Blows Against the Empire

(Because the Audience Always Cheers for the Rebels)


Archival post: Originally published at ...And 
What Will Be Left of Them?, February, 2013

Insert obligatory Leni Riefenstahl reference here.

Yes, K-punk – we know, we know.

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?

But maybe it's just a matter of perspective. For instance...

* * * *
When the first Star Wars film was released, I was eleven years old. Some six years later when Return of the Jedi 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:

1.  Han Solo will get a bad feeling about something,
2.  Darth Vader will will at some point proclaim that something-or-other "is now complete",
3.  There would doubtlessly be a gaggle of short, cloyingly cute aliens of some new variety or other, and
4.  R2D2's gonna get shot. 

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.

And perhaps we were also becoming prematurely jaded. But fuck it, we also remembered being subjected to that wretched Star Wars Christmas TV special – so who could blame us?

* * * *

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 Star Wars "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 The Phantom Menace, 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.

* * * *

One thing about K-punk’s article that sparked some comments-section incredulity: the claim that Lucas was originally slated to direct Apocalypse Now. 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.

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:

"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."

But for various reasons, Lucas lost interest in Apocalypse Now, drifting off (after the dismal reception that greeted the Zeotrope-produced THX-1138) to make American Graffiti, and eventually pitching his dream project that would become Star Wars to various producers.

Both films, as many have noted are products of both personal and cultural nostalgia. American Graffiti was a winsome revisitation of the 1950s, to a prosperous and supposedly more carefree time before the turbulence of the 1960s; whereas Star Wars' basis in the Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials of Lucas’s own childhood. If they seem – when compared with problem like Apocalypse Now or Coppola's The Conversation – as "escapist," audience-pleasing fare, then it was by design. On his decision to walk away from Apocalypse Now in favor other projects, Lucas would later say:

"Before American Graffiti, I was working on basically negative films – Apocalypse Now and THX, 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."

Lucas didn't want to be dark or angry, apparently; and just wanted audiences to enjoy themselves. Speaking to American Film magazine in 1977, he would say something very similar about his idea behind making Star Wars, couching it once again in some socio-cultural context, complete with even more dubious assertions...

"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 Star Wars, it struck me that we had lost all that – a whole generation was growing without fairy tales."

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 The Six Million Dollar Man and Marvel Comics to stealing hubcaps or some other form of juvenile delinquency.

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.¹

* * * *

An American Folktale (Rough Draft)

Originally posted at And What Will Be Left of Them?,  
November 2011, as a teaser/preface to this second part.

Originally he hailed from the "Cradle of Liberty," that echo of the cradle rocked out of, Boston. Historic and colonial, an Atlantic capitol of Old World once-wasness. A lovely "walking city," everyone said.

But a fucking nightmare to drive in.

Home to the reputed Worst Drivers in the Nation. Unsurprising, seeing how successful navigation requires the quickest and most aggressive reflexes -- the sort that never fail to confound and frighten non-natives. It's what's required if you' aim to get anywhere. Of bettering the illogic of the city's narrow streets, those streets that weren't designed with the idea of this sort of traffic in mind, ages removed from any modern idea of enabling vehicular progress.

And you know how progress means a lot of things. For over a century it'd meant heading west, to the land's nether shore. West over terrain once crossed by horse and by wagon, then by telegraph and railway. Much of it, thank god, now much more easily and more often flown over. All part of expansion, of a fated and manifest destiny. So westward he went. To where everything, as they said, was presently at. The whereall to which everything led, the telos of all pioneering and frontiering. To the ascendant domain of the Now, the cultural seat of powers-having-shifted, of late modernity itself. Last stop, final destination. Built for cars, for maximum traffic, to fully accommodate its flow and—the theory had it -- avoid the snarls and tangles and perpetual arterial clusterfuckage. Its skies and sun having waited all those ages to be finally tinged pink by a brume of ozone.

He found plenty of things to do in L.A., though. Like playing in traffic. Lying down on a bustling blacktop amid flares (but only to get arrested once the cops arrived). Or staging lurid roadside distractions for random passersby. Getting shot, or tortured, or dangled from on high. Or having himself nailed to one of the road-clogging four-wheeled beasts, with the beast screaming beneath him as he lay belly up in the morning sun. All of this a means, perhaps, of becoming one with the city, of becoming part of its circulatory system.

And then one night arriving at an elevated and narrow stretch of coastal highway, and there placing a monument. Twin cruxes, soaked in the very stuff that made all these things possible. Planting them in the paths of the road's to and fro. Igniting them and then vacating into the night, leaving behind a pair of blazing glyphs -- flaming totems, emblems for the name and number of the century in which all of this came to be. A pair of sentinels, their limbs splayed to alert, or forewarn, or to deliver some form of reckoning. Left there for the latenight traveler who, finding his route obstructed, could only stand in the torchlit road and wonder what on earth it could possibly mean.

King for a Day

(or, Depressing Films of the Early 1970s: The King of Marvin Gardens)

Originally posted at ...And What       
Will Be Left of Them?, January 2013 

A couple of immediate impressions, in reverse order...

Mainly: Atlantic City in the wintertime of 1972 looks for all the world like the elephant’s graveyard, the place where the American Dream of unending postwar prosperity went to meet its final resting place. The aging tourists line up for the photographer along the boardwalk. The tourists are old enough to remember the boardwalk and the City’s glory days. They line for the photograph in the shadow of the hotels along the boardwalk, the hotels which also once knew – if not hosted – those long-gone glory days, their flanking facades a persistant motif throughout the film, themselves lined as a backdrop before the camera of cinematographer László Kovács. Autumn years all around, for nearly everything and everyone. For the pensioners, for the hotel owners throwing in the towel and putting the whole kit & kaboodle up for sale, perhaps even for the enterprising young hustler who wanders onto the scene and thinks that maybe there's an opportunity of a lifetime to be wrung from it all.

