Living Cinema 1987
Selling Out
The other evening at the Red Rock open mic I was talking to Bill, a singer with an incredible voice. He referred to Bob Dylan and mentioned “Selling Out”.
I noted that the concept of “Selling Out” was hard to apply to Dylan, since he had a record contract within weeks of hitting NYC, before he wrote any of his most innovative songs. The question of “selling out” was around in the ’60s and ’70’s, but its application has always been problematic.
Some artists create a space that is difficult for viewers or listeners to navigate. If that difficulty isn’t too great (the level differs with different people and different media) people can be attracted to playing with the space, learning how to navigate it, and how its edges are determined. The attractiveness, as I’ve written before, is a function of Vygotsky’s “zone of proximal development”.
With the mass media that was present in the ’60s, large numbers of people shared the same inputs, and pop artists emerged, like Dylan.
What happens, I believe, is that people eventually learn to navigate the artist’s space. Artists also either exhaust it, or move to other spaces for their own explorations. The artist can lose the ability to create an attractive zone. Some artists find strategies that work throughout their whole lives, like Duchamp, Picasso, Zappa. Others have the space lose its foreignness for much of its audience–people domesticate it.
I like Beefheart’s “selling out”. After putting out some incredible sonic constructions, he put out an album called “Unconditionally Guarenteed” with a photo of himself holding handfulls of cash. The music inside was simple and dull, I’ve never heard anyone defend it. So when Beefheart sold out–explicitly–he lost his audience. Some sell-out. He later put out a couple of killer albums, after regrouping. And the space was back.
As an artist, you find a space to manipulate. Depending on the strategy of that manipulation, and the complexity it engenders, it may give you enough to work with for your whole life. Or you may work through it within a year, and never find another. But the relationship of the artist to that space is not one of money. You can’t buy it, and you can’t starve yourself into it.
Stan Brakhage
I was looking through the foreign section of Frys’ DVDs when I came across the Stan Brakhage DVD released a year ago, not long after his death. I had just asked Robert Polidori if he’d seen it, and coming across it in Frys was something of a surprise. I’m still surprised at times when I find something out here that I think of as east coast.
They did a wonderful job transferring the films to DVD, I’m surprised that DVD would handle the single-frames so well. The compression work is exceptional, as it should be for such a set of images.
I hadn’t seen Brakhage’s later directly painted work…God knows how many hours of Brakhage films I’ve sat through–possibly more hours than I’ve spent sitting in Greyhound busses. And I’ve done Greyhound busses.
The transfer was good enough for me to be absolutely transfixed by the images on my monitor. Brakhage films I always hear more than I see, even though they’re silent. I guess there isn’t much more for my eyes to bring to the images, my body instead reacts synaesthetically, and I settle into hearing the rhythms, pitches and timbres of the images as they pound past. What I get out of it, besides the sensual pleasure of the experience, is the sense that THERE IS SOMETHING PRESENT. There is a referent, somewhere between Brakhage, the painted film, and my self, that is present like a spirit, that, for moments at a time, while I experience the film, exists.
Not all art form provide that presence. Usually songs don’t. Not for me. They aren’t sensual enough, there’s too much pre-agreement to the rules of the game. But sometimes there’s an articulation that reminds you of the inner muscles in the throat, or a timbre that suddenly modulates from scratchy to smooth and hard, or a counterpoint that has you parsing the phrasing one way, then shifts and forces you to parse the same notes differently. Something happens between the form you hear and the ability to hear at all, and suddenly you glimpse into the interstice between the surfaces, as they shear and suddenly there is a depth there, a dimension that wasn’t there an instant ago. And ya know I could fall into that depth, and so it isn’t just another aspect, it’s one that I have purchase in, and yet this is just sound. How can I have purchase in sound? But here it is, and I don’t just hear it, I care about how it evolves, even though its only a sound.
So the Brakhage images remind me: there is this place, a place that has always attracted me, where for brief moments at a time, I am sensually aware of my immediate existence in a way where there is a break in time itself, which I recognize as an a-priori necessity for such a perception to take form. A fissure in the sensual stuff that is composed, a fissure that appears unexpectedly and invites my scanning senses to fall in, and at that moment I feel a vertigo that has nothing to do with the physical material of the composition except that I’m present. Because all that occurs in the presentation is a change: it is my self that supplies all the vertigo. And that is the moment I feel my existence, with its own texture.
