tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28305632257832034922024-03-13T21:28:36.496-04:00Our God is SpeedGreyhooshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14161781141733273715noreply@blogger.comBlogger630125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2830563225783203492.post-41784765428999641952017-09-24T22:47:00.000-04:002017-09-24T22:48:35.033-04:00Cargo Culting<br />
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Christopher D'Archangelo, <i>Post No Art</i> (c. 1975) as seen at documenta 14, Kassel, Germany.</div>
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via Thierry Geoffrey</div>
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Various graffiti, Athens, Greece. Summer, 2017.</div>
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<br />Greyhooshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14161781141733273715noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2830563225783203492.post-24498098821493252482017-09-07T11:28:00.001-04:002017-09-07T16:35:17.766-04:00Because<br />
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Honestly, back in the days when Julian Cope's <i>Krautrocksampler</i> doc became the Young Person's Guide to Same, I took issue with the author's assertion that German prog was part of a concerted effort to shed all all Anglo-American influences. True enough if you're listening to Neu!, Harmonia, Kraftwerk, Cluster, and Faust; but not much of the case at all when applied to most of their German prog contemporaries.<br />
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And not so true much early Can, either; which -- despite however adventurous it aiming to be -- still adhered to the arc set by Anglo-American psych/blues/"freak-out" models. But that would change soon enough , all such stuff was gradually stripped away and the music pared back to its base elements. Which is probably why <i>Ege Bamyasi</i> and <i>Future Days</i> remain the albums I most often revisit. With the former album, the band starts to shed the aforementioned baggage -- with Czukay's bass and Jaki Liebezeit's drums brought prominently into the foreground, guiding much of what transpires, mixed and crafted in a way that created an uncanny sense of sonic spatiality. The latter album followed further down that path -- far enough to achieve its own peculiar musical universe.<br />
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It was heartening to see Czukay paid proper tribute when the post-rave electronic music boom of the late 1990s came along -- his contributions as an e-musik pioneer widely recognized, thus giving him a second life with a new generation of listeners. I recall clips of him playing as festivals, bobbing and dancing around behind racks of new-gen gear, delighted that the world still kept offering him the means to further explore musical ideas that had gotten into his head from his early days as a Stockhausen student. <br />
<br />Greyhooshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14161781141733273715noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2830563225783203492.post-15871828035318709612017-02-26T14:52:00.002-05:002017-02-26T15:10:49.481-05:00La Trahison des Clercs, ed. #115<br />
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There are a number of reasons that my interest in following the present art world has flagged to almost complete indifference these past several years. I've grown to see little point in complaining, and increasingly think less and less abut it all. But R.M. Vaughan's <a href="http://artfcity.com/2016/06/28/the-berlin-biennale-an-act-of-passive-compliance/" target="_blank">critique</a> of the recent Berlin Biennale, posted this past June at <i>Art F City</i>, echoes some of thoughts about it very well. The opening paragraphs provide you with a preview of the tenor of the entire thing:<br />
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<blockquote>"Since the last Berlin Biennale, Europe has undergone a currency and debt crisis, watched far right political entities grow from obscure clusters of nutjobs into massive populist movements, dealt, badly, with the millions of people fleeing conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa, and been subjected to terrifying and brutal acts of terrorism by all manner of extremists.<br />
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In all of these crises, Berlin, the capital of the EU’s richest and most politically powerful country has played a central and keynote-determining role.<br />
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I can thus think of no better way, given the circumstances, to reinforce the popular perception that contemporary art has nothing to say about the world that surrounds it than by hiring the NYC-based fashion bloggers DIS to curate the ninth edition of the Berlin Biennale. I have rarely seen such a profound case of not giving the people what they want, of so many heads so far up so many assholes.<br />
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Just walk away, Berlin. Go have a strong drink. Read a good mystery novel. Take too much MDMA and pee your slacks. Sit in an empty room and cry. Do anything but waste 26 Euros on the Berlin Biennale.<br />
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I am not arguing that every work of art must pay keen attention to (nor certainly attempt to resolve) world problems. But I cannot see the value of artworks that exist in and speak solely to a snarky, self-affirming vacuum either, as do almost all of the works I saw at the BB. There is so much avoidance of current problems on offer here that one could reasonably see the entire project as an act of retreat, even denial. It’s as if the world is too much for DIS and their assembled artists, so they’ve all gone back to the rec room to play video games."</blockquote><br />
Admittedly, Vaughan wasn't alone in this assessment, as <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/jun/13/berlin-biennale-exhibition-review-new-york-fashion-collective-dis-art" target="_blank">negative reviews</a> of the Biennale <a href="http://hyperallergic.com/306932/the-9th-berlin-biennale-a-vast-obsolescent-pageant-of-irrelevance/" target="_blank">stacked up</a> across the internet. But then there's Vaughan's review of a large exhibition of paintings by American artist Amy Feldman which appeared this past week. I recommend reading <a href="http://artfcity.com/2017/02/24/no-paintings-for-old-men-im-done-with-amy-feldman/" target="_blank">the whole thing</a>, but the crunch comes in the final stretch:<br />
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<blockquote>"I showed a friend a selection of Feldman’s works, a friend who happens to be an accomplished novelist who grew up in poverty in the UK. His response was that all I was doing by showing him these lazy paintings was affirming his long-held suspicion that the art market really existed to give frivolous rich people a way to show off how much play money they have. Feldman’s paintings are that and that only – light amusement for jaded buyers.<br />
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The works have no redeeming qualities other than as oversized examples of how shitty and decadent times have become. Feldman’s paintings are the wall-based equivalent of hiring peasants to play at being peasants in your estate gardens, the extra chandeliers in the posh hotel lobby, the last dollops of gold and poured blue glass on King Tut’s 25 pound funeral mask, the extra season of <i>Girls</i>; flitting, careless excess and high-brow gluttony rendered into being with a gutting, lurid insincerity"</blockquote>Easily the most acidic art reviews I've encountered since the bygone days when Gary Indiana used to occasionally contribute to <i>The Village Voice</i>.<br />
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Greyhooshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14161781141733273715noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2830563225783203492.post-88204664963375643252016-12-21T09:57:00.001-05:002016-12-21T11:04:38.127-05:00Islands of the Colorblind<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Presently scrounging through texts, attempting to sort through Romanticism's various pushbacks against the tides of Enlightenment, Utilitarian, and Positivist thought in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and encountered the following. Not unlike Jane Jacobs, but 120 years before the fact...<br />
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"It is not disputed, that in any land where there are flourishing cities, the territorial aristocracy will be distinguished as patrons of the beautiful in art. But whence has this aristocracy derived the wealth by means of which it indulges so largely in the gratification of those tastes ? Whence has it derived these tastes themselves? And whence came the men of genius possessing the power to minister to those tastes ? On these questions, it is not too much to say, that as the town has made the country, giving to its lands a beauty and value they would not otherwise have possessed ; so the citizen has made the noble, by cultivating in him a taste for art, which would not otherwise have formed a part of his character. For it must be obvious that the countrv which should be purely agricultural, producing no more than may be consumed by its own agricultural population, must unavoidably be the home of a scattered, a rude, and a necessitous people, and its chiefs be little elevated above the coarse untaught mass of their dependants. Burgesses produce both the useful and the ornamental, and minister in this manner both to the need and the pleasure of nobles and kings. What they sell not at home they send abroad. In either case, wealth is realized; lands become more valuable; public burdens can be borne; and along with the skill which produces embellishment, come the means by which it may be purchased. [...]<br />
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"We only maintain that the successful patronage of the fine art depends less on the existence of noble families, than on the existence of prosperous cities. Without the former kind of patronage, art may be wanting in some of its higher attributes; without the latter, it would cease to have existence."</blockquote>
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- Robert Vaughan, "On Great Cities in their Connexion </div>
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with Art," from <i>The Age of Great Cities</i> (1843).</div>
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Or, as a friend of mine said of San Francisco a few years ago, "[It's] been officially pronounced dead. It's a good city to consume culture, but in a very short time it has become one that is completely inhospitable to those who produce it." <br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">*image: Attributed to Tom Sachs. First spotted by the author in </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">an alleyway of the Soho district of Manhattan, circa 1997.</span></div>
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Greyhooshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14161781141733273715noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2830563225783203492.post-44130515005429016732016-12-10T15:00:00.000-05:002016-12-11T13:12:12.305-05:00Notes Toward a Theory of Depressive Resublimation<br />
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<blockquote>"One of the operations of power is to deflect the critique of capitalism onto the terrain of a more limited cultural critique. The condemnation of arrogant elitism or dumbed-down consumerism, of the detached art object or the degraded commodity form, has value. But, being partial, such critiques are always liable to overshoot their mark, and become their opposite. In the end, you have to keep your sights on transforming the system that produced such contradictions in the first place."</blockquote><br />
- Ben Davis, <a href="http://www.e-flux.com/journal/72/60496/connoisseurship-and-critique/" target="_blank">"Connoisseurship and Critique"</a>, <i>e-flux</i> journal, April 2016<br />
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Greyhooshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14161781141733273715noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2830563225783203492.post-83077677465777686872016-12-04T15:01:00.003-05:002016-12-04T15:01:59.058-05:00On the Exhaustion of Something of Other<br />
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Christian Viveros-Fauné, <a href="https://news.artnet.com/exhibitions/mark-leckey-man-child-at-moma-ps1-770276" target="_blank">writing</a> at a<i>rtnet News</i>, on "Containers and Their Drivers," the Mark Leckey mid-career retrospective presently on view at MoMA PS1:<br />
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"<i>Fiorucci [Made Me Hardcore]</i> achieved cult status at almost viral speed, thanks in large part to its timely anticipation of the YouTube generation’s breezy manipulations of digital sources. This accident of history lent the North England-born artist the veneer of being the Cezanne of the interwebs—in today’s artspeak, post-internet art’s analog pioneer. A gifted but ultimately trivial sculptor, filmmaker, poster-maker, installation-designer, lecturer, musician and general jack-of-all-0-and-1-art-trades, Leckey seems to have never recovered from the pigeonholing. [...]<br />
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"Traipsing through Leckey’s multiple rooms at MoMA PS1, consequently, comes across as a spiritually exhausting, Reagan-era throwback experience. As captured in his first US survey...Lecky’s life’s work takes physical shape as a concatenated set of new media reworkings of Jean Baudrillard’s 1980s-style vaporings. The majority of Leckey’s current installations, in fact, deal with some unacknowledged version of hyper-reality. Were Leckey American, no doubt this exhibition would have featured the DeLorean from <i>Back to the Future</i>. [...]<br />
<br />
"'I see myself in a tradition of Pop culture,' Leckey told artnet News contributor J.J. Charlesworth in 2014. 'I'm a Pop artist – I believe in the idea that you’re essentially a receiver, that you open yourself up to, and you allow whatever is current to come through you and absorb it into your body and somehow process that, and that’s how the work gets made.'<br />
<br />
"The work's chief revelation is as simple as it is uncritical: in our era of data glut, everything is everything is everything. Leckey’s replicas (or are they simulacra?) accrue on repeating shelves and pedestals, one after the other, in ongoing, insistent, recurrent, nearly endless succession."</blockquote>
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<br />
The gist of Viveros-Fauné's critique is hardly a new one. If anything, it very much echoes that of Julian Stallabrass's YBA <a href="https://www.versobooks.com/books/59-high-art-lite" target="_blank">bollocking</a> of some years hence, <i>High Art Lite</i>. That being, that "pop conceptualism" rapidly degenerated into a a default modus in which postmod irony, long having lapsed into a state of rhetorical depletion, becomes a form of passively (if not somewhat masochistically celebratory) fatalism. We are all merely receptors, culture is effectively like a pinterest page, and "<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJjCRc6-sGs" target="_blank">thinking isn't cool -- shit and stuff is cool.</a>"<br />
<br />
The prevalence of 1980s tropes, themes and cultural references in Leckey's work is apropos in a way. For those old enough to remember the art of the '80s, this sort of installation art bound to seem so tiresomely familiar, because it's little more that the eternal return of Haim Steinbach -- endlessly reused and recycled and diluted into a thinner gruel with each iteration, a cultural product that exceeded its shelf life with the close of the prior century, a salon art that now signals aesthetic inertia and little else. Except, I suppose, some would argue that in his day there was something about Steinbach's work that seemed simultaneously both humorous and ever-so-slightly horrific. Whereas much of the stuff of this latest generation too often comes across as thoroughly anesthetized.<br />
<br />Greyhooshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14161781141733273715noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2830563225783203492.post-33844734582393364502016-11-28T12:57:00.001-05:002016-11-28T23:03:47.780-05:00The Day I Disconnected The Erase Head And Forgot To Reconnect It<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I suppose by this point I should quit occasionally popping up to say "please pardon my absence," as I've been doing more often than anything else (here) in many months. But I only recently discovered that this blog had been knocked out by a tech glitch. It seems google did some sort of update and the tweaking rendered some html meta-tag coding on the blog's template unparsable, thus taking this thing off the air. Which has since been remedied.</div>
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At any rate, a belated RIP is in order for e-music pioneer extraordinaire Pauline Oliveros. Admittedly, I don't own nearly enough of her work (although, if I had the money to spare, I imagine <a href="https://www.discogs.com/Pauline-Oliveros-Reverberations-Tape-Electronic-Music-1961-1970/master/715856" target="_blank">this collection</a> from a few years back would've done nicely). But back when I used to do the free-mixing session for an experimental music radio show that aired late in the Chicago p.m. , what I did have of her work often filled the bill for providing one element or another to an hour-long multilayered mix.<br />
<br />
So, with that in mind, here (link below) is one such mix that dates back to about a decade ago, with Oliveros taking the lead...<br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><i><b>Flotsam on the Ocean of Sound</b></i> <b><i>(Radio mix no. 12)</i></b></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><u>Primary material includes:</u></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Pauline Oliveros - “Something Else” (Pogus)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Brutum Fulmen - “Spore” (Crippled Intellect)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Miko Vaino - “Vaihtuja” (Wavetrap)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Robert Normandeau - “Tangram” (Empreintes Digitalis)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">John Wall - “Construction III” (Utterpsalm)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Joji Yuasa - “Projection Esemplastic for White Noise” (Neuma)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Douglas Quin - “Canada Glacier/Wind Harps of Taylor Valley" (Miramar)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Merzbow - “Tatara" (Manifold)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Pimmon - “Bettler Kempt” (Fat Cat)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Stillupsteypa - “Nice Things to File Away Forever” (Mille Plateaux)</span></blockquote>
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[ :: <a href="http://www.mediafire.com/file/cd4jlripcbpe7l7/Radio_Dada_Mix_no12.mp3" target="_blank"><b>drone, phase, flux</b> </a>:: ]<br />
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Greyhooshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14161781141733273715noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2830563225783203492.post-77724657410865287022016-10-07T14:13:00.001-04:002016-12-21T16:50:34.944-05:00Art Decade (Redux))<br />
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<br />
Yes, so <a href="http://ourgodisspeed.blogspot.com/2016/10/look-good-in-ruins_28.html" target="_blank">that last bit </a>was re-post of something written five years ago, originally hammered out for the "the 1970s blog" team-effort thing. At the time, I didn't originally set out to write about David Bowie, per se. Rather, I'd been thinking about the American popcult fascination with many things German, particularly Weimar-era Berlin -- a common fetishizing of its decadence, of its status of a place teetering on the edge of an historical abyss that it would soon topple into. And then, reading something about Bowie's time in Berlin and the events that led him there, I decided to use the Bowie angle as a thread on which the loosely hang a number of other themes and thoughts.<br />
