval rating knows that they owe their careers to the current system of funding, so the public must take the initiative.

Also, Pasolini's comment from '68: "When you clashed with the policemen at Valle Giulia, I sympathized with them. Because policemen are children of the poor" applies here. An NYPD policeman told Michael Moore in solidarity that Wall Street stole their pension fund, but they know Michael is a regular guy. I agree with those columnists that say there's too much effort spent by college kids heckling the cops, when they should be discussing policy. That said, the cops are ordered to represent the interests of what is being protested and I've experienced how tear gas makes you angry and talkative, to go with the brutality the protesters have witnessed from the hands of some like Officer Bologna. I don't think Pasolini would have liked Officer Bologna, he was Roman.

(Update 9/29: CA Conrad weighs in inside a grey polygon on Huffpost)

I don't agree with Arthur Danto's view that the essential art is in New York, though I note both that Wall Street is in New York and that there have been supportive protests elsewhere. I'll let you know when I agree with him about something.

__________

Criterion came out with The Complete Jean Vigo on August 30, so if I label this a New on dvd citation it is only because a certain mail rental company that has wallowed in the negative attentions of the masses recently, a company that makes no attempt to offer all of Criterion's titles in concert with a larger cultural push to dumb down cinematic audiences, releases it to its subscribers tomorrow. Complete means all of Vigo til his death at 29, including a documentary juxtaposing the idyllic port of Nice with its corruption, no less relevant today, and Zero for Conduct, for which my longstanding adoration has thankfully not affected my good attitude for school. And of course the restoration of L'Atalante (on Youtube sans sous-titres en Anglais), the only comedy and the only film before World War II to make my Top 15. This is not to say I have thought long and hard what the best comedy ever is, because I don't seek out comedies for the same reason goats don't shop for sweaters, but it would be on any short list of the best comedies, adding to the genre - which has caused critics to say the story line is not characteristic of a 'classic' - so much that is completely unique to Vigo and his imitators. I can, however, with more certainty give it award hardware in other categories:

* Best barge movie: I don't think I've seen another canal barging movie but there could be one some time in the right hands; I find memoirs of barge trips amusing and read them often;
* Best cat movie: This perhaps also relates to how many cat movies you've seen and what your needs are in a cat movie;
* Best love triangle movie: Would have to research the extent to which this set forth the French genre of love triangle movies but whatever that may be, it is a parody of all of them that came later;
* I think I had more but I can't think of them. I will update this while I'm watching it again. Also I have recently commenced my fascination with Otar Iosseliani films and he's interviewed on the extras.

* von Heyl has a 10 year retrospective in Philly til Feb 19

2011-09-14T12:17:00.000-04:00

Dream journey: An Armory-like art show that I entered with a friend in the evening, someone who goes to these things infrequently. It was based in an old Gothic revival campus that was otherwise unused, either out of session or permanently, and the surrounding area that was landscaped into wooded paths like a zoo. The first exhibition I entered in the zoo area was a tea garden and plantation house with a field of plastic leaves. There was a tour of the plantation house with free tea, and a place to sit that was more like a cafeteria than a tea house, where a guy who was dispensing napkins at the table and selling $30 plastic sculptures affected that he was the gallery owner but that he was too coy to say so, but I decided later he wasn't. The young man said "my job is to make you endure the impossibilities" and "joy is what you feel when you have expended all anguish." There was then a corridor with smaller galleries which repeated shows I was familiar with, until the heart of the campus where the Gothic revival brick and ivy dorms had large DayGlo insects climbing up them, and a cartoon animal that was going to jump off a balcony with cartoon animals on the ground consoling it with a trampoline, again things I considered predictable. The campus had a large chapel, and the interior was impressively covered with video screens of mostly abstract, kaleidoscopic patterns, and mechanical works by five different artists. I went to a rest room and a trio of women were making cryptic jokes about being on hallucinogens and going to the woods to do more and I spoke to them briefly. Then I entered a corridor and every one in attendance was made to crowd into that single corridor, and I made a loud joke and no one laughed. Then we were made to get on buses for reasons I wasn't told, and basically drove around the block for a half hour and returned to the show. On the bus there was the view of a walking area by a river that had long been out of style, with people trying to rent out paddle boats and no customers, and there were about 12 floating art works in different directions that could be seen from the bus, 9 kites and several other mechanisms.

2011-08-30T21:12:00.003-04:00

Blacked out for 46 hours, recalling my emotional stake in electricity: I like to read by candlelight but someone told me once "it's hard on your eyes." What I like about electricity is reading at night, reading blogs instead of newspapers, pushing buttons on a laptop that make books appear in the mail, some movies. Every way that electricity can make you stupider is utilized to the fullest, including by writers. This past week I've been into Dubuffet's writings, quite helpful and freeing, including "every year there are small discoveries like the telephone or the airplane, and these small discoveries ultimately have no importance for man's mind, his condition, or his sense of life. When a Parisian who's got gas and electricity in his home speaks with a villager who cooks in a fireplace and uses a kerosene lamp, it won't take him long to realize that the villager is nevertheless not supider than he, and that things like gas and electricity are trivial, highly trivial matters, that in no way modify or even scratch the position or structure of man."

What I was driving at with Matta was first described by his precursor Duchamp: "Simply, I thought of the idea of a projection, of an invisible fourth dimension, something you couldn't see with your eyes. Since I found that one could make a cast shadow from a three dimensional thing, any object whatsoever - just as the projecting of the sun on the earth makes two dimensions - I thought that, by simple intellectual analogy, the fourth dimension could project an object of three dimensions, or, to put it another way, any three-dimensional object, which we see dispassionately, is a projection of something four-dimensional, something we're not familiar with." This is at the heart of what is accurately called conceptualism, when conceptualism is being helpful to expression - the combination of the retinal and the non- or super-retinal, the invisible dimension which the literary art has through the centuries attempted to illustrate in different ways.

2011-08-29T14:48:00.002-04:00

I'm at the community library, still blacked out.

Supposedly Roberto Matta was one to read any theory that may possibly apply to painting, and there was an early period of about six years when he would mostly use a blue-yellow color scheme, so I am entertaining the notion that this period was influenced by Goethe.. perhaps influenced also by Turner's application of Goethe. Turner's Deluge series has been at the Tate for some time. I generally don't have editors influencing my thought process, but a large press editor who lives in a flooded area was staying here and when I told him about the Tate, he said that it was possible Matta saw the image in a book. See what I mean! That ruins my whole practice of trying to GPS an artist's movements in order to chart their influence tree - artists see things in books. My main point, though, is that both Turner and Matta used the symbolic aspects of color (day/light, night/darkness) both in representatation and as emotional prompts, to stage an allegorical realm - Turner using the image of a shaved Moses in After the Deluge and Matta developing his own iconography for this practice. The storm was itself relaxing for me, nothing weighty flying around and less death than anticipated. I took in practically the whole thing in my observation chair with only a 2.5 hour sleep break Saturday night, there appeared a mosaic of the ocean for which I had left out the painted tiles and the waves put each in a separate space, some words so shaking their obstacles.

2011-08-27T14:51:00.004-04:00

Turner's most primary application of Goethe's theories of color in his Deluge series (1843, a year after the painting in yesterday's post) was that blue is the primary derivative of darkness (Evening)...

and yellow the derivative of light (Morning)...

2011-08-26T23:33:00.005-04:00

Hard hat, goggles, Turner books that can get wet. Took in some folks from the shore that lavished me with gifts but evicted them because they were interrupting my train of thought and compromising my latest literary affectations.

2011-08-23T14:34:00.007-04:00

I was writing about books as a physical phenomenon this hour when the East Coast earthquake happened and a few books fell, a very mild affair (5.8 in Virginia) that played on the locals' cluelessness of such things. My first. Of course I didn't think it was an earthquake, and the only explanation I could muster was that there was a very large animal on the roof, although no particular species could credibly fit the bill for size, behavior, or proximity, so it became a sort of hypothetical animal - perhaps human or partially human - that adopted its own mythological dimensions, and I circumnavigated the house with a baseball bat to satiate my curiosity about this animal and make sure it was not rummaging through my desk.

Years back I was going out to write in a small shack in the yard at 3 am where I had my computer set up, and apparently a passer by called the cops, so when I was immersed in a paragraph I looked through the window to see a SWAT team making its way through the brush towards me. The light was on above me and when they saw me typing they got back in the van and left. I thought, "this must be a good paragraph."

2011-08-21T21:15:00.002-04:00

I've actually been working on some reviews of recent books of poetry.. six in all, for here or elsewhere. Three of them are positive, one is mixed, two are negative. I'm thinking of making one of the positives more mixed and giving one of the negatives a better consideration. I did "Friday capsules" a while back and was going to do five the following week, but wanted to re-read a book I was going to pan, that I read but didn't buy, but never did so.

I have criticized logrolling, but I think if logrolling were a major crisis people would react differently to it. If you don't like the state of criticism, do it better. Obviously as someone who has defended Silliman's blogging, that was for me sort of a formative experience of contemporary criticism, and I was motivated by respect for him, but not so formative as I thought there was anything unusual going on, as I expected there to be some backlashes against what he was doing. A lot of the "lack" of negative criticism of small press books arises from the feeling that they are up against enough. But Silliman's crit often took the form of criticizing the stylistic foundations of works that were well realized, which is often the most useful negative criticism rather than "so-and-so is a lightweight." Cahiers du Cinema, when negative, criticized the foundations of works that were well realized.

I don't think film or art criticism has done much to improve those genre. The negative reviews of Andrew Sarris seem suspect to me, even if his positive reviews make me want to see a film. What film reviews do best is publicize the product in the newspapers, but this has comprehensively resulted in a declining medium. Most negative art reviews I read are garbage. Frank O'Hara's art commentary, such as it was, set the standard for only being positive in what he said, even when quietly acting to impose limitations on the medium. Ashbery says he only reviews art that he is very interested in, i.e. positive. The others in that town mostly followed suit. There is no golden age of literary criticism. Thomas Mann presumably writing Lukacs into the Magic Mountain was contrary to pattern, the way most good things are in this racket. What we have now is a vast improvement over what we had 40 years ago.

But in general I have been trying to focus on finishing up creative things in recent months and my internet interactions have been unfortunately limited to responding to things that really irritate me. I have enjoyed some recently published books. I would perhaps like at some point to get a lot of free books in the mail and gab about them, but I have difficulty - or cultivate difficulty - with what I'm writing as it is, and don't need to seek out more distraction.

2011-08-18T00:46:00.002-04:00

Enrique Morente recorded two albums in the mid-90s about Frederico García Lorca, one collaboration with the rock band Lagartija Nick called Omega with lyrics from Poet in New York and a follow up called Morente-Lorca, which concludes with a stirring elegy in collaboration with the Bulgarian Female Choir:

I just found a live version of this for Spanish television with the choir which is quite dramatically enacted but medleys into the sudden (spoiler alert) appearance of Lagartija Nick for a different tune.. I would have liked to have heard the whole song on its own live..

Speaking of cantaores, someone uploaded my two favorite El Lebrijano songs, which are from his album Grandes Cantaores de Flamenco adapting verses from the Sermon of the Mount (Spanish versions in comments section):

Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth,
But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven..
Behold the birds of the air: for they sow not, neither
do they reap, nor gather into barns;
And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin:
And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

(from Matthew 6: 19-29)

Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's
clothing..
Enter ye in at the narrow gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way,
that leadeth to destruction..
Ye shall know them by their fruits.
Inwardly they are ravening wolves
Do men
gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?
Beware of false prophets..

(from Matthew 7: 13-16)

Manolo Sanlúcar is on guitar in those two tracks.. of whom there's a fair amount of footage online such as in the Saura film with Diego Carrasco singing "I am a gypsy, from the salt of Cádiz" and the women in the back singing "ay, lemon seller, give me some lemonade.."

Also lest I forget I found 29 seconds of an early 60's TV appearance by veteran Colombian actress Dora Catavid singing "Se Llama Lucia Cristal" surrounded by two guys dressed as elephants:

2011-07-16T14:43:00.000-04:00

bloo
d-on
i

ce-f
or-so
o th
say ma
de in th
shade-to
face
th-sun
less
dead

2011-07-16T14:01:00.002-04:00

Ah.. Qui me rendra mon pays.. Haiti.. C'est toi mon seul paradis.. Haiti.. Ah.. Dieu me rappelle.. Tes forêts si belles.. Tes grands horizons.. Loin de tes rivages

La plus belle cage
N'est qu'une prison
Oui.. Mon désir, mon cri d'amour
Haiti..
C'est de te revenir un jour

Oh, beau pays bleu.. Bien loin, bien loin sous d'autres cieux.. Je vivais des jours heureux.. Mais tout est fini..
Seule dans mon exil aujourd'hui
Je chante, le coeur meurtri

Oui ! mon désir mon cri d'amour
Haiti
C'est de te revenir un jour
Haiti...

(emphasis mine)

2011-07-10T20:35:00.004-04:00

In addition to Frank O'Hara's statement that Twombly was "witty and funereal" and CA Conrad's poem where "we realize we're driving in Cy Twombly's paintings," I recall Robert Creeley talking about how he walked through a Twombly show after exhibition hours and the custodial staff was having an animated conversation, pointing out different parts of the paintings with their mops... & a conversation I had with a guard at Philly's installation "I'm going to tell my neice about this" "Why your neice" "She paints.. She can do this because she's 8" "Then she should" "But I keep telling people, it has a meaning." In 1994 Twombly sculpted the Thermopylae series, each of which contain insciptions from Cavafy's poem of the same name:

Honor to those who in their lives
are committed and guard their Thermopylae.
Never stirring from duty;
just and upright in all their deeds,
but with pity and compassion too;
generous whenever they are rich, and when
they are poor, again a little generous,
again helping as much as they are able;
always speaking the truth,
but without rancor for those who lie.

And they merit greater honor
when they forsee (and many do foresee)
that Ephialtes will finally appear,
and in the end the Medes will go through.

tr: Rae Dalvin

2011-06-19T19:14:00.001-04:00

sss
ever
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land it-see

sss
peak
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i am)

not-t
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or-ever
euer

id
dice(e

What's up

2011-06-11T06:36:00.007-04:00

Julio Galán's show at the Mexican-owned Ramis Barquet (532 w24th, til July 9) is only 14 paintings, full of a tortured lyricism that rewards comparisons to a Cavafy sonnet. So taken in by this appearance of no comparisons too unfortunate am I that I've made up lineup cards for the Neo-expressionism - Venetian Renaissance masters game:

Basquiat ss
Eliz. Murray 1b
Clemente 2b
Galán lf
Baselitz rf
Cucci cf
M. Dumas c
Paladino 3b
Kitaj p

Tintoretto ss
Bellini c
Titian 1b
Giorgione p
Mategna cf
Veronese 2b
Lotto 3b
Palma rf
Bassano lf

OK, perhaps that's a one-sided game but my point seems to be that while the prolific get on base frequently (1-3 spots), the enigmatic master (batting cleanup) drives the metaphorical art ball further out by a combination of impenetrable subtext and a rethinking of painterly form. Piero della Francesco and Anselm Keifer are both pennant race acquisitions, btw. Though, as I said, small, this is Galán's first gallery show in New York since 2001, and since he hasn't had a museum retrospective since 1994, this is a show you don't want to miss. Galán's posthumous website is also quite good whether or not you can make it to the show.

On 24th the Salvatore Scarpitta tribute should be checked out at Boesky, 509, til June 18.

Marlborough's "Living in Havana" show (525 w25th, til June 18) features a series of conceptual works by Ernesto Rancaño, known around the Caribbean for his exceptional "baroque" paintings. At a show of Cuban art at the UN Office at Geneva in 2005, two nudes were taken down out of Rancaño's paintings, at which time the curator asked him to create a work for the International Labor Organization headquarters. What he came up with was "Noble ser" (left), a shovel covered with thorns, leading to the development of the other conceptual sculptures in this show including a ladder with thorns on it called "Ascension," a rope to escape being a figurine in a suit perched high on an obelisk called "The Escape," a phone with the earphone and microphone on opposite sides called "Wordless," and a horseshoe with a microscope on a man in suit.

