John Maus at the Victory Grill

One might call John Maus‘s live performance at the Victory Grill “unbelievable.” And so we did. Maus wailed and shook on the stage, grappling with his microphone like he was trying to strangle it, occasionally screaming not into the microphone, but away from it, out over the heads of the crowd, into the void.

None of this would be so strange were it not for the fact that Maus stood alone on the stage, nary an instrument in sight. Even a guitar hanging from Maus’s neck would have made him more comprehensible, more mundane. We likened him to a drunken karaoke performer, seeing teary renditions of “Don’t Stop Believing” from our pasts reflected in the sincerity and abandon of his stage presence. But a karaoke performer fully gripped in the throws of rapturous intoxication. . . who has come, alas, to the desperate and final realization that he is truly alone in the world.

The maudlin aspects of Maus’s performance were made even more apparent by the Lynchian setting. The venue was dimly lit by red overhead lights; Maus performed on a low, bare stage before a set of bedraggled velvet curtains; teenagers ringed him on two tiers of torn diner seats; out front the restaurant — an old jazz/blues establishment that has maintained in the neighborhood since the sunset of World War II — served catfish sandwiches and strawberry cake.

Maus’s music is reminiscent of that of Gary Wilson. But where Wilson’s eccentric spirit manifested itself in the form of schizophrenic, voyeuristic songs, Maus’s lyrics center on the tried and true themes of love and solitude. When Wilson does sing about loneliness, it’s more of a despair-ridden solipsism than a pained enchantment with love loss. Maus’s music is an earnest cry of desperation; a distant groan of unrequited love; a spell of ceaseless wandering and homelessness; a scream into the ghostly neon-lit night.

Maus yelped in awe and chanted over programmed motorik rhythms and synthetic harmonies, an unsettling combination of sounds he once honed as a member of Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti.

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The Soft Moon and Shabazz Palaces at Klub Krucial

Whereas John Maus’s screams were uncontrolled and sometimes animal in nature, The Soft Moon‘s Luis Vasquez screamed methodically, then distorted the percussive quality of his voice into the cipher of an echo chamber.

It was our second time seeing The Soft Moon, and we are prepared now to say that Vasquez has his live show down to a science. The visuals, which were projected onto a huge empty wall behind the band, reflected the sparse geometric structures of the post-punk beats and the muted lightness-upon-darkness of the synthesized melodies. It was as if the video for “Circles” came alive on the set.

The venue in which we saw the Moon is usually a dingy hiphop dance club, but in the daytime, the dusty mirrors and grime and the torn-apart carpets made it look like a genuine 80s new wave joint. Some real tech-noir kind of steez. We’re still waiting for The Soft Moon to play “When It’s Over” live — a track maybe a bit too despondent for most in a live setting, but without a doubt the one song that launches the listener into the prime emotional desolation at the heart of The Soft Moon’s catalogue.

Unfortunately for Shabazz Palaces, the whole fitting-right-into-the-environment thing didn’t work out for them so smoothly. Technical difficulties cut Butterfly’s partner off from his mic and electronic drum kit; all we could hear from him was the minimal bongo rhythm over the crunchy low end bass charged off of the MPC. At times Butterfly shifted from the vital frustration and anger of the inner city Shabazz Palaces anthems to the spacey slam poetry anachronisms endemic to his Digable Planets days. This had us thinking: We’d really like to hear El-P in his prime remix Blowout Comb; on a second thought, that’s what Shabazz sounds like at its best.

Dominique Young Unique, taking it to the streets

Not that there weren’t some killer female MCs in town at the time. We stumbled quite accidentally upon a set by Dominique Young Unique, to our delight. How else can we say it: She rocked the crowd flawlessly. The two white guys backing her up on beats and instrumentals — a long-haired metalhead and a computer programmer from the UK — also rocked it, albeit in their own nerdy way. At one point the metalhead picked up his synth keyboard and got down like Dam-Funk keytar style.

Musically, Dominique reminds us of Thunderheist but with her hood pass intact. Girl raps rapid-fire style with a 15 year-old’s bravado over video game electro noise. This recipe could easily become cheesy but Dominique channels a bit more of the charisma and longevity of a Roxanne Shante than an Amanda Blank. (Although big ups to Amanda Blank when she sings over Eli Escobar’s nu-disco, but not so much when she raps.)

Dominique Young Unique — who is from Tampa, Florida — was recently taken under the wing of another Florida act of similar tendencies: Yo Majesty. You can definitely hear the Miami bass and Freestyle influences merged with Salt -n-Pepa “Push It” antics, which never gets tired as long as you play the game with correctness. Although the limited emotional range of this kind of electro can hold talent back, Dominique’s sharp swagger was made both more impressive and more emotionally rich by how much innocent fun she was visibly having on stage. Others agree. We also caught the tail end of an act at Beauty Bar with Yo Majesty’s Shunda K on the mic and Austin’s own DJ Orion on the turntables; girl still knows how to work the crowd.

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Das Racist at the ND

And of course many hiphop acts at SXSW did not fall into the easy categories of a black/white divide. Take Das Racist, for example, repping hard for the Brown when we saw them perform at the ND and galavant about town the rest of the weekend (playing a total of something like 15 shows in 2 days).

The three gentlemen of Das Racist mostly yelled their songs (sometimes in a falsetto), punctuating them with funny effeminate dance displays and a shrill pterodactyl sound Mike was particularly fond of. Their set at the ND was something like a cross between a rap show and a stand-up act, featuring one liners like “yo that was SHOE-icide. Cause his feet were KILLIN it.”

This extra entertainment was much appreciated by our Hydra heads; unlike other acts that spent a half hour tinkering with mic volumes, Das Racist displayed an utter disregard for detailed sound engineering, although this came at the expense of their ability to communicate their music’s best attribute: their clever lyrics and wordplay.

Addendum: We would see Das Racist again, this time while meandering around an after-hours party they were headlining. Out of nowhere Heems and some scrapper began to brawl it out on the street outside of the club, Heems’s air freshener chain bouncing to-and-fro, his wifebeater pulled over his chest, revealing a spacious underbelly. Actually it wasn’t much of a scrapper; just looked like a normal kid who was standing in line to see Das Racist. He probably didn’t even know who (or what) hit him.

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Jamie xx and SBTRKT at Barcelona

To reconnect with the first part of our dispatch, we’re still trying to work through some thoughts regarding the massive influx of UK electronic sounds to American dance floors. Mexicans with Guns impressed us with the sense that the programmed percussive swing of American digitalism quite directly mirrors England’s syncopated but slightly off kilter dance records. This latter scene was showcased at South by Southwest by UK garage producer SBTRKT and a sprawling DJ set by Jamie xx.

SBTRKT has an ear for the forward pulse of 2-step as well as the bubbling synthetic melodies and soulful croons of garage. These tunes sound amazing on a sound system crafted for the low end, and we were getting a heavy dose of it at Barcelona. If dubstep might have grown a bit tiresome within its own wobble wobble fold, we have it to thank  not only for importing the sonic trajectory of the UK into the US, but also for its help spawning all those fragmented mutations of uptempo dance music in England — from future garage to funky to dubbage and whatever else is on the rise.

