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I’m in Dallas — or more accurately, Richardson, a silicon suburb north of the city — to meet with David Hanson, a maker of realistic (i.e. human) looking robots.
We’re collaborating on a piece that, if all goes well, will be part of a group show at The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid this summer. Some time ago, the curators invited me to be part of a tech-oriented art show, and I suggested approaching Hanson to make a singing robot for which I would write and record a song.
Hanson’s robots flirt with the uncanny and test our notions of what it means to be human. They have rubbery flesh made of what he calls frubber, with tiny wires on the inside that pull the “skin” to mimic human facial expressions (to an extent). Some of them can also make eye contact and some can carry on a weird dialogue, adding to their profoundly disturbing nature. Part of what makes this human likeness so creepy is our instinctive desire to empathize with the robots and to ascribe to their behavior human motivations and even emotions.
As a result, Hanson’s machines make us wonder how much of our interaction with our fellow humans (and animals) is based on instinctual empathy. We believe that behind the actions, words and facial expressions of the people and animals we encounter there is a life force and a consciousness. But the robots force us to ask how much of that is presumption on our part.
I was curious whether a singing robot might push these reactions even further. We often assume that singing is “from the heart” — or at least some part of it is. I myself believe that it is and it isn’t: it’s both a developed skill (to emote convincingly), and a true outpouring of emotion, as the physiological effect of singing is by nature more connected to the lizard brain than to the rationalizing frontal lobes. The fact that singing can engage both parts of the brain makes it maybe the least likely thing one would expect a robot to do.
There have been other singing robots. For instance, in 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL sings “Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for Two)” as he is powered down. The scene demonstrates HAL regressing from independent thought to mere parroting, and was not meant to be a kind of expression of HAL’s feelings.
Before leaving for Dallas, I wrote and recorded a short song in New York, something I believe is passionate, over the top, and extremely emotional sounding. The song is sung a cappella.
Getting down south had its share of setbacks. Due to some McDonald-Douglas planes having untreated technical problems, three successive American Airlines flights were cancelled. The reason was never given at the time. They would say things like “we can’t find a crew.”
I eventually arrived in Texas and drove from the massive Dallas-Fort Worth airport (it’s larger than Manhattan) across the flat plains of northern Texas. The gracefully curving highways were the color of the surrounding earth — a sort of warm beige. After about twenty miles, I turned north on Highway 75 on what might be the mightiest and most awe-inspiring interchange I’ve ever seen. At least five levels of roads are stacked up, all swooping over, under and around each other as if in some mighty concrete mating dance. It’s a truly incredible work, graceful, and of a scale so large that it is impossible to see the whole thing from any one vantage point.
When driving on the upper levels, you are almost completely unaware that you are arcing and swooping and curving in a ballet with all the other vehicles exiting and merging down below. You simply see the curve of the road ahead, and some signs alerting you of approaching merging lanes and future exits.
 
I ate dinner at the Renaissance Hotel. The restaurant’s only other diner sat off in the distance. I’m currently reading Temple Grandin’s book Animals in Translation, which seems appropriate for this project. She’s a highly functioning autistic person who claims her autism has helped her to better understand and empathize with the animal point of view.
From the door to my hotel room I could see across the atrium to the identical rooms on the other side. The building’s massive scale, warm moody lighting, and repetitive pattern of doors, plantings, and balconies felt more like some very peculiar temple than a place to sleep. Within this strange temple, all individuality is erased, all ego lost, and, as with many religious sites, one experiences transcendence, a sense of being part of something beyond and greater than oneself.
In religious practice, this glimpse of a profound truth would be channeled via word, sound and symbol to join a pre-established system and set of myths. In this case, one wonders where such channeling might lead? To the world of meetings, creative business exchanges and exciting capitalist enterprises?
The next morning I went to Hanson’s studio, located in an office/industrial park called The Telecom Corridor, where corporate headquarters for companies like Texas Instruments, Samsung, Ericsson and AT&T abound. One building — of a new type springing up here and there — houses data archives, so it has no windows. It’s beautiful in a strange way.
It’s like being in a new world where humans are merely visitors. We work to secure the data and take care of it, like worker bees for machines.
I arrive at the studio, which is on a street called West Executive Drive. The studio itself consists of a reception area, a conference room and few workshops. Some workshops are dedicated to hand-sculpting the heads and faces that will be cast in the fleshy frubber that Hanson has invented. Others are littered with servo motors and laptops that tell the partially assembled robots what facial expression (or Viseme, as Hanson says) to display and how to move their heads and arms. It’s a scene from a thousand science fiction movies, which is pretty exciting to actually walk into.
I proposed that I be videotaped singing the short song, enabling Hanson and his crew to study the series of head movements and facial expressions that I instinctively produce when performing. I do a number of takes, some with more movement, some with less. A few of the robots have mechanical arms, so I do a couple performances moving my arms like I normally would when singing. The robot — which doesn’t resemble me, by the way — won’t mimic my particular mannerisms, but will instead render the performance of a typical singer.
I also suggested that I write and record a version in Spanish since the audience in Madrid will be mainly Spanish-speaking. So, while the wire “tendons” are being attached to the inside of the skin, I hole up in the empty conference room and come up with a Spanish verse that might work.
Just as in the English language, some words and phrases can sound strange and awkward in Spanish. Moreover, the use of melody can place the non-native Spanish speaker at even greater risk. For instance, a melodically emphasized syllable effectively accents the vowel, which, in some cases, conjugates the word into the past tense, or changes its meaning entirely.
To be sure I hadn’t inadvertently done any of that, Thomas, one of Hanson’s collaborators, took me to meet a poetry teacher fluent in Spanish at the nearby UT Dallas (a school that originated as a Texas Instruments Research & Development facility). I sang what I had written for her and she helped with a few phrases. Sadly, I discovered that two of the lines didn’t work at all — though most of the others did — leaving me with a little homework to take back to New York. But, once complete, I’ll be able to record the Spanish version, too.
We returned to the studio, and eventually Hanson’s crew of assistants and collaborators drifted off to their homes and day jobs and I went back to the towering atrium by the side of the highway. That night, Kevin — a Hanson collaborator and production manager — and his boyfriend Carter hosted a BBQ at their traditional Dallas bungalow. (The bricks used to make Dallas bungalows and many newer houses as well are the same color as the highways.) The inside of their home is filled with their paintings and artwork, some of which leans against the walls or lies stacked in piles in the various rooms. One painting displays the Kool Aid pitcher man brandishing a bundle of dynamite. Others show a young Shirley Temple making a cute expression and wielding a butcher knife. These latter paintings have been popular so Kevin will paint more of them.
Hanson once did a stint at Disney in LA, which is no surprise since the Magic Kingdom calls on sculpting and molding skills like his for their theme park needs. While there, he began to develop Frubber, but didn’t work out all the problems and get a patent until after he left the Kingdom. I hope they don’t steal the formula; the Disney folks are rumored to be ruthless. Hanson also worked at the LA studio of artist Paul McCarthy. Although McCarthy’s work leans towards the obscene and scatological, the molding and sculpting techniques are probably not much different than those employed at the Disney parks. The crossover between McCarthy and Disney is, I think, significant.
Heather, a former Hanson employee, said over BBQ that she’s heading to LA this week to apply for similar work. There’s a circle of modelers, engineers and artists mixing technology with artier impulses. They float between the art world, theme parks, Hollywood, and high-tech AI conferences.
Hanson went to RISD, the same art school I briefly attended. Early on in his attendance, Hanson wanted to mix his tech and performance interests with more traditional art techniques and skills. But the school strongly discouraged this, since they lacked a department capable of overseeing that kind of work.
I had a similar experience. While working on a photo-based semi-conceptual art project, I was advised to try my luck in NYC instead of trying to fit in to the school programs. “We don’t teach this stuff,” they told me. At the time it was very frustrating, although in retrospect it turned out to be good advice. And at least I managed to acquire some valuable drawing skills while there.
Hanson and I decide that all programming and adjustments for the English song should be complete within two weeks. In the meantime, he’ll send me a video of the work-in-progress. Once I finish the Spanish song, I might revisit Dallas to facilitate programming Julio’s face for this alternate version. The robot’s body should be ready two weeks later, and then we’ll decide whether the arms will move, whether the head will bob in time with the song’s meter, and whether the torso will sway just a little to the (implied) beat. That leaves us a month to solve any additional problems and install in Madrid — the opening is in June.
I have my fingers crossed. If it all works — even forgoing some of the more ambitious ideas — it will be pretty astounding.
Some robot and artificial intelligence labs discourage and frown on work like Hanson’s. According to his detractors, building robots to mimic human appearance and expression is for the most part irrelevant. More significant investigations will explore what actions the bot can accomplish. Can it learn? How does it process sensory information? In what ways can it react to its environment? Hanson’s work may be less academically rigorous, but it does probe at some sensitive areas that traditionally focused engineers and theoreticians might prefer not to think about.
