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| February 2006 »
Saw the 2nd half of The New World on 42nd St. Young Q'orianka Kilcher is the entire movie. The entire drama takes place on her amazing face. The movie is that and a bunch of metaphorical shots of birds soaring and sunlight through trees. No wonder the 42nd St. crowds were frustrated. Where were the battles, the raping and the pillaging? The revenge and the desperate struggle for survival? The guts and the glory? Wasn’t all that in the trailer? Where’d they go? Not here. Instead we watch her smile, and the mood lightens, the audience becomes optimistic and then her face goes blank, and we sense trouble, tears — and we sense she and her whole culture are falling to pieces. It’s like Carl Dreyer’s Joan of Arc film disguised as a commercial movie. A movie made entirely of close-ups of a beautiful face intercut with nature footage. What a concept! One face tells the whole story. And it does.
Time limits on Justice?
The people of Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia, have been attempting in recent years to reclaim the farming lands taken from their ancestors by the white settlers. The whites have sometimes lived on a farm for 3 generations or more and naturally they think of it as theirs, that it is their homeland now too. The whites accept that the nation should not be ruled by outsiders anymore, but they see their homes as their own. They have raised children, built infrastructure and improved the fields. But as the political tide has recently turned and they are no longer the bosses, their right to hold on to the 80% of the arable land in the area that they claimed seems less likely to continue.
Is this fair? Not exactly, but neither was the appropriation of the land years ago. Justice, one might say, was simply delayed. If I can steal from you and you are powerless to reclaim your property or land for generations does it then become mine? At some point does time itself transfer ownership?
Most likely justice will be skewed. Whites will be forcibly removed, land will go unused and some of it will be wasted by the new owners, unaccustomed as they might be to managing it. There will be unscrupulous land grabs and struggles for property amongst the new owners. But maybe after some time, if things don’t get completely out of hand, a kind of balance will be achieved. Some will argue that not even a single white person belongs on this land, and they have a point. But with some compassion and forgiveness the descendents of thieves might find a place and a home.
Historical Justice
When does the clock run out? Can the Lenape, or their descendants, claim a share of NYC? If they somehow became fabulously oil rich, let us say, would that make it seem less ridiculous? Can Miami Cubans claim their ancestral homes in Havana in the not too distant future? German Jews their houses in Leipzig and Berlin? Russians exiled since the revolution their beautiful homes in St. Petersburg? Chinese their family homes, where they’d lived for generations, that they were tossed out of during the Cultural Revolution? Can everyone simply make history go backwards — and is that justice?
Certain personality types, risk takers, for example, will gravitate towards specific fields, jobs and places. A recent NY Times article suggests that it would have been the risk takers who would settle a new country, like America. So the initial population would be all feisty, thrill-seeking individuals, and their offspring would have a high percentage of those genetic propensities, too. But as with other creatures, the long term evolutionary advantage is never to have too much of the population clumped into one type, so over many generations the normal statistical spread between timid, aggressive, curious or sex-mad individuals would occur. The nation would soften, become less wildly adventurous and aggressive. Or so one would think.
Naturally, the aggressive types would habitually find themselves in the jobs that satisfy their lusts — politics, big business, etc. — but the general population, over successive generations, would no longer be primarily the go-for-broke fanatics and frontiersmen that stomped out the nation. “Leaders”, by nature, will always be continually attempting to convince the more risk-averse to join in their bold new plans and schemes — and sometimes finding some resistance to these ventures, they will inevitably create workarounds — the NSA, the CIA, The Patriot Act, Homeland Security, Gitmo.
A series of articles in the latest issue of New Scientist picks up on a lot of the God, self-delusion and faith ideas I was getting at in the last posting, but in a more succinct way. Thanks to Antonio Perez, Manila for alerting me.
What if there is no self? No such thing as being the unique personalities we think we are? What if, and this is very convoluted, there are even parts of our brains that have evolved to convince us that each of us is unique — as a cover up or mask for the awful truth? The truth that parts of our brains deceive other parts of our brains. And that this trickery evolved because it’s useful.