The authenticity of the British club experience in Barcelona actually made it difficult for particular Hydra writers to focus on the music. Certain of us (Adri) were mostly trying to dodge the insane coked-out British girls that filled the club in their “frocks” whilst thrashing about arrythmically. But from what we did hear, Jamie xx spiraled from American sources of dance tunes to the UK takeovers, and back and forth through the dialectic. His selections spanned Chicago ghetto-tech, deep house, as well as grime/club tunes, genres of dance music that mesh seamlessly yet complement each other’s patterns of intensity. The ferociousness of the bass and warmness of both the synth keys and vocals fit easily into our SXSW thematic of swag/vulnerability.

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James Blake at the Fader Fort

Shortly after Cass McComb‘s solid — but rather unremarkable — set at the Fader Fort, fellow crooner James Blake took the stage. A blonde fangirl with a large backpack informed us in an offended and authoritative tone that we should all be as excited as she was for Blake’s impending appearance. Once the man of the hour did appear, we were struck by the similarity of his appearance and sincere delivery to that of  pop icon Justin Bieber. Quipped Adri: I’m waiting for Bieber to pull a James Blake. Responded Mike: You mean James Blake to pull a Bieber.

Jokes aside, (and seriously though, Bieber really channels Michael Jackson on “Runaway Love“) Blake performed his tender, skeletal dub-step lamentations with polished, graceful aplomb, adding some cool musical refreshment to an otherwise sweltering afternoon. Blake’s tunes show that the structural framework of dance music — when dissected, retextured, and rearranged — can offer quite a bit of inspiration and emotional fodder for a singer-songwriter. And along with stateside groups like Gayngs, Blake proves that there is something to be sonically salvaged from the soft-rock side of the 1980s.

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Los Rakas, Dave Nada, and Toy Selectah at Frank

Oaktown boys Los Rakas also repped the brown and the raka, adding a latin infusion to SXSW to counterbalance Fader’s shutout. To our surprise, we found them performing at local restaurant Frank, where we also saw fav DJs Dave Nada and Toy Selectah. Dave Nada’s expert drops kept us engaged and the floor moving, as did the mad stylings and intricate transitions of Toy Selectah on the clocks.

Most exciting was the way that Los Rakas and Toy Selectah chose to combine the energy of traditionally-inflected live vocals and call-and-response with the spinning of sophisticated beats.  After a week straight of all-day shows and all-night partying, our Hydra correspondents needed a concentrated dose of that freshness in order to stay awake.

"All this is... White Man's Fantasy," remarks Fernando Hernandez, a Mayan priest who played the Lord of Xibalba in Darren Aronofsky's 2006 film, The Fountain.

In February 2010, after a series of snowstorms had carpeted every strip of pavement and stretch of land, but before the packed carpets had begun to melt, I settled in with some movies, in the hope of relieving the nervous torpor that takes hold of me whenever I have been confined to watching the world through apartment windows for too long. The snow that had fallen had been followed by more snow, at least three times, each time landing more gently on the bed of its forebears. And in fact they seemed so carefree that a person watching them through a window would believe that these softly increasing beds were indicators of a tranquil and agreeable time arrived. The atmosphere felt alive if just a little sleepy. Leaning out the window, I could see the subtle northeast haunch of the mounds on the sides of the birches and jack-pines, divulging the vicinity of the celestial fountainhead from which the carefree visitors had jumped. Unless they had a winter cave somewhere, the Indians of this area would have had to turn their tents to the southwest to keep the snow from collecting at their entrances. All along the Connecticut River Valley, tanners, hunters, quahog- and whelk-grinders, arbiters, weavers, loomers, emissaries, doctors and farmers would be settled in, facing the southwest with their imaginations dancing on winter’s end.

It was in a winter like this that Metacom’s war, one of the bloodiest in the history of North America, was fought here, waged amid the forebears of these same trees and atop an earlier concretion of the soil beneath.

Not too long before, I had walked the icy canyon paths formed between the mounds with Moshe Feldstein, icon of self-realization. We talked about the snowfall that would never melt away.  Or that had melted but in doing so had infected the soil with its cold blood soaked as a nutrient by the roots of the bushes and the trees of this valley. We listened closely to the wind moving through the trees for the whispering legacy of Metacom’s war. Moshe told me that we could make peace with the Indian, even today. I disagreed. I told him that Metacom, also known as King Philip, the young Sachem of the Wampanoag Indians, had lived in Boston and clothed himself in the fashion of the colonialists. In his adolescence he was seen as an apogee of integration and cultural hybridity. Years later, when Mary Rowlandson was captured and held as Philip’s slave, she betrayed a solace felt in the company of the urbane, tobacco-smoking King, who had her make for his son shirts and caps after the Boston fashion. Metacom had welcomed the garish lifestyle of his enemy, had met his enemy in their world, a world of coins, buttons, and windows. What could we, in this world, offer Metacom that he hadn’t already relished, rejected and continued to secretly relish?

After Metacom was driven from the valley, it was a short while before he returned, knowing he would certainly be killed, to his ancestral lands. John Alderman, the praying Indian who shot Metacom dead, received as a reward for his work the prize of the famous King’s head plus one hand. He traded the head to authorities of the Plymouth Bay Colony for the standard price for an Indian head of 30 shillings. It is said that he purchased silk net purse for keeping the 5 shilling fee that he would collect in exhibiting Philip’s cut-off hand. The head was displayed free of charge by the authorities of the Colony on a stake on Burial Hill for 20 years.

But why did Philip return? Linguist Jesse Little Doe, of the Mashpee Wampanoag suggests a relationship to language brought Philip back. When we say just land in the Wampanoag language it’s ahh-key. But if we want to say my land we must say na-tahh-keem. This means, Little Doe explains, that we are physically the land and the land is physically us. After the Europeans were here for about 70 years, people started to write na-tahh-key, which is so sad because it means that I am not necessarily part of the land anymore. The land can be separated from my person. Philip, who fought his war 55 years after the arrival of the English, would have been in the vanguard of this shift of language. He would not have said na-tahh-key, not knowing that it was even a possible linguistic construction. Without the silent brown soil he would have been nothing. Just as the silent brown soil would have been nothing without him. In all their coming and going, the residents of this snowy valley, grumbling in their apartments, have added nothing to it to offer as reparation. Metacom needs his land, desolate and frozen as it might appear. We hear him and others like him imploring in the inner whispers of the wind in the trees.