I pick up Malu, and we have breakfast at a funky, charming little place in Silverlake. As we eat, the couple next to us are chatting while busy knitting. Both of them! The coffees we have later at Intellegencia are incredible. This seems to be common knowledge — the place is filled with hipsters waiting patiently to order. The sun is shining, and the hyper-colorful exteriors of the Salvadoran markets and clubs remind me that this city has pockets where a wonderfully crazy mixture of all different kinds of people end up living in more or less in the same hood. I’m not sure the disparate layers of Angelinos actually mingle and cross paths very often — as sometimes happens in old NY neighborhoods in transition — but the visuals are great and the availability of authentic regional foods is incredible.
Afterwards, Malu and I go together to the Murakami show at the downtown Geffen Contemporary museum, notorious in some circles for having a Louis Vuitton boutique right in the middle of the museum — just for this show. Murakami designed some versions of the LV handbags a few years ago, and has also had his anime eyeball pattern printed on them alongside the LV logos. These designs are also presented on canvases, as works of art.
Other rooms display the copious amounts of merchandise that Murakami has produced — T-shirts, plastic figurines, toys, CD covers — so the mix of art and commerce is pretty fluid and seamless. To some of us, this mix is scandalous, sort of, but to M it isn’t even worth a mention. It’s a non-issue. I tell her that some people find the mix of art and luxury branding disturbing, and I get a strange look. There were lines to get into the museum and lines just as long to get into the Murakami gift shop. (NOT the LV shop, which has turned over a reported thirteen million in goods, no part of which goes to the museum. I’ll bet the curator who made that deal won’t work again in LA any time soon.)
It’s a hugely popular show, mostly filled with kids around Malu’s age and slightly older (in their twenties I’d guess) wandering around the museum-cum-recombinant psychedelic manga universe. Not everything he did is cute. As is common in the okatu and manga world, there is sometimes a pervy undercurrent of nerdy sexual obsession. Some short videos on a plasma screen show a CG character — an adolescent alien boy with no hair, a huge head, and beady eyes — obsessing over the uniformed Japanese schoolgirls in his midst. In one piece, he returns home after school and lying in bed he remembers a girl classmate and as a result his (plaid?) pants poke up. His face gets a look of confusion and horror.
Other fabricated mannequin-like sculptures show a manga boy spurting a massive steam of jism out of his hard on.
The front of a transformer girl’s body — her breasts down to her pinkish red vagina — flips forward on a hinge, and there are little dragonfly wings on her back. The rest of the stuff is pretty cute, though fragmented and freaky, as only the Japanese can do.
Some of the relentless merchandising seems out of control, like the infinite variations of the DOB character on t-shirts and everything else, its jellyfish eyes arrayed on any imaginable surface. But some of it is truly inspired — little teeny figurine versions of some characters were given away inside candy boxes sold in Japan. Like luxury arty Crackerjack prizes! And the carpet in the video screening room is a subdued pattern of flowers with his smiley faces in the middle of them.
Tonight the Grammy Awards will take place. They’re held at the Staples Center, a huge downtown sports arena, which, I am told, explains why downtown seems so lively today. The talk is all about Amy Winehouse’s substance abuse problems, and which megastars will give good moments on TV. The dire situation of the record business is never mentioned, not once.
We attend a gala opening of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum, a massive new wing of the County Museum here. C has many, many pieces in this new wing, so they flew her out for this. (Eli Broad has amassed more of her work than any other collector.) The County Museum is situated on a massive park site off Wilshire Blvd, which is also the location of the famous tar pits. As you approach the museum complex from the east, one of the pits is plainly visible — a small black lake can be seen just off Wilshire Blvd. A white statue of a struggling wooly mammoth sits within it. The animal is depicted lurching and crying out, so we can imagine the theoretical scenario.
When the rains fall, these bubbling ponds of tar and oil emanating from beneath the LA geology become covered in a thin layer of water. Long ago, prehistoric critters, seeing only the aqueous top layer, would wade in the pond thinking it was comprised of fresh water, inevitably becoming stuck in the black goo. Nearby, a covered pavilion houses a dig that has continued for decades, uncovering lots of bones and fragments. Somehow, the sight of giant beasts stuck in tar pits amidst the backdrop of LA’s extreme luxury and urban sprawl seems a too perfect metaphor: big lumbering creatures lured to their demise by what they think is a lovely sparkling fresh water pond…or something like that.
Outside the museum entrance, valet parking attendants await newcomers, systematically arrayed so that no one has to wait too long to be relieved of their car. We have a rented Prius, and I overhear one of the parking guys asking another if he knows how to drive it. (They don’t start like regular cars.) Guests are immediately dumped onto the red carpet and I ask C if she wants to let the photographers get some snaps or just run for it. Too late — a young woman quickly attaches herself to us and makes us stop every few yards, allowing pack after pack of photographers to get their snaps. I’m kind of game, up to a point. At each stop, I urge us on after enduring a minute of flashing bulbs. C is taken aback, blinded by the barrage of flashes, which I suspect she must have also endured at the various NY fashion shows she has attended; but this is more drawn out and structured.
The actual entrance features a collection of vintage cast-iron lampposts from LA County, painted light gray by Chris Burden. I read about these somewhere. He bought them when he heard that these and other bits of civic detritus were being sold or auctioned, and then he stored them on his Topanga Canyon property. Now he has declared them a “piece” and I assume has sold them to the museum, or to Eli Broad, the developer who funded much of this wing.
The elevation of an individual’s personal collection of curios to the status of an artwork in it’s own right seems increasingly common these days. Recently, a NY gallery featured an artist’s collection of kitsch sculptures of a monkey holding Darwin’s skull. It seemed like an eBay collection to me — charming and wacky if I saw it at someone’s house, but presented as a stand-alone artwork?
The artist Francis Alÿs did a similar thing last year at a museum in NYC, where he presented his collection of found paintings of the same Mexican Saint. Some were refined, some crude, and they filled the whole place — again, a sort of eBay collection as an integral original work. Or not. My friend Ford has some wonderfully eccentric collections: grotesque clown dolls and paintings, a whole series of bottles made to look like logs, yardsticks.
Jim Shaw, the LA artist, did something vaguely similar years ago when he presented his collection of paintings he’d picked up in thrift stores as “his” show. (This was pre-eBay.) It was great, and the book of these paintings was and still is inspiring. He picked out the weirdest and most disturbing, the creepiest and most surreal artistic attempts I’d ever seen. In a sense, the show was really about his eye and sensibility — and the objects had obviously been diligently accrued over quite a few years. Together, these paintings suggest a mass of dark, twisted creativity lurking beneath the amateur Sunday painter — a deep strangeness informing some “unprofessional” art making. The intimation is such that this unusual and powerful creativity also lurks beneath the country at large. It was a powerful show.
We wander around the throngs of black suited elderly men, and women dressed in unusual gowns. I comment that the age of the folks at this gathering made me feel young.
We aren’t yet allowed into the new museum wing — that prize would be saved for later. Instead, we are herded into a huge enclosed tent the size of the Parthenon, through a dark, covered passage, containing small, isolated pools of light.
The new wing is the pink and blue boxes seen below (shouldn’t those colors be reserved for Miami?) and the tent is the big gray thing behind them. The other wings of the museum are over to the right, and further over are the tar pits.
Photo: J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times
Inside the tent, huge white cubes the size of small houses hung from the ceiling, the BCAM acronym on their sides, and some abstract projections undulating on their bottom surfaces. We found our seats and were served some food as various speeches congratulate Broad, Renzo Piano (the architect of this extension), and others, one after another.
Afterwards, Lionel Richie, Nicole’s “father”, takes the stage and sings about being easy like Sunday morning. I head to the restrooms. Kind of shocking that a place purporting to support innovative and groundbreaking contemporary art plays such middle of the road music. Well, OK, if they’d asked me to perform while people finished dessert and networked, I’d have said no, so maybe it’s not that surprising. And maybe contemporary music requires an investment of time and a bit more focus and involvement — whether it’s academic, quasi-classical, post-rock or electronic — than the average work of contemporary art. So maybe that explains the disconnect as well.
Lionel and Co., leave the stage and a second smaller platform descends from the ceiling, hosting a piano player and a fiddle player — and maybe a third musician? — playing a version of Led Zeppelin’s Kashmir! Duh duh duh — duh duh duh — go the grand chords, while the violin (it sounds like there is more than one) does the Indo-Arabic fills and licks that lend that classic rock tune its exotic identity. It’s a great song, but not what I expect to hear right now. And this slightly lounge version of it — though still powerful — is less than thunderous. It’s been somewhat tamed, even though it’s still a nicely weird surprise.
It’s not long before the little stage ascends once more to prepare for the coup de théâtre — the wall of the tent separating us from the new wing suddenly drops (a trick I’d seen in quite a few Kabuki shows) to reveal a walkway leading to the huge, illuminated buildings. On either side of the walkway there are some fiddlers made up like the blue man group, only these ones have bald heads painted red (to avoid copyright infringement?) They’re situated on either side of the walkway, on a lower grassy area, on a grid of little plinths, sawing away as the Zeppelin tune continues.
