Thursday, June 25, 2009

Stray Thoughts on Rebirth of a Nation




















I finally manged to catch the theatrical version of Paul D. Miller / DJ Spooky's Rebirth of a Nation at MOMA last night and at the end of the day it seems like a missed opportunity for Miller. To be fair I'm going to assume that the performance piece is significantly more free and interesting then the stultified for dvd version we saw. The inane voice over and ham-fisted introduction and prologue sections really hurt the overall product. The narrator is either pointing out what is blatantly obvious or making intelligence generalities or overreaching inferences. The project was to remix the original silent film in order to draw out and deconstruct the racial supremacist imagery and ideology embedded in it. If you need to explain to the viewer what they are seeing, or draw out connections to the present day, then it project has failed and should have been taken back to the editing room. I'm not certain Miller's film isn't capable of standing on its own feet, it probably is, but in this presentation it's never given the chance.

Once you get through the intro and tune out the intermittent narration things get better. The score, the work of Spooky in collaboration with Kronos Quartet is pretty haunting and subtle. It works best when it is counteracting the action on the screen, creating moments of still anticipation where there would be dramatic builds and feelings of emotionless syncopated progression where the original film would have crescendos. That said, I really wanted there would be more slicing, dicing and re-contextualizing of the original film. I wanted further use of the digital effects which appear so sparingly and with such little conviction or courage as to render themselves ineffective. It's only in the climatic five or so minutes that the "DJ as Director" lets rip and begins using focusing and perspective effect in connection with the inserted digital graph lines to deconstruct the nuanced textures of race and power at play within the scenes. If the entire piece was worked over in this manner I think it would be much more provocative and insightful. Instead the film reads more like a paired down and re-scored version of the original than a insight fueling deconstruction.

What's most interesting to me about Griffith's original Birth of a Nation is that it's really the first American movie blockbuster. the film is encoded in to the very core DNA of the US Summer Blockbuster and main stream film as a whole. Griffith's stylistic tricks used to elicit extremes of emotion in large audiences are part of movie history and I don't believe you can separate those theatrical devices from the sexist, racist and classist ideologies that underpin the film. I wish I had and encyclopedic knowledge of film, because I'm certain one could trace many of the racially charged shots in Griffith's film throughout the history of movies. That idiotic/menacing black-faced grin repeated endlessly throughout Hollywood's cannon right up to the present day. I think that would be more telling, more informative to the present moment, than the timid deconstruction that has ended up on the Rebirth DVD.

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

MoCCA Treasure: Sofia Falkenhem's Fågelhjärta


So I originally intended to do a full write up on MoCCA Fest but I got distracted and now enough time has past that it seems unnecessary. However, I do want to throw up a quick post about my surprise favorite score of the show.

Swedish comics creator and illustrated Sofia Flakenhem is a new name to me. We were drawn to her table by a gorgeous postcard and on a delighted by the wonderfully crafted items there we also purchased a neat three fold comic that was tied in a handsome ribbon and gorgeous little mini-comic titled Fågelhjärta (which i believe translates to Big Heart). As you can see the postcard is gorgeous and the dark anthropomorphic three fold has a wonderful manga by way of Europe feel that really resonates for a piece so short. Conveying an atmosphere of unease and melancholy instantly, It leaves you seriously primed for more.

But it was the wordless mini Fågelhjärta that really blew me away. The seemingly simple story of a little girl who lives with a family of foxes is in the wood, it feels like a piece of folklore, and may well be. It appears to be a thematic continuation of two short comics on her website, Fox Spirit and Walk in The Woods but takes takes the story and imagery to the next level. The pacing, touch of macabre storytelling, and perfect use of thick black lines on an un-blemished white work to create an enchanting and mysterious tale. The silent presentation coupled with the stark pallet perfectly captures the sensation of being lost int he wood and the young foxes are endearingly adorable in the way that only illustrated critters that disarm while piquing ones suspicion can.

Now i just need to see if i can track down some more of this woman's amazing work. I'll report back on my finds.

