Albrecht Durer, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling ruin upon ruin and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. — Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History

The end of the year prompts all sorts of rituals of recollection. We’ve once again revolved around the sun, and to prepare us for the celestial rhythms of the next cycle, turning our gaze backwards allows us to reflect on where we’re heading, as if no great distance separated the before from the after. To some remarkable extent, we’re still here, alive on the planet, although we might not be so confident of our stay for much longer. This year, the proliferation of apocalyptic tales, natural disasters, eschatological nightmares, and the perpetual recycling of end of history lamentations have permeated the inclinations of both popular and unpopular culture, especially in music (and film, too, as Hydra’s Jose-Luis Moctezuma relays), spreading its virus through the subterranean fringes, and whatever one might still call the avant-garde.

Perhaps we’ve come to take seriously some of the unnerving considerations proposed by philosopher Ray Brassier, that our impending extinction requires our deepest reflection, one which should reorient our thinking away from the anthropocentric framework of the Copernican Revolution, to regions unbound by the gravitational pull between earth and sun. Enlightenment requires an absolutely unhuman mode of thinking, living, creating. Unhinging ourselves, as Brassier prescribes, would certainly follow to its end the internal logic of what Simon Reynolds recounts in his book published earlier this year, Retromania: Popular music has turned its activities to the past, bewitched by the ruins of history and recordings, disjointed from its temporal circumstances by the internet’s diffusive mode of networking and distributing information. But if the difference between past, present, and future no longer holds in any simplistic chronological order, what then becomes of history, of world-annihilation, without an end in sight?

Mark Fisher, who has written imaginative politico-economic examinations of  music on his blog, K-Punk, suggests in his recent book, Capitalist Realism, that our current obsession with annihilation reflects a stifled awareness that, in our post cold-war malaise where we are frozen by the never ending war on terror, we can no longer even envision an escape from late capitalism–a horizon outside the ever expanding frontiers of the market system in which everything is swallowed. His diagnosis certainly gains some weight from the year’s many events of unrest, from the revolutions invoked by the Arab Spring, and its continuing struggles, the Eurozone’s teetering on the edge of collapse, to the global eruption of physical occupations of the idea of Wall Street. Nevertheless, earlier this year, a Christian radio broadcaster’s warnings of rapture did not come to pass. Twice. But now, the dawn of 2012, and the fabled end of the Mayan calendar, is upon us.

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As for music itself, few releases captivated this year’s disoriented, apocalyptic zeitgeist as well as James Ferraro’s Far Side Virtual. Conceptually daring, alienating, horrifically ordinary and optimistic in the most disturbing way possible–Far Side Virtual is a nearly unlistenable musical theory of the technological dream in which we are all enraptured. Ferraro pulls sonic detritus from iPhone apps, computer start-up noises, ringtones, late 1980s and early ’90s infomercials and commercials, Pixar films, and music scrapped from video games menus and end game sequences. While anchored in references to synth-pop, Far Side‘s virtually encoded soundscape is modified through an Apple laptop with digital beds of drum patterns and glowing, synthetic shine.

At first, I couldn’t quite figure out Ferraro’s stance: sincere, ironic, critical? What I’ve determined, though, is that his intention doesn’t matter much. Ferraro’s artistic talent lies in a phenomenological sensitivity for hyper-realism: the way contemporary, digitally networked technology is altering our way of desiring, connecting, committing. In interviews, he has reported to tap into this hyper-realism in strip malls in Los Angeles, St. Marks in New York, and the global non-space of Starbucks cafes. After listening to the album a few times, just on tinny laptop speakers, I’ve come to find myself exiled to a strange sensation of lost, endless time within an enhanced world, one whose cycles arhythmically (un)balance the rapid production and satisfaction of distributed desire. It’s spontaneous and overwhelming.

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Many music journalists come to understand and listen to Ferraro’s music in terms of the theoretical framework of hypnagogic pop, a concept initiated by The Wire’s David Keenan set to mark the recent emergence of lo-fi rock evoking a nebulous psychological state between being awake and dreaming. Is this space something of the last frontier? Given the kind of anxiety and unrest Ferraro’s work inspires, and the hyper-sterilized space within which it puts into motion its labor, the hypnagogic might just establish the deterritorialized boundaries for a new sort of mobilization. Simon Reynolds sums it up concisely: ”Perhaps the secret idea buried inside hypnagogic pop is that the ’80s never ended. That we’re still living there, subject to that decade’s endless end of History, killing time as we wait for something (seismic, subaltern) to rupture the dream.”

Ferraro wasn’t the only musician this year to harness the kitsch of the dream and remagnetize the tech-utopia of waking life. John Maus, also working within the sphere of 1980s synth-pop, produced an excellent record of romantic solipsism and city-living despair. In short, he wrestles with the Enlightenment myth of our alleged autonomy over our desires, and seeks out his true desire in the most unlikely sonic resonances. Maus named his record We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves after the 12th thesis of French philosopher Alain Badiou’s fifteen theses on contemporary art, published in issue 23 of Lacanian Ink:

Since it is sure of its ability to control the entire domain of the visible and the audible via the laws governing commercial circulation and democratic communication, Empire no longer censures anything. All art, and all thought, is ruined when we accept this permission to consume, to communicate and to enjoy. We should become the pitiless censors of ourselves.

Maus, like Ferraro, struggles to pass the threshold, without contamination, into those spaces unheralded, neglected, or forgotten by Empire–post-industrial detritus, everyday noise, abandoned infrastructure, lost time–where the markings, traces, and graffiti of outsider desire thrive. The young hip-hop producer of Dipset fame, Araabmuzik, found the source of his scrawl in the shadow of 1990s trance, some of the most ecstatic, optimistic, and highly marketed music to ever subject millions of alleged Dionysian initiates to the rush of the rave, the utopian reveries of the bass drop. I wrote on Araabmuzik’s record, aptly titled Electronic Dream, in late summer, and still marvel on its way of uncovering the dark, even tragic motivation, of classic Eurodance cheese. The haunted underbelly of trance is revealed through unsettling bass patterns, nearly arhythmic percussion, and a gurgling dose of demonic synthetic keys, all which suffocate the false idols, kitschy optimism, of the source material which he attacks, perverts, and desiccates. An unliving, underground stream awakens.

Any end of the year recap also has to account for the resurgence of the overground stream of raves in 2011. A resurgence which helped a previously unknown emo screamer turned dubstep producer, Scrillex, garner five Grammy nominations, including best new artist. Yes, dubstep has gone mainstream, a sequence launched at the beginning of the year by Britney Spears, and culminated in the easily digestible electronic rhythms of Scrillex (and a dubstep Korn album?). But despite the increasing monotony, and consistently conventional masculinity of the genre, sometimes disparagingly, or lovingly, labeled bro-step, something is left to be said of Scrillex’s bizarre music video for “First of the Year (Equinox).” If we could generalize from its narrative, and the video’s popularity at nearly 30 million views, then I have to say something is disturbing about millions of festival goers across the country identifying with a little girl who resists a pedophile’s advances through the angsty violence of Scrillex’s wobble, wobble, bass. This music doesn’t exactly mirror the utopian trance of Paul Oakenfold’s ’90s, but has mutated in the conditions of depressed times, diagnosing the general disillusionment with, yet attachment to, the dream plaguing a great deal of America’s everyday, middle-class populace.

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Some more unsettling explorations of masculinity come from Los Angeles’s Odd Future collective and Sacramento’s Death Grips. While Scrillex sycophants scorn the figure of the pedophile-like good upholders of resentful ethics, Tyler, the Creator surprisingly found a way to incarnate a kind of moral decrepitude in Goblin that prompted music critics and listeners to wage in ceaseless battles over censorship. Although Tyler fell just as quickly he rose, it seemed like no one from either side of the debate actually listened to his music. Whatever your stance on the moral caliber of his raps, Tyler’s serpent-like nihilism holds up as an antithesis to Alain Badiou’s call for us to become the “pitiless censors” of ourselves: his free reign of desire somehow taps into an illicit territory which resists facile consummation. I credit this to Tyler’s musical schizophrenia more so than any rebellious talent, one whose psychological disintegration produces a multiplicity of contradictory perspectives on a festering decay haunting both our most banal-seeming and repressed desires. Hugely popular R&B saviors, Drake and The Weeknd, on the other hand, promote a kind of self-indulgence and sexual decadence that fits all too perfectly into typologies of capital. Although, I have to admit that I find great, thoughtless pleasure in listening to The Weeknd.

Drummer Zach Hill’s side project, Death Grips, also has just as little remorse for moralists. Their release, Ex Military, sounds like the biological weaponry of Cannibal Ox, deconstructed into feverish noise and maniacal slaps of bass–nightmarish landscapes of sound recalling the destructed bio-mechanical ecologies of dystopian films from the likes of Ridley Scott and George Miller. On “Guillotine,” MC Ride spits raw verses, his voice barking a kind of incomprehensible language, whose tenor joyously approaches the precipice of apocalyptic implosion. Music, even sound, becomes dehumanized, embodying to the extreme Ray Brassier’s concept of “the unlife”. The specter of Brassier, implied in its extreme nihilism, haunts a number of releases, this year. Another brilliant record from Hype Williams, One Nation, begins with pure morbidness: a gruff voice appears from the shadows in an untitled track over sparse dub rhythms and swirling John Carpenter synth lines, insisting on the need for the living to face up to mortality: “but of course everyone dies, and you will too.” The record heeds this wisdom, playing with the fleeting character of recycled sounds from UK bass, as if they are all about to wisp away as soon as they appear.

One of the most evocative listens of the year, Kuedo’s Severant invokes the lost paradise of Scott’s Blade Runner with a recharged urgency. “Vectoral,” in particular, beautifully echoes Vangelis’s soundtrack, reframing the synthetic pulse within footwork rhythms, programmed breakdowns, and drum machine gusts of digitally-manufactured liquid wind. More than a few musicians found inspiration in the frenetic, tinny grooves bubbling up from the hoods of South and West Chicago in the form of footwork. Descending from the same sort of post-industrial depressed economies that brought about Detroit techno and ghetto-tech bootlegs, footwork sounds strangely like UK drum n’ bass or grime, as if the Black Atlantic diaspora of electronic rhythms cyphered towards synchronic destinations despite their regional dislocation. DJ Rashad’s Just a Taste EP booms with poly-percussive rhythms that shift abruptly in winding drum patterns while vocal cuts dissolve into looped beats of flittering noise. A good introduction to footwork is the second volume of Bangs & Works on Planet Mu, a compilation tracing the grooves in their constant ascension, without any final horizon in sight–after all, this is music essentially made for the dance floor.

What Kuedo’s Severant does best is guide desire to take pleasure in loss, transforming nostalgia into renewal–invigorating the shadowed wastelands perhaps once formed and shaped by Empire, but since forgotten, thrown into the gutter to rot and decay. The two releases of the year which I keep coming back to, Laurel Halo’s Hour Logic EP and Oneohtrix Point Never’s Replica, conjure a kind of mournful alienation that bridges the apocalyptic character of melancholia with an ecstatic resoluteness. While Laurel Halo prefers a symbiosis between percussion and ambient fluxes pushing bio-engineered corpse of techno to new heights of potency, Oneohtrix’s alchemy consists in the sounds of analogue ambient–flooded synth melodies, electric surges, and sparse piano keys–eerily unbounded in a ghostly absence of percussion.

From turning our gaze backwards, and recycling lost time, a new music is emerging: hyper-real, intensely emotional, richly theoretical, outside anachronistic sentiments for the acoustic or authentic–slowly paving way for the impending rupture to come.

Here now are Hydra Magazine’s top ten films of 2011:

10. The Tree of Life — dir. Terrence Malick (USA)

9. Nostalgia for the Light – dir. Patricio Guzmán (Chile/Germany/France)

The thirst for cosmic presence, cosmic relevance, is one that does not leave us even when we are at our most ordinary and vulnerable. The Tree of Life’s analeptic urgency demanded something of an escape into cosmic refraction, but where it seemed to stumble upon the insurmountable obstacles of New Age aesthetics, Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light (its title borrowed from a book by astronomer-poet Michel Cassé) succeeds in restricting its intellectual and emotional interests to symmetries of a less ornamental nature. The Atacama Desert in Chile is the driest desert on earth; for reason of its dryness and clarity of air, it is the site of two different (and seemingly unrelated) activities: its high altitude provides the ideal atmosphere for the research of two major astronomical observatories, from which distant galaxies are glimpsed and studied; but the desert’s vastness was also, tragically, the preferred dumping site for the assassinated political victims of the murderous Pinochet regime. The search for distant stars and planets instantly absorbs into itself the (self-same) search for the murdered victims of a grievous (and terribly recent) political past. If the stars and planets are the effects of a million years gazing back at us, then our own contemporary present is nothing less than a fleeting illusion, the momentary trace of astral states depleted long ago. An archaeology of memory, of the past that cannot, must not, be abandoned, hence, assumes a magnitude equal to that of the pain and voracious desire to know, which drives mothers, scientists, sisters, and astronomers to locate their celestial origins in the mineral sleep “of what is past, or passing, or to come.” The mournful search for the bones of the dead, beneath a moisture-less sedimentation occasionally sprinkled by the salt of fallen, minuscule teardrops, finds resonance in the daily, patient work of lonesome astronomers. Thus, “the calcium which we carry in our bones, the bones which the dead offer up to the living as consolation, is the same calcium that the farthest stars are made of, the same dust that has fallen over eons on the crust of the Atacama, and which has shaped constellations out of the remains of prehistoric man.”