The museum wing is enormous. There is more space inside than in two of the major NY museums put together, or so I hear. On the outside it’s nothing spectacular — it will never be an architectural destination or a landmark like some other recent museum structures. But the building does its job. The large rooms are easy to understand and to navigate; they don’t distract or try to upstage the art, which is a relief these days. Even the stairs have been moved outside (a possibility in LA). So other than a large elevator, the whole building appears to be display space. Many artists, including C, have gigantic rooms devoted to (mostly) Broads’ collection of their work over the years. He seems to have collected some artists’ works in depth, seemingly ignoring others all together. Maybe, as is rumored, this is only a small sampling of his holdings, and this is just what he has decided to put on view here now.
In other cities, like Miami, some major collectors have built their own independent museums – separate from any city institutions — to display their private collections and curated shows of newly acquired work. They don’t have to contend with other board members or museum directors. Here at the LACMA wing, things are fuzzier — it is clearly a Broad showcase, but it’s also a county institution. Yet, the works don’t belong to the museum, they’re on loan.
The evening’s elaborate spectacle was, I suspect, the work of the folks who usually do “industrials,” its lavish fanfare the type usually reserved for trade fairs and at corporate shareholder events. I’ve always wanted to attend one of those, as they often employ the most advanced spectacle technology and money is generally no object. These things are deigned to hype the product, produce oohs and ahhs, and entertain the armies of shareholders and board members who have traveled from far and wide to attend. It’s true industrial theater: auto-ballets, smells, massive screens, sound and light are typical, so I hear. The public is never invited, but I still think maybe one day I’ll get to see one. I guess I am seeing one. (I had storyboarded my version of one for possible inclusion in my mid-80s movie True Stories, but that scene didn’t happen.)
I suspect that a spectacle on this scale can be ordered up pretty easily from one of those outfits, though I’d like to think that someday, someone might say, “Hey, why don’t we have one of the artists, or a contemporary theater director do the spectacle?” Julie Taymor is a no brainer. Or Robert Wilson (though the dinner might then go on for five hours). Or David Lynch. Or Peter Sellers or….
Same issue as with the music, I surmise. Why not make it as contemporary and groundbreaking as the art on display? Funny how things can be compartmentalized that way.
I finished (sort of) a 3.5-minute video during the tutorial. The video is comprised of shots of the weird concrete park across from the Javits Center, over which I inserted an improvised voiceover about some vague time and country where traditional religion is outlawed and human sacrifices are performed regularly in a concrete outdoor temple. I cobbled together some abstract footage I’d already had, and shot a little more during my stay, and the voiceover was an attempt to give a kind of narrative linkage. C and I read the narration and we’re seen in silhouette a couple of times. It’s crude, but it IS a little piece, so I’m pretty thrilled. On the last day I learn how to do little titles and how to output the “finished” piece. Good timing.
After four or five days of continuous snow — which kept the airport here closed — the sun comes out and we leave on time. We arrive in LA in the early afternoon and I text Malu who is anxious to meet up. She’s way downtown at her dorm, so I suggest that as our time is tight, she meet us at the hotel where I’ll order her some room service lunch, and then we can hang out.
We all head off to the Museum of Jurassic Technology, and M loves the room with 3-D images of X-rayed flowers (i.e., The Floral Stereoradiographs of Albert G. Richards). Neither she nor C has ever been here before, so the mixture of the real (the stereoradiographs are comprised of a single image and don’t require the use of a special viewer) and the imaginary (dioramas and letters regarding an imaginary opera singer’s spectacular exploits, for example) is a bit of a head twister at first. “Wait, THAT is real, I’m sure, but does that mean THAT might be real too?” The answers to such questions are never given, and the succession of dark Victorian rooms with eccentric, spotlit displays creates a mood of time warp and possibility.
One room has a new exhibit of paintings of all the dogs that the Russians sent into space. Are these real? Yes, I think so, but I’m not sure if they are mid-century Russian paintings, or more recent ones. Laika is given pride of place, or course, but there are a whole slew of them, all mutts, posed for their heroic portraits. They were gathered from the streets of Moscow, we are told, and trained to wear doggie pressure suits and to withstand the G-forces during the launch. Many of them returned as well, one of whom later sired a litter of puppies. She had company on her voyage — another dog, two rats, forty mice, and some greenery.
C and I had booked a dinner at a place called the Pine Creek Cookhouse. A friend had told me it’s a thing to do here, as it’s up in the hills and can only be accessed by cross country skis or by sleigh — you drive to a certain point, after which you must switch to a more humble form of transport. It’s dark as we head up the mountain road and we notice that there aren’t many other cars headed this way. And the snow and wind starts to increase the higher we go. Hmmm.
A few miles further and the road is completely white — it twists and turns in the dark along what looks like a river created canyon on our right. The wind occasionally blows the snow from the surrounding fields and hills obscuring the road, and then we have to drive slower, as it’s hard, almost impossible, to see. After a few more miles we spot a small pickup tilted at a 45º angle into the snow bank on the ravine side of the road. A few more feet and it would have tumbled down. I stop and suggest that Cindy walk over and see if anyone is in there and if they need a ride or help. She returns trembling, and with a slight quiver in her voice says, “The truck seems empty…let’s turn around and get out of here.”
The road here is too narrow to turn around, so I continue slowly up the mountain. The blowing snow increases and we see either a couple of grey foxes or small wolves crossing in front of our headlights, but there is still no safe place to do a U-turn. By now C is really panicking, and I agree that if this weather continues, it could be really unsafe to drive back down after a meal and some wine.
Eventually I see a road branching off on the left and I use that area to turn around. We head back down and before we even reach the abandoned truck we see another vehicle — an SUV — dangling over the edge in a very similar way, it’s hazard lights flashing. I get out this time, but no one is in the car. So we drive on down.
When we reach the valley floor the clouds have lightened and the snow has stopped, but we both reason that given the weather pattern here thus far, the snow could begin to fall again in a minute — so tonight might not be the best night for cross country skiing to a fancy restaurant.
C is more of a skier than I am — I’ve only tried it twice — but this seems the ideal place for it. We decide to rent couple pairs of cross-country skies and some booties for the week. First, we attempt the trail that passes right behind our guest-house. I panic whenever we approached a descent, and I fall into the deep snow about four or five times, but we make it around the course.
Over the course of the week, we venture out on various trails about three or four more times, an hour or so at a stretch. On the very last day, during a few hours of sunshine, I begin to get the hang of it. I can glide along like I am skating or rollerblading, and it’s a nice workout and pretty exhilarating. Maybe it was the little grooves carved into these prepped trails that kept me on track, or maybe it was just my increased confidence — but at any rate, I get it, finally.
C and I are here to take a Final Cut Pro tutorial at a place called Anderson Ranch Arts Center. Years ago Mike and Doug Starn told me they took Photoshop classes up here and recommended it for intensive learning. The ranch includes ceramics studios, a large woodshop, a metalsmithing studio, darkrooms, and a full print shop that functions quasi-independently of the ranch center.
Normally, established artists come here to get help realizing a project, or to consult with the younger aspiring artists also taking the tutorials. While we didn’t have specific projects in mind, we were excited by the possibilities offered with these new affordable video and editing tools. With Final Cut one can edit professional quality, high-res video on a laptop if need be. No extra hardware, other than an external hard drive, is needed. And with the new high-definition cameras that have just come out in the last year or so, the image quality available for a relatively low cost has taken a quantum leap.
It reminds me of when Logic and other comparable softwares made audio recording, editing, and mixing available at a more reasonable cost than with Pro Tools, which required that you use their expensive hardware. Pro Tools eventually responded to the competition’s populist approach with more reasonably priced hardware setups, but the cat was out of the bag. It was possible to record audio at home, on a laptop even, at the same quality as in a professional studio.
As others have pointed out, the required gear — mics, headphones, A to D converters, amps, speakers, etc. — is far from free. And though the costs are significantly less than they once were, much of the gear still remains out of reach for many young artists. The investment need be made only once though, whereas the cost of using a professional recording studio must be shouldered every time an artist goes in. I continue to pay for a recording studio from time to time, mostly for the skills and the fresh, creative ears of the mixer, recorder or producer.
On the way to Aspen, in Newark Airport, I used the restroom, and there was a man in the neighboring toilet talking on his cell phone. Of course, everyone could hear what he was saying — not that it made much sense, as we all just heard one side.
Blocked
There’s free Wi-Fi at the Denver airport, which is a nice, sensible touch. But to my surprise, one of my habitual surfing sites has been blocked. I’m not totally shocked that alleged nudity might be blocked (if there is nudity on the Boing Boing site it’s pretty rare and likely to be arty or ironic), but I’m perplexed by the implication that all blogs and wiki sites are suspect!
Back in NYC however, Danielle explains that not all blogs and wikis are blocked, just those filtered by Secure Computing’s web censorware product called SmartFilter. According to Boing Boing co-editor Xeni Jardin,
“[…]SmartFilter isn't very smart. Secure Computing classifies any site with any nudity — even Michaelangelo's David appearing on a single page out of thousands — as a ‘nudity’ site, which means that customers who block ‘nudity’ can't get through." (see blog post here)
Turns out, Secure Computing and other similar companies have sold their products to government-controlled monopoly Internet providers in places like Kuwait, Oman, and Sudan to name a few, effectively blocking access to filtered sites — like Boing Boing — for entire countries. Xeni wrote an op-ed in the NY Times on the issue, which you can find here.