Saturday, June 20, 2009

Rainy Daze Playlist


It has been raining in the North East for what seems like solid month which has really preempted the kick off of summer in the city. The one bright side is that I have managed to perfect my rainy day play list so I thought why not share it with the rest of the class. Its split evenly between new stuff and storm tested classics with a nice mix of melancholy instrumentals, deep dubbed out rollers, and bitter sweet vocals. If you have a rainy day tune or album of your own please drop it in the comments.

I hope you dig this:



Rainy Daze Playlist

1) Mount Kimbie – William

2) Clouds – Protecting Hands pt. 2

3) Falty DL – Meta-Cognist

4) Bloc Party – Where is Home (Burial remix)

5) King Midas Sound – Ting Dub

6) Modelselktor – Let Your Love Grow (feat. Tikiman)

7) Bill Withers – No Sunshine (Grievous Angel mix)

8) Miles Davis – So What

9) Kilimanjaro Dark Jazz Ensemble – Parallel Corners

10) Breakage – Rain

11) Jamie Woon – Wayfairing Stranger (Burial remix)

12) Thom Yorke – And It Rained All Night

13) UNKLE - Heaven

Thursday, June 18, 2009

Plastic Moments #2: June 13, 2009 11:42:00AM


555 W 24th St New York NY 10011
(40.749045, -74.005378)

The building’s facade uncluttered by signage of any kind, the massive doors made of polished metal and frosted glass, the entryway thick with the leaden silence and oppressive climate control that only art galleries posses. Drastically high ceilings, sealed cement floors, pristine white walls hung with oversize canvases. Each canvas is covered in its own intricate and distinct pattern layered out across its surface in thick textures of iridescent paint. Interesting from an aesthetic point of view but nothing is really captivating. A handful of people circulate the vast open galleries with a casual air. Save for one woman. As I enter the second room she stands transfixed by one of the paintings. It has sweeping textures rushing from left to right in thick greens and golds. I stop next to her, attempting to mimic her gaze I stare at the massive textural surface until my vision relaxes and gently blurs. Suddenly, as I am about to turn and walk away, the canvas ripples, the textured pattern begins to undulate ever so gently, hypnotically, as if I am staring too closely at a taught ships sail or stranger still the hide of a great beast. I try to control my reaction, not wanting to make a scene I step back from the painting gracefully and turn away. Glancing back the illusion of motion, unmistakable just moments ago, is gone. My stomach settles and I continue on to the third room trying hard not to look too closely at the pieces.

The paintings all remain static and my nerves relax. I enter the fourth room. The gallery now seems a bit long for a Chelsea block. I can no longer see the entrance. My innate sense of urban space is set off kilter. In the fourth room there are no paintings. The lights are dimmer and shadows play about in the corners. In the center of the room is a white rectangular structure, with a simple door at its front. A room within a room? I walk around its circumference looking for some minor detail or subtle clue that will unpack its meaning. But there are none, only cheap construction, white pressboard walls, and exposed nails. Obviously this is some manner of slacker conceptual piece, a poor man’s Whiteread or hell maybe the gallery’s supply shed. I’ve been fooled by these things before. I turn to leave the dimly lit room when I’m turned out by a hushed but stern voice :”Psst, hey you …come here”.

It’s a rather large security guard. He motions for me back toward the structure. He’s talking in loud whispers on a cell phone, alternately nodding at the person on the phone and gesturing at me to wait just a moment. I’m off balance and a bit confused but politeness and curiosity leave me waiting patiently until he finishes his call. Straightening up he ask in an over the top voice. “Hello sir, how are you doing today?” I smile, say that I’m well and then wrinkle my brow inquisitively hoping I can get some information without asking an actual question. The security guard glances at his watch. “That’s about enough, time to let ‘em out” he proclaims to no one in particular. He throws open the door. Inside its black as night but from the darkness emerges a family of four, all blinking and rubbing at their eyes as they adjust to the light of the dim gallery. “Enjoy the show?” ask the security guard / barker. The family nods and mumbles in agreement as they stumble out of the back room toward the exit. “In you go!” declares the guard as he gestures with his hand like a high end doorman.