It’s not as farfetched as it sounds. If you accept the idea that the propensity for religion might have evolved in our brains and you also accept that it is possible that the self-deception of religion and believing in unlikelihoods might give some kind of evolutionary advantage, then you can transfer this over to our concept of our personalities and ourselves. (This assumes that you view literal interpretations of religious orthodoxy as a form of self-delusion and fantasy.)
So, given that I believe that the brain might have evolved propensities to create believable faith-based fantasies, I am ready to apply it to my view of myself. It’s only fair. If I’m going to claim that religion is a deception, then maybe I myself am a deception as well.
The evolutionary advantage of self-deceptions of various kinds is that in order to go ahead with many activities you need to convince yourself that the activities will be worthwhile, that there will be a payoff down the line. You have to keep the faith. Delayed gratification. And what promises the biggest payoff of all? Religion.
The biggest self-deceptions are that life has a “meaning” and that each of us is unique. One can see that evolving an inbuilt obscuring mechanism for those depressing insights might be practical. O.K., we are unique, in a sense — the huge numbers of available combinations of available traits, propensities, body types and experiences that make up each of us is unimaginable — the number of every possible outcome is immense. Immense, but still restricted within certain boundaries or we wouldn’t be able to recognize these types at all. It’s somehow “infinite” but always similarly shaped.
But maybe what we think of as self, as us, exists in dogs and even insects. One of them might be just like me. I’m not unique after all. The range is limited, and universal up and down the food chain. So when we stray into the forbidden zone of these kinds of ideas the policeman inside says, “don’t even think that.” And he says it for our own good.
Anyway, back to the self. Or what used to be the self. Recent Studies (should be a brand name, that) hint that we, and a surprising range of our fellow creatures, have genetic propensities towards a limited range of personalities. What is surprising is that it is not only humans that are shy, aggressive, risk-taking or timid — but that fruit flies and octopi are too, in almost the same percentages. The point spread is consistent. What we think of as our own special personalities — well, spiders and flies have them, too.
Not that environment and upbringing have no say in the matter. Being social animals, our brains are partly structured and given a framework by genetics and then experience helps make more connections and fill in the blanks. But the neurons that are being connected are already in place; experience and the environment can only skew things so far.
I wonder then if other qualities besides selfhood that we think of as being unique to ourselves and to human being in general are also present in the animal kingdom? If animals and even insects have “personalities” then do they also have morality? A sense of right and wrong? It’s not so crazy. Right and wrong could be notions that lend an evolutionary advantage and foster social well-being, and therefore survival of the group. So why shouldn’t animals have these principles too?
What if we go further? Do animals have a sense of humor? Do insects? Ever see one chuckling behind those dead eyes? Do animals have philosophies? In the sense that moral and ethical codes are philosophies applied. Do they have religions? O.K., hyenas don’t built temples and shrines, but do they share with humans that nagging sense that there is something more, something greater? An afterlife maybe? Insect Heaven.
Drove upstate to scope out MASS MoCA in North Adams, Mass, where there is interest in my Playing The Building piece.
Stopped at the new Dia museum in Beacon, NY on the way — housed in an impressive renovation of an old Nabisco box factory, it is now filled with modern art.
In short, the space is spectacular, awe-inspiring, massive — and the art is, for the most part, BORING. The combination of such austere and generous accommodation for such boring stuff makes one, well, slightly angry. Or maybe jealous. Others made the pilgrimage as well; there is a train station nearby and solemn figures and art students from NYC stream over the hill to pay their respects at the biscuit factory building. Here are some typical rooms:
Here is a painting by Agnes Martin, which seems to be an empty canvas. (It’s not, not quite):
Backstory, as I know it:
Dia was founded by Heiner Friedrich, who had married Philippa DeMenil, an heir to the Schlumberger oil fortune. The money was not actually from oil — it is my understanding that the money initially came from the RENTAL of an oil drilling bit design. Wow. Domenique DeMenil, of the previous generation, was a big collector of surrealist art, and much more — she has her own lovely museum in Houston, where that branch of the family was based. Oil=Houston. There is also the Rothko Chapel in Houston, a small museum that finally makes explicit that modern art is a form of worship and that museums are the temples. These are the de Medicis of a certain kind of modern art.