We transfer to the small plane to Aspen. It arrives over Aspen about twenty-five minutes after takeoff, but there is low visibility, so we can’t land. The plane circles for an hour over the clouds and then we have to fly back to Denver. The airline people tell us the next available flight is twenty-four hours later, so we all scramble to look for ground transportation. A wild man with a van is outside soliciting passengers; as the busses aren’t leaving for hours, a group of us pile in and we leave as soon as the van is full.
As we ascend into the mountains the snow begins falling and the roads are increasingly covered in snow. After an hour or so it’s dark, and the road is a white path amidst a white landscape. The Vail Pass is pretty outrageous, with falling and blowing snow and pretty low visibility. Every time we hit a bump the interior light in the van blinks on and off. The kid next to me is getting restless — after about 3.5 hours, he routinely asks how much further and how much longer. It’s annoying, but he’s only articulating what the rest of us feel.
On the way back from breakfast downtown with Malu, I’m driving on the Santa Monica freeway and listening to KCRW. A woman — post sex reassignment surgery — named Yvonne is talking to Harry, the chat show host. Her current job is as a life coach, whatever that is. He asks, and she says, “No, it doesn’t require any training or a degree, and it can be done from one’s home.” “So it’s really convenient?” Harry asks. “Oh yes,” Yvonne replies. “Just yesterday I did a phone session with a client while I was having an estrogen colonic.”
[Note: Turns out this was from Harry Shearer's "Le Show", a bit with Tom Leopold: Listen here]
In the afternoon, C and I went for a hike in the Santa Monica Mountains, which sounds like more than it is. The trail begins in Brentwood — OJ once lived there — at the former ranch of Will Rogers, now Will Rogers State Historic Park. The trail continues and then connects to some parkland in the hills. The Backbone Trail continues along the spine of the hills, up and up. We hiked uphill for a solid 1.5 hours. That’s Santa Monica in the distance. It’s glorious.
The vegetation is desert scrub: pathetic dried out plants barely eking out a life on the dusty, dry hills. Occasionally there are unexpected areas of shade that feel cool and seemingly damp. Some succulents and holly oak trees now and then, but mostly it’s desert vegetation and ready for a match.
These trails (we went on another, much more crowded one in Hollywood the day before) are some of the nicest things about LA. The plant life may be sad — at least according to someone from the east — but the views are magnificent, and the quiet and stillness is something you will never find in Central Park. We asked a mountain biker and she said that Backbone eventually leads to Dirt Mullholland, an extension of the famous road that snakes along the ridges over Hollywood and Beverly Hills. From there one could go down to the ocean, and if you go even further inland, you will eventually get to Topanga canyon.
On the way back to NYC we flew over the western lands, which were looking even more abstract than usual.
Dinner at the home of Susan and Leonard Nimoy. They are big art collectors and a Joseph Beuys piece in their living room features a photo of the Beuys clan sitting in a room all gazing up at the TV, giving it their full attention. They’re watching Star Trek.
Francesco Vezzoli, the artist, had witnessed my rendition of “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” at a concert in Milano, and described it as an “intellectual rehabilitation” of the song. That was nice to hear.
Shared a talk at the new Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston about art and sexual selection with the evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller, author of the book The Mating Mind. He spoke first, laying the scientific groundwork for sexual selection and his proposal that creativity is one of many fitness indicators. For Miller, “reading” creative works — artwork in this case — is a way of determining social standing and genetic fitness. I followed on from this, dealing with specific examples in the art world and the ways art movements and styles contort themselves in order to signal to the desired parties that they may be a good match.
Miller was concise and clear; I was rambling and, well, maybe less clear. With practice I can get my part of the show more together, I know.
At the dinner afterwards, there was a sigh of relief that we didn’t cynically dismiss all contemporary art as a sham and a con game played by the elite, though we came pretty close. I think we said that, yes, to some extent, contemporary art appreciation is a game and tactic of the moneyed classes, who use their ‘knowledge’ to distance themselves from the hoi polloi. But, that doesn’t make the creativity any less vibrant, wondrous and enjoyable — sometimes. Other times, in my opinion, it’s pure game playing.
I began my part of the talk saying that when I moved to NYC, I was incredibly shy and socially crippled, but I could sense that my creative abilities, if anyone liked them, might be a way to make connections. I wanted to give a practical instance of creativity used for social leverage and as a genetic indicator, as described by Miller. An Italian couple at dinner expressed relief on hearing my story, as they described their son as being in a similar social situation. However, they seemed a little shocked and dismayed that my creativity didn’t start working in my favor until I was in my mid-twenties. I did say it helped me in high school too — it got me out of gym class.
The new ICA, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, is lovely and practical, despite being situated in an area of Boston that is a weird urban wasteland. From what is called the backside, which is actually the main entrance, the building is nondescript, except for the glowing translucent plastic clerestory encircling the top, much like those on the galleries of Jay Jopling and Larry Gagosian.
Photo by James Muspratt
On approach, the museum seems a lonely structure in the middle of a sea of parking lots. Yet once inside, the water and the bay are in almost constant view, and the asphalt and traffic cones are forgotten. Lots of interior glass walls, even a glass-walled elevator, allow views through much of the building so you are constantly reminded of the water lapping on the other side. The exhibition spaces are practical white boxes, and there are enough of them to have a few different shows running simultaneously. (There is a wonderful design show and a Louise Bourgeois show up now.) At night, the auditorium where we spoke has the glittering bay lights as a stage backdrop, and the media center — tiered rows of Macs facing a window — was a very cool space with an angled window framing the water such that there is no visible horizon line. As an effect, it’s a little like those James Turrell rectangular opening pieces. Here it is, pre-Macs.
Photo by James Muspratt
I was drawn to the view, but frightened of it at the same time. The rows of Macs are linked only to an extranet with info about the exhibits. I can’t imagine too many people hanging out there, except to experience the room. Maybe another use can be found for it?
This part of Boston was formerly the docks and the shipyards. A little closer to town, across a bridge, there is an area of warehouse buildings that was formerly the center of the New England wool trade. These big old brick mill buildings have since been converted into funky offices. When the wool business moved elsewhere, the shipping area became a handy place to build highway interchanges, bus and rail yards and cloverleafs. Now the highways wrap the area like a tangle of spaghetti, while a few isolated buildings have been plunked down in the concrete expanse — a massive convention center and a hotel to accommodate its visitors, and a couple of other lone structures sit surrounded by half-filled parking lots. The ICA is one such structure, its galleries cantilevered over the water.
I was told that most locals feel this area is far away, though I walked here from the South Street Amtrak Station in 10 mins. One wonders if continued development will work, with the barricades of highways a constant impediment to connection and integration. But the area is right next to the city center, so it seems inevitable that it won’t stay this empty for long.
Malu and I are driving cross-country to ferry some of her stuff and her new car to LA.
First we stopped in Columbia, MD, at my parent’s house and had a long lunch with my parents, my sister, Erik (her partner), and their twins.
We drive on, past the Mormon Cathedral in DC that rises over the trees and looms over the highway. It was built on this spot intentionally to give that effect, and its tall white spires remind everyone around here more of the Emerald City — though white, in this case — than a church. It’s a fairy tale image, an awe inspiring one, come to life. Inevitably, someone wrote the words “Surrender Dorothy” on one of the highway overpasses over which the temple looms. The temple was begun in the late sixties, and the surrounding acreage was purchased by the church and left alone — both for effect and to increase the feeling of the church as isolated in the wilderness. Smart idea, as everywhere around here is now crowded with mini-malls and housing developments. The architecture then, doesn’t end with the building — it includes the surrounding context, the trees in this case, and maybe the view from the highway.
Truman O. Angell was chief Mormon architect for some time back when the church was founded, although Joseph Smith got some real estate and design help from the Almighty. From Angell's journal: Joseph received the word of the Lord for him to take his two counselors, Frederick G. Williams and Sidney Rigdon, and come before the Lord and He would show them the plan or model of the house to be built. We went upon our knees, called on the Lord, and the building appeared within viewing distance, I being the first to discover it. Then all of us viewed it together. After we had taken a good look at the exterior, the building seemed to come right over us, and the makeup of this hall seemed to coincide with what I there saw to a minutia.
The Church Architect at the time was a guy named Emil B. Fetzer (pronounced EE-muhl). He's 93 now, still sharp as a tack and driving around Salt Lake City (in the daytime, at least). There were four architects on the DC project: Fred Markham, Henry P. Fetzer, Harold K. Beecher, and Keith Wilcox — Mormon church leaders like to use their middle initials, btw, and the in-house architects follow suit. As a spectacle it surely ranks as one of the great works of architecture, but I seriously doubt that architectural scholars and critics will agree with me here — they might prefer the more austere, minimal church of Tadao Ando or Corbusier’s wacky asymmetrical church in France. I’ll take this one, and Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, over those austere buildings. If certain architectural works are made to inspire awe and act as three dimensional signs and symbols, then surely this one qualifies. Fetzer the Elder also designed the kitschy 60's temples
in Provo and Ogden, UT, which look like giant 1-yo birthday cakes (the
spires used to be gold). For sheer driveby temple spectacle though,
nothing beats the San Diego temple,
which is right along the I-5 freeway — it's like a temple from Buck
Rogers. (Thank you Greg for writing in with this wealth of information).