8. Meek’s Cutoff — dir. Kelly Reichardt (USA)

Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff unravels with very little exposition; dialogue is muttered almost inaudibly, as if we were accidentally stumbling upon the middle of someone else’s conversation. Natural sounds blend in with human voices, sounds that describe the economy and daily chores of living permanently on the road: wind passing through blankets on a makeshift clothesline, spoons tapping and scraping on metal plates, the crackle of someone lighting a pipe or stoking a campside fire, the murmur of a devout woman reciting Bible verse, her husband splashing water in his face in the light of early morning. Events occur strictly on the plane of the immediate present, irregardless of the overtly historical character of the costume and proceedings — we are somewhere near to, but also very far from, the Oregon Trail, and we, along with a small group of emigrants traveling on a harsh wagon road known to posterity as the Meek Cutoff, are lost in the blank unfolding of the present, bewildered by the vast openness of the road and humbled by our incapacity to perceive anything more significant than the sight of the mute sun rising, and setting early, on a monotonous and water-starved landscape. Reichardt makes no effort at romanticizing or mythologizing the pastness of the past, and for this reason Meek’s Cutoff circumvents the fictitious retro-feel nostalgia that too many latter-day westerns fall into. Meek’s Cutoff is as urgently contemporary (and as urgently local) as Reichardt’s previous film, Wendy and Lucy (2008), was: the Oregon depicted in both films constitutes a being-lost-in-the-present which is timeless and indelible. Meek’s Cutoff is undoubtedly Reichardt’s greatest achievement yet, and as an exercise in the western genre, it offers the wide-screen spaciousness and cinematographic richness that all orthodox westerns are known for. But what makes Meek’s Cutoff truly original is its rigorous use of atmosphere: its sonic absorption of environmental pressures and aleatory forces produces passages which hint at but never fully reach a kind of hermetic enlightenment.

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7. The Kid with a Bike — dir. Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (Belgium/France)

6. The Mill and the Cross — dir. Lech Majewski (Poland/Sweden)

Brueghel’s famous sense of motility — multitudinous, boundless and scattered — is brought to rapturous life by Lech Majewski’s The Mill and the Cross, one of the finest films on art to have been produced in recent memory. One is reminded of Peter Greenaway’s oeuvre, particularly Nightwatching (2007), a dramatic recreation of the historical forces that worked for and against the completion of Rembrandt’s “The Nightwatch” (1642); but Majewski’s work avoids Greenaway’s theatricality and licentious asides by immersing itself within the pictorial fabric of Brueghel’s dizzyingly meticulous canvas. Much like in Auden’s poem on Brueghel’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” the historical/mythical subject has been replenished by its delimitation: its off-screen, minor placement allows for the plurality of life to flower around its small puncture-point. Icarus, much like Christ — titular subjects of their respective paintings — are no longer the overbearing, overdetermined despots of subject-object relations; rather, they serve as Archimedean vanishing points from which, and through which, the sentient world is allowed to breathe, to move, to come to vivid life. Majewski’s wisdom in following Bruegel’s example, situating his film in the pictorial depths that Bruegel walked through and discoursed upon, provides us with the felicitous occasion of watching the (cinematic) frame vanish and blend into the pictorial surface.

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5. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia — dir. Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Turkey)

There is a hilarious scene in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Distant (2002) when Mahmut, a middle-aged, successful photographer, treats his cousin Yusuf, a laborer from the countryside temporarily staying with him, to a screening of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker. Yusuf, ostensibly bored by the pensive film, excuses himself and retires to his room for the night; the more worldly Mahmut, now left alone, decides to eject Tarkovsky’s masterwork and slyly pops in a porn film (clearly part of the nightly routine for a bachelor used to living alone in an Istanbul apartment), all the while anxiously glancing over to Yusuf’s bedroom door in the fear that it should open and interrupt his secret pleasure. The comedy, of course, arrives when Yusuf does open the door and Mahmut quickly changes the channel — Yusuf, now interested in the television program, hovers over Mahmut, who pretends to channel surf randomly. The scene holds a lot of meaning within the thematic context of Distant, but I find it also curiously resonant in the leaps which Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s artistic career has taken. The disjunction, or should we say the distance, that divides the greatness of a film like Tarkovsky’s Stalker (or any of the immortal Russian’s films for that matter) from the lowness of the common porn film is about as immeasurable as Dante’s Paradiso was from the Inferno (Lars von Trier, another Tarkovsky acolyte, has frequently tried to bridge the two levels, the spiritual and the base, in several of his films). Ceylan’s humorous appropriation of Tarkovsky performed two functions: it brilliantly conveyed the vast gulf which separates the impenetrable formalism of great and timeless art from the contingencies and trivial demands of modern life (particularly, in Ceylan’s estimation, the kind of life lived in Istanbul or any other cosmopolitan city sunk into the disaffections of postmodernity); but the scene also projected, perhaps subconsciously, Ceylan’s evident aspirations to commit himself to an art worthy of Tarkovksy, a cinema, moreover, made profoundly difficult by the insuperable ordinaryness of situations.

4. Mysteries of Lisbon — dir. Raúl Ruiz (Portugal/France)

3. A Separation — dir. Asghar Farhadi (Iran)

2. Poetry — dir. Lee Chang-dong (South Korea)

1. The Turin Horse — dir. Bela Tarr (Hungary)

2011 was a fertile year for festival films, especially for well-established and world-renowned auteurs, a few of whom happened to produce some of their most vital work. Some interesting parallels arose: ruminations on the origin(s) of life contrasted with visions of an apocalyptic nature. The end of the world turned out to be an occasion to reflect back on its beginning. Other films were almost wholly involved in the different valences of the surface, either as an apparition of speed and tactility, or as an asylum from the immanent and consternating depths of the past. As usual, there are a number of films that won’t appear on our list simply because they were unavailable or were not released in time. But we are confident that we have selected among the very best; in fact, there were so many films that we loved, we had to expand the list to 20 entries (from last year’s 10). So, without further ado, here is the first part of Hydra Magazine’s Top 20 Best Films of 2011 (for Part Two, click here):

Reduced to its fundamental parts (a preternaturally sadistic prince abuses and terrorizes his subjects at his every whim, so a group of 13 samurai are secretly gathered in a conspiracy to kill/stop him at any cost), the plot goes no farther than “good guys go after the bad guy” — but this is precisely the reason why 13 Assassins works so well: it wastes no time to get to the meat of the action, of which the centerpiece is the 40+ minute final battle scene in which the 13 samurai take on an army of 130 soldiers. Part of the pleasure of the film is in discovering how the 13 manage to level their odds: where Seven Samurai quite famously developed engaging storylines by involving the villagers in the operation of the makeshift battle fortress they construct alongside their samurai protectors, Miike and his screenwriters, perhaps sensing their inability to recreate such a highly inimitable plot structure, choose to forgo too much exposition and dive right into the visual surprise of trick-shot battle tactics (but this is probably more due to the inherent design of Kaneo Ikegami’s original screenplay). A young boy’s fever dream undoubtedly, but one whose execution puts to shame the current stock of action and superhero films that are being made with three times the budget in Hollywood now (that said, there was probably no better pure summer action film than this one in 2011).

19. The Strange Case of Angelica – dir. Manoel de Oliveira (Portugal)
Manoel de Oliveira, as has been abundantly remarked upon, is still making films at the tender age of 103. Not only has he managed to continue working steadily since directing his first film in 1927, he has been producing films at a rapid pace. The Strange Case of Angelica, following quickly on the heels of its companion piece, Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl (2009), only confirms the suspicion that Oliveira won’t be quitting anytime soon. Angelica is filled with a literary allusiveness that saturates its many frames and interiors. Beginning with a quotation from Antero de Quental and propelled by the verse of José Régio, the film covers a wide expanse of literary-historical landscape: it feels both antique and contemporary at the same time, like a 19th century short story furnished with the techno-aesthetic novelties of the early 20th. Angelica centers itself around the reanimating wonders of photographic art, but its fable concerns itself with the encroachment of the cinematic on a chimerical world divided into a series of rooms, frames, and landscapes. Interiors in Oliveira’s film seem to denote an artificiality made resplendent only through controlled light and photography, balanced on the other hand by the naturalistic landscapes of plein air scenery (most notably in several passages when the photographer, a young man named Issac [played by Ricardo Trepa], shoots pictures of day laborers singing and working on a hillside farm). If some feel that the film’s peculiar pacing carries an artificial dryness bordering on the unreal and the corny, I would answer that its strangeness relies precisely on this dryness and artificiality which Oliveira meticulously builds up frame by frame — Angelica‘s atmosphere of muted washed-out colors, anachronistic knick-knacks, and old portraiture only makes necessary the odd Méliès-style special effects that suddenly, but tastefully, lift the two dream lovers into the ether of early cinema.

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In contrast, the Claire section is impressively subtle and affective. Gainsbourg does an excellent job bringing real pathos to her performance. Though we are meant to be critical of Claire, who wants only to sit on the terrace with a nice glass of wine and what’s left of her family—(and they will have a little Beethoven playing in the background as they go!)—her sincerity, as empty as it is, is itself moving. As is the care she takes in selecting the perfect piece of chocolate for Justine, the person least likely to care, and the arrangement of the flowers by her bedside, and her futile attempts to take her young son somewhere, anywhere, as the world ends. She loads him into the golf cart and drives—fast—towards what? It doesn’t matter, but she needs to feel as if there’s a point to the driving. As she scurries around like an insect about to drown in a deluge, Justine looks on with digust. Now it is Justine who is the villain, not the planet careening through space to destroy our own. And through this, the ending offers a splinter of comfort. Justine, the ultimate nihilist, nevertheless offers something that is the closest thing to a revaluation of ritual that we will get out of von Trier. We will go on building our magic caves.

– Anelise Chen

Before the violent turning point, the anonymous “driver” or “kid” played brilliantly by Ryan Gosling suffers through at least half an hour of emotional awakening, stirred from the solipsistic confines of his shiny, enclosed vehicle, to the outwards overflowing of love for his too cute neighbor, Irene (Carey Mulligan), and his growing affection for her young son. I’ve already followed this propulsive narrative in terms of the stunningly beautiful synth-pop soundtrack, which sonically provokes  the cosmic expansion of the driver’s emotional sphere from an enclosed world of solipsism, but something is left to be said of director Nicolas Winding Refn’s play with themes of the human and machine, mechanical labor and violence, love and war. After all, the driver is a mechanic by day, a stunt devil during the fringes of his workday, and an amazingly expert get-away driver mercenary in the dark hours of the neon-lit night. His dawning love interest doesn’t so much pull him away from mechanical labor as transform his nuanced precision into even more incredible feats, expressed in what could count as heroic or even superhuman acts of violence, on the level of wars waged in epic romance, against those who threaten what’s gathered into his emotional sphere or resonance. But back to the soundtrack, you can now listen to two hours worth of Johnny Jewel’s unused tunes for an “imaginary film.”

These are interesting times indeed. When something we collectively call time is interrupted by a situation, when by situation we mean something that has moved although we know not yet in what direction, we have something very interesting developing. Lauren Berlant says a situation is a kind of time “in which a relation of persons is sensed to be changing but the rules for habitation and the genres of storytelling about it are unstable, in chaos.” Situation is interruption, a fiery bowl poured onto the sea.

A canister of pepper spray on a line of seated students: I see the video from UC Davis showing the officer whose name has not been released lowering a smooth and righteous handle of pepper spray from the sky to the students’ heads and faces. The nameless judge throws down upon them a sword of fire. It is evidently well practiced. I wonder how many others have swallowed his burning fist. An incident videotaped and an officer suspended doesn’t change certain facts.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AdDLhPwpp4

What brought Los Angeles to a breaking point in 1992 wasn’t just that famously grainy video but that that video finally revealed what had been experienced as the status quo for years. And the police seem to understand the terms of their relationship to an increasingly agitated group of disaffected people; so the status quo hasn’t changed, their defense of it has just learned to allow itself such excesses across a broader base. The end product, so to speak, is an antagonistic police force with an increasingly diminished compulsion to hide its use of excessive force. Notice how he raises the canister to the sky before lowering it with an air of grace over their lowered heads. So high that the four corners of the earth should see.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=yE0Uua7jnSA

And they would be gathered for battle, their number like the sand of the sea. And they would march up over the broad earth and surround the camp of the saints and the beloved city.