<br />
And I was prompted to go ahead and re-post the piece this back while I was reading Paul Morley recent volume, <i>The Age of Bowie</i>. When it comes to Bowie's Thin White Duke year and what followed, Morley takes no discernible interest in Bowie's drug habit and near crack-up, focusing instead other aspect of the the artist's work and career. But he does mention, more or less in passing, something else that seldom comes in most accounts -- something far more pragmatic and less romantic that might help cut through the fog of mystique that long ago coalesced around Bowie's "Berlin trilogy" of albums.<br />
<br />
That being the artist's business deal with manager Tony Defries and Mainman, Ltd.. In 1975, Bowie apparently realized that the arrangement was stacked too heavily in Defries's favor and fires him. But he still has some years left to go before his contracts with Defries and RCA expire. So he spends the next several years doing what wants, working with whom he wants, recording where he wants -- releasing darker, more esoteric and "experimental" albums that RCA is increasingly vexed to wring any singles out of; and when they do manage to do so, the tunes don't chart as highly or as frequently as earlier work (thus perhaps insuring that Defries's royalties from newer work dwindles).<br />
<br />
So, with those three albums -- as well as a second live album, two "best of" collections, plus a children's record by way of an adaptation of <i>Peter and the Wolf</i> on which Bowie provides the narration -- he finally fulfilled his contractual obligations for RCA when he handed over 1980's <i>Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)</i>.<br />
<br />
But his contract with Defries didn't run out until 1982. Something that Bowie had clearly been anticipating and planning around, when you consider the way he steered his career in a more commercial direction with the album he released the following year.Greyhooshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14161781141733273715noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2830563225783203492.post-61009511747065776032016-10-04T23:56:00.000-04:002019-09-17T14:54:09.859-04:00Look Good in Ruins<h4>
<b>(or: Twenty-five Tangents about Bowie in "Berlin")</b></h4>
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<span style="background-color: #cccccc;">Archival post, originally posted at <i>...And What Will Be </i></span><span style="background-color: #cccccc;"><i>Left </i></span><br />
<span style="background-color: #cccccc;"><i>of Them?</i>, April, 2011. It's a shame I can't re-post all </span><span style="background-color: #cccccc;">of the </span><br />
<span style="background-color: #cccccc;">amusing responses that piled up in the comments section</span><br />
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<br />
<br />
<b>1.</b><br />
<br />
By all accounts, he had to get away from L.A. That much is a matter of undisputed public record. Some claim it was little more than a tax dodge, but others argue it was Bowie's attempt at breaking the maeslstrom of drugs and increasing psychosis that was consuming his life -- the obsession with Aleister Crowley, the traffic, escalating paranoia, the $500-per-diem cocaine habit supplemented by a diet of milk and peppers. Or maybe it was all of the above. But it had to start with leaving, getting out and getting away, extricating oneself from certain endangering circles, breaking with destructive habits and everything that fuels or enables them, and hopefully changing course and salvaging what's left of one's creative energies before it's too late. First to Switzerland, then -- eventually -- to Berlin. Leaving Los Angeles and all of its snares and poisonous associations behind. To hell with it all. Looking back, he would later say of Los Angeles, "The fucking place should be wiped off the face of the planet."<br />
<br />
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . <br />
<br />
<b>2.</b><br />
<br />
No big surprise, really, that Bowie would inevitably wind up in Berlin. He'd been enthralled with Germany for some time -- fascinated, as some recent recorded comments and reputed gestures suggested, to a worrisome or problematic degree. He was deeply taken with its art and its music, with the decadent cabaret culture of the Weimar era, and -- more alarmingly -- with a certain sordid chapter of its 20th-century history.<br />
<br />
But mainly it seemed like a good place to go to detox and collect one's wits. Bleak, depressed, somewhat coldly (and dingily) modern, furtively wrestling with its own history in the most repressed of ways, physically divided, socially and politically adrift in the throes of its Cold War limbo. That was the impression of the place as it existed at the time, anyway – the picture that the word "Berlin" commonly painted in a person's mind. A "come-down" city if ever there was one. You wander down a given city street, only to come to its sudden and abrupt end, the point of stoppage at which you find yourself facing the Wall. Some histories aren't so easily left behind, some histories leave harsh reminders.<br />
<br />
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . <br />
<br />
<b>3.</b><br />
<br />
It was Christopher Isherwood who put the idea of moving to Berlin into Bowie's head. Bowie had long been a fan of Isherwood, whose <i>Goodbye to Berlin</i> had undergone a recent revival in popularity from loosely providing the inspiration for the musical <i>Cabaret</i>. Attending the Los Angeles stop of the <i>Station to Station</i> tour in 1976, Isherwood and artist David Hockney had made their way backstage to converse with the singer afterward. The topic of Berlin came up. Isherwood would later claim that he tried to disabuse Bowie of the notion of going there, going so far as to dismiss the city as "boring." No matter, as it prompted Bowie to decide that a lack of distractions and some anonymity were what he needed to clear his head, and it wasn't much later that he started packing his bags. <br />
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<br />
<b>4.</b> <br />
<br />
Bowie wasn't the only one fascinated by Berlin in the 1970s. Far from it. A quick survey of the American cultural landscape revealed that a certain number of people in the U.S. shared a similar interest. Lou Reed's <i>Berlin</i> LP might've played some small part in the matter, with the way it sketched its setting in the gloomiest and starkest of tones. And there was also the popularity of the Broadway and film productions of <i>Cabaret</i>. Plus, the novels of Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass sold modestly well, with the films of Herzog and Wertmüller and Fassbinder and Wenders drawing crowds at the cinema in New York and reviews from urbane film critics.<br />
<br />
As far as how the idea of Berlin was conceived and held in the American public imagination -- it represented something, must've served as some kind of metaphor. But a metaphor for what? Nobody ever said precisely, and perhaps nobody actually knew. Something having to do with trauma and unthinkable sins, with atonement and the weight of history, about rebuilding from the wreckage without looking back, of not being able to speak of the past, of living in a historical limbo. And about modernity. Because Berlin seemed deeply modern, but in a way that was as hard-won and enburdened as any form of modernity could be.<br />
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<br />
<b>5.</b> <br />
<br />
"<i>Amerika kennt keine Ruinen,</i>" art historian Horst Janson reputedly wrote in 1935. America knows no ruins. Ruins, as such, serve as a marker of history; of the past, of civilization having peaked and waned. In its sui generis exclusivity, America in the 20th century say itself as the embodiment of modernity. History was for the Old World, something that effected various elsewheres -- deeply European in its fatalism and determinism. To acknowledge it, to speak its name, meant playing the defeatist's card -- an admission of falling victim to causal forces beyond one's control. Never, never, never. America isn't shaped by history, America <i>makes</i> history. America knows no ruins because it is continually razing the grounds and building anew. <br />
<br />
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<br />
<b>6.</b> <br />
<br />
Unlike the projects that preceded it, Bowie's <i>Young Americans</i> blue-eyed soul schtick seemed like an aesthetic dead-end from the start -- conceptually limited, not the sort of thing one could build on, could take in any further direction. Transitioning into his European, world-wearied proto-New Romantic persona as the Thin White Duke the following year, Bowie would revisit the formula on <i>Station to Station</i>, albeit in a revamped, more dense and shadowy form. <br />
<br />
Case in point, <i>Station to Station</i>'s "Stay." Abetted by the chops of a couple of former members of Roy Ayers Ubiquity, the song showcases Carlos Alomar and Dennis Davis tucking deeply into the groove, getting louder and more open than they did on most of Ayers's recorded outings. "Stay," Bowie croons, although it sounds more like a suggestion than a plea. He sounds numb or placidly transfixed to the spot, while the band piles in a car, stomps the accelerator pedal, and screeches off toward their own destination, all but leaving the frontman in the dust. Stay? The singer was already in the act of grabbing his coat and heading toward the exit. <br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQz6kcWEOdsaBxciLwFZsGQMvXICSGAzoji5zzGlri13r1ncD_5DQvfekO0ayDRTibeUOq3PEs22WI3tylL5EvbJjeDSe9fzfpuz8DWJPHqw6GkctRcSX1Hrj2jf5b_qfilEAD-iDA-Sk/s1600/saluting_01.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQz6kcWEOdsaBxciLwFZsGQMvXICSGAzoji5zzGlri13r1ncD_5DQvfekO0ayDRTibeUOq3PEs22WI3tylL5EvbJjeDSe9fzfpuz8DWJPHqw6GkctRcSX1Hrj2jf5b_qfilEAD-iDA-Sk/s1600/saluting_01.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Left: Victoria Station, 1976. Right: Martin Kippenberger, <i>Ich kann beim Besten Willen</i></span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: xx-small;"><i>kein Hakenkreuz entdecken</i> ("I Can't for the Life of Me See a Swastika in This"), 1984.</span></div>
</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<b>7.</b><br />
<br />
At Victoria Station in London, the camera shutter snaps and catches Bowie waving to fans, his arm in mid-sweep. The photo then runs in a number of tabloids, each claiming that the singer was seen giving the Nazi salute. Of course, that's just the tabloids being the tabloids. But it certainly didn't help that at about the same time he would make a remark in an interview about how Britain could really "benefit from a fascist leader." It was at that point that people started to wonder about the depth and the nature of the singer's Teutophilia, or if all that cocaine hadn't irreparably fucked his brain.<br />
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<br />
<br />
<b>8.</b><br />
<br />
In 1969, the artist Anselm Kiefer made a series of excursions across Europe. It was the earliest stage of his career, and the journey was the basis for a project -- a photographic travelogue titled <i>Occupations</i>. In each of the resulting photos, we see Kiefer at each of his stops giving the fascist salute. <br />
<br />
There's something deeply, ironically comical about the series, as we see the artist as a lonely pathetic figure isolated within the frame, standing at attention with his arm held stiffly in the air. In Rome, at Arles and Montpellier, facing the ocean à la Friedrich's <i>Wanderer Above the Misty Sea</i>. An isolated and abject figure, a bathetic caricature of nationalist sentiment and imperial hubris -- ciphering away in empty and indifferent spaces, dwarfed by the surrounding landscape and architecture, repeating a delusional and ineffectual gesture ad absurdum, summoning the spectre of a lapsed and doomed history again and again and again. As if to drive the issue home with a visual pun, in one shot we see Kiefer in the same pose while standing in silhouette against the window in a trash-strewn apartment. <i>Lebensraum</i>. Of course. <br />
<br />
All irony aside, the series still managed to piss off a lot of people at the time. <br />
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<br />
<br />
<b>9.</b><br />
<br />
Albert Speer knew the value of history, and he also knew the importnace of ruins. During the 1930s, Speer was developing and promoting his own <i>Ruinenwerttheorie</i> ("Theory of Ruin Value") as the overarching principle for the imperial architecture of the Third Reich. The power of the state was to be exemplified in its architecture, he argued; architecture which would stand and sprawl boldly and proudly, endure for a millennium, and then look good in ruins as "relics of a great age." As the Reich's chief architect, Speer was most notably responsible for designing the Nuremberg Zeppelin Field and the German Pavilion for the 1937 World Exposition in Paris. But by dint of their grandiose and unrealistically ambitious character, most of Speer's projects never made it beyond the drawing-room stages. Among his grand, unrealized visions was that of overhauling the capital city of Berlin in a monumentally neoclassical fashion, in the process rechristening the new megalopolis Germania. <br />
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<br />
<b>10.</b><br />
<br />
Reputedly, Bowie's interest in Berlin was mainly artistic in origin. As an aspiring painter, he'd always admired the German Expressionists. And in the middle of the 1970s, in the blur of cocaine and fame and things going off the rails, he was gravitating again to that initial interest in putting paint to canvas; devoting more time to doing so, if only as a means of (re)focusing his creative energies. Some stories have it that before he left for Berlin, he'd been discussing the possibility of doing a film called <i>Wally</i> -- a film based on the life of the Viennese proto-Expressionist artist Egon Schiele. <br />
<br />
Nothing ever came of that project, so eventually he had to settle for being in <i>Just a Gigolo</i> instead. But looking at the cover of <i>"Heroes"</i>, you might think Bowie was having a flashback to his early days as a street mime. If not that, then maybe he was running through a series of contrived and contorted poses reminiscent of Schiele's numerous self-portraits.<br />
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<br />
<b>11.</b> <br />
<br />
<i>Common side effects of advanced cocaine use: Possible neurological and cerebrovascular effects, including but not limited to, subarachnoid haemorrhage, strokes of varying aetiologies, seizures, headache and sudden death. Symptoms might also include chest pains, hypertension, and psychiatric disturbances such as increased agitation, anxiety, depression, decreased dopaminergic signalling, psychosis, paranoia, acute and excessive cognitive distortions, erratic driving, writer's block.</i><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5XL1OZz5Z6ekGwp9hnwUwx6a7V9lX9cRlsOBYryrukZNU9h8ZfR-cf_MSMCqTWV3jSud513Npb7OtN1FtPXGEQQZ9mRXlwvbIVtCUSK1fFvJYC0jk2bd9NvBVo-EKPZJSXP5b8Qpu1eA/s1600/bowie_02.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5XL1OZz5Z6ekGwp9hnwUwx6a7V9lX9cRlsOBYryrukZNU9h8ZfR-cf_MSMCqTWV3jSud513Npb7OtN1FtPXGEQQZ9mRXlwvbIVtCUSK1fFvJYC0jk2bd9NvBVo-EKPZJSXP5b8Qpu1eA/s1600/bowie_02.jpg" /></a></div>
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<br />
<b>12.</b><br />
<br />
A severe and minimal stage setting, Kraftwerk piped in over the p.a. before the performance, followed by Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel's surrealist short film <i>Un Chien Andalous</i> being screened above the stage. Bowie would claim that the idea for the stark black-and-white stage design was inspired by German Expressionist cinema, especially <i>Metropolis</i> and <i>The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari</i>. All of it signifying the "shock of the new" -- the adversarial tradition of modernism and the avant-garde in twentieth century art, complete with its aesthetic credo of relentless progress and innovation, of perpetual revolutions in artistic form and content. <br />
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The Third Reich, however, had no truck with the avant-garde. Goebbels (the failed novelist) had tried to argue with der Führer (the failed painter) about the nature of the regime's cultural policies, making the case that the ideas of a dynamic and forward-thinking society should be embodied in art and literature that was boldly and unapologetically modern. But Goebbels lost that argument, and was given the order to abolish all traces of the avant-garde -- to rid the culture of all art that Hitler deemed "degenerate" and "foreign" and poisonous to the constitution of a "pure" German culture. With that decree, all enclaves of modernist art, literature, and film in Germany were abruptly and sweepingly shut down, wiped out, or driven into exile. <br />
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<br />
<b>13.</b><br />
<br />
Being an artist in postwar West Germany meant being part of a "lost generation." This was on account of a major aesthetic disruption -- first, from having been removed from the modernist continuum by Hitler and his cultural commissars, only to be plunged back into it after an extended absence. The past buried twice over. The result was a sense of alienation, of feeling culturally adrift, hopelessly provincial. What to paint in the West Germany of the 1950s? A number of artists opted for Abstract Expressionism, since that was the favored international style of the day. But somehow -- what, with all its heroic and romantic and subjective underpinnings -- it didn't feel right. And adopting some mode of <i>art brut</i>-styled shabbiness or <i>art informel</i> neo-primitivism was problematic for a whole different set of reasons. It all seemed dismally inadequate and second-hand. So to be an artist in postwar West Germany meant having to find your own way, devising new methods and means of reconnecting with the surrounding culture -- a new iconography for articulating the times.<br />
<br />
But if you were in East Germany, you didn't face this sort of quandary, because the state had already made the choice for you. That choice being the mandated style of Socialist Realism -- long favored by the Soviets, and not much different from the official art of the Third Reich. Interestingly enough, a number of prominent postwar West German artists were defectors from the former East Germany. This was the case with the artists Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter, who -- having learned their painterly chops under the state-mandated, institutionalized style of Socialist Realism -- met in the early 1960s and began trading ideas. Between the two of them and a third artist by the name of Konrad Lueg, they soon cooked up a platform for their own mode of production -- one based in the visual language of advertising, which they christened "Capitalist Realism." The way they saw it, it all amounted to one form of propaganda or another in the end.<br />
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<br />
<br />
<b>14.<b></b></b> <br />
<br />
It was probably just as well that Bowie had gotten into rock'n'roll, because there was no point in being a painter man in the 1970s. As the mandarin aesthetic discourse of the day had it, the medium of painting was dead; deemed outmoded, obsolete, mired in formalism and tradition, elitist and undemocratic in its institutional and technical orientation. The act of picking up a paintbrush, as critic Matthew Collings would later put it, was the equivalent of worshipping Satan. (Or, to put it another way: What guitar solos were to punk, painting was to the art community in the 1970s.) In the prior decade of the 1960s, art practices had splintered off into a diffuse set of multimedia practices; with the boundaries of what constituted "worthy" subject matter being thrown wide open, thus ushering in the age of art spelt with a lower-case <i>a</i>. <br />
<br />