But initially, before any of that: You’re confronted by the fact that It’s a bold move to begin a film with a full six-minute monologue. With a tight close-up of a face floating in darkness, pensively spinning a morbid tale. Especially when that monologue – in lieu of any other contextual prompts – at first appears to be some sort of confession, the sort of confession that usually only turns up in the course of a group therapy session. It’s only well past the five-and-half minutes that the viewer is given any sort of clue as to what’s going on.


^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^

The story:

David Staebler (Jack Nicholson) is a writer living in Philadelphia, residing in mid adulthood at home with his elderly father. It’s difficult to tell what sort of writer he is exactly, aside from being a somewhat dark and dejected Jean Shepherd type – sending his stories out over the airwaves of a local radio station between 2-3 AM, relating them to whoever’ll bother to tune and listen during such lonely hours. But it’s clear that his life is cloistered and hermetic; a life devoted or resigned – we gather – to a peripheral existence.

Or so it's been up until the night he receives a call at the station during a broadcast. It ends up that the call is from his older brother Jason, to whom he hasn’t spoken with in a number of years. As it turns out, his brother is summoning him. Jason (Bruce Dern) has a new enterprise in the offing, he's in the process of taking over an Atlantic City hotel that was recently put on the auction block by its owners. "The Essex Carlton – the Oldest and Finest Accommodations on the Boardwalk." And Jason wants David to aid in the venture – to help him bring the deal to a close, with handling the outgoing management as things change hands, with the wheeling and dealing of roping in investors. And Jason also wants his younger brother to share in the eventual reward of the enterprise.

Thing is, it soon becomes apparent that Jason didn’t swing the deal on his own, but has instead fallen in league with some questionable business associates – organized crime, by all appearances – to help him leverage the purchase. What's more, David arrives to find his brother holed up in one of the hotel’s suites with a pair of female companions – the older Sally (Ellen Burstyn) and the much younger Jessica (Julia Anne Robinson), the latter apparently being the former’s stepdaughter by a previous marriage. Jason's not sure what's going on between the three, about the exact nature of the sexual relations involved, and he’s fairly sure he's better off not knowing.

Throughout, David remains skeptical about many of his older brother’s boasts and claims, if not about the business venture as a whole. Still, he wants to be a part of it – maybe for the sake of joining the larger world that Jason inhabits, maybe with the hope of reviving the fraternal ties and ambitions of years-gone-by, maybe both. Despite these misgivings and the feeling of being a peripheral latecomer to the whole affair, David plays along at times and finds that he actually enjoys the opportunity of walking in someone else’s shoes – enjoys, for instance, playing the role of co-owner and pitching the hard sell to a pair of potential Japanese investors over dinner. But at other times his doubts aren’t so easily shaken; at which point Jason harangues him for his chronically sadsack demeanor, his defeatist pessimism, his pragmatic caution and his chronic lack of faith. Even though, as soon becomes apparent, Jason is blithely sailing into treacherous waters.

Frenzies of Renown

From the archives. Originally posted at                       

...And What Will Be Left of Them?,  January, 2011.  

"Sirhan Sirhan shot Robert F. Kennedy. And Ethel M. Kennedy shot Judith Birnbaum. And Judith Birnbaum shot Elizabeth Bochnak. And Elizabeth Bochnak shot Andrew Witwer. And Andrew Witwer shot John Burlingham. And John Burlingham shot Edward R. Darlington. And Edward R. Darlington shot Valerie Gerry. And Valerie Gerry shot Olga Giddy. And Olga Giddy shot..."      - J.G. Ballard, “The Generations of America"  

"The Andy Warhol prophecy of 15 minutes of fame for any and everyone blew up on our doorstep."    - Lance Loud

Altamont, post-Tet Vietnam, the Manson trail, Attica, skyjackings on an almost daily basis, economic decline.

What the hell happened? It wasn't supposed to be like this, living in America in the late twentieth century. The economic affluency and social certainty of the post-War boom, the ascendant "American Way of Life" of a decade prior was pointing to another horizon, to an entirely different future. The outlook of that era couldn't have been more optimistic, more assuring.

The era-defining visual artist of that earlier, not-too-distant past had been Andy Warhol. He had his eye on the essence of the times. Everyone now knows the artist's Greatest Hits -- the ersatz arrays of soup cans, Brillo boxes, gunslinging Elvises, etcetera. All the flat, emblematic, serialized signifiers and mass-produced objects of a new, modern consumerist society blankly mirrored back to itself. But behind all the sharp and glimmering surfaces of those objects lay a shadow; that shadow being death -- death imported into the fabric of modern life in new and improved ways. There was the enshrinement of the suicided sex symbol screen star, then the First Lady in numbed and unimaginable shock after a certain fateful day in Dallas. Death, death and still more death as it played out in newspapers, movies, television. State-mandated death by electric chair, and self-actualized death from leaping off of a skyscraper. Death in car crashes, in plane crashes, and lurking in tainted tins of tuna fish.

Warhol's series of Marilyn Monroes and Jackie O's and the like are among the Greatest Hits; but most of the later iconography that appeared in his work in the years that followed is the stuff that now merits a mere footnote, perhaps because it it struck too dissonant and dour of a chord at the time. Ignore it not, a definite morbid undercurrent seemed to be amassing, becoming a recurrent theme. Maybe even pointing to a sort of symbolic ossuary that was gradually piling up under the surface of the glimmering and sleekly designed banality of modern life.