Years ago I became acquainted with François DeMenil, as she was very supportive of Robert Wilson’s theatrical vision. She had a very cool Doug Wheeler light piece installed in her living room that made it seem as if the whole floor was floating.
Anyway, years later Heiner took a shine to minimal and earth art and decided to do something about it, as one can do when one has this kind of money. And why not? He created Dia Foundation and in the early 70s Dia funded huge earthworks projects out in the desert by various artists and gave these artists financial support, stipends and collected their work like mad. Very few of these massive earthworks, I would imagine, would ever have been realized without their support. Donald Judd moved to remote little Marfa Texas and made a whole compound that was a temple to his own sculptural vision. Walter Di Maria made The Lightning Field and one can visit BUT YOU HAVE TO STAY THE NIGHT IN A LITTLE CABIN — you can’t just drive by and have a look — NO HEAT OR ELECTRICITY EITHER. It really is a form of pilgrimage.
Jealous outsiders claimed that being anointed by Dia was a death knell for an artist’s creativity — maybe so, but it also made their work (in the collection) more or less permanently visible.
Anyway, starting in ‘87 Dia had a museum-sized space on west 22nd St. that had slowly, slowly rotating shows of artists and installations that someone somewhere decided were fit for inclusion. This is not meant to sound snide or mean, it seems to be just how it is — they were paying for it (though there was an admission charge) so they could decide who and what got included. Why not? The contents of art museums are never a matter of democratic vote. They are one of the few institutions in which we happily accept secrecy and elitism as the natural way of doing business. The Met may be supported heavily by the city — not sure how heavily — but we there is never a public referendum on whether Thomas Hoving should continue as president. Churches are not taxed, and are not subject to public decision making either. The Cardinals and Bishops don’t pay taxes, but we don’t elect them — nor do we have a say in how things run in the massive New Churches springing up out west, but that’s another subject.
In the late 90s the west 22nd St. area filled with galleries and foot traffic and Dia decided to move further afield — about 70 miles up the Hudson, to bigger and even more austere quarters. (A Manhattan branch will reopen in ’06, they say.)
Dia 22nd St. was famous, to me at least, for its quintessentially “modern” use of gray — typically they converted industrial spaces and refinished them in neutral gray cement flooring and gray hallways. It seems to be an unspoken rule. The gray is a way of articulating the implied rationalist neutrality of modernist display technique — white walls, gray floors and halls are ostensibly designed not to draw attention to themselves, but to allow only the art to speak. No one ever mentioned that that all that gray was screaming, but times change. Some years ago an artist names Jorge Pardo installed wildly festive tile work in the lobby and bookstore — and what a relief, though he did have the nerve to claim it as a work of art.
So now we have the massive ex-Nabisco building filled with the collection of an oil industry family. It’s nice to be King, and it’s nice when you are on the receiving end of the King’s largesse, as many of these artists are or were for many years. To each his own, I guess…if someone wants to build a huge temple to display his or her trophies then fine, no real harm done, they’re not killing anyone or exploiting anyone. Though any collector in collaboration with the museums not so subtly affects the course of what art gets made, which artists make a living, who gets massive shows and receives the attendant press. That may not seem entirely fair, but it’s just protecting your investment, and to be fair not everything they invested in has been applauded; some of the artists are seen, even after many shows, as just too damn minimal even for the jaded art crowd.
Moving upriver, and slightly east, to MASS MoCA, in North Adams, Mass, another massive arts center in a former industrial space — this one most recently was home to the Sprague corporation, maker of transistors, capacitors and electronics of all sorts (Heathkits, some may remember.) They missed the boat on integrated circuits and the town died soon after.