Neo-expressionist midlife crisis in Bali (Ashley Bickerton, Lehmann Maupin, 540 w 26th til June 25) v. Neo-expressionist midlife crisis in the Hamptons (David Salle, Mary Boone, 541 w24th St til June 25). The artist in the Hamptons repeats himself more, while the artist in Bali felt enfranchised a few years back to rethink his art, winking at the brand he's now created for the international art market while finding interesting compositional effects in the personae he's turned to. The artist in the Hamptons adds deck chairs to the brand he created back in the day. The artist in Bali is in a shotgun wedding with Gauguin's legacy, having reacted to expat artists' Gauguin kitsch and the inability to "invent" his paradise for the Western mind, referring exclusively to the garish ubiquity of the culture he left behind, the artist in the Hamptons leaves his social surroundings intact.

Tony Shafrazi (544 w26th, til July 30) has some of the orignial R. Crumb drawings for Kafka for Beginners, amongst other things a graphic pep rally for writing in solitude, and quite a lot of Soviet film posters with Potemkin, Earth, and Man With the Movie Camera on a continuous loop. Kafka quotes found elsewhere: "Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself." "I need solitude for my writing; not 'like a hermit' - that wouldn't be enough - but like a dead man." "one can never be alone enough" “It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking . . . in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet.”

Louise Bourgeois (Cheim & Read, 547 w27th, til June 25) features works of the past decade made out of discarded fabrics, which freed up her color palette and made for other creative re-thinkings to surprise even to those who think they've seen all the LB combinations.

Speaking of fabric shows, Philly has Sandra Hicks this summer at ICA of much greater fabric scale, a fabric scale rarely scaled, with comparable artistry, til Aug 7.

At 535 West 22nd Street 2nd floor, a selection of the American master George Tooker just opened, at DC Moore til Aug 5.

Of course the John Richardson-curated "Picasso and Marie-Thérèse" show at Gagosian (522 West 21st Street, til July 15) is up, the third of what has happily become an annual tradition, and though at 80 works smaller than the "Mosqueteros" extravaganza (sob pout sob), the wide variety of materials makes for a feast even for those who've seen their fill of Marie-Thérèse stone heads and portraits. Uptown Gagosian features Arshile Gorky (980 Madison til July 1), around the corner from Baselitz' work from the 60s (Werner, 4 e77th til June 18).

I enjoyed Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung's parodies of the 2008 US presidential election, but his 10 new digital prints inspired by the Chinese Jasmine Revolution of the past few months provides a rare glimpse into the Chinese resistance, at Postmasters (459 w19th til July 9). Revolutionary dissident Ai WeiWei can be found on one digital print imprisoned in a logo of a chrysanthemum extract powdered drink and as the Buddhist god Guan Yin in another (left). A running theme is the Great Firewall of China, internet censorship including a ban on the word "Jasmine," which is expressed here both in the digital prints and a ping-pong table with the Great Wall in the place of the net. If you go as you should, take the brochure at the entrance in with you which explains the symbols and dark humor of each work.

Galan paintings: blue background: Llegando por mi, 1989; red: Los complices, 1987; maritime: The Black Pearl, 1990.

2011-06-02T02:56:00.011-04:00

Another addition to the top 30 films of the 00's:

12a. In the City of Sylvia (2007, d: José Luis Guerín) came out on dvd last week, and I hadn't seen it before though it has had the keyboards buzzing. I had just re-watched L'Eclisse, which is clearly an influence on Guerín, who avoids the gravity of Antonioni's subject matter in favor of the sights and sounds of the street, that full opening up to the faces, footsteps, reflections and shadows as in Jeanne Moreau's Milan encounters in La Notte or Monica Vitti's Messina stroll in L'Avventura. In the City is so referential that it seems to me like a second-gereration exercise rather than a strikingly original film, but this opening up to the particulars of the frame and soundtrack is so pleasurable and such a stark contrast to other current fare as to merit its cult status. The Rohmer influence also comes through very clearly, especially the third episode of Rendezvous in Paris in which "the painter" follows "the young woman" around the Marais after adjourning his date with "the Swedish girl" at the Picasso Museum. The knot in the back of the hair of this woman in the café presumably refers to that Anglo-American classic of the fixated male in urban romantic pursuit, Vertigo..

Though Antonioni said "the female consciousness is the best filter of reality I know," Guerín, like Rohmer in the Rendezvous episode, centers the film around the male consciousness. William Arrowsmith explained Antonioni's quotation "women provide less impeded access to the realities suppressed by the Faustian organization of the world. Since the actual structure of the Faustian world, especially those in Italy of these earlier films, is a male affair, and since Antonioni has mostly depicted male intellectuals - architects, writers, art critics, even stockbrokers, all of them clearly Faustian intellectuals insofar as they are manipulators of abstractions - his men exhibit fairly consistent traits..." Perhaps coincidental or not is a factor that I don't think has been touched on much, the narrative structure of In the City's debt to Goethe, about whom Guerín made an earlier seven minute short (in the extras) called In the City of Lotte. At the age of 21 Goethe lived in Strasbourg, the City of Sylvia, where he was introduced to German folk songs by the slightly older Johann Gottfried von Herder, and fell in love with the country girl Friederike Brion, about whom Goethe's folk song Heidenröslein was written:

Once a boy saw a little rose standing,
Little rose of the field,
She was so young and beautiful,
He dashed there quickly to see her near,
Beholden with abundant joy,
Little rose, little rose, little rose red,
Little rose of the field.

The boy then said: “I shall pick thee,
Little rose of the field.”
The little rose said: “I shall stick thee,
That you’ll always think of me,
And, I’ll not want to suffer it.”
Little rose, little rose, little rose red,
Little rose of the field.

Still the rough boy picked the rose,
Little rose of the field.
The little rose fought thus and pricked,
No prose of pain could help her,
Alas, she must suffer it yet.
Little rose, little rose, little rose red,
Little rose of the field.

..so if In the City seems to me at first to take the atmosphere of Antonioni while forgoing the master's use of these forms to reflect on the "Faustian world," it returns to a pre-Faustian male consciousness of one who did perhaps the most to decipher that world.

Update: Also, Balthus seems to be a big influence: both the portraiture and the street scenes, in which guys are constantly carrying things across the frame.

2011-05-27T14:22:00.015-04:00

"The duty of the right eye is to plunge into the telescope, whereas the left eye interrogates the microscope."
-Leonora Carrington (1916-2011)

A little quibble: (note: after I contacted the Daily Telegraph, they corrected the obit. Email me if you require a copy of the rant.)

Also, speaking of the lost loves of Loplop, the red knots will be in Delaware Bay feasting on horseshoe crab eggs for another week or so, and can be seen on the Jersey side here (where I saw them) or here or on the Delaware side. Since horseshoe crabs are 250 million years old and have existed in other forms for another 200 million years, and birds predate the dinosaurs, this has been going on for a very long time, but the number of red knots migrating to the Arctic Circle from Tierra del Fuego to mate is only a quarter of what it was thirty years ago. (PBS special) They're lighter than an apple but their tendency to fly in groups of 100 or so, provoked at a moment's notice (such as if you step within 40 feet of them) which can commence a week in the air, never gets tiresome.

2011-05-21T17:55:00.014-04:00

Only a week after Mexican poet Javier Sicilia's son - declared innocent by police - died as a result of the drug war in Cuernavaca, he had organized marches in 16 Mexican cities. The poetry of Sicilia, who writes political columns for Proceso, reads like spiritual preparation for life's trials, in which he consults Catholic saints, world religions, Mexican modernism, Rilke's meditations and Cavafy's nostalgic sensualism. The pain felt sets in motion a vision of "a world not worthy of words" from where he shared with his lost son in what he called his final poem "the silence of the righteous," after which he organized a silent march of 20,000 people from Cuernavaca to Mexico City.

In Sicilia's "Meister Eckhart," about the theologian whose doctrine of "disinterestedness" has been compared to Buddhism: "the meditation of naked gaze/ went beyond silence," Silicia goes on to describe how the silence and absence was greeted with divine presence. "Vigil," a sonnet for the composer Manuel Ponce, refers to no sound other than "the murmur under the aurora." Octavio Paz noted how Mexican rituals recover time and memory: "The fiesta occurs in an enchanted world: time is transformed to a mythical past or a total present." (Labyrinth of Solitude 50) "(The fiesta) is a break in the sequence of time and the irruption of a present which periodically returns without yesterday or tomorrow. Each poem is a Fiesta, a precipitate of pure time." (Paz, Mexican Poetry 41) In such a land of ritual, eternal themes are passed on from place to place and person to person, so the story of Thérèse of Lisieux - who influenced Bergson, Kerouac, and Merton, in Alfonso Reyes' hands is a Cubist "being beside me," is in Sicilia's a testament of sacrifice, in which the poet is absent and his commentary is minimal. Reyes (right) instilled in Mexicans a belief that "literature was more than a vocation or a profession, it was a religion.. the writer's first obligation is fidelity to his language. The writer has no other instrument but words." (Labyrinth 163-4)

Mexican poetry went through a period at the beginning of the 20th Century when it imitated the Parnassans, until Enrique González Martínez (left) decided to "wring the swan's neck." The erroneous belief that this was a reference to the Nicaraguan Rubén Darío underscored how this poem set forth what would define Mexican modernism in relation to other traditions. Where Darío would give way in Nicaragua to Ernesto Cardinal's Liberation Theology and political testimony, González Martínez' spiritual imagery, written by a traditional politician opposed to Madero's revolution, was kept separate from the political, setting the standard for Mexican modernism and thereafter. "Grace" is found in "interpretation" rather than appearances, the signified and not the signifier:

Wring the swan's neck who with deceiving plumage
inscribes his whiteness on the azure stream:
he merely vaunts his grace and nothing feels
of nature's voice or the soul of things.

Every form eschew and every language
whose processes with deep life's inner rhythm
are out of harmony... and greatly worship
life, and let life understand your homage.

See the sapient owl who from Olympus
spreads his wings, leaving Athene's lap,
and stays his silent flight on yonder tree.

His grace is not the swan's, but his unquiet
pupil, boring into the gloom, interprets
the secret book of the nocturnal spill.

(tr: Samuel Beckett)

Paz wrote in Labyrinth of Solitude "At the beginning of his eighth Duino Elegy, Rilke says that the "creature," in his condition of animal innocence, "beholds the open"... unlike ourselves, who never look forward, toward the absolute. Fear makes us turn our backs on death, and by refusing to contemplate it we shut ourselves off from life, which is a totality that includes it. The "open" is where contraries are reconciled, where light and shadow are fused. This conception restores death's original meaning: death and life are opposites that compliment each other. Both are halves of a sphere that we, subjects of time and space, can only glimpse.. This recognition can only take place through detachment: he must renounce his temporal life and his nostalgia for limbo, for the animal world. He must open himself out to death if he wishes to open himself out to life. Then he will be 'like the angels."(61) Sicilia's poem "The Open" distills in his own mind Rilke's imagery, referencing in Jen Hofer's translation "the animal advancing low to the earth toward the Open, a back and a forward in the occurrence of the infinite" the angel "suspended in the eternal" concluding with a utilization of Rilke's "is it different for lovers?" finding in their embrace "a faint crack/ in the porcelain dawn of the Open."

In a best-selling - though not translated into English - book published by Random House, Anabel Hernandez (above) accuses Mexican President Felipe Calderón and Gerardo García Luna, Secretary of Public Security, of having made a pact with Joaquín "Chapo" Guzmán (on book cover) and the Sinaloa Cartel, and last month filed an official complaint of death threats against her made by García Luna. On December 15, 2010, Gerardo Fernandez Jose Noronha distributed 300 copies of one of Hernandez' books at the end of a parliamentary session as a Christmas gift, asking for the resignation of Calderón and his government. Says Hernandez, "I think it is not a failed war but a phony war." Journalist Diego Enrique Osorno has published a book making similar allegations.

In 2006, several marches on behalf of former Mexico City mayor and presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador in the capitol's Zocalo, alleging that Calderón's victory was a result of electoral fraud, attracted more than a million Mexicans, (below) with tent cities set up to accommodate the protesters from day to day. Over 800,000 ballots were added and over 700,000 were missing, 60% of the ballot stations had inaccurate counts. With a one term presidential limit, electoral fraud is a way for past presidents to hold onto power, and both Carlos Salinas and Vincente Fox were actively involved in rigging the election.

Upon taking office, Calderón immediately declared his war on drugs, leading to the death of almost 40,000 people, about which Charles Bowden says "the Mexican government has announced they’ve made 53,000 drug arrests since they started this war. Less than two percent are the Sinaloa Cartel, the biggest one. I guess they haven’t had time." Congressman Manuel Clouthier, a member of Calderon's party, says "The Calderon government has been fighting organized crime in many parts of the republic, but has not touched Sinaloa.'" Policeman Luis Arturo Perez Torres says "I work in the police and because of this I know the government is protecting Chapo Guzman. It's hitting all the cartels but Chapo." Many of the protestors this weekend called for Calderón's resignation. After the protests, Calderón made a supposedly high profile bust of a Sinoloa operative. Also last month, legendary Gambino family attorney George Santangelo filed a two page motion in US federal court on behalf of Sinaloa kingpin Vicente “El Vicentillo” Zambada alleging "the FBI, the DEA and various Dept. of Homeland Security agents in Mexico were actually working with Zambada for more than five years." The US provides $1.3 billion annually to Mexico for military and juridical aid.

Sicilia, a self-described anarchist, has called for García Luna's resignation and drug legalization but is not endorsing a political party and spreads the blame around: "The political parties, the PAN, the PRI, the PRD, the PT, Convergencia, Nueva Alianza, the Panal, and the Verde have become a “partyacracy” from whose ranks emerge the nation’s leaders. In all of them there are links to crime and the mafias across the entire nation. With out a real cleaning up of their ranks and a total commitment to an ethics policy the public will have to ask ourselves in the next elections, 'For what cartel and for what power will we have to vote?”

In 2006, the PAN party had very low approval ratings, but Calderón's approval rating was high enough for him to run close enough to López Obrador to steal the election. After Calderón's highly unpopular drug war, those not in the higher echelons of the Sinoloa cartel or money laundering for US banks have a low opinion of PAN while its candidate, perhaps Calderón's campaign manager Josefina Vasquez Mota, will likely face off against López Obrador again next year. López Obrador said "the ones who defame, slander, and accuse me are those that think they are the lords and masters of Mexico. They are the ones who want to privatize the oil and electric industries.." CSIS, a US thinktank seeking to privatize Mexican oil, reported this month (pdf) that "although López Obrador himself contemplated a role for the private sector in oil production prior to the election of 2006, he has since moved firmly away from that position" that "A PAN president would likely try again to get far-reaching reform of the oil sector" and the old guard PRI "is once again the most intriguing of the three options.. it is the most likely to control Congress, yet.. has hard-line groups within it who continue to resist (oil privatization)."

Reformist president Lazaro Cárdenas expropriated Mexican oil in 1938, which had the effect of wiping out the prosperity of boom towns like Tampico. But of course, once private companies take over the oil, they take over the government. Would the politicians and media rush to war in Iraq if the US's oil was publicly owned?

Bowden, when asked if anything gave him hope, replied: "Certainly. To start with, the war on drugs has to end. We can’t build any more prisons. Second, the endurance of the Mexican people." Bingo.

The Program Strikes Back

2011-05-13T13:41:00.010-04:00

I remember a period leading up to three years ago when I would think "why is Dickinson College organizing readings that are relevant?," that surprise and bewilderment being its own phenomenon, not feeling the need to investigate the matter further. Then the fluke was eliminated: I found out that a psychology professor with literary taste, Richard Abrams, had been organizing the readings, that no member of the English department attended them, and that Abrams, despite a top score on RateMyProfessor.com, had been denied tenure - as a psych professor - at the insistence of a coterie of English professors who were in opposition to the readings. Though Dickinson doesn't have an MFA program, both the unusual nature of the readings and the actions taken against the professor of good taste provide a window into to what, precisely, is the source of the "mediocrity" that could "make all writers sound alike" which Mark McGurl finds alleged in the "numerous.." "broadsides" on the subject of MFAs.