But perhaps one can invoke only so much death and morbidity before fate itself reciprocates by finding a place for you in its Rolodex. For Warhol, death would arrive one June afternoon in 1968 in the form of three slugs from a .32 calibre pistol, the pistol wielded by disgruntled and deranged ex-associate Valerie Solanas. Although he was briefly and officially declared dead by doctors after the shooting, Warhol managed to survive the attack.

Andy's chest

In his 1975 autobiography, Warhol would write, "In the '60s everybody got interested in everybody. In the '70s everybody started dropping everybody. The '60s were clutter. The '70s are very empty." In the end, he was most likely talking about himself. After the shooting, Warhol began living a more guarded and less accessible existence. And it's been argued that with the '70s-being-very-empty remark, Warhol may as well have ben speaking solely of or for himself, if only because it perfectly sums up the artists's career from that point onward.

No more art with a grim or ironically critical subtext. The 'seventies for Warhol were the decade in which making art meant making money, and the artist found that he could do this by simply resting on his laurels, settling into a formulaic signature style, and cranking out portraits of celebrities, socialites, and wealthy collectors.¹  He'd also spend the decade toadying to glamorous and powerful patrons (among whom could be counted Empress Farah Dibah Pahlavi and her husband, the Shah of Iran), and hanging out with the likes of Bianca Jagger and Liza Minnelli at Max's KC or Studio 54. And then there was launch of his own show-biz/society magazine Interview, a publication devoted to aimless chit-chat with people who were famous, or angling to become famous.

█ █ █

One good way to become famous in America during the 1970s was to shoot somebody who was famous. Preferably an elected official. You didn't need a political motive. The target didn't have to be someone who was especially beloved by the public. You didn't even need to be a decent enough marksman to properly finish them off. None of that mattered, because it still made for good theater. Ask Arthur H. Bremer. A socially maladjusted and marginally employable young man hailing from Milwaukee, Bremer originally set out to shoot president Richard Nixon (who was running for re-election in 1972), but wound up shooting would-be Democratic contender George Wallace, instead.

Wallace, for those who need a reminder, was the two-term governor of the state of Alabama. In the prior decade, he’d attained notoriety for having opportunistically opposed desegregation. He'd physically blocked enrollment of black students at the University of Alabama in 1963, and had defiantly proclaimed, "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever." In 1972, he was making his third bid for the presidency, this time running on the Democratic ticket. Regarded as the "Spoiler from the South" by the press, Wallace had proven a formidable contender. He was, by one journalist's description, "a Southern populist of the meanest streak," and in 1972 he posed a considerable threat to both the Democratic ticket and to president Richard Nixon. On the campaign trail, he stumped on a staunch law-and-order plank, and vociferously decried the increased liberalism, civil disorder, and "moral decay" of the 1960s. All of which met with a warm welcome with Nixon’s "silent majority."

Wallace, squaring off with the feds at the University of Alabama in 1963

Wallace's run for the White House was, of course, troubling for some Americans. Even though by 1972 he'd denounced his prior pro-segregationist platform, Wallace proved that he wasn't above exploiting the racial tensions surrounding the federally-mandated school busing program for his own political gain. His campaign speeches were the epitome of unbridled demagoguery -- podium-thumping screeds of anti-federal rhetoric aimed at the intrusive, do-gooder meddling of the "briefcase totting," "pointy-headed bureaucrats in Washington," interlaced with mockery of a diffuse and unnamed elite of "hypocrites" and "intellectual snobs" who reputedly shaped the nation’s social and economic policies.

To the alarm of many in the press and public at large, Wallace’s message found a broad and receptive audience, particularly among disenfranchised or alienated blue-collar and middle-class voters. On the campaign trail he met with enthusiastic and overflowing crowds when he appeared at rallies in Wisconsin and Michigan. Covering the Democratic primaries for Rolling Stone magazine, journalist Hunter S. Thompson declared, "George Wallace is one of the worst charlatans in politics," further observing: "But there is no denying his talent for converting frustration into energy. ...The frustration was there, and it was easy enough to convert it -- but what then?" The danger, Thompson recognized, was that Wallace was ultimately "stirring up more anger than he knew how to channel."²

Not that any of that mattered to Artie Bremer, he was just looking to make a name for himself. He'd first set out with Richard Nixon in mind as his target. For weeks he shadowed Nixon's campaign stops, chronicling his journeys in a diary as he went. Hapless and unfocused in his stalking, there was one aspect of his task that he was deeply attentive to -- his appearance. Bremer wanted to make sure he did the job in style. He didn't want to be taken for some disheveled loser or -- even worse -- some sort of hippie. He put a great deal of thought and effort into his wardrobe and his grooming in order to meet each opportunity to shoot the president looking like a normal, clean-shaven, patriotic citizen.

Bremer, photographed by security at a pair of rallies in the late spring of 1972

At one point, spying Nixon’s car outside the American embassy in Ottawa, Bremer realized that he had been caught by surprise and wasn't properly dressed for the occasion. He dashed back to his hotel room to change and smart himself up, returning to the embassy to find that Nixon had already departed. Furious with himself, he wrote in his diary:

“I wanted to shock the shit out of the [Secret Service] men with my calmness. .... All these things seemed important to me, were important to me, in my room. I will give very little if ANY thought to these things on my future attempts. After all does the world remember if Sirhan’s tie was on straight?”

Yet, attending a Nixon rally a day later, he witnessed the same Secret Service personnel targeting rank-and-file protesters, and noted incredulously, "WOW! If I killed him while wearing a sweatty tee-shirt, some of the fun & Glamore would defionently be worn off [sic x 4]."

