Medium Cool

For a the past couple of decades -- up until quite recently, really -- a good number of my friends and acquaintances have been younger than myself; usually by a full decade, sometimes more. Naturally, I long ago noticed the differences across those ages, about how we each respectively viewed the world, our perspectives having been shaped by the different circumstances of our "formative years." My own youth having well pre-dated the internet, with VCRs and cable TV only fully entering the picture by roughly about the time I started high school. They on the other hand grew up in a culture that was awash -- flooded, morelike -- with a variety of media. And baring out the sociological stats that we've been hearing for some years now, I often noted the evidence that they were also the product of a generation that was aggressively, incessantly marketed to.

Not that my exposure to TV was limited when I was young -- far from it. But we never had more than one TV set at a time, and I don't think we owned a color TV until I was about 10 or 11 years old. As far as having the thing on in the background was concerned, turn it off if you're not really watching it -- you're running up the power bill. Which made sense at the time, not only because we were always broke, but because it was late '70s and thanks to the energy crisis everyone was being admonished to conserve energy by whatever means possible.

I only mention this in relation to a fine pair of posts that Carl has up'd over at the group-effort decades blogs. I'm impressed at how astutely he describes and sizes up the media landscape(s) of the era in question -- its transformation in relation to the broader culture. In hindsight, not too many years after the fact, I could look back and recognize the nature of these cultural shifts; but of course when you're younger and living in the midst of it all, it isn't the sort of stuff you give much thought to, on account of it merely being the way things are, and one's own lack of a frame of reference at that time in one's life.

At the '70s blog, a very sharp conflating of two very significant movies of the time, Network and Being There, and the role that television itself plays in each film...

"Chauncey isn't exactly a parody of Reagan but of a whole tendency toward the idea of the natural man; whose power is precisely his uncluttered, uninflected apprehension of direct truths that the more sophisticated can never attain, dogged as they are by psychological and existential problems, their optimism ruined by experience. This lionization of the homespun, the good plain sense of a true American spirit uncorrupted by doubt and fancy European book-learning will reach its peak/nadir with Forest Gump. TV is the soul of America made visible and Chauncey is its word made flesh. This is why in the final sequence as the Elders discuss his candidature for president we see him guilelessly walk on water, he is superhuman, a redeemer, has a direct unmediated access to the Oversoul, incarnates it. Diana in Network may be 'TV incarnate' for Chayefsky (indifferent to suffering and love alike, the phallic witch of the coldest of all cold mediums) but Chauncey incarnates TV as salvation, and what he will save is Capitalism." *

From there, Carl continues at the '80s blog, transplanting the theme of deregulation as it occurs in Being There and applies it to the emergent cable-TV market of the 1980s; more specifically to the boom in youth-demographic target marketing that came with that emergence. In the course of which, he makes the following aside:

"From the perspective of 2012 and the waves of nostalgic music that hark back to the 80s and portray it as a world of colour and fun, there is a pre-Lapsarian longing for a restoration not just of the loss of childhood but also a point in which media specifically intended to divert and engage with children of virtually every age were in abundance. The often low-fi and misty evocations of the past, the primary colours, simple shapes and themes seem to replay the very early experience of nebulous but scientifically honed and crafted eye- and attention-grabbing ads and products for very young children. This is also a kind of 'cathode pastoralism' in which a later generation looks back in longing at the pre-internet age of analogue TV and shiny, solid objects in the way early denizens of modernity perhaps idealized the rural and artisanal past."

Impressive too is the accuracy of the description of the U.S. mediascape in particular, considering that Carl's writing about it from other shores. Curious about the rest of the "work in progress."

Speaking of "other shores," I couldn't help but be amused by this recent post from another contributor.

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*  Admittedly, the ending of Being There is an ambiguous one; the sort that prompts a variety of readings. One could argue that the "Elders"/pallbearers in the funeral scene speak in a way that casts them as (more pointedly) behind-the-curtain manipulators -- members of a partisan cabal who shrewdly and cynically view Gardner as little more than a malleable agent (a stooge, effectively) for retaining their own power. The fact that they're carrying Rand's casket to a mausoleum that can only be characterized as distinctly Masonic in style supports this conspiratorial reading.