That's the first thing I think about when McGurl starts to speculate about how the intervention of the workshop could have improved modernism, citing the example of Thomas Wolfe, who was actually the only modernist of his caliber to get a graduate degree, but despite the Harvard MA, his being critically slammed coincidentally the same year the Iowa workshop opened suggests for McGurl what could have been. I had a rebellious, suburban-dwelling writer tell me one evening that Thomas Wolfe was his favorite writer, and my conditioned response was something along the lines of "he's out of style, his form has its problems," causing him to be annoyed and discouraged at my reflex to affect adapted cultivation. I'm not going to contemplate what effect hanging around school and that era's publishing world had on Wolfe's narrative form, but McGurl's tactic of cherry picking Wolfe as one example of the workshop potentially "improving" a modernist begs the question: what if the MFA programs told him he has to soften or hybridize his view of Asheville, or else!, and his status as a junior functionary in a bureaucracy caused him to squelch what courage he could muster to ruffle the feathers he ruffled in his novels? Who would read him then?

But of course the cadre of post-WW2 writers that did or didn't officially Master their Fine Art, listed by McGurl in his recent interview, perhaps out of a perceived need to improve upon the New Yorker list, is compared to that sole practitioner Wolfe, representing Modernism, out of McGurl's desire to game the contest. Comparing the merit of modernism in fiction to workshop post-modernism is too one-sided to occupy my time or yours, as well as the question of whether Joyce, Dos Passos, Hemingway, Stein, Beckett, Woolf, Faulkner, etc. (this being a Program discussion, we consider only the Anglo-Americans) would have been "improved" upon if they had to get permission for their literary impulses from those that upheld the prevailing fashions of the local literary bureaucracy. Nor is it worthwhile to discuss in depth how McGurl ignores all of Elif Batuman's useful points, including her citation of some of the aspects of "novelistic alienation" that Cervantes' formed for what "hasn’t yet been fully described," and focuses instead on attacking her perceived privilege and "elitism," then affecting a socio-economic-political hybridization by playing off straw men such as the "Deranged" and that prefabricated and discredited spokesman for a majority of the global population "Comrade Dour the Maoist," to whom he reports that this isn't "after the revolution" when "tuition will only be 95 cents".. "literary production cannot realistically be shared with the masses in any world we are ever likely to see... We need them working at the register." Considering the increasing numbers of non-Harvard grads (and some Harvard grads) falling below the poverty level as he writes these words, more African-Americans behind bars than were slaves at the onset of the Civil War, maybe we've reached the point where McGurl has outlived his use as apologist for the Program Era, as the extent to which he truly reflects the Era, which is, in fact, only the Program Era to the self-important, jingoistic myopia of some within the program, would inspire a tedious and nebulous debate. My own internet discussions on this topic have not so much centered around the logistics of providing everyone with an MFA, but of the practice of some in the Program culture actively attempting to devalue the literary merit of the people who haven't, over the years, bought in to the program and submitted their work to those "with the requisite leisure to cultivate themselves," including the work of many authors who couldn't afford to get a BA.

Joyce appropriated many aspects of Rabelais in especially his later works, but perhaps the most important borrowing was the dismissal of the assumptions of genre, which Rabelais was free to do because, as Bakhtin indicated "his place in the hierarchy of genres.. was the lowest of all... the appraisal of Rabelais as a merely amusing and gay author was already beginning to take shape. Such was also, as we know, the fate of Cervantes, whose Don Quixote was listed for a long time amongst the amusing books of light literature," citing the slightly younger Montaigne's characterization of Rabelais' and Boccaccio's "amusing works.. worthy to divert us." We see repeatedly in national traditions the invention that occurs before the perceived laws of the novel are a known entity: Lermontov, from whom Tolstoy borrowed and refined, both Sterne and as Batuman cites, Austin, occurring at the beginnings of the British novel. When Shakespeare and Marlowe wrote their plays, they had no idea what the laws governing their genre were, but now we know clearly what a play is and isn't because the drama schools tell us. Dante and the troubadours, Homer, etc etc. We in The Program Era now know what a novel is and isn't, what a poem is and isn't, and if a psych professor in Pennsylvania has a less fixed view of what makes a poem, he may have to start looking for other employment.

Cheers to all from here, where I know less about genre every day!

2011-05-10T16:49:00.012-04:00

I had been meaning to update my Top 30 Films of the Decade to include films that I hadn't seen by January 2010, uninterested in debating when decades begin and end. I don't generally change much on old posts but I snuck Cristian Nemescu's California Dreamin' onto the original list and deleted a film that I saw on a particularly romantic evening when anything with a working projector would have made the list.

16a La Virgin de la Lujuria (2002) d: Arturo Ripstein. It would have been hard for me to have sought out the films that Ripstein, a Buñuel friend and collaborator, made with his wife, screenwriter Paz Alicia Garciadiego, until recent dvd releases, and I suppose it would have been good to have seen them earlier but it's been fun to save 'em for when I got to them. Garciadiego's scripts are arguably the best in the hemisphere, though they're best appreciated by Mexiphiles that like Beckett and Genet and can be tedious for others. La Perdicion de los Hombres is particularly claustrophobic and tedious, but that's sort of the point... a truly inspired script. Such is Life can hang with Pasolini's or Von Trier's Medea. Hard to choose one, but La Virgin is the most over the top and has apparently the biggest budget. Crazy Carnival.
16b California Dreamin' (2007) d: Cristian Nemescu. Armand Assante, Jamie Elman, Răzvan Vasilescu, Maria Dinulescu. Also called Endless (Nesfârșit), some of the scenes seem a bit endless because they were shot and assembled for coverage, and then the 27-year-old director died tragically in a car crash. In some scenes you find yourself saying, "OK, I get the joke/point" and it could/would have been halved in the editing room. Subversive political comedy of the age of NATO peacekeeping written by Nemescu, Tudor Voican, and Catherine Linstrum and a promising directorial career cut short. Marilena from P7.
21a Alamar (2009) d: Pedro González-Rubio. Natan Machado Palombini, Jorge Machado. A family film on my list.
21b Spoken Word (2009) d: Victor Nunez. Kuno Becker, Ruben Blades. Could have been below on my Films About Writers list but it's easier to put it here. Nunez operates the 16mm camera on all his films. Coastlines.
21c 35 Shots of Rum (2008) d: Claire Denis. Mati Diop, Alex Descas. Variety calls the classroom discussion referencing Frantz Fanon and Joseph Stiglitz "unnecessarily pedantic." White Material, The Intruder.
21d The Yacoubian Building (2006) d: Marwan Hamed. Adel Imam, Nour El Sharif. Alaa Al Aswany's novel marked a new era in Egyptian fiction and this sprawling 165-minute adaptation added to its cultural significance. Al Aswany was very active in the protests that toppled Hosni Mubarak and historians will assess what effect the novel and film had on them.
22b The Wedding Director (2006) d: Marco Bellocchio. Sergio Castellitto, Donatella Finocchiaro. Godard liked Bellocchio's early work and I swear by some of it - I like to sit back and feel like the director's a master and Bellocchio is one of the few that can deliver that. Film references, others may not like this one. My Mother's Smile.

Also, prompted by the folks at HTML Giant, my top 15 films about writers, in chronological order, not including writer-films that made my Top 15 like The Lady from Shanghai, The World of Apu, Stalker, Edvard Munch, and Alphaville:

Orpheus (1949, Jean Cocteau),The River (1951, Jean Renoir), La Notte (1961, Michelangelo Antonioni), Through a Glass Darkly (1961, Ingmar Bergman), Contempt (1963, Jean-Luc Godard), The Lonely Wife (1964, Satyajit Ray), Hunger (1966, Henning Carlsen), Claire's Knee (1970, Eric Rohmer), Adrift on the Nile (1971, Hussein Kamal), Christ Stopped at Eboli (1979, Francesco Rosi), The Singing Detective (1986, Jon Amiel), 36 Fillette (1988, Catherine Briellat), Uranus (1990, Claude Berri), The Dark Side of the Heart (Part 1, 1992; Part 2, 1992, Eliseo Subiela), Late August, Early September (1998, Olivier Assayas).

Update 5-11: I forgot about Resnais' 1977 film Providence, that inspirator for bipartite David Lynch story lines which is a no-brainer for the writer-film list but which I haven't seen in a while as it's not on dvd... but alas it's on Youtube, in, of course, that crazy language called English, scripted by David Mercer. I've surely forgotten something else as well. Update: Strick's Ulysses. Update 5-12: Sant Takuram, The Third Man, Madame Bovary (1949), Lawrence of Arabia, Zorba the Greek, I The Worst of All, The End of the Affair, Wojazek, The Farewell, La Petite Lili, Reprise.

2011-04-25T16:19:00.007-04:00

In his cinematic essays, Deleuze mentions Brechtian 'jest,' "the link or knot of attitudes between themselves... [that] do not depend on a previous story" (Cinema 2 192), and that Brecht, like Lang, passes the act of judgement onto the viewer (139), but the conspicuous absence of reference to Brecht - or Brechtian theory in the hands of Benjamin or others - when writing about Ophüls, who named Brecht as one of his closest friends, is, I think, a result of Deleuze's sparring with the Frankfurt School over the legacy of Bergson and, by extension, dialectial materialism. Max Horkheimer's Zu Bergsons Metaphysik der Zeit complains that Bergson's generalities of time trivialize the truth of individual experience, its suffering, and unpleasant social realities, and in "Materialism and Metaphyics," Horkheimer decries "Bergson's depreciation of theoretical thinking" "defenselessness.. before any and all supernaturalist tendencies".. "helplessness in the face of spiritism and occultism".. "the neglect of the theoretical in favor of the bare immediate datum.. wholly robs philosophy of its illuminative effect" while years later, the dialectical Badiou credits the anti-dialectical Deleuze for "single-handedly.. secularizing Bergson." (AB's Deleuze 99) Lola Montès is film's closest thing to a full catalog of Brechtian effects, the parts of which were used with more intensity by Godard in the following decades. It's unclear whether or not Ophüls was influenced by Bergson, but as Badiou says of Deleuze "Bergson.. is his real master" (AB's D 38), Deleuze's interpretation of Lola Montès can be read as an attempt to view Brectian theater as an object within a Bergsonian whole.

Defining the crystal-image as the "formation of an image with two sides, actual and virtual" (Cinema 2 68), Deleuze sees the circus-track of Lola Montès and the round of episodes of La Ronde as his spinning crystal, with Lola (Martine Carol) being "thrust on stage" by the Circus Master (Peter Ustinov) in search of a virtual image of herself. After we are appraised of the physical toll the circus is taking on her, Lola asks the girl who plays her as a child about Lola-as-circus-attraction:

Lola: Do you like this?
Girl: Uh huh.
Lola: Do you still like it in the same way?
Girl: Oui madame. I hope it never ends.
Lola: (hugs her) You're right. Go...

The real Lola Montèz never performed in a circus and Ophüls was originally hired to make a film only about Lola's relationship with the Bavarian King Ludwig I. The Circus Master's cracking the whip while warning the audience of "a creature a hundred times more murderous than any beast in our menagerie" through whom "we'll show everything that women dream of doing, but lack the courage to do," whose "authentic revolution" in Bavaria is heralded by Lola impersonators juggling Lola heads and repeating in unison "authentique," may seem to some today - me at least - as a parody of Nietzsche ("the truth and nothing but the truth"), but the "bloodthirsty monster" and the whip go back to Félicien Champsaur's 1888 pantomine Lulu (left), from which it was also lifted by Frank Wedekind for his 1895 play Earth Spirit, and Champsaur's Lulu was loosely based on the stock character Colombine of the Commedia dell'arte, which was entrenched in French culture by the 17th Century. Another traditional theatrical device is that of the Bänkelsang (bench song, pictured below) technique which Ophüls got from Brecht's The Threepenny Opera, in which the balladeer (or Brechtian chorus) would stand on a bench and gesture to stories pictured on a scroll, the scroll of tableaux which opens and closes Lola Montès, doubling as an allegory of depth of field. The "bench song" was common in Italy in the 16th Century and dates back to 6th Century India. Brecht was against the presentation of iconic, essentializing characters and the film's implied distance from the descriptions of the exploitative circus master has led Lola Montès to be called a feminist film. Ophüls chose neither the subject matter nor did he want to shoot in color, but after Michael Powell, who turned down the film, colorfully filmed Ophüls' beloved Tales of Hoffman, he may have warmed to the idea of shooting a circus in color, deconstructing with Brechtian irony the Colombine/Lulu icon.

Bergman's classic b/w circus drama Sawdust and Tinsel had been shot in Sweden in February 1953 and released the same year, a year before Ophüls was signed to direct Lola, while Jean Renoir's color Commedia dell'arte farce The Golden Coach was released in early 1953. These three masterpieces provide a window to an era of itinerant performance long since vanished. All three were lambasted by the critics at the time and later praised by Andrew Sarris, who said of The Golden Coach: "To claim, as reviewers of the time did, that Renoir had failed to produce a convincing narrative, is to scorn Matisse and Picasso for not painting plausible pictures." The Golden Coach turned a profit, but the other two almost ended their director's careers: In the Cahiers du Cinéma interview with Truffaut and Rivette near the end of his life, a life which may have been cut short by stress over this film, Ophüls expressed optimism that Lola Montès would "slowly recoup its money," which it didn't. In addition to the trashing it took in the French press, the police stood in front of the Théâtre Marigny, a few feet from the Fourth Republic military displays on the Champs-Élysées, telling viewers to avoid the films of the "cosmopolitan" Ophüls.

For Ophüls, the episodic format used in Le Plaisir and La Ronde and the chorus of La Ronde function as what Walter Benjamin considered the modern form of allegory he found in Brecht's plays and Eisensteinian montage.. As Ophüls told costume designer Yuri (George) Annenkov (recounted in Masao Yamaguchi's essay For an Archaeology of Lola Montès): "Lola is merely an axis around which the drama unfolds.. this is not to.. minimize her role.. I am displacing the center of gravity.. she is the one who provokes the dramas that interest us, she is their trigger..." the tabloid femme who enters the viewer into the realm of the composer Franz Liszt, of Ludwig I, the artistically inclined King of Bavaria, grandfather of the more Wagnerian Ludwig II of Neuschwanstein Castle fame, as well as the domestic drama of her first husband, who digests the customs of his class with alcohol and calls her "the eternal victim." 'High art' and political power are represented in the circus by Lola's ascent on the trapeze into vertical space "higher, Lola, higher!," in which the middle classes are told that royalty trumps being Richard Wagner, who the king's ear doctor doesn't like "you could hear him from the bottom of a whale," or the "even greater and very famous Chopin," a spiral which The Circus Master mirrors himself while ascending a spiral staircase (common in Ophüls films) singing a song (referenced in Godard's My Life to Live) while the cameramen are instructed the change color filters in the middle of a shot, something that hadn't been done before because it was believed impossible. Vertical dimensions take on a significance throughout the film determined by the subculture around them: that of the hotel, the opera house, the baroque staircase at Ludwig's palace and at the event where she meets her first husband; the circus' symbolism of vertical space is equally contexual.

Unlike the "all-knowing interlocutor" that introduces La Ronde, the suspect character of the Circus Master warning us of Lola the "murderous creature" provides a Brechtian filter from empathy for the protagonists. There are very few shots of Lola's point of view: only that of the chandelier, accompanied by the repetition "remember the past?," corresponding to her red balloon as a little girl and setting up the 312-frame dissolve from the opening circus scene to the first recollection, seeing the Latin teacher (Oskar Werner, Truffaut's Jules) hiking through nature in a horizontal depth of field, later looking down at the Latin teacher - with whom she could have settled down with instead of taking up Ustinov's circus offer - from a second floor (ergo lower cost) hotel room, and the looking down before the climactic shot of the leap. Her gaze at cultural rituals like the society dance through the porthole of the ferry (with just a brief POV before her reaction), looking into the dormitory accommodation she so detests on the ferry to Europe, looking at the stars symbolizing her social ambitions at the bow of the boat, and the Bavarian military parade are mediated through the sight of her seeing.

