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.
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.
The Black Eye Galaxy, quilt by Jimmy McBride, 2010
The line that divides the study of astronomy from pure divination is a thinly constructed one. In Europe, the science cut its teeth on heresy and witchcraft trials; in the Americas it was the stuff of priests. Little wonder that in the post-Hubble age of digital imaging and democratized technologies it has taken its place in the toolkit of conceptual artists. It is, at root, the diligent pursuit to see what does not, to the “normal” eye, exist. At the same time, the precise methodology required to track, map, and diagram the paths of astral bodies is grounded in the honing of a repetitive and highly mathematical technique. Which is all to say that the telescopic arts are perfectly situated to provide a mirror upon the artistic process itself — specifically, the tense relationship between conceptual abstraction and “craft.”
Hua Yang De Nian Huais an archival short film composed by Wong Kar Wai. You can find it on the Criterion release of In the Mood for Love or posted in various internet fora. It’s a lovely assemblage of clips from old nitrate films, inspiring more of the nostalgia one can already derive from the lush retro imagery and old radio broadcasts that compose the backdrop of Wong’s films. Wong’s work is the product of a multiplied nostalgia: the Chinese language title for In the Mood for Love derives from an old Chinese song from the 1940s;his late 90s depictions of 1960s Hong Kong display his own wistful daydreams of a time ago, and his films consistently center on lonely characters thinking of another, simpler time – pining for home. I am a regular & devoted passenger of such train rides to the past, and so it was with great joy that I discovered a trove of 1930s Chinese silent movies on ye blessed ol Internet Archive.
He rhymes as weird as I feel
- Mos Def, on MF DOOM
The abstraction of hiphop – sonically & visually – is a progression other commentators have discussed in relation to instrumental/beats artists like Flying Lotus and the unparalleled Dilla. But what of the lyrical persona in the abstract world? Which is to say, in this constantly expanding kaleidoscope universe, what happens to the MC?
Said a speaker at a recent conference I attended: “Every nation has within it its own Global South.” Retorted my friend, “that misses the meaning of the word global.” Au contraire, friend of mine! Alter-globalization, with its many polycentric manifestations (Global Civil Society; the World Social Forum; the Third World; la Red; TSMo‘s; the Diaspora; the Developing World; the Majority World; the South) has been able to realize within and across national borders “un mundo donde caben muchos mundos” (if you’ll permit me the zapatismo). And alongside this political blossoming has sprung an international artists’ movement of analogous tone, variety, and timbre. I’ll nick a nomer for the length of this post, and refer to that musical-aesthetic movement as “World Town“.
Tonight, Manno Charlemagne played another show in Miami at the Tap Tap. Charlemagne is a Haitian singer who made his name creating oppositional music in the vein of Fela Kuti, Bob Marley, and Bob Dylan (if you can imagine Dylan getting shot at whilst playing Kent State). He did a brief stint as mayor of Port-au-Prince; lived as a “caged bird” in the Argentine embassy to escape the military junta; moved to Miami after being forced into exile. But in the last couple months, Charlemagne, whose life has been so extraordinary, has been living through an ordeal shared by countless other members of the Haitian diaspora:
Here in Miami, American immigration authorities have been detaining Haitian refugees who did no more than cram onto planes in order to flee the death and destruction wrought by the recent earthquake. The pregnant and ailing were told to get on board so they could be transported to receive medical care; they woke up in crowded cells shared with hundreds of detainees hailing from all parts of the world. A Babel of a boat. [Read More]
I’m a Caveman / Your modern ways frighten and confuse me
I watch your spirit box with the blinking lights and think
Are those little people trapped in that box? (No, Caveman)
1877. Dr. Richard Gatling writes to a friend of his new invention: “a machine … which could by rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that would, to a great extent, supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease be greatly diminished.”
1910. Nicholas Roerich recounts to Igor Stravinsky his vision of a pagan ritual in which a young girl dances herself to death before a circle of elders who offer her as a sacrifice to the god of Spring.
1882. The Gatling Gun is used at the Bombardment of Alexandria. The British Royal Navy successfully quashes the Urabi Revolt. A century later, Charles Taylor paraphrases Hilaire Belloc: “Whatever happens / we have got the Gatling gun / and they have not.”
“Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers of yesterday’s homeopape. When nobody’s around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you go to bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up the next morning there’s twice as much of it. It always gets more and more. No one can win against kipple, except temporarily and maybe in one spot …”
- Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
Bastard child of video art and net art; egalitarian in its accessibility; pop in its sensibility; dadaist in its nihilistic bricolage; simultaneously making sense of the accumulation of sensory detritus in our Internet age and encouraging said accumulation. Youtube!
In 2008, Nicholas Carr wrote an influential essay in the Atlantic titled “ Is Google Making us Stupid” ? Since that essay’s publication the use of the Internet and its effect on our brains has become a highly divisive topic which has produced a large spat of journalistic and academic articles in its wake. [Read More]
Sanullim is something of an anomaly in rock history. At a time when vintage rock was dying and new cultural tropes were diversifying the palette of pop music, Sanullim appeared on the margin in a country whose pop music landscape, heavily censored by the authoritarian bureaus of Park Chung-Hee, mainly consisted of traditional trot ballads and dance-pop music. Sanullim’s heavy bass lines, thunderous drums, chromatic fuzz guitar-work, and psych-image lyrics were a revival shock in a system which had gone dormant since the early 60s scene singlehandedly engendered by Korean rock godfather Shin Jung-Hyeon. [Read More]
The abstraction of hiphop – sonically & visually – is a progression other commentators have discussed in relation to instrumental/beats artists like Flying Lotus and the unparalleled Dilla. But what of the lyrical persona in the abstract world? Which is to say, in this constantly expanding kaleidoscope universe, what happens to the MC? [Read More]
If Martin Scorsese had stopped making films after the 90s, he’d still prove an invaluable part of cinema history on the basis of his current film preservation efforts. Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation, which works to “help developing countries preserve their cinematic treasures,” has gone a long way in preserving and promoting little seen, almost lost films from a wide range of countries. [Read More]
The Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film last year was bestowed onto an Argentine mystery romance; a film that intermixes the pathos of unspoken love and the torture chamber of memory, and parallels these alongside the shadowy contours of law and corrupt politics. As the film frames all these disparate elements within a novelist’s remembrance of a rape and murder investigation that he was involved in as a young attorney in the court halls of Buenos Aires in the early 1970s, it continuously draws analogies to the mercenary political machinations of a dictatorial Argentina. This brilliantly scripted and acted film was written and directed by Juan Jose Campanella, a director who has now catapulted himself onto the international film scene with this minor masterpiece. [Read More]
The best story in Nam Le’s eponymous collection The Boat is a harrowing “
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