Sitting down into the striped sofa with my dog to watch one of the movies, the one that caught my eye did so because of the Indian glyphs along the right side of the title, adjacent to a tagline that asked: “What if you could live forever?” The opening sequence consisted of a passage from Genesis (3:24), a woman who one later learns is Queen Isabella of Castile bathed in white light bestowing a fictional conquistador with a ring a license to conquer at all costs, and a battle pitting the conquistador with two compatriots on one side and a mob of spear-wielding filthy Maya warriors on the other. The compatriots who retreat are killed while the conquistador who charges ahead is captured and taken to the temple’s inner sanctum where, so this story goes, the fountain of eternal youth lies protected. There, he finds another filthy Maya, although this one is dressed in fanciful garb being that he is a priest, who shows his teeth, blood-stained and filed down to fangs, before striking the white warrior with his obsidian blade.

a still from The Fountain

The images in this film, many of which follow the historical standard for justifying the conquest and correctional religious conversion of the Indians of the Americas, astounded me because, on top of their overt racism, they were not especially captivating. In fact, they were so boring that the director of this film had to compensate by injecting the production with a speedball of Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI) mixed with frequent upside-down tracking shots that made me reach for my chest in severe agony. It was then that I thought again of Metacom. In 1772 Paul Revere etched an image of “Philip King” on Mount Hope, flattening him into a repulsive pygmy-like man dressed like a puss-in-boots in the gaudy gaiters and faux-mozetta cape popular among the social climbers of New England at the time. We could call this beastly social upstart uppity. And we could say the same of the obstinate, ogrish, blood-cocktail drinking Maya of Darren Aronofsky’s 2006 film, The Fountain.

Likely one of the most boring and simultaneously most offensive movies that I have ever seen in my life. I had to contact others to see if the world had indeed gone blind to the historical Indian. Was this horrid amalgamation of CGI and the degrading deformation of an ethnically cleansed race what counted today for historical fact? Did the sound of munching popcorn fill the silence left by the genocide of the people of these lands? I sent an email out to the writers of this magazine warning them of the film, admonishing that it would hurt their soul to watch it. The following thread ensued:

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I really like the film — but i think you need to take his historical references and genre-bending with a grain of salt. What Aronofsky is doing is really a sort of trash aesthetic, where he collages all sorts of kitschy, sometimes silly ideas, on top of one great, serious story line.

This movie is about our scientific way of viewing the world and the desire to live forever — in essence, the culmination of the western world’s imperialist mindset, which led Europe to the Americas, Ponce de Leon to search out the fountain of life, and today’s scientists to try to cure the disease of death (the singularity theory, etc.). Really good and fun to watch (in a sci-fi sort of way, which is all i ever expect from Aronofsky).

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I don’t think Aronofksy is a very good filmmaker. The Fountain was terrible. His ideas are so simplistic and he keeps whacking you over the head with them. (I wanted to think of a clever pun to put here but could not.)

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What I saw when I watched the film was Mayans = Death, Europeans = Life. Mayans had to die for Europeans to figure out secret of everlasting life. That sounds pathetically familiar.

Aronofsky is just reformulating same imperialist notions into sci-fi dreamscape. Along the way making indigenous people look like bloodsuckers. Why do Mayans always have blood in their teeth in these movies? Like all they did was sit around and drink blood cocktails. and notice there are none of them in celestial Xibalba. It’s like the Lord of The Rings-looking guy is the only person in their heaven.

I can’t take it with a grain of salt when it’s the one thing that keeps hitting you over your head. Also – when the character for the dying wife is played by the same actor who plays Isabela of Spain of course I’m going to want her to die. Isabela was terrible, and no amount of bathing her in light (which this movie does a lot of by the way) is going to convince me otherwise.

And those shots where he follows the car upside down and then follows the horse upside down and then follows the sphere upside down don’t really have a point. Those were the ones that made me most sick.

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“And those shots where he follows the car upside down and then follows the horse upside down and then follows the sphere upside down don’t really have a point. Those were the ones that made me most sick.”

hahahahaha

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I am not a fan of The Fountain; it’s very bad in my opinion. There are some moments here and there that are ok, but not worth sitting through when you have to wade through so much garbage. It’s the film where it became obvious that Aronofsky doesn’t have the mental chops to tackle such weighty subjects.

This doesn’t even get into the visual aspects which are even worse.

That said, i saw it when it came out and I had been waiting for it for many years, so it’s possible my anticipation made me more biased. I would be willing to re-watch just to see if my criticisms still hold.

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Couldn’t help but chime in on Aronofsky. I absolutely must concur  that The Fountain is horrible dreck and thoroughly worthy of all forms of neglect. On the other hand I do not think Aronofsky is, by reason of this, a horrible filmmaker; I rather think he’s a formidably muscular director in the way a boxer is considered athletic: capable of certain camera rhythms which, however empty they may be of content, are worthy of being studied in the way a right hook is emulated. The Fountain is Aronofsky attempting to think for himself (for once in his career) and we find he is a poor metaphysician, and an even worse historicist: let’s hope he doesn’t attempt these Kubrickian statements again. If you can imagine a late 90s Tool video (you remember the band Tool right?), then you have The Fountain in a nutshell (the Tool analogy came through loud and clear during the ludicrous CGI blowout at the end).

But if anything good ever came out of this grotesque failure, it had to have been the evident humbling of Aronofsky, who’s since scaled down to subjects worthy of his talents. A fatuous film like The Fountain made the relative asceticism of The Wrestler possible (not to mention his imbibement of the Dardennes style), and these two were something like training experience for the production of Black Swan, which I think is rhythmically quite excellent.

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I’m inclined to publish this conversation in some form, because it has made me laugh.

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I thought you all might be curious — Aronofsky’s Fountain movie & screenplay are banned in Texas jails.

Last year, South African musician Spoek Mathambo flipped Joy Division’s “She Lost Control” into a disorienting pastiche of dubstep, new wave, and South African electronics on his excellent debut long-player, Mshini Wam. Spoek traded the female interest of Joy Division’s original for a frenetic meditation on the concept of “Control” itself. In fact the whole record spins elusively around the interplay of control and resistance, organization and disintegration, creation and destruction. Spoek himself baptized the record as a foray into “Township Tech.” Coagulated terms like “darkwave township house” have also been passed around. These cascading words, reminiscent of Hydra’s own worldtown moniker, quite precisely suggest the outline of Mshini: Syrupy synth chords meander along fragmented bass lines and gurgling wobbles. It echoes the deep soulfulness of Chicago House and the interlaced poly-percussive wirings of UK Funky. But this shit is purely South African, hungry and pressing. Spoek, together with photographer Pieter Hugo–who also documented Nigeria’s burgeoning film industry in Nollywood–and cinematographer Michael Cleary, just dropped the video for “Control.” Who knew township occultism and gangs of South African kids shared something of the pulse of post-punk dirges?

Fellow writer Adri Wong recently asked me whether an African musician can be afro-futurist. After all, the central origin story, or so it seems, of afro-futurism stems from a sci-fi nightmare at the heart of America’s own genesis as a nation. A people is abducted from their homeland and taken to an alien, new world, where they are forced into exploitative manual labor. Generations pass, languages are unlearned and new ones adopted; values distorted, transformed, and re-modified, lives divided and interwoven, new forms of life invented. Blackness solidifies, dissolves, and refigures itself.