I step in and the door closes suddenly behind me. I find myself in complete darkness. A single incandescent bulb hangs from a cord directly in front of me. My eyes try to adjust to the darkness but there is nothing to focus on. The single light is joined by a dozen others slowly brightening in the dark, and then dozens more, followed by hundreds, until there is seemingly tiny flickering lights for as far in the distance I can see. The lights dance about flashing on and off in a rhythm of their own making that grows steadily faster and more frantic until things begin to strobe and my head begins to spin. I nearly lose my balance entirely and then everything descends again into blackness.

I catch my breath, my eyes begin to relax and then the single light reappears just as before it is followed by others growing in number and intensity until the field of lights returns. This time though the lights don’t stop at a low wattage but continue to get brighter and brighter still until I can feel the heat from the glow and a bead of sweat runs down the back of my neck. I turn around reaching for the door but find only light in every direction. Still the light grows brighter, until I’m unable to discern one light source from another. I’m drenched in sweat and panic but still the lights get more intense, hotter until there is no longer any distinction left, only blinding white light. White out.

I can feel my eyes blinking but it makes no difference all I can see is pristine whiteness. I stumble around feeling for a wall or door but nothing. I can feel the floor on my feet but when I reach down with my hands there is only empty space. I stumble aimlessly in one direction and then another desperate for some sense of direction. Eventually I collapse, alone in the most extreme sense possible, my thoughts elevate to a roar, the panic and paranoia feed on themselves until I’m lost deep in the labyrinth of my own mind where I chase childhood fears and real world terrors through the shadowless light. My mind is miles away, flying fancifully through the white out abyss when they come for me. I don’t notice the smell, and I can’t hear their sloughing footsteps. I don’t even feel the cold sandpaper flesh as half a dozen arms rap themselves around me. I don’t feel anything until the razor sharp claws pierce my ribcage and rend my chest cavity open to the blistering light.

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Bloom's Day Cut-up


As Scores Perished In The Waters of Tomorrow:

Blooms Day Cut-up (June 16, 2009)


I first heard of the 23 enigma from William, the ferryman of the dead, Hermes of the Nova Express, etc.  

According to Burroughs, the souls of the deceased, he ferried them with Clark, around 1960 in Tangier.  

Hell, only the dead who are probably years without an accident have that very day silver coin enough for their passage, him and everybody else aboard.

Ancient Greek burial rights make the corpse a crude example of irony in the Church of 323 Sixth Street.

The Radio announced the crash of an airliner that will be found to have 1,000 victims, all welcomed by Capt. Clark aboard flight 23 this morning.

Fire Chief Croker shared love for me enough to have perished at 3:30 O'clock.

What, as they say, was the cause of 69 more bodies laid in the morgue? Just scandalous revelation and not a single lifeboat burned beyond recognition.

What I can't understand is how inspectors at North Brother Island can bring totals of straight talk from Mr. Crimmins about the disaster that stands unparalleled among those who are without doubt.

Well now, look at that, wiped out, in many instances a father is left smiling as his prick starts to twitch at him.

America, I said, quietly, just like that in the end, spread out on the floor, looking at every country even our own.

Isn't that knowledge? Cold cold water in the bowl. Well, of course there's money to be made all hours of the day.

And the old man smiled, I saw him looking at my frockcoat and dress.  

Women were roasted to death, their blood burning and turning as scores perished in the waters of tomorrow. Wondering from which table came their doom in the river after 23 years and a day.

Taking the heroic work of the waterman to Spain. Looking at coffins in a line.

The bombardment of machine guns and howitzers on the ground. Some Kildaire street club toff chops-off the prayers of the dying infantry.

She, the manager of the Hibernian Bank, she gave me a can whose pressure seemed inexhaustible to fellow knights of the road.

"Gentlemen... and Metzger" she moaned, and sank her teeth in to the high color, of course, laughing at his grizzled mustache made of sharkskin.  

Everything smelled like hairspray as she bore his stumpy body forward on spatted feet that bounced away, leaving silvery reticulate on Lambert's brother Sam before it all fell jingling into the sink.  