Of all the artistic movements of the 1960s, the international Fluxus movement most epitomized this jettisoning of big-<i>A</i> art. And in NYC during the 1970s, Fluxus's most prominent German representative Joseph Beuys was regarded as one of the most significant European artists of the postwar era. Artworld types crammed auditoriums to hear him talk. At the René Block Gallery in 1974, he performed his famous piece "I Like America and America Likes Me," which involved him being locked in a room with a coyote for three days. As was typical with Beuys's work, interpretations of the performance varied; but many saw it as involving themes about American history -- about manifest destiny, the materialistic nature of American culture, as well as the country's ongoing military involvement in Southeast Asia.<br />
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<b>15.</b><br />
<br />
But something about the chronology is a little off, here, in terms of Bowie's interest in Germany is concerned. As far as the avant-garde was concerned, Expressionism was out of vogue by the time of the Weimar Republic. Weimar was, instead, the age of <i>Die Neue Sachlichkeit</i> -- the "New Sobriety," or (depending on which translation you opt for) the "New Objectivity." It was that period after WWI in which Germany was in turmoil, and a younger generation of artists had come along and rebelled, declaring that Expressionism -- with all its interiority and subjectivity and romanticizing of the artist's creative vision and ego -- was too bloated and self-important, too wrongly out of tune with the times. Art and literature and film, it was decided, should instead cast its gaze outward; outward to society, and critically reflect all of that society's aspects -- especially its excesses, its injustices and hypocrisies, its innumerable desperations. <br />
<br />
Yes, Weimar...cabaret and homosexuality and transvestites and jazz and decadence, extreme economic disparities, death and crime and riots in the streets. All of that, up until the point when a new regime came to power and put things in order. And therein (perhaps) lies part of the iconic romantic appeal of Weimar -- the orgiastic, blinkered indulgences of a dark chapter in history. And then a page in the history book turns and an even darker and more troubling chapter begins.<br />
<br />
Being a creative sort and a young gay male, Christopher Isherwood had -- along with confrere W.H. Auden -- relocated to Berlin to get in on the action, mainly looking to expatriate himself to a climate where his own sexuality might meet with fewer social reprisals. But as a writer, he was also attuned to the culture, and fell in step with the New Objectivity. "I am a camera," he famously wrote, "With its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. ... Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed."<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/2BhIwytZWbg" width="420"></iframe></center>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtQSIzVr4IHUS1FZ3A6-rZ8avgo6xovAr9Vua9ty-FKujcNOqmdlLzLWTfhuKIM4uSt7kWSOYGtsWb0Fr416vgJqAbAQcbjwvmZcpE_ATqVRmL73NkNHxWsjv4n00U7WfVjcit40Ofd1Y/s1600/immendorf_00.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtQSIzVr4IHUS1FZ3A6-rZ8avgo6xovAr9Vua9ty-FKujcNOqmdlLzLWTfhuKIM4uSt7kWSOYGtsWb0Fr416vgJqAbAQcbjwvmZcpE_ATqVRmL73NkNHxWsjv4n00U7WfVjcit40Ofd1Y/s400/immendorf_00.jpg" width="398" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="text-align: start;">Jörg Immendorff, </span><i style="text-align: start;">Hört auf zu malen!</i><span style="text-align: start;"> (</span><i style="text-align: start;">Give Up Painting!</i><span style="text-align: start;">), 1966</span></span></td></tr>
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<br />
<b>16.</b><br />
<br />
Within the context of postmodernity -- with its linchpin criteria of pluralism, hybridity, circumscription, semiotic slippage, and distanciated irony -- there is nothing inherently problematic about blue-eyed soul. Or, perhaps, discussing the misfire of a German studio-manufactured black euro-disco outfit trying to wring a dancefloor hit out of The Creation's "Painter Man."<br />
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<br />
<b>17.</b><br />
<br />
<blockquote>
"The avant-garde was defeated by the changing conditions in which it had to operate. Huyssen contends that the avant-garde was either killed off by the repressive political regimes or dissolved in cultural environments like the United States where its dialectic could find no purchase. In dozens of accounts the latter is described as a process of cynically selling out, or being forced out in what financial journalism would call a hostile takeover, some voluntary or involuntary collusion with art markets and hegemonic systems of representation that belies the avant-garde's revolutionary pretensions. [. . .] The economic equation can of course also be used retroactively to discredit the avant-garde all the way back to its point of inception: now the avant-garde was never anything more than a way to generate new commodities or develop a more striking sales pitch. This critique is usually attached to analyses of the so-called culture industry. In the west this death-as-devaluation is also a by-product of the perception that the revolutionary movements with which the avant-garde has historically been linked tend inevitably to end not in utopias but in totalitarianism."</blockquote>
<div style="text-align: right;">
- Paul Mann, <i>The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde</i></div>
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<br />
<b>18.</b> <br />
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Joseph Beuys wasn't the only German artist to be a hot ticket item in New York at the time. In fact, interest in German art -- of both the current and early twentieth-century variety -- was in vogue in the late 1970s, resulting in what some would soon refer to as a "German Invasion." First came the arrival of high-rolling German art dealers setting up stateside satellite outposts in the city's main gallery district. Then followed a gradual invasion proper, with critics and collectors taking an advanced interest in the works of contemporary German artists. Starting with Beuys, and then followed Sigmar Polke and Georg Baselitz and Blinky Palermo and Jörg Immendorff and A.R. Penck and Anselm Kiefer and eventually Gerhard Richter, and there were plenty of others where they came from. Sure, painting was still a dubious pursuit and, yes, most of these guys were painters. But due to some twist in historico-criterial rationale, the Germans were issued a pass. Maybe it was because, in sorting through the societal rubble of postwar German culture, this generation of artists was engaging the medium in exceptional ways, turning its conventional visual syntax against itself with the driest sense of irony. Whatever the case, this newfound interest in contemporary German artists would remain a staple of the NYC uptown art boom of the 1980s. <br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVrpoj8gkhQ7d8XcFCRFAUp3ryVrMonHR84DCciTzyxo6hPM01ZnoJUFzkAt00KQGEXvxkGsP6gY4IVe2jB5uxyICWFD9MGzim-TtbAHztCXqJL3i-hpYrE1I_5mIjGzYZyIvsl2F90oA/s1600/chancellry.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVrpoj8gkhQ7d8XcFCRFAUp3ryVrMonHR84DCciTzyxo6hPM01ZnoJUFzkAt00KQGEXvxkGsP6gY4IVe2jB5uxyICWFD9MGzim-TtbAHztCXqJL3i-hpYrE1I_5mIjGzYZyIvsl2F90oA/s400/chancellry.jpg" width="255" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Albert Speer's German Chancellery. Berlin, 1945</span></span></td></tr>
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<br />
<b>19.</b><br />
<br />
Ruination would arrive much earlier than Speer or Hitler had anticipated. Along with a number of cities throughout Germany, Berlin would be obliterated by the Allied powers aerial bombing campaigns between the years of 1942 and 1945.<br />
<br />
Economically crippled and purged of any- and everyone who had been associated with the Third Reich, the German film industry lumbered into the postwar reconstruction era with limited means and resources. What followed were a series of middling-budget dramas set in the streets and among devastation of the country's cities. The result was a short-lived form of cinematic neorealist genre/not-genre that would later come to be known as <i>Trümmerfilme</i> ("rubble films"). This variety of film, reputedly, would prove unpopular with German audiences, who preferred movies that could offer them an escape from their daily lives. <br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgY-UpP3refq24WSJ0Nf0_jmVYbLDyPwGb0tKLCdK9V4bh0-bD7GTBKuPE3aCH_-YuBMfbbY8He8JjguSIwR9jRpqy_DwphGETwJHTsM5XaEh8xxzApHQwIXJcf6jgNsT8HWaMG2bPMDxk/s1600/kiefer_heidegger_00.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgY-UpP3refq24WSJ0Nf0_jmVYbLDyPwGb0tKLCdK9V4bh0-bD7GTBKuPE3aCH_-YuBMfbbY8He8JjguSIwR9jRpqy_DwphGETwJHTsM5XaEh8xxzApHQwIXJcf6jgNsT8HWaMG2bPMDxk/s1600/kiefer_heidegger_00.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Anselm Kiefer, <i>Martin Heidegger</i>, 1976.</span></span></td></tr>
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<br />
<br />
<b>20.</b><br />
<br />
At this point, I imagine there's a really profound and pertinent quote by Heidegger that I could insert here. Something connected to cultural memory and nostalgia and the role of myth in a socio-historical context. Something that might add a little more rigorously academic and metaphysical weight to this scattered and meandering spiel.<br />
<br />
But honestly, I really don't feel like going out of my way to search for one. Because while David Bowie might not have actually been a fascist, Martin Heidegger was. So to hell with him.<br />
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<b>21. </b><br />
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True, there was the popularity of "Autobahn," which brought the music of Kraftwerk to many people's attention. Bowie had been impressed and used Kraftwerk's music to open each show on his <i>Station to Station</i> tour. And there was the <i>motorik</i> rhythm of the Düsseldorf outfit Neu!, which can be heard echoing throughout Bowie's so-called "Berlin Trilogy." Brian Eno was quite smitten with it too, going so far in 1976 as to seek out Neu's Michael Rother (by this point working in the trio Harmonia) for the sake of recording together.<br />
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The motorik rhythm: mechanical pulse and vibration. The cycling of the engine, the oscillations of wiper blades, the road and the tires providing a baseline drone from underneath. The experience of traveling along motorways; that arterial network linking city to town, traversing borders and scattered terrains. Life in transition, the landscape always in passing. Speed -- deliberate, enabled by technology -- as the essence of twentieth-century modernity, its tautology and telos. <br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjToB6V4cf5uiSo-3WypuQ_3PKeXW78q5GN-xNkYi-ML45rBqtNAqRJAKKkyFR5z1PwCafTbkKSsPqs5v4X1iut_5ZC8qclh_ITdh4-yiHJ4uzhUBEwTAedTwaYhBOhKssb8PqGR-IIjjs/s1600/roadmovie_01.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjToB6V4cf5uiSo-3WypuQ_3PKeXW78q5GN-xNkYi-ML45rBqtNAqRJAKKkyFR5z1PwCafTbkKSsPqs5v4X1iut_5ZC8qclh_ITdh4-yiHJ4uzhUBEwTAedTwaYhBOhKssb8PqGR-IIjjs/s1600/roadmovie_01.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="text-align: start;">Left: Wim Wenders, </span><i style="text-align: start;">Im Lauf der Zeit</i><span style="text-align: start;">, 1976. Right: Gerhard Richter, </span><i style="text-align: start;">Platterspieler</i><span style="text-align: start;">, 1987</span></span></td></tr>
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<br />
<b>22.</b><br />
<br />
For Wim Wenders, early rock'n'roll tunes made for the ideal travel music. This is what often serves as a diegetic trope throughout the director's "road movie" trilogy of the mid 1970s, particularly in the trilogy's finale <i>Kings of the Road</i> (<i>Im Lauf der Zeit</i>, 1976) It's the soundtrack of choice for the film's two protagonists -- film-house projector repairman Bruno and suicidal drifter Robert -- as they travel the open roads between dead-end towns along the country's eastern border along the <i>Zonenrandgebiet</i>. <br />
<br />
At one point in <i>Kings of the Road</i>, Bruno and Robert are poking around in a shabby, empty small-town theater. Having finished his repairs on the projector, Bruno gathers a few short strands of film he finds on the floor of the projection booth and whimsically splices them into a loop. The duo ease back into a pair of theater seats and wryly admire Bruno's improvised handiwork -- a short montage of sex and catastrophe repeated ad infinitum, the gratuitous staples of cheap entertainment filling the void of a culture in flux. As the character Robert mutters at another point in the film, "The Americans have colonized our subconscious." <br />
<br />
<br />
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . <br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6dRJ2BkdSKBnDHzBrI9bvnlLLizhv69QYpqTuaOipcNEtBmtLdfCiDkDjCCj9MJTUip0NdAvXh1FyrYSv4_AIDbwAavi7R5hvqnOezbxoFr0r0pBi3KAmgtvhIGSAnYbbORMpTX0ESjM/s1600/cap_realism_01.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6dRJ2BkdSKBnDHzBrI9bvnlLLizhv69QYpqTuaOipcNEtBmtLdfCiDkDjCCj9MJTUip0NdAvXh1FyrYSv4_AIDbwAavi7R5hvqnOezbxoFr0r0pBi3KAmgtvhIGSAnYbbORMpTX0ESjM/s1600/cap_realism_01.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Left: The verb imperative? East Germany, circa 1960-ish. Right: Gerhard Richter </span><span style="font-size: xx-small;">rolling out the </span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: xx-small;">season's Capitalist Realism wares in Düsseldorf, 1966.</span></div>
</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<br />
<b>23.</b><br />
<br />
Polke and Richter's formulation of "Capitalist Realism" was, as such, a variant of Pop Art -- a reading of the movement's engagement with the dominant culture from a postwar German perspective. As some proponents of postmodernism would later decree, Pop Art marks a pivotal moment in the history of twentieth century art; the moment of dissolution and terminus in which the critical imperatives of the modernist avant-garde -- e.g. the Futurists' demand of taking art into the streets, of aestheticizing everyday life, its adversarial attack on the status quo of the larger society, etc. -- were overtaken and subsumed into the common (re: commodity, consumerist, "everyday") culture. By this rationale, during the 1970s some critics asserted that art and its avant-gardes were now officially dead. An artwork was now little more than another product circulating in a broader political economy, of no greater cultural importance than any other commodity -- be it a car, a kitchen appliance, or a sitcom on TV. Or so the argument had it. But as far as lazy and under-nuanced postmodern declarations go, this obituary more than slightly reeked of a self-gratified bourgeoisie triumphalism. <br />
<br />
<br />
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . <br />
<br />
<br />
<b>24.</b><br />
<br />
The album title <i>Low</i> reportedly described the state and mood Bowie was in during its creation. West Germany had seen its share of lows at the time, as well. In some respects, some things in West Germany weren't much different than they were elsewhere during the 1970s. The "economic miracle" of its postwar recovery years had ground to a crawl, bringing a spike in unemployment and labor unrest. Chancellor Willy Brandt had to resign from office when it was discovered that one of his top aides was secretly in the employ of the East German Stasi. And in 1977 -- just a couple of weeks after Bowie and company wrapped up their sessions for <i>"Heroes"</i> at Berlin's Hansa Studio by the Wall -- the country was entering the one of most violent and politically tumultuous episodes of its postwar years. It was the "German Autumn" which marked the culmination of the country's long-running conflict with the Baader-Meinhof gang, bringing with it a series of connected events that involved kidnapping, hijacking, murder, and death. While these events were very specific to the decade, they also pointed backwards; begging a number of critical questions about the society's self-imposed cultural amnesia and denial, its unwillingness or inability to acknowledge -- let alone address -- the ghosts of its own history prior to the "year zero" of 1945. There were some things, it seemed, that couldn't simply be bulldozed away with the rubble.<br />
<br />
<br />
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . <br />
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<br />
<br />
<b>25.</b><br />
<br />
Rapidly going broke, mental and physical health in shambles, life run off the rails. Bowie had reputedly gone to Berlin for a number of reasons -- reasons both personal and creative. To what degree he achieved what he wanted to achieve, made the changes he hoped to make, or how much the city met his expectations or provided him what he sought is anyone's guess. Dicey going, that -- going to a place while viewing it from an earlier half of the century, from a remote and amputated portion of its own history. <br />
<br />
What we do know, once the facts are teased out from the blur of myth and marketing copy, is that Bowie didn't spend the entire time of 1977-1978 in the city. Of the three albums that fall under his so-called Berlin Trilogy, only one of them was fully recorded there. But as a critical rubric, the "Berlin years" designate a distinct and transitional phase in the artist's career. There's the much dissected sonic difference that evolved from working by alternate methods of crafting and developing songs, drawing from a set of different influences, from working with specific people at a specific time. Lyrically, the material is in some ways darker, at other turns cryptic and fragmented. It was also, at first, sometimes more personal. It was as if the artist who'd spent the past several years submerging himself in a sequence of invented identities and elaborate theatrics finally had to check in and find out who, if anyone, was still at home.<br />
<br />
<br />Greyhooshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14161781141733273715noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2830563225783203492.post-50809720339164312882016-09-11T12:15:00.000-04:002016-09-11T12:18:01.637-04:00Strungout on Jargon (Slight Return)<br />
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<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>TEMPLATE 6: The Disneyland/ Dystopian Paradise/Planned Utopia Artist Statement $21.99:</b></blockquote>
<blockquote>
Step 1: talk about how your interest in planned communities came from interrogating the assumptions of the following:<br />
<ul>
<li>the American dream</li>
<li>the failed narrative of progress</li>
<li>conflicts that inhere in postmodern urbanism</li>
<li>experimental geography</li>
</ul>
Step 2: talk about ambiguous futures, suspended temporality and the destabilization of the reality principle<br />
Step 3: rail against a too-perfect repressed 'paradise' that is really a simulacra of XYZ<br />
Step 4: bring in Buckminster Fuller, Brazilia and Celebration (planned community in Florida)<br />
<br />
<b>TEMPLATE 7: The Deconstructed Architecture/Unmonumental Sculpture Artist Statement</b><br />
<br />
Step 1: talk about how your work began with a preoccupation with 'haunted spaces,' 'aporia' and 'liminality'<br />
Step 2: talk about how your installations render visible what the built environment has naturalized or obscured<br />
Step 3: tell an anecdote about how your 3 month artist residency in a Third World country (i.e. South/Central America, Eastern Europe, Africa, etc.) awakened an awareness about how ethnography is embedded in place in a way that the homogenized metropli of the First World never allowed you to perceive that allows you to simultaneously:<br />
A.) off-handedly brag about how you were at a residency<br />
B.) show that despite your impenetrable wall of accolades, you are still a sentient aware person capable of being effected and transformed by lived experience (they LOVE that!)</blockquote>
<br />
<br />
From "Top Ten Words I Am Sick of Seeing on Artists Statements" by Andrea Liu [ <a href="http://e-flux.com/aup/project/andrea-liu-top-ten-words-i-am-sick-of-seeing-on-artists-statements/" target="_blank">#</a> ]<br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: right;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">image: Thomas Struth</span></div>
<br />Greyhooshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14161781141733273715noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2830563225783203492.post-65540822206328850772016-09-10T14:33:00.003-04:002016-09-10T14:38:15.198-04:00Arts & Leisure<br />