In college I took a translation course with Robert Hass. He was working on the Japanese Haiku of Basho and I was into doing some variety of Latin and Romance lyrics. Given as he was at that time to environmental concerns, his selections were pretty idiosyncratic and, likewise, my own probably reflected a range of interests limited to matters erotic if not blithely inebriated and esoteric. Something like a decade later, I read his opinion piece in the New York Times describing his assault by the Alameda County deputy sheriffs. The story of his wife thrown to the ground while he is bludgeoned in the ribs follows a string of similar stories and incidents: Women and the elderly pepper sprayed and beaten, military veterans killed, all kinds of people submitted to egregious uses of oppressive force. The videos I see show me an army who would kill but are at the moment content to maim. If I were taking Hass’ class today, my selections would be different. Ernesto Cardenal, Roque Dalton, and Pablo Neruda would be more pertinent voices.

I am surprised by the difference ten years can make to the social tick of the earth’s clock.

We have a situation here: And they marched up over the broad earth and surrounded the camp; but fire came down from heaven and consumed them and they will be tormented day and night for ever and ever.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGf9wEIXMns

The weeds seem to laugh as they hit and slide on each other in the wind until the wind brings a fire upon their hissing bodies, a situation.

Hass’ editorial ends with the strange image of a tent lifted by helium balloons into the air, hovering over the plaza, “large and awkward,” he says, “occupying the air.” “Today and everyday,” echoes Geoffrey G. O’Brien, “we occupy the air.” And from one Abiezer Coppe again the injunction to “occupie the ayre.” After a recent post, I was criticized for comparing the voices of the occupy movement’s human megaphone to a hymn of ghosts, enchanting alien bodies to be re-chanted by alien windpipes. When air traverses the windpipe it is breath or spirit, the vital principal within living beings. In German “spirit” is geist, our etymological ancestor for “ghost,” of which Hegel says that communal forms of life are built. Geist, as he uses it, could also be translated as “mind,” if mind is understood to be operating at a higher level of existence than just self-awareness. “Spirit, so far as it is the immediate truth, is the ethical life of a nation: — the individual, which is a world.” This worlding of the individual occurs by a process of acculturation and, in moving his discussion to effective cultural objects, he defines culture as the “world of self-alienated spirit.” Although we might feel ourselves to be reflected in another person’s poetry, for example, we are not committed to it except insofar as we are bound to its alienations. Culture allows us, more generally, to reflect and, in doing so, enter a concrete actuality, a grounding effect. Spiritual substance brings us into actual reality. Geist is breath and is also mind, much like Donne’s spiritus or pneuma, (“Since thou and I sigh one another’s breath”), the motile air bringing body and mind together in the speaking voice. When air traverses the windpipe, it, also voice, likewise can be poetry. So I likewise repeat the injunction that we occupy the air.

And though they might stand at the four corners of the earth, holding the four winds of the earth, that the wind should not blow on the earth, nor on the sea, nor on any tree, a vial of air will be released with a great voice out of the temple of heaven. And the voice will be as of many waters.

When a certain illusion is eroded, gnawed like a cliff-base by the sea’s persistent tooth, it will not be again stabilized. Who still believes (viz., gives spirit to) the fantasy that they are today there to serve and protect anything other than a system designed to serve and protect a privileged few? The number of violent police might be like the sand but the sand is not the sea, churning in its spirited contradictions, even swallowing the sand, if it will. These waters rush from the voice of the occupations. They are the churn of history, even as that churn might sicken the sick. They have become the intractable situation.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGKuX8akRzw

The pre-cinematic origin of Bela Tarr’s The Turin Horse (2011) holds residence at an unlikely (and resistant) site of historiography: the mental breakdown of Friedrich Nietzsche. Whether the facts of Nietzsche’s breakdown in Turin are as true as one anecdotal legend claims, the narrative details are compelling enough to stand forth as fiction: “In Turin, on January 3rd, 1889, Friedrich Nietzsche steps out of the door of number six, Via Carlo Alberto, perhaps to take a stroll, perhaps to go by the post office to collect his mail.” The mundaneness of the incidentals, in which Nietzsche assumes the role of an ordinary man who ponders two equally banal choices (to take a leisure walk, or to pick up the mail? or why not both?), augments the pull of the inevitable catastrophe. “Not far from him, or indeed very far removed from him, a cabman is having trouble with his stubborn horse.” The cabman begins to whip the horse viciously because it refuses to budge and convey its load, and Nietzsche, overwhelmed by the sudden violence and pathos of the event, rushes to the horse’s aid, throws himself on its neck, and prevents the cabman from flogging it any further. Nietzsche, perhaps feeling underneath his arms and face the rippling skin and pulsing heart of the animal, breaks down in convulsive tears and, as a crowd collects around him, submerging him further beneath the heat of an encounter which has escalated beyond the point of comprehension, he collapses unconscious. The rest, as they say, is history: carried back to his apartment, the philosopher wakes up, but he can no longer function as he had; that is, he can no longer make autonomous decisions about taking either leisure strolls or visits to the post office, or anything else for that matter. He lives out the rest of his years in a state of profound philosophical silence, “only broken on occasion by a lengthy and unpunctuated scream.”

Bela Tarr

As scripted by Tarr and his regular screenwriter, the great Hungarian novelist Laszlo Krasznahorkai, the unfounded but no less evocative event of “the flogging of the Turin horse” signals the terminus of Nietzsche’s life as a philosopher, though not the end of his life as an all-too-human man (he still would live on for another eleven years under the care of his mother and, later, his sister Elisabeth). Tarr’s film uses Nietzsche’s dramatic exit from public life as the point of departure: of what happened to Nietzsche, reduced to the state of being a “gentle and demented” man, we presumably know enough. But to Tarr and Krasznahorkai a greater historical lacuna emerges: “Of the horse…we know nothing.” The nearly five minute tracking shot that opens The Turin Horse immediately answers the query in a stridently phenomenological manner: the horse materializes right before us, and we see it has finally recovered from the Nietzsche episode and moved onward. The speckled horse pulls its driver with grim but determined velocity through a cold skeletal landscape that promises no end in sight. Moving Sisyphus-like toward a destination that lies somewhere beyond the screen (a liminal place that might be located somewhere at the far end of the world), its heavy but forceful movement seems to occur in a vacuum, a progress that is abjured by the eskhaton of nonprogress, Zeno’s impossibility of movement. The horse moves because it is forced to, but inwardly, we may say, the horse does not move; its muscular nature is still and timorous perhaps, and though solidly built, it resigns itself to a deathlike trance made stark by its inability to abdicate the cruel task assigned to its strained legs, its aching back impelled by the whips and grunts of a stubborn but hardworn and similarly bestial man. Man and animal are one in their movement forward.

All throughout this eternalized march, Mihaly Vig’s solemn funereal music envelops us (as it will continue to envelop us throughout the film, as a doom-ridden leitmotif), and we are transported by the fluid camera that swivels around the horse and keeps pace with its advance (as if it were tied to the magnetic pole of the horse’s moving sphere), and we are transported by the horse itself on a darkening passage into the closed world of Tarr’s film. It goes without saying that the first shot of The Turin Horse (much like the first shot of many of Tarr’s films) constructs the whole architectural valency of the film in miniature, only this time in an inverse relation: the action-event of the horse’s trudge through an eternalized landscape turns out to be the positive topside of what gradually develops into an entropic negativizing of the scenario. The film moves, as one critic has astutely pointed out, from the “pure movement of cinema” to “the absolute stasis of photography.” (One is tempted to add: from the animism of the cinema to the spectral entombment of the photograph.)

 

www.youtube.com/watch?v=v32n4lCG0OA

 

The march of the horse from the historiographical site of Nietzsche’s departure from world history (or should we call it rather his dramatic entrance?) to the ahistoric realm of Tarr’s picture, in which the horse-driver and his daughter dwell in their own phenomenological vacuum, constitutes a suspension of dramatic impulse within the slow freeze of the film’s gaze. The horse, which we just witnessed trudging determinedly toward us, refuses during the next “six days” of the film’s arc (each chapter is divided into separate days) to pull the cart-wagon again. Just as it had done in a parallel universe one innocuous day on a cobblestone street in Torino, the horse respectfully declines the apparatus of its vocation; it prefers not to perform its job, we may say, because it senses an ending on its way to arriving, a metaphysical “dead brick wall” past which it cannot imagine moving. The horse’s refusal is the first decisive act of the film, or rather, the hinge on which the film shifts from the ostentatious mobility of the tracking shot to the reciprocally stringent anchoring of the film in the inertia of domestic life. The horse’s sad refusal ties us down to its stable life and, concomitantly, to the rustic cottage inhabited by the horse-driver and his daughter. The story shifts from “Of the horse…we know nothing” to “Of the carter, and of his life at home, we also know nothing.” But these two focal points soon become merged: man and animal are also at one in their habitation.

After nearly twenty minutes of non-dialogue, we learn to the full what kind of meager, bone-dry existence the carter and his daughter endure. We perceive that the carter relies on his horse as the primary means of eking out a paltry economic subsistence, and that he relies on his daughter, in lieu of the absence of a wife or partner, to dress and feed him since he is lame in his right arm. The daughter, on her end, seems to enjoy no private life other than the absent-minded pleasure of staring out her window for extended periods of time; that is, when she is not stoking the fire, pulling water from the well, dressing and undressing her father, feeding the horse, cleaning the stable, and boiling potatoes for what seems to be their only meal of the day. Father and daughter rise early and, when darkness comes, they go to bed early — not to sleep, but to bide the reprieve that structures their waking hours. They do not speak much to each other, and their lack of words posits a life emptied of reflection or introspection, indeed of personal history and historical insight. The rituals that formulate their existence, and which are dictated by the objects and material conditions that restrict them to the bare essentials, are ultimately what define their severely curbed form-of-life, a life simultaneously bounded by the interiority of the austere cottage they call a home and by the ascetic cinematic space in which Tarr gives them limited range to dwell, sleep, and eat in.

But I must digress a little. The term “bare life” has specific significance, and it owes its recent conceptual resurgence to the work of Giorgio Agamben. In his book Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Agamben explains that since the Ancient Greeks had no term that could equate to our contemporary usage of the all-inclusive word life, they “used two terms that, although traceable to a common etymological root, are semantically and morphologically distinct: zoe, which expressed the simple fact of living common to all living beings (animals, men, or gods), and bios, which indicated the form or way of living proper to an individual or a group” (1). For Aristotle, zoe was excluded from consideration in the life of human beings: people were fundamentally thinkers whose form of thought, and not the mere fact of their living, defined their existence. But in the nebulous zone that sprouted between zoe (bare life) and bios (political existence), as human civilization grew more and more complex, a modern incarnation of man as containing both bare life and, in Michel Foucault’s words, harboring “the additional capacity for political existence,” became feasible. Political man was gradually recontextualized as a “human animal” who was still subject to the sovereign power of the polis or state apparatus as its resident or citizen, but who remained eternally suspect on account of his potential regression to the bare life of animals, vegetables, and things.

The proposition that existence stands higher than a just existence is false and ignominious, if existence is to mean nothing other than mere life… Man cannot, at any price, be said to coincide with the mere life in him, no more than with any other of his conditions and qualities, not even with the uniqueness of his bodily person. However sacred man is (or that life in him that is identically present in earthly life, death, and afterlife), there is no sacredness in his condition, in his bodily life vulnerable to injury by his fellow men. What, then, distinguishes it essentially from the life of animals and plants? And even if these could be sacred, they could not be so by virtue only of being alive, of being in life. It might be well worth while to track down the origin of the dogma of the sacredness of life. Perhaps, indeed probably, it is relatively recent, the last mistaken attempt of the weakened Western tradition to seek the saint it has lost to cosmological impenetrability.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPpJoTmIeuc

But bare life, mere sentience, is only one part of the puzzle of inclusion/exclusion in the architecture of The Turin Horse. The severity of the fading world winnows down their actions to the level of what Benjamin calls “mythical violence”: the violence which does not necessarily destroy laws or destroys life but which founds an order of things that must be patiently and habitually built up, again and again, day after day; a violence that is also a kind of law-making and law-keeping, the law of ritualized actions; the minor laws of domestic space and the major laws of boundaries and boundary-setting. (With this in mind, we can begin to understand the carter’s hostility toward or distrust of foreigners and strangers who visit his abode, those who trespass over the boundaries he set up or who force him into reactive thinking: “It is rubbish.”)

For a film that is so devoid of dramatic event and cataclysm, it is also one which problematizes the effects of critical appraisal despite its clarity of execution and the exhausting repetitiveness of its rituals. Tarr’s aesthetics of maximalized minimalism produces a disorientation involving its repetitions. The soundtrack, but also the framing of the scenes and the daily actions of the duo, are replayed over and over again, each day no different from the last except for the rare intrusions of other characters or the deprivation that comes with the reduction of their resources, of their water supply, of their hunger, of even the light that comes with each new day, and which disrupts the regularity of their domestic actions and behavior. The inclusiveness of these ceremonies of domesticity reciprocates the exclusiveness of each individual movement in the bare life of these apolitical people.