We drove on as far as Lexington, VA, in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The drive down the Shenandoah Valley is lovely. The mountains on our left turn blue, then purple, as the sun goes down. Lexington is a little town tucked in the hills, home to the Virginia Military Institute and to Washington and Lee University. VMI is the West Point of the south, rivaled only by The Citadel. On the cute old streets we could see military academy students in what seemed to me to be full dress — the boys in white with matching caps and the girls in trousers and stiff grey jackets. These are their school uniforms.
From Wikipedia: The new cadet, known as a "Rat", walks a prescribed line in barracks while in an exaggerated, painful form of attention known as "straining". The Rat experience, called the Ratline, is intended to instill pride, discipline, brotherhood, and a sense of honor in the students. A Rat faces many physical and mental challenges and must memorize rules, school songs, and facts about the school and its history. The Ratline is among the toughest and most grueling initiation programs in the country. It is best described as a longer version of the Marine Corps boot camp combined with rigorous academics.
Once the first week is complete, life continues to get tougher as Rats await the arrival of the returning students, the "Old Corps". Each Rat is paired with a first classman (senior) who serves as a mentor for the rest of the first year. This pairing is integral to cadet life at VMI. The first classman is called a "Dyke", reference to an older phrase "to dyke out", or to get into a uniform. This arose from a pair of cadets helping each other get into the full parade dress uniform, which includes white pants or ducks, a full dress coatee, belt and leather cartridge box, a military dress shako, and several large web belts, or "cross dykes", that are extremely difficult to don alone, along with a school-issued M-14 rifle.
After break out, rats are officially fourth class students and no longer have to strain in the barracks or eat "square meals" at attention. Many versions of the Breakout ceremony have been conducted. In the 1950s, Rats from each company would be packed into a corner room in the barracks and brawl their way out through the upperclassmen. From the late 1960s through the early 1980s, the Rats had to fight their way up to the fourth level of the barracks through three other classes of cadets determined not to let them get to the top. The stoops would often be slick with motor oil, packed with snow, glazed with ice, greased, or continuously hosed with water. The barracks stairs and rails were not able to take the abuse, so the Corps moved the breakout to a muddy hill where Rats attempt to climb to the top by crawling on their stomachs while the upper classes block them or drag them back down.
We ate in a lovely little restaurant (Bistro On Main) and then retired to our Best Western further down the hollow. I told Malu we used to take family vacations in the National Park in the Shenandoah Mountains and Malu asked me, “What did you do?” Gee, I guess we went on some hikes, camped out, attended little nature slide talks and stopped and looked over the scenic overlooks. It doesn’t sound like much to a New York City kid I guess.
The next day I drove as fast as I could further down the valleys until we got to Tennessee and Pigeon Forge, home of Dollywood — our destination — and a whole lot of other attractions too, it seems. The road leading to Pigeon Forge is also the approach to Great Smokey Mountains National Park, and as there are no vendors allowed in the park, the approach roads tend to turn into a border town where all the forbidden pleasures can be indulged. There are rides (the band and I rode a free fall ride once while we were on tour), souvenir shops and today there is a car show somewhere, so the roads are packed with trailers pulling pumped up cars and attendees. Cars are the hot item this decade — NASCAR and other “shows” seem to be in evidence all across the country. We pass massive trucks and trailers covered with images of NASCAR drivers and/or race cars. The highways are now a network for race cars carried by trailers crisscrossing the continent to do their “shows” here and there. These trailers are constantly on the move — they fill the roads and the race car images are everywhere, including fast food outlets and billboards.
The song on the hotel TV is Lil’ Mama singing, “My lip gloss be poppin’[…] And all the boys keep stopping.”
Dollywood
Dollywood is off this main drag that leads to Knoxville, tucked up into a more remote hollow. In fact, you can’t see anything of the theme park at all form the road, just the parking lots and the little trams that ferry you into the woods where the park is hidden.
The park is a mixture of amusement park rides — both for little kids and adults — regional foods (most of them cooked or prepared on the spot), gift shops, small musical venues and stages (all free with the hefty admission), and re-creations of 19th Century crafts and skills.
We stopped to chat with a man pouring molten aluminum into sand molds and other containers. There were lots of BBQ stands (a pig slowly turned over some coals at one of them), ice cream made by churns powered by belts run off a small water mill, and pies made for giants, each piece big enough to feed about four people.
There was a wooden shack meant to replicate the Appalachian home where Dolly came from, though it never says so explicitly. There is very little evidence of Dolly herself except in the gift store as you leave, as well as a plaque by that simulated Appalachian house. It’s all very 19th or very early 20th Century — definitely before Dolly’s time.
We watch a short talk about eagles. There is a bald eagle sanctuary as part of the park, a sort of fenced in section of the surrounding forest. The “cage” has something to do with bringing the birds back from being endangered. Two handlers on a little stage bring out various birds and one flies over our heads from one handler to another. The golden eagle is massive; its talons can penetrate a wolf skull I think they said.
Dolly made much of her humble upbringing (“Coat Of Many Colors” was one of her early hits) and sure enough, tucked in between the hillbilly souvenir joints, fast food restaurants and BBQ joints, there are still some double wides and slightly dilapidated houses with cars in the yard.
Although there are none anywhere else, I glimpse the few posters of Dolly on our way out, with her huge tits and hair, and her fairly extreme makeup. This was not the young Dolly who teamed up with Porter Wagoner; although that look was in evidence then, this was an almost contemporary photo.
Here she is in 1972.
Photo by Henry Horenstein
She’s a little worked over now, which makes the look even more extreme, and a little scary. The hourglass figure on the tiny woman, the little girl voice- combined with an astute business sense and dynamite songwriting — well, it’s a confusing combination for a Yankee. The look smacks of insincerity, or someone living in a fantasy world, yet her acts, what she did (like creating Dollywood), and her songs are completely sincere and heartfelt. The look says sex combined with little girl, a combo typical of Japanese schoolgirls and manga comics, but not of a serious singer, and later an actress.
Feminists used to stand up for Dolly, mainly because she was in charge of her own business affairs and wrote her own material, I imagine, not because they envied her cleavage and high hair. I remember Patti Smith once covered Dolly’s wonderful heartbreaking song “Jolene,” an endorsement from another empowered woman.
We stay until the park closes, then join the throngs heading for the various parking lots. We take a back road, and pass surplus stores and honky tonks, and eventually that night we make it to Knoxville. The early Goth country classic “Knoxville Girl” comes to mind, the song where the singer murders a young girl out in the woods by beating her with a stick and then drags her round and round by the hair as her blood soaks the ground around his feet. It’s all graphically described in the song, made all the more chilling because the singer gives no reason for his murderous rampage and professes to have loved the girl. To me this kind of love is Old Testament love — God may love mankind, but he’ll send down wars and genocide and serial murderers for no reason whatsoever. The song prefigures Cormack McCarthy’s Child of God, and Flannery O’Conner’s stories of minds bent by Jesus or by introspection and isolation.
At the Holiday Inn in Knoxville, I saw a sign for the historic town center. Thinking it might contain some character and restaurants, we head there in search of dinner. There’s no one on the streets — not metaphorically, but literally not a single soul is out and it’s not even 8 o’clock. Eventually, we reach Market Square where we see people sitting at some outdoor seats. There are few restaurants, so we’re in luck. They serve me wine in a tiny plastic airplane bottle and we share a nice salad and some salmon. We wonder, where is everyone? Do they come to town to work, some of them, and then go home and stay in at night? Or do they go to restaurants and bars in suburban strip malls?
On the way back to the hotel I grab a free copy of a local hip tabloid sized mag called Skirt, and I suggest to Malu that this might give us a clue what people do around here. Inside the well-designed and hip looking magazine there are numerous editorial exhortations directed towards their women readership — The Goddess Manifesto, Light Up The Universe, Be the One Who Makes the Rules, Miss Congeniality or Ms President?
But interspersed with this are ads for plastic surgeons (Repario! It’s not magic, it’s portrait plasma!); Wedding and “Event” photographers (“Exquisite Moments”); Laser Vaginal Rejuvenation (get those feelings back again!); Beautiful Hardwood Floors (the ad photo shows a couple from the knees down, on a nice hardwood floor, he wearing khakis and business shoes, and she, barefoot on tippy toes, standing on his shoes); No Needle Mesotherapy; and my favorite, an ad for a Brookhaven Retreat, a countryside rehab clinic that looks like an exquisite spa hotel (“no judgment, no shame — for women with emotional or drug addiction challenges”).
Wow, so THAT’S what everyone is up to! How does one reconcile the empowerment rhetoric with the insecurity implied by the plastic surgery, the “catch a man with a hardwood floor” and the drug addictions? Do I believe what I hear (the self-boosting) or what I see (degradation and insecurity)?
