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David Auerbach on literature, tech, film, etc.

Tag: america (page 19 of 19)

“Purposeful Lady Slow Afternoon,” Robert Ashley

26 January 2003 / / 0 Comments

The piece is ten minutes long. Over some distorted, inconspicuous bells and static, Cynthia Liddell details the story of a rape from the victim’s point of view in mostly (but not totally) descriptive terms. Ashley describes his aims as follows:

My instructions [to friends] were simple: just describe a sequence of events, without any moral or psychological interpretation of those events, but include your sensory perceptual role in the events.

Ashley found all submissions unsatisfactory and subjective, and he wrote this one himself. He says:

The recording of this particular “description” got a lot of attention. Curiously, compared to some of the stories I heard, it has always seemed rather tame to me…It is the description that disturbs.

Well, no. Ashley certainly puts together an unsettling piece of music, but not for the reasons Ashley believes. The writing is unremarkable, but because of the subject matter, it’s memorable. Most people don’t want to read or hear ten minutes of this sort of thing:

His mouth was very wet. I remember he tried to touch his tongue as far down in my throat as he could reach. It choked me. I couldn’t swallow and I couldn’t breathe.

These are the same tactics used by horror writers: the intrusion of foreign forces, the narrator’s lack of control, the chance of rescue continually growing more distant. Ashley pulls a few tricks to extend the effect, which is to make the “description” entirely passive on the woman’s part. He even cheats at one point by having her say, “I felt hollow.”

Ashley’s words are part of an American literary tradition whose most famous exponent is John Updike, where vernacular and obviousness act as a pipeline to truth. The danger is that such concerns can be used indifferently simply to play on common experience and evoke bathos. It is the fate of someone who, in Robert Musil’s terms, “had not learned how to think based on the experience of his own imagination, but rather, with the aid of borrowed terms.”

The words are, however, considerably more effective in the recording. The story is unpleasant, but the urge to stop reading isn’t as strong as the urge, when listening to Liddell, to get up and turn the thing off. It’s Liddell more than the description. It is her hesitant, vulnerable, nearly blank voice that is chilling. It invests the piece with all the emotion that Ashley claims to have removed from the text. It is not the voice of detachment; it is the voice of dissociation and vulnerability. It is the voice of a victim, of someone in a psychological state so fragile and private that you feel uncomfortable listening to her. Ashley has dealt with the notion of societally unacceptable speech in other works, and it’s hard to believe he’s not aware that it’s the voice rather than the words that has the dominant effect here. When there is a gasp towards the end, it gives away the game: Liddell has been pulling you along emotionally by the nose. The relation of facts, opinions, emotions, or anything in this style of speaking would sound dissociated and creepy.

If it sounds like I have a problem with “Purposeful Lady Slow Afternoon”…I do. I find it cheap. Liddell is not subtle, but she is effective, and she is at such odds with Ashley’s stated intention that it drags it down to the level of shock. A good chunk of the history of music (not just pop music) is singers giving weight to uninspired texts. “Purposeful Lady Slow Afternoon” is notable for the failure of its atypical literary pretenses and the arrogance in its manipulation.

Kiwi Days

15 January 2003 / / 0 Comments

Snarkout takes me back to my days as a teenager when I paged through the Ajax catalog trying to divine from the descriptions which records I would actually like. Tim Adams enthusiastically wrote the descriptions, before he burning himself out a few years later, as the text got shorter and the catalog got larger and less selective. Bits of the catalog endure here, and I still recognize some of the descriptions ten years later. I discovered that I didn’t care for most indie music coming out of America, and I fixated quickly on what I did like: New Zealand, and the Flying Nun and Xpressway labels. The Chills, the Verlaines, Jay Clarkson, the Terminals, Sneaky Feelings, DoubleHappys, the Jefferies brothers, Alastair Galbraith. New names continued to show up in the catalog, and I’d order most of them.