Just as Tarr and his crew had memorably performed in Satantango (1994), we revisit some of the same set-pieces but from different perspectives and angles (except that in The Turin Horse, each set-piece constitutes another day in chronological order, whereas in Satantango the scenes comprise a single chronological event re-seen from different points of view). The event of eating the boiled potatoes with their bare hands (and which scene signals more than this one the grounding of the carter and his daughter in the residuals of bare life?) is played numerous times, each time from a different perspective, i.e. from the daughter’s point of view, and then from the father’s point of view, and then from the side showing both of them looking upon each other, and so forth. Just as he accomplished in Satantango, Tarr submits us to a cinema of physical endurance, at once below cinema, but also qualitatively beyond its spectacle; a cinema in which we are bodily committed not as spectators but as participants in the rituals that constitute the very surface of the image. It is possible to consider the belaboring of each ritual to carry the purpose of causing us to suffer with them the ennui of each passing day, in which the same actions are performed ad infinitum (or until they or we perish); but I am more drawn to believe that each ritualistic repetition, because it is seen from a different perspective or angle, reconstitutes the event as a qualitatively different phenomenon quite distinct from the last; not only are the multiple repetitions of the potato eating different in kind, but they are also different in potentiality.

But what do these repetitions mean in relation to the aesthetic intentions of The Turin Horse? Its simplicity pushed to the point of absurdity foams at the mouth in Zarathustrean complexity. Its major inclusion, or should I say, its chief visibility, is that of the bare life of the carter (who I shall now call, archetypally, the patriarch) and that of the bare life of the daughter. Removed from political existence, indeed only barely clinging to the faintest lineaments of domesticity and civilization, they appear to be inhabiting a corner of the world at the margins of an apocalyptic event, in which human language, the foundation of political existence as such, is aborted and dispersed, quite literally, to the sound and bluster of the wind. These two people are only barely removed from animal existence, not in any pejorative sense, but in a way that is at once political (i.e. material) and metaphysical. It is to this extent that, quoting Agamben, “there is politics because man is the living being who, in language, separates and opposes himself to his own bare life and, at the same time, maintains himself in relation to that bare life in an inclusive exclusion” (8). So that the major exclusion, or rather, the film’s key invisibility, happens to be that of the political autonomy which has been denied to them. This is not simply to say that The Turin Horse is not a political film, but that its politics is compounded with the gestures and limitations of material disappearance; it is a film about the end of history and the consumption of a world order, perhaps even of the end of the world as we know it, not in a bang, but in a whisper. In short, it is a film about Nietzsche and about the ponderous silence in which he became submerged.

To return to our beginning: of the horse we know nothing, but the film makes it a point to put the horse and its dependents front and center; their exclusion from history automatically becomes the major inclusion in the film. Reciprocally, of Nietzsche we pretend to know enough; but it is his dramatic inclusion in the history of human civilization which Tarr/Kraznahorkai invert into an overwhelming invisibility in the film. A dialectic of presence/absence ensues. Nietzsche’s very absence in the film becomes an overbearing presence; he is the eraser in the book of history, and it is his thought process which slowly deadens the light, one would say, and makes impossible the virtuous powers of political sovereignty in a world gone abysmally absurd.

But this is only one way of looking at it. Another way is to reconsider the cumulative effect of the repetitions in the film. A few reviewers have already alluded to the Beckettian overtones that the repetitions play out. Two of the best reviews of the film (by Robert Koehler, the other by Andrew Schenker) utilize the classic ending line of Beckett’s The Unnameable as a pithy summation of the attitude conveyed in The Turin Horse: “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” — but a study of the literary work of Kraznahorkai would suffice on its own to explain how Tarr hit upon these existential tonalities without having to read Beckett. In any case, Beckett (and Kraznahorkai), both in their stylistics of prose and in their fundamental attitude, paint the gateway through which the film sets up Nietzschean games of absence/presence. I perceive instead something of a recreation of the concept of the eternal return, one of the most misunderstood and misquoted tropes of Nietzsche’s thought (see The Gay Science). Gilles Deleuze provides a supple explanation:

We misinterpret the expression “eternal return” if we understand it as “return of the same.” It is not being that returns but rather returning itself that constitutes being insofar as it is affirmed of becoming and of that which passes. It is not some one thing which returns but rather returning itself is the one thing which is affirmed of diversity or multiplicity. In other words, identity in the eternal return does not describe the nature of that which returns but, on the contrary, the fact of returning for that which differs. This is why the eternal return must be thought of as a synthesis; a synthesis of time and its dimensions, a synthesis of diversity and its reproduction, a synthesis of becoming and of the being which is affirmed in the becoming, a synthesis of double affirmation. (Nietzsche and Philosophy, 45)

Elsewhere, Deleuze rejects the term “mechanism” for describing what shape the eternal return takes form. “Why is mechanism such a bad interpretation of the eternal return? Because it does not necessarily or directly imply the eternal return. Because it only entails the false consequence of a final state.” The term mechanism resonates, I think, in Tarr’s film: it is precisely the kind of word one would use not only in describing its mechanical repetitions, but also in general consideration of what cinema does as an artform (the cinema is, in a superficial sense, the result of a variety of mechanisms at work). Yet this temptation to restrict or malign its repetitions as the result of a mechanism compounds the genius of the film for me: in spite of the logical resonance, I find myself unable to compare Tarr’s cinema of repetitions, such as they appear in The Turin Horse, to a mechanical process of “passing through the same set of differences again.”

The activation of the body in being laid bare by Tarr’s film defies or circumvents mere mechanical rotation or repetition; one is gradually weaned off the idea of “spectacle” and the body becomes the central event of the film’s “eternal return.” (“We must eat,” the patriarch says, because the body, ground degree zero for all versions of political existence, zoe or bios, is what ultimately matters.) The body in its full erosion represents, and quickly absorbs, the germ of the screen: we are also attempting to return to ordinary life, but its mundane ceremonies have been permanently affected, have undergone transmutation. After watching The Turin Horse, we cannot so simply “return” to life again; our conception of life has been transformed, its entrails slashed open. In the sense that Deleuze admonishes the description of the eternal return as a mechanical process, we are also encouraged to refuse labeling Tarr’s repetitions as mechanisms of the cinema. We are subliminally entering a zone of synthetic possibilities; we are placed beyond the cinema, in a curious state of exception, yet very much a part of the cinema, insofar as our body is heavily weighted with the experience of its totalizing, self-effacing image.

Describing “the abyss and the apotheosis” of Nietzsche’s final year of coherence before his mental breakdown, Pierre Klossowski writes, “Now he saw the world beyond language: was it the sphere of absolute muteness, or on the contrary the sphere of absolute language?” (Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, 251). This is the question which The Turin Horse asks not only of what Nietzsche glimpsed that fateful day in Torino, but also of what the patriarch and his daughter witnessed shortly before the end of the world arrived at their doorstep. The film’s shift from the sphere of absolute cinema to the sphere of total photography works as a correlative to the Nietzschean shift, but it also summons an inversion of its own mechanics: an entropic shift from an ending to a beginning. In the beginning, that is to say, at the multiple originary sites of cinema, there were already present the mechanisms of its destruction, a state of “sacredness” (in the Agamben sense) which plays out as an affirmation intent upon going mad, going bare, “becoming animal.” This is because what is repeated is affirmed, is active, is perpetually on its way to actualizing a truer, fundamentally different non-identity:

Only action and affirmation return: becoming has being and only becoming has being. That which is opposed to becoming, the same or the identical, strictly speaking, is not… We can thus see how the eternal return is linked, not to a repetition of the same, but on the contrary, to a transmutation. It is the moment or the eternity of becoming which eliminates all that resist it. It releases, indeed it creates, the purely active and pure affirmation. (Nietzsche and Philosophy, x)

In some ways, Tarr’s stated decision to not make any more films after The Turin Horse signifies a noble resumption of the Nietzschean concept of affirmation. The film’s last gasp is no true gasp, it recedes rather into unostentacious silence, and the images of the two archetypes, Patriarch and Daughter, become a pure affirmation that performs a double act: the will to nothingness, transmuted to the will to power, consummates itself, that is, negates its own negation; while the will to power, fulfilling the desire of a nihilism that wishes to vanquish itself, allows it to become pure nihilism, a nothingness, that allows the body, our bodies, to return to life, to make their recurrence in the world which lies beyond cinema.

On the road in southern Utah

Thelma left the soundtrack up to me. She would plan out our five-week trip from Los Angeles to New York and all I had to do was come up with some music to play. Our first stop was Las Vegas. We would stay in Circus Circus for a colorful slap in the face of the spectacular. From there we would abruptly shift from gambling and buffet-gorging in stale casinos to hiking and camping in the southern Utah desert, a sprawling and extraordinary landscape of red rock and blue sky. Some of the rocks were massive, unapproachable. I nearly collapsed from exhaustion three times in the shining sand. Maybe it was from shock.

We would then trek through Roswell–just to satisfy my childhood obsession with alien conspiracy theories–and through the endless truck pastures of the Texas panhandle. When returning from a relaxing jaunt in a swimming hole outside of Austin, a white Dodge Ram armored with a gleaming cattle herder would rear-end us, spin us sideways, and send us shopping for a beat-up hoopty in the many used car lots of East Texas.

The heat wave across the country, which fittingly skipped over our California point of departure, would assure profuse sweating for the rest of our escapades through the south: a horridly swampy New Orleans knocked me near-delirious. The driver of the Ram, a young Texan dressed in business casual, blamed his missteps on the sun. He was reaching for a bottle of water and didn’t notice the slowed down traffic zone. He just wanted to go home and have a beer. He tried to swerve but still hit us. His car had no dents. Ours was destroyed. Glass stormed down onto the asphalt and our bodies flung like Slinkies from the chairs. He was sorry he ruined our trip.

Hardly ruined. Road trips across America, I realized, aren’t like they read in the books. They are more difficult, tiresome, often filled with stretching moments of static, boredom. Sometimes, unimaginable violence. While Denis Johnson hit the mark with his short story “Car Crash While Hitchhiking,” I found our travels neither as loopy nor alienated. “And therefore I looked down into the great pity of a person’s life on this earth,” writes Johnson. “I don’t mean that we all end up dead, that’s not the great pity. I mean that he couldn’t tell me what he was dreaming, and I couldn’t tell him what was real.”

The songs capture the road trip better. For one, they are able to movingly navigate that tension Johnson pinpoints between reality and imagination. Since our expectations on the road met brute forces of resistance, our soundtrack required flexibility. And music is also precisely the sort of thing that can adapt to the friction of the world. Folk songs fold into blues into gospel into electronic dirges and driving chants and slapstick raps. We would finally cool off under the puffy white clouds of the Appalachians and come to a sudden stop in our home to be, New York. The city greeted us with crashing markets, an earthquake, and a hurricane.

* * * * *

Since my duties didn’t seem all that difficult compared with organizing a road trip throughout a great stretch of America, I devoted serious time to them. Coming up with a soundtrack isn’t as much of a precise science as an unarticulated form of alchemy. An art of summoning the ghosts. So I did fairly extensive research. I started with humble beginnings: the cheesy, overwrought, and overused, yet signature moments which mark the kernel of the genre. First, I watched the late Dennis Hopper’s 1969 cult classic film, Easy Rider. In the film, the duo of Hopper and Peter Fonda travel on cruiser motorcycles to Mardi Gras after a successful drug deal somewhere in the southwest makes them rich.

The story, however, ends tragically. The two outsiders lose their poetico-alcoholic ACLU lawyer friend (played brilliantly by Jack Nicholson) to xenophobic locals. The film closes when the duo are shot off their bikes and killed by vindictive truck drivers somewhere in the thickets of Louisiana. It’s a pretty straightforward 1960s story of undermined liberation, but I’d argue that the soundtrack is what really holds the film together. A mix of psychedelic rock and folk from the likes of Jimi Hendrix, The Byrds, and Steppenwolf (including the “Born to be Wild” theme) casts the personal story into a broader narrative charged with the urgency and tarnished idealism that spread across America as the shadow of Civil Rights movement faded on the horizon.

Clip from Dennis Hopper's 'Easy Rider' (1969)

Easy Rider‘s carefully curated soundtrack recalls how Jack Kerouac underpinned his novel On the Road, published just a decade earlier, with the jumping bop of the 1950s. For instance, while residing in San Francisco, Sal, Dean, and Carlo channel the firey pulse of live jazz played in the black clubs of the Fillmore district. They get wild in the jukebox bars on Central Avenue in Los Angeles and to the landmark radio shows blasting the new music across America. But it’s not just specific scenes in the novel that sing of bop, the whole off-the-cuff lyricism and spirit of adventure spiral around the improvisational flow and melodic breakdowns and screaming horns of Charlie Parker-era jazz.

In his substantial notebooks for On The Road, Kerouac wrote with the frenetic pulse of bop: “Let’s hear no more about jazz critics and those who wonder about bop:–I like my whiskey wild, I like Saturday night in the shack to be crazy, I like the tenor to be woman-mad, I like things to GO and rock and be flipped, I want to be stoned if I’m going to be stoned at all, I like to be gassed by a back-alley music….” But Keroac’s understanding of  American music, and in this work primarily black-American jazz, did not stop there. More than anything else, he associated music with the very constitution of American identity: “That grand wild sound of bop floated from beer parlors; it mixed medleys with every kind of cowboy and boogie-woogie in the American night.”