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Images: Paul Kremer, via <a href="http://greatartinuglyrooms.tumblr.com/" target="_blank">Great Art In Ugly Rooms</a> and <a href="http://artscrub.tumblr.com/" target="_blank">Art Scrub</a>.</div>
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<br />Greyhooshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14161781141733273715noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2830563225783203492.post-72625942309325162052016-09-04T14:36:00.001-04:002016-09-04T14:58:20.015-04:00Speculation Rules the Nation<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj27pLUtFTwbi60hlSzVkECFgzZXQFK55tgT1MypnFqNJ4cv5La80OnvZeJBXrx0g4KBXRCmocDacAhvW_WEOoIea8yFvCPi5hnwnQE9rO_jraCzDDHlfL4VlMNCW4Sd9JIvwbRCraaQdU/s1600/bristol_1985.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj27pLUtFTwbi60hlSzVkECFgzZXQFK55tgT1MypnFqNJ4cv5La80OnvZeJBXrx0g4KBXRCmocDacAhvW_WEOoIea8yFvCPi5hnwnQE9rO_jraCzDDHlfL4VlMNCW4Sd9JIvwbRCraaQdU/s1600/bristol_1985.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Robert Del Naja, Bristol, 1985</td></tr>
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Dubious hypothesis of the week, "street art" edition: According to a blogger in Glasgow, Banksy <a href="http://www.factmag.com/2016/09/02/massive-attack-3d-accused-of-being-banksy/" target="_blank">is really Robert "3D" Del Naja</a> of Massive Attack. After all, if the <i>Daily Mail</i> deems that a dog worth chasing, then it must be true.<br />
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News of which has me walking to my book shelves and pulling out a couple of old volumes. First up, 3D as he appeared in the 2-page spread devoted to Bristol in the Henry Chalfant & James Prigoff title <i>Spraycan Art</i>, Thames & Hudson, 1987...<br />
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The other half of the spread being devoted to a young, pre-Metalheadz Goldie.<br />
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Next up is the volume <i>Scrawl</i> (1999, via Booth-Clibborn Editions), which features exactly one piece by Del Naja, but also depicts four graffiti murals by up-and-comer "Robin Banks," aka Bansky...<br />
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Comparing the two, I'd say that Banks's can control and and compositional sense in 1998 weren't quite as nuanced as Del Naja's had been some 12 years prior.<br />
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Bansky has said in the past that the work 3D had originally inspired him to pick up a spraycan and stencils. What's more, in the Booth-Clibborn title, he's quoted as saying that members of Massive Attack were among the first clients to buy some of his canvases. (Meaning that Banksy haters can blame Del Naja & co. for helping the guy get a leg up.)<br />
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The Glaswegian sleuth Craig Williams cites as evidence that Banksy murals have a habit of popping up in various locations that seem the follow Massive Attack's international tour route. The only thing this prompts me to wonder is: Who, then, is the more obsessive Massive Attack fan -- Banksy, or Mr. Williams? Either way, I'd assume Del Naja already has a lot on his plate between the demands of his music career and also continuing to produce visual work in <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/gallery/2015/aug/07/3d-and-the-art-of-massive-attack-in-pictures" target="_blank">a variety of other graphic mediums</a>. Enough so, that I image it'd be difficult to access the surplus time and energy it'd take to maintain a third career as a stealthy, nocturnal, internationally-renowned hit-and-run graffiti artist.<b>*</b><br />
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Anyway, about that recent work of Del Naja's, here's a few samples...<br />
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Actually, I once bought what I thought was a Banksy. But when I got it home I saw that it was signed "Peter Doige."<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>*</b> Pure deduction on my part. Because Del Naja's the same age as me; and I know <i>I</i> don't have that kind of time or energy, anymore.</span>Greyhooshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14161781141733273715noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2830563225783203492.post-18218056556745346602016-08-23T22:32:00.001-04:002016-08-23T22:32:38.842-04:00"The Artistic Temperament"<br />
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<a href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/arts/peter-doig-canvas-dispute-1.3732841" target="_blank">Verdict</a> of the Peter Doig case that I posted about earlier. As well as a befuddlingly <a href="https://news.artnet.com/art-world/peter-doigs-amazing-trial-ends-609389" target="_blank">hilarious recap</a> of the closing argumennts.<br />
<br />Greyhooshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14161781141733273715noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2830563225783203492.post-8861074164570994882016-08-16T23:14:00.000-04:002016-08-18T19:29:46.703-04:00Because<center></center><center></center><center><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="338" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/b2mYaOkKQtI" width="450"></iframe></center><center><br />
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RIP, Bobby Hutcherson<br />
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<center>^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^</center><br />
{ Post-posting afternote: Yeah, I know, I exclusively drew from Hutcherson's early career. Shrug. There are a number (low number) of other notable vibraphonists throughout the history of jazz. But as far as depth, range, and flexibility, Hutcherson may've been the one who best demonstrated it's full potential as a non-novelty/surplus component of a jazz ensemble. Especially the way he used the instrument to bridge the melodic/percussive vs strictly-percussive properties of the piano and drums...best exhibited when he was working between an eccentric pianist/composer like Andrew Hill, and a drummer/composer (yes, that's "a thing," although very rarely) like Joe Chambers. Wonderfully guiding things in the right stretches and spaces; at others times -- espec as a sideman -- adding accentuations and highlights, or (as on the Henderson and Patton pieces above) helping drive the whole joint into rhythmic overdrive. }<br />
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Greyhooshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14161781141733273715noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2830563225783203492.post-45205741977038150422016-08-07T23:42:00.000-04:002016-08-08T22:49:37.532-04:00Dysattribution<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Last summer Woodridge resident Doug Fletcher was visiting his older brother, Bob, in Canada, when Bob mentioned that an artist he'd purchased a painting from in 1976 might now be 'kind of famous.' At least, that's what a friend had told him. [...] </blockquote>
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Bob now does construction work; Doug is a health-care recruiter and interfaith pastor. Neither of them is schooled in art, but upon viewing the painting Doug said he'd do some googling when he got home. A search for 'Pete Doige' came up empty. But as Bob's friend had suggested, Peter Doig—who was born in Scotland, lived in Canada as a teen in the 70s, made his name as an artist in London, and now lives in Trinidad —- was in fact very successful. Among other things, he'd broken the auction record for a living European artist when his painting White Canoe sold for $11.3 million at Sotheby's in 2007." [ <a href="http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/pete-doige-painting-a-peter-doig-treasure/Content?oid=6490119" target="_blank">from</a> ]</blockquote>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“Mr. Doig and his lawyers say they have identified the real artist, a man named Peter Edward Doige. He died in 2012, but his sister said he had attended Lakehead University, served time in Thunder Bay and painted. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
‘I believe that Mr. Fletcher is mistaken and that he actually met my brother, Peter, who I believe did this painting,’ the sister, Marilyn Doige Bovard, said in a court declaration. She said the work’s desert scene appeared to show the area in Arizona where her mother moved after a divorce and where her brother spent some time. She recognized, she said, the saguaro cactus in the painting. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The prison’s former art teacher recognized a photograph of Ms. Bovard’s brother as a man who had been in his class and said he had watched him paint the painting, according to the teacher’s affidavit.” [ <a href="http://www.artmarketmonitor.com/2016/07/07/if-it-looks-like-a-doig-it-cannot-be-a-doige-us-courts-take-unusual-step-in-authenticity-case/" target="_blank">from</a> ] </blockquote>
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"[Co-plaintiff/art dealer Peter] Bartlow, who helped bring the case against the artist, told artnet News in a phone interview that he believed Doig’s motive in disavowing the work is not to deny a criminal past but to disguise the fact that 'he can’t draw.' </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The Chicago dealer insists that Doig relies on using projections on the canvas. 'No critic has ever written this about it,' he acknowledged. 'The only reason I did is that I have this book of his by Phaidon of the painting in the Canadian National Gallery, and I was looking at it upside down. There’s a couple of shapes in it that are the same shapes located in our painting. I could see what he did.'" </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Bartlow told <i>artnet New</i>s in a phone conversation that Doig’s legal team has 'produced nothing of substance' since they first filed the suit in 2013. He continued, 'After all is said and done, we’d like to be awarded damages of at least $7 million and we want the painting declared a genuine Peter Doig painting. We have a very fair and smart judge.'" [ from <a href="https://news.artnet.com/art-world/peter-doig-threatened-authentication-590423" target="_blank">1</a> / <a href="https://news.artnet.com/art-world/peter-doig-threatened-authentication-2-590762" target="_blank">2</a> ]<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "neue helvetica w01" , "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; letter-spacing: 1px;">.</span></blockquote>
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Equalling: The potential of a bafflingly absurd legal precedent being set in a Chicago courtroom on Monday.Greyhooshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14161781141733273715noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2830563225783203492.post-2414608891709170342016-08-03T13:16:00.002-04:002019-09-17T14:50:03.392-04:00New Maps of Purgatory<span style="background-color: #cccccc;">Archival post: First published at <i>...And What </i></span><br />
<span style="background-color: #cccccc;"><i>Will Be Left of Them?</i>, August 2011</span><br />
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</span> A partial, off-the-cuff survey of middling 'Seventies science fiction films, in no particular order...<br />
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<b><i>Logan's Run</i> (1976)</b><br />
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We've seen the future and it's a <a href="http://ounodesign.com/2009/06/11/architecture-in-the-movies-part-3-logans-run/" target="_blank">shopping mall in Dallas</a>, Texas. And yeah yeah -- it's better to burn up than to fade away. Effectively what we have here is the previous decade's generational war slogan of "Never trust anyone over thirty" extrapolated in to an extreme, resulting in the dystopic dénouement of the premise for <i><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRLwV2xafpk" target="_blank">Wild in the Streets</a></i>. <br />
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Yet how humbling, how Romantically fatalistic -- in this, the year of the American bicentennial -- to see the nation's capitol as ruins, strewn with vines and all sorts of flora, patinaed by the elements to which they've returned. And Sir Peter Ustinov's wrinkles are a marvel to behold and to touch; the very embodiment of nature itself, if not of the authority and experience so thoughtlessly discarded by the cult of youth. <br />
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But nevermind the ageism angle, because Richard Pryor has the last word: "Looks like white people aren't counting on us being around." <br />
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<b><i>Rollerball</i> (1975)</b><br />
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The excesses of empire, sans vomitoriums. Key concept: <i>Bread and blood circuses (</i>by way of a popular bloodsport).<i> </i>Considered by some to be very thematically profound and excessively violent at the time, but funny how relative such things are rendered within a few years. What it gets wrong about the future: International corporation have abolished war, poverty, hunger, disease, and all other curses on humanity. And that the year 2018 will see that early '70s-style leisure-wear and manly chest hair will never go out of fashion. And that the cradle of futuristic architecture (via shooting locations) will look like Munich. What it kinda gets right about the future: The black-white ratio of cast members/Houston rollerball team kinda-sorta suggests what the future demographics of Houston, TX will be like.<br />
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As far as it's "social critique" angle in concerned: The thing as a whole is tedious, hazily simplistic, often ludicrous, and a waste of time even as limited-options drunk-watch. Massively upstaged by <i>Death Race 2000; </i>which, as irony would have it, came out the same year.<br />
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<b><i>Westworld</i> (1973)</b><br />
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The excesses of empire, alternate take; but perhaps this <i>with</i> vomitoriums (since the robot-populated adult amusement park had an Ancient Rome division). One of the advantages of this empire being that -- artificially, and merely for the sake of leisure -- one can colonize the past. Key concept: <a href="http://www.metamute.org/en/articles/hostile_object_theory" target="_blank"><i>Hostile objects</i>.</a> <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8aLLG1bS_MbnuxozxNhNy2_45TXu0gLH8ep_6UKYho9zBnE_CYmNX1XZhH7HnFCQgP2aboMH4zl8Apr3yO4viLDXnEKbTtnBfZhjGAef2fvaJ25Tx50nVSbaXxiuGhVaDWIxNt-Whvn8/s1600/phase_iv-31.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8aLLG1bS_MbnuxozxNhNy2_45TXu0gLH8ep_6UKYho9zBnE_CYmNX1XZhH7HnFCQgP2aboMH4zl8Apr3yO4viLDXnEKbTtnBfZhjGAef2fvaJ25Tx50nVSbaXxiuGhVaDWIxNt-Whvn8/s1600/phase_iv-31.jpg" /></a></div><br />
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<b><i>Phase IV</i> (1974)</b><br />
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Effectively this borrows a premise that was put forth some years earlier in <i>2001: A Space Odyssey</i>, that the human race is overdue to make an developmental leap, and that it need help from an outside party -- of extraterrestrial origin -- in order to take that next step in its evolution. And as in <i>2001</i>, it puts that thesis across in a confusingly oblique way.<br />
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Exactly what the nature of this impasse might be, who can tell? But noted that the mathematician believes that everything can be quantified in numbers, and the ants -- in their own way -- prove him correct by demonstrating the power of collectivity. But don't look to a movie that pilfers much of its "action" from a nature documentary for any sort of clarity or coherence.<br />
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<b><i>Silent Running</i> (1972)</b><br />
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In which Deep Ecology meets deep space. With all plant life on earth being choked off by (we're to assume) pollution, Freeman Lowell would sooner kill a man than a tree. This of course is bound to stretch the borders of pathos for most viewers, as much as the plot stretches those of scientific plausibility. For starters: The spaceship survives a passage through the rings of Saturn with all but the most minor of damage. Which is ridiculous enough to start with, exponentially moreso when you note that the spacecraft bears the American Airlines logo. <br />
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<b><i>Day of the Dolphin</i> (1973)</b><br />
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Directed by Mike Nichols, directly following the warm press he'd received for <i>Catch 22</i> and <i>Carnal Knowledge</i>. The only interesting thing is about this film is that Nichols took the project after (reputedly) Roman Polanski was slated to helm the project. But Polanski, who was dealing with the aftermath of Sharon Tate and his unborn child's murder at the hands of the Manson clan, decided that making a violent screen adaptation of <i><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXDS3GMRpzI" target="_blank">Macbeth</a></i> was more suited to his state of mind at the time. Discuss. <br />
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<b><i>The Exorcist II: The Heretic</i> (1977)</b><br />
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With which the director, having missed out on a pile by turning down the first film in order to make <i>Zardoz</i>, doubles back and tries to recoup his losses by agreeing to tackle the sequel. Should we be surprised to learn that the forces of the Prince of Darkness directly link back to the heathen hordes of the "Dark Continent"? Or should we be more surprised that, in a supposedly more enlightened age, such a plot twist was expected to go uncontested? No matter. The result was universally ranked as one of the decade's worst films. Still, between its gloriously unenlightened post-colonial confusion, its jumble of popular paranormal phenomena, and its bizarre efforts at glamorizing its pubescent female lead, it's also one of decade's most enjoyably incoherent movies.<br />
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Greyhooshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14161781141733273715noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2830563225783203492.post-85729023178211022742016-07-30T09:54:00.000-04:002019-09-17T14:48:07.327-04:00Everything Falls Apart, Pt 2<br />
<span style="background-color: #cccccc;">Archival post: First published at <i>...And What </i></span><br />
<span style="background-color: #cccccc;"><i>Will Be Left of Them?</i>, January 2011</span><br />
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<b>A Sum of Possibilites: Gordon Matta-Clark and the Urban Landscape</b><br />
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When the artist Gordon Matta-Clark moved to New York City in 1969, the city as a whole wasn't in the best of economic shape. Declines in post-War manufacturing and shifts in the labor market, loss of jobs, economic stagnation, flight to the suburbs and a shrinking tax base, municipal mismanagement -- all of the problems that were affecting a number of major American cities were beginning to take a severe toll on the city of New York. Nevertheless, artists of every stripe continued to move into Manhattan -- visual artists, writers, and musicians who would play an instrumental role in shaping the City's cultural landscape over the next decade or so. With the real estate market in an extended freefall, many of them had no problems finding cheap and available places to live and work.<br />