Afro-futurism is the dream of a distant homeland, one no longer home, and a prophetic liberation, set somewhere in the purple glow of the horizon. Does the same narrative apply to peoples recovering from generations of colonialism? Third-world countries competing in globalizing markets? All nomadic peoples of the Diaspora in its multiple forms and aberrations?

In recent years, an embryonic pulse for dance music, rap, and experiments on the boundaries of conventional genres has erupted in South Africa. Last year’s Shangaan Electro compilation on Honest Jon’s tracked the skittering mutations of 1990s Kwaito into a rapid gurgling discharge of digital sounds that strangely parallels the footwork and juke movements in South Side Chicago. Sometimes a Shangaan song is just a Kwaito record played at 45 RPM.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXE6_j1N7o8

2010 was also a big year for the white South African group Die Antwoord. The crew stormed the blogosphere and indie dance parties with their elaborate agitprop performances, lyrical extravagances, and an onslaught of music videos seductive enough to terrorize your subconscious. What is so striking about Die Antwoord is how the group evokes such a global sound, ideas, and emotions from an essentially local focus on South African concerns and heritage. Their latest experiment “Evil Boy” centers around the story of a boy who refuses to obey his tribe’s gruesome right of passage into manhood: self-circumcision.

Still less on the mass radar, but no less innovative, is an emerging movement of new dance music from South Africa which informs Spoek Mathambo’s stylings, but stretches far beyond in boundary and scope. Inspired by synth swirling Chicago House and recent blips of UK Funky, just as well as dub and poly-percussive funk, South African producers and musicians are forming a new pattern of rhythm and electronics. The music not only thrives in local clubs, streets, and parties, but also circulates in roaming taxi sound systems throughout Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Gabrouw, among other townships.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=0l5-zQlgoEE

One of South Africa’s most promising up and comers is Mujava whose “Township Funk” received mad play on Rinse FM a couple years back, and inspired remixes from the likes of Skream and Ikonika. A good place to start, to sink into a vortex of music of which I barely was able to scratch the surface while researching for this article, is courtesy of London-via-South Africa producer Gerv, part of the group LV (Factmag interview here), who scrambled together this OKZharp mix early last year.

These tunes, strangely enough, sound like they could just as easily be coming out of densely populated immigrant neighborhoods in East London, as if the trajectories of underground dance music in SA and London traveled side-by-side into the flittering dark spheres of broken down rhythm-and-melody house. But once again, the global arises from the absolutely local, transmitted in a digital haze, intravenously through the coiled wires of the network. A glimpse of the township can be heard.

Cine Foundation International is a humanitarian cinema organization, a non-profit film company and a human rights NGO devoted to tracking and assisting those who are oppressed and/or missing from the normative rhetoric of cinema. CFI was launched on December 10, 2010 (Human Rights Day) with a single objective in mind: “To empower open consciousness through cinema.” Founded by Tobias Morgan, Jesse Richards, and Blue Un Sok Kim (who is also a fellow Hydra contributor), CFI takes vital interest in the protection and preservation of human rights through the promotion of an open cinema society that empowers minority and third-world cultures through the technologic voice of the cinema. According to their website, “CFI’s actions include the creation and reclamation of temporary spaces for film projection, arts regeneration and emergency broadcast; humanitarian actions aimed to increase agency for people who are typically voiceless within a culture, community or location; ad campaigns raising awareness of social or political injustice, and film, reportage and broadcast actions to aid in conflict resolution.” 

Among those who are unjustly missing from a free and open cinema discourse are Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof. Panahi, a major figure in the Iranian New Wave movement and director of The Mirror (1997), The Circle (2000) and Crimson Gold (2003), was sentenced on December 10, 2010 to six years in prison and given a twenty-year ban from making, writing, or producing films of any kind. Panahi was convicted for “colluding with the intention to commit crimes against the country’s national security and propaganda against the Islamic Republic,” dubious charges which fail to account for the immense cultural service Panahi has given his country by increasing cultural awareness of the human issues that define and particularize life in modern-day Iran. Mohammad Rasoulof, Panahi’s compatriot and director of Iron Island (2005) and The White Meadows (2009), also received a 6-year prison sentence for the same charges.

Mohammad Rasoulof

CFI’s Advisory Board lists Vincent Moon, the independent filmmaker responsible for the Take-Away Shows published on La Blogotheque (which featured in a Hydra article), and Bill Mousoulis, founder of the Senses of Cinema website, as members. The Board of Directors includes Fred Kelemen, Lav Diaz, and Bela Tarr, whose latest film, The Turin Horse, won the Silver Bear at the 2011 Berlin Film Festival just last Monday (February 21). In a gesture of solidarity, the Berlinale held an empty seat in honor of Jafar Panahi, who was symbolically named to the jury. Just as fitting was the announcement that Asghar Farhadi’s Jodaeiye Nader az Simin (Nader and Simin, a Separation) won the Golden Bear for best film at the festival. Farhadi’s film is the first from Iran to win the top prize at the Berlinale. Receiving the award, the director expressed goodwill for his compatriot: “I really think his problem will be solved and I would like him to stand here next year.”

Visit Cine International Foundation’s website to read statements issued by Bela Tarr, Fred Kelemen, Lav Diaz, J.P. Carpio, and others in support of Panahi, Rasoulof and the right to free discourse in cinema. To access the White Meadows Video App, click here. You can also visit CFI’s alternate wiki-site, whitemeadows.org, to read about its latest initiative, The Ortolan Project, a “massive global alt-Documentary” enterprise which “will comprise 9 feature length films (mostly shot on 16mm), 40-50 short-form film, digital video and other transmedia works and over 300 broadcasts and audio-visual documents including live feeds, news reportage, photography exhibitions, audio files and eyewitness testaments,” some of which will be submitted through the White Meadows application.

Best Book for the Chronically-Paranoid Manhattanite

Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem (Paperback, Vintage)

Most consistently-read book on the subway for the early part of 2010, and deservedly so. Lethem deploys line after line of careful, streamlined prose which contain a wild logic insidiously persuasive in its precision. There’s a lot going on in this book, as with all of Lethem’s work. Plot-wise, there are firecrackers exploding all over the place; we have no idea which conflicts and dilemmas are most dire, but somehow this constant feeling of panic suits the book well. Double entendres, hidden meanings, uncanny duplicates, alternate universes, desires too nebulous to satisfy — this is reality filtered through Lethem’s lens. The cast of characters, briefly: Astronaut-fiancee lost in space, writes beautiful tear-inducing letters to love-object Chase Insteadman, protagonist and retired child star who befriends legendary rock-critic-turned-recluse Perkus Tooth of the constant debilitating migraines; a posse consisting of protege/femme fatale Oona Laszlo; a homeless guy named Biller. Other minor characters include a celebrity acupuncturist, an enormous Second Avenue tiger on the loose, two eagles, a poetically-inclined weed dealer, sketchy government types (naturally), something called a “chaldron,” and cameos by such elite art institutions as The New Yorker and Criterion. I spent a summer week reading this book out loud with my sister inside our insufficiently cool New York apartment, and then stumbling outside at night into the city’s sticky, stifling streets. Why is this city so…grid-y? Why is it never possible to remember the faces of your taxi drivers? What does it mean when pigeons circle a church steeple? After this book, you see everything differently.