Going ever deeper in my research of the American road genre and its pairing with music I learned that Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank culled inspiration for his book The Americans around the same period Kerouac published his groundbreaking novel. Indeed Frank met Kerouac one evening at a party in the Lower East Side and asked him to write something for it. Kerouac agreed and began an introduction to the work by identifying Frank’s photos of the Americans with the music they make:

That crazy feeling in America when the sun is hot on the streets and the music comes out of the jukebox or from a near-by funeral, that’s what Robert Frank has captured in tremendous photographs taken as he traveled on the road around practically forty-eight states in an old used car . . . with the agility, mystery, genius, sadness and strange secrecy of a shadow photographed scenes that have never been seen before on film.

Traveling across America on Route 66, Frank documented the doldrums and the rumbling and the fragmentation and the violence and the dreams forming the people of America in the places of their time. By 1972, The Rolling Stones would commission Frank to design the cover of their outsider record Exile on Main St with photos from his numerous road trips across the country. This was a surprising displacement of Frank’s photos. They were reassembled to represent a British rock group who left their home on the run from tax debt–an analogue for another young and anxious generation on the rise, an unsettled multi-national grouping of nomadic people including those on the other side of the Atlantic. Frank also took footage of the group on a Super 8 camera, which eventually became the now bootlegged Cocksucker Blues, during their own journey on the road across America to the Sunset hills of Los Angeles.

* * * * *

In pursuing all this research over the past year–of which many segments of my findings were published on Hydra–I began to wonder whatever happened to the on-the-road genre of Americana. Certainly the theme of the quest for self-reconciliation or exploration still permeates American lore. But music, I think, has lost its crucial role of both organizing these stories with the rhythm of adventure and charging their lyrical flesh with something larger, the movement of the times. (Vincent Gallo perhaps comes closest with his mawkish attempt at a loner rock odyssey, The Brown Bunny.)

The themes of travel, migration, and free spiritism have underscored Americana music as far back as we can collectively remember. Perhaps the most famous early excavation came from eccentric ethnomusicologist Harry Smith who arranged a broad selection of regional blues, cajun, country, and gospel in his Anthology of American Folk Music for Folkway Records in 1952. Smith carefully crafted the anthology from his own collection of 78 rpm phonograph records dated from the years 1927-1932, a lush period for recorded music right before the advent of radio and television would supersede the local, and the Great Depression would snare small-town sales.

Smith divided the anthology intro three parts: Ballads, Social Music, and Songs. Despite these categorial divisions, the poetics of the road–travel brought on by economic pressures, commercial exchange via train, anxious callings of unrest, or the many seductions of exploration–saturates the whole collection. On the cover of each album Smith put an etching of the Celestial Monochord, an instrument of allegedly mystical powers pilfered from the work of alchemist Robert Fludd. According to Fludd, the monochord linked musical intervals to the cosmic cycles of the Ptolemaic universe. Smith, in turn, incorporated the instrument into his own embedded cosmology which oriented around the water, fire, and air of the living Americana ghost.

Print of the Celestial Monochord.

About the time we cruised through thunderstorms in Mississippi in our lugging Subaru Forester–without working windshield wipers and with a huge leak in the trunk–Furry “Memphis” Lewis’s rendition of the hypnotic folk tale “Kassie Jones” whirled through the speakers. Lewis’s haunting voice, covered in layers of distorted buzz and electric humming, spun ciphers around his expert guitar strums. He waned about the life and vital rhythms of a train engineer whose train eventually crashed:

I woke up this mornin’, four o’clock
Mister Casey told his fireman get his boiler hot
Put on your water, put on your coal
Put your head out the window, see my drivers roll
See my driver roll
Put your head out the window, see my driver roll

A couple days later we found ourselves in a blues joint on a commercially redeveloped Beale St. in Memphis–the historic black music strip was remade into an amusement park of itself. An original Furry Lewis guitar hung on the wall with big blocky white letters spelling out his name on the case. I thought of Casey’s crash and our own as if the song meandered through a portal in time and struck us in a lightning storm on the Texas highway and sent us on some sort of alternate course of discovery. But then it all seemed too silly. Kerouac’s novel is too earnest and abused to be taken seriously today; Easy Rider pivoted around a cosmopolitan paranoia of the backwoods southerner, while Lewis’s guitar stayed lifelessly framed on the wall; none of it really worked anymore.

Perhaps I’ve been too much of a historicist, concerned with collecting and archiving and researching in order to inform my own experiences and give them weight. Perhaps many of us young people have become too dusted in our nostalgia–inclined to praise the avant-garde of yesteryear rather than throw those generations and their work into the wastelands and start afresh. Isn’t that what’s required of us? But it’s hard to think Keroauc or Hopper or Frank did that so categorically to Smith’s anthology. Nor did The Rolling Stones a generation later.

So we listened to music on the road. Araabmuzik’s haunted trance in Vegas. The synthetic droll of Ford & Lopatin, the electronic drone of Emeralds, and other self-effacing music rotated under the sun in Utah. In the desert, even songs exploited for years by commercial interest, and identified for so long with an older generation’s heritage, (yes, America’s “Horse with No Name“) burned deep into our marrow.

We circled through the Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico listening to jazz and beats and techno on BBC Radio 1 and Rinse FM. We bought cheap cassettes and CDs in thrift stores in Texas with names we never heard of, hoping to find occultist religious rock from the ’80s, but didn’t find a single one worth listening to besides a Quickflight vinyl which melted and broke in the heat. Local radio, sadly, was primarily homogenous and awful everywhere.

We were disoriented and pleased by Kraftwerk on the Panhandle. By the time we got to Louisiana, we cycled through two huge compilations of pivotal and overlooked New Orleans funk on Soul Jazz Records. Through the rest of the South, we listened during rubbery hours from dawn to dusk through Smith’s entire folk anthology. By the time we floated out of North Carolina on the Blue Ridge Parkway we eased our weary travels with the lull of Washed Out, the gurgled boogie of Toro Y Moi, and the plastic funk of Com Truise.

* * * * *

Smith’s anthology featured regional sounds of Americana not only before radio and television became commonplace in the typical American household but also before the forces of mass commodification would streamline our music into product and business. Even children and teenagers can no longer sidestep the threat of sonic inculcation as they once were able in the baby boomer generation. But at some distant point in the gunning American memory, music was just the stuff of myth, ephemera.

Now, music is global, worlding, in a different way. Our soundtrack, I think, reflected that. We’re restricted neither by space or time nor vertical structures of marketing; 1928 blues from Tennessee in collusion with 1977 German techno and 2011 digital synth-pop; live radio from wherever (and whoever) and recorded broadcasts from whenever.

Yet we still haven’t lost a sense of place. Surely the Internet and new technologies programmed for social networking have reshaped the road, wired it to the globular layers of computer networks and information databases, connected it to unstable modes of movement and direction, restructured its linear geometry into a great big open possibility of blinking dots. But the music still filters through the speakers and spills out the openness of the car, overflowing into the rush of the wind, and into the thickness of the earth. The soundtrack on the road, formed and reconfigured in collage from the far reaches of recorded time and space, now taps into something more diffuse and nebulous–maybe even a strange spirit again, unruly, mystical.

What a soundtrack can achieve is the opening up of a place. The highest aim of a soundtrack undermines the familiar callings and purposes of a place and works through them to uncover the richness of its substance. Music has a mysterious way of letting what things are shine forth. Ours seemed to channel the highly networked road, lightly suspended in an ethereal recorded body of sound and heritage, as if we called up the spirits of the American past and tapped into a resonating present–still alive, still circling in the shadows of the road, and wandering in the glow of the horizon.

“On the road again/ Natural born eastman on the road again,” Lewis crooned through the rumbling time machine. And so we drove on.

Crazy, the power of distraction a man has who is bored, intimidated, or embarrassed by his work: working in the country (at what? At rereading myself, alas!), here is the list of distractions I incur every five minutes: spray a mosquito, cut my nails, eat a plum, take a piss, check the faucet to see if the water is still muddy (there was a breakdown in the plumbing today), go to the drugstore, walk down to the garden to see how many nectarines have ripened on the tree, look at the radio-program listings, rig up a stand to hold my papers, etc.; I am cruising.

Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes

For Geoff Dyer’s protagonists, life seems like one long concatenation of distraction. They set out (or put off) doing one thing and end up doing twenty other things, yet somehow they manage to circle back to something like original purpose. In other words, Dyer’s protagonists are highly successful failures. They are world-weary slackers who get sent on exotic writing assignments; impotent men who manage to have tons of sex; procrastinators who get the work done; do-nothings who do.

In Dyer’s most well-known book, Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence, the protagonist has only one goal: to write a “sober” academic study on D.H. Lawrence. It sounds easy and straight-forward enough. Unfortunately, the “I” in the book—Dyer himself, we are told, though the words “a memoir” are conspicuously absent—suffers from something a little more serious than writers’ block. He suffers from chronic indecision.

At the start, Dyer describes not his desire to write the study of Lawrence but his desire to write a novel. He waffles back and forth between the novel and the academic study until he finally decides to apply himself “wholeheartedly” to the study of D.H. Lawrence. Rather than simplifying the picture, he is again confronted with an exhausting list of further decisions. First, he must decide where to live in order to compose the book (Paris? Rome? Greece? Oxford?); where to go to “research” (Taos? Oaxaca? Taormina?); and what books he will need to read and to consult.

After much mental rallying, Dyer moves from Paris to Rome with determination. “I was ready to begin my study of Lawrence,” he declares. “The only trouble was the heat.” Turns out, he can’t write in Rome because it’s too hot. In Greece, he is ready to start anew, but the setting is just too ideal: “It was impossible to write on Alonissos, it was impossible to read . . . it was actually impossible to do anything.” Then, another attempt in Oxford: “Now that I’m here in Dullford, in England, all I want is to be back in Rome.”

In the span of the book, Dyer travels all over the world in order to find a setting or starting place that will feel “just right” (a homophonous command?) so he can begin his study of Lawrence. He is desperately in want of inspiration. Not finding any causes him severe agony. Here, great storytelling is happening, even if nothing is happening. If distraction is dread of the present moment, then the present moment is automatically charged with conflict. Because what is happening right now is always the worst possible thing that could be happening—each undesirable situation supplies enough drama to prod the reader on. It is almost guaranteed, under this method, that the reader will keep reading.

“I made a serious mistake in Rome,” Dyer laments in one of many such passages, “a mistake of such magnitude, in fact, as to jeopardise any chance of going on with—let alone completing—my study of Lawrence. From the start I’d known that I had to write my book as I went along. There are people who like to complete all the reading, all the research, and then, when they have attained complete mastery of the material, then and only then do they sit down and write it up. Not me. Once I know enough about a subject I lose interest immediately.”

Contradicting claims exist simultaneously. Dyer claims he is one of these writers who must write as he goes along, which means he must have generated some pages during this ordeal. But since he keeps insisting he’s made “no progress” we think he’s written nothing. For example, one section trails off with some vague ellipses and a page break, after which Dyer begins a new entry. (This is on page 123, in my edition–already halfway through the book.) “Well, it’s been a hectic couple of months. Action-packed. You won’t believe what I’ve done. Only bought a flat in Oxford. Yes, really. Unbelievable but true. Oxford! Now if there’s one place on earth where you cannot, where it is physically impossible to write a book about Lawrence it is here, in Oxford.”

Then, pages fly by while he’s still in Oxford. As one reads, one can’t help wondering: so now, is he writing this all down in Oxford, the place where it’s impossible to write? If not in Oxford, then where? It is difficult to imagine Dyer sitting down long enough to compose anything. Yet as he keeps telling us of his failure to write, the book continues to move forward; the pages continue to materialize. In fact, we do learn things about Lawrence. We are entertained. There are scenes, descriptions, and dialogue. It is a real book.

If Dyer (the writer in the book) isn’t writing, then who is? Of course, the only way Dyer (the author, not the character) can write so well about not writing is that he is not the narrator, that he is putting in the work, and he never intended to write an academic treatise on Lawrence in the first place. The book was intended to be about a writer who can’t write. And because of Dyer’s ingenious use of the first person, this book is better than metafiction, it’s magic; the book seems to write itself spontaneously alongside life. We truly experience what it’s like to struggle (aptly, wrestle) with a goal. The journey, the cliché goes, is more important than the destination. But this isn’t a trick that can be pulled twice, and thankfully Dyer hasn’t, yet.

At the very end, Dyer/the narrator sums up the book’s itinerary in one short paragraph:

And there you have it. One way or another we all have to write our studies of D.H. Lawrence. Even if they will never be published, even if we will never complete them, even if all we are left with after years and years of effort is an unfinished, unfinishable record of how we failed to live up to our own earlier ambitions, still we all have to try to make some progress with our books about D.H. Lawrence. The world over, from Taos to Taormina, from the places we have visited to countries we will never set foot in, the best we can do is try to make some progress with our studies of D.H. Lawrence.

We understand that when he says “our studies of D.H. Lawrence” he means very generally any goal or ambition we have in life. Even if the study will never be published (except that it has), we must keep going along.

Read Dyer’s new book of essays, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition.