Here is where they are now: IC Semiconductors | C4/1, RakshaLekha Koregoan Park | Pune 411001, MH, INDIA
But there is a smidgen of a silver lining for North Adams, as this arts center — which has films, dance, concerts, a restaurant, and large exhibition spaces — has brought some visitors and employment back to this little town. The factory is massive — it dominates the whole center of town. Two rivers converge and the factory occupies this large V and all the area around and the arts center is little by little renovating these buildings.
Much of the place is not renovated yet — here is an old 3rd floor industrial walkway between buildings (not open to public — yet.)
And a massive V-shaped room above where the two rivers meet.
MASS MoCA is not built around a collection. It is more like a European Kunsthalle — a vessel for shows, events and performances. A show of drawings by the Iranian artist Kamrooz Aram had just opened and these were like trippy Persian miniatures. Another show was of a much written-about group of East German artists. Trained in vaguely academic painting skills, which were laughed at for years by the art cognescenti as being hopelessly outmoded, these guys are now seriously hot.
A third show was of animal-related art — a walk in a birdcage by Marc Dion and a video of an Armadillo cam, for example. Very entertaining and sometimes creepy.
Tonight’s opening was pretty spectacular. A European artist named Carsten Höller had filled a massive room with real (old) amusement park rides which he had altered to move very slowly. Maybe too slowly, in some people’s opinions.
The cocktail reception would be held in the Gravitron, the second ride down, a sort of flying saucer shaped tilt-a-whirl. Hold on to your drinks. Had to get back to the city so couldn’t stay.
Here’s another piece he did in Milan:
Happy New Year. Don’t Buy CDs from the Big 5.
CDs from the big five run the risk of damaging your computer, opening you up to security risks, and you can’t rip the music onto your iPod. Stop buying CDs now. At least until they guarantee us that they will never try this shit again.
O.K., I’m exaggerating, but if I need to carry around a list to know which CDs I can safely buy it’s getting out of control.
For those of you who don’t know. Sony, BMG and EMI have been adding software to their CDs to create a kind of copy protection. Warner’s and Universal I don’t know about yet. This software is designed to stop you from copying your CD for your friends or making MP3s…which means you can’t copy it to your iPod, or even copy it to iTunes, which is how an awful lot of music fans listen to an discover music these days.
In addition, some of these CDs contain software that will burrow and worm into your hard drive and do damage — creating security leaks etc. Mainly, as usual, for Windows users, but who knows what else they do. New reports are that the damage Mac operating systems too. The software is very difficult to remove, intentionally so. The record companies have offered repair kits but who knows how effective those are, and the damage is done, guys!
So, first they start off suing their customers, and now they are maliciously making it hard for their customers to even listen to music, and they will cripple your music and media player to boot. These guys deserve to go out of business, they obviously don’t love music, and they don’t understand their own customers. They must have a deathwish or be run by….who? FEMA? Rumsfeld? Bin Laden?
Here are some CDs to avoid at all costs. At least for now. 1. Neil Diamond — 12 Songs (supposed to be a good CD, too)
2. Trey Anastasio — Shine
3. Foo Fighters — In Your Honor
4. Dave Matthews — Stand Up
5. Alicia Keys — Unplugged (standard)
6. Angie Stone — Stone Love
7. Babyface — Grown and Sexy
8. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club — Howl
9. Charlie Wilson — Charlie last name Wilson
10. Imogen Heap — Speak For Yourself(I almost bought this one)
11. J-Kwon — Hood Hop
12. Kasabian — Kasabian
13. Kings of Leon — Aha Shake Heartbreak
14. Maroon 5 — Live Friday the 13th
15. My Morning Jacket — Z
16. Pink — Try This
17. Santana — All That I Am
18. Sarah McLachlin (her too!?) — Bloom Remix
19. Velvet revolver — Contraband
20. Silvertide — Show and Tell
There are more, but that’s a shocking top 20. To be fair, I don’t think a lot of these artists, maybe none of them, were told this was being done. But they know now.