Ophüls, normally evasive and coy, seemed to confide to the kindred spirit Annenkov, a renowned painter (right, Portrait of the dancer Elena Annenkov, 1917) who designed costumes for circus dramas in Russia, resulting in a book by Annenkov about Ophüls in French that hasn't been translated. Ophüls described to him how the color scheme of the circus was a virtual mirroring the actual: "In my film, the circus assumes precisely a symbolic sense... I want all colors to collide with each other in the arena of the circus, because my circus runs through an entire life, encompassing all its stages." If this sounds like Baudelaire's poem "Correspondences" ("through forests of symbols.. // Perfumes, sounds, and colors correspond..,") Ophüls wrote in a play called "Thoughts on Film" that "Baudelaire knew all about [the camera as a human eye] long before their were films" and then recited Baudelaire's prose poem "The Window": "A man looking out of an open window never sees as much as the same man looking directly at a closed window. There is no object more deeply mysterious, no object more pregnant with suggestion, more insidiously sinister, in short more truly dazzling than a window lit up from within by even a single candle. What we can see out in the sunlight is always less interesting than what we can perceive taking place behind a pane of windowglass. In that pit, in that blackness or brightness, life is being lived, life is suffering, life is dreaming...." This reference by Ophüls provides a key to not only the many shots through windows (the brothel in Le Plaisir, Lola looking through the porthole at the dance) but Ophüls' constant practice of placing screens and obstructions between the camera and the scene, something von Stroheim had done in Hollywood before him.

But as Andrew Sarris, the inventor of auteur theory, added to his 1962 proclamation "Lola Montes is in my unhumble opinion the greatest film of all time, and I am willing to stake my critical reputation, such as it is, on this one proposition above all others" (pdf) the 1969 update "I stand by that judgment.. I have been told by authorities in the field that it even fits into the pot [marijuana] scene as it swirls and swoops through space with its delirious director's camera," it is, most notably in the circus scenes, the symbolic encoding between the correspondences of sense, including color, vertical space, depth of field, memory, dolly shots, color filters, personae and caricatures, costume, representations of time and places, filtered through an all-encompassing Brechtian irony, that dispenses of acquired perceptive assumptions to return the viewer to state of child-like discovery, without the manipulation that often awaits children in theaters. As King Ludwig I was notorious for promoting the arts at the expense of the public, hard of hearing and lascivious, Ophüls turns this episode into a running cinematic allegory of sense: at the opera house, tapping his fingers to Lola's dances to music he can't hear, judging a painting by the duration of its production, having Lola replace cigars with pastries while they conspire to dismiss the university faculty, remarking next to a giant model ear at the doctor's office that "there are things I wish to hear nor see" while the white pamphlet against him enters a 76 frame dissolve into a riot scene, reading aloud Hamlet's "How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,/ Seem to me all the uses of this world" while the masses riot outside.

In the final shot (don't watch it if you don't want to see the final shot) the virtual image of Lola and the circus reflects back to the actual phenomonen of the cinema, wherein audience with the former mistress of kings and composers is being offered to the masses for a small fee, deposited into the head of the Lola statue, while the camera pans back at Lola in her animal cage, the cinematic image that André Bazin has likened to a sarcophagus, shrinking behind a crowd of men in hats which can be seen as both a egalitarian celebration and Brechtian alienation-effect, which I fancy to be a precedent to Antonioni's distancing of the female protagonist in L'Eclisse, but as in L'Eclisse retains the melancholy - enhanced by the melody of the barrel organ - of this distancing, both from the empathy towards the protagonist and the circus culture that is vanishing on the horizon of time, blocked off at last by the closing of the Bänkelsang scroll and its illusory perspectives and separated from our eye by that single leaf spiraling in the air.

English translation:
Circus Master (aside): I was terrified, you know. I couldn't live without you. Thank you.
Lola: It'll be alright.
Circus Master (aloud): Treat yourself to a good time, gentlemen. Come and see Lola! Only one dollar!.. Mind your cigar, sir! Roll up, gentlemen! An unforettable souvenir for a dollar!.. Step right up! Only one dollar. It's next to nothing. You won't regret your money, gentlemen!

2011-04-18T21:46:00.007-04:00

Conveniently one of the directors on my list for the top 15 films meme has a photography show - two shows - at Peter Blum so I can combine the two items into one post. First the films, in chronological order by color format with director noted:

b/w: L'Atalante (1934, Jean Vigo), The Lady from Shanghai (1947, Orson Welles), The World of Apu (1959, Satyajit Ray), Viridiana (1961, Luis Buñuel Portolés), Accatone (1961, Pier Paolo Pasolini), L'Eclisse (1962, Michelangelo Antonioni), Alphaville (1965, Jean-Luc Godard), Persona (1966, Ingmar Bergman).

Color: Lola Montès (1955, Max Ophüls), Muriel, or the Time of a Return (1963, Alain Resnais), Edvard Munch (210 minute version, 1974, Peter Watkins), Heart of Glass (1976, Werner Herzog), Stalker (1979, Andrei Tarkovsky), Sans Soleil (1983, Chris Marker), A Passage to India (1984, David Lean).

While I'm mentioning Heart of Glass there's an online clip of the prophecy scene from the recent re-release:

"The crystal is expression. Expression moves from the mirror to the seed. It is the same circuit that passes through three figures, the actual and the virtual, the limpid and the opaque, the seed and the environment. In fact, the seed is on the one hand the virtual image which will crystallize an environment which is at present amorphous; but on the other hand the latter must have a structure which is virtually crystallizable, in relation to which the seed now plays the role of actual image. Once again the actual and the virtual are exchanged in an indiscernibility which on each occasion allows distinction to survive... Perhaps this is also the perspective from which to understand the splendour of the images in Herzog's Heart of Glass, and the film's double aspect. The search for the alchemical heart and secret, for the red crystal, is inseparable from the search for cosmic limits, as the highest tension of the spirit and the deepest level of reality. But the crystal's fire will have to connect with the whole range of manufacturing for the world, for its part to stop being a flat, amorphous environment which ends at the edge of a gulf, and to reveal infinite crystalline potentialities in itself ('the earth rises up from the waters, I see a new earth...'). In this film Herzog has set out the greatest crystal-images in the history of the cinema." (Deleuze, The crystals of time from Cinema 2)

"It should not be hard for you to stop sometimes and look into the stains of walls, or ashes of a fire, or clouds, or mud or like places in which.. you may find really marvelous ideas." (Leonardo, Notebooks)

Chris Marker's Sans Soleil is the only documentary on the list, aiming straight at the time problem. Interestingly the English version replaces the Racine quote "The distance between countries compensates somewhat for the excessive closeness of time" at the beginning with T.S. Eliot's "Because I know that time is always time/ And place is always and only place/ And what is actual is actual only for one time/ And only for one place" then:

If you haven't seen it, I think it would be interesting to read the text of the voice overs before hearing them with the images, am not as sure about reading snippets out of context, but can't resist a few (in order of appearance):

"All women have a built-in grain of indestructibility. And men's task has always been to make them realize it as late as possible."...

"Pac-Man is the most perfect graphic metaphor of man's fate. He puts into true perspective the balance of power between the individual and the environment. And he tells us soberly that though there may be honor in carrying out the greatest number of victorious attacks, it always comes a cropper."...

"I have listened to the stories of former guerrilla fighters, who had fought in conditions so inhuman that they pitied the Portuguese soldiers for having to bear what they themselves suffered. That I heard. And many more things that make one ashamed for having used lightly—even if inadvertently—the word guerrilla to describe a certain breed of film-making." ....

"In Portugal—raised up in its turn by the breaking wave of Bissau—Miguel Torga, who had struggled all his life against the dictatorship wrote: “Every protagonist represents only himself; in place of a change in the social setting he seeks simply in the revolutionary act the sublimation of his own image.” ...

"I envy (video artist Hayao Yamaneko) in his 'zone,' he plays with the signs of his memory. He pins them down and decorates them like insects that would have flown beyond time, and which he could contemplate from a point outside of time: the only eternity we have left." ....

This quote about Guinea-Bissau: "Amilcar Cabral was not afraid of ambiguities—he knew the traps. He wrote: 'It's as though we were at the edge of a great river full of waves and storms, with people who are trying to cross it and drown, but they have no other way out, they must get to the other side.'”... reminds me of Graham Greene's theological crisis at the end of his Haiti novel The Comedians, in which Duvalier's opponents are forced into a tragic, mortal struggle against his armies, most pertinent now that the Obama-backed puppet Micky Martelly, winner of a fixed election, is bringing back the death squads which "openly claim to be Duvalierists." The film version with Burton, Liz Taylor, Ustinov, and Alec Guinness is also recommended.

If you prefer your documentaries to be about a specific political or historical topic, watch your favorite after Marker's A Grin Without a Cat and see how it holds up. You're hanging with Prokofiev and Shostakovich if you think you can write music for Eisenstein footage, and Luciano Berio's re-orchestration of Luigi Boccherini's Night Music of the Streets of Madrid after the opening voice over is up to the propagandist task.. English translation: "I didn't see Potemkin when it first came out, I was too young. I remember the shot of the meat - definitely - with the maggots, the little tent where the dead man was laid out, and when the first person stops in front of it, and the bit when the sailors take aim on the brink of the battleship and just when the officer gives the order to fire, a huge sailor with a big mustache shouts a word which spreads itself all over the screen: 'БРАТЬЯ!' ('BROTHERS!')"

Stills from Sans Soleil were shown at Blum three years ago, and Marker's attentions have shifted from Japan to Korea for part of this show, utilizing a range of effects, but much of the show takes place in the subway, displaying the comic and tragic dislocations, paratactical realms, play of surfaces, reflections, and windows that have inspired many.

In recent years Marker has inserted master paintings that resemble the female passengers in the photographs, thus avoiding what Baudelaire called the "war of the imagination" caused by presenting the circumstantial without the eternal, which Piri' Miri Muli' readers recall from the third paragraph of last July 4th's post, followed in the next paragraph by Baudelaire's overview of beauty and time.

The Russian painter Semyon Faibisovich has for years documented the juxtapositions and reflections of cars and buses as well as other public places and has recently switched at times to photographs to achieve these same effects, focusing more frequently on the alienation and deprivation found in these settings.

2011-04-17T09:04:00.000-04:00

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Friday capsules

2011-04-15T14:16:00.007-04:00

Best American Poetry: The most literal poet in town spearheads the project, in the event someone out there doesn't understand his poetry.

Best American Fiction: The cover says Best European Fiction, but the first adjective is ludicrous and the second inaccurate, save for László Krasznahorkai's Venetian art story (a theme this blog didn't get from War & War. See, three sentences.) getting in through the grandfather clause (legitimacy anchor), featuring even a story called "Raymond is No Longer with Us - Carver is Dead" from Montenegro, a few hours' drive from the Camp Bondsteel Writers' Workshop.

I only get a chance to say "I don't praise many books here" a few times but I will use one for Kit Robinson's Determination, since Silliman is working 24/7 after having the nerve to apply for academic jobs despite no BA, thinking he knows something, and doesn't seem to have time for the the normal scathing aspersions he casts on those Language poets; Robinson sustains the context of a poem more than his earlier work for reasons that are reprieved in each case and maintains at times the structure of his early work with similar results.

Just in time for the lyric revival.. actually, no, I think I missed the lyric revival.. Buck Downs proffers a screen display of returned post cards, which is how Ray Johnson would have obtained his own postal works unless he'd spring for one of these mass produced portraits for the mantelpiece with writing attached.

2011-04-11T10:47:00.003-04:00

There comes the interval where the gang stands around arguing about weather patterns, which I'm convinced has little to do with the weather patterns. For Leonardo, laboring to keep the light in his inn, Socrates' disparaging of the sun is an allegory of sight and connotation, but for Socrates I think he suspects he can pull it off but he's not quite sure. Aragon wrote "The storm takes pity on the sea and tells me: let her be, the poor old thing. We were made for finer whores" because Lautreamont found the sea first, and, by extension, the wind (I typed window) driving the sea. So the storm, form escaping banality, even if "columns of mist start fly down" leads to "Business Opportunities too !!" Such is fortune that the weather doesn't even look at the pictures.

2011-03-26T08:24:00.011-04:00

Goya's dog wasn't shown to the public until after Turner's death, but Turner was most likely aware of the controversy over composition aroused in 1810 by Casper David Friedrich's The Monk by the Sea (below), when Turner was 35. Turner's Sunrise with Sea Monster of 1845, executed a few years after Friedrich's death, has the same vertical grid pattern, similar cloud formations, and, like Friedrich's canvas, doesn't emphasize the water beyond the land so much as suggest it. Two years earlier, Turner had painted the After the Deluge series, naming one canvas after Goethe's theories on color which he feverishly studied in this period, using a brush stroke pattern similar to that of Sunrise. Friedrich's Monk would become for some a phenomenological protagonist, enabling painters like Whistler in his Nocturnes to give free rein to their consciousness, and in 1961 Robert Rosenblum traced a lineage from Abstract Expressionism and the color field back to this painting. Turner's work is indispensable to this lineage for his time and as "a figure that cuts through time" (Deleuze), but while Friedrich reportedly decided to cover up the only two ships on the horizon, Turner tended towards depicting some actor immersed in the work of nature.

The Sea Monster is no such actor: if anything in nature complicates matters for it you couldn't tell. A sea creature in the background of Paris Bordone's St. Jerome in the Wilderness in Philly reminds me of my observations of the dragon in Venetian iconography (I, II), an image like Giorgione's Three Philosophers mysteriously rendering a moment of East meeting West in the Veneto.

While for Henry James "feeling a sea-breeze throb languidly between the two great pillars of the Piazzetta.. is to be as happy as is consistent with the preservation of reason," Turner characteristically selected a more threatening weather pattern for his 1835 rendering of the 12th Century pillars (right). One column holds the winged lion, the symbol of St. Mark which Catholics say derives from biblical sources - the lone voice roaring in the desert, Ezekiel's vision of winged creatures - but is more likely lifted from "a Persian, Syrian, or even Chinese chimera"; visitors to the Met and other world museums are confronted with the Assyrian Lamassu, which had a human head, though it more closely resembles the Chinese Pi Xiu, which according to Feng Shui ought to be facing away from the Doge's Palace.

The other column features St. Theodore of Amasea, Venice's patron saint before St. Mark's remains were pilfered, slaying a dragon which is here represented as a crocodile. The story of St. Theodore and the dragon dates from the period of around the 8th through 10th centuries, when Amasea was warding off barbarian attacks. Beneath the columns, Turner painted San Giorgio Maggiore, and the church would have welcomed Turner with Carpaccio's 1516 St. George and the Dragon, a story with a narrative similar to Theseus and the Minotaur, but may have derived the dragon figure from Python, the creature of the earth that lorded over Delphi until slain by Apollo. The first occurrence of a storm god who slays a dragon on the Mediterranean may be Taru, from unwritten stories of 2000 BC of the Hattians of Anatolia. On Murano, the Venetian island one up from where Pound and Stravinsky are buried, the Romanesque Santi Maria e Donato contains what is reported to be the bones of a dragon (left) that St. Donatus killed by spitting on it because the dragon was poisoning a well. St. Donatus was from Tuscany, but the bones, from an extinct creature, likely were also shipped from somewhere in the Byzantine Empire or further East.

If the St. George story comes from a culture intent on improving on nature and the Chinese belief in dragons indicates reverence for nature, it is the Chinese dragon which currently retains its popularity, a fear of the storm shared with Turner. And as with the Mercurius figure of alchemy, the Chinese dragon represents both the below - the earth and the seas - and the celestial. Svādhiṣṭhāna, the second chakra of Hindu tantrism "located at the genitals" and "associated with the water element" is represented as "an aquatic monster represented as a crocodile (symbol of fertility)," resembling the Sufi nafs and Yesud of the Kabbalah. (353) The Egyptian crocodile god Sobek, comprising opposites like Mercurius, is in some stories complicit with Set's plot to keep the limbs of Osiris from Isis. In the Occulta Philosophia the dragon says: "By the philosophers I am named Mercurius; my spouse is the gold; I am the old dragon, found everywhere on the globe of the earth, father and mother, young and old, very strong and very weak, death and resurrection, visible and invisible, hard and soft; I descend into the earth and ascend to the heavens, I am the highest and the lowest, the lightest and the heaviest; often the order of nature is reversed in me, so regards color, number, weight, and measure; I contain the light of nature; I am dark and light; I come forth from heaven and earth; I am known and yet do not exist at all; by virtue of the sun's rays all colours shine in me, and all metals."