The next morning we head for Memphis, and we hope to make Graceland before the last tour. We are on the Tennessee interstate, which winds through the rolling hills of this long state. There are occasional religious billboards on the route, such as “Are You Ready?” and many others. Malu is shocked by the aggressive threatening tone. The ad paraphrases all 10 commandments in simple white letters on a black background — no affiliation or comment is needed — and it makes me wonder about that story.
I wonder if the story — Moses going to mountain and returning with the moral law engraved on tablets — might be “true” in a metaphorical sense. The idea that the “law” has deep roots, that those roots might be Meta human, and therefore “universal” makes psychological sense, even today. Not literal sense, but sense in the way that social strictures and rules are often considered to be innate, genetic, or a result of a combination of genetic and environmental influences.
Likewise, the idea that to discover these laws one has to “go to the mountain top” also makes perfect sense. Martin Luther King Jr. used the same metaphor. One seeks a place of isolation, a place apart from men, away from society and the grazing herds in which to allow one’s inner nature to speak, a place where it can be heard above the clamor and conflicting shouts of the crowd. A walk in the wilderness is a metaphorical inner voyage, and if the inner voice can be heard, then its message is presumed to be beyond individual, temporary or local biases (in each society, at least) and therefore true beyond mere personal concerns. If one substitutes one’s inner being, one’s “true” nature, one’s genetic and generic nature, for the concept of God— or if one assumes they are identical — then Moses could be said to have indeed brought down the Lord’s commandments. He simply heard his inner voice and intuited what laws should be carried over from Hammurabi’s Code.
That the myth says he brought them down inscribed on tablets might have been a way to redirect the focus away from Moses himself, as a Prophet, a shaman or visionary and towards the invisible force and ubiquitous presence he claimed to have communicated with. He claimed to be just the messenger, not a God.
The King Is Dead
We just make it to Memphis in time to board the tram at the visitor center for the Graceland mansion across the street. Elvis’ choice of decorator, or his decorator’s choices were pretty, um, imaginative. Some of the other visitors giggle that he must have been on drugs when he made some of his décor decisions. Having seen the photos that the family allowed Bill Eggleston (a native Memphian) to take shortly after the King’s death, I knew what to expect, so I was prepared (they trusted Bill, as he was assumed to be “one of us”).
Here is the Poolroom.
Following the mansion tour are exhibits of Elvis’ cars (a pink convertible Willys Jeep!), and the many, many jumpsuits worn by the King during his 4th act. (The first act was the rocker, the second, the Army enlistee, the third, the movie star, and the fourth, a return to the stage, mainly in Vegas.) These jumpsuits, like the décor in the house, were created in collaboration — in this case with a tailor/designer, and were wholly original in my opinion. They combine Elvis’ love of Karate, Afro-American couture (the Temptations and Jackson 5 were wearing jumpsuits in the early 70s, most hippie rockers were not) with a touch of…Liberace.
I take a bunch of photos as we walk through, but Eggleston’s remain embedded in my mind, so I may not have anything original.
Malu calls her classmates, who have heard of Elvis, but not of Graceland, and certainly not of Dolly Parton.
We pass the Soul Music Museum on the way out of town — that will have to be another visit. I remember when its creation was being discussed and I thought while the recognition is good, better would be if those influential creators got paid.
We drive on and make Little Rock by dinner-time. Another Holiday Inn. This one has a presidential theme (Bill Clinton was Governor), so there are pictures of Bill, and of George Bush (!) and framed copies of the Declaration of Independence. The front desk recommends a Bar-B-Q place not far away and we rush out before their 8PM closing. (8PM! New Yorkers are just sitting down to eat!). The place — The Whole Hog Café — justifies the recommendation. There are trophies all over the walls and plaques for all the awards their BBQ has won. I am recognized by one of the staff and I sign a bunch of autographs on the sidewalk outside. It was really sweet.
The next morning we head southwest. We don’t have a destination today, no attraction beckons, so we will simply see how far we get. We pass Dallas and Fort Worth, but it’s a little too early in the day to visit Christina and Johnny Reno there, so we continue to Abilene. I explain how Fort Worth was once the big town for cattle, etc., and the Jewish merchants couldn’t get a foothold. So, they pulled up stakes and made their own trading center 30 miles east, which eventually became Dallas. Not sure if this apocryphal story of karmic justice is true, but it holds like a little myth.
We cruise through Abilene and Malu sees every run down motel and gas station as a location from Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Jeepers Creepers. I love an old motel with character (if it’s clean), but that doesn’t seem to be in the cards. We drive on and stop at a Best Western next to the highway in Sweetwater, a small town where we are told Elvis played twice. We eat at a restaurant across the highway from our hotel. My steak is delicious, as it should be here. The decor is all red chairs, tables and trim, in honor of the local High School football team, the Mustangs. A large painting of the coach sits right on the wall behind us. I watch a man across from us shoot up his insulin after he and his wife finish their meal. He does it deftly, as casually as one would look at one’s watch.
The restaurant (the only one within walking distance of our hotel) doesn’t serve alcohol. I’m not that surprised — between the early-for-us dinner hours and dry counties, I know we’re not in New York anymore. I wonder at how some of these puritan restrictions — the encouragement to go to bed early and to not enjoy a drink with one’s meal — have lingered. I suspect that drinking, much like drug use, is considered a sign of moral weakness, and a disdained desire for pure, cut-loose pleasure something maybe not to be encouraged either by our puritan ancestors or the skin-of-our-teeth settlers and farmers in this part of the country. You never know what will come out of that bottle once you open it. These indulgences have therefore been relegated to “bad” places — honky tonks and dark, sad bars in the case of drink, secluded sessions in the sole company of other users for druggies. Either way, this disdain creates a counter-culture, and ostracizing the ‘weak’ only creates the bad scenes the culture had hoped to eradicate in the first place.
Along the same lines, in the local paper a debate is taking place over whether the high school students should have a curfew. It’s not clear what hour is being proposed, but some students who aspire to have after school jobs would be unable to take those jobs if the hours extended past the proposed curfew. Some other students who have after school sports and other activities would likewise be hamstrung — many of these students have to walk home from jobs or activities, as they are not old enough to drive or don’t have their own cars. They therefore risk being picked up as curfew breakers.
One student offered that ever since the local skating rink and some other activities closed, there is nothing to do in town. So kids, bored out of their minds, will find something to do and sometimes it might be disruptive. Some students are in favor of the curfew, as are the local football coaches, who seem to function as the local wise men.
I sort of suspect that the curfew could be an unspoken and underhanded way to round up “loitering” Mexican kids, who are no doubt seen as the principal troublemakers in this town. We drive around the older part of town. A motel that was once on the main highway, and is now probably an SRO weekly rental, reiterated the moral message.
I wonder if this frontier Puritan fundamentalism combined with economics is what made buildings like this one common and acceptable:
It’s so Spartan and purely functional in keeping with the Bauhaus dictum “form follows function.” But these structures take the prize — they make the Germans and 20th century Modernists looks baroque. I think these buildings, much like the taboos mentioned above, are expressions of the hard, no-nonsense life that this land demands — an endless landscape of few concessions and little accommodation to the settlers.
There are people selling watermelons in a shopping center parking lot, a US flag made of plastic cups jammed into a fence, an abandoned drive-in and a church in a pre-fab metal building with a sign urging visitors to “come be apart.”
We drive on across West Texas, through Midland and Odessa, home of George and Laura, they claim. It’s oil country out here; all the industries are devoted to drilling, refining, selling, storing and marketing oil. W was given an oil company to run out here I believe, but he ran it into the ground, as is his wont. Failing upwards I think they call it. Oil pumps move lazily up and down, scattered across the flat plain, fed by a network of telephone poles that carry power to the pumps. This power grid — one can see row upon row of telephone poles — extends over a vast area. In some areas, no one has risked digging, so there are no pumps; other wells have run dry, but the power grid is ready.
There is a museum of petroleum that features oil derricks like they used to have all over Texas, when Texas supplied much of the US oil. I remember passing through here as a kid and gas was 21¢ a gallon (not a liter, a gallon).
Pervert Planet
We cross into New Mexico and arrive at Carlsbad Caverns National Park by 2:30pm. We’ve missed the last guided tour and a chance to clamber down the natural entrance, so we take the elevator down and spend almost 2 hours wandering the marked paths underground. The Big Room is vast, bigger than a football field (one quote claims one could lay the Empire State Building down in here — what an image!), and other spaces branch off from it. There are electric lights cleverly hidden behind rocks and formations so one can see pretty well, but some people still bring flashlights and I saw one couple with lights on their heads.
The formations are creatively named, as they often do in these caves: The Chinese Doll Theater (really!), The Temple, The Klansman(!), the Twin Domes, The Giant, The Lion’s Tail. I remember seeing some hilarious B&W pieces that Mike Kelly did where he made up his own names for cave formations.