My friend (and fellow Hydra writer) Edgar Garcia once surprised me when he stated how much he disliked Ralph Waldo Emerson. This conversation was over text message, and he stealth-attacked me with this unforeseen indictment of one of America’s great prophets, friend to all humanity, the Sage of Concord. What he disliked so much about Emerson was the “erosive quality, the constant undermining” that seemed to “require the reader to move forward and backward in order to get what’s going on.”

It was true: Emerson’s peculiar style, which moved and swayed in giant steps and seemed to say something forcefully, lyrically, without saying anything in particular, drove the reader into some kind of rapture that necessitated the comprehension of great hermetic truths about life, about nature, about humanity, on just about everything ever said and made and experienced. Instead, “what the reader is fed in this novel redesign of the reading experience is washy Vedas. Its dreams of freedom and independence are cheaply purchased. Cheap tea for the American soul market.” Watching Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, I’m finally starting to understand what Edgar meant by the “washy Vedas” that lay concealed in the subterfuge of Emerson’s lyrical style. If Terrence Malick, the sage of Waco, Texas, is the new Emerson, then his Tree of Life introduces an updated, 21st century Transcendentalism that uses cinematic hyperbole and a barrage of ultra-scenic visuals that irk and distract rather than enlighten

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Shortly after watching The Tree of Life, I re-read Emerson’s seminal book-length essay Nature (1836) on a hunch, and something like a mystical apple fell and struck me on the head: Malick’s Tree has its roots firmly placed in Emerson’s Nature. The return of Transcendentalism! It had never gone away apparently, and it was sprouting from the transparent, all-seeing eyeball of a revered but media-shy American film director who’s only made five films up to now, his latest earning the Palme d’Or at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. A film of tremendous promise that had been hyped up for years since Malick finished principal shooting in 2008 (and spent almost three years editing it into several versions that changed in length over time), the wait-time spent for the completion and release of Tree of Life was a considerable improvement over the 20 years that divided his second film, Days of Heaven (1978), from his third, The Thin Red Line (1998). The smallness of Malick’s oeuvre seems to be due to his artistic commitment to one-up himself with each successive work. Badlands (1973), still considered by some to be his finest work, is a bona fide American classic. It gave definitive roles to Martin Sheen (impossibly cool and handsome) and to Sissy Spacek (simultaneously wise and naive), shortly before they would become established actors of the 1970s American film renaissance. Badlands proved to be a blessing and a curse for Malick: it was a film so spherically airtight, so instantly memorable and iconic, that its debut set a high standard for Malick the director; he had to reinvent himself at the very moment he was discovered by the industry.

Terrence Malick

Days of Heaven followed five years later, and it was the first attempt on the part of Malick to experiment with a different way of shooting and editing that seemed to grace or skirt straight narrative instead of directly involving itself in its parameters. The repetitive use of voice-over (a Malick hallmark) was used in Days of Heaven as a kind of tangential punctuation for scenes that seemed to always be in medias res, often in the middle or at the end of conversations in which words were barely heard or muttered, but in which landscape, American landscape, was the thing itself, the narrative captured in still life. Badlands was already a miniature study of 1950s Americana filtered through the eyes of two fugitive lovers, and Days of Heaven served the same purpose, only this time setting the period even farther back (circa 1916), and expanding the color palette, dilating the largeness of sky and terrain, which in turn diluted (and sometimes enhanced) the molecular intimacy of the characters who only happened to stumble into his camera sight.

The progression from the tight narrative and character development of Badlands to the looser, more contemplative style of Days of Heaven was the first step in creating the signature Malick style, in which the linear conventions of strong narrative are replaced or derailed by staccato rhythms of natural history scenes and American dreamscape. Malick was not so much interested in the stories he had to tell as he was in the geography that was traveled by the characters, the historicity that situated and authenticated them, and the search for a new land that drove them perpetually forward.

And I have said it elsewhere: Malick’s oeuvre is almost exclusively concerned with geography, American geography, and his image-ideas serve as historiographies of an American-oriented epistemology. An American epistemology is necessarily a geographical one: the endless search for the “New World,” whatever it was, if it existed at all. Badlands and Days of Heaven were enough to cement Malick’s reputation for good, to such an extent that there was quite a clamor raised for his late reemergence with The Thin Red Line. I do not want to spend much time analysing Malick’s war film, so I’ll only state that it was a significantly longer film (170 minutes) and even more elliptical in style than Days of Heaven had been — a continuation, but also a step forward, of the Malickian technique. Days of Heaven, even at 95 minutes, seems to feel epic, and its brevity belies the desire to show more landscape, to explore more geographical and historical strata, to perhaps develop the back story and the characters more (and its strange way of being edited, as if in a hurry to include all the shots and scenes that were filmed, points to the possibility of a different film, longer and slower, if Malick had to time to put it together).

The Thin Red Line, to some extent, liberated Malick from the constraints of producing a film within the 90 minute mark, and this newfound freedom was no doubt indebted to the 20 years that had served to increase his fame within the network of a new Hollywood generation that readily worshiped him. Everyone who was anyone at the time signed up to be in his film: the ensemble cast was so large that the initial edit of the film (running at 5 hours) took 7 months to get through, just to include all the star performances in the film. The same Malickian tropes appeared again: nature-worship, fraternitas, elliptical asides and voice-overs, geographical cognition, the search for and the destruction of Paradise. (So that all of his films play like variations on Paradise Lost — and The Tree of Life could possibly be Malick’s Paradise Regained.)

Whatever the merits of The Thin Red Line, Malick’s fame escalated high enough to secure a larger budget and expenditures, to dream bigger and shoot longer, to dare to top himself again and again. When The New World was released in 2005, some of the hype that tended to surround a Malick production had been depressurized (the wait time was no longer 20 years but 7), but the film received its due share of awards and praise. Even after watching The Tree of Life, I still consider The New World to be the culmination of Malickian technique or, at least, the most successful incarnation of his mass-aggregate style of shooting and editing. The New World epitomized the sort of dreamer’s naivete that characterizes all of Malick’s work with a grace and tenderness that was, indeed, sumptuous and myth-making, because it was so purposefully neo-romantic, so determinedly optimistic, and even sometimes delirious and foolish (as all love stories ought to be).

The New World was always about Pocahontas (just as Hart Crane had envisioned her), and it freely expressed itself in the permanent American idiom: the plural, the ecstatic, the Whitmanesque. As usual, different cuts of the film came to exist: a limited release version (150 minutes), the wide-release version (135 minutes), and an extended cut version (172 minutes), all of which were harvested from well over a million feet of film shot — Malick shot large, but he also shot long and hard. This is an important fact because, judging from the vertiginous plurality of shots and scenes that make up The Tree of Life, I would not be surprised if Malick and his team of filmmakers surpassed the exorbitant amount of film stock that was used up in the discovery of The New World.

Scene from "The New World" (2005)

Scene from "The Tree of Life" (2011)

The extraordinary thing about The Tree of Life is, firstly, its sheer scale. Nothing less than the Origin of Life itself is directly tackled, and this extra-large evolutionary scheme is anchored by the core story of a young family’s parallel evolution in 1950s Texas. The second extraordinary thing is the ease and velocity with which the film migrates through a succession of macrocosmic phenomena that envelop and comment upon microcosmic occurrences.

It is a film divided into 4 sections: the 1st works as a kind of prelude in which large scale astral events (let us group these massive events under the more generic term “the Macrocosmic View”) intertwine with the events surrounding a man’s recollection of his life growing up in Waco, Texas and his subsequent present-tense life working and living in what looks like modern day Chicago (we can call this other half, “the Microcosmic View”). A death in the family, received by letter and telephone call, disrupts the tight-knit peace of the family: we see them endure their suffering, as the camera gazes on their gestures and faces (there are a lot of close-ups that swoop in or rise up to the expressive faces of the characters, which often stand in for actual dialogue). We gradually discover that Sean Penn plays the grown up version of the oldest boy of the family, and we see him too inwardly suffer within the air-conditioned nightmare of his existence (or so we are led to believe by the dismal grays and silvers and blues of his sleek, well-cushioned [i.e. "empty"] lifestyle as a wealthy architect trapped in a nature-less modernity).

The 2nd section shifts into the Macrocosmic View: we start with a “Let there be Light” moment, and then we progress to starbursts, to cataclysmic eruptions, massive volcanoes, tectonic plate shifts, and so forth. Eventually we have water, eventually we have microorganisms, amoeba, fish, tadpoles, etc., until we arrive at the awaited moment: dinosaurs! Yes, the film contains dinosaurs, and it is no wonder: Malick takes his natural history very seriously, and having the American backing and resources to reproduce life-like prehistoric creatures (and even an American tradition of loving and supporting this kind of hyperrealism), why not? If Kubrick could have the Dawn of Man littered with bone-flinging apes, then why not go farther back and show every possible step in the evolution of life?

Yet by the time the dinosaurs make their stage entrance, the film has already lapsed into a semi-ridiculous, pseudo-Kubrickian mood. 2001: A Space Odyssey is the obvious model for many of the grandiose shots that Malick and his team indulge in (Malick even hired Douglas Trumbull — special effects supervisor for 2001 – to handle some of the special effects work), but Tree of Life never succeeds in achieving the strange and anomalous balance that Kubrick (in my estimation, still a far more accomplished, versatile director) had managed to construct in 2001. The antiseptic coldness and aloofness with which Kubrick envisioned impossibly large, astronomical events happening outside of time (and indeed outside of human perception) seems now more sincere, paradoxically enough, than Malick’s picturesque, New Age-y meditation on astronomical and molecular life processes.

Perhaps nothing exhibits this note of falseness in Malick’s vision of extra-human/pre-human phenomena more than the dinosaur episode, not ridiculous, as I said, because of the mere fact that dinosaurs appear (for certainly, depicting the ontological blossoming of the Cosmos cannot be considered any less outrageous than showing terrestrial lifeforms which really did exist a long, long time ago); rather, the dinosaur episode (albeit brief) is ridiculous because the saurians appear so ludicrously anthropomorphized that one has to question the whole reasoning behind the beginning-of-time setup.

A dinosaur (a “parasaurolophus” according to the author(s) of the Wikipedia article on Tree of Life) lies wounded by a shallow stream. Another critter (a “troodon” — as if it really mattered what a CGI-rendered creature happened to be) comes out and contemplates eating the wounded reptile, which seems to be condemned to die anyway: as a way of showing that the dinosaur “thinks,” it experimentally steps on the head of the wounded creature, repeats this process again, a little harder, a little lighter (I can hear a few gasps of alarm from the audience), and then, miraculously, decides not to eat it (now I hear “Ahhhs” and sighs of relief). An altruistic dinosaur! Who would have known?

The film happily skips along to show other pre-human formations and terrestrial events, but my attention has already been permanently damaged by the dinosaur’s altruism: what was the purpose of that, really? That “life loves life”? That we are all… One? That if a dinosaur can love its fellow brother, certainly we can, and we should, too? The message was irreducibly kitschy (a fresh dosage of hardcore existential alienation would have been welcome by this point), and as I looked up at other impossibly beautiful shots of cave formations, church spires, majestic trees, etc., I realized that Malick’s pan-historical travelogue mode had gone too far this time — he had run out of actual ideas, or he had grown bored with plain old narrative.

The mainly fatuous 2nd section of Tree of Life is nothing more, nothing less, than a miniature copy of the BBC and Discovery Channel’s Planet Earth series, an invariably impressive mosaic of natural phenomena, but Malick’s work seems to carry a kind of National Geographic aesthetic that tries to compensate for a dearth of actual emotion, actual thought, with the pull of wonder-baiting cinematography. Seen from this angle, the personal investment for the viewer is small because one has only to watch, to gawk in awe, to stare passively at a stream of pretty pictures, in place of reading and interpreting difficult, ponderous subtexts or deciphering the layered depths of more complex (i.e. less tourist-ready) images. The Attractive immediately becomes the True.

Malick seems convinced that staggering beauty is always enough — and that a surplus of it can overwhelm all the other faculties of intellectual engagement. Watching parts of Tree of Life is comparable to reading a pop-up children’s book on a pre-school level: the text is either absent or reduced to the barest minimum and the illustrations are maximized to ultimate, panoramic effect. Yes, pictures tell stories (picture theory is, after all, the primordial root of all cinema), but Malick leaves no room for doubt or speculation in his images: his sweeping camera movements, the compulsive rush of events that are always lunging forward, work as unquestionable assertions, injunctions even, “to believe.” Believe! Yes, but believe in what?

This sophisticated form of cinematic legerdemain simulates the gospel message of American Transcendentalism, a universalist credence made persuasive by the hypnotic but indeterminate fulcrum of Emersonian aesthetics: the will to believe, left on its own, and supplemented merely by a pseudo-pantheism that lacked the certainty of conviction or the repository of a well-defined doctrine. It is a kind of beauty-cult faith that circumvents definite, Kierkegaardian faith: as empty of meaning as it is large of target, it signals everything and beckons nothing in particular. Emerson had no “dogma” to adhere to or speak of (to the Concord Sage’s credit, he never pretended to subscribe to any religious doctrine but that of a  philosophical syncretism that based itself largely on self-reliance and private revelation), but he did place a tremendous semantic value on Nature — with a capital N — and it is this Emersonian spirit of nature-worship which has been consistently echoed throughout all of Malick’s work, so that we find him frequently

Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed in blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.