The Location of Culture: Scattered and Increasingly Digressive Notes About 'Collage Culture', Pt. II

Asco - Día de los Muertos Takeover, East L.A. 1974

In his essay "The Death of Subculture," Aaron Rose relates a comment made to him by Glenn O'Brien, who had remarked, "Subculture is no substitute for culture." Naturally, because the former always evolves and formulates values and identity by way of its inverse relationship to the dominance of the latter. This putting me in mind of Koolhaas's topography of the Generic City:

"Identity centralizes; it insists on an essence, a point. ...As the sphere of influence expands, the area characterized by the center becomes larger and larger, hopelessly diluting both the strength and the authority of the core; inevitably the distance between center and circumference increases to the breaking point. In this perspective, the recent, belated discovery of the periphery as a zone of potential value – a kind of pre-historical condition that might finally be worthy of architectural attention – is only a disguised insistence on the priority of and dependency on the center: without center, no periphery: the interest of the first presumably compensates for the emptiness of the latter. ...The last vibes emanating from the exhausted center preclude the reading of the periphery as a critical mass. Not only is the center by definition too small to perform its assigned obligations, it is also no longer the real center but an overblown mirage on its way to implosion; yet its illusory presence denies the rest of the city its legitimacy."

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Two quite common, if not slightly clichéd, readings of the work of Alberto Burri...

The first is the materialist angle, concentrating on Burri's use of materials evocative of the landscape of a war-torn Europe -- the "sackcloth and ashes" of his earlier work being reflective of a society digging itself out from the rubble and the burden of a troubled modern history, with the later works using industrial-grade plastics and the like paralleling Italy's recovery thanks to the largesse of the Marshall Plan (if not of the short-lived economic miracolo italiano of the late 1950s and early '60s).

The other being the one that stresses the visceral associations bound up with many of Burri's works. An account anchored in the biographic, that cites his former service as a medic in the Italian military during WWII; and how that experience proved too much for him, causing him to turn his back on a medical career, only to take up painting shortly after war's end. The tears and cuts and stitching and scorchings that appear throughout his works calling to mind fleshly wounds, lacerations, bandagings, suturing and cauterizations.

Both readings being highly metaphorical, each being rooted in a different site of trauma -- the first socio-historic in character, the latter psychological.


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Alberto Burri's work gained almost immediate attention in the late 1940s; especially in New York, where a young Robert Rauschenberg quickly fell under its influence. By 1952, Rauschenberg traveled to Italy with Cy Twombly, the former with the intent of seeking out Burri in Rome. That artists like Rauschenberg and Twombly would come into the mature phase of their careers by way of European influence proves intriguing, partly because it flies in the face of certain critical accounts of art history in the second half of the twentieth century -- the common version that has it that American art during those years having been a scenario of self-invention and willful pioneering, taking no cues from a European scene whose Modernist momentum had faltered due to the disruption of WWII, and whose postwar artistic developments constituted lateral or idiosyncratic zags that failed to resonate in a broader international context.

By some accounts, the European postwar art informel movement was interpreted as a response to the historical plight of Europe in the middle of the twentieth century -- an expression of cultural and existential malaise, arising out of smoldering doubts about the metaphysical health of Western civilization that had resulted in two world wars, the rise of fascism, and the Holocaust.¹, ²  The disparity between historical circumstances makes for an ironic contrast -- Burri and his contemporaries laboring in postwar Europe, engaging modern material culture in a tentative and ambivalent manner; Rauschenberg (and his contemporaries working in the more overtly "Pop" vein) working in a postwar American climate of emerging affluence and triumphant complacency.

Intertubes Interlude

Recent weeks: A malady that arrived just in time to Grinchicize the holidays. Returning home to a dead modem and various stressful upheavals. The sleep-dep resulting from the first item on the list accounts for my scarcity of late. I suspect it's also responsible for being a-bit/all emo like a muhfuh'r lately. Such as frequent bouts of homesickness, to which the above can be attributed. Because (goddammit) I haven't had a decent Middle Eastern meal in some 2-plus years, and I miss regular (hell, any) exposure to things like the above. Was present at the first two occasions, saw the others in different settings on other occasions.

Cohran's the odd one. Yeah, "seminal" figure in the whole AACM & "soul jazz" hotbed Chicago southside scene once-upon-a, but for a long while his only regular appearances were playing at an Ethiopian restaurant on the northside -- switching out between a variety of instruments (harp, kalimba, sax, etc.) over a cheezy prerecorded backing.

And I guess there's the matter of missing certain friends that I haven't seen since I vacated on Chi & isht like that.