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Such was the case with the neighborhood of the SoHo (then called the South Houston Industrial Area), a former sweatshop district where obsolete and derelict property was plentiful. Since the late 1950s, scores of artists had settled into the neighborhood, the property owners often letting many of them live there in an off-the-books capacity. This situation allowed Matta-Clark and his peers a number of unusual opportunities, the means of establishing and developing their own interconnected and mutually supportive cultural community. The anarchically-run co-op exhibition space at 112 Greene Street, which allowed artists to stage their own exhibits and performances, was one such example. Another communal anchor was the artist-run restaurant FOOD, which Matta-Clark -- along with his partner Caroline Goodden and several of their friends -- opened in 1971.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLNT41_33CkL9TF_u_fYcvUN5L6s6aajtF6zc_MZahtjMaFsgEX1EcZjpeBQ6_g3elOUPEh2t1nYgbZcivq0kAL-wx2o65y_N4k4YB1vdLE4nH6iTYWwT7r6or7ImwcrFpvjez-3Kk_zk/s1600/gmc_food.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLNT41_33CkL9TF_u_fYcvUN5L6s6aajtF6zc_MZahtjMaFsgEX1EcZjpeBQ6_g3elOUPEh2t1nYgbZcivq0kAL-wx2o65y_N4k4YB1vdLE4nH6iTYWwT7r6or7ImwcrFpvjez-3Kk_zk/s1600/gmc_food.jpg" /></a></div><center><small>L-R: Tina Girouard, Caroline Goodden, and Gordon Matta-Clark </small><br />
<small></small><small>in 1971, at the storefront that would soon become FOOD.</small></center><br />
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For Gordon Matta-Clark, making art was a fairly recent pursuit. He’d spent much of the 1960s unenthusiastically earning a degree in architecture at Cornell University. His grades throughout had been consistently poor, perhaps owing to the fact that in the course of this studies he discovered his own deep antipathy for the Modernist tenets of architecture and city planning that his professors adhered to as gospel. Only so much sterile formalism and blindly reckless idealism, Matta-Clark had reckoned. If there was any single experience that proved instructive and inspirational to him during his time at Cornell, it was when he met and spoke with the visiting artist Robert Smithson in early 1969 -- just one year before the latter would create his ambitious <i>Spiral Jetty</i> earthwork on the Great Salt Lake in Utah.<br />
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<center><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/vCfm95GyZt4" width="480"></iframe></center><br />
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Robert Smithson was a voracious reader across a baffling broad array of disciplines and interests, not the least of which were geology and science fiction. He held a perverse aesthetic fascination for the vagaries of accelerated urban sprawl -- with <i>terrain vague</i> and rough-edged "non-place urban realms" where hapless juxtaposition of prefab modern civilization and the natural landscape resulted in curious new forms of desolation, upheaval, and disfiguration. ("Ruins in reverse," he'd called the suburban developments of his own native New Jersey.) A central idea for Smithson in the course of his own work and theorizing was that of entropy – the second law of thermodynamics that decreed that all entities and systems inevitably gave way to degeneration, decay, and disorder. As in nature, so too with man-made systems. Speaking in a 1973 interview, Smithson explained:<br />
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<blockquote>"...<i>It seems that architects build in an isolated, self-contained, ahistorical way. They never seem to allow for any kind of relationships outside of their grand plan. And this seems to be true in economics, too. Economics seem to be isolated and self-contained and conceived of as cycles, so as to exclude the whole entropic process. There's every little consideration of natural resources in terms of what the landscape will look like after the mining operations or farming operations are completed. So that a kind of blindness ensues. ... And then suddenly they find themselves within a range of desolation and wonder how they got there.</i>"</blockquote><br />
His own art, he asserted, was the product of his own efforts at creating "a dialectics of entropic change." In many ways, his ideas coincided with a larger aesthetic shift that was transpiring in the late 1960s and early ‘70s -- new artistic practices and strategies in which artists favored Bataille over Kant, contingency over autonomy, the temporal and indeterminate over the transcendent. Instead of formalism, formlessness; instead of purity, dissipation.<br />
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It was Smithson's ideas on entropy and site-specific art that fascinated Matta-Clark when the two conversed in 1969, and it was those ideas that played an instrumental part in the latter's development as an artist. But whereas Smithson was interested in creating "new monuments" in the open expanses of the American landscape, Matta-Clark's prior education steered him in the direction of the nation's urban centers -- to the physical environment of the city itself.<br />
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Having grown up in New York City, Matta-Clark returned after an extended absence to find the city in the throes of decline. Speaking in a later interview, he recalled of his youth in Robert Moses’s Manhattan:<br />
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<blockquote>"<i>As the City evolved in the Fifties and Sixties into a completely architectured International Style steel and concrete megalopolis. By contrast, great areas of what had been residential [space] were being abandoned. These areas were being left as demoralizing reminders of 'Exploit It or Leave It.' It is the prevalence of this wasteland phenomena that drew me to it.</i>"</blockquote><br />
As an artist Gordon Matta-Clark quickly gravitated to the idea of making art works that were connected to (and more often, arose from) urban topology, mutable space, communal life and cultural memory, property, the disconnect between architectural form and architecture as surplus commodity, as well as the varied economies of expansion and waste that existed in the urban landscape.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilWNS-vhn20nTuyhecioHZVW7WriDeFHnoJ_yWFbHyKQAe1f8Y6sXDxorNhmOlarVo5zjOX1bALiZcW9KC7QyzbAVveV_KROJGSq0Bq0QJ_zrqDG_kQD_QAG4r0ziISm__PxvwECSBO5o/s1600/GMC_PigRoast.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilWNS-vhn20nTuyhecioHZVW7WriDeFHnoJ_yWFbHyKQAe1f8Y6sXDxorNhmOlarVo5zjOX1bALiZcW9KC7QyzbAVveV_KROJGSq0Bq0QJ_zrqDG_kQD_QAG4r0ziISm__PxvwECSBO5o/s1600/GMC_PigRoast.jpg" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjID14eWVNlcnqXJcZrK_iEE-7MldVijECXhz5olDAFMcSHMOasaYmWzfkarF62ZrC-ZFKjLNFRDX4J9arpGw_Ny7z4i9bUEnXlECfQYE45wewxi3jQBz9EToPDDtVcwajic14EGUJrU9k/s1600/GMC_NYWalls.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjID14eWVNlcnqXJcZrK_iEE-7MldVijECXhz5olDAFMcSHMOasaYmWzfkarF62ZrC-ZFKjLNFRDX4J9arpGw_Ny7z4i9bUEnXlECfQYE45wewxi3jQBz9EToPDDtVcwajic14EGUJrU9k/s1600/GMC_NYWalls.jpg" /></a></div><center><br />
<small>Top: Gordon Matta-Clark, "Pig Roast," at the Brooklyn Bridge Event, 1971</small><br />
<small></small><small>Gordon Matta-Clark, photo from <i>Walls Paper</i> series, c. 1972</small></center><br />
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In 1972 he began to set out to the city's blighted neighborhoods, seeking out the blocks of condemned and abandoned buildings. Sneaking into these buildings with saws and chisels and blowtorch, he made a series of precise and scattered incisions -- carving them up, rearticulating the architectural spaces, exposing their structural and material components. His friend and fellow artist Ned Smyth accompanied him on many of these excursions, helping lug tools and equipment and keeping an eye out for the police. As Smyth <a href="http://www.artnet.com/magazine/features/smyth/smyth6-4-04.asp" target="_blank">described it</a> years later:<br />
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<blockquote>"<i>We would break into abandoned buildings in the South Bronx and cut large, geometrically shaped pieces out of walls and floors, opening up the spaces. ...This was always scary, with blocks and blocks of empty, boarded-up buildings, haunted by junkies who would steal copper wire and pipe to sell as scrap to get money for drugs. ...We would haul all his saws and other tools, including a power generator, up into these building shells. Sometimes the apartments looked as if the occupants had simply walked out on their lives, leaving their furniture just as it was, their clothes hanging on hooks behind the doors.</i>"</blockquote><br />
Many of these early "cuttings" were done without permission and amounted to criminal trespassing. As early as 1970 Matta-Clark had drafted a proposal for such work and had been sending it out to various organizations and public officials, presenting himself as an artist who aimed to "make sculpture using the natural [sic] by-products of the land and people."<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiCfwB9LxeSIuI2w0Y_KbdkFAdx8MEtfRhynEsvKkRjZF6NKDsfq6gpvfHGjBHEvPpoiq1C7aoA9s6M6IK9EeiWM5VLkYX7d_PE5qd_15Mf0nS3T9LtnMBYNbLG95XIUEMW1J-ZuTw-yo/s1600/GMC_CI_Work.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiCfwB9LxeSIuI2w0Y_KbdkFAdx8MEtfRhynEsvKkRjZF6NKDsfq6gpvfHGjBHEvPpoiq1C7aoA9s6M6IK9EeiWM5VLkYX7d_PE5qd_15Mf0nS3T9LtnMBYNbLG95XIUEMW1J-ZuTw-yo/s1600/GMC_CI_Work.jpg" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikb5B9UQxK5eSgKr1hTPi2ThtqGLhwP710KMEiq4md0n48YCNNEXLTyHooWUoZhiheTqDWhqxxQElyWhGh0PaKFLL24PSZZqeqRiznYOo2hhOKNhugG1lC-NQogP4GtbbLpitsI6gB3-U/s1600/GMC_Schematic.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikb5B9UQxK5eSgKr1hTPi2ThtqGLhwP710KMEiq4md0n48YCNNEXLTyHooWUoZhiheTqDWhqxxQElyWhGh0PaKFLL24PSZZqeqRiznYOo2hhOKNhugG1lC-NQogP4GtbbLpitsI6gB3-U/s1600/GMC_Schematic.png" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRedxlXIdKcvE73_NKQKKUSg2XfJBOCWZDQUosK5UKCfRvm0WkTu7Z_JUx5_Gw1299CbxvZHQABNqzsRtRDZWhQp72Gx8ldVrSpyfEtaQ3_5K-f0Ob61JEKH-eiy5ptEzGAWXRQIKw6YM/s1600/gordon-matta-clark1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRedxlXIdKcvE73_NKQKKUSg2XfJBOCWZDQUosK5UKCfRvm0WkTu7Z_JUx5_Gw1299CbxvZHQABNqzsRtRDZWhQp72Gx8ldVrSpyfEtaQ3_5K-f0Ob61JEKH-eiy5ptEzGAWXRQIKw6YM/s1600/gordon-matta-clark1.jpg" /></a></div><center><br />
<small>Top: <i>Conical Intersect</i> (Paris,1975) artist's execution & schematic.</small><br />
<small></small><small>Bottom: <i>Conical Intersect</i>, and <i>Office Baroque</i> (Antwerp, 1977)</small></center><br />
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Within a few years, however, Matta-Clark would gain permission to realize some of his projects, and during the years of 1972 to 1978 executed a number of <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q67JZ489UjE" target="_blank">site-specific dissections</a> in several cities -- in locations around New York and New Jersey, as well as in Genoa, Chicago, and Antwerp. Utilizing buildings that had been condemned or slated for demolition, the works were intended to exist for a brief period of time, fated -- like the structures themselves -- for a temporary existence. <br />
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On a symbolic or theoretical level, Gordon Matta-Clark's engagement with the discarded architecture of the contemporary city comprised a form of “urban reclamation.”<sup><b>5</b></sup> As such, one might read it an inquest into the dialectical gaps between (use-)value and obsolescence, surplus and salvage; of architectural space as mere material and property and its role in framing or containing and channeling the intricacies of human activity, interaction, and experience -- cycles of births and deaths, moments of private joys or shared sorrows, of everyday life -- that transpired or are carried out within the spatial boundaries of a brute physical environment. In the end, it operated as an inquiry into the production of social space --- as it was perceived, conceived, and lived.<sup><b>6</b></sup><b></b> <br />
<br />
Initially, Gordon Matta-Clark's proposal letters met with little response. He'd continue to send them out over the years. When he approached real estate developer Melvyn Kaufman in 1975, seeking to "collaborate" on a series of projects, Kaufman sniffingly responded:<br />
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<blockquote>"<i>Someone said that dying gracefully is an art. Perhaps it is. But I do not like funerals, either as sad occasions or celebrations. I believe in the great demise but I believe in life more, and I resent the infringement of death processes prolonged as a devitalization of the living.</i>"</blockquote><br />
The castigating tone is amusing, as it seems Kaufman considered Matta-Clark's request as being part of a cynical and reprehensibly exploitative enterprise, accusing him of something akin to "playing in (or with) the ruins" of an ailing metropolis. Given the conditions at the time, one can imagine the reasons for Kaufman's consternation. After all, it was hardly an ideal time to be a real estate developer in NYC -- what, especially seeing how 1975 was also the year of the fed's famous "drop dead" decree. Hence Kaufman's pilings-on of funereal analogies. Morbid metaphors for a morbid and entropic time.<br />
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Neither Robert Smithson nor Gordon Matta-Clark would live to see the end of the decade. Smithson would die in a helicopter crash in 1973 while surveying the location for his next major project; and Matta-Clark died in 1978 of pancreatic cancer, at the age of 35, scarcely six years after he had begun his series of urban "cuttings" and fully embarked on his work as an artist. By that point, SoHo was already well on its way to becoming a different place than the one Matta-Clark and his friends had known and inhabited. New businesses would begin to move in, and shortly the neighborhood would start to "turn around." And in the decade that followed, it would become a cultural hub -- sweeping with restaurants and boutiques and a number of high-end art galleries that would all help fuel the moneyed-up, inflated art boom of the 1980s. <br />
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<small><b>5.</b> This idea of urban reclamation more or less falls into step with certain claims that have been made about graffiti -- that graffiti in the act of marking, tagging, and bombing constitutes a recuperative gesture against an alienating and anonymous environment. By some accounts, this sort of connection wasn't lost on Gordon Matta-Clark. He was enthralled by the tags and murals that he saw proliferating throughout New York City in the early 1970s. At one point in 1973, he drove his truck to a street festival in the South Bronx and invited residents to decorate the vehicle with spray paint as they saw fit. He later cut up the truck's body with a blowtorch, and exhibited select segments at a group exhibition. In the same year, he would also document murals on the city’s subway trains for a series of works called <i>Photoglyphs</i>.<br />
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<b>6.</b> In the two decades that followed his death, Matta-Clark's work received only fleeting and limited attention among art critics and historians. He did, however, become something of a mythic figure in architectural circles, where his work was viewed as an act of "deconstructing" architecture -- as a wholly <i>aesthetic</i> exercise. In more recent years, that narrow reading of Matta-Clark's work has been challenged by overdue accounts from art-historical quarters, with a number of critics pointing out the <i>social</i> ideas that fueled much of the artist's work.<br />
</small>Greyhooshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14161781141733273715noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2830563225783203492.post-89852310913790886242016-07-29T23:34:00.006-04:002019-09-17T14:46:19.316-04:00Everything Falls Apart, Pt. 1<br />
<span style="background-color: #cccccc;">Archival post: Originally published at</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #cccccc;"><i>...And What</i><i> Will Be Left of Them?</i>, January, 2011</span><br />
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</div><b>Certainly the End of Something or Other, It Seemed</b><br />
<blockquote><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">"Do you think a city can control the way people live inside it? I mean, just the geography, the way the streets are laid out, the way the buildings are placed?"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">"Of course it does," she said. […]</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">"Yeah...But thinking that live streets and windows are plotting and conniving to make you into something you're not, that's crazy, isn't it?"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">"Yes," she said, "that's crazy--in a word."</span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">- Samuel R. Delaney, <i>Dhalgren</i></span></div><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">“Architects tend to be idealists and not dialecticians.”</span></span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">- Robert Smithson</span></div></blockquote><br />
In 1975, science fiction author Samuel R. Delaney published his eleventh novel, <i>Dhalgren</i>. Weighing in at 800-plus pages, knottily metafictional, equally praised and reviled by readers and critics alike, <i>Dhalgren</i> would prompt comparison to another similar novel that had appeared only two years previously -- Thomas Pynchon’s <i>Gravity’s Rainbow</i>. Commenting in an interview years later, Delaney countered, "<i>Gravity's Rainbow</i> is a fantasy about a war that most of its readers don't really remember, whereas <i>Dhalgren</i> is a fairly pointed dialogue with all the depressed and burned-out areas of America's great cities. ...To decide if Gravity's Rainbow is relevant, you have to spend time in a library. ...To see what <i>Dhalgren</i> is about, you only have to walk along a mile of your own town's inner city."<sup><b>1</b></sup><br />
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In many respects, <i>Dhalgren</i> was very much a product of its time. The setting of <i>Dhalgren</i> involves a city -- a fictional city called Bellona that lay somewhere in the American Midwest, a city that has been cut off from the rest of the country by some mysterious and unexplained rupture in the space-time continuum. Post-apocalyptic, ethnically diverse, gang-infested, and pornographically rife with all nature of pansexual couplings, Bellona embodied the cultural phobias that many Americans held about the nation's metropolitan centers at the time -- represented many of the reasons that the white middle classes had fled in ever-increasing numbers to outlying suburbs over the two preceding decades. It was the sort of setting that would appear again and again in the years that followed, often in films of the "urban exploitation" nature; films like John Carpenter’s <i>Assault on Precinct 13</i> and <i>Escape from New York</i>, <i>The Warriors</i>, <i>Fort Apache: The Bronx</i>.<sup><b>2</b></sup> If this setting would had become a predictable cliché by decade’s end, it was a cliché that hinged on an underlying Hobbesian-Darwinistic dread that much of America had about the fate of its urban centers. As Richard Nixon had reputedly mused to his aides at some point in 1972, "Maybe New York shouldn’t survive. Maybe it should go through a cycle of destruction."<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihLwoiBCHxB-pT0vbj4jJUUWs7KXw5CwOOS5C9AQXWs_FlqzxNlo6ZTN73lds28nQv7A74YAS5iC0v47Zj4hK1P7p4sYKZZ4pZY8R6TrFIy_KKRlNOBWUTssTpVZPryot-dSlJPOCLDiY/s1600/drop_dead.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihLwoiBCHxB-pT0vbj4jJUUWs7KXw5CwOOS5C9AQXWs_FlqzxNlo6ZTN73lds28nQv7A74YAS5iC0v47Zj4hK1P7p4sYKZZ4pZY8R6TrFIy_KKRlNOBWUTssTpVZPryot-dSlJPOCLDiY/s1600/drop_dead.jpg" /></a></div><br />
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Another artifact of the era was the 1979 documentary <i>80 Blocks from Tiffany’s</i>. Focusing on life among black and Puerto Rican gangs of the South Bronx, the film graphically illustrated the advanced urban decay and socio-economic breakdown that afflicted the South Bronx in the late 1960s and the 1970s. The film's very title is curiously awash in ironic implications. Firstly, in its highlighting of distance and economic disparities, but second in the way these disparities invoked a specter that haunted the history of modern urbanization from its very origins -- pointed to a social legacy that could be traced back to the "Haussmannization" of Paris in the previous century. <br />