I find the formations disturbingly biomorphic, organic, and mostly sexual. Alien sex planet. The names they give them seem to belie what they actually resemble. It seems the underworld is comprised of vast landscape of penises, vulvas, vaginas, tentacles and fleshy flaps. Freud would have had a field day in here: it’s as if our own forbidden images and imaginings have all been forced not merely into the unconscious, as he would have it, but physically underground, in exaggerated form, with elements of the male and the female sometimes mixed together. Other elements seemed strongly sexual, but not quite human, like the sexual organs of insects, or deep-sea creatures. Only in this case it is the sexual organs of rocks hidden 830 feet beneath the earth’s surface, as they should be. Imagine farmer Jim White seeing a plume of weird black smoke being spewed out of the earth near the top of a ridge – these were the bats. At sunset, thousands gushed from its small orifice, the way in to the sexy underground world. Any artist producing objects like these in such quantity and profusion would be considered a pervert, or at least obsessed. In this case, it is the Earth that is the pervert.
We drive on, past the Guadalupe range, and descend gradually along some long bleak highways. We pass across a salt flat and over a small range of hills and as night approaches we can see El Paso looming in the distance. On one of the hills on the far side of El Paso — the Juarez side — someone has written in Spanish with huge lettering,“The Bible is the truth — Read it!”
The Rio Grande is so small here that one cannot tell where one city ends and the other begins, at least not from this distance. As we get closer to downtown we can see that there are big banks (Chase, Wells Fargo and others) in El Paso, and in Juarez there are shantytowns and residential tracts covering the surrounding hills. (Juarez also has some great restaurants.) As we approach the center of town, near the bridge that crosses to Juarez, El Paso becomes a Mexican town — there are discount stores and little barbershops and bars, and all the signs are in Spanish. The buildings in the center of town don’t seem to have changed much — they are low and funky. The modern, slick US business and mirrored office buildings are out on the fringes of town, well away from the migrants that once passed through here daily, but are more restricted now. I saw, on the other side of the highway, a checkpoint where all traffic was funneled through, and the (mostly Hispanic) guards looked for illegals.
I tell Malu that on a previous visit here I saw — a little ways from the bridge and the main immigration checkpoint — various improvised ways of crossing the river. A couple of men had some large inner tubes with a piece of plywood tied to them, making a rudimentary raft so that the “wetbacks” wouldn’t get wet feet. A rope helped guide this little ferry straight across the river, and there were slices in the chain link fences that allowed easy passage.
Signs on the Mexican side warned of the risks of hiding in a boxcar — one could suffocate or die or heat stroke — or of the dangers of trying to cross the desert around El Paso on foot. The signs also claimed that the Rio Grande water was dangerous, though that might be directed to non-swimmers.
It was all tolerated, all the travel back and forth, and maybe even encouraged at one time — where else where the cheap pickers and workers to come from? But circumstances have changed, and now the desire is to keep the Mexicans on their side and just ferry the goods over and back for the Mexicans to assemble cheaply in sweatshops.
We stay at a nice hotel — The Camino Real — downtown, and at dinner Malu remarks on a nearby couple — throughout dinner they didn’t speak to one another but were transfixed by their cell phones.
The next day we move on to Phoenix, where a girlfriend of Malu’s has started school at University of Arizona. Before leaving town, I wander around in the 100º heat and take some pictures of mirrored buildings, vacant lots and saguaro cactus as landscaping.
The road enters the Mojave Desert and we pass over scattered ranges of hills separated by long flat desolate expanses. It’s lovely. We stop briefly at Quartzite, where many RV parks are clustered — people living in RVs with hookups, not holiday campers. I browse through a sort of flea market of rocks that a couple has set up. On tables and in metal barrels there are piles fossils, crystals, jade and other minerals priced mostly by the pound.
More ranges of hills, and eventually we pass San Bernardino and we have entered the LA sprawl. As downtown LA comes into view we hit traffic. We slow to a standstill and I try surface streets, but they’re not much better (or I’m on the wrong one). I realize why I eventually couldn’t stay in LA when, in the late 80s, I tried for a few years to be bi-coastal. We hit rain in the desert around Joshua tree, so we didn’t stop there, and more rains hit LA at night after we arrived. It was a torrential downpour, like they usually have in their winter. We’ve made it cross-country in almost exactly a week.
Oh yeah, one more Berlin thing. CS and I saw a piece in Berlin by a Polish artist we’d never heard of, Katarzyna Kozyra, and it was terrific. It was a group of videos of retired folks, naked, except they all wore opposite sexual prostheses (men with merkins, women with penises) doing, via stop-motion animation, moves from Nijinski’s choreography for Rite Of Spring — naturally. It was both disturbing and funny.
[Link to video]
Spent a little over 2 days here in Venice. One mostly allotted to viewing the Arsenale, the ¼ mile long former ship facility, now a massive exhibition space, and one day mostly at the Giardini, a park with national pavilions, each mostly featuring an artist from that country. An American, Robert Storr, curated the Arsenale and the Italian pavilion, which is always given over to being a group show. There’s always grumbling about these things, but there are always some wonderful surprises too.
The first half of the slog through the Arsenale featured a lot of fairly didactic political art. Some of this was pretty good, but it also seemed out of context. Not that we just want to be entertained, but some of it seemed educational, journalistic. Large-scale photos of crumbling Beirut buildings and a moving and elaborate memory piece about a Palestinian intellectual living in Rome assassinated by Israel both deserve to be photo essays in a glossy magazine or in a newspaper’s Sunday supplement. Sadly, there aren’t many magazine formats dedicated to this kind of work. For a while Doubletake tried to do this — to mix arty journalistic photos with writing — but it’s a tough sell, I guess. Online versions of quite a few magazines offer expanded versions of the photos they run.
Here is one from a series by Brendan Corr that was in Foreign Policy magazine (of all places!)
And one by Brian Ulrich that is in Mother Jones — online.
What is odd is that these often adhere a little too tightly to the photojournalism/Magnum model to be thrown into the rarefied arty context of this show. The memory piece on Wael Zwaiter, Kara Walker’s silhouettes, Ed Burtynsky’s Chinese photos and another artist’s drawings of U.S. war dead could all be combined with writing, and not necessarily didactic writing, to tell us about ourselves in ways that include history and current events and that go beyond aesthetics. They don’t have to be relegated to the weird insular art world — in fact they may have more power outside of that world.
What they collectively do, maybe what makes them seem odd here, is they point to something else — they ask us to look through the work at something else — a situation, a person, a place. It’s a fuzzy line, and maybe who am I to try and draw it? Even Andreas Gursky’s stuff sometimes (moreso in the past) could almost be viewed as journalism — but now it’s so heavily photoshopped that it represents a mental impression of a place more than the actual place.
(The tiny drawings on one wall of U.S. war dead, are, in my opinion, in poor taste. The Iraqi war dead — most of them civilians — so vastly outnumber the American casualties that in an international art forum this commemoration of only the U.S. deaths seems symptomatic of the current U.S. xenophobia)
Anyway, for a while it felt like we were being lectured at a bit, but there were lots of other pieces that, while not merely existing in a imaginary dreamworld unrelated to our harsh reality, were much less obvious in their intent. While some of the more didactic pieces would be lovely and poetic in another context here they seemed swamped and overpowered by the poetic ambiguity surrounding them.
And then there is encroachment from the other side. Journalistic snaps these days are looking more and more like performance art or elaborately staged film stills — how can an artist compete with this image below? All matching outfits — with the occasional Disney touches! 
Photo — John Raoux/AP
About 1,000 people from 75 countries took their oaths together under the turrets of Cinderella’s Castle at Walt Disney World in Lake Buena Vista, Fla., as Gloria Estefan sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
Or this one by James A. Rodriguez (via BoingBoing) of a demonstration in Guatemala. These simple sheets with faces of the disappeared — they don’t need text to speak volumes.
In another section Joshua Mosley did these odd claymation films of famous philosophers mouthing off as they stroll through a forest — eventually one of them gets viciously attacked by a huge (clay) dog.
[Link to video]
A Chinese artist/filmmaker Yang Fudong had a whole series of boxes spaced throughout the Arsenale: each featured another chapter of his film Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest. The title sounds like a classic story, and it is, but the film was of young hipsters full of ennui and intellectual angst wandering aimlessly, sometimes among rivers and streams, sometimes by modern apartments. It was shot in 35mm (!) and made to look like it was made in the 30s with scratches, flicker and all. Nice to see such high production value in an art context. Why this film had to be shown fragmented into 5 separate booths wasn’t clear — this extravagant presentation did however encourage one to spend a little time in each room, watching for 5 minutes or so. If one were expected to stand or sit on a bench (as is the art installation style) for 25 minutes one might balk — but in smaller doses, little by little we got a substantial taste.
I wouldn’t mind watching the whole thing on DVD, but I imagine if he’s showing it as an art piece and not as a film then only collectors get the DVDs.
In the Russian pavilion crowds lingered over a 3-screen video by AES+F, "Last Riot", that inserted young models having a ritualized battle into a super elaborate computer-game-like landscape, all set to Wagner. It struck a nerve — shirtless models, swords, missiles and explosions — pretty apocalyptic shit. The Wagner didn’t hurt either.
[Link to video]
Another Russian artist, Alex Ponomarev, made a shower stall that rained TV feeds — here it was raining news programs, but apparently if you turned the nozzle you got porn, sports or financial news. It was an homage to Nam Jun Paik, but seemed equally informed by the Matrix.