An excerpt:

January 8,

C.,

Severed-foot disposal in a pocket biosphere is really a daft problem, one I hope you never need face, love. We considered air-lock ejection, a sailor’s funeral, but to send my pedal appendage spinning down to Earth, or worse yet, to trigger a mine, seemed florid, flamboyant, a bit of a flambe, and not in the least flame-retardant, even if we wrapped it in a foil boot. (If we had a thousand feet among us, a millipede’s supply to lop off and defenestrate, maybe we’d kick our way out of this crate!) So we opted for a somber burial in the Greenhouse, under the shade of the tallest of the mangroves, though in truth it meant a slightly watery grave after all, stuff seeping up through the muck to swallow the foot, bubbles of mud detaching and floating among us during our tiny, foot-size ritual observances. Sledge, having scooped up the dead bees from the shelf in the Nursery, embedded these in the gunk to form a ring of bee emissaries, the better to passport the foot into whatever afterlife it deserves. Keldysh recited a poem in Russian, Mstisav made a joke about Gogol, then we sealed up this weird stew with cheesecloth mesh, as we do the rest of the topsoil, to keep it from absconding in the zero-G.

Afterward, back to work or to moping in our various private nests. I’m not so much an occasion, anymore, for renewed bonhomie. My ailment is another ambient backdrop now, another machine falling apart with no parts to replace the scrapped ones, another grim dispatch from the various quadrants of the deadly dull but not yet quite deadly enough condition our condition is in. My cancer is a mood. We all of us up here have our moods.

Now a part of me will never touch Earth again, Chase.

Happy New Year!

Footloose,

J.

Best Book for the Young and Aging Hipster

The Ask by Sam Lipsyte (FSG)

The Ask is thematically similar to Chronic City but the real schizophrenia in this book is found in Lipsyte’s syntax. By now there must be something we can call “The Lipsyte School” of stylistic followers and imitators. To see it at work, working, is awesome and miraculous; to see a cheap imitation of it not working is cringe-worthy. Lipsyte, however, has so perfected his art that he rarely ever makes us cringe. When he decides to leap the semantic distance of a canyon he will do it and make it to the other side, effortlessly. A sentence like, “But I was biased, and not just because I often loved my son,” inverts expectation so quickly the humor could easily be missed. At readings, Lipsyte will read the sentence slowly and let the laughter ripple through the audience. Readings is where Lipsyte’s language really comes alive. He’s best as narrative monologuist — standup comedy as high art. The punchline often comes at the end of the sentence. Modifiers are unexpected, atypical, sacriligious: “Horace, after all, was [the students'] age. He had no health insurance, just hope.” It’s easy to picture Milo, the middle-aged, balding narrator employed at a “mediocre” arts institution (Lipyste teaches in the MFA program at Columbia) when he’s sitting right in front of you. The book’s descriptions of hipster loft-living are scathingly accurate and hilarious. Scenes of fatherhood are another of the book’s strengths. The plot has been described by my favorite people as being “loosely hung, like a skeleton,” which I completely agree with. But don’t worry, the novelty of Lipsyte’s sentences make this a totally worthwhile, pleasurable read.

An excerpt:

“Gentlemen,” said our supervisor, Vargina, coming out from her command nook. “Did you send off those emails about the Belgian art exchange?”

Horace swiveled back to his monitor with the mock panic of a sitcom serf. Vargina took scant notice of our talk, tolerated foul banter for purposes of morale. But the fact remained, we had forgotten the afternoon’s assignment. The gods of task flow did not easily forgive.

Where we worked was in the development office of a mediocre university in New York City. It was an expensive and strangely obscure institution, named for its syphilitic Whig founder, but we often called it, with what we considered a certain panache, the Mediocre University at New York City. By we, I mean Horace and I. By often, I mean once.

Our group raised funds and materials for the university’s arts programs. People paid vast sums so their spawn could take hard drugs in suitable company, draw from life on their laptops, do radical things with video cameras and caulk. Still, the sums didn’t quite do the trick. Not in the cutthroat world of arts education. Our job was to grovel for more money. We could always use more video cameras, more caulk, or a dance studio, or a gala for more groveling. The asks liked galas, openings, recitals, shows. They liked dinner with a famous filmmaker for them to fawn over or else dismiss as frivolous.

Best Book for the Irreverent History Junky

Love Like Hate by Linh Dinh (Seven Stories)

Linh Dinh has written some of the most influential and widely-taught books of poetry and prose poetry, and his novel debut is equally groundbreaking. Love Like Hate paints an intimate picture of Vietnam before and after the Fall of Saigon, when the country reunited under communist rule. Dinh follows a family through two generations and traces the trajectory of a nation through the details of domestic circumstance. Hoang Long, captain in the ARVN and imprisoned patriarch of the family, comes from a wealthy landowning clan of South Vietnam. He marries Kim Lan, the daughter of a “wannabe Frenchman.” She eventually becomes the owner of a cafe called Paris by Night, and represents the resilience of the average Vietnamese citizen caught in the middle of a war they perhaps don’t quite understand. They are the transition generation: those who are forced to radically shift deeply ingrained ideologies and loyalties and consequently reemerge believing nothing. During the time Hoang Long is in reeducation camp, Kim Lan marries a Chinese-Vietnamese (more allegorical implications) who triumphs by ousting Hoang from his own home. Kim Lan’s two children represent the polemical divide in Vietnamese youth: the daughter embraces Western culture and elopes with a rich, well-read punk-rocker, and the son marries a submissive, uneducated fishmonger from the countryside. In the end, we are left wondering if the fate and future of Vietnam are nestled somewhere in between the two poles or if it rests with the daughter, who comes into adulthood with the last words of the novel: “The next day Hoa turned 18. THE END.” The bluntness of the statement leaves an unsettling peace, one detects perhaps a note of bitter resignation. On a stylistic note, Dinh proves the age-old mantra that poets often write better prose than prose-writers.

An excerpt:

Her father was a wannabe Frenchman, or, rather, an aspiring Corsican. He had studied at Lasan Taberd, a French school in Saigon, and supposedly spoke French, although no one had ever seen him talk to a Frenchman. His conversations were sprinkled with a dozen or so French words, such as moi, toi, bon, and ecoutez.

“Ecoutez! Do toi want to drop by moi house this evening?”

The only book he had ever read was a biography of Napoleon, which he kept rereading until he knew all the details of Napoleon’s life better than Napoleon himself. He was one of those people who simply assumed that whatever they happened to be thinking about had to be of immediate interest to everyone else. Looking up from his crumbling book, he would ask Kim Lan’s mother, “Did you know that Napoleon was only five foot six, only an inch taller than me?”