But eventually Bremer did draw the attention of Nixon's security detail, which prompted him to quickly change plans. After briefly considering Democratic frontrunner George McGovern, he instead set his sights on Wallace. In his diary, Bremer bemoaned the diminished media coverage his lower-profile target would attract, yet that didn’t dissuade him from contemplating what sort of clever one-liner he'd deliver before pulling the trigger.³  Within a week of trailing Wallace, he shouldered through the crowd in a shopping center parking lot in suburban Laurel, Maryland, approaching the candidate as he shook hands with supporters after a campaign speech. At close range, he emptied his revolver, shooting Wallace four times and critically injuring three bystanders.

█ █ █

In much the same way that acts of terrorism are efforts to intervene in the machinations of history or global politics by way of the "communicability of images" that surround such events, so too can an attempted assassination -- no matter how botched or incoherently motivated -- be regarded as an effort to disrupt the hierarchy of society’s symbolic order. If political assassinations in the U.S. of the 1960s were unanimously spoken of in terms of martyrdom and "national tragedy," then in the decade that followed they often took on an element of absurdity. Perhaps it comes down to the power of contemporary cultural myths, and the deflation of same that transpired in the 1970s. One such myth being that in a supposedly classless society any citizen could "grow up and become President." If anything, the 1960s and 1970s provided frequent reminders that, instead, it was much easier to be the person who grew up to take a shot at the President.

As with Warhol, George Wallace survived the shooting; although the attack would derail his bid for the presidency and leave him a paraplegic for the remainder of his life. Arthur Bremer would receive his desired 15 minutes of fame, which ended up translating into a 65-year prison term. Upon sentencing, Bremer reportedly told the court, "Looking back on my life I would have liked it if society had protected me from myself."

Shortly thereafter, somewhere on the West Coast, aspiring screenwriter Paul Schrader wasn’t doing so well. Estranged from his wife and living out of his car, Schrader found himself contemplating the emotional effects of loneliness on the male psyche. He had also been reading Bremer's newly published diaries, and from there he got it in mind to write a script about an existentially adrift NYC cab driver. The resulting film, as we all know, would become a huge and controversial success a few years later -- controversial due to its brutally violent content as its use of a former Disney child actress playing the role of a twelve-year-old hooker. The actress was Jodie Foster, who would inspire an amorous fan from Colorado by the name of John Hinckley to begin plotting ways of gaining her attention.

"And Olga Giddy shot Rita Goldstein. And Rita Goldstein shot Bob Monterola. And Bob Monterola shot Barbara H. Nicolosi. And..."⁴

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NOTES:
1.  This was, as art critic Matthew Collings has called it, Warhol's "'doing uncritical portraits of anyone who could pay' period."

2.  It's been argued that Wallace was an early pioneer of the contemporary "politics of rage" -- the backlash rhetoric that has been the primary parlance of the culture war waged by American conservative movement over the past 3 decades. It was for this reason that historian Dan T. Carter declared Wallace "the most influential loser in twentieth-century American politics."

3.  In keeping with the culture of paranoia of the era, the legitimacy of Bremer's diary (as quickly rushed into print in book form) met with skepticism. There were at the time a number of conspiracy theories surrounding the attempt of Wallace’s life -- theories hailing from both the Left and the Right ends of the political spectrum. Numerous sources have it that in the hours following the shooting, Nixon and his aides were scrambling to find a way to plant evidence that would tie Bremer to the campaign of Nixon's leading Democratic opponent, Senator George McGovern. For this reason, the American author Gore Vidal would soon assert in the pages of the New York Review of Books that Bremer’s diaries were a fraud, alleging that that had been authored by one of Nixon's henchmen and planted among Bremer's belongings by the C.I.A.. But even in the last years of his life, Wallace would ask the White House to look into a high-level conspiracy leading to the failed assassination on his life. Who he expected to be behind any such conspiracy is anyone's guess, seeing how he'd already colluded with Nixon's Committee to Re-Elected the President to run as a Democrat (and thus a potential "spoiler" in the DNCrace) rather than as an Independent.

4.  All of which would become a history-repeated-as-farce trope in the early years of America in the 1970s. The '60s had seen a series of political assassinations and iconically martyred figures (JFK, Malcolm X,  Martin Luther King, RFK, et al.) as carried carried out by what can only be described as -- tragically and ironically -- successful marksmen. Whereas such high-profile attempts at assassinating U.S. figures in the 1970s often amounted to little more than incomprehensibly low-level figures (Wallace, Gerald Ford) being by targeted by the likes of Bremer and "Squeaky" Fromme. At the time it made n sense while making perfect sense -- the nonsense of it speaking fully about how many people felt about the state of Americans society at the time. 

Techno Notwithstanding

File under: Prematurely published. Circa 1979, Continental Heritage Press, American Portraits series.

The Cloude of Unhearyng

(Or: A series of random and incomplete late-night thoughts prompted by revisiting the music of Harry Partch for the first time in nearly two decades.)


[...]   Firstly, I recognized the architecture within within the first frame, because I immediately felt a twinge of homesickness. Which was odd, because despite two decades spent in Chicago, I never heard any mention of Partch ever having lived or worked there. I associated him exclusively with the West Coast, assumed he might have spent some time on the East Coast, but could never imagine him having reason to venture inland.