Q'uq'umatz, the feathered serpent that created the earth in the Popol Vuh appears in other Mesoamerican creation myths going back to Olmec remains (right). The snake was associated with the underworld while the wings, that of a quetzal, represented the celestial plane and wind, to use Lévi-Strauss' phrase "a mediator between earth and sky," like Turner's sea monster on the picture grid. "..The most common Olmec motifs might be associated with the earth and sky. The Olmec "dragon" may be a caiman, a Mexican crocodile, which when split open by creator gods became the earth floating in a primordial sea, which was associated with agricultural fertility and sprouting vegetation." "Iconographic investigations reveal that the Olmec Dragon, like later Mesoamerican primordial monsters, floated on the surface on the waters of creation. In some titanic struggle in the mythic past, the body of this great leviathan was broken apart to form the earth and sky realms. ..The Olmec Dragon is either two seperate creatures or a single monster with both terrestrial and celestial aspects."

2011-03-25T18:21:00.003-04:00

oft I float on bliss of is
and is not
is jocund and not margin of eye
and those yellow things out there now
what do they call them

2011-03-17T13:22:00.003-04:00

There were no local radio broadcasts when Proust was writing Swann's Way and the phonograph was in an early stage of development, so in order to listen to music without leaving the house he subscribed to the théâtrophone service, a man holding out a phone receiver inside the concert hall.. Victor Hugo used the service as well.

2011-03-11T21:55:00.009-05:00

You may have guessed that Dreams is my favorite Kurosawa film, and the first two vignettes are perhaps the best babysitter short films ever made - try it if you have the right audience. Sunshine Through the Rain shows the consequences for a transgression against the balance with nature:

The Peach Orchard celebrates a past that can never be returned to:

Amongst the next few films you get a Chopin video with some animation I am quite fond of and have watched many times, starring Martin Scorsese as a certain Dutch painter (tho I like Maurice Pialet's Van Gogh even better):

Then you have two films that warn Japan of the perils of nuclear power, the transgression against nature that all the other vignettes point towards symbolically and becomes the symbol for all of mankind's environmental devastation, Mount Fuji in Red and The Weeping Demon. I don't like to watch them and certainly not tonight. I just watched Fuji. As I write this, radiation has already been discharged from Fukushima Dai-chi nuclear plant and there are concerns of a meltdown. Barack Obama is asking for $58 billion in loan guarantees to the nuclear power industry, triple the previous available amount, an industry which already is kept profitable only through federal subsidies. His campaign manager and former Chief of Staff are lobbyists for the industry. A Japanese firm is contracting to lend money to a poorly regulated Texas plant.

The film ends with Village of the Watermills, one of my favorite films of the master, a funeral procession in a town without electricity:

Review no. 2, after actually seeing the stuff..

2011-03-04T16:50:00.013-05:00

It being Friday, now the early evening, I'll get to what's there just this week, beginning with Kai Althoff who doesn't have his name anywhere on his show at Gladstone (515 W 24th), presumably to make the space seem lived in by a fictional character. What impresses me in addition to obvious painterly chops is how each work comprises a separate aesthetic conception and composition, so even as the works relate in unspecified ways to each other, repetition is kept to the minimum that is inevitable, that of days and motions. The ceiling is low, a soundtrack accompanies the two relatively small rooms, and the room has an odor. I will expand the commentary to shows with a longer running time only to say that 24th Street seems to have taken the olfactory dimension and ran with it what with Nitsch's dried blood and whatever scents are added to the effect of Terrence Koh doing what he is doing for eight hours a day in a windowless room.

Moving Image: You only need to know that it's free, located in one of the most interesting local industrial renovations, and giving out free canvas bags and ground coffee. It is amongst other things a showcase of the historical range of feminist video, set up so you see this section first, including the snappy dialogue of Melanie Bonajo and a 1983 Carolee Schneeman mop repeatedly hitting a TV with bombed out Lebanese buildings. A 1978 Hannah Wilkie video comprises a determined attempt to use Method techniques to project as much intimacy as she could for the camera, including strategic use of music, reacting to phone messages of her loved ones, and picking letters from their names off her chest. (pdf)

Two artists at Independent stood out for me: This page on Marta Riniker-Radich (above, represented by Hard Hat) from a gallery in Basel called New Jerseyy (here I live the myth) has a good selection of images. In the real place of New Jersey we had a show of the poet-artist Dmitri Prigov (below), whose metaphysical interiors have a similar layout: the square room in perspective with objects of subconscious significance. Whether she is depicting interior or exterior space she takes care to do so subversively.

Galerie Susanne Zandler offers a generous assemblage of pencil drawings, narrative tableau of military figures, by outsider artist Oskar Voll, who was repeatedly sent to psychiatric hospitals by the Nazis until 1935, after which there are no records of his life.

2011-03-02T11:11:00.000-05:00

Dream journey: I was driving along in suburbia and thought "I need to think" pulling over by a row of Victorian homes. I didn't turn the radio on or headphones and I don't know how long I was sitting there, maybe a half hour, maybe an hour. Then I looked up and the police had cordoned off the area around a house and a SWAT team was running around. A shady guy approached a car across the street from me, returning my gaze, saying "You didn't see nothing" and I thought "he's right." I started the car and turned it around and there was a young plainclothes cop talking on a walkie talkie with a causal demeanor. I didn't feel right about just leaving so I pulled up and told him that I was there for a half hour but I didn't see or hear anything. "There were a hundred shots popping. You must be hard of hearing." I told him I had no testimony but he could take down my name and number if he wanted. "Yeah, sure." He put my name, no contact information, on a day box of a wall calendar he got from the hardware store.

Piri' Miri Muli' Art Fair Guide

2011-03-01T00:44:00.010-05:00

If you arrive early for the Armory Show or you want to come out for air there's a collection of Allen Ginsberg's photo portraits with the captions covering 40 years at Greenberg (41 E 57th, between Madison & Park) and a Pierre Huyghe film at Goodman (24 W 57th). Further north at 980 Madison (76-77th Sts) Gagosian is giving up a lot of wall space to this Malevich kid that rips off Ryman with the white canvases. All open 10-6. I think the least Armory crowds, other than the moment it opens, are at dinner time, as the peer pressure for dining mounts. Two installments over the course of a day, picking out select works the second time. You can sit Indian-style at cubicles if done thougtfully (I said so) but it grates when people get caught up on each others lives for 20 minutes in the middle of a gallery. I make a ritual out of camping by the Daniel Richter if there's one, but then there's the other problem, no Zwirner means no Richter &co., Zwirner defected to the All-American ADAA joining Galerie Lelong and Luhring Augustine which won't be at Armory, then there's the galleries that spit between both, which is ok if you have the time and inclination to see both. 2011 Armory has a Latin America Focus which consists of 18 galleries, to go with a lot of European galleries.

Free shows: The Independent, highly recommended if you're in the area, which has co-founder Elizabeth Dee as well as Kern and Gavin Brown's defecting from Armory, White Columns and Artists' Space ++. 548 West 22nd Street. At 535 W 22nd (PPOW) you can check out the Wojnarowitz videos so promoted by right-wing Catholics and pray for your sins by Francesco Vezzoli's stained glass (below) at Gagosian (522 W 21st). Dee Gallery is two blocks away (545 w20th) with Mariam Cahn paintings. 24th Street has Ellsworth Kelly, Hermann Nitsch blood paintings, Kai Althoff figures "awakening loathsome blood" (pdf), Terrence Koh and a pile of salt, and more paintings.

Nearby is another free recommendation: the Moving Image show at the tunnel at 269 11th Avenue around 28th St, strategically located if you are seeing Los Carpinteros at Sean Kelly at 528 W 29th, for which tank can be filled, essential as hunger from not stuffing one's self leads to early Armory exits, at the Punjabi buffet at 301 10th Avenue between 27th and 28th. Verge Art Brooklyn in DUMBO is free and open til 10.

2011-02-26T15:12:00.004-05:00

th flo
ating deer
for pur
chase pon
qua
rries
stolen, my blo
od
like-marble, ore
ste
als the deer
of air
pon
clouds of antlers

( listening to Iphigénie en Tauride now)

2011-02-17T17:57:00.000-05:00

sky
wears

sun
in

side
out

2011-02-14T17:06:00.001-05:00

eyes with
out the

se on
ly light

that
grieves -

our lips
again

Übersonntag

2011-02-06T17:30:00.004-05:00

"The phoenix showed the poet a scroll which was burning to ashes. 'Do not be dismayed!' it said, 'it is your work. It does not have the spirit of the age and even less the spirit of those who are against the age: consequently it must be burned. But this is a good sign. There are many kinds of daybreaks.'"

2011-02-04T16:39:00.010-05:00

Fisk made an interesting point about the architecture of Tahrir Square:

"The truth is as symbolic as it is important. It was Haussmann, brought to Egypt by Ismail under notional Ottoman rule, who built the square as an Etoile modelled on its French equivalent, laid over the swamps of the regularly flooded Nile plain. Each road radiated like a star (much to the chagrin, of course, of the present-day Egyptian army). And it was on the Nile side of 'Ismailia' square – where the old Hilton is currently under repair – that the British later built their vast military Qasr el-Nil barracks. Across the road still stands the pseudo-Baroque pile in which King Farouk maintained his foreign ministry – an institution which faithfully followed British orders."

I can't verify that Haussmann "built" the square but for all practical purposes he did, even if he didn't come to Egypt. Isma'il Pasha attended school in Paris and upon becoming Viceroy set about to Haussmannize Cairo after visiting Baron Haussmann during the Universal Exposition of 1867. Although historical Mamluk architecture was razed, Isma'il's plan wasn't so much to replace the existing streetscape but to expand Cairo westward to the Nile. Urban planner Pierre Grand was brought in and Bois de Boulogne designer Jean-Pierre Barrilet-Deschamps designed the Al-Azbakiyyah Gardens, but the project was supervised, ironically, by one Ali Pasha Mubarak. This coincided with the construction of the Suez Canal, a time when European diplomats and businessmen became more interested in Egypt and Isma'il sought to accommodate them. Though tourism hadn't become an industry, the preservation of Islamic Cairo was justified for religious reasons and, like the Latin Quarter in Paris, the pre-Haussmann Khan el-Khalili in the Islamic quarter, memorialized in Naguib Mahfouz' Midaq Alley, has became a focal point for tourism. Borrowing money from Europe to make Europeans feel at home resulted in Britain and France being granted the demands of large tracks of Cairo land and all of Egypt's shares in the Suez Canal in exchange for its debts.

The grand boulevard's suitability to modern military control and the debt and surrender of the Canal caused by Tahrir (Liberation) Square's construction make the current public revolt, facilitated also by the central plaza of Twitter and Facebook, somewhat of an urban planning boomerang. Mahfouz, a critic of Mubarak and his predecessors, would look out at Tahrir Square from his breakfast table at the Ali Baba Café.

2-4-11: Day of Departure

2011-02-04T13:38:00.003-05:00

".."

2011-01-27T17:08:00.005-05:00

Blogs: most often, diaries of consumerism. It hadn't occurred to me, for instance, when I had decided to announce here my selection of The Duchess of Langeais as the only film I would watch in the theater in 2007 that "Balzac's story was nearly filmed, tantalizingly, by Max Ophüls in 1948 as Greta Garbo's comeback vehicle.." When Ophüls died in 1957, Cahiers du Cinema published an interview he conducted with Rivette (dir. of 2007's Duchess) and Truffaut, in which Ophüls lets fly this:

"I’ve long been an admirer of Balzac. Before, when I read La Duchesse de Langeais, I loved the way he had the people subjected to the pressure of political events: his characters are always splendidly indecisive. When they’re flung about from one side to the other like that, they always give us the impression that they’re helpless victims. In Balzac, men often put on a poorer show than women in the face of political events. The women still carry on conviction probably because they’re not so closely linked to politics: they have the courage to form an opinion. The men are just opportunists."

.. and then this...

"I read an article… I can’t remember where, an article by Hitchcock about the refrigerator-public -- a very good piece. It’s unbelievable, the public scarcely exists any more. They’re a mass of consumers, that’s all. The danger is that you see too many films… In America, you start at twelve years old, you watch films then ‘till you’re twenty and that is how you become a consumer. Consumers watch films the way they stick a cigarette in their mouths: they’re no longer aware that they are smoking, they keep it in their mouth while they talk.

"As a result of this continuous mass production of dramas, with people to consume them who see six or eight such works every month, it’s impossible to appreciate a really ‘dynamic’ film. It’s like newspapers: they can’t publish poems; and people read maybe three or four newspapers a day."

Eric Rohmer also cited Balzac as a primary influence, saying to Barbet Schroeder that he got from him the idea for what he called "Moral Tales," meaning not parables as some may think but tales of the constant conflict between people's differing moral principles: another possible explanation of the blogosphere.

2011-01-27T17:08:00.001-05:00

People believe in the dialectic because it pains them to think that other people may be right. People who don’t believe in the dialectic assume everyone else is wrong.

2010-12-21T03:51:00.004-05:00

No beams to weave the linen
For chlorotic laundry maids
The earth has plucked them all
The moon is not its glow
But the thing seen
All the gloomy black moths
Have massacred the sun
Pierrot checks his frock coat
Floating on a water lily
Without the glowing rudder

(after Giraud, pdf)

Autumn songs

2010-10-31T10:54:00.001-04:00

I found a translation of the 8th Century T'ang era poem by Zhang Ji that Mahler's second song Der Einsame im Herbst ("Autumn Loneliness") of Das Lied Von Der Erde is based on:

Autumn sky, jade-like frost drifting
Northerly wind carries lotus fragrance
With love, weaving till the lonely lamp fades
Wipe tears, fond memory, long cold night
Eaves edge, blue clouds pure like water
Rising moon, roosting birds caw; geese soar.
Whose young wife is weaving love birds on her loom?
Deeply concealed by silk curtain and inlaid screen
Listening to falling leaves by the white jade window
Pity the woman, chilled and alone without company.

The fashion for Chinese poetry in Paris that prompted Pound to invent Imagism and get parataxis into Anglo poetry had spread to Vienna by 1907, where Hans Bethge had popularized reworkings of translations that had previously been published in German, which were, in turn, based on two translations into French. All the Europeanized versions of Zhang Ji's Long Autumn Night seemed to be somewhat similar, beginning with Judith Gautier's French version, but they all differed significantly from the original Chinese version in two ways:

1. The original T'ang version makes reference to scent (line 2), sight (line 3), tears and memory (line 4), hearing (line 9), and the body's reaction to cold (lines 4 and 7). Gautier's version and the subsequent French and German versions notes only tears (les larmes) and all sensory provocations have expired or been covered by frost, wind, or darkness.
2. Zhang Ji is thinking about a "young wife" "chilled and alone" while all references to such an object of thought are struck from the European versions.

T'ang poets were highly attentive and deliberate about line arrangements, and Long Autumn Night features 1. Nature (lines one and two), 3. a visual representation of love relating to the visual experience of night, 4. tears and memory coupled with the experience of cold, 5. Nature again, lines 5 and 6, both the visual and aural experience of birds, Line 7, the "love birds on her loom," 8. the image of line 7 "concealed," 9. her aural experience of nature, 10. commentary on subject of poem. Zhang Ji doesn't note the action of his own senses but rather what is perceived, while the woman's perception of the leaves listened to, the temperature, and the birds on the loom is stated. As Taoism has used the image of weaving to demonstrate the unification of life and death, the exact same symbol recurring in the Upanishads and Plato, "love" weaves in line 3 and is woven in line 7.