And if there is any gospel message to be gleaned from the surfeit of images that constitute Tree of Life, it is that last sentence from Emerson: “I am part or particle of God.” If we never received the memo, Malick makes sure that the incessant voice-overs (all of them irritatingly whispered and “poetical”) remind us of it. “Brother… sister…” becomes a kind of biblical invocation for Sean Penn to walk aimlessly around in a canyon (he is in Nature this time, outside of the sterility of the Office), or for Brad Pitt (who plays the father, Mr O’Brien) to mug a little and stand perplexed, or for Jessica Chastain (who plays Mrs. O’Brien, the uber-motherly 50s housewife who almost never says anything above a few words) to hover around magically and flash a smile at her children: “Mother, father… you wrestle in me.” (Or something like that.)

But I am only meagerly, maybe unfairly, bringing Emerson into the picture: indeed, Emersonian thought is not so simple or clear-cut as the stock of sometimes fascinating, sometimes generic, images Malick brings into his picture frame. Emerson invoked Neoplatonism and the Upanishads, he sought Nature not in natural scenery strictly but in the apperception of the human soul channeling nature or re-creating it — he found it nestled and functioning within “the infinitude of the private man.” Malick sees it quite the same, I’m sure, but it is a Nature so washed out by breathless whispering and beauty, beauty, beauty, that it does end up looking and feeling a bit like a “washy Vedas.”

All is not lost however: the 3rd section of the film, which should be considered the movie proper, is fortunately the longest part, and it is the section when Malick actually begins “doing cinema” (in the same manner that a philosopher finishes setting up the prolegomena to the problem at hand and begins “doing philosophy”). Malick shifts to “the Microcosmic View” and gives us a detailed portrait of a boy’s youth in 1950s Texas, from the moment of birth up to his early adolescence, and one wonders how many of the events that transpire during this section occurred to Malick personally. I would guess not too many: while many of the scenes are lovingly crafted and superbly paced (the sound design is impeccable here), they still retain a residue of generic standardization: we watch a photogenic anglo-saxon family grow up together through thick and thin, just as we would imagine them in compressed form, in Coca-Cola advertisements or on black-and-white television shows of the period (but with more doses of realism to temper the emphatic loveliness of everyone).

All of the actors are attractive and fresh-faced enough to star in commercials, the sons as much as the parents, and their growing pains, when attempting to simulate real friction and real family problems, embody the sheen of harmlessness that typify idealized family dramas. There is nothing overtly ugly or crooked in anything that happens in Tree of Life. The father is a disciplinarian who makes his sons fear and love him; but he is also something of a failed dreamer who makes us empathize with him; the oldest son grows to hate the father once he nears puberty, he wants to replace him, he is confused about life because fear and desire, sex and pain, begin to grow in him, etc. The mother is softer, kinder, more intuitive and empathetic, she teaches the boys how to love and be free, how to be kind to one another, etc. And the second oldest boy, who plays the guitar and has a “sensitive side,” takes after his mother, while the older boy adopts the more masculine behavior of his father.

In short, many of the literary and media-informed tropes that have gone into the historical representation of the everyday white American family are here exploited to great emotional effect. This family is not my family, but I’m so familiar with the themes, with the domestic arguments, with the quite universal forms of emotion that are exploited here, that I cannot help but understand and sympathize with their troubles or relate to Malick’s boyhood memories. Some of it is endearing, undoubtedly, but its montage of attractions has no real hold on singularity, on that indefinable eccentricity that makes each family fundamentally different from others, so that the O’Briens turn out resembling more of a blueprint for the quintessential American family than an actual collective of complicated individuals. (But maybe this was the universalist goal Malick had in mind: he wanted to build and reproduce the family archetype, “the family of families,” the family experience in itself.)

However meticulously wrought this 3rd section is, much of the hard work that went into its execution (majestically lensed all the way through by Emmanuel Lubezki) is instantly subverted by the lackluster, almost laughable, 4th section, the coda of the family’s evolution, in which (I presume) Sean Penn somehow escapes his waking dream-dilemma of wandering around canyons and through open door frames (surreal!), and finds himself on a beach with everyone he knew in life, Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain, himself as a younger boy, his brothers. 8 ½ it absolutely is not, but the attempt to tie everything together after all that transpired, remains a partial failure of empty accretion — we are reminded of the washy Vedas again (literally this time, since the principal characters get wet while they walk around the beach or run through the lapping waves), but not before a final montage sequence of randomized scenery (micro and macro mixed in), seemingly in the attempt to fit in every shot which the editors could not find a place for in the opening section. Two of the final shots are, inexplicably, of a carnivalesque Eyes Wide Shut-style mask floating in the water (an art film!) and another of a modern-day bridge at sunset (the Golden Gate Bridge?), surreptitious moments which inspired a colleague of mine to quip outside the movie theater, “It would make a great screen saver.” I can’t think of a better summation.

Does Malick succeed in creating a new cinematic idiom with The Tree of Life? Yes and no. Yes, he has crafted a film that has pushed the Malickian technique to its breaking point, and the film’s true core (the 3rd or “main” section) is an undeniable spectacle of consummate, indeed transcendental, filmmaking — capturing emotions and intimacies as only a transparent all-seeing eyeball can.

The universality of Emerson assumes the universality of everyone else, of the American Experience specifically, but also of me and you and everyone we know (in the world of cinema anyway). It is the prayer for “all things”: an ornate rhetoric that disarms our skepticism and subdues our thought in aromas and sensations — we are pushed along, pulled here and there, because there is never any one place to stop at and think for a minute, because everything has got to be accounted for, no matter how fast or haphazard. But this love of speed and texture also collapses into structural disorder. The Tree of Life loses traction and a lot of internal coherence when it tries to augment and move forward, when it could be taking pauses, reducing its vocabulary and effusiveness, and sharpening its focus. This is the “erosive quality, the constant undermining” that diminishes (for me) the revolutionary aims of the film.

But I suppose it is in Malick’s nature to do more and more, to one-up himself, to constantly move forward at greater and more intricate velocities, leading one to wonder how on earth Malick could top himself after something so all-encompassing as The Tree of Life. Evidently, it would simply have to be even more of itself: a 6 hour version is reportedly being prepared already. A friend asked me what makes this film especially American, and I would answer that it would be this more-of-more-ness, this contagious audacity to film as much of everything (both the representable and unrepresentable, the objective and the inter-subjective) as is financially and technologically possible: the quantification of human experience in a nutshell. The optimistic belief that a million feet of film (2 million, 3 million?) could register the sum total of a boy’s life in Texas. A similar question would be: what makes Transcendentalism an American ideology? It could be answered something like this: the belief that one can transcend the perceptual limitations of history, of time and place, provided one invents one’s own medium for narrating it. A kind of metaphysical entrepreneurship. We produce our own history, or we bring the universal down to our size, if we can create a private, self-willed language for its mediation. Or as Emerson would say (and Malick approve of):

The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face-to-face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? . . . The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.

Mochilla's Eric Coleman (on the left) and Brian Cross prepare for the gallery opening. (photo Mike Park)

I dropped by San Francisco’s Peek Gallery last week for the opening of an exhibition on Mochilla, the Los Angeles production company composed of photographer/filmmaker/DJ duo, Brian Cross (B+) and Eric Coleman. Talk about a party. Less than a half hour in, the spacious gallery — part of the new third-space unit of The Summit SF — filled to the brim with enthusiastic Mochilla followers and the occasional straggler called from the Mission streets to the banter, blue glow of the Mochilla’s music-films, and surely, the deep crates of free alcohol at the bar. I made out with more than a few freshly made Caipirinhas and cold Tecates on the closest to a summer evening it ever gets in San Francisco.

There was barely enough room to look at the collection of large, handsomely framed photographs placed on the long slice of gallery wall. Cross and Coleman chose only 20 pieces respectively to represent the past 10 years of Mochilla in action, selecting from a broad range of work loosely tied together by musical themes of rhythm and melody, with a primary focus on the subjects of instrument, urban and natural environment, and of course, the musician.

Among a few standouts, I particularly enjoyed portraits of a shadowed J Dilla in the studio and a looming Madvillain, clad in signature mask and mixer. A couple documents of an overturned car and collapsed home depicted the ghostly spaces–remnants of vibrant life and color–which populated New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Perhaps the most striking, though, was a simple photo of a boy jumping head first into a deep blue body of water, the ripples sprawling to the contours of the frame.

10 years of Mochilla

Last year, Los Angeles-based production group Mochilla released Timeless, a trilogy film series documenting three concerts performed in L.A., early 2009. For these concerts, Brian Cross and Eric Coleman shined light on three composers who have helped influence and shape hiphop in different ways: the originator of Ethio-jazz, Mulatu Astatke; leftfield Brazilian arranger, Arthur Verocai; and a gutsy rendition of J Dilla’s beats arranged by Miguel Atwood-Ferguson with a 60-piece orchestra. The films paint intimate portraits of musical exchange and live performance while paying tribute to some of the overlooked giants of the sprawling African musical diaspora.

In many ways Timeless is a culmination of themes explored in Mochilla’s films from the past decade. Their first project, Keepintime: Talking Drums and Whispering Vinyl (2001), and the follow-up live recording and DVD release in 2004, captured improvisational collaboration between L.A. hiphop producers and DJs, such as Madlib and J.Rocc, among others, with some of the powerhouse session drummers who inspired their sample-based work. Brasilintime: Batucada Com Discos (2007) also navigated the dynamic tension between an older generation of drummers, this time including legendary Brazilian percussionists and the new school of analog producer/turntablists.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kbwRoikF9o

But not only did Mochilla depict creative partnership between these two forms of percussionists, they also translated the cut-up aesthetic of the DJ and rhythmic momentum of the drummer to the inner workings of the films themselves. A pastiche of words, music, and imagery composed of still shots and footage drive forward the fragmented stories and striking moments of reconciliation that unfold on screen.

More recently, Cross set off to Columbia to document the Petronio Alvarez music festival, as well as collaborative work between Will Holland (a.k.a. Quantic) and Ernesto “Fruko” Estrada, who could be credited with forging the rootsy, Afro-Columbian take on salsa. Mochilla also shot a good deal of the footage for Banksy’s street art disaster film from last year, Exit Through the Gift Shop; caught wayward rapper Jay Electronica at the Pyramids in Egypt and recording in South Africa; and documented Nas and Damian Marley on tour. To put it short, the dudes put in work.

“I look more for the off-handed moments that can be sustained as photos in themselves,” Cross tells me over the phone, while working in the darkroom basement of his home in Los Angeles. “I’m trying to be iconic, but at the same time I don’t want to make publicity photos for record companies,” Cross says. “The videos, in a way, can be much more interesting because the fluidity allows for a certain kind of candidness.”

Brian Cross, hip-hop, and working through the diaspora

Cross, 44, has quite a history with such candidness in his work. Born in Limerick, Ireland, he moved to San Francisco’s Mission district in 1990 before attending CalArts in Southern California to study photography. While still completing his degree, Cross started writing what would become a landmark book on the emergence and socio-political implications of hiphop in L.A.: It’s Not About a Salary: Rap, Race, and Resistance in Los Angeles (Verso Books, 1993). He is responsible for a number of iconic album covers of underground hiphop acts, from Freestyle Fellowship to Ras Kass and Mos Def. And Cross also made headway with more than a few magazine photo spreads and music videos throughout the past couple decades, including, notably, an arresting multi-textured piece for DJ Shadow’s “Midnight in a Perfect World” off Entroducing….. (Mo’ Wax Records, 1996).

www.youtube.com/watch?v=InFbBlpDTfQ

Looking over Cross’s ever-growing body of work, some primary themes consistently arise: Through the lens of hiphop, Cross orients a number of conversations, multi-generational interchanges, rhythmic confluences, and resistant divergences that weave through the diaspora of African musical traditions in the Americas. “There’s an anthropological side as well as an ethnomusicologist side to it—an attempt to make a map of the diaspora in terms of the music set by the present,” Cross explains. “The goal is ultimately to document in a way that is not strictly historical, but to let the past speak to now rather than the other way round.”

Michael Krimper I find an interesting dynamic in your film work and the documented live performances. On the one hand, you’ll take hiphop producers and DJs and pair them with percussionists, so as to put the contemporary in tension with the recent past that informed those contemporaries. On the other hand, there’s another element of featuring the music of those composers themselves. In what way do you think the past speaks to the present, as you put it, in both those approaches?

Brian Cross The idea is that somehow you don’t want to frame it off. In other words, for Keepintime, we didn’t want to get Paul Humphrey or Earl Palmer involved in something and frame off the dialogue in terms of, ‘Ok Paul, we want you to play the classic break on “One Man Band (Plays all Alone),” and now we’re going to layer something on top of it and develop a routine.’ But that’s not what’s interesting about Paul Humphrey. Yeah, it’s amazing he did that, and that’s why we’re choosing to work with him. But Paul Humphrey is somebody living and breathing; he’s our past, but he’s also our present. We want to open up a space of dialogue that is open to this series of works but isn’t limited to it.

