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The Unplan

Or, strength vs. weakness, as the case may be presents.

Imagine a wall to which things thrown may stick, but only for a short time. Enter the policy entrepreneurs.

In a most unfortunate mashup, the MBA ethos (?) has been paired with a kind of cribbed international politics model in a cache of people who pride themselves on not understanding anything about what they are doing. When David Brooks calls you stupid (no NYT link) you’ve won the golden calf.

There is something refreshing (refreshingly horrifying is a KIND of refreshing) about squeezing modern America and all its exceptionalisms into a new, middling third world country. We’ll update a lot corruptions and make them worse. We’ll crash many calcified industries and norms – universities, the law, farming. The notion that people should feel sorry for recent college graduates has it exactly backwards – they were the last ones to get a vintage education without all the sides and intellectual pestilence of acquiescent fascism. Especially if you went to small liberal arts or other well-regarded institution. Congratulations. Well done. We’re going to need you. Tune up your language and get ready to use it.

Commodification of everything in a society that worships it can be difficult to see – though many Europeans look at the U.S. and see nothing else. We suspect envy; they allow for the cautionary tale.

A$ it happened to visual art and what’s left to work with leaves a lot of space for making thinking grappling – which is to say space that goes greatly under-used. But it leaves a great place to lean in, to see it, to see this:

Artists are rarely moral heroes and should not be expected to be, any more than plumbers or dog breeders are. Goya, being neither madman nor masochist, had no taste for martyrdom. But he sometimes was heroic, particularly in his conflicted relations with the last Bourbon monarch he served, the odious and arbitrarily cruel Fernando VII. His work asserted that men and women should be free from tyranny and superstition; that torture, rape, despoliation, and massacre, those perennial props of power in both the civil and the religious arena, were intolerable; and that those who condoned or employed them were not to be trusted, no matter how seductive the bugle calls and the swearing of allegiance might seem. At fifteen, to find this voice-so finely wrought and yet so raw, public and yet strangely private-speaking to me with such insistence and urgency from a remote time and a country I’d never been to, of whose language I spoke not a word, was no small thing. It had the feeling of a message transmitted with terrible urgency, mouth to ear: this is the truth, you must know this, I have been through it. Or, as Goya scratched at the bottom of his copperplates in Los desastres de la guerra: “Yo lo vi,” “I saw it.” “It” was unbelievably strange, but the “yo” made it believable.

A European might not have reacted to Goya’s portrayal of war in quite this way; these scenes of atrocity and misery would have been more familiar, closer to lived experience. War was part of the common fate of so many English, French, German, Italian, and Balkan teenagers, not just a picture in a frame. The crushed house, the dismembered body, the woman howling in her unappeasable grief over the corpse of her baby, the banal whiskered form of the rapist in a uniform suddenly looming in the doorway, the priest (or rabbi) spitted like a pig on a pike. These were things that happened in Europe, never to us, and our press did not print photographs of them. We Australian boys whose childhood lay in the 1940s had no permanent atrocity exhibition, no film of real-life terror running in our heads. Like our American counterparts we had no experience of bombing, strafing, gas, enemy invasion, or occupation. In fact, we Australians were far more innocent of such things, because we had nothing in our history comparable to the fratricidal slaughters of the American Civil War, which by then lay outside the experience of living Americans but decidedly not outside their collective memory. Except for one Japanese air strike against the remote northern city of Darwin, a place where few Australians had ever been, our mainland was as virginal as that of North America. And so the mighty cycle of Goya’s war etchings, scarcely known in the country of my childhood, came from a place so unfamiliar and obscure, so unrelated to life as it was lived in that peculiar womb of nonhistory below the equator, that it demanded special scrutiny. Not Beethoven’s Muss es sein-“Must it be so? It must be so”-written at the head of the last movement of his F Major String Quartet in 1826. Rather, “Can it be so? It can be so!”-a prolonged gasp of recognition at the sheer, blood-soaked awfulness of the world. Before Goya, no artist had taken on such subject matter at such depth. Battles had been formal affairs, with idealized heroes hacking at one another but dying noble and even graceful deaths: Sarpedon’s corpse carried away from Troy to the broad and fertile fields of an afterlife in Lycia by Hypnos and Thanatos, Sleep and Death. Or British General Wolfe expiring instructively on the heights of Quebec, setting a standard of nobly sacrificial death etiquette for his officers and even for an Indian. Not the mindless and terrible slaughter that, Goya wanted us all to know, is the reality of war, ancient or modern.

From Goya by Robert Hughes.

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Chimurenga – who no know go know

Along with promoting some recent work, a new project is making clips from my Unscripted interviews available on social media. One of those we’ll get to eventually is with journalist and DJ Ntone Edjabe, founder and editor of Chimurenga, an innovative platform for free ideas and political reflection by Africans about Africa.

And this is one of the rare, correct uses of ‘innovative’ as an adjective. in newspaper form, the issues have a little of everything – poetry, photography, plays, terrific writing of all kinds and of course, news. However,  and I only started to understand this much later and not especially because of the times we are a’living in, Chimurenga’s journalism often presents news stories long after actual events. That is, rather than so-called breaking news – which honestly leaves us mostly flummoxed and discombobulated by its sheer volume (not to speak of those who work the sheer volume for their purposes, ahem) – Chimurenga presents news much later. Maybe more information has come available, maybe people still don’t understand a thing that happened… does this sound familiar?

It really changes the idea of news into information for action and understanding.