The parataxic structure of Chinese poetry was conducive to Mahler's creation of the first-ever symphony composed entirely of separate songs. Mahler never heard it performed and much has been written about his having just been diagnosed with heart disease after his daughter had died in accordance with his earlier premonitions and he had been forced out as the music director in Vienna due, in part, to anti-Semitism, an event which marked the decline of the artistic golden age of Vienna. Adorno attributed the use of Chinese forms to Mahler's move to New York: "The inauthentic Chinese element, sketched with extreme discretion, plays a similar part to that of the folk song earlier: a pseudomorph that does not take itself literally but grows eloquent through inauthenticity. But by replacing the Austrian folk song by the remote, an Orient approved as a stylistic means, he divests himself of the hope for a collective cover for what is his own…Mahler’s exoticism was a prelude to emigration." (Mahler: a Musical Physiognomy) Where Debussy had recently been influenced by Javanese gamelan, Mahler uses a continuous, spiraling string melody onto which fragmentary motifs are added, including the vocals:

(Jessye Norman mezzo, Simon Rattle conductor)

While certain types of Hindustani raags are performed in autumn while others are for monsoon season to bring the rain, Tom Jobim's bossa nova classic Waters of March uses ascending and descending scales to depict the rainy season in the Southern Hemisphere's autumn. Jobim, quite the student of literature as many Brazilian songwriters are, endeavored to write an English language version which referenced Spring and didn't include any Latin roots, an Oulipoesque move which perhaps sought to give the song a North Pole free from Romance languages, although some of the words did have Latin roots. As with Mahler's Der Einsame im Herbst, the raga-like continuous motif supports fragmentary lyrics in which the "waters," the rains, unify the fragments of the season. Instead of Wallace Stevens thinking on a Sunday morning "Death is the mother of beauty," for Jobim all things like deaths, hopes, traps, voids, sunsets, emotions, sicknesses, body parts, animals, plants, mud, broken down cars, comprise the object being described simultaneously in a synesthesiatic pattern, making up one of the best lyrical pop songs ever. Supposedly Elis Regina disliked Jobim's intellectualism but decided she needed the song as much as the song needed her.

Sampling duets

2010-10-15T00:29:00.003-04:00

Andrea Parkins samples for Ches Smith

Ikue Mori samples for Zeena Parkins

DJ Oktopus samples for Dälek

Marty McCavitt samples for Darius Jones

New on dvd

2010-10-12T01:14:00.002-04:00

Don't know why this took so long, but should be worth..

2010-10-06T00:39:00.001-04:00

The fall issue of OnandOnScreen is out, with works by Bill Berkson, Rodrigo Toscano, Emily Dickinson, and of course yours truly the antediluvian progenitor of the text-reel poem.

2010-09-29T17:26:00.001-04:00

The birds aren't here, because I can't hear them. I am thinking about myself, they should know that, not clear on what they know, not because I have to, because I want to, now that is, it is too late for the birds, their ideas, I am not ready for them, especially here. Where are the birds?

2010-09-11T23:12:00.003-04:00

Making the rounds as result of Roberto Bolaño's new New Directions collection is his reaction to Mallarmé's "Sea Breeze," one of the most straightforward and rhetorical of Mallarmé's poems. Mallarmé's first line [“The flesh is sad – and I've read every book”] is both catchy and imprecise, the sort of declaration – like the lines that Rimbaud crossed out - that you wouldn't find in later Mallarmé, which gives Bolaño the opening to take him to task in his edgy stylistic evocation of Céline and the Beats which the Anglophone world can't seem to get enough of:

How could anyone declare that the flesh is essentially sad, that la petite mort, which doesn’t last even a minute, casts a pall over all lovemaking, which, it is widely known, can last for hours and hours, and go on interminably? If the line had been written by a Spanish poet like Campoamor, it might have meant something like that, but such a reading is quite at odds with the work and life of Mallarmé, which are indissolubly linked, except in this poem, this encoded manifesto, which Paul Gauguin, and he alone, followed to the letter (as far as we know, Mallarmé himself never listened to the sailors singing, or if he did, it certainly wasn’t on board a ship bound for an unknown destination). And the claim to have read all the books makes even less sense, because although books themselves may come to an end, no one every finishes reading them all, and Mallarmé was well aware of that. Book are finite, sexual encounters are finite, but the desire to read and to fuck is infinite; it surpasses our own deaths, our fears, our hopes for peace. And what is left for Mallarmé, in this famous poem, when he desire to read and the desire to fuck, so he says, are all used up? Well, what is left is travel, the desire to go traveling. And maybe that’s the key to the crime. Because if Mallarmé had concluded that the only thing left to do was pray or cry or go crazy, maybe he’d have come up with the perfect alibi. But no, what Mallarmé says is that the only thing left to do is travel—which is like saying “to sail is necessary, to live is not necessary,” a sentence I used to be able to quote in Latin, but that’s just one of the many thing I’ve forgotten with help of my liver’s traveling toxins—in other words he sides with the bare-chested traveler, with Freedom (who’s bare-chested too), with the simple existence of the sailor and the explorer, which isn’t so simple when you get right down to it: an affirmation of life, but also a constant game with death, and the first rung on the ladder, the first step in a certain kind of poetic apprenticeship. The second step is sex, and the third, books.

“Sea Breeze” was written by Mallarmé when he was 23 and had married Maria Gerhard two years previously, who'd given birth to his daughter Geneviève: “Nothing can hold this heart steeped in sea-/ not my lamp's desolate luminosity/ nor the blank paper guarded by its white/ nor the young wife feeding her child..” He was in this period both an apprentice poet imitating elders and the poet he was becoming, formulating his own poetic revolution, as his first draft of The Afternoon of a Faun was written at about the same time. A year and a half later he would write: “I am terrified because I have to invent a new poetics, which I could best express in these words: 'Paint not the thing itself, but the effect it produces.'” As Walter Benjamin has written, the representation of consciousness was a project set forth by Baudelaire, a project that Mallarmé indeed created a new poetics to realize.

This poem "Sea Breeze," however, is a rather clumsy and unoriginal amalgamation of poems and sentiments of Baudelaire and Theophile Gautier. From Gautier we get a romantic maritime drama of what the soul requires: Mallarmé's poem ends with “..my soul, listen to the sailor's song!” which may contain Gautier's longing in “Sea Gloom” for the sound of the ocean to take pity on his soul and transform it and his grief into a shipwreck. Mallarmé paints a scene in “Sea Breeze” where “storm winds buckle above shipwrecks cast/ away.”

Starting a new sentence in line 10 with “Un Ennui, ..” is about as Baulelairean as it gets, as the term occurs with emphasis and famously as the conclusion of "T o the Reader" but also several times in "Le Voyage," which Gauguin did, in fact, cite in his journals, the poem that appears to be the most direct antecedent to “Sea Breeze.” Baudelaire's uses of it here are crucial: it illustrates both the naïve wanderlust of the tourist and the realization, at the end of the poem, that “the world's monotonous and small; we see/ ourselves today, tomorrow, yesterday,/ an oasis of horror in the sands of ennui!”

We should consider that Baudelaire's only experience of travel was when at age 20 his domineering stepfather put him on a boat bound for India to apparently separate him from his druggie friends (“the least senseless../ Flee the great herd penned in by Destiny/ And take refuge in a great opium!”) and the boat was damaged by a storm and returned after landing in Mauritius and Reunion, perhaps inspiring a confrontation with death, the final journey of the poem (“to drown in the abyss – heaven or hell,/ who cares? Through the unknown, we'll find the new.)” Baudelaire begins by saying “the true travellers are they who depart/ for departing's sake” who “dream/of spacious pleasures, transient, little understood,/ whose name no human spirit knows” then describes the soul as a ship in which the voice atop the mainsail cries out “Love.. glory.. fortune,”* “the poor lover of chimerical lands.” He then describes the traveller as they who “gladden the ennui of our jails.” At 21, Mallarmé in his earnest poem “The Windows” uses a dying man looking out the window of a hospital room as a metaphor for his desire to escape his life for art and mysticism: “can I flee with my featherless wings-/ and risk falling through all eternity.” Baudelaire goes on to describe the “monotonous and small” world, in which our travels are a visualization of the race against time, at the end of which “if sea and sky are both black as ink,/ you know that our hearts are full of sunshine.” The equation of the discovery of “the new” with death contains all the irony of his embrace of modernity and everything else.

The “spacious pleasures whose name no human spirit knows” may have taken an entirely new form in Mallarmé's masterpiece The Afternoon of a Faun. The refrain “There, all is order and beauty;/ luxury, calmness and beauty” from Baudelaire's more idyllic “Invitation to the Voyage” appears to turn up in Faun as “..fringes of a placid mere in Sicily,/ plundered” by Mallarmé's “sun-rivalling vanity,/ silent beneath the blooms of brilliant night.” It is also where the soul goes: “void of words and heavy body slowly/ fall before noon's haughty calm.” Wherever Mallarmé was right then, he'd left the others behind.

* If there were finalists for the worst translations of all time, Robert Lowell would field several entries, but his Le Voyage (from the New Directions collection) should merit serious consideration. “«Amour... gloire... bonheur!» Enfer! c'est un écueil!” becomes “"Here's dancing, gin and girls!" Balls! it's a rock!” and “Partout où la chandelle illumine un taudis” becomes “we see Blue Grottoes, Caesar and Capri.” In both cases, his attempts at humor convey the exact opposite of what the poem is communicating, in key moments of the poem.

2010-08-28T16:57:00.005-04:00

There was a peregrine falcon here for about a half hour. Passers by, oblivious to its presence, were making a fair amount of noise and it was undaunted by smaller birds flying around it, so I succumbed to the transgression of playing (for it, not me, so I thought) Peregrina on my laptop, as the Kayapó in the Amazon sing to the birds. After about a minute of the song it flew away. The song is not about a bird but uses the bird as a symbol, and the bird-symbol in the song flies away. The song is actually about the feminist journalist Alma Reed, who beat Katherine Ann Porter out for the affections of reformist Yucatan governor Felipe Carrillo Puerto, who established the first birth control clinics in the Western Hemisphere before he was murdered by "supporters of the efforts of the Yucatán's ruling class to regain the henequen haciendas and de facto slave labor they were forced to give up as a result of the Mexican Revolution" in the days leading up to the wedding. While Felipe and Alma were hiking with the poet Luis Rosado Vega, Alma commented on the scent of the nature around her, and Luis said “that perfume is because you are passing by and the earth, trees, and flowers wish to caress you,” prompting Felipe to request a poem.

Cuando dejes mis palmares y mi sierra,
peregrina del semblante encantador,
no te olvides, no te olvides de mi tierra,
no te olvides, no te olvides de mi amor.

2010-08-27T13:21:00.001-04:00

More to come on Russian modernism, and thanks to Jerome Rothenberg for posting the first installment.

2010-08-10T15:02:00.003-04:00

This much longer piece (than before) from Colombian cumbia legend Lucho Bermúdez is also probably from the mid-to-late 1950's, featuring a series of clarinet solos by Lucho to set up a vertically arranged duet with the trumpeter. More vocals here as well, from a song composed by Wilson Choperena with additional verses calling for togetherness between the nations of Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, and Panama, or at least celebrating the act of dancing with women in long, traditional Panamanian dresses in those countries, a song which has also been a hit in Peru and has been credited for spawning Mexican cumbia after Lucho's time there in the early 1950's.

Speaking of Colombia, Leonor Gonzalez Mina's brief a cappella “La Violencia.”

2010-08-08T02:46:00.012-04:00

Jerome Rothenberg just posted the meaty second part of a 1994 talk on e.e. cummings, ending it with an excerpt from a Navajo horse-blessing song he translated in the 1970s:

(Nnnnn N ghan) because I was the boynging raised ing the dawn & nnnn but some there are mine all (ghan) & some (gwing) there 'rrr mine there

The gerundization of “boy” and “raised” reminds me of Velimir Khlebnikov's “Там, где жили свиристели (Where the Waxwings Used to Dwell),” where Khlebnikov uses suffixes and formed words to convey specific meanings, with the word “momentwill (времирей),” a word he made up which sounds Bergsonian, relating to the joined words around it: “warblewingish,” “waxwings,” “beguilish.” Russian like German has larger words than English, so Khlebnikov is using this composite diction to combine two concepts generally kept separate: time and will, the will of the past enduring, befitting his wish for an eternal present and his belief that language has been a divisive force, which he set out to resolve by way of his zaum language (pdf, p. 33), the sort of representation of cosmological unity that Foucault criticized in Les Mots et les choses.

In addition to works of his composed entirely in the zaum language, Khlebnikov uses made-up words in contexts of existing words that elaborate their possible meaning, as in “Grasshopper” and “Bo-beh-o-bi sang the lips,” assigning a non-connotive language to animals, objects, body parts, and sensory stimuli. Roman Jakobson said “The question of the interplay between speech sounds and letters and the possibility to utilize these interplays in verbal art, particularly on its supraconscious (zaum) level, vividly preoccupied me in 1912-14, and they were intensely discussed in my correspondence of 1914 with Krutchenyk and Khlebnikov."

In a way, the combination of cummings being the major figure of typographic innovation in America and that the content he used it for didn't inspire, may have had some sort of effect on the use of typographic effects thereafter. Creeley spoke of this in a 1963 interview (which I typed out for a conversation with Curtis Faville about cummings last April):

“Cummings' battle with the typographical set of the poem was one in which, once people were willing to admit typography could be variable and could have a useful effect, the particular value was lost... I like some of his earlier poems very much, both the uses of the sonnet and some of the straight wise-guy poems where you get this beautiful jargon and slang, but I feel that he's always been limited by being a real college boy, by which that his thinking, curiously, has never really gone deeper than the kind of, oh! let's say junior, sophomore, college wit... cummings, despite all his insistence on the single identity of the "i," is speaking for almost a class.”

As Creeley found cummings' content wanting, Joanna Drucker complains that Khlebnikov “was not interested in the contents of the individual psyche, but in himself as a priestly figure working in the service of profound truth,” though Julia Kristeva and Jakobson find a stylistic imprint of sexuality in Khlebnikov's frequent use of “mech-mjach” (sword-bullet) as in lines like “mecha stat' mjachom” “(Impatience) of the sword to become a bullet,” a psyche perhaps too impulsive and not sufficiently reflective for Drucker's tastes. Kristeva also credits Khlebnikov among others for the “resurgence of an “I” coming back to rebuild an ephemeral structure in which the constituting struggle of language and society can be spelled out.”

Osip Manselstam said Khlebnikov wrote “one enormous all-Russian book of prayers and icons from which, for centuries and centuries to come, everyone who may will find something to draw on.” Included in everyone are the Soviets and their more religious successors. The Soviet association most likely caused Joseph Brodsky to brand Khlebnikov taboo to the poetic foot soldiers of Reagan-era Cold War triumphalism, but a Khlebnikov revival in Russia seems afoot in the music and theater worlds that see in him a spiritual guide. The composer Vladimir Martynov was recently asked to compose a fusion piece for symphony orchestra and the Tuvan throat singing ensemble Huun Huur Tu and decided to use as his libretto Khlebnikov's creation myth of the Altay region Children of the Otter, and the work premiered in 2009. Martynov states in an interview that he finds in this Asian music and Russian traditions a model for "the end of the era of the composer," the preservation of cultures without humanist authors, a far cry from the “resurgence of the 'I'” Kristeva found in the artist Martynov is adapting.

Martynov describes Khlebnikov's vison of the “super-saga” as “the synthesis of different planes, or as in Children of the Otter, “sails.'” Kristeva describes the drama as “a mother, coming to the aid of her children in their fight against the sun. The Otter's children are squared off against three suns, one white, one purple, the other dark green.”

Also there's a splendid trailer for a new production of Victory Over the Sun, with attempts made by the editor to incorporate the visuals of Kazimir Malevich and others as well as Malevich's costumes:

2010-08-04T02:47:00.006-04:00

As the title of this blog used to be All About Your Caste, I think about genre from time to time, a concept that doesn't have the same traditional relation to fate as caste does. Genre is and isn't a private matter, genre is a drama of opportunities and impediments, genre is a imprint of culture and an artist's reaction to it, genre consists of models and aspirations contained within subgenre, genre consists of real limits and the perceived limits of hierarchies. The Venetian Renaissance was a moment when secular patrons enabled painting to be reimagined as limitless, something that, like Elizabethan drama, leads to the genre reaching its summit in a short period of time, the same national tradition of theater that Dennis Potter recently felt the need to circumvent by going into television. People then and now criticize Joyce for his effect on the novel, after he applied the methods of Rabelais who people didn't perceive to be a novelist. Sterne arrived at the beginnings of the British novel.