For the Brasilintime project, we could have gone to Brazil and found obscure musicians who made amazing recordings and complete the narrative in the way that normal Eurocentric or Western versions of the story go: We bring them to Carnegie Hall, we do a concert, venerate them, and show them that Carnegie Hall is in fact the best venue in the world and is the most important place to see music. Whoa whoa whoa, back it up, we’re not going to do that. We’re going to go to there and engage, and try to actually build a bridge to the music. Let’s not have this as a one-sided sentence that leads in a single direction.

Generally, what we try to do is to de-center, to find ways in which we can open up, because, invariably, when you do these things, that’s when you make discoveries. Oh, Mamao and Wilson das Neves played on the Jose Mauro record, he died before the record came out, and then Dilla sampled it … that’s when you make these discoveries.

The musicians of Brasilintime (photo Brian Cross)

You know I don’t mind the Buena Vista Social Club [1997] record. Ry Cooder is a great producer and a great musician, but the film is fucking awful. It’s so fucking wrongheaded. And that director, Wim Wenders, is smarter than that, man. We’re people of the left, he knows better than that. Of course, everybody got involved and was super happy that these guys were finally discovered, and we can fully appreciate how beautiful their music is and the contributions they’ve made. But then Carnegie Hall is put into the equation; we don’t need to reaffirm the same set of cultural values. We don’t need that. Maybe that’s kind of a trite example, but I’m interested in trying to forge ways to talk about music, or to explore possibilities of music, that don’t fall into the same set of traps that most writing and television and documentaries about music fall into.

MK Yeah, there are standard methods for placing outsider music, or the marginal narratives of musical traditions and musicianship, into the mainstream narrative, one of validation internal to our own frameworks of understanding. As a photography and filmmaker, how do you approach a sense of the outsider, or the musician who is resistant, or peripheral to the grand narratives? What techniques do you take up in order to engage these musicians and traditions and make them visible for a broader audience?

BC Well, when it comes to Brazilian music, I’m pretty serious about my shit. I do my research thoroughly. I try to put my best foot into it. But other than that, it’s pure human relationships, man. For me, here’s my pet peeve: Too much of the stuff happening right now is done without real social engagement. It’s through the Internet, whether it’s digital digging, or people paying 800 dollars for an obscure record from Ethiopia or Angola, when you could buy a ticket to go there for the same amount. You should be going. That’s the responsibility. The responsibility is to go there, actually experience it, and see what works on the ground.

To go back to Ry Cooder, when he went to Cuba to make Buena Vista, that wasn’t the music people were listening to in Cuba. People were listening to Timba, and Timba is a completely different thing. I just think there’s a lot more to be gained from actually going to say, Baranquilla, and spending time there in the town—meeting people, buying records, meeting musicians—than there is from surfing the Internet and finding the latest hot cumbia re-groove from Argentina or whatever. If you’re serious about your shit you have to go there, engage on the ground, and see what makes sense. You like Wu-Tang? Go to Staten Island. Go for a walk around the projects. Go visit P.L.O. Liquors where all those songs came from. That’s the kind of compliment you need to be paying people. And there’s ways to do this that aren’t touristic. You can go and feel the vibe there. It might seem obvious, but it gets lost in these discussions.

MK Do you see that as your primary motivational force? That your projects are prefaced on this desire to travel, meet these musicians that inspire you where they live and make music; find out what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, and be a part of it?

BC Well, the two things are kind of contingent. It’s cyclical somehow. I’m there, experiencing, helping to build bridges as best as I can, and I’m also thinking about photographs because that’s what I do.

MK How do you think this approach fits back into your earlier photo work in Los Angeles and your book, ‘It’s Not about a Salary?’

Clip from It's Not About a Salary (photo Brian Cross)

BC It’s an extension of it, really. You know the book is a very primitive thing, if you actually sit there and read it from cover to cover, which I did for a project a couple years ago, and I was highly embarrassed (laughs). But there was no model. It’s not like Can’t Stop Won’t Stop [Picador, 2005] existed, and someone had put that work down. I was 26, I had been into hiphop since I was 17, and I gave it a stab. And, of course, I put myself into a cultural debate that I didn’t know much about, for my own peril.

Ostensibly, the work isn’t much different. In that book, yeah, it’s about hiphop in Los Angeles, but I also managed to talk to Roy Porter, The Watts Prophets, Kamau Daaoood, Horace Tapscott, and a whole slew of other people who didn’t straightforwardly have anything to do with hiphop in Los Angeles. But in another way, they had everything to do with it. What has always been interesting for me with hiphop is that it has this historical reach. That’s what I tried to bring into the book. There’s definitely things which I don’t agree with now, and suppositions that I made or thought what would happen which didn’t. But it was a critical moment, right before The Chronic [Death Row, 1992], which I think was really a world changer.

The amazing thing about the golden era of hiphop, as they call it now, that era up to ‘95 or ’96, is that it was incredibly inclusive music. There was Japanese Koto, all sorts of rhythms from the Caribbean, rock, jazz, funk, you name it. That sourced people into record stores in different ways. The categories didn’t make sense as they did previously. That’s the magnetic lure of it. Somehow, hiphop allowed this extraordinary ability to look at previously recorded things and make them work in the present. For me, that was a critical modernist moment, or as the prevailing discourse has it a post-modernist moment—the collage and montage.

MK That brings up another interesting point in your work: the idea that when listening to hiphop not only is the origin of the break or the sample concealed, but also the artist’s background is concealed. The identity of the artist is mystified. Would you say that your projects aim towards making visible the musician as a person rooted in an environment or social setting?

BC The two-sided sword of the invention of youth culture is that it posits a kind of energy and dynamism to what we call youth. The problem is that the way it’s commodified is made contingent on the exclusion of anything outside youthful values or youthful thinking. I don’t agree with that. And if you look at the music of the diaspora, it’s not there. These kind of generational fishers don’t exist in other traditions of music: not in Latin, not in African-oriented music, and in my understanding of European folk traditions, they’re not there either.

While I find aspects of youth admirable, it shouldn’t ever be considered an exclusive category. For instance, David Axelrod is in his late 70s, and he has as much to contribute, and as many interesting things to say now as he did when he was 30. The thing is we’ve consigned him off to a category as if he doesn’t exist. And that seems ridiculous to me. I mean James Gadson still has fire now as a drummer just as he did when he played with Bill Withers. Why would we decide that he no longer has importance? It’s not like people have stopped listening to Bill Withers. But that’s how our music culture works. We fetishize the appearance of youth, but we’re not entirely clear on the implications of that. So, I like the idea of putting the person in the room if I can. For inclusivity, it has to be that.

And we have to get past the old ways of thinking, too. When I was first doing this, it was all super secretive. No one was supposed to know what your samples were or where your drums came from, because that was your tool kit, and if everyone had the same tool kit, it wouldn’t be interesting anymore. But I don’t buy that. In the end, there’s a deluge of information out there, it’s what you do with it that’s important. Your understanding and ability to manipulate the history is what’s important.

James Gadson (photo Brian Cross)

MK Even when you put out ‘Keepintime,’ I imagine that people worried that you would unveil the alchemic creative process, otherwise covered up, behind a hiphop record.

BC It goes back even before that. Take the video I did for DJ Shadow’s “Midnight In A Perfect World.” It plots out a series of concerns that I’m still interested in. You know, Earl Palmer is in there, and the sample is from a David Axelrod record. And they didn’t clear the sample. Shadow was terrified that Earl was going to recognize the song. But Earl didn’t even remember David Axelrod the person, let alone the record (laughs). They weren’t hits! Earl wasn’t sitting around listening to Axelrod records. But if you’re going to be too scared to talk to him, we’ll never learn anything from the guy. And then he shows up, and we’re transported to a whole different world: New Orleans before World War II.

You could say rock n’ roll came from the soles of Earl Palmer’s shoes. He was a child vaudeville performer, a tap dancer, and he battled against Sammy Davis Junior, and a lot of cats from that era. But he was never the best dude, and he was always interested in drums, so he taught himself how to play drums. So, that shuffle beat, that swamp beat as they call it, which became the foundation of rock n’ roll drumming, came from a guy who’s a tap dancer in black vaudeville as a child, who figured out a way to transform his tap dancing onto a drum kit. Think of the multi-billion dollar industry that rock n’ roll has become, and we still don’t know these things. We have to sit down and talk to these guys to find out these stories.

If It Fits in the Backpack: 10 Years on the Road with Mochilla
Thru 06/30
Peek Gallery @ The Summit SF

An earlier version of this article was published in the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

I heard the news of Gil Scott-Heron’s death while visiting friends in New York. We spent much of our evenings waxing intoxicated under the violet canopy of early mornings, yelling and laughing, talking The Watts Prophets and Melvin Van Peebles, bumping jazz and hip-hop, falling silent and being silent, listening to Jamie xx’s remix record of Scott-Heron’s latest and last effort, I’m New Here. Our own peculiar brand of mourning.

Over cartons of dumplings, we entertained alleged causes of death. Weakness stirred by drugs? Complications from HIV? Exhaustion? I saw Scott-Heron perform in San Francisco two years ago, I professed, and he warned us not to trust the many rumors circulating about his ill health. Was it just a strategy for the satirist to protect himself?

But then a year afterward, the New Yorker published Alec Wilkinson’s haunting profile of Scott-Heron’s struggle with crack. He smoked openly in front of the reporter. His body was thin and twisted, his face gaunt, and his voice, once a sweet baritone, now battered and gruff.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7c3wRzUUjs

Scott-Heron took no credit for the album on XL Recordings, the brainchild of former UK rave producer Richard Russell. He may have wanted to give Russell due credit for organizing the deeply evocative record, pairing Scott-Heron’s gravelly lyrics over sparse beats and menacing bass; but even so, he would neglect to mention that many of those recorded words were indeed his own–a collage of poems culled from his early 1970s book, The Vulture, captured asides in the studio, covers of blues and fettered demons that he made his own, that were his own.

In a radio interview last year on BBC, host Mark Coles attempted to address the subject of Scott-Heron’s personal trials. Scott-Heron interrupted, “Very few things have been autobiographical that have been included in my work … If you do a good job on a song and convince people of it, they’ll attach it to your biography as though it’s actually something that’s part of your life instead of a good acting job…. And so we’ve made a lot of characters come to life for people, because they needed them to come to life.”

At one point during those drunken evenings, during the first humid wisps of summer in America, Edgar wondered why Scott-Heron didn’t own it. He could have owned it; whether he suffered from HIV, or became a victim of the crack epidemic that still plagues  our inner cities, or however he might have spiraled down the caverns of his own troubled soul.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=_b2F-XX0Ol0

It’s reasonable to wonder why the bluesologist infamous for tapping into spiritual and political unrest, known for “The Bottle” and “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” and “Angel Dust,” remembered still for his masterpiece recording in 1974, Winter in America, didn’t openly reckon with his transfiguration into the protagonist of his own cautionary tales. And maybe we would have listened. Maybe the time had come that we would have paid attention to Scott-Heron, again. That he would not be just another black musician, poet, shaman, political defiant, visionary, tossed to the history books or the hip-hop samples, the category of dead before they’re dead, and then when they’re really dead, we can finally remember again.

Greg Tate wrote for the Village Voice of the spells of ruin, momentary rejuvenation, and ghostly disappearance of Scott-Heron. He was wiped away in prison, became a drugged hermit in his Harlem apartment, showed mere glimmers of life as a passerby in the New York subway. Tate saw Scott-Heron locked in the all-too-familiar story of American musicians ”who’d figured it all out by puberty and were maybe too clever and intoxicated on their own Rimbaudean airs to ever give up the call of the wild.” He was caught in a gyre of self-destruction and renewal, as we sat by idly, just hoping he would find his way out of the tragic cycle. Whereas white musicians like Bob Dylan and Keith Richards mustered popular support for their healing and peace of mind, black musicians like Hendrix and Scott-Heron and James Brown vanish to the wayside.

Strangely, Scott-Heron prophesied it all in his songs. He spoke and sung seemingly from a distance, sketching out the horrors and demons that haunted a scourged American dream. But he always implicated himself, quietly and sometimes secretly, in these songs. In “The Bottle,” he sang, “If you ever come looking for me/ You know where I’m bound to be — in a bottle. / If you see some brother looking like a goner/ It’s gonna be me.” Scott-Heron spun private confession into the appearance of political protest.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOUMvjw9RlA

Many of Scott-Heron’s older songs now feel more damning, fresher and more troubling than before. He sings of the sick redemption found in drugs in “Home is Where the Hatred is,” and revisits the pain of being uprooted, of not finding a place of rest, and of not coming from a place of settled warmth, in “Home.”

Stand as far away from me as you can and ask me why
Hang on to your rosary beads
Close your eyes to watch me die
You keep saying, kick it, quit it, kick it, quit it
God, but did you ever try
To turn your sick soul inside out
So that the world, so that the world
Can watch you die

“Because I always feel like running,” Scott-Heron intones on his latest, “Not away, because there is no such place/ Because if there was, I would have found it by now.”