[Link to video]
In the Korean pavilion Hyungkoo Lee had made a fake natural history museum exhibit of bones and skeletons — which, when you looked closely, turned out to be super realistic bones of cartoon characters! Here are the fossilized remains of Tom and Jerry.
In the Spanish pavilion two artists called Los Torreznos made hilarious videos of themselves. For some reason their stuff reminded me of conceptual comedy — Andy Kaufman or others whose comedy borders on weird theater.
[Link to video]
In a separate building Francesco Vezzoli made two short fake political ads that were completely believable. The style was dead on and the sound bites and graphics were perfect. Of course, the fact that one featured the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy as a U.S. presidential candidate and the other Sharon Stone sort of gave it away. Stone's campaign ad was produced by Mark McKinnon, Bush's top advertising strategist in 2004, who is senior adviser to Senator John McCain's presidential campaign. Meanwhile, the "BHL" ad was managed and directed by Bill Clinton's advertising gurus from 1996.
[Link to video]
Francis Alÿs did a lovely little animated film of a shoe being shined. The way it works with the song is perfect. I guess someone thought that wasn’t enough, for the adjoining room was filled with the animation cells, which seemed completely unnecessary.
[Link to video]
A Belgian artist, Sophie Whettnall, made a video ("Shadowboxing") of a professional boxer coming really really close to hitting her.
[Link to video]
These days many people know of Stasi, the East German internal security agency, from the recent movie The Lives of Others. Not too long ago I read the wonderful book Stasiland [link to journal entry] which has a lot of horrible/incredible anecdotes about domestic spying in East Germany. And then a number of years ago two artists, the Wilson sisters, did a moody surreal art film in the former Stasi headquarters that features a levitating chair. The agency was known for turning citizens against their neighbors by subtle pressure, implied threat or economic incentive. It seems it’s something that many national agencies do from time to time (“If you see something, say something”.) Turning the citizenry into rats makes the entire populace scared and docile, as no one knows who’s informing on whom. ANYONE could be an informer or an agent. The world becomes a Phillip K. Dick novel — although in his version everyone would be informing on themselves.
Sure enough, just like I read about, and as seen in the movie, there were smell samples in jars, bits of cloth holding the odor or suspected citizenry (often a stolen piece of underwear — the perverts!) These were filed away just in case that person should disappear, and then a dog could sniff the rag and discover the bad guy’s hiding place.
The Stasi Museum is inside one part of a former massive compound that enclosed many city blocks. Parking and entrances were inside the compound, so no one could see who was coming or going. And the whole complex is now for sale! For one Euro! Well, I’m sure there are conditions. I think the city is trying to sell it to the country if they will turn it into a proper museum. As is, it’s rudimentary. One floor of former offices displays clunky spy devices: cameras in logs, behind buttons and in fake rocks. Here’s one in a birdhouse — a little obvious, I think.
Maybe the intent was NOT to hide this surveillance gear too well, the idea possibly being to make people aware they were being looked at and listened to. If you’re not aware you’re being observed then you won't live in fear, so what’s the point? Sometimes buildings here in the U.S. put up fake surveillance cameras in the hopes of discouraging perps. Of course, it wasn’t all just nutty surveillance stuff — people’s lives were ruined, destroyed, their careers came to a dead end at the least suspicion, there were prison terms and torture without stated reason (where have I heard that one before?) and information and culture was heavily censored. And the food wasn’t that great, either.
On a higher floor were the offices of the head of Stasi, a Mr. Mielke. They weren’t very grand by Western standards, but he did have a little apartment attached, which was pretty cute if one can now look at this style as very peculiar design aesthetic.
Hardly luxurious — but then maybe these higher-ups saw themselves as modest functionaries just doing the noble work of the state rather than as secret oligarchs or royalty. I remember visiting Pravda HQ in Moscow in the 90s and the decorator must have been the same guy. In that room there were also no decadent touches — just one long bookshelf that held the collected works of Lenin. (When did Lenin have time to write all those volumes?)
The Stasi AV room: 
As the wall was coming down the shredding machines in this place went into overdrive. Most of them clogged and they had to call for reinforcements. Many many documents were destroyed but there were too many to shred in just a few days, so there are organizations now that will allow you to locate your file if it is readable. Here is a page from John Lennon’s FBI file, for example — not a lot of it is “uncensored” — a sort of piece of conceptual art, if you ask me.
The next day we checked out some more of the local museums. The Hamburger Banhof (a former train station and freight terminal) was massive! Bigger than DIA Beacon or the Arsenale in Venice! An endless series of identical galleries. Here is the adjoining hallway, disappearing into an art-filled infinity.
CS has some pieces in a room juxtaposed with some Paul McCarthy grotesques. She said one of hers had been hung upside down — a giant grotesque vagina.
The hotel sells pieces of the Berlin Wall in addition to overpriced Pringles above the minibar. This piece of the wall looks like a cookie. 
You can also take rides in a Trabant, the cheap plastic-bodied Eastern car that was a joke and now is nostalgia. Or Ostalgia, as it is called here.
At Arndt Gallery there was a stuffed tattooed pig — a real pig. On another floor in another room (many of the successful galleries have expanded rapidly) there was a piece by Thomas Hirshhorn that I liked of manikin hands holding aloft literary tomes and ordinary tools — a sort of hilarious intellectual “workers arise!” image.
An idealized revolution on a (large) tabletop. I can imagine this as a crude proposal for a large-scale monument that would have been made years ago in the former East. Maybe done here by a high school senior using available materials: paperbacks rather than more impressive bound volumes, and puny screwdrivers and measuring tapes rather than hammers and sickles. And of course all held together with packing tape, a Hirshhorn specialty by now.
I like this much better than his recent installations that feature scenes of horror and photos of mutilated bodies from Iraq or elsewhere mixed with slogans, art and detritus meant to amplify or heal — those pieces seem too obviously shocking or didactic. Images of mutilated bodies are indeed the part of the U.S. invasion that are carefully kept from the view of most Americans. Accounts of every car bomb, reported almost daily, are not, for example, accompanied by close-ups of the body parts that inevitably accompany those events. Usually we see a smoking car or building in the medium distance and people running away or carrying stretchers. But we don’t often see the toll on human flesh. There was a show at White Columns about a year ago in which a photographer re-photographed the images seen in a museum in Vietnam whose subject was The American War, as they call it. Mangled bodies, living and dead, Agent Orange victims, denuded countryside. Again, the human toll was brought home in ways that Life magazine and CBS never did.
In a strange way, however, the censoring of war’s toll seems reasonable. Both sides of many conflicts can, to some extent (though hardly in Iraq, it’s so one-sided) hold up gruesome images of maimed loved ones and partisans to justify their outrage and need for revenge. The images further inflame passions, anger and distrust. The images demand “justice”, not an explanation. And in order to obtain the “justice” these horrors demand, one must create equal and opposite horrors. But then we have sunk to the level of beasts, clawing at each other, an eye for an eye, until nothing is left standing. And eye for an eye may be justified in a stable society, or at least one could argue for it, under the tight control of an impartial body. But in wartime, without the controls, it spirals quickly out of control. Besides, an eye for an eye rules out forgiveness, repentance and rehabilitation. I know that our prisons are mostly about punishment and revenge — as are many wars — but those three hopeful words are the only way out of the spiral. The Israeli, Soviet and U.S. solutions — not really solutions but stopgaps — are to build massive walls and keep the parties, the entities, separate. It didn’t work in Berlin, or in South Africa, or even China, but it seems to be a recurring idea — as if no one had ever thought of it before!
At another gallery the little-known German pop artist Thomas Bayrle had some surprising pieces. He’s been making stuff since the 60s, some of which now looks like psychedelic posters. He came up with Polke and Richter, but never had the success they did. One wall was covered with wallpaper covered with a repeating graphic of women’s shoes. Possibly before Warhol’s cow wallpaper, who knows? He likes swarming patterns. In another room was an old B&W 16mm film of a rubber plant slowly turning, but on its leaves, swarming like aphids, were tiny people. They seemed be images from a busy street scene, shot from a high angle. Somehow it almost matched the angle on the plant’s leaves so the people really seemed to be crawling all over them. The explanation said it was done frame by frame.
[Link to video]
In another room he there was a wall-sized video projection of a crucified Christ (without the cross) seemingly made out of thousands of shiny angled crystal facets. There was a familiar but unidentifiable whooshing sound. As the “camera” moved in closer one could see that every facet of every “crystal” was a tiny oddly shaped high angle moving image of a highway with trucks and cars zooming by — hence the strange whooshing sound. The “camera” pushed in further, until the “Christ” was no longer discernable and all one could see was weirdly shaped films of cars and trucks on a highway.
[Link to video]
Here are some quotes from the artist:
"The entire world opinion lies in a couple billion halftone-dots."
“I never say good motorway or bad motorway.”
"I consider the relationship between individual and collective/community the same as that between dot and grid, the dot representing a component of the grid, and between cell and body, the cell being its basic element." Lastly, there was, tucked under a river embankment, a tiny museum of DDR life, complete with with a recreation of an apartment interior. Apparently nudism was a popular idea in the East, as the museum included a detailed and extensive diorama of a nude beach: |