What I always liked about the comment fields as genre is people don't know what it is yet. It's not that I've wanted genre luminaries to stay away, but I thought something could happen that wouldn't happen otherwise. I have no nostalgia or specific expectations about that genre now, nor do I assume Silliman will keep the comments off or that phenomenon will resituate itself, but history doesn't support the hypothesis that reevaluation, refinement, and 'improvement' of internet discussions will do anything but suck them dry of every aspect that made them remotely interesting. The celebration over their closing by people offering their services as inspirateurs and administrators of poetry that thought they themselves could write better criticism if the comments didn't exist, that discussion will be better if there were fewer discussions, that their delicate appreciation for poetry has been violated, that the condescension expressed by some exceeded their own, indicates to me that the comment fields were sufficiently abhorrent to those that trade in these limits, models of the past that deny its essence.

Genre hierarchy is communicated acutely by these reactions. People don't say that a university press publishes a lot of crap but occasionally has an original idea, a statement that would be accurate nine times out of ten, nor is there much attention paid to religious and gender discrimination of university hiring and enrollment during the 20th Century when every avant-garde artist is being raked over the coals by the university presses for anything that could possibly be interpreted as a slur. It would be inaccurate to say I'm oblivious to genre hierarchy so much as I try to evade the traps that come with the terrain.

So it follows that I have no idea what just happened. Whatever points I made that came off as compelling and different generally seemed too obvious to me to have emotional resonance (like the existence of the avant-garde itself, until recently a discredited notion), and my floated ideas arising from sustained preoccupations have been altered little if at all by feedback. As for Silliman's blog, without question the main influence has come from Silliman himself, the reiteration and elaboration of his fertile ideas grouped largely in The New Sentence, the most important book of poetry criticism of the past sixty years, studied by many but underrated to the point that his contempt for his contemporary counterparts in the critical field is understandable.

The navigation of genre hierarchy is a creative process in and of itself and not a mass initiative responding to ideals of justice, except in situations like France's, a country where Sarkozy has maintained the Culture Ministry but is raiding the gypsy camps, a culture painted by Manet, Courbet, Daumier, Seurat, Picasso, Rouault, so on and so forth. For the first time in a few years I put on Sawdust and Tinsel last night, perhaps the best film ever made about genre hierarchy, its theater director telling the circus performers “you risk your life, we our vanity,” its bear scenes never paid for due to bad box office. The bear's not on Youtube, just an unfortunately clipped opening scene. But there's gypsies (colorful and stereotyped) in the Kirov Petruscka, and the bear arrives in the sixth minute of the third installment.

2010-08-01T11:17:00.000-04:00

I wrote up my dream for my blog, but it was such a biting parody of me that for me to print it, whether or not I have the sense of humor to do so, would do it disrespect to suggest I could feign indifference to its brutality, or rewrite it to make that possible.

2010-07-30T19:43:00.001-04:00

Robert Head's beautiful poems of the history of Plaquemines Parish and the oil spill.

2010-07-22T18:15:00.005-04:00

Adolph Gottlieb: “Another thing – I have changed my mind about an idea of Milton Avery's – as he says, 'don't try to paint a masterpiece.' It seems to me now that that is the very thing to do – try to paint a masterpiece – it probably won't be one anyway. Of course, from his point of view, Milton's right, there are many pictures that would be pretty good if they were not belabored and worked to death in trying for perfection. But right now I am sick of the idea of all the pretty good pictures and want a picture that is either damn good or no good.”

“Pretty good” can be oppressive.

Gottlieb stayed with what I consider a landscape grid in later years, which kept it in the spirit of Max Ernst's canvases (below) which were his main influence. Ernst created Pollock, Motherwell, and Gorky, and then the next generation turned dogmatically against representation, which is turning against infinity. That's my main beef with abstract expressionism, which I otherwise like. When something becomes standardized, the first thing to go is infinity. I haven't undertook to write about the avant-garde on this blog so far except to stress this point.

2010-07-22T12:16:00.001-04:00

Unexpected charms in the Ellsberg documentary just out on dvd, like the nugget that when his defense lawyers consulted a psychologist about whistle-blower jury selection, the advice was to avoid middle-aged people. News you can use.

2010-07-19T21:46:00.001-04:00

The most pleasant storm this summer, though it didn't last long, beginning with cooling spiral winds that moved the leaves against a white sky, the smell of a distant fire and a nearby TV that had some African music which seemed at first not the be a TV, then the thunder moving closer and the rains, and with the clearing, first blue sky with puffy clouds to the west and then the north as well. Cage says your Mozart CD sounds the same every time. I am overcoming two fears, that of the thunder when it gets close, and also that a tree, less than a foot from the storm observation structure, about three feet from my own feet, is climbed by a family of raccoons, a mother and four children, and though I have been known to feed 'em in the past I found it at first disquieting to have the raccoons physically above me, where a slip could hurl it through the screen and on to my lap. In both cases I've made peace with the law of averages. On the other side where my laptop is, the raccoons are now walking down another tree. Cage liked the noise the cars make on 6th Ave., Sebald: “For some time now I have been convinced this it is out of this din that the life is being born which will come after us and will spell our gradual destruction, just as we have been gradually destroying what was there long before us.”

2010-07-13T14:21:00.003-04:00

I'm glad I saw this without knowing who the speaker was, so that I could wonder about the back story. At first I wondered whether the person was in the Himalayas (which I have been reading about) but Yosemite was on the video title. I thought that the person was camping, not accustomed to people having this sort of view in front of their house.

Comments about this video on Huffington Post and Youtube illustrate how one conditioned response to the perception of nature relates to another conditioned response. Vasquez is happy not just about the double rainbow, but the fact that the double rainbow validates his rationalizations to live at the precise spot where he lives and, by extension, his persona, which is organized around immersion in nature and Indian heritage. A person on a camping trip would be more likely to think such a rainbow was routine, or perhaps be socially conditioned to relate their enchantment in a more understated manner.

Vasquez denies being on drugs, though he admits to drug use at other times. I'm not saying I don't believe him, but he would have incentive to say that he isn't on drugs, as admission to drug use may inhibit the media promotion of the video. Reactions to the ecstatic reaction to the double rainbow often center more around people's opinion of the morality of drug use than how nature should be appropriately rendered linguistically. Of course, people's perception of these two issues overlap, though many dedicated campers are anti-drug, people who have low opinions of drug users often have low opinions of naturalists.

Without question, Vasquez views this as a religious experience, and the ecstasy traditionally associated with religious experience has always elicited divided reactions. What interests me more, though, is how understatement functions: the fact that the creed of linguistic understatement is in this social division aligned with apathy towards nature while overstatement is here aligned with affirmation of nature. Other situations, such as the excitement over the economic benefits of a strip-mining project, would align overstatement and understatement differently. My fear of being at an analytical distance to the baroque cannot be separated from the fear of fate, or fate operating as the fear itself.

2010-07-12T23:41:00.001-04:00

2010-07-09T11:12:00.002-04:00

I've received confirmation from Dresden that Augustus II purchased Sleeping Venus in 1699, though the provenance is sketchy before that. It seems reasonable to assume the painting stayed in the Casa Marcello before then, during Velasquez' visits, since it had been a prized possession. Sleeping Venus was the first of many paintings acquired by Augustus, a Venice enthusiast who perhaps wanted in on his namesake's claims to divine right, as Caesar Augustus' stepdad (but nonetheless blood relation) said: “The family of my aunt Julia is descended by her mother from the kings, and on her father's side is akin to the immortal Gods; for the Marcii Reges (her mother's family name) go back to Ancus Marcius, and the Julii, the family of which ours is a branch, to Venus. Our stock therefore has at once the sanctity of kings, whose power is supreme among mortal men, and the claim to reverence which attaches to the Gods, who hold sway over kings themselves."

I had a blackout here last night for about 3-4 hours, despite very little rain to alleviate a local drought, a branch fell down right in front of here. I went to Barnes and Noble for a/c, electric light, and all that good stuff. Last time I was there they had Toscano's Collapsable Poetics Theater, and one or two other cool things, but it was more BNey this time. No one told me there was a Library of America edition of early Ashbery! A sight to behold. I believe it was intentional that the blue ribbon placemarker is placed right at Joe Brainard's toilet in Vermont Notebook. It's actually cool to see Vermont Notebook in such a volume, the legit cover making it funnier, but it's odd to see Three Poems in there, sort of like it's become a 19th Century novella that comes in a 1200 page anthology for a survey course. Nothing else really fits in that thing. If I were a lot older that edition would make me feel old. I could say about other books there, this is workshoppy, that is workshoppy, after having skimmed them, but you already get that I think that way and the allegation would not surprise anyone about the poets in question. Finally it seems to be really raining here!

2010-07-08T09:14:00.001-04:00

Going back to Palma Vecchio's Sea Storm, it has just come to my attention that that canvas is believed by at least a quartet of scholars, including Bernard Berenson, to have been originally conceived by Giorgione. One other new wrinkle is the belief that the sea monster on the lower left hand side was added in 1833 by Sebastiano Santi. I have another book that seems to think it was acquired by the Accademia in 1829, but it was apparently then in the Albergo della Scuola Grande di San Marco, which took liberties with its restorations. This all still predates Turner's sea monster but it's unclear to me whether Santi's monster, and, by extension, Turner's, was following a fashion or whether Santi's monster was a unique image. This is a developing situation and you are advised to check back for updates.

2010-07-07T23:55:00.012-04:00

As it takes little provocation for me to fixate on Giorgione, I have devoted some time this evening to the question: did Velasquez see Sleeping Venus before he painted the Rokeby Venus?

I'm not aware of any firsthand account of Velasquez commenting on Giorgione's painting or of his viewing it. Girolamo Marcello, who had owned two other Giorgione canvases, commissioned Sleeping Venus presumably in order to obtain “a talisman to guarantee Morosina and Girolamo an heir.” Though the painting is no longer at the Casa Marcello, the reproductive initiative seems to have been a success as it was Giralamo's descendent, himself called Count Giralamo Marcello, that in recent years put up Joseph Brodsky in Venice for which he became the subject of one of the Nobel Laureate's poems. Titian's Venus with a Mirror (below) was in the possession of the Barbarigo family during the time of Velazquez' visits to Venice. As Velasquez was both a famous painter and wealthy enough to amass his own collection of Venetian masters, it's not inconceivable that he visited these houses although not as inevitable as if they had been in museums.
Among the revelers at the 1694 Venice Carnivale was Augustus, younger brother of Johann Georg IV, Elector of Saxony, on one of his extended visits to the island town. Shortly after the festivities Augustus received word that his brother had died of smallpox and that he would become Augustus II, Elector. Over the course of the next few years Augustus, who would later become King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, bought up Venetian paintings for the Dresden palace, where Sleeping Venus hangs now, having been stashed away during the World War II bombing raids. Julius Caesar Augustus was believed in his time to be a descendent of Venus and was a patron of the arts, which may have affected Augustus II's resolve to obtain the canvas.

Though there is no documentation of Velasquez visiting the Casa Marcello, recently notes have been discovered stating that during one of his trips to Italy, he chronicled the idea to paint Il Pordenone's Venus (right) in reverse - a close rip-off of Sleeping Venus with a red blanket underneath by a Giorgione disciple. The fact that he's so inspired by Pordenone's version indicates that Velasquez didn't, in fact, ever see Sleeping Venus, but was inspired by it indirectly.

Some suggest that the Rokeby Venus was an inspiration to Manet's Olympia, but there's no evidence that Manet ever saw the painting in person, and no reference of Manet's to a reproduction of it that I'm aware of. The Rokeby Venus was in a private collection in Yorkshire, which Manet never got to, from 1813 to 1905. This is a case of Velazquez and Manet both riffing off paintings that were inspired by Giorgione (by Titian and Pordenone) and coming up with a similar end result.

I was oblivious to Velazquez having seen a knockoff of Sleeping Venus when I shared my thoughts the other day about interiors and exteriors. Velazquez, first of all, was not a landscape painter as there was no admired tradition of landscapes in Spain at the time he worked save for El Greco who was not considered an influence, and since nudes in Spain were then painted for noblemen's bedrooms, perhaps he was disinclined to turn over a new leaf for such a client. The interior also makes the mirror more credible, enabling the portrait of the face which is essential to the effect of the work.

2010-07-04T11:49:00.011-04:00

The art critic Theophile Thoré correctly identified Manet's subject matter as rife with “borrowings and pastiches” of Velasquez, Goya, and El Greco, amid what he called the painter's “magical qualities.” Driven underground in 1848 by Cavaignac's provisional government, Thoré had resurfaced in '59 during Napoleon III's general amnesty to publish reviews under the name William Bürger, bringing the works of Vermeer and Hals from two centuries earlier to the attention of those outside Delft and Haarlem. Mindful of Manet's insecurities, Baudelaire struck back with a letter, lying through his teeth that Manet had never seen a Goya or an El Greco. Thoré, unconvinced, published the letter in Belgium, reiterating his praise of the painter: for all his borrowings he was the most original painter in Paris.

While pastiching the colors and subject matter of Iberia would produce in one critic such a minor qualification, pastiching the subject matter of Giorgione and Titian was, to the general art world, unforgivable, resulting in storms of insults and condemnations, deepening Manet's self-doubt and causing him to flee to Spain. This is no accident: the seeds of modernity cited in Baudelaire's essays on painting had already been sewn in the first decade of the 16th Century.

The events of the Paris Salon of 1863, in which 2800 canvases including those of Manet and Whistler were excluded, to be shown separately by Napoleon III's agreement in the Salon des Refusés, are often cited as the beginnings of Modernism. This rupture between the painters and the judges was set in motion a decade earlier by Courbet's The Bathers (above), which was removed from the 1853 Salon by the police and led to a change in the composition of the jury. The academic paintings of the Salon were full of nudes, but Courbet's pair was called “vulgar” by, amongst others, Delacroix for their body shape, pose and for being contemporary peasants rather than allegories of chastity and wisdom. In 1855, after Burial at Ornans and The Painter's Studio were rejected, Courbet set up an exhibition for himself across the street from the Salon, called "Realism." It was in 1855 that Baudelaire attacked Courbet's realist style: “the heroic sacrifice that Monsieur Ingres makes for the honor of tradition and Raphaelesque beauty, Courbet accomplishes in the interests of external, positive, immediate nature. They have different motives when waging war on the imagination, and the two opposing obsessions lead them to the same immolation.”

Several years later, Baudelaire wrote his seminal essay “The Painter of Modern Life,” in which he clarified his view of the dangers of separating the immediate and the Raphaelesque: “Beauty is made up of an eternal invariable element, whose quantity it is excessively difficult to determine, and of a relative, circumstantial element, which will be, if you like, whether severally or all at once, the age, its fashions, its morals, its emotions. Without the second element, which might be described as the amusing, enticing, appetizing icing on the divine cake, the first element would be beyond our powers of appreciation, neither adapted nor suitable to human nature. I defy anyone to point to a single scrap of beauty which does not contain these two elements.”

This essay wasn't published until November 1863, but had been written in early 1860, after which Baudelaire shopped it around a while. Manet valued Baudelaire's friendship, spent many hours with him, and the poet's opinions were an anchor against everything he chafed against, which inclined him to let his paintings be the embodiment of Baudelaire's theories.

Not only did, in fact, Courbet portray eternal beauty, but it's possible that his 1855 The Bathers was influenced by The Pastoral Concert, the 1508 painting hanging in the Louvre that is currently attributed to Titian, as the Reubenesque figure on the left of The Bathers is involved with water and draped around the leg. The painting was then attributed to Giorgione, and although dissenting opinion at that time suggested Palma Vecchio, the Titian theory didn't come onto the scholarly radar until the 20th Century. The figures look like Titian's, but the content, figures not relating to mythology, and the enigmatic subtext show the profound influence of older master Giorgione.