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Eighteen years in the offing, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann's redevelopment of Paris was the most ambitious and expensive undertaking of its sort in modern history, requiring inconceivable amounts of leveraged financial backing and a labor force that employed upwards to one-fifth of the city’s working population. It amounted to an infrastructural overhaul that completely transformed the city. The project required the dislocation of thousands of the city’s citizens, the course of which resulted in the destruction of numerous poor and lower-income neighborhoods (those potential pockets of political unrest in the Second Empire); in the end pushing much of that population into slums on the city’s margins. In the place of some of these demolished neighborhoods arose housing for the city's more affluent and middle-class residents, districts in which the broad avenues converged on a series of arrondissements and commercial hubs that included such newly-built department stores as Le Samaritaine and Le Bon Marché. Another artifact of the era was the 1979 documentary <i>80 Blocks from Tiffany’s</i>. Focusing on life among black and Puerto Rican gangs of the South Bronx, the film graphically illustrated the advanced urban decay and socio-economic breakdown that afflicted the South Bronx in the late 1960s and the 1970s. The film's very title is curiously awash in ironic implications. Firstly, in its highlighting of distance and economic disparities, but second in the way these disparities invoked a specter that haunted the history of modern urbanization from its very origins -- pointed to a social legacy that could be traced back to the "Haussmannization" of Paris in the previous century. <br />
<br />
Eighteen years in the offing, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann's redevelopment of Paris was the most ambitious and expensive undertaking of its sort in modern history, requiring inconceivable amounts of leveraged financial backing and a labor force that employed upwards to one-fifth of the city’s working population. It amounted to an infrastructural overhaul that completely transformed the city. The project required the dislocation of thousands of the city’s citizens, the course of which resulted in the destruction of numerous poor and lower-income neighborhoods (those potential pockets of political unrest in the Second Empire); in the end pushing much of that population into slums on the city’s margins. In the place of some of these demolished neighborhoods arose housing for the city's more affluent and middle-class residents, districts in which the broad avenues converged on a series of arrondissements and commercial hubs that included such newly-built department stores as Le Samaritaine and Le Bon Marché. <br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGVI_1Rsa1RmQCGWenKJX6Pm8ybDxG6uzPUC6Xoscb1_mQsxsjm0ZHQfzKt70ZeRKZy3OTJRREx0ngTjzsWCgxtPpzumcpVFJcQdLIKJ1H-2EjbWRcMUhoUVk4ig_94aJXWFCFLoqCyJ8/s1600/r_moses.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGVI_1Rsa1RmQCGWenKJX6Pm8ybDxG6uzPUC6Xoscb1_mQsxsjm0ZHQfzKt70ZeRKZy3OTJRREx0ngTjzsWCgxtPpzumcpVFJcQdLIKJ1H-2EjbWRcMUhoUVk4ig_94aJXWFCFLoqCyJ8/s1600/r_moses.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small; text-align: start;">Robert Moses: 'Look upon my works, ye haterz...'</span></td></tr>
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Haussmann’s Paris would become a modern model city for urban planners the world over, and an inspiration to American twentieth-century men of vision such as Daniel Burnham, Frederick Law Olmsted, and Robert Moses. Hailed as a "master builder," it was Moses who presided over the extensive projects of city planning and urban renewal in New York City from the late 1920s through the 1970s. It was also his Cross-Bronx Expressway -- begun in the late 1940s and completed in 1972 -- that many critics blamed as the primary factor in the demise of the South Bronx. Between the Expressway and the compounding factors of "white flight," strained social services and budget cuts, and the city's policies of municipal redlining and "planned shrinkage," the neighborhood entered a steep downward economic spiral. Within the span of a few years, the blighted South Bronx would become -- as a sort of idée fixe in the public imagination -- the epitome of an "urban wasteland," a testament to the dysfunctionality, failure, and obsolescence of the modern city.<sup><b>3</b></sup><br />
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By some accounts, the mid-1970s may well have marked the official end of the Modernist social vision. The demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project by the city of St. Louis in 1972 was framed by many as de facto evidence of the failure of modern urban renewal and social engineering. That same year, architects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour published the first edition of their anti-Modernist decree<i> Learning from Las Vegas</i>. The following year brought Daniel Bell’s <i>The Coming of Post-Industrial Society</i>. And in 1975, Robert Caro’s <i>The Power Broker </i>appeared -- a comprehensive and deeply critical account of the life and career of Robert Moses that met with a broad readership and would eventually land a Pulitzer.<sup><b>4</b></sup> The ground was shifting, all that was solid was melting into air. <br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPFefm588fztX79go-NnYfYMJ0ADmsOy1DJa3fDx7aGG3HB-b1D2A_UcTf41eeRwwsdeBdsO6i6yHhffe6gtSBT-VW5V1Fr4CCPZMqvDQ2qthXmyeLGWCYUrlAE9T-zf-iIUZhwHzsyko/s1600/Carter_Bronx_1977.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPFefm588fztX79go-NnYfYMJ0ADmsOy1DJa3fDx7aGG3HB-b1D2A_UcTf41eeRwwsdeBdsO6i6yHhffe6gtSBT-VW5V1Fr4CCPZMqvDQ2qthXmyeLGWCYUrlAE9T-zf-iIUZhwHzsyko/s1600/Carter_Bronx_1977.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small; text-align: start;">President Jimmy Carter visits the South Bronx, October, 1977.</span></td></tr>
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<small><b>1.</b> No doubt Delaney’s dismissive remarks will rankle some readers. So perhaps it should be pointed out that numerous critics have argued that <i>Gravity’s Rainbow</i> couldn't have been more crucial and timely. Publishing in the midst of the Watergate disclosures in 1973, the book's unstable narrative unfolds in a densely intertwining sprawl of conspiracy theories, shadowy global alliances, conflations of actual and speculative histories, the irresolution of its narrative and structural slippage embodying the paranoia of its milieu. As author and historian Andreas Killen summed it up, G<i>ravity’s Rainbow</i> is ultimately about how "the loss of historical consciousness becomes a function of image culture...and its rewriting of the past" in contemporary/postmodern America.<br />
<br />
<b>2.</b> To name just a few notable examples, admittedly.<br />
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<b>3.</b> Sociologically, this all shaped up in a very tautological fashion. Advocates and apologists for increased suburbanization routinely pointed to the decline of inner-city conditions to argue for the increased relocation of jobs and families to the suburbs, conveniently ignoring the very same relocations were in part responsible for the conditions in question.<br />
<br />
<b>4.</b> Adding another pivotal book to this stack, Gayatri Spivak’s English translation of Jacques Derrida’s <i>Of Grammatology </i>appeared in 1976.</small><br />
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</small>Greyhooshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14161781141733273715noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2830563225783203492.post-25003298638352327162016-06-13T00:30:00.000-04:002019-09-17T14:43:15.275-04:00Blows Against the Empire<b><span style="font-size: medium;"> (Because the Audience Always Cheers for the Rebels)</span></b><br />
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<br />
<span style="background-color: #cccccc;">Archival post: Originally published at <i>...And </i></span><br />
<span style="background-color: #cccccc;"><i>What Will Be Left of Them?</i>, February, 2013</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXWbogXpXO079GuhbuD28DDFdA5qVwV6NGvz7MUocFdmkipuLSDRbMsUn-h4wEguQOw89WWTq4sGi7t6M_ndOjwKijEvbqdavsDBmP-S_Uz5ThZtNgKJF_TF-w2Kn5OHeLLh6Lkyo-K6A/s1600/NH_endceremony.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXWbogXpXO079GuhbuD28DDFdA5qVwV6NGvz7MUocFdmkipuLSDRbMsUn-h4wEguQOw89WWTq4sGi7t6M_ndOjwKijEvbqdavsDBmP-S_Uz5ThZtNgKJF_TF-w2Kn5OHeLLh6Lkyo-K6A/s1600/NH_endceremony.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Insert obligatory Leni Riefenstahl reference here.</td></tr>
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Yes, K-punk – <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/01/star-wars-disney-sell-out" target="_blank">we know, we know</a>.<br />
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Why would anyone be surprised by this? And what’s the purpose of harping about it? Seems obvious enough. But look at how that comments section stacks up. Not that it isn't a valid thesis, but really – it isn’t the sort that’s likely to go over well with that venue's readership, is it? <br />
<br />
But maybe it's just a matter of perspective. For instance...<br />
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<center><b>* * * *</b></center><br />
When the first <i>Star Wars</i> film was released, I was eleven years old. Some six years later when <i>Return of the Jedi</i> came out, I was about to begin my final year of high school and wasn't feeling any pressing need to rush out and see the latter movie during its premier weekend. Me and a friend had a conversation about it; about what we knew from the adverts and the advanced promotion, and about our waning enthusiasm. What could we expect this time, the third, time around? I offered a list of predictions, based on a pattern that seemed to have already been set in concrete with the first two films:<br />
<blockquote><b>1.</b> <i>Han Solo will get a bad feeling about something,</i><br />
<b>2.</b> <i>Darth Vader will will at some point proclaim that something-or-other "is now complete",</i><br />
<b>3.</b> <i>There would doubtlessly be a gaggle of short, cloyingly cute aliens of some new variety or other, and</i> <br />
<b>4.</b> <i>R2D2's gonna get shot. </i></blockquote>We'd been of the ideal age when the first one - or the fourth one, or whatever - came out in 1977, and we'd been some of the first in line. Not only that, but we then ran out and bought the action figures when they began to arrive on store shelves, collected the several series of baseball-style cards that followed, and even went so far at one point as to buy issues of the dodgy cash-in extrapolatory Marvel Comics series that followed in its wake. But now we were a little older, and - as happens in mid-adolescence - our interests had drifted into other areas. We were "aging out" of what had become the franchise's target demo. <br />
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And perhaps we were also becoming prematurely jaded. But fuck it, we also remembered being subjected to that wretched <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_Wars_Holiday_Special" target="_blank"><i>Star Wars</i> Christmas</a> TV special – so who could blame us?<br />
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Some sixteen year later, a good many other people would get a strong dose of that same "aged out" and left-behind feeling when the <i>Star Wars</i> "prequels" arrived in theaters. By reviving the series for a second trilogy of films, Lucas and company were looking to appeal to a new and younger generation of viewers. What’s more, the studio and its licensees trotted out an extensive array of tie-in merchandise well in advance of the release of <i>The Phantom Menace</i>, more and more people – far more than usual – started to take to the notion that the films were becoming little more than thinly-disguised, mega-inflated toy commercials. <br />
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One thing about K-punk’s article that sparked some comments-section incredulity: the claim that Lucas was originally slated to direct <i>Apocalypse Now</i>. Yes, that’s true, although perhaps not widely known. Lucas had been Francis-Ford Coppola’s co-instigator when the latter decided to start up his own production company, American Zeotrope. Since the idea for the film started out between Lucas and writer John Milius, Coppola originally had Lucas in mind to direct the film. <br />
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The founding of American Zeotrope had been a "New Hollywood"-type upstarts' venture – the result of Coppola and Lucas bristling against the sclerotic and stifling pressures of the major studios. Speaking to an audience at the Rotary Club in his hometown of Modesto, CA in May of 1973, Lucas reputedly said, "The future is going to be with independent filmmakers, ...It's a whole new kind of business. We're all forging ahead on the rubble of the old industry." He would later decree:<br />
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<blockquote style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">"The studio system is dead. It died fifteen years ago when the corporations took over and the studio heads suddenly became agents and lawyers and accountants. The power is with the people now. The workers own the means of production."</blockquote><br />
But for various reasons, Lucas lost interest in <i>Apocalypse Now</i>, drifting off (after the dismal reception that greeted the Zeotrope-produced <i>THX-1138</i>) to make <i>American Graffiti</i>, and eventually pitching his dream project that would become <i>Star Wars</i> to various producers.<br />
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Both films, as many have noted are products of both personal and cultural nostalgia. <i>American Graffiti</i> was a winsome revisitation of the 1950s, to a prosperous and supposedly more carefree time before the turbulence of the 1960s; whereas <i>Star Wars</i>' basis in the Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials of Lucas’s own childhood. If they seem – when compared with problem like <i>Apocalypse Now</i> or Coppola's <i>The Conversation</i> – as "escapist," audience-pleasing fare, then it was by design. On his decision to walk away from <i>Apocalypse Now</i> in favor other projects, Lucas would later say: <br />
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<blockquote style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">"Before <i>American Graffiti</i>, I was working on basically negative films – <i>Apocalypse Now</i> and <i>THX</i>, both very angry. ...We all know, as every movie in the last ten years has pointed out, how terrible we are, how wrong we were in Vietnam, how we have ruined the world, what schmucks we are and how rotten everything is. It has become depressing to go to the movies. I decided it was time to make a movie where people felt better coming out of the theater than when they went in. I became really aware of the fact that the kids were really lost, the sort of heritage we built up since the war had been wiped out since the '60s and it really wasn't groovy to act that way any more, now you just sort of sat there and got stoned. I wanted to preserve what a certain generation of Americans thought being a teenager was really about – from about 1945 to 1962."</blockquote><br />
Lucas didn't want to be dark or angry, apparently; and just wanted audiences to enjoy themselves. Speaking to <i>American Film</i> magazine in 1977, he would say something very similar about his idea behind making <i>Star Wars</i>, couching it once again in some socio-cultural context, complete with even more dubious assertions...<br />
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<blockquote><div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">"Rather than do some angry, socially relevant film, I realized that there was another relevance that was even more important – dreams and fantasies, getting children to believe there is more to life than garbage and killing and all that real stuff like stealing hubcaps – that you could sit still and dream about exotic lands and strange creatures. Once I got into <i>Star Wars</i>, it struck me that we had lost all that – a whole generation was growing without fairy tales." </div><br />
</blockquote>So he did that first Star Wars film for us – for my generation. For me, effectively. Even though I know I already had a highly developed and active imagination as a child, and – to my recollection – was in no danger of going directly from <i>The Six Million Dollar Man</i> and Marvel Comics to <i><u>stealing</u> <u>hubcaps</u></i> or some other form of juvenile delinquency. <br />
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Sure, Lucas's remarks above might sound pretty self-aggrandizing, but I don't doubt he was speaking in earnest. Because ultimately, all he did was what any savvy artist or entertainer or businessperson aims to do. That being: You spot some gap or vacancy in a market or the culture at large – look for something that’s missing, for a need or a desire that's not being met. Look for a stimulus that's lacking and that people might be hungry for, and to then try and make or provide something that might satisfy that hunger. And judging from the response he received, he was pretty astute in sizing up the situation.<b><sup>1</sup></b><br />
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Fair enough. And why not? Why try and pursue a certain course if your heart's not in it, or be something that you're not sure you want to be?<br />
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And admittedly, there were plenty of "bummer" films on the market during the first half of the decade. <i>Save the Tiger</i>, <i>The Last Detail</i>, <i>Dog Day Afternoon</i>, <i>Scarecrow</i>, <i>The King of Marvin Gardens</i>, <i>McCabe & Mrs. Miller</i> (and any number of Altman’s other films), <i>Carnal Knowledge</i>, <i>Straight Time</i>,...a comprehensive list would be long one, and is too long to list here.<br />
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Yet somehow the remark about "how wrong we were in Vietnam" has a somewhat hollow ring to it. It's a moot point. Reason being, the American film industry had avoided the topic altogether during the years in question. It was a controversial, polemicized, impassioned topic that it was almost totally off limits – guaranteed "box-office poison."<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">credit: Thanks, <a href="http://socialismandorbarbarism.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Evan</a>.</td></tr>
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Despite all the talk of "New Hollywood" afoot, the film industry was at the same time indulging in some of its own nostalgia, revisiting its former Golden Age. There were the occasional remakes of old blockbusters, such as <i>A Star is Born</i> and <i>King Kong</i>. But mainly there were the two installations of <i>That’s Entertainment!</i>, with their blizzard of complied clips of the highlights from MGM musicals from decades past.<br />
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In the midst of the film industry eating itself, one that came and went with little notice was the 1976 comedy <i>Won Ton Ton: The Dog Who Saved Hollywood</i>. Satirizing the film industry of the 1920s, the film sported cameos by numerous stars from previous eras; and as a running gag throughout there was Bruce Dern as an aspiring producer, enthusiastically pitching ideas for movies that might save the financially-struggling studio, only to be waved off by the studio chief each time. Proposals like: "I've got just the thing we need – how a movie about a big shark that terrorizes a peaceful seaside resort town?" Or, "Brace yourself for this one: A little girl...gets <i>possessed</i>...by the <i>devil</i>!"<br />
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But something about Lucas's comment concerning Vietnam rings a little hollow. Mainly because there really weren’t any films about Vietnam until well after the war was over – until after the first <i>Star Wars</i> movie had been released, actually. There'd pretty much been one major film – John Wayne’s <i>The Green Berets</i>. And that one hardly fit the description of what Lucas was describing. <br />