Transcendence
Exhaust is America’s transcendence.
Living Cinema
Living Cinema 1989
Art Process
Seen from a certain perspective, the generation previous to mine defined Existentialism, and my generation could take that focus and explore it as an art practice. Not just that existential moments existed, but that one could develop their poetry for ourselves.
Art, then, not as a hobby for distraction, and not as a career, but as an ongoing project of creating an image of what it means to be human. And whatever aspect that is the least successful for your last piece, that becomes the focus of your next piece.
So this process, repeated throughout a lifetime, leaves a crumb trail of portraits, and of course the sequence itself is as interesting as any one piece.
The creation of the work requires a certain seriousness of purpose…although I don’t mean the type of seriousness that many people think of with art. I mean serious, I mean dedication to the series. Not a flake. And that’s different than a dilettante, and where the dilettante and the artist part paths.
The younger someone is when they begin the art process, the deeper it sinks, and the longer it has to mature.
I was speaking with my friend Ethan Place the other evening, and we both knew people who had put off facing their meaning their whole lives, until they retired. And when they finally retired, they didn’t know what to do. Sometimes they just die, for no apparent reason.
Children know instinctively what to do, they intuitively create art, and their laughter marks the moments that they perceive–it’s all so amazingly natural. But people, one bit at a time, step away from that natural inclination to create, to grow the self. And life, when its distractions recede, becomes empty. There is no vector into the future, there is only the past and the empty room of the present.
There are many lives that are just too hard, and a person who is living through one of them may not have the ability or time to create. But where did gospel come from, if not sung by those who had the hardest lives, least time, and didn’t even own themselves? Or the British and Irish tunes, rebirthing in the poor Appalachians? This isn’t just a rich man’s game.
What is it that causes us to want to shy away from meaning?
Old News
This is old news, but worth reviewing I believe. This was published briefly during the Iran-contra scandal. It was striking enough so I cut it out and kept it. After the initial publishing in newspapers, it was barely mentioned again. Interesting phrase “…national opposition to a U.S. military invasion abroad.” I wonder what today’s version looks like.
Knight-Ridder Newspapers
WASHINGTON — Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North helped draft a plan in 1984 to impose martial law in the United States in the event of an emergency, provoking a sharp protest by Attorney General William French Smith, according to government officials.
The secret plan called for suspension of the Constitution, turning control of the government over to the little-known Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), appointment of military commanders to run state and local governments, and the declaration of martial law in the event of such a crisis as nuclear war, violent and widespread internal dissent, or national opposition to a U.S. military invasion abroad.
North’s involvement in a proposal to radically alter the U.S. government by executive order in a time of crisis is evidence that he was involved in a wide range of secret activities, foreign and domestic, far beyond the Iran-contra affair, according to officials.
The chief council of the Senate Iran-contra committee has declared in an unreleased memo that North was at the center of what amounted to a “secret government-within-a- governement.”
Deutschland
Lubeck, Under a Bridge
There, and Offset a Couple of Centimeters
Walk for overlooked refuge
Seeking motionless being
One like every place at every time.
And in meaninglessness
It balances the caterwauling of civilization.
It balances what inertia insists.
It balances tomorrow’s threat with the calm of eternity,
and anonymous existence.
This balance isn’t death and it is not life.
It appears a moment after wings escape your hand.
It is in the shadow of the momentous,
in the piss-humid alley near the spactacular entrance hall.
It’s the blue you yourself initiate after staring at yellow.
It’s an inch to the right from the entrance of the bullet that killed Jack Kennedy.
It’s a dropped voter’s ballot that was never marked.
It is the measure of importance and unimportance.
It is a bas-relief on a wall that has never elicited a face of the holy virgin.
Thoughts, hearth, country, globe, systemless scattering of suns.
Any unnoticed space the size of my hand.
The pressure in the forest never cocking an ear.
I remember that I sensed my late mother’s presence in a place she’d never visited.
This rush of meaning into a vacuum without gesture.
Unaffected by the measure of one man’s knife to the throat of another.
Unaffected by the desperately won identity of the primary causes,
Even the sound of a breeze through your hair excludes this place from your contemplation.
This is the place without chains and values,
This is the place that allows us to know love,
This is the place that is the senseless and uncaring measure of our achievement,
This is the place that is the other, and allows us grace.
Outside
Outside