[...]   The story’s been told, by David Toop and others, about how the composer Claude Debussy encountered Indonesian gamelan music at a Parisian international expo in 1889. He was enchanted by it, having – lazing about on an adjacent grassy space, having dozed off at some point in the performance, awaking a long time later to hear the same music going on with little variation, for hours on end. It apparently gave him some sort of epiphany, about other types of music – “all-night” musics that were infinitely open and modular and had a logical and purpose all their own, obliquely interweaving itself into one’s experience and awareness, following any of the usual Western ideas about beginning or end, progression or development or focus, etc.. He wrote about it in his journals, made notes to perhaps incorporate his impressions of this music in his future compositions, but died before ever getting round to exploring the notion. His friend and associate Erik Satie proved more ready to venture down that path.

[...]    Re, that last thought...

There’s nothing like going to something you saw advertised as a performance by a “gamelan ensemble,” and being confronted by a bunch of local white folks (townies, essentially) coming out to clang away on water kettles and marimbas. This has been known to happen. Reason being that apparently at some point in the early-mid twentieth-century, gamelan music became something of an exotic ethnomusicalogical fixation in the U.S.,and the music departments of many major universities clamored to acquire all the instruments involved in making the music. Which they still own, and would otherwise be mouldering in storage if some of them hadn’t started some sort of community-outreach programs to bring people in to learn how to play them and give the occasional free-to-the-public performance.

File under: "Not what I had in mind." I don't know who’s to blame for this, but I'm fairly sure Debussy and Satie can't be held responsible.

[...]   By the time Tortoise released their 2nd album (1996's Millions Now Living Will Never Die), people around town were already starting to talk shit about them. You know how it is – the backlash. Once the artist in question starts to get widespread recognition, everyone who claims to have gotten in on the ground floor gets all churlish and sneeringly dismissive. Perhaps this was the reason the group so quickly adopted the Never-Play-Your-Hometown policy that they'd adhere to for about a dozen years thereafter.

But in there sudden absence, they inspired their share of imitators around town. Small outfits with unconventional instrumentation and approaches. Lots of realtime dubbed-out knob-twisting and reverb-soaked sound manipulation, or with percussive elements taking the lead, often more openly structured and unresolved than what rock audience would've wanted or been conditioned to ever expect. I recall one such ensemble that had a marimba as their central instrument as seemed to be quite smitten with the music of Morton Feldman. There were enough of these types of groups around that for a while you might've wondered if the whole "post-rock" sound was going to be the next big underground thing in the city. Nothing doing, as it proved to be short-lived, with only one of two of the acts in question ever getting around to recording anything before splitting up.

Tortoise meanwhile, were making themselves scarce about town. "Last time I saw those guys," one local backlasher was recorded as saying, "They did nothing but play 'Tubular Bells' for forty minutes. Doubtlessly in reference to when the band started working with vibraphone and marimbas; a phase that seemed to be inspired more than Steve Reich than anything else, although I remember wishing at the time that they would've instead steered it more of a Partch-like direction.

The Half-life of Images

"Data, sounds, and images are now routinely transitioning beyond screens into a different state of matter. They surpass the boundaries of data channels and manifest materially. They incarnate as riots or products, as lens flares, high-rises, or pixelated tanks. Images become unplugged and unhinged and start crowding off-screen space. They invade cities, transforming spaces into sites, and reality into realty. They materialize as junkspace, military invasion, and botched plastic surgery. They spread through and beyond networks, they contract and expand, they stall and stumble, they vie, they vile, they wow and woo.

"Just look around you: artificial islands mimic genetically manipulated plants. Dental offices parade as car commercial film sets. Cheekbones are airbrushed just as whole cities pretend to be YouTube CAD tutorials. Artworks are e-mailed to pop up in bank lobbies designed on fighter jet software. Huge cloud storage drives rain down as skylines in desert locations. But by becoming real, most images are substantially altered. They get translated, twisted, bruised, and reconfigured. They change their outlook, entourage, and spin. A nail paint clip turns into an Instagram riot. An upload comes down as shitstorm. An animated GIF materializes as a pop-up airport transit gate. In some places, it seems as if entire NSA system architectures were built—but only after Google-translating them, creating car lofts where one-way mirror windows face inwards. By walking off-screen, images are twisted, dilapidated, incorporated, and reshuffled. They miss their targets, misunderstand their purpose, get shapes and colors wrong. They walk through, fall off, and fade back into screens."

From "Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?", by Berlin-based filmmaker Hito Steyerl, appearing in the latest edition of the e-flux journal.

The e-flux journal has volleyed off a pair of thematically-linked editions in the past few months. In the first of the pair, "The Making of Americans", penned by the Slovene[?] conceptual artist known to sometimes lecture in the persona of a back-from-the-grave Walter Benjamin. In the essay, "Benjamin" addresses the shaping of the canon of Modern art during the post-war years; particularly hinging on the role played by MoMA director Alfred H. Barr:

"While walking through MoMA, a majority of the American museumgoers there probably had no idea that what they were seeing was not Europe’s present, but its past. Although all the artworks were from Europe, hardly anyone was aware that the story told through the arrangement of the museum’s exhibits was not European; it was not a European interpretation of modern art. Instead, it was a story told by an American—namely, Alfred Barr. This story did not merely preserve the memory of European modern art, but in fact reinvented it by categorizing artists according to 'international movements' instead of 'national schools.' After the catastrophe of WWII, MoMA began to be perceived in Europe as the most important museum of modern art in the world. By admiring this American museum with the most comprehensive collection of European modern art around, 'natives' of the Old World were unaware that they adopted its story as well—its story about their own art and culture. Gradually, this story became the dominant, canonical narrative on both sides of the Atlantic, determining future developments in Western art for decades to come."