File under: Pure personal indulgence on my part. (Or the alternate that my friend & associate Pere Lebrun's so fond of: Without music life w/b a joke.)

Raiding the 20th Century: Scattered and Sundry Digressive Notes About 'Collage Culture', Pt. I

Simon brings an item to my attention, a recent slender volume titled Collage Culture: Examining the 21th Century's Identity Crisis, for which I was grateful, because it had otherwise escaped my notice. The book sports a pair of essays, one being by Aaron Rose, director of the Alleged Art gallery and the man responsible for both the book and documentary Beautiful Losers; with the other being by writer/poet Mandy Kahn. Kahn's "Living in the Mess" is the longer and more enjoyable of the two essays -- a hopscotching, discursive path over & around her own ambivalence about certain aspects of the culture of the past decade. A cultural landscape in which, amidst all the slippage of irony and clutter, a type of semantical entropy results from everything canceling each other out. "THERE IS DANGER IN A LANDSCAPE OF MEANINGLESS SIGNS," she concludes early on.

Rose's contribution, "The Death of Subculture," is another thing entirely, being something of a manifesto or clarion call to young creatives, culture workers, & artists to return to a "total existence of innovation," to ditch habitual plundering and borrowing. At one point he describes the cultural landscape of the first decade of the 21st century as being "a blender devouring the trends of the last century," which prompts him to worry:

"We are in danger of destroying the fundamental and basic foundations of our creative identity. Our culture has come to view the tenets of original thought and creative innovation as an outdated model – but it has yet to release a new version to replace it."

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In the musical context, what's to blame? Why was the previous decade so largely given over to an orgy of plundering, retreading, recycling, etc? I suppose one could partially blame the whole 'bastard pop'/ mashup trend for giving the whole thing a good bit of its momentum. Or how all the business with "Grey Tuesday" and the Joy Garnett case and whatnot politicized the whole matter of appropriation and "fair use" in the face of the rapidly-inflating realm of "intellectual property" and the corporate copyright police. Or maybe it had something to do with that fucking Rapture album, and with James Murphy and the DFA network, and with all the Brooklyn bands who in the early part of the noughties unanimously decided to resurrect the post-punk sound, thus kicking off a trend of plundering the sounds of the Reagan Era that unflaggingly continues to the present. Or with graffiti art (which traditionally always relied quite heavily on quoting and citing) finally, fully coming into its own via the post-"Mission School" generation of street art. Or with "acid folk"/"New Weird America" and its fascination with the past, creative precedents, the cultural archive. Undoubtedly yes to all of the above, as well as to about a dozen other things that don't immediately leap to mind.



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A question that's nagged me for a while: With all this recently enabled access to the cultural archive, if indeed it's now "everything time," why aren't things (then?) more eclectic? Seems that there's long been a tendency to return to one specific period (to one aspect of its look or its sound) and just put things in Park mode. The '80s being the overwhelming favored era, of late. About which, the less said the better.

Forget the Future/The Future of Forgetting

Image: Dave Jordano [ # ]

At the Design Observer site Places, "The Forgetting Machine: Notes Towards a History of Detroit," in which contributor Jerry Herron sorts through the aestheticization of dereliction by way of the recent glut of "ruin porn," the Motor City's provisional efforts at urban reclamation, and the fate of Detroit as possible cipher or harbinger of the telos of contemporary economics...

"This is a history created by serial default. Nobody really planned the ends — the ruins — of these buildings, any more than they planned Detroit, or America for that matter, despite our dedication to continental-scale projects, beginning with the Declaration of Independence and moving through Manifest Destiny and continuing with the Urban Renewal programs that destroyed America’s cities. We’ve all had a hand in our collective making, and now we’ll have to live with the consequences, not the least of which is our ignorance about the origin of things, so that we stand stupefied or angry or fascinated — camera at the ready — before the monuments to ruination."