The windscreen of the motorcar in the sun has a flash just like that, like him, the Rev. George C.F. Haas with his vitals and his breath.

A good drop of gin in the morning for the pastor, in the sunshine of his fat strut, down there with two pilots and some of members of the Greasy Black Rope.

Dogs lick at the blood as the fire starts with an explosion from heaven's imperial state as attests the honor and custom of the cup.

Are the unhappy crew deprived of old sayings from the north wall and Sir John Charon, the buried host.

He sailed westward, sailed a skiff, a transport vessel, cross the waves of fairy wash. Elijah is coming Mr. Kernan.

Against your throat it could only be me. You will see.

Is he buried in Michan's or no? 

The old man smiled, just the same way as before, as the corpse was brought in through a secret way making his business neat and tidy now.

Went out in a puff. Well well, better turn away as the world ends with a whimper.

Kernan turned and walked down the slope of Guinness's visitor's waiting room.

- - -

The cut-up an amalgamation of Dadaist absurdity, occult ritual and high school slumber party collage.  My mind has always made peculiar connections between the Gen. Slocum tragedy of 1904, it's use in Joyce's Ulysses, the infamous tale of Capt. Clarke that was the catalyst for Burroughs theories on the 23 Enigma and Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49 (as well as RAW's Illuminatis Trilogy but really what text does not have tangential connections to that work). So I decided to use these texts in a writing experiment using a variant of Burroughs and Gysin's cut-up methods. A favorite method that I have developed over the years uses the repetition of the number 5. This includes using five separate sources so along with the three main text I added a NYT article on the Slocum disaster and for bonus randomness a passage from Virgil in which he describes Charon the ferryman on the river Styx (see what I did there?).





There is always a moment when you are working with random chance that you question your sanity and become convinced that nothing of any sense is going to rise from all the gibberish. This experiment was no different but once I read the line, “Women were roasted to death, their blood burning and turning as scores perished in the waters of tomorrow.”, I had suspicions that it might all come together. In the end it’s a pretty fun piece of surrealist poesy with a few great lines, and yes some awkwardly formatted nonsense. I also like how there is just enough hint to some actual narrative, distinct from that of the component parts. I am certainly considering chartering a secret society called The Greasy Black Rope.

If your interested in cut-ups and other experimental forms of writing I highly suggest tracking down a copy of The Third Mind, its pretty amazing stuff and if anyone is interested in the details of the method I used here drop a note in the comments or send an e-mail, I'd be more than happy to share the technique with you

Friday, June 5, 2009

The June 4th Incident

Like many important events of the 1980s, my experience of the Tiananmen Square massacre results from news reports preempting my Saturday morning cartoons. I'm at my grandparents' house where I stay most Saturdays, it's a warm day in early summer and I probably have a million outdoor activities planned that will be postponed for another day as I sit unmoving, transfixed by the events unfolding on television in place of my beloved Kidd Video. I'm a middle class kid in the suburbs of New Jersey. I'm in no way ignorant of current events or other cultures but the world beyond my everyday experience, let alone my national border, is still distant and ethereal, unconnected to my daily life, but these images of horrifying, darkness shrouded violence will bring the reality of the outside world cascading in to my grandmother's front room.

The post-gulf war technology that journalists wield today didn't exist then so when the PRC cleared international press from the square and cut the satellite feeds the reporting was plunged into darkness. Frantic reporters shouted down scratchy telephone lines over shadowy pieces of smuggled footage and repeated images taken the weeks before of the young protesters, sunlight on their faces, with no knowledge of the horrors to come. I know that the image from the following morning of the brave solitary figure standing against a line of tanks is the iconic image of the massacre for a culture founded on the cult of the individual. For me, however, it was the images shot weeks before the crack down, of a group of people larger than any I had yet seen, all standing together, smiling in their conviction, making their mere presence a statement of political intent, their occupation of physical space a defiant gesture, locked arm and arm singing out with one voice a song I would later learn was The Internationale. These images locked in stark and tragic juxtaposition with the crackling telephone line reporting of violent repression, mass chaos and raging fires punctuated by automatic weapon fire and desperate shouting are the images that I carried with me from June 4, 1989 into adulthood.