A sample of the excellent writing, in an article by saxophonist and composer Shabaka Hutchings:

In a lecture he gave on Afrofuturism, Kodwo Eshun used a phrase which resonated with me – “encoded language”. I believe there is an alternative vernacular present in both hip-hop and jazz which relates the two musics intrinsically, and which exists outside the orthodox analysis. This idea that music has layers of encoded information, passed down through generations, without explicit acknowledgement even from the participants, fascinates me. It speaks to the question of why certain elements of African musical stylings are propagated by the diaspora. Are there more stories within musical elements which survived the middle passage than we choose to admit? Are we in a position to grasp the meanings of these tales? Maybe the formulation of new myths is a valid way of approaching these questions, if only for the creative stimulus imagined answers can inspire.

Let us then try to explore the worlds of both jazz and hip-hop as vessels for an informational network outside the parameters of pre-packaged discourse. What happens when you take away the notion of harmonic movement in jazz as being central to its intrinsic meaning or the message the improvising soloist has to offer? What happens when you take the focus away from lyricism in hip-hop?

Yes, we could learn a thing or three – and wow do we need to. There’s so much more to all of this – and take that however you want. Chimurenga is supported by donations, if you are able. My interview with Edjabe is here.

Image: an issue of Chimurenga I keep in my office.

 

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His Air was on Fire

I saw this show of paintings, sound installation, and short films by David Lynch in Paris in 2007, by far the most hilarious art show I’ve ever enjoyed:

Lynch started out as a painter at Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art way back in 1966, and famously moved to making short abstract films, which he calls “moving paintings”, when he saw one of his canvases moving in the wind. With the money he made from his first private commission while still an art student, he bought a Bolex Super 8 camera.

Given the almost accidental nature of his move into film-making, would he ever have been satisfied had he remained a painter? “Oh yes,” he says, without hesitation, “for sure. That’s all I wanted to do for a long time. Just paint. But, suddenly, now there was film. This big thing.”

THE ground floor at the Fondation Cartier is devoted to Lynch’s paintings and drawings, the latter of which number in the region of 400, and some of which seem to date back to his college days.

“I hadn’t seen a lot of this stuff for a long, long time,” Lynch drawls, “and it made me realise that it’s actually a very good thing to see old work again. Some of the stuff that came out of storage really fired me up. I really don’t know where it will lead but it sure feels good.”

Over the last few years Lynch has been painting several series of nightmarish landscapes, each peopled with vague shapes in opaque, dusky landscapes. One such series is called the Mr Jim Series another, the Bob Series, perhaps inspired by his love for the Bob’s Big Boy restaurant in Los Angeles where he used to breakfast daily on “four, five, six cups of coffee – with lots of sugar”. He’s since given up sugar as a creative catalyst but his vision remains somewhat frantic.

We both stare at a work called Bob Burns Tree. I ask him to talk me through its gestation.

“Well, it’s called Bob Burns Tree ,” he says, pointing to the Bob figure and then to the tree. “I knew from the start it was going be about, well, Bob burning a tree. I started with that idea and I kind of stayed with it. Yep.”

So good. Writing in paintings, normally abhorrent, sat with a kind of sang-froid alongside jeans that had been run over multiple times by a car, next to plaintive flat-space ear-marked for ill by the master with his own hand. I mean.

And then you would catch the sound loop running throughout the skeletoid building, akin to holding a stethoscope on the chest of gun factory.

Thank you and godspeed, sir.

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The Continuous Profile

Take him back to Tulsa, indeed.

Raise your hand if you thought the original Juneteenth date was a coincidence. Wow. No Takers.

The absurdism of this fascist performance art expresses the thin smallness of this entire four-year escapade of MAGA authoritarianism led by a needy, under-educated man-child. We can be grateful in many ways for the incurious incompetence on continual display. People joke about slogans that sounded better in the original German, but the sheer unstudied pettiness of it makes the earlier epoch seem practically elegant by comparison:

ONE HUNDRED years ago, on the early morning of March 23, 1919, a small crowd gathered in the Piazza San Sepolcro in Milan, a few blocks west of the Duomo. Many had arrived from other cities the night before, drawn to hear a charismatic young journalist, former socialist, and recent war veteran, who—with a vigor that would mark his discourses for two decades to come—duly trumpeted the ambitions of a new political movement. As a self-declared “anti-party,” Benito Mussolini’s Fasci Italiani di combattimento (Italian Combat Fasci or, simply, Fascists)1 aimed to yoke growing social unrest to an unabashed nationalism, freshly stoked by the country’s victory in World War I alongside the Entente powers (Britain, France, and Russia). Dubbed the Sansepolcristi for their presence at this fateful first meeting, the so-called Fascists of the first hour counted among their number syndicalists and ex-soldiers, even a few women and Italian Jews, as well as artists and writers such as the painters Achille Funi and Primo Conti and the Futurist poet-impresario, F.T. Marinetti.

For the preceding ten years, Marinetti’s Futurists had upended Italian culture in every imaginable domain, from painting and poetry to clothing, music, architecture, photography, and theater. A political phenomenon as much as an aesthetic crusade, Futurism lent Fascism much of its early ideological impetus: anti-Communist and anti-clerical, interventionist and irredentist, hostile to academic pedantry and cultural patrimony alike.

Substitute ‘reality TV’ for ‘Futurists’ in the above for a more accurate, recent rendering.

Image: author photo, Rome.

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So that persons could thrive once more

Some time ago, as I was going through Ruskin’s Fors Clavigera, I would re-type sections into a message for a good friend, C______. Herein are some of the reasons we were so locked-in with the heart and mind of the Victorian savant:

The second major stage of his career may be said to begin in 1858, when Ruskin was visiting Turin and, having been depressed by a boring and stupid sermon, saw Veronese’s painting of King Solomon and the queen of Sheba. He was utterly overwhelmed by the sensual immediacy