Barr's famous schemtic "tree" makes an appearance, naturally; as does the dissent that arose in the New York art community concerning Barr's Europhilic affinities and the Museum's early tendency of ignoring indigenous artists. What intrigues me is the portions of the essay in which "Benjamin" makes an argument -- re, the divergent nationalist-versus-international perspectives that he attributes to Europe and the U.S., respectively -- that all-but constitutes a counterithesis to that of Serge Guilbaut's axe-grinding How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art. Of particular interest is the "view from abroad" section toward the end, in which he discusses government funding for art exhibition during the Cold War years, particularly in light of the "Advancing American Art" political fracas that I wrote about here earlier.

Iconography, II

Some scattered, straggling thoughts; prompted by the post of last week...

The initial cold reception that greeted Guston's later work wasn't solely because of the artist's abrupt change in style. The content of the paintings likewise baffled and alarmed a number of his viewers. The recurrent motifs of disembodied feet, shoes and legs; the caricatured bulbous head with its giant peering blooshot eye, the bare lightbulbs dangling from the studio ceiling, etc. – some sort of limited, redundant and often esoteric inventory of the artist’s life, many assumed. But what of the hooded figures – Klansmen, obviously – that repeatedly populate many of the images? Hooded figures loitering about or driving around town in a car, almost always smoking cigarettes. A cryptic and controversial motif, appearing in painting after painting. A good many people found it troubling, since the images offered no clear explanation, no key for its own decoding.

Little surprise that the explanation lay in Guston’s own life. Philip Guston (née Goldstein) had been born in Montreal in 1913, the son of Ukranian Jewish immigrants, but mostly grew up in Los Angeles. This was the years following the release of D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation, in which nationwide membership in the Ku Klux Klan was at its highest. Guston remembered as a child seeing the Klan hold parades in the streets of Los Angeles; as well as hearing the rumors and reports of their assaults on targeted individuals and communities, their role in strike-breaking and attacks on unionists. Guston may have heard his parents talk about the pogroms that had been carried out back in their native Odessa, and at a young age came to associate the knights of the Klan with Cossacks, seeing them as an American version thereof.

At the age of eighteen, Guston had already taken up painting and had joined an L.A. chapter of the John Reed Club. At one point, Guston and some of his fellow Club members decided to create an exhibition of murals devoted to the subject of racism in America, inspired by the recent scandal surrounding the trail of the Scottsboro Boys. Guston decided to do a painting that depicted a Klan lynching, producing a number of sketches for the work in the process. When the show opened, it was promptly raided by an group of angry men (led, apparently, by members of the local American Legion) who defaced and destroyed many of the works; one reputedly using a handgun on Guston’s painting, shooting it through with several bulletholes.


* * * *

Guston’s work in the earliest stage of his career had been quite different from the Abstract Expressionist style he would explore in the years following WWII. In those early years, his work was highly figurative in orientation, often classically-referenced, intermixed with modernist influences by way of Picasso’s “neo-classicist” period and the work of Fernand Léger. During the Great Depression, Guston had – like many of his contemporaries – received some piecemeal employment for public projects through the Works Progress Administration. Much of his duties involved preparatory sketches and designs for projects that were never realized, but it was one of Guston’s murals – “Maintaining America’s Skills” – that graced the façade of the WPA Community Building at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York.

In 1946, a painting of Guston’s would also be included in the aborted 1946 State Department international exhibition "Advancing American Art." Intended as a Cold War PR exercise on behalf of the Truman administration, the exhibition was promptly recalled and the work sold off in the wake of a public outcry which had been stirred up in the press. Much of the controversy had been provoked by William Randolph Heart, who had rallied his publishing resources to launch a smear campaign against the show. The modernist tilt of the exhibition was labeled as an embarrassing misrepresentation of the nation's artist culture and a scandalous misuse of tax dollars.

Footnote No. 5: The Division of Labor

The FBI’s special agent in charge
(SAC), R.B. Hood, compiled
a dossier on                                                      
                                                                             The Master Race –
noting the portrayal
of a sympathetic                   Russian officer and the various
                                                     red participants
 in the production                                    

                                   – and sent it to J. Edgar Hoover
                                   in case the FBI director was called upon              
                              to detail                    communist propaganda             
 in the movies.

Hoover disagreed with Hood
with the reasonable objection
                     that the FBI agent had
                     no particular expertise in
                                                                                      content analysis
                    and no way of knowing
                 what effect, if any,
            such propaganda
        might have
  on an audience.

* * * * * * * * * * * *
Text taken from J. Hoberman's An Army of Phantom:
American Movies and the Making of the Cold War [2011]

The Future of an Illusion

"It's pure fantasy to think that there is a real difference between the 'amount of regulation' in the situation where the government is prepared to rescue the entire economy versus the situation where the government actively manages the economy. The difference, in terms of the 'amount of regulatory intervention,' is trivial at best. There are, however, huge differences as to who reaps the benefits. In this country, we privatize gains, but socialize losses. To be sure, there are enormous differences in the distribution of wealth, but not in the 'amount' of regulation. [...]

The mechanism can be described as naturalization and normalization — naturalization of the market and normalization of the resulting distributions of wealth. When we think that the market is functioning 'by itself,' that it is unregulated (as if that were possible), that it is not controlled by the human hand, the economic outcomes become more 'natural.' They appear to be the product of nature, or merit, the way things should be. 'We are not interfering,' we tell ourselves. 'We only put in place neutral rules that everyone has to follow.' It's as if we're just watching a race and seeing who is the strongest, the most able. And the one who wins, we perceive as more deserving. All the while, there are myriad hidden rules and regulatory mechanisms that we put in place that favor certain outcomes. By masking those regulations, by talking about that illusion of 'deregulation' and failing to recognize that in all cases we simply reregulate, we insulate the unequal distributions that follow, we do not subject them fully to critique. We normalize growing inequality — as evidenced by the sharp and constant increase in inequality in this country since the 1970s. [...]