I came in late. Most of the best groups were already gone, Xpressway was almost dead, and Flying Nun had gone commercial. But it didn’t matter. The records were still around, and they could have come from Mars for all I knew. Most of these people never set foot in America. No one I knew liked them, and I didn’t hang out with a music crowd anyway. There were only these records from people on the other side of the world, who, from what little evidence existed, were stuck in about the most remote first-world country there was (Dunedin and Christchurch, the fulcrums of the “scene” there, were on the rural South Island), and didn’t seem terribly happy about it. Sneaky Feelings’s “P.I.T. Song” sounded as close to emotional hell as I’d ever heard in music, but there was nothing around me to join with it.

Very little of it sounds different to me today than it did then. Even though I spend money on the latest Otomo Yoshihide disc today, the part of my brain that appreciated the Kiwi music of the 80’s and 90’s seems to have been preserved along with the music, unaging. There has been nothing I’ve encountered in the last ten years to change my attitude towards it. I wasn’t consciously seeking out music without any cultural referents back then, but I stumbled on it, and it’s very nearly the only music from then I still listen to. Ajax eventually became Three Beads of Sweat and reissues Mountain Goats rarities, among other things. But the Terminals (or 3/5 of them) had a new album out a few years ago, and I bought it, and listened to it, and it was exactly the same as it was then.

Slavoj Zizek in Ha’aretz: I’m living in a coo-coo clock!

15 January 2003 / / 0 Comments

Noam Yuran of a Ha’aretz gamely interviews Slavoj Zizek on the occasion of his visit to Israel. I planned to stay away from theorists like him, but I’ll bite when he steps out to speak to the reading public of a leftist Israeli newspaper. Arguably, being published by Alexander Cockburn’s Verso also counts as more of a political gambit than an academic one, but one look at The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology will convince you otherwise.

As background, Boynton’s Lingua Franca article on Zizek is here, which partly misrepresents him as a wackier version of Hans Magnus Enzensberger, but offers Zizek’s great account of his botched psychoanalysis:

In addition to being Zizek’s teacher, adviser, and sponsor, Jacques-Alain Miller became his analyst as well. While familiarity between analyst and analysand is discouraged by Freudians, it was not unusual for Lacanians to socialize with their patients…Lacan’s sessions ended the moment he sensed the patient had uttered an important word or phrase–a break that might occur in fifteen minutes or less. Miller had fine-tuned the logic of therapy to the point that few sessions lasted more than ten minutes…As the head of the main Lacanian publishing house, Miller was in a position to turn Zizek’s doctoral dissertation into a book. So, when not presenting his fabricated dreams and fantasies, Zizek would transform his sessions into de facto academic seminars to impress Miller with his keen intellect. Although Zizek successfully defended his dissertation in front of Miller, he learned after the defense that Miller did not intend to publish his thesis in book form.

But how does he speak to the public? Yuran says:

Zizek’s prose style has a rebellious and highly compelling side that brushes up against the most critical intellectual trends of our day like cultural studies, contemporary feminism, post-colonialism, and post-modernism.

When filtered down for the common man, here’s what it sounds like:

What fascinates me about disaster films is how circumstances of vast catastrophe suddenly bring about social cooperation. Even racial tensions vanish. It’s important at the end of Independence Day that everyone pulls together – Jews, Arabs, blacks. Disaster films might be the only optimistic social genre that remains today, and that’s a sad reflection of our desperate state.

I think what’s going on today in the name of a war on terrorism shows that liberal democracy is not the transparent, simple political system is it often understood to be.

We should summon our courage and ask the fundamental question – `what is democracy today?’ What are we really deciding? You in Israel, perhaps you are lucky in that on some level you still have a real choice to make. Perhaps a more radical version of a solution for the Palestinian problem would have meaning.

The sad result of this collapse is that we have returned to the concept of history as fate. Globalization is fate. You join it, or you’re out of the game. In any event, there’s no way to influence it.

I’m not saying that there are answers – I’m just saying there will be huge problems. And then maybe we’ll find the answers. Or we won’t.