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By fiml critic J. Hoberman’s account, there had been a fair number of films about Vietnam during the late '60s and early '70s, but only the sort that dealt with it obliquely or allegorically (e.g, Peckinpah’s <i>The Wild Bunch</i>). Pauline Kael would say in the early '70s that there had been a number of movies in recent years that had at least "felt like Vietnam" on some oblique or indirect level. But as far as films actually set in Vietnam – dealing with combat or the war itself? No studio would go anywhere near such a project. At best you got a couple of generally anti-war themed black comedies (<i>Catch-22</i>, <i>M.A.S.H.</i>, <i>Slaughterhouse-5</i>) which were based on recent semi-countercultural bestselling novels, which were in turn based in experiences from earlier – and uncontroversial – wars. <br />
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Or that was the case until 1978, almost three years after the fall of Saigon and the withdrawal of U.S. troops. Two films appeared that year, each done directors associated with New Hollywood. The first being Hal Ashby's <i>Coming Home</i>. Close on its heels came Michael Cimino's <i>The Deer Hunter</i>. American critics at the time praised both movies, but many were deeply enamored with the latter.<b><sup>2</sup></b> <i>Apocalypse Now</i> was originally slated to come out in 1978, as well; but it didn't. Its release date was pushed back into the following year. Coppola had held a test screening of the film for a limited audience, and in response to the audience's negative reaction, decided to withhold it from the market for the sake of extensive re-editing.<br />
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In the end, we’re all far better off that Coppola – and not Lucas – ended up making <i>Apocalypse Now</i>. No disputing that.<br />
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One thing I noticed years ago from talking to younger friends was that it’s assumed the films <i>Apocalypse Now</i> and <i>The Shining</i> were always regarded as undisputed classics – great films of their era. After all, each film has yielded its share of memorable and often-recited quotes, have been winkingly referenced on <i>The Simpson</i> and whatnot. But no, this wasn’t always the case. In fact, both films were treated quite harshly by critics and audiences when they were first released.<br />
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In the case of <i>Apocalypse Now</i>, rumors about the fiasco of the film's production had been circulating in the entertainment press – about how Coppola had gone off the rails, over schedule and over budget, all but lost control of the project. During that time, the movie became the topic of all sorts of wary speculation, and would become the brunt of a number of jokes upon its eventual release. Critical reception was, at best, mixed; with a majority of the opinion falling on the negative side of the scale. By the reckoning of its detractors, the film was a long, bloated, indulgent, and at times nearly unintelligible mess – a ludicrous waste of $31 million, and the studio really should’ve reined the director in earlier in the process.<br />
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Stanley Kubrick's screen adaptation of <i>The Shining</i> would appear some nine months later, just in time for the 1980 summer season. The reception was, by my memory, overwhelmingly hostile. Overly-long, boring and poorly-paced, indulgent and misguided, bafflingly miscast and far from frightening were the common complaints, with several critics declaring it the worst film of the year.<b>3</b> Between the two films, one sometimes got the feeling that people were poised to hate them before they'd even been screened; and at times it seemed that certain critics were taking genuine delight it tearing each to shreds.<br />
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With each film, it seemed like a large number of people were poised to hate it in advance. What I was too young to be aware of at the time was that I was watching a backlash unfold. Earlier in the decade, moviegoers had welcomed a new generation of filmmakers, master storytellers whose works would define the times. And soon enough, a number of these directors were given the means and the budgets to tell bigger and more epic stories. But in a short span of time – during those years of the decade’s middle stretch – viewers had been treated to the likes of <i>Jaws</i>, then <i>Saturday Night Fever</i>, and eventually <i>Star Wars</i>. And they discovered what they’d been missing – big, thrilling productions that could more inclusively appeal to large audiences.<b><sup>4</sup></b> And that shift in attitude manifested itself in a wave of apathy and animus for many of the important, widely-heralded American filmmakers of the several preceding years. To a considerable degree, it was as if a majority of the population had decided: "Enough with the auteurs and their long, heavy, self-important epics and Big Cinematic Statements! How about <i>entertaining</i> us for a change?"<br />
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The pinnacle for all of this was, of course, Michael Cimino’s highly-anticipated frontier epic <i>Heaven's Gate</i>. Costing nearly $44 million and running upwards to four hours, the film was universally pilloried upon its release in the autumn of 1980. I myself can remember critics Robert Ebert and Gene Siskel reviewing the film on their PBS TV show. After showing an excerpt from the film's climactic siege sequence, both critics leaned back in their seats with exasperation, crying, "Bah! Completely incomprehensible – you can't even tell what the hell’s going on in that scene! This entire film’s a muddle and a bore!" Ebert would later describe the film in print as "an example of wretched excess." As you would expect, barely anyone went to go see it, and the movie was soon pulled from theaters. <br />
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<i>Heaven’s Gate</i> would quickly earn the reputation as the Biggest Flop of All Time, and result in the bankruptcy of its studio, United Artists. But Cimino's film would eventually fare better many years later, and was re-released on DVD this past year. From a recent write-up in the <i>New Yorker</i>, critic Richard Brody noted the "grandeur" and "breathtaking energy" of some of the film's sequences, particularly in the scene of a "deadly vortex of an encircling cavalry charge." Ironically, he was referring to the very scene that I remember Ebert and Siskel singled out for severe punishment on their program.<br />
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Returning to where I started: I couldn't quite get the point of K-punk’s spiel. Maybe it was I felt because his argument was – for the most part – pitched to the wrong readership; but mainly because the core of his argument is one that I realized myself many years ago, and have since taken as a given. <br />
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So what point do I have to offer in return? Not much of one, probably none. Truth be told, it’s been over 25 since I was inclined to give a shit about <i>Star Wars</i>. Sure, when the first one arrived back in 1977, I was at the ideal age for such a thing. In fact: I fucking loved it. As did a lot of people – not just kids my own age, but most adults, too. But whatever, that was a long time ago. The one thing we can acknowledge it that when George Lucas created the first <i>Star Wars</i> movie, he was creating a universe – one of his own making, and one that would provide him with unimaginable mileage throughout his career. And at the same time, without knowing it, he created another universe. Because after the first film proved such a smashing success, we’ve been living with the film and entertainment industry that followed in its wake. <br />
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And about what’s followed in its wake – the perpetual churn of big-budget, glam-strewn, special-effects laden blockbuster fare that has become the thing Hollywood (re)oriented itself years ago and has unflaggingly stuck with ever since?<br />
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Thinking about it now, I can’t help but think of the legacy of <i>Heaven’s Gate</i>, and detect a twinge of irony. After all, lately I’ve been hearing some of the discussion about certain recent films – some critics and viewers starting to complain about long certain types of films have become lately. About how they stretch out unnecessarily, padded out with extended and visually-complicated battle scenes made possible by rococo paroxysms of the latest in CGI technology, now frequently clocking in close to the three-hour mark. Some critics shruggingly offer that this is because the studios reckon that more is more, and that means that more is better, and that every one of these things is be given the epic treatment and trotted out as if it were a major culture-defining, life-altering event.<br />
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With that in mind, one can't help wondering if this sort of thing might reach its own tipping point, might prompt its own backlash. Perhaps it will, and the studios will respond by exercising a little restraint, trimming off lots of excess for the sake of reducing a film’s duration (and hopefully ridding of several plot-holes in the process). That’s pretty much the most, in the way of change, that anyone could expect to come of such a scenario. Other than that, it’ll just be business as usual.<br />
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<small><b>1.</b> The cited quotes from Lucas can be found in Andreas Killen’s book <i>1973 Nervous Breakdown</i>. Killen, in turn, extracted the quotes from Dale Pollock’s <i>Skywalking: The Life and Films of George Lucas</i> (1983), and Peter Biskind's <i>Easy Riders, Raging Bulls</i> (1998). Killen goes the extra yard by relatedly (and in this context, pertinently) citing the final words of Pauline Kael's 1973 review of the film <i>The Last American Hero</i>. Discussing what she termed a prevalent "defeatist" attitude in many American films of early 1970s, the closing sentences of Kael’s review are perhaps quoting more fully:<br />
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<blockquote style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><small>"We will never know the extent of the damage movies are doing to us, but movie art, it appears, thrives in moral chaos. When the country is paralyzed, the popular culture may tell us why. After innocence, winners become losers. Movies are probably inuring us to corruption, <i>the sellout is the hero-survivor of our times</i>." [Emphasis added.]</small></blockquote><small><b>2.</b> But as a number of people have pointed out over the years, <i>The Deer Hunter</i> isn't "about" Vietnam much at all, either – at least not in any literal or factual sense. <br />
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<b>3.</b> It could be argued that Kubrick primed that pump himself just a few years earlier with his previous film, the long and tepidly-received <i>Barry Lyndon</i>. <br />
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<b>4.</b> The story had it that <i>Saturday Night Fever</i> ranked as one of critic Gene Siskel's favorite movies of all time. He liked the film so much -- the rumor has it -- that he later bought the white polyester suit that John Travolta wore in the movie at some auction a couple years later; and enshrined it in a glass display case in his home. </small>Greyhooshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14161781141733273715noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2830563225783203492.post-18128297828618537712016-04-22T11:21:00.003-04:002016-04-23T13:18:05.157-04:00On Zeitgeist (Sidenote)<br />
<div style="text-align: right;">Re, today's top story</div><br />
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[...] But ultimately, I guess the problem is me.<br />
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It's a matter of perspective, I suppose. That being: I harbor almost <i>no</i> nostalgia for the 1980s whatsoever. As far as it's pop culture and politics went, I regard it in hindsight as a low -- as a thoroughly dismal, insipid, frequently horrifying and depressing (or just plain boring), utterly crap decade. And that perspective tends to taint most of my memories of the era.<b><sup>1</sup></b><br />
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As far as the music is concerned, I think hip-hop and the emergence/influence of Detroit techno are the only things from the '80s I've ever felt any glimmer of nostalgia for, that I felt any excitement about that carried down through the decades that followed. And pretty much to hell with the rest.<b><sup>2</sup></b><br />
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At any rate, pardon my absence, of late. Recently took on a tedious job that’s been taking up the bulk of my bandwidth...both literally and figuratively. Activity to resume shortly.<br />
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<center>^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^</center><br />
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Eh. On second thought, maybe I'm just still grumpy about not having gotten laid as much as I would've liked at the time.<br />
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Nothing like entering your early adult years just in time for the AIDS epidemic/scare to sweep the culture. Good times!<br />
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And Prince made it all sound so easy, so carefree. So dude definitely wasn't helping, in that respect.<br />
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<small><b>1 </b>Case in point: When it was finally ushered out, it was by way of the Clintons blasting a Fleetwood Mac tune on the White House lawn. How fucking boring is that?<br />
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<b>2 </b> I’m speaking in the broadest, most generalized terms, of course. Naturally, there are a good many exceptions. But still, the prevailing aesthetics of the time were pretty much rubbish.</small>Greyhooshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14161781141733273715noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2830563225783203492.post-13394655585206130352016-03-11T23:23:00.000-05:002016-03-11T23:52:29.117-05:00Coda<center>
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And thus ends the bass thing, as far as this contributor is concerned. We now resume usual programming.<br />
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Myself, I was hoping that some other contributors would've kicked Mr. Reynolds some good example of classic basswork from the canon of first-gen roots rocker reggae. But alas, no haps in that area, whatsoever. I might be able to offer a few personal favorites, but they'd be very arbitrary, given my spotty knowledge in that area.<br />
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So in lieu of that, let's just leave with the above, a bit of a oceanic "lover's rock" seance, that provides a seductive, head-nodding rolling bass line that'll tuck this whole topic (and the listener) a proper nighty-night.<br />
<br />Greyhooshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14161781141733273715noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2830563225783203492.post-38586363247450232332016-03-10T13:11:00.001-05:002016-03-10T17:46:13.462-05:00Frequency Range, II<div>
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The second, and last, part of my 20-plus years of locale-specific bass musics travelogue. Last time I dealt with my years living in the American south. This time we head to parts north...<br />
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<b><u>Chicago, 1993-4: What's That Sound?</u></b><br />
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At the time, I had no idea of what it was I was kept hearing -- something I occasionally hear booming from jeeps as they passed through the block. Hilariously uptempo, threaded on very tight loops of sped-up, stuttering vocal phrases, extremely minimal with only incremental shifts and modulations. At one point, I happened across it on local public access TV, some talent-show program with a bunch of southside high-school kids dancing to it -- slow, rolling bodily undulations passing from head to toe and back again, from limb to limb. I didn’t hear the music all that frequently, when I did it was only from a distance, and it seemed to have come and gone within a season of two. In retrospect, I thought maybe I was hearing an example of Baltimore's "dew doo" beat making an inland incursion, but years later (see last entry below) would realize that what I'd been hearing were local "ghetto house" tracks.<b>*</b><br />
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<b><u>Chicago, 1993-4, Pt. II: Jungle and Drum'n'Bass</u></b><br />
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U.K. import tangent, number two. Simon's already weighed in on jungle in <a href="http://blissout.blogspot.com/2016/03/bass-bits-9-jungle.html" target="_blank">a pair</a> of <a href="http://blissout.blogspot.com/2016/03/bass-bits-jungle-postscript.html" target="_blank">posts</a>, so I’ll gladly defer to authority on the matter. <br />
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The first time I heard jungle, via a mixtape I'd picked up, I had no idea what I was hearing -- was startled and bemused by the rush and clatter of the accelerated BPMs.<b>**</b> By the third spin, the music had not only clicked with me, but I had decided it was among the most immersively gorgeous music I’d ever come across. The undertow of the bass was what pulled me in, the way it moved at a fraction of the pace of the drums, provoking the sensation of being pulled into a temporal flux. <br />
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<b><u>Baltimore, 2003: Baltimore Beats</u></b><br />
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Ten years after having relocated to Chicago, circumstances landed me in an 18-month stint in Baltimore. A couple weeks in I'm driving around one Friday evening and punching around for a weekend mix show on the radio brings something unexpected my ears. Punchy, popping breaks, over which are spliced an odd assortment of vocals from tunes both recent and vintage -- from Lil Jon to to the Marvelettes. I found myself thinking, "<i>This must be some seriously homegrown isht, here.</i>" In the following months, I came across a few cd-r mixes by DJs from further up the east coast that sported a few Baltimore clubcuts. Within a year "Baltimore club" beat was getting attention, before finally (after I'd left Baltimore to return to Chicago) becoming a Big Hipster Clubrat Thing. <br />
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Personally, I loved the breaks, the musical sparsity and bleak atmosphere of the music -- the striped down, floor functionality. Something about it took me back to the mystery music I’d heard back in Chi a decade previously. I would eventually learn or realize that it had a long Baltimorean evolution, one threaded on the "dew doo" beat that I mentioned last time (sometime referred to by a few locals as "knucklehead" music). But where was the bass? Mostly left unarticulated, implied, carried by the visceral punch of the beat. And the way DJs like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYJmwEOuLPo" target="_blank">K-Swift and Blaqstarr</a> would take a bit of vocals, double and loop it so that the two parts were going in and out of phase with other (a la Steve Reich's "It's Gonna Rain") was quite delirium-inducing.<br />
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<b><u>Chicago, 2007-8: Juke & Footwork</u></b><br />
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At which point the mystery music I had heard on the southside of Chicago many years earlier. This one I probably don’t have to explain, since the “footwork” style of beat has very much gone global. If anything, it was what cemented for me the idea that there was (to borrow one of Simon's terms) a booty-bass "nuum" -- one that developed from different American cities and provinces over decades, styles traveling from one place to another, being adopted and expanded on to suit local dancefloor preferences, eventually leaking elsewhere and the cross-pollicating cycle to progress further. <br />