These simplistic but tired Cold War ideologies have been extremely detrimental to political life in this country. For the past forty years, the false dichotomy and the
fabricated fear of government regulation is precisely what made it possible for political and socio-economic elites to reregulate the economy in such as way as to reap more social resources and wealth, and to magnify inequality."

- from "Punishment and the Natural Order: An Interview with 

Bernard E. Harcourt," in the summer 2012 edition of Cabinet 

[ # ]

I Have Sniffed the Future, and It Smells Like Pittsburgh

Circa 1932:

"When you stand on a hill along the Monongahela River, looking out over miles of steel mills, hundreds of stacks belching flame, you are experiencing an emotion. You may have had the same experience in a chateau in France, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, on the rim of the Grand Canyon, or when looking at a piece of furniture, or even at a fragile wineglass. Likewise, if the sight of the Akron or of Man o' War leading the field down the home stretch excites you, you are reacting to an emotion. When automobiles, railway cars, airships, steamships or other objects of an industrial nature stimulate you in the same way that you are stimulated when you look at the Parthenon, at the windows of Chartres, at the Moses of Michelangelo, or at the frescos of Giotto, you will then have every right to speak of them as works of art.

Just as surely as the artists of the fourteenth century are remembered by their cathedrals, so will those of the twentieth be remembered for their factories and the products of these factories."

From the opening chapter of Norman Bel Geddes's Horizons, reproduced -- with alternated illustrations -- at The Charnel-House. Geddes having been, for the unfamiliar, the designer who would a few year later envision the General Motors-funded "Futurama" exhibition for the 1939 New York World's Fair. Geddes was one who was "of name" back in the day, a definitively forward-thinking designer for his time, a designer of influence during the postwar years. His 1940 publication Magic Motorways is said by some to having influenced the design of what would be implemented as the Interstate Highway System.

Still, the introductory chapter -- including its evocation of an industrial sublime -- is absolutely the most bewildering read I've come across in quite some time; the sort where (or me, anyway) every other sentence drips with so much unintended, retrospective irony that I nearly find myself rolling over with guffaws. Not the least of which is the assertion that the designer would never conscionably lend a hand in designing shoddy goods, never be party to any sort of industry whose bread and butter hinged on narrowing and calculated degrees of planned obsolescence. Or the part where the author offers a casually fantastic revisioning of art history, and by doing so effectively places himself as an equivalent of a Renaissance Man, with his corporate sponsors as the modern-day Medicis. And there's the seventh paragraph, which in some ways almost anticipates some aspects of Warhol by almost 3 decades...

"Until recently artists have been disposed to isolate themselves upon the side of life apart from business; apart from a changing world which, in their opinion, was less sympathetic because its output, in becoming machine-made, was losing its individuality. The few artists who have devoted themselves to industrial design have done so with condescension, regarding it as a surrender to Mammon, a mere source of income to enable them to obtain time for creative work. On the other hand, I was drawn to industry by the great opportunities it offered creatively."

After which follows an extended spiel of self-aggrandizing bombast. Other chapters in the same volume sport the tiles, "Speed -- To-morrow," "New Houses for Old," "Architecture for the Amusement Industry," and "What Price Factory Ugliness?" And while the chapter on speed at least sounds like it might be promising, in the end it winds up being little more than an extended sales pitch for the author's own design for a new class of luxury ocean liner.

Full text of Horizons available via the Archive-org. Plenty other background info on Geddes on the web, but here's an interesting side item courtesy of The Believer.

Imminent Domains

The collaged, sutured merging of two separate sites from vintage postcards, as done by artist Mary Lydecker. Slightly amusing, I suppose; at least at first glance. But ultimately, I'm not so sure about how "dystopic" these scenarios in the end, in terms of uncanniness. Likewise with the artist's discussion of how the series was prompted by an idea that might be described as a process of de-reification in terms of land reclamation.

The reason being that some of these images doesn't seem quite so far-fetched, particularly given what certain portions of Los Angeles and Orange County, CA looked like back in the mid-20th century. You figure the artist must've seen these images of what Long Beach and Huntington Beach looked like around that time...

The Wired piece on the series features some comments by the artist. One in particular jumps out at me, strikes me as a familiar observation:

"The way that we manage our resources is often ad hoc; the rush to take advantage of a natural resource or develop an available parcel inhibits overall planning efforts, leaving us with a diverse patchwork of landscapes and spatial relationships."

If only because the comments vaguely echo some thoughts voiced by artist Robert Smithson in 1 1973 interview. Speaking to Alison Skye, Smithson talked about his use of the landscape in relation to things -- citing the story of the "acidental" creation of the Salton Sea during the Teddy Roosevelt administration, suburban sprawl, and strip-mining. In relation to that last item, Smithson offered:

"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. I guess it's what we call blind profit making. And then suddenly they find themselves within a range of desolation and wonder how they got there. So it's a rather static way of looking at things. I don't think things go in cycles. I think that things just change from one situation to the next, there's really no return."

All of which reminds me, I guess I'm ridiculously overdue (once again) for completing the next portion(s) of this series. Tsk.


[ Wired, via Mammoth. ]

Growing Up Absurd (Fischer vs. Spassky Edition)

Not that I necessarily recommend reading this recent piece over at HTML Giant. While it could use a lot of help (i.e., editing, rewriting & development, etc), its central thesis -- that of reading Don DeLillo's Underworld through the lens of the Walter Benjamin's oft-cited concept of the "Angel of History" -- makes perfect sense. For those that don't know it or can't recall it in full, Benjamin described the concept thusly:

"A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."