My faith in governments to protect their people and to enact the will of those people above their own interests has never recovered from that day. It was torn to tatters not only by the oppressive acts of the PRC but by the pitiful actions of my own government which was willing to put its own political and economic gains ahead of the lives of young libertines who had naively looked to the US as a beacon of freedom and justice. I have since found myself in a number of strange and tense protest situations, from the pitiful group of fifteen that shouted in vain in the park against our university's inhumane treatment of animals, to the anti-WEF protests just after 9/11 where the percussive hum helicopter rotors drowned out the chanting and we all knew that we stood in the sights of a hundred sniper rifles; or the marches against invasion of Iraq that saw my girlfriend and I constantly scrambling from under the hooves of trampling horses. In all these mad and dangerous situations I've always found a strange calm of conviction and it may be that I believe that in my resistance I owe this much and more to a group of brave young students that I watched be massacred by their own government now twenty years ago.

I'm a pretty rational person, but I have a rather irrational faith in the power of of people united in spirit to stand up against the forces of oppression. The evidence that street protests in the Untied States are capable of effecting social and political change is not strong. The current political and media climates in this county do not suffer the street level activist well. It often appears that this form of political expression is antiquated and futile, but I have always held the conviction that for an individual to turn their physical presence into on a statement of conviction, to have their occupation of physical space be an act of resistance is an integral part of the democratic process and essential to the maintenance of liberty in a society. I think this conviction is grounded in lessons I learned sitting in my grandmother's front room watching a million brave Chinese citizens stand firm against oppression twenty years ago today.

Thursday, June 4, 2009

We Go To Work

"Use night to wake your clarity.

Darkness and the living water are lovers.
Let them stay up together.

When merchants eat their big meals and sleep
their dead sleep, we night-thieves go to work."

      from What Hurts the Soul by Rumi






"Not strong
Only aggressive
Not free
We only licensed
Not compassionate, only polite
Now who the nicest?
Not good but well behaved
Chasin after death
so we can call ourselves brave?
Still livin like mental slaves
Hidin like thieves in the night from life
Illusions of oasis makin you look twice
Hidin like thieves in the night from life
Illusions of oasis makin you look twice"

     from Thieves in the Night by Black Star

     

Unified Bass Theory (mix)

This is my first proper mix so please excuse a ham-fisted mix or two. I tried to keep the tempo up and the genre designations fluid, touching on a bit of bassline, breaks, grime, wonky hip-hop and several flavors of dubstep with a few vocals and cheeky remixes thrown in for good measure.

Unified Bass Theory:
1) Champion – No Heaven (ghislain poirier remix)
2) TRG – Horny
3) Wiley – Wearing My Rolex (agent x mix)
4) Hijack – Possessed
5) Sunship feat. Warrior Queen – Quits (sinden remix)
6) Caspa – Louder
7) Marlow feat. Bongo Chily – Everyday
8)Tes la Rok & Uncle Sam - Up in The VIP
9) Mr. Hudson & The Library – Ask The DJ (moody boyz remix)
10) Santogold – You’ll Find a Way (switch & sinden remix)
11) Flying Lotus – GNG BNG
12) Si Begg – Bangin’
13) Rustie - Just 4 Kicks (instrumental)
14) Lukid – The Now (hudson mohawke remix)
15) Starkey – Bounce
16) Matty G – West Coast Rocks (jeep mix)
17) 6Blocc feat. Big Daddy Kane – Rawer
18) Cease – Upper Left Side
19) The Bug feat Flowdan – Ganja
20) Blackmass Plastics – Do The Mash
21) Kromestar – Dot 2 Dot
22) Joker – Snake Eater
23) Cluekid – Hovercraft
24) Cotti - Calm Down (witty boy remix)
25) Alter Ego - Fuckingham Palace (modeselektor remix)
26) Adele – Cold Shoulder (rusko remix)


























d/l mirror



WARNING: Consumption of Unified Bass Theory at high volume may result in Uncontrollable Skanking, Irreversible Bassface, and in extreme case The Jimmy Legs (known locally as the Club Love Stumble).