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With Chicago juke and footwork, you hear that nuum reaching yet another phase, this time with the bpms kicked up to frantic speeds, weaving drum patterns and bass punctuations that were often geared to offer some bewilderingly off-kilter rhythmic counterpoint. At which point I vaguely recall some quote by John Cage many years ago, something to the effect of a future in which dancers making music for other dancers. Yeah, that could be considered the core idea behind dance music from disco onward; but with juke and footwork, it was catapulted into hardcore competitive sport mode. <br />
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<small><b>*</b> How styles and trends circulated (or didn't) around Chicago in those pre-internet days could be a bit tricky. What played on the west side might not go over so well on the south side, or vice versa. This might make sense if have some sense of the immense sprawl of the city, and its multi-faceted geography of economic and cultural segregation. As it was, the early '90s saw the waning of the hegemony of the classic House sound as the sound side's hip-hop scene belatedly began to expand. <br />
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<b>**</b> My initial confusion may have had something to do with the fact that a number of stateside critics at the time tended to use the terms “hardcore,” “jungle,” and “drum & bass” fairly loosely, interchangeably, if not inaccurately. <br />
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And as far as the beats-to-bass ratio is concerned: Ever been to a club and watched someone try to dance to jungle by <i>following the drums</i>? Not a pretty sight.</small><br />
<small><br /></small>Greyhooshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14161781141733273715noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2830563225783203492.post-78128857325348171332016-03-06T18:50:00.002-05:002016-03-07T02:07:43.464-05:00Frequency Range, Interlude<br />
At which point Simon <a href="http://blissout.blogspot.com/2016/03/bass-bits-8-postdisco-electro-old-skool.html" target="_blank">delves</a> into early hip-hop. Truth be told, I was planning on passing on that one. But since I spent most of the music’s “mid-school” years totally immerse in the stuff, I naturally have a few things to contribute on the topic...<br />
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(Caveat: Since you're listening to this on a computer, a decent set of headphones are recommended.)<br />
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What, no mention of Run DMC? The <i>Tougher Than Leather</i> album sported a number of tunes where the Run DMC took a turn away from the stark minimalism of much of their prior material, going with a sound that much fuller and more spacious. I recall a critic at the time saying these two tracks in particular sounded had taken up residency in outer orbit, rapping and mixing while springing off the the space-station walls in zero gravity. An image that has stuck with me over the years (particular when the reverb on the punctuating snare shot darts through the mix of "Run's House). Jam Master Jay was the man, but apparently the bass on the above can be partly attributed to co-producer <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_DMX" target="_blank">Davy D.</a>. <br />
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Simon cites the Beasties. From <i>License to Ill</i>, I remember "Paul Revere" being the cut that dudes used to use to give their woofers a workout. Personally, I had a love/hate relationship with the Beastie Boys in those years, which had taken a dissenting tilt toward the latter by the time <i>Paul's Boutique</i> came out. A friend loaned me his copy, I gave it few spins, and my feeling was that if someone could somehow release <i>an all-instrumental version</i> of the thing, I'd probably be all over it. Thankfully, the production duo that was the Dust Brothers partially obliged me via a couple of 12-inch remixes. The bass bits on their overhaul of "Shake Your Rump" were particularly satisfying.<br />
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And as far as live-group era Beasties are concerned: "Jimmie James" was a tune that rode its smoked-out bass line mighty nicely.<br />
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A favorite block-rocker from what could be considered the golden era’s swansong summer that was the summer of '93, when the version that appeared on the b-side of the Masta Ace Inc.'s "Slaughtahouse" 12" became the definitive jeep beats of the season. An ode to the "quad"-pumping lifestyle and incivic disturbance coming from the most unlikely of locales -- the (previously) bass-anemic upper East Coast. Sure, the bass on the thing was dope, but I‘ve always found it deeply funny at the same time -- maybe because it sounds kinda "sick" in both senses of the word. <br />
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Speaking of jeep beats...<br />
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Another favorite of mine from roughly around the same time, via a production duo out of Queens. Reworked <a href="https://www.discogs.com/Nubian-Crackers-Do-You-Wanna-Hear-It/master/246940" target="_blank">12" version</a> of a tune that originally featured Newark, New Jerz hip-hop/graffiti duo Artifacts providing verbals. As much as I liked Artifacts and the rolling bass line that threaded the main mix of the thing, I always preferred this particular version because of the thuzzed-out, blown-speaker, oldskool block-party kick of the bass at the beginning, which passes into a sample of the laid-back bass guitar bit sampled from Cloud One's <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pH64e9QsOg" target="_blank">"Patty Duke."</a> <br />
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And Simon gives a big-up to Mantronix. At the time, I myself was never clear on how they fared audience-wise in domestic-vs-abroad listenership; just knewI was buying everything I could get my hands on by them after I first copped a 12" of "Bassline" after I heard it, and knew that me and brothers from around my way could agree that (as they put it) "Mantronix brings the boom." Yet Simon doesn't include this one...<br />
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...Which commands you to <i>"listen to the bass."</i> True, the bass is mostly just 808 kick in this instance, but that sound was so definitively 1986 as far as hip-hop was concerned. (Reference Schoolly D's <i>Saturday Night, The Album</i> and Steady B's debut LP of the same year as evidential exhibits A and B.)<br />
<br />Greyhooshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14161781141733273715noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2830563225783203492.post-75314839784077046092016-03-04T14:54:00.000-05:002016-03-04T18:14:03.925-05:00Habitat, no. 12<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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From the looks of it, the architecture in Ben Wheatley’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRBeZGYisLg" target="_blank">film adaptation</a> of J.G. Ballard’s <i>High-Rise</i> doesn’t much reflect that of the novel’s Brutalist-era 1970s setting. But in <a href="http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2016/march/inside-high-rise/" target="_blank">an interview</a> from latest <i>Creative Review</i>, designers Michael Eaton and Felicity Hickson talk about how pulled from a variety of Retro- stylistic sources to give the film a particular type of unified atmosphere in terms of graphics and typography:<br />
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<b>CR: </b><i>What research do you do for a film like this, set in the recent past?</i><br />
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<b>ME:</b> It was a really fun one – from a design point of view, everything just looked so cool from that time. ...We had fonts on the office wall that Ben and Mark Tildesley, the production designer, liked – certain things would have their own font; the high rise itself, the supermarket and everything had a sort of ‘brand’ within the building. So from the start, you were aware of how you could stick to a certain aesthetic.<br />
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...We realised when we saw the shelves just how much it would take to fill the space. We looked at references for that – Andreas Gursky’s shots of supermarkets with loads of repeats of the same packaging, that was the starting point. We also looked at old images of phone books, any kind of instructional manual, toy kits.<br />
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We looked at covers of things, such as Penguin books and magazines. Also, the buyers on the film would be out buying props and every so often they’d come in with, say, a box of comics, or TV guides from the 70s. So we had all this great stuff lying around the office we could look through.</blockquote>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>CR:</b><i> [The products seen in the supermarket set] have the feel of Sainsbury’s own-brand packaging from the 1960s and 70s.</i><br />
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<b>FH:</b> They’re brilliant, I love the simplicity of the designs, they say a lot about the period and the quality of available printing methods at the time.<br />
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<b>CR:</b> <i>Were you asked to reflect some of the more ‘atmospheric’ aspects of the film – its oppressive air etc – or was it more about reflecting a time?</i><br />
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<b>FH:</b> Both really. The ‘oppressiveness’ was in the fact that the products were pretty standard and generic designs that were quite quickly produced. I guess if everyone [in the block] has got the same thing, then that helps the feel of that era – and particularly what Ben was trying to create in that building.</blockquote>
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I hadn’t realized that the film’s official site has a splash page meant to look like that of the architecture firm from the novel. And was also unaware that the idea for a film adaptation had been kicked around since shortly after the book’s publication back in 1975, with Nicolas Roeg being the first director in line for the job. <br />
<br />Greyhooshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14161781141733273715noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2830563225783203492.post-15692571294047019012016-03-03T23:38:00.000-05:002017-03-02T01:11:47.193-05:00Frequency Range, IAnd the conclusion of my contributions to the extramural <a href="http://blissout.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Blissblog</a> bass poll/topic, intro...<br />
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<a href="https://www.ultimate-guitar.com/news/general_music_news/science_explains_that_our_love_of_quality_bass_lines_is_traced_to_back_when_we_were_baby_fetuses.html" target="_blank">This brief article</a>, which turned up in an early post from Simon's polling, touches on some transmusical fundamentals. Because -- <i><u>yes</u></i> -- as the title of an old Smith & Mighty albums once had it, “Bass is Maternal.” Which may all seem a bit intuitive, a bit too physio-/psychoacoustics 101. Because pulse component aside, those low frequencies (espec when majorly boosted via car stereos or massive club PAs) are also deeply corporeal. They envelope and penetrate; making viscera quake, thick stone walls shake, and I don’t doubt it that it's also the ammo for recent sonic weaponry tech.<br />
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All of which also partly explains why -- yes -- there are such a things as <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkwLyRP-j3k" target="_blank"><i>deaf raves</i></a>.<br />
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I was a little predisposed to bottom-heavy music. My hearing was always a little “hyper-acute” with high-frequencies. Maybe this had something to do with why I avoided whole genres of music that were too tilted to activity in the high-end registers, and more prone responding to tilted toward the opposite end of the spectrum.<b>*</b> Over the years I’ve found myself exposed to a number of varieties of “bass music” -- the sorts that could be considered as constituting some kind of (to borrow one of Simon’s terms) a ‘nuum. But aside from being bass-heavy, the peculiar thing about them is that they each seemed to be specific to certain places/cities/regions. If not being the product of some homegrown locals-only restlessness.<br />
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The following is more or less a "doof-doof" travelogue, playing out over the course of 25 years of happening to be in certain places at certain times...<br />
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<b><br />
</b> <b>I: 1980s: SOUTHERN/MIAMI BASS</b><br />
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Being a teen in the Deep South of the U.S. after hiphop broke was a dicey affair, especially if you were wanting to hear more and more of it. Throughout the first half of the 1980s, most hiphop from the upper east coast didn’t filter down south. I guess much of it proved too “urban” in its perspective to appeal to places that were at best only semi-urban. But electro-funk took in a big way early in the ‘80s, and had a lasting influence in the southeast. Kraftwerk’s “Numbers” and “Tour de France” got a lot airplay on the non-white radio stations. Stuff like Twilight 22’s “Electric Kingdom” and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESbQc3FqHvQ" target="_blank">Egyptian Lover</a> went over massively in clubs and on boom boxes. Some of it brought “that boom” that was popular with a certain demographic. But not enough of it. As Dave Tomkins wrote in his “Primer to Miami Bass” piece in <i>The Wire</i> many years ago, the sub-Mason-Dixon response to much of what was coming from up North was that it involved <i>t<u>oo many guys in spacesuits and not enough <b>boom</b>.</u></i><br />
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So the locals started making it for themselves, tweaking the music to their own tastes. And sure, originally the southern booty-bass sound did hail from Miami and parts thereabouts at first; but within a few years it was also coming out of Atlanta and Houston and elsewhere in the SE region. I can remember numerous nights of driving around on a Friday or Saturday night, punching across the radio dial until I found a program where a DJ was playing a weekend party set. Track after track of punchy bass that had my ass careening in the driver’s seat while I steered down thinly-travelled roads in the darkness. At some point me figuring I was listening to the 181st (then 182nd, & etc.) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTXS4Fdy65Y" target="_blank">remake of “Planet Rock”</a>, which I was just fine with.<b>**</b> <br />
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It was so prevalent, that one could be excused for thinking that that was what most of the hip-hop universe consisted of. So many years later I was a bit thrown when James Lavelle put together a compilation of early tracks by DJ Magic Mike, and I read reviewers writing things to the effect of: “Arrrrgh!! Why am I only now hearing this stuff?” Considering that it was so inescapable to me once-upon-a, I couldn't help being befuddled by finding out that the music was such a marginal & provincial thing.<br />
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<b>EARLY '90s, PT. 1 - BLEEP & BASS:</b><br />
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Still a victim of geography at this point. A lot of early U.K. House/early Rave music didn’t make it my part of the country. College kids were I was at the time were in the thrall of lots of northern European “industrial dance”drek. What little early rave fare trickled my way seemed alright enough, because I welcomed the energy. Functional for the dance floor, but didn’t strike me as the sort of stuff I’d want to much time with outside of a club setting. Until a number of tracks popped up that really caught my attention, seemed to be going in a direction that really appealed to me. More bass, and a distinctive use thereof. And, just generally, electronic music starting to move in the direction of kicking its made-upcsounds every which way around inside the listeners head. Years later I would learn that all of these records had something in common; that being that they hailed from city of Sheffield and its surrounding area, and could be filed under the category of the “Bleeps and Bass” subgenre.<br />
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<b>EARLY '90s, PT. 2 - HIT THE BREAKS</b><br />
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Around the same time, I was moslty immersing myself in what's not looked backed on as "midskool" hiphop. I also stumbled across a few tunes that excited me tremendously, because they signaled the entry of breakbeats into the rave-culture mix. But at the tim had no idea about “‘ardkore” being a thing, let alone a very divisive, scene-splitting thing across the water. Only that it sounded like something I’d been eagerly waiting for. <br />
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But we need to talk about a couple of Atlanta joints. First off...<br />
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True, Rob Base & E-Z Rock had had a big big hit using the Lyn Collins "Think" break on their mega-hit "It Takes Two" in 1988; and over the next several years a number of tunes by high-profile acts milked further hits with the same break. But this Atlanta act pitch-shifted it into higher, more punchier bpm territory in a way that must've given a lot of people ideas. The title of the track is sampled from a 2 Live Crew number, and shortly thereafter Luther Campbell & crew in down in Miami responded to 2 Hyped Bros's jawn by doing their own version of the above, speeding it up even more and adding heaps of club-flattening bass. <br />
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And then there's this...<br />
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B-side wins again, by way of Mantronix-style editing being flipped into full warpspeed. This time via a reissue of Atlanta's Success-N-Effect debut track "Roll It Up N___a", this time with a instrumental remix that had been outsourced to Miami DJs Charlie Solana and Felix Sama, who gave in a Mantronix-in-warpdrive overhaul, using a chopped-up sample of the Winstons' "Amen" break for the benefit of maximum punchiness. If Frankie's Bones's account is to be taken as vaguely factual, then he heard it at the time and started playing it in NYC, and from the audience reaction decided it was worth flipping to Carl Cox, who then took it to overseas connections, where it helped inspire the beginnings of UK breakbeat 'ardkore. Perhaps partly true, or maybe total bullshit, but most likely doesn't matter (except for those that might be looking to get all chauvanistically "nativist" about such stuff).<br />
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And admittedly, here's where things get tricky. Because it's the point at which the the symbiosis of bass and kick drum comes in, which could argue consists slippage or cheating on my part. But since the 808 was what got this particular nuum rolling, <i><u>it</u> <u>totally</u> <u>counts</u></i> by my (and plenty others') reckoning.<br />
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Whatever the case, both the "dew doo" [sic] and "amen" breaks will factor heavily in second (more Northern) part of this thing. But for now, that's the end of Part I. <br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>*</b> </span> <span style="font-size: x-small;">This is not bullshit. My wife thought it was, until she became an audiologist and put me into a testing booth. Not to gloat or brag, but -- even after years of my abusing my eardrums night after night spent blasting music through headphones, or a fair number of nights spent in clubs with the shittiest acoustics -- in the end my claims were fully vindicated by the test results.</span><br />
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<b>**</b> NOT ENTIRELY TRUE. Lyrics were another matter. Here there are some problems. Not the least of which was the annoying habit of the vocals consistently being placed far too high/frontally in the mix.</span><br />
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</span>Greyhooshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14161781141733273715noreply@blogger.com0