The essay is the first in a new series by Herron. The notion of "forgetting machines" was introduced and explained in the author's earlier serialized essay "Borderland/Borderama/Detroit," which appeared in the 2010 Routledge anthology Distributed Urbanism: Cities After Google Earth.*  In that prior essay, Herron analyzes Detroit's status as a city/not-city via a historical trajectory that circuitously connects Tocqueville's assessment of the American idea of individualism with Rem Koolhaas's observations about American urbanism. Of interest is his discussion of Henry Ford's famous "history is bunk" decree, in which Herron fleshes out something that I long ago recognized as a distinctly American pathology:

"A history reinvented each day is no history at all, of course, at least not in the usual sense, with all it implies about the narrative chain of cause and effect that binds the present inextricably to the past. And that belief in necessary cause and effect is precisely what Henry Ford is calling 'bunk.' We want to live in a kind of perpetually self-renewing now,... That forever present condition of the individual is precisely what Henry Ford depended on to create a modern industrial work force — not people enmeshed in tradition or each other’s affairs, least of all union affairs, but individuals unfettered from the past, whom machine-made prosperity would turn into believers in Ford’s evangel. What he built, then, both the cars and the factories that produced them, might be thought of as forgetting machines — industrial works that became so successful as to make Ford’s point about the 'bunk' of history seem self-evident. [...]

"Where 'nothing' existed before, then, we were free to plan as we saw fit, getting it right this time, in a way that the old world, mired in history and tradition, could never do. Our cities came into being first as designs — as contracts with some higher ideal that entitled us to do whatever it took. Thus liberated from history, these urban idealizations had embedded within them their own inevitable undoing. Nothing real can ever live up to ideal standards of perfection, so that all our cities in a sense have been cities/not — forgetting machines always already sabotaged by history. But that would come later."

The essay was also reprinted at Places in three parts, and can be read here: 1, 2, and 3.


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* Herron's notion having no lack of precendents over recent decades. For starters, much of what rests at the core of Herron's essay touches upon some of the themes explored by Paul Connerton in How Modernity Forgets.

Dancing About Architecture, IV: 'Rather Than for a Real World'

Brasília under construction, photos by Marcel Gautherot. Via.

The Atlantic article (see link) and its pull-quote from Simone de Beauvoir prompt me to return to my copy of Robert Hughes's The Shock of the New, for the three paragraphs he devotes to Brasília.* In which planner Lucio Costa is also called out on the carpet for Supreme Malconceptualism. Hughes's verdict echoes that of Beauvoir:

"Brasília, as this place was named, was going to be the City of the Future -- the triumph of sunlight, reason, and the automobile. It would show what the International Style could o when backed by limitless supplies of cash and national pride. ...In the future, everyone would have a car and so the car, as in Corbusier's dreams, would abolish the street. This was carried out to the letter in Brasília, which has many miles of multi-lane highways, with scarcely any footpaths or pavements. By design, the pedestrian is an irrelevance -- a majority irrelevance, however, since only one person in eight there owns a car or has access to a car and, Brazil being Brazil, the public transport system is wretched. So the freeways are empty most of the day, except at peak hours, when all the cars in Brasília briefly jam them at the very moment when the rest of the working population is trying, without the benefit of of pedestrian crossings or underpasses, to get across the road to work."

Which makes me recall an musical item I used to own. Back in the late '90s, the label Caipirinha briefly did a short-run "Architecttura" series of releases of experimental musicians doing compositions that were thematically linked to certain works of architecture. For instance, David Toop doing Itsuko Hasegawa's Museum of Fruit (Yamanashi, Japan). But I recall Panacea's contribution to the series involved a homage to Niemeyer's Brasília. On which the artist completely ditched ditched his trademark drum'n'bass/quasi-gabber rhythms, instead opting for downtempo or beatless soundscapes that are often as cold and airlessly spatial and inhuman as Costa's city planning. An envisioned utopian as a synthetic dystopia. One sample from the thing ...

:: Panacea - "Void of Safety"

But that's just the atmosphere of the thing. I recall finding much of thing (musically) too angular, and not particularly bringing to mind the more curvilinear and organic aspects of many of Niemeyer's buildings. Much of it, somewhat appealingly, had a very depopulated and nocturnal vibe about it, as well.

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* Yes, I've been known to read Robert Hughes from time to time; despite the fact that he's so "conservative" and that I often disagree with him about on almost everything that's transpired since 1950. And I mainly like him because he's often, in the strictly technical sense, an impeccable and eloquent writer. Which helps, especially seeing how -- when it comes to architecture in particular -- he can often be a shameless hack, merely rephrasing the ossified & honored verdict or what other critics had long since decreed. Which (for example) has everything to do with his verdict on Pruitt-Igoe so rotely follows that of Charles Jencks, and which is probably why his remarks on Brasília shadow those of Beauvoir.