“Why are you always talking about that man? What has he ever done for you?”

“Did you know that Napoleon was killed by his wallpaper, which contained arsenic? Isn’t that amazing? Did you know that Napoleon only had one testicle?”

“What’s wallpaper?”

“It’s something they do in France. You wouldn’t know.”

He kept a nearly full bottle of Napoleon on the highest shelf of a glass cabinet, flanked by upside-down snifters and brushed by cobwebs dangling from the ceiling. Even an adult standing on tiptoes could not reach it. He admired the liquor’s amber glow and aroma, appreciated the bottle’s elegant shape and brown-gold label, but had no stomach for cognac itself. He began each morning with a croissant and a cafe au lait, chain smoked Gauloises, and snacked often on pate chaud. Once a week he had to have a steak au poivre or a steak tartare, which he ate while scanning his wife’s face for hints of amused disapproval. “What are you grinning at?” It also irritated him to no end that she could never tell cheese from butter. The only cheese she had ever tried was Laughing Cow, which she always enjoyed with a banana. The sight of his wife holding a banana in one hand, a wedge of Laughing Cow cheese in the other, chewing happily, always made him seethe. I’m married to a monkey, he’d think.

If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other territories. — Susan Sontag

Last month the lunar eclipse fell on the winter solstice for the first time in nearly 400 years. If you were in the northeast of Sarah Palin’s great America, like me, then the onset of heavy clouds preparing for a torrential blizzard and more to come, might have blocked your view. Not to worry — Wonder in the face of the cosmos, forever beyond and other, can be achieved at any moment with the right sort of word, image, sonic frequency, or combination thereof. Ah yes, it’s about time for another cosmic rundown.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9t8Oex9BpQ

Hydra favorite The Soft Moon, one sonic incarnation of Bay Area multi-instrumentalist Luis Vasquez, released his self-titled debut in December to welcome in the winter solstice. Influenced by the cryptic melodies of post-punk and krautrock’s motorik beat as much as Afro-Cuban polyrhythms, Vasquez channeled an array of eerie hypnotism into this whirlwind of a record. The Soft Moon taps into the raw underbelly of the cosmic — a cold and lonely desert wind blowing over soft desert sand — where the resonance of some fetid and unsalvageable mourning climaxes in the dirge of a sublime dystopia.

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www.youtube.com/watch?v=uE3uqVRGQHY

After watching the introduction to British director John Akomfrah‘s stunning documentary on the spiritual frontier of afro-futurism, 1995′s Last Angel of History, I searched everywhere on the internet for the full version. All I found was a $300 copy of the dvd from Icarus Films. Much love to you Icarus. But my research was not in vain: while trying to manifest some search bar destiny, I uncovered a surge of dusty and quite edifying mid ’90s literature on rhizomes, rhythm, and outerspace: Erik Davis’ “Roots and Wires” and Mark Dery’s “Black to the Future.” So who has the missing link?

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www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4A3YSjWwCc

To indulge in the luminescent side of the cosmic I’ve been rocking Cut Copy‘s sophomore effort, the sprawling Zonoscope. The Australian band — who are about to go on a world tour – expanded on the catchy new wave/disco hooks and gushing arpeggios of their debut record, In Ghost Colors, for a sound that expands pop at its border zones and ventures into wholly satisfying out-there territory. The closing track, “Sun God,” clocking in at 15-minutes, is an incredible trip into the heart of the ero-tech. For more from the Cut Copy vaults, I recommend the “So Cosmic Mix” for a blend of rock, disco, and scrapped electro new wave, sure to send you into the juicy flesh of the void.

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I’m not sure how I stumbled upon this collaboration between filmmaker David Kaplan and game designer Eric Zimmerman: a mesmerizing concept film called Play, commissioned by the Independent Television Series as part of Futurestates. In Play, immersive videogame worlds — layered within each other in an endless chain of avatars like a multi-tiered Inception dream world where you don’t even know who is at the source of the dreams — confuse any coherent notion of the real.  I was hooked immediately after pressing, yes, the play button. What if the point of a game is to lose yourself? To forget the rules and come out, if you’re good enough, transformed into something other? What if the stakes of losing mean that you simply and utterly lose yourself? I’m damn excited for the near future (isn’t it always the near future?) when the game-film will emerge in all its sound, artistic glory.

On the first installment of our best of re-issue list we covered British art-rock, psych-folk from Chile, French bossa-new wave, Swedish drone, American lounge folk, Jamaican dub and Ghanian psychedelia. On the next two installments we continue traveling the globe with prog from Italy, Nigerian rock, Egyptian soundtrack music, Persian rare groove, Detroit folk, Philly psych, Chicago house and afro-jazz, minimal wave from Europe, and psychedelic Chicano funk from South Texas.

Franco Battiato — Fetus

Fetus is an album that unites so many divergent tendencies, potentialities and abstractions into a piece of music that it’s hard to pin down within formally precise categories. It was written in 1972 by Franco Battiato—a composer who was influenced by the work of musique concrete and minimalist composers, and transposed those ideas to create arguably the first proto synth pop record. It’s a narrative told from the perspective of an unborn fetus that delves into ruminations on politics, metaphysics, dreams, love and war.

Although not well known outside collector circles, Fetus exhibits all the innovative qualities that Kraftwerk’s Autobahn is lauded for, and yet, it was written two years earlier. The record mostly gets ensconced within “prog-rock,” a tag that I bristle at because to call it prog deters listeners who would otherwise get a lot from it. The best way to look at Fetus from a purely sonic perspective is to imagine Kraftwerk having more intricate arrangements—but not any extra notes or chords—with the addition of more organic elements such as acoustic guitar, violin and field recordings.

Even though Fetus is a concept record, the conceptual scaffolding paradoxically gives the album more emotional depth. It works to immerse the listener in the embryo’s wide-eyed confusion towards the violent nature of humanity. This meditation on violence is heightened by Battiato’s constant deployment of Italian children talking and singing in the background while soft harmonic synths percolate in the distance. This is the primary reason I’ve always preferred Fetus to Autobahn. Both records are the first templates we have for synth pop, but Battiato remains human while perched on the edge of machinery. Also, the vocals throughout are hauntingly passionate, akin to Bowie in Ziggy Stardust on the ‘conventional’ songs and Alan Vega at the more extreme margins. It is a record which Battiato intended originally to be a very personal and idiosyncratic statement on the world; it just happened to be an innovative one as well.

Available here.

“Energia”

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The World Ends — Afro Rock & Psychedelia in 1970s Nigeria

As the counter-cultural movement reached its apex circa 1967 in San Francisco with swarms of people preaching peace, love, communal living, psychoactive drugs and “dropping out,” there was a similar revolution brewing in Nigeria that had nothing do with good vibes, wearing flowers in your hair, or communing with New Age mantras. Nigeria was in the midst of a brutal civil war that would end up spanning over two years and extinguish over three million lives in the process. The World Ends is the newest compilation of African psychedelic music released on Soundway Records that gives voice to the renaissance of music that occurred after that savage period in Nigerian history. This album is a key entry point into the world of African rock and psych with tracks that range from fuzzy takes on American soul and funk to more traditional Nigerian sounds filtered through a psychedelic lens. I interviewed Uchenna Ikonne, the man who has been tracking down the music from this turbulent era, and we got to speaking about the apoliticism of the post-civil war generation, Fela and Kanye West, and some of his favorite records off the comp.