Links and more info:
BoingBoing
Electronic Frontier Foundation
We Are Scientists blog
Guardian UK
Melanie from Wired arranged for Danielle and me to visit Apple and have a chat/lunch with Jonathan Ive.
From Wikipedia: Ive's team designed the original iMac and its successors, the original iBook and its successors, the Power Mac starting with the Blue and White Power Mac G3, the Power Mac G4 Cube, the PowerBook starting with the Titanium PowerBook G4 (or possibly earlier), the eMac, the Mac mini, the Xserve and Xserve RAID, the iPod family, the AirPort base station family, and the Apple Cinema Display and some later Studio Displays.
Whew, no wonder he has been winning lots of design awards. Jonathan showed us the inside of an aluminum PowerBook — he seemed as proud of the intricate foldings and stampings of the invisible stuff as most would be of the outside. The point was that the design goes clear through — it’s not an appliqué merely stuck on the outside to make it all seem groovy, but extends to stuff most of us will never ever see.
I mentioned that I was in the midst of a collaboration with Fatboy Slim and Jonathan said he was having dinner that night with his friend John Digweed, one of the world’s top electronic DJs and a pal of Norman’s.
Maybe that gives as much insight into where he’s coming from as anything.
John Digweed:
Here to meet with the McSweeney’s folks about our long-discussed plan to do a book of the “tree” drawings. As often happens, in two separate meetings we got sorted what had been languishing for at least a year, with various e-mails going back and forth. It’s going to be called Arboretum, appropriately, and will be simple looking, though making things look simple and straightforward is never as easy as it seems.
826 Valencia was buzzing — there were writing classes in progress, people milling about the pirate supply store up front and the tiny back office that amazingly manages Believer, McSweeney’s and now Wholphin (the DVD magazine) was filled with activity and the desks were overflowing.
This bunch has good ideas — their comments and suggestions are spot on — we plan on the book hitting stores and other outlets Aug–Sept this year.
It was raining, but the next day the weather cleared up and this city sparkled with that crystalline Northern California light that makes everything pop out with hard edges. The folding bikes came in handy, though due to the X-mas plane traffic Continental charged for overweight coming here and a surprise “bike charge” ($80!) returning. This has never ever happened to me before. I think the X-mas spirit vaccine didn’t take on the airline check-in folks — they’re probably totally overworked this season. (The “bike charge” must have been meant for people who don’t have folding bikes; the airlines sometimes add a charge for wrapping a whole bike in cardboard, understandably. But these were in suitcases, so the rule was inappropriately applied. Ahem.)
There’s lot to see between meetings — Robert Adams’ sad but chaotic and beautiful photos of clear-cutting and Kiki Smith’s retrospective at SF MoMA and two lovely pieces by British artist Cornelia Parker at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. One piece was made of the remains of a church struck by lighting, the other of a church burned by arson.
Here’s a picture:
And a short interview: BF: Obviously with Cold Dark Matter: The Exploded View, you actually blew up a building which was probably scarier for everybody but you. What was the motivation for that?
CP: I had done the piece with the steamroller-Thirty Pieces of Silver-and the piece with the train running over coins — Matter and What it Means. I was thinking of different ways of killing something off. I think the explosion was another clichéd cartoon death. At the time I was living in a house that was due to be knocked down for a motorway in a few months time, but it kept getting postponed for another six months and so on for almost ten years. I think because of living for such a long time with this constant threat of demolition that is where the steamroller and explosion ideas came from. But it wasn't a home I blew up; it was just a garden shed, a surrogate. It's another British institution, the garden shed.
BF: It feels more like J.G. Ballard than T.S. Eliot somehow, doesn't it? It has more of that kind of wit.
CP: I think it came from all kinds of places. It's a modern condition: the threat of bomb scares, and the fear it symbolizes. From seeing explosions on the news and all the time in films you sort of think you know what they are, but really your firsthand knowledge of it is very limited. I realized I'd never walked through the detritus of a bombed-out building.