There’s not much to say about the quotes; I don’t like them. My point is that Zizek, being a mischievous sort of person, is celebratory of the fact that his self-involvement has led to considerable personal success, but when presented with a popular platform, he can’t say anything. I don’t mean that he doesn’t try to make points; I mean that he concertedly avoids saying anything even remotely germane to Israel (the third quote above and his comments on Nazism not excepted). This sets him a far ways off from Edward Said and Stanley Aronowitz, theorists with more readable soapboxes. His mention of American disaster movies in an Israeli newspaper is absurd, but he doesn’t seem to be able to help himself.

So Zizek relegates himself, happily it seems, to the status of entertaining clown. His most popular analogues seem to be Charlie Kaufman (for building fluffy Escher castles in the sky) and Dave Eggers (for shameless shamefulness). But since he gives the game away so baldly, maybe that’s his intent.

(Dated tangent: do you think Nader supporter Alan Sokal voted for Aronowitz? All signs point to yes!)

Whiteness Theory

12 January 2003 / / 0 Comments

Claudio Puebla delivers a very extensive examination of Whiteness. Much of the site is intensely technical, but some of his broader observations bear quoting.

Definition
The “ideal white” is defined by a perfect reflection value for all wavelengths of light: “No losses means that the reflectance values are 1 for the whole wavelength range (or 100%); this defines the ideal white, a body rarely encountered in nature.”

Components
As described on the Theory page, the “whiteness” of a shade is determined by three elements: base white, shaded white, and fluorescent white. Though observers cannot distinguish the elements in a shade, differences in any of the three elements will result in colors not matching under some lighting conditions (“metamerism”). Two colors gauged at the same level of “whiteness” may be metameric along any of three axes.

Utility
White’s lightness makes it extremely useful where visibility and contrast are important. Puebla states that this has led to “the use of color mixing techniques as a means to increase the perceived whiteness is quite widespread in the industrial areas of paper, textiles, detergents and plastic.”

Aesthetics
On the Assessment page, he describes how mixing varies amongst cultures:

Considering now the personal taste for certain whiteness it can be said that this varies with cultural background of the observer as well with the final application of the white object.

As such people with a cultural background of the Far East prefer a reddish white, Europeans prefer a neutral white, while in Latin America shaded bluish whites are preferred. On the other hand neutral bluish whites are preferred for objects suggesting freshness (like bottles for mineral water) but a reddish white are favored for white underwear garments.

Bill Dixon, Vade Mecum

11 January 2003 / / 0 Comments

The archive doesn’t seem to work right, but if you scroll down to the 12-10-02 entry of Melting Object, and you’ll see him salute trumpeter Bill Dixon. Dixon’s a great and underexposed figure, coming out of the 60’s avant-garde jazz movement and following his own path from thereon out.

I believe it has something to do with his melding of a very respectful classicism (he cites Webern especially along with the rest of the serialists) with an interest in pure timbre outside of the realm of explicit “notes.” His embrace of Austrian trumpet abuser Franz Hautzinger speaks to how open he’s been to abandoning structures of notes for pure sound. You can even hear it on his early (1964, I think, and it sounds like nothing else of the period), and rather unavailable Intents and Purposes, where his playing is far more linear, literally, than it became, but the relation of it to the bed of musicians beneath him shifts drastically and often.

But more specifically, just take the two Vade Mecum cd’s, from the early 90’s. Dixon works with two bassists, Barry Guy and William Parker, who come out of two drastically different backgrounds (English free improv and American free jazz–okay, if you like records like these, they seem drastically different). Parker plays with tonal and rhythmic ideas fairly often, while Guy is much more inclined towards extended techniques, more traditional “classical” playing, and noisy outbursts. The relationship seems to progress as the recording goes along (I’m with MO; the second disc is better), but my favorite moments are when Guy and Parker play at complete odds with one another, but Dixon bridges them. It’s beyond my ability to articulate without imprecise metaphor, but Dixon provides a well around which both Parker and Guy’s orbits can be independently sustained without crossing.

Dixon records sparingly, and the lack of flash in his playing has probably cost him as much as his personality has. But his structural concerns are, as far as I know, very different from anyone else’s, and only recently are younger musicians seeming to pick them up. (Two albums that strike me are GratHoVox and Wing Vane, but who can say?)

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