Available here:

The Semi Colon — Isi Agboncha

The Hykkers — Deiyo-Deiyo

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Omar Khorshid — Guitar El Chark

Omar Khorshid is considered the finest guitarist to have come out of Egypt. Not only was he a powerful and dynamic force as a musician, he was also a well known actor and soundtrack composer. Although Khorshid recorded with many different groups and under different guises, first as a guitarist for a 60s beat group then later as a session man for orchestras, it is his work from 1973-77 during his time in Lebanon that comprises Sublime Frequencies excellent compilation.

What does it sound like ? Psychedelic belly dance music with blazing guitar lines soaked in reverb and expert percussionists playing Middle Eastern rhythms is a good start. It’s the kind of music that transports you to Egyptian film sets in the 60s, bohemian cocktail parties, or lone walks in a Cairo garden underneath the translucent sun. For those who have enjoyed the recent spat of Turkish rock reissues like Selda, or Erkin Koray this is absolutely essential.

Available here.

“Rakset El Fadaa”

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Deutsche Elektronische Musik — Experimental German Rock and Electronic Music 1972-83

I have written before on the monumental debt that contemporary music has to the Kraut Rock movement and this new compilation curated by Soul Jazz reinforces that thesis by focusing on the electronic spectrum of artists. This is one of the best compilations on the genre not because it necessarily treads new ground but because it forges connections and sketches out a narrative that tethers itself to current movements in music. Emeralds, Arp, and Oneohtrix Point Never are all artists that have been working with many of the ideas on offer here, a sort of 21st century take on synthesized new age drone.

A good entry point is Michael Bundt’s “La Chasse Aux Microbes,” a track that uses synthesizer polyphony to achieve the kind of immersive sonic experience that makes you forget who you are, where you are, what time it is, where you’ve been, where you will be, and so on. Electrifying doesn’t even begin to grasp the sort of resonant frequencies that pulsate through you when you submit to his masterful synthesizer artistry. These are sounds made to expand the parietal lobe and give a flash of creative conductivity in the process. You can see why Emeralds and Oneohtrix were inspired by artists working with sounds like these.

A few other standouts are Emak’s “Filmmusik,” a slice of German minimal wave that hooks into the current coldwave releases that are being put out by Wierd and Minimal Wave Records. Can’s “Aspectacle” is a discofied kraut jam replete with a harmonica run through a delay echo and a vocal delivery that sounds like an aloof Mark E Smith. The songs by Amon Duul 2, Popol Vuh and Ibliss take on a more cosmic slant with otherworldly percussion, flutes and strings. The whole compilation is an accurate reflection of what happened to music in 1970s Germany, a time and place where a community of artists made music along a progression that was not linear, but refractory and spontaneous. In retrospect, aside from post-punk I can’t think of a more fertile topography that has had such a seminal influence outside of itself in the last 40 years.

Available here.

Michael Bundt – “La Chasse Aux Microbes”___Ibliss – “High Life”“__________
__

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Minimal Wave Tapes Vol 1

Veronica Vasicka (who I have written about here) is the owner of Minimal Wave records—a small NYC imprint that focuses on releasing music that is usually referred to as minimal synth or cold wave. This year has seen a major resurgence of interest in these DIY electronic artists with the release of her excellent compilation on Stones Throw: The Minimal Wave Tapes Vol 1. Really, this music is just lo-fi new wave which gives it a charm that a lot of new wave tends to lack due to its pomposity and dearth of self awareness. These were artists who didn’t have the money to make music like Depeche Mode so they did the best they could with low rent analog synthesizers and cheap mics. As is usually the case in these circumstances what they lacked in sophisticated gadgetry they made up for with raw creativity and passion.

One of my favorite artists on this compilation is Oppenheimer Analysis, a duo from the UK who bonded over their love of Soft Cell, Human League and physics. Nearly three decades ago, they released a cassette entitled New Mexico that included “Radiance” along with “The Devil’s Dancers,” a song that has become a veritable dance floor classic at the minimal wave revival nights in NYC. Another standout is Esplendor Geometrico’s Moscu Esta Helado, a Spanish industrial band who took their name from the futurist writings of Marinetti and wrote politically motivated satirical lyrics to complement their machinist grooves. The final song on the compilation by Das Kabinette “The Cabinet” is a dark foray into a refracted narrative about the film Dr. Caligari. An insistent kick drum and an arpeggiated synth drives the song forward until the emerging guitar coda flies out of the recording and into negative space. It is a thrilling and apt ending to a compilation that serves as a key entry point into this almost forgotten scene.

Available here.

“Radiance” ____________“Moscu Esta Helado”

__

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Virgo — Virgo

Virgo was the Chicago house project of Eric Lewis and Merwn Sanders, a duo that was cut a very raw deal by the then owner of the legendary Trax Records. Since there was already a band called Virgo on the label’s roster (Adonis, Marshall Jefferson, Vince Andrews), and Larry (owner of Trax) didn’t think the music Eric and Merwyn would sell, he forced them to release their tracks under the Virgo name, effectively giving all the credit of their music to the original Virgo. This is one of those breaks that happens in music all the time, but the only difference in this case is that the music Eric and Merwyn were making was not only better than the original Virgo but is arguably the greatest house record ever made.

Now, Rush Hour Records is rectifying that fact by reissuing the original album that Eric and Merwyn made in all its glory. This is totemic Chicago house: jacking minimal beats, a wealth of soul, and ambient synth pads that glide and swoon over the surfaces. “In A Vision” is probably one of the finest cosmic laden house tunes I’ve ever come across, replete with futurist ambient washes that coast along the edges of the industrial drum programming, and luxuriant melodies that have the tendency to sneak their way into the most recondite areas of your aural chamber. “Do You Know Who You Are” is the most well known track of this collection. The opening kick groove, the tick tick hi-hats, the simple piano riff that hums in tandem to the beat, and the reverb heavy balearic guitars all add up to one of the most satisfyingly elegant house creations this side of the Atlantic. It’s rare for forgotten records to see the light of the day after many years but it’s even rarer that what was re-discovered ranks with the best of the genre. Virgo is that discovery.

Available here.

“In A Vision”

Part 1 of The Best Reissues of 2010

A dory is a small fishing boat, not built to rough high seas, but designed to bring catch in from waters along the coastline. When I received a preliminary copy of Small Anchor Press’ Dory Reader in the mail, the first in what will be a serialized run of “disparate authors” throughout 2011, one author every month in your mailbox, I had the impression that the nautical motif was fitting in that the editions were compact, bringing poetry to my door, in effect using handmade craft to bring catch in from the whipping waters. But as I sat down with the first issue, poems by Jen Bervin, it became apparent to me that a dory, although modest in size, still conveys something from a larger body. The point, in other words, is to fish.