BF: It's almost like you believe things are animated. Or that they're potentially animated. That they're sitting there still but if you do something to them then they're going to be animated.
CP: I like the life/death resurrection bit, which is very Catholic, something dies, but it's resurrected in another form.
Then there are the restaurants. Admittedly a foodie thing to do — but this seems to be the place that has become a center for food tourism — the produce is so fresh and it’s served in mostly casual unpretentious settings and mixed in imaginative combinations — it’s a gut-busting, wallet-thinning kind of place for a visitor. The Slanted Door, Delphina, Foreign Cinema, Luna Park, Blue Plate, San Juan Taqueria, El Farolito Taqueria, Blowfish Sushi, Greens, Zuni and Liberty Café. Most of these are in or near the Mission district, which was convenient to the hotel and to 826 Valencia, but there are many many more. Every one a winner. Not always cheap — for being in a sometimes-funky neighborhood some of these mission joints have uptown gourmet prices, but the food quality and relaxed vibes are better than many fussy uptown hoity-toity places.
Saturday is a day off so we take a bike ride with Dave Eggers in the Marin headlands. Load the bikes onto a MetroMuni bus, all of which have bike racks up front, and head across the bridge. After a little rain it turns into one of those gorgeous days that are such clichés to describe, so I won’t. There are bike trails all over the headlands and around western Marin, much of which has been left as National Forest, so there are hawks and vultures and mountain lions and seals.
With the brisk air and the mist it reminded me of the bleak but beautiful Scottish highlands, though the rain drizzles less often here.
Dream: Jerusalem Mobile
…a dream at night of a woman with very short salt and pepper hair whom I meet and we chat briefly in a field as we walk together…then we part…but I obsessively must see her again…I end up in Jerusalem, where I need to be according to some itinerary, and where I hope to find her…but at the border where I am detained a fire breaks out in one of the buildings where we’re being questioned…along with the crowd of Hasidic and other men (noticeably more relaxed and friendly than their NY counterparts) I rush out of the burning room, down some outdoor stairs, we’re all jostled and smooshed, and ominously I hear a crunch. I am wearing a yarmulke. I rush out, in the lead, through the immigration gate, followed by the others. Smoke and flames billow behind, I am clutching my (unstamped) passport…the guard waves me and rest quickly through…we pour into the streets.
I reach for my mobile to call this woman, only to find it has been crushed, and as I try to hold its pieces together to find her number it slowly crumbles and nasty chemicals leak onto my hands, Chinese characters appear briefly on the screen…all I want is the last number I dialed, which was hers, but the phone is disintegrating in my hands. I imagine I will lose the love of my life. A feeling of desperation.
I save the SIM chip and some other parts and determine that maybe if I buy a new phone and insert my memory chip then I will be able to call her, as I have her number in there — and she lives here.
…
Had dinner with another ex-Talking Head, Jerry Harrison and his wife Carol, who are just back from the massive Consumer Electronics show in Vegas. Jerry won a whole bunch of awards for his and ET’s surround sound mixes of the Talking Heads re-releases, so he’s suddenly a tech expert in that area as well as being a successful record producer. He therefore gets invited to these kinds of confabs and we discussed the news reports about the IT companies jostling for positions in the upcoming convergence of TV with the Internet.
Some reports imply the creation of a two-tiered internet — one fast enough for TV streaming and the other like what we have. Naturally the high speed one would be proprietary — you’d have to pay to get on in — so the Internet would only be partly free, and just as Apple used to offer free viewing of music videos but now charges, little by little the corporations will find ways to lock up and charge for the world wide web.
Jerry says there are lots of fiber optic cables laid down that are unused, or not used to anywhere near their capacity. And that the dot com crash hurt the backers of this infrastructure more than it did anyone else, as they never even got their stuff truly up and running. Now might be the second chance.
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