Benjamin was writing in 1940, and the storm he was referring to was the tide of fascism that had swept part of Europe. Yet Benjamin's notion of the Angel of History seems not only apt for analyzing Underworld, but could also apply to a fair amount of DeLillo's other works I've read over the years; particularly in relation to the meditative thematic undertow and tropes that often lay at the narrative heart of several of his other more ambitious novels. Which is unsurprising in a way, considering that DeLillo is an author of a specific generation. That generation being the post-"Greatest" one, the one that came of age in the decades immediately following the Second World War. The generation that grew up in during America's confident post-war peak as "Leader of the Free World," only to watch the country watch it all falter and begin to slide into decline a mere two decades later.¹   Something happened along the way -- in the murky and turbulent transition between those two eras -- but what, exactly? Somewhere in the past, back in the years of the Cold War and the arms race with the Soviets, back when the country assumed its leadership role with an almost frenzied and bloody-minded sense of assurance (if not divine birthright), certain forces were set into motion -- forces which not only shaped history, but also birthed their share of secret histories, as well. And in so doing, produced a legion of demons and phantoms that would linger for decades thereafter, even into the present day.²

This has frequently been the stuff of subtext for a number of DeLillo's novels -- the cognitive dissonance of trying the square the American present with the past -- the inability to fully make sense of the of how things are in relation to how they were, or how they were supposed to be. The past as a foreign country, the present as the most mundanely maladjusted of futures.³   Therein lies a shared cultural neurosis, with DeLillo aiming to examine its various tics and symptoms in literary form.⁴


_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

1.  Although this socio-historic framing has been frequently invoked in his more recent titles, it isn't just the affluent years of 1950s America that DeLillo summons in certain novels. Earlier novels like Americana and Great Jones Street draw on elements of the 1950s and '60s countercultures. Yet inasmuch as Delillo engages these countercultural elements from the recent past (as an tangential "alternatives" to American mainstream society during those years), it's usually in a way that highlights their dwindling and marginalized and dissipated half-life in American culture during subsequent decades.

2.  A good bit of which very much continues to shape the ideological and political landscape in America to this very day. As manifest, one might argue, by the recent revived popularity of Atlas Shrugged and of various conspiracy theories that hail back to the most batshit of Bircherite literature from the 1950s.

3.  "The present" being a somewhat relative term in this context, because DeLillo's more ambitious novels are usually set or centered within a certain historical period -- ranging from the 1950s into the 1980s. There are exceptions, of course; such as The Falling Man, which was set in New York City in the weeks and years immediately following the 9-11 attacks. Yet inasmuch as the specter of the World Trade Center's twin towers serves as a recurring motif throughout the novel, in many ways it seems like an echo of the towers' appearance in Underworld -- referring back to the years of the Trade Center's construction in the early 1970s, playing out as an ambivalent and ironic symbol in each book.

4.  I wouldn't, however, make a case for there being a hauntological element in DeLillo's work. His tone is often more contemplative and circumspect (as opposed to melancholy or nostalgic) for that sort of thing.

Everybody Else But Me

By now we all know that Abstract Expressionism was a CIA front. No surprise there, because Jackson Pollock's work embodied American freedom (dammit). Which was why after 1956 Pollock lived out his life in luxury. He bought some property in Colorado, never had to so much look at paint can again, never had to agonize over dick for the rest of his days. Ornette Coleman, being an unwitting stooge to the program, would continue the operation -- going so far as to call one of his albums Free Jazz, with said album sporting a Pollock painting on the cover. Isht put a bug up Leonid Brezhnev's ass like you wouldn't believe. Unfortunately, Coleman was (pardon the pun) a "free" agent...a dupe. He was never on the payroll proper, he never realized that the same policy that covered inarticulate paint-slingers from Wyoming might not extend the same largess to a soft-spoken, non-caucasoid note-spatterer from Texas. The CIA didn't wasn't so enlightened about having it's EOE ducks in a row back in those days, so where else can a dude go from there but to Harlem? Here's to being ahead of your time, yet still being behind it...or something like that.

And those who claimed Coleman was a "charlatan" were actually part of a covert psych-ops campaign; one that supposed to throw people off and smokescreen the origins of the first (real) operation. It paid off handsomely, too -- because Brezhnev and his politburo didn't know to collectively shit or wind their wristwatches by that point.

Anyway, anyway, enough with the sarcasm. The clip above is new to me, though the person who kindly posted it cross-ref's it with the Roland Kirk/John Cage film (also by Dick Fontaine) that's been circulating (thank you internet) for several years now. I found the Who's Crazy? LPs many years ago -- back when I was in college -- but haven't revisited them in a forever. Coleman switching out between sax and trumpet and violin, to maximum deliriating effect. Executed as the soundtrack for some obscure European film that supposedly had some Living Theater connection. Coleman reworked some of the resulting material for his Blue Note album The Empty Foxhole less than a year later, letting his ten-year-old son Denardo step in to bang away on a drumkit at times. The latter outing being, if I recall, mostly an abridged and weaker version of the former.

Not that anyone noticed, except for Brezhnev and the apparatchiks in the politburo. Man, they hated it. Plus, The Empty Foxhole had even more of that slapdash "free"-style American paint-y stuff on the cover, and it came out when the whole Vietnam thing was building. Far from a subtle message, that. Plus it was all Chinese music to begin with, wasn't it? So what more evidence do you need? It all fits, once you think about it.