The analogy of the production of poetry to local fishing, as it might be understood by somebody like Olson in Gloucester, or Ferrini for that matter, or even Merrill in Stonington, presupposes a field of imagination in which culture is sustenance, and the poet the fisher just in with a net full of wriggling vittles. It should come as no surprise then, that Bervin (the first poet published in the series), has (through Ugly Duckling) published “NETS,” in which she strips “Shakespeare’s sonnets bare to the “nets” to make the space of the poems open, porous, possible—a divergent elsewhere.” Showing her erasures of Shakespeare in light gray print, her fish are given in black. The famous 18th becomes:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate;
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st.
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Letting the catch show through the erasures, her work in the Dory Reader is more evidently reticulated, or woven in such a manner that net shows. Lines of poetry, which appear embossed on the page, are painted over so that you see the bumps or shape of words pushing up against the shrouding brushstroke. Thicker strokes make some text unreadable. Varying thicknesses of paint therefore produce a range of readability or unreadability. Not every fish slithering in the catch, it seems, is meant to be ate: “the best part of the weaving/was the drawing pressed/up against threads so/carefully arranged/to look simple/ … /the best part of the drawing/was how the whiskers emerged/like comets on the face of/a leopard.”

Like a catfish trawled from the lower waters, Bervin’s poem captures a fitting emblem for the Small Anchor project. Not only do they publish original work by new poets, they are also bringing to the surface older albeit rarely seen works, such as Joe McElroy’s “Preparations for Search,” a much-speculated-upon section withheld from his 1987 work, Women and Men. Although I am told that the cover of the book is meant to convey “a coastline at the same time as representing a graph of randomness,” I cannot help but be reminded of Mandelbrot’s graphs for the fractalization of the English coastline in his famous essay, “How Long is the Coast of Britain?” The idea of auto-perpetuating self-similarity upon which Mandelbrot bases his theory of fractals is a good way to think about the publication of a piece of an author’s work, an unseen or unnoticed leaf-tip leading back in similar patterns through branches to the beastly tree.

Other hand-bound, limited edition works published by Small Anchor include Kimiko Hahn’s A Field Guide to the Intractable, Bridget Talone’s In the Valley Made Personal, and, forthcoming, Professional Human Beings, by Pauline Cavillot, a book of writings and interviews from New Orleans, with poems by Brett Evans, Michael Ford, Bill Lavender and Frank Sherlock. But subscriptions to the Dory Reader 2011 close in two days (December 15th). The series, which will feature one poet each month and will include printed and audio material delivered to your mailbox, features Jen Bervin, Sarah Dimick, Autumn Giles, Christian Hawkey, John Jodzio, Hoa Nguyen, D.A. Powell, Matthew Rohrer, Sarah Sala, Chris Sawyer, Betsy Wheeler, and Matvei Yankelevich. With the series beginning next month, the chance to get ‘on-board’ rapidly departs.

still from "A Man Escaped" (1956), dir. Robert Bresson

So what is the perfect film ?  Or (one might choose to ask the more precise question): from whence does that perfection derive?  Hydra‘s own Jose-Luis Moctezuma interrogates this question — with all its cinematic and metaphysical nuances — in the current Fall/Winter Issue of Cerise Press, through an article exploring the greatness of Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped.

Wondrous indeed the film which is both perfect and great; rarer still the film whose perfection derives from a deliberate minimalism and severe reduction of expression. Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped (1956) is one of those rare instances of a work whose greatness is directly characterized by its mechanisms of refinement; the film does not so much present a sheen of indisputable perfection as it reveals the hidden engine by which its nature produces a kinema of inward and outer symmetry.

…

The art of cinematography, as we well know, derives from a technologic origin, so that the cinematograph (the element of kinema inscribed on film) is produced through an arrangement and operation of mechanisms. Bresson’s intention, however, is not to repeat or sublimate the mechanism at work as its own end, but to transcend and transform dumb machinery via the corporeal and emotional actuality of the human model, its covenant inscribed on film by the model’s acts of faith (or contrary acts) …

You can find Jose’s complete discussion of the film and of Bresson’s theory of cinematography in “Anatomy of a Perfect Film: Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped,” available in Cerise Press’s online journal.

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Cerise Press is an international online journal based in the United States and France, builds cross-cultural bridges by featuring artists and writers in English and translations, with an emphasis on French and Francophone works.

Raul Llerena, born in Belén, Iquitos, in the heart of the Amazonian rainforest, is something of a luminary in that watery town and a legend in the world of cumbia music. Musician, producer, journalist, television and radio station broadcaster, he was ever only any of those things when he could take charge of his self-presentation. To disseminate his music, he pressed his own records. To get on T.V., he broadcast his own signal. He is currently running for mayor of his town. And, if you’ve never heard of him, another independent vinyl-press project, Masstropicas, is looking to change that.

I had a chance to meet Masstropicas’ head honcho, Michael Pigott, at a curated speaker and performance series in New Haven, “SOUND HALL,” presented by DETRITUS bookstore and CHAMPIONSOUND, and co-sponsored by the Public Humanities Initiative and the Program in Ethnicity, Race and Migration at Yale. Upon discovering that Pigott and I shared a number of cumbia crate-fiend friends and acquaintances, diggers like Supersonido and the tripartite team of Ganas, Enorbito and Lengua at Mas Exitos, I realized how tight the community of presenters and preservers of cumbia music is in the United States. Although Pigott travels regularly into the Amazonian jungle to find records so rare that he may own the only existing copy, his curating project takes place in the North: sometimes requiring that he mend broken 45s lest the recording be lost forever.

His current project takes on a similar mission of communal preservation. Along with Lima Foto Libre, Masstropicas, in conjunction with La Cumbia de Mis Viejos, Chapillacs, and Fokus Limonta, is kickstarting a project to travel up the Ucayali river, through the Peruvian rainforest, to record and document a new cumbia movement, expecting to emerge from the adventure with a 7″ and LP from the recordings. In donating to the project, you reserve your own artifactual vinyl from the jungle.

There is, of course, a more complicated implication for the exportation of jungle sounds to the world stage. In many cases, the cumbia musicians of Peru include a shaman in their band, as if to ward of the devil of wherewithal. Nonetheless, under the spiritual guidance of the genii of jungle rhythms, the spirit of ayahuasca and the funky techniques of modern production, cumbia has transformed to and from chicha, entered the 1980s and transpired to take its place on the world’s stage while remaining resiliently local. The brew having settled, it seems, in their favor.

But, you might be asking, where the sounds? Upon Masstropicas‘ digs, I present the following selection:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLX6saKTTig

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ocym9HVyMP0

www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PKRJWKJgKM

www.youtube.com/watch?v=LElcPIokLuI

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lpFk75GO9I

For more, you know where to go.