THE HYDRA

Martin Kemp examing an alleged Jackson Pollock; Photo: Steve Pyke (The New Yorker)

Martin Kemp’s daily work involves a magnifying glass, an archive of art books, a nimble memory, and a keen eye. As one of the world’s leading art authenticators he has transformed works that were once thought to be worth pennies into objects that now have the value of small 3rd world countries. The methods by which he arrives at his conclusions are often the object of both praise and ridicule. To hear Kemp articulate what it’s like to come into the presence of an authentic work by a Renaissance master bears all the imprint of a connoisseur in thrall to his subjective vision.

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Here’s the funny thing about the illustrated Youtube lecture series “RSA Animate” (put together by the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA)):  Several of its best lectures address how understanding the cognitive nuances of the human brain can help us achieve gains in social progress. At the same time, the animated lectures are themselves delightfully successful at piquing the brain with movement, shape, text, and sound – and with the simplest of technologies: a marker, a whiteboard, an arm. Most impressively, the lectures manage to engage the viewer’s attention without compromising the sophistication of their content. Watching clip after clip, I feel like a caveman held rapt by the flickering light of the fire. A caveman learning about deliberative democracy.

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In his annotations to Pound’s Cantos, Robert Anton Wilson writes that Ezra was privy to a “stoned perception” by an everyday practice of pranayama and “40 some years meditatin’ on Chinese ideograms like a cloud over falling rain over dancing shaman.” He writes this between these lines of Canto XX:

With noise of sea over shingle,
Striking with:
hah hah aha thmm thumb, ah
woh woh araha thumm, bhaaa.
And from the floating bodies, the incense
blue-pale, purple above them,
Shelf of the lotophagoi,
Aerial, cut in the aether.

Wilson writes that “Ez” wasn’t “stoned on dope” like “Baud”[elaire] but nonetheless knew of artificial paradises and their ensuing agony enough to produce lines like the above. Wilson suggests that, having achieved these levels of consciousness with his own poetic-meditative practice, Pound’s stoned consciousness comes off in the poems as a kind of spiritual sensibility — usually represented as a global syncretism of the arts. And this, Wilson argues, led to the consciousness of the “global village” in Pound’s poetry. But, of course, Wilson himself reached the global consciousness by the ways of “Baud.” So what did these thinkers share that transcended the means (drugs or no drugs) and got them likewise to an elevated understanding of global community? [Read More]

In 1938, Orson Welles’s radio broadcast of War of the Worlds — a story about Martians invading New Jersey — caused 1 in 12 over-credulous listeners to run out of their houses with towels over their faces, screaming, tripping, breaking limbs, basically caught in a mass hysteria. Back then, listeners had a hard time distinguishing the simulated from the real; today, we seem to have the opposite problem.
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People's Choice Printing, Oakland CA

This month, transit police officer Johannes Mehserle stood trial for killing 22-year old Oscar Grant by shooting him in the back while he lay unarmed, restrained, and prone on the floor. Grant was black; Mehserle is white.  Mehserle was charged with second degree murder, but it was widely predicted that he would be convicted only of involuntary manslaughter – as was ultimately the case.

In anticipation of this verdict, the Oakland Police packed the downtown area with squads, simulated a riot for training, and issued warnings to local merchants, advising them to lock up their property and close shop early.  A national media flurry surrounded these preparations, “covering” the riots like they had already happened.  When a Daily Kos blogger noted that bay area transit police had killed another young man in similar circumstances in 1997,  a commenter accused him of inciting violence: “Is your goal riots? That is going to be the result if people go out of control . . . One incident does not need to be broadcast from coast to coast, causing anger and hate. . . “  In general, the fear of what Mamdani has referred to as a “native’s genocide” spread fast and wide, settling in everywhere a smidgen of white guilt could be found.  Refusing this dehumanization, the people of Oakland responded characteristically: with solidarity, peaceful protest, a little mischief, and (the focus of this post) a whole lot of art.
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When graffiti artist and experimental stop-motion animator Blu claimed his wall-painted video short, MUTO, was just a test for a larger, more thoughtful narrative, I didn’t quite know what to expect. His MUTO project was already decidedly impressive — the Italian (Maybe? The artist’s terrestrial positioning is somewhat cloaked in mystery, just like another iconoclastic vandal from the UK) artist used a camera to make his graffiti evolve in time through a frantic succession of images. Fantastical creatures emerged from floating blobs of paint; they traveled across the city walls and streets in a fluttering movement, and found their end in surprising turns of events.

In “BIG BANG BIG BOOM”, yes all caps, Blu offers his most decisive work thus far. It’s a mythological tale, seemingly lighthearted and playful, but bound together with a strong sense of caution and compassion. It’s a story of our cosmological origins, the evolution of the planet earth, and our likely end, plastered onto the surfaces of city space and then embedded in code onto the digital stratosphere, glowing electric like a Homeric fire pit, where lyrical stories of human folly and inevitable subjection to divine forces are still shared.