It's been stated frequently that when Manet, who rarely painted nudes, set out to produce one for the 1863 Salon, he used the situation of The Pastoral Concert with the figure poses of an engraving after Raphael's The Judgment of Paris. What isn't often noted is that the resulting canvas, Le déjeuner sur l'herbe, is the first intentional application of Baudelaire's credo, exemplified in advance by Titian and Giorgione. The two men in The Pastoral Concert are wearing contemporary clothing – one suggesting wealth, the other not - while the females – possibly present in the minds of the men - represent the eternal. The lute and the flute have represented the Appolonian and Dionysian opposition, with the flute being played here by a nymph and the lute by a scruffy male.

Manet, who has studied the painting enough to copy it, has replaced the nymph with the flute with a woman staring directly at the viewer, the model Victorine Meurent, herself a painter. I take this to suggest that the Dionysian function is being fulfilled by human observation, again in keeping with Baudelaire's theories. Nude women in traditional allegorical paintings of the Salon didn't look back at the viewer as Titian's Venus of Urbino did. As for Manet, whose early nudes (he only painted nine in his lifetime, most long afterward) stare at the viewer, let's recall that no one who pastiches Velasquez can ever wrest from their mind Las Meninas, where the Infanta Margarita stares back at the viewer, shown in the mirror to be the king and the queen. This representation of the viewer is an allegory of sight, since you, the viewer, are in fact standing in place of the king and the queen. Manet converts this allegory into a Dionysian function set forth by Baudelaire.

Picasso painted more pastiches of Le déjeuner sur l'herbe than any other painting. Las Meninas was another one he pastiched over and over, perhaps the runner up. He would spend 20 hours straight locked in his studio agonizing over these two paintings.

The angry reaction that Le déjeuner met from critics, the public, and some painters in 1863 is legendary; even Thoré called it “absurd.. inappropriate.. ugly.. and shocking” and the painter Jean-Léon Gérôme stipulated that his students not utter Manet's name. The legends can't reconcile why a knowing provocateur would be so emotionally shell-shocked by the reception he met, but I'm inclined to believe he was thrust into this role by Baudelaire and found the burden harrowing. This possibility is supported by the fact that Olympia, a nude in contemporary setting that created an even greater stir in the 1865 Salon, was painted before the 1864 Salon but not entered, and presumably entered the following year at Baudelaire's insistence.

In 1864 he entered two paintings: Incident in a Bull Ring and The Dead Christ With Angels (now at the NY Met), reverting to tried and true subject matter, which were immediately savaged by Theophile Gautier, leading to Manet destroying Incident. While Incident was a return to Goya, Dead Christ seems to me to be a return to Giorgione, who was near completion of a work of the same theme when he died, which was completed by Titian.

Olympia was accepted into the Salon of 1865 but the unprecedented critical vitriol and ridicule that met it is well documented. Again the figure stares the public in the face, and as people have guessed that the frog in Le déjeuner was a reference to prostitution, the name in the title was typically used in a brothel. Concurrent with Manet's discovery that Napoleon III was keeping a courtesan as a regular mistress, we have ourselves an interesting riff on Las Meninas, the courtesan taking the central position occupied by the princess to illustrate France under Napoleon III.

The influence of Titian's 1538 canvas Venus of Urbino (left) is universally acknowledged, but Titian's canvas is itself rooted in Giorgione's 1510 Venus Sleeping (below), which Titian is believed to have completed by filling in the landscape after Giorgione's death. The referencing of Venus Sleeping is illuminating: the physical ease, closed eyes, imperviousness to the exterior setting, and the gesture of the hand (which Twain complained upon seeing Urbino was masturbatory) contrasts with the penetrating stare, animated mood, social context, interior setting, and use of the hand to conceal the sex organ from the intruder in Olympia. Buddhists talk of the peace of closed eyes and wrath of open eyes, or Christ sleeping through the storm contrasted with his turning the tables at the Temple. Giorgione's Venus attempts to represent the mysteries of nature, while Olympia through Urbino uses the interior to explicate the man-made world, the psychology of class, transgression, and ambiguous interpersonal relations, emerging from an eternal eroticism.

A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, painted by Manet two decades later, is believed to be another version of Las Meninas, again with the female staring at the viewer, and as with Le déjeuner and Olympia, the conventional belief that the woman in the painting is a prostitute. If Olympia was Napoleon's mistress looking back at the Emperor in the style of Velasquez, here the barmaid stares back at a bourgeois of the Third Republic setting up a paid tryst in bar that caters to ordinary male taste, perhaps intended in 1882 as an ironic celebration of the recent defeat of the monarchical restoration.

Though Michelangelo and Raphael were painting more famous works on the walls and ceilings of the Vatican at the time, I consider Giorgione's Sleeping Venus, 500 years old this year, to be the greatest exterior ever painted, and if it falls short of Las Meninas in the final round, it is perhaps only because the human mind is better suited to explore the dimensions of what it has built. Its pictorial qualities, most notably the color, are groundbreaking and infrequently exceeded, and its content contains not only the seeds of Manet's leap into modernity but the seeds of Surrealism.

2010-07-03T18:01:00.009-04:00

My World Cup loyalties tend to center on whether I have most recently read a book by an author from a particular country. Now there's only one non-European team, Uruguay, so it's Benedetti and Onetti vs. the History of the Novel, except that they would probably root for the history of the novel.

During the tournament there are inevitably articles speculating why the US favors American football rather than “soccer.” I'm inclined to think that allegiances to sport are contingent on the physical size of the upper class, and countries where the upper class is physically smaller are going to favor a sport where smaller people can excel. American football is descended from rugby, a sport where large men push each other around, and, in England, the upper classes insulate themselves from a possible challenge from lower class men through the distinction of Rugby Union and Rugby League, just as British crew maintains its hierarchy by giving last year's winners a head start. Rugby is popular amongst the German upper class while soccer is apparently the working class sport. Americans in the mid-19th Century were some three inches taller than Germans on average, even though the country's full of German blood by way of England or not. American football introduced more law enforcement and incessant discussion, and my attempts to stop watching it have been unsuccessful. Basketball (which I used to watch but have managed – cross my fingers – to kick) is likewise a sport that favors the tall. Baseball favors the tall in certain instances (pitching, first base, etc.) but the fact that it is easier for shorter players to overcome this accounts for it being the US's most popular athletic export, winning over Latin America and East Asia.*

After Jim Crow the question of whether to integrate the sports came into play, and after much resistance, white people let black people play, leading to the worldwide phenomenon of the black basketball star. Rush Limbaugh tries to discourage the black quarterback (which led to my pulling for McNabb and the Eagles and the ensuing addiction) because the idea that the team is best managed by a white administrator-athlete enables people of that mindset to maintain their competitive disposition. People in Blue States have moved on to playing soccer, presumably to escape the perception of immanent physical injury associated with football, leading to Republican concerns in 1996 that the Democratic lead was attributed to “soccer Moms,” while people in Red States stick to the gridiron. Also, immigrants from countries of shorter people tended to concentrate in the Northeast and in California, and the shorter people were more likely to play soccer and vote Democratic.

With professional sports came the Team Owner. In horse racing, the owner of the horse is understood to be the protagonist, which allows the sport to maintain the favor of a certain culture. The oil man Jerry Jones was recently voted one of the most hated figures in football despite running the team rather effectively and wanting feverishly to win, taking over the mantle of baseball's retired defense contractor George Steinbrenner. The fans enter into a difficult emotional relationship with this protagonist: they resent their enormous net worth more than the simple snob with a good salary as well as their power and lack of accountability, but still share the owner's aspirations to win and invest their self-image in the success of the team, which symbolizes the success of the region's economic base.

*I remember shooting hoops in a small Mexican town with an African-American surfer from California, concerned that a game would ensue and that I had only brought sandals with me on this day trip. The school got out and all the local kids ran up to him, completely ignoring me, begging him to teach them basketball.

2010-06-26T19:50:00.012-04:00

We are at the 500 year anniversary of Giorgione's death, and while the significance of this is manifold, one of his instigations of the last years of his life was the belated arrival of the landscape genre to the West, which may have come on a merchant ship from the East. It is believed that he left Venice infrequently and spent little time in rural expanses, and one of his incentives for doing so was to seek out patrons willing to pay for secular canvases, "Young Turks" that became part of his particular legend. Such patrons were spread around the country as Botticelli had found two decades earlier in Florence and as Pope Julius had hired Raphael to decorate his library with classical imagery.

Giorgione's Tempest, which has come to be known as the West's first landscape, immediately sets out to depict cumulonimbus cloud formations, making the highest vertical grid active and rendering the grids below passive, the threatening representation of water balanced by brooks and the maternal images of nursing and the stork. It has come to be a depiction of its interpreters as well as its own subject matter: Judeo-Christians suggest this is a rest on the flight to Egypt, the flight from Paradise or the broken pillar of the Philistines, Classicists suggest it's the abandoned Oenone amid the storm of the Trojan War, fatalists suggest allegorical figures awaiting the storm's destiny. X-rays have shown the figure on the left was originally a female bather, lessening the likelihood of a specific symbolist intention.

The broken pillar has elsewhere been a symbol for death, and traditional Eastern symbolism of the storm has focused on the its dual nature of death and rebirth such as the Japanese god Susano-o and Indra's maruts. The death of 46 people in Maharashtra this month in the early days of the monsoon is culturally weighed against the need for the phenomenon. If Giorgione was aware of harvest rituals it would have added to his incentive for ambiguity, as his Three Philosophers clearly indicates his integration of Eastern ideas.

Those who dispute a symbolic strategy are more likely to suggest that the characters are gypsies on the periphery of the city, literal personifications of the convergence of East and West. This motif has been developed in modernity by Manet and Picasso, examples of both which can be found the DC's NGA and suggest a newer symbolism that can be approached only by visual observation. Courbet never used classical or religious symbolism in his landscapes save for his use of water and female figures in his "the source" series; Pisarro proceeded similarly. The storm was a common subject of Mannerism as with El Greco and where classical or Christain iconography fell out of favor, a Baroque fatalism remained as with Donne's The Storm, inspired by his sailing as a young man against Spain in the late 16th Century where his proud, sheltered British self-image is imbued with reverence for Nature, or Shakespeare's use of the tempest to represent the divining art of theatrical illusion. A few years later the Christian allusion would return with Rembrandt's only seascape, The Storm on the Sea of Galilee,

an episode that Delacroix would paint repeatedly, which used Christ's sleep to illustrate calmness in the face of chaos and being at one with nature.

The storm taken up by Edvard Munch, the figures are again in the foreground, but with none of the contentedness of Giorgione's figures or Christ on a boat.

The storm becomes an allegory of representation in Magritte's Threatening Weather:

Or Leonora Carrington's clouds:

When George Grosz moved to America he began to paint landscapes with none of the social commentary (and people lost interest in him as a result). The American depiction of the storm has mostly followed the same vein, as with John Marin's storms-for-storms-sake (Storm Over Taos).

Kay Sage eliminates nature, keeping only the wind:

All these potential uses for the storm in painting were contained in Giorgione's canvases.

2010-06-25T01:56:00.012-04:00

I'm not aware whether this painting (The Sea Storm) I was looking at today in reproduction has been speculated about before as an influence on Turner. Jacobo Palma il Vecchio was believed to have been working on this commission when he died in 1528, so the task fell to Paris Bordone to complete it within the next few years. Venice's Accademia acquired it in 1829, while Turner's visits to the city were increasing in frequency. Turner painted the academic Dutch Boats in a Storm in 1801, the landscape Snow Storm: Hannibal Crossing the Alps in 1812 and some spare watercolors of sea storms before this. A year after the acquisition Turner produced

Rough Sea with Wreckage, then starting a decade later a flurry of storm oils, beginning with the seminal Slave Ship, which places the figures overboard in the lower right hand corner

Then all this within the next few years:

Sunrise with Sea Monsters, 1840-1845

(detail) Ever wonder where this guy came from? Just sayin'. A little shout out for Palma Vecchio. I go to bed now.

2010-06-24T17:38:00.002-04:00

I just had my "back to the metal chair" moment, the moment when I return to the relative comfort of the metal chair in the space where I perceive thunderstorms in the evening, disappointed somewhat that it has ended but assuming by the absence of lightning that my return to the chair will not lead to the story line "he was sitting in a metal chair during a thunderstorm, all his books unfinished." I need to find a wooden chair that is comfortable as the metal one so this resigned transition is no longer necessary, as opposed to the uncomfortable and somewhat unsightly Ottoman stand-in. There have been so little in the way of cumulonimbus clouds this spring that the symbol is placed on the weather forecasts strictly out of habit, but I assume this is temporary, if blogging changed the weather I wouldn't blog. Likewise blogging will not alert birds to new feeders and my enjoyment of English is precisely its imperceptibility to the avian hierarchy, as the one baby finch with brown stripes seems to have little incentive to report its discovery.

Thirty Things for Robert Creeley on the Fifth Anniversary of His Death

2010-04-30T13:14:00.004-04:00

whereyr

2010-04-29T00:35:00.000-04:00

thisisnot
howIwrite

2010-04-28T18:26:00.001-04:00

yrslippersheartheferalcatsbe
neaththearthforagingfordeceptionsI
heartheshadowsrestinginyrfeet

2010-04-27T20:58:00.001-04:00

donderwegto-er
atomickhell-o
copperbellss-s
-e4

2010-04-26T00:02:00.002-04:00

donder&
bliksem&all
thbardsinth
getawaycar

2010-04-25T00:00:00.003-04:00

oil-yesbutmennotwont-tocarve
selvesofstoneforfearsymbolisch-she
willrender'tfleshashame-fulvolte
　
face&
onhorseback

2010-04-24T09:48:00.000-04:00

la
dr
nt
　
to
n
　
to

2010-04-23T02:35:00.004-04:00

s

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असंख्येय

8

∞

zzzz

2010-04-22T01:47:00.000-04:00

inyrdesertth
ereisnoone at
thedoorno
mirrorsjust
yrhairwhere
thestars
hang

2010-04-21T01:35:00.000-04:00

2hrs
inth
jaguars
eye
　
stonescome
toclimb
jaguars
　
&thenbe
lowasif

2010-04-20T00:03:00.000-04:00

Iwriteopen
unadddress
edletterrss
tohysterick
alwrriterss
as mycoeur
t-mandated
commmunit
y-sservicce

2010-04-19T00:00:00.000-04:00

thterms-o
yr-appp
probation-r
　
filthy-just
filthy
　
butyrpoems-r
stillasunnylow
maintains
ains-walkup
intheLatin
quarter

2010-04-18T00:01:00.002-04:00

while I was
thinking things over
　
poets got older
sort of sad

2010-04-17T00:00:00.001-04:00

myface
th size
oa med
i
cine-ball
　
danc
e on th
rect
angle

2010-04-16T00:11:00.000-04:00

16hrsinsidemyear
mosaicsshowmeforgettingmusic
floatingbridgessherows,dolphinstairs
hurriedatlunchIseewater
　
likeyoutoldmeIwas16
andwesettledabet
furrycritters
throughstonesandcorn
　
Itoldtheproprietorchanceisthelake
hesaysitwasalwaysthere
Ithankhimprofuselyforrecognizing
　
nothingisthatthelakeiswater
ponearthabovemesheforgetscorn
asadeerIdriveabandonedcars

2010-04-15T00:08:00.001-04:00

dead Iraqi children
now that Obama's won
who's counting?
quater-million+?
　
time to pay your taxes

2010-04-14T00:10:00.000-04:00

a more
violin
　
t& sssim
plistick
　
you, &
snow-or
　
no snow
I carrot
　
tween eyes
bweet slow

2010-04-13T00:14:00.000-04:00

, then
tell-e
　
graph
in
tent
　
ion
I can
not
sss
　
ee
Me-
let-
us
　
for
horses
picture
time

2010-04-12T00:07:00.001-04:00

pon st
reams a
light-I
float&
ear,
thy-t
on
gues
hum
　
ly-I
wld sign
i
fy the
e
sse

2010-04-11T00:03:00.002-04:00

the man
who sits
by the door
is called
　
Carrying Sixteen
Renounced Comets
Slowly
　
his brother
sometimes
sits there
too

2010-04-10T00:03:00.001-04:00

peace in clean
museums
　
old masters
I can't estrange
from their-patrons
　
Breton hated just that
all-what-changed
by-him
　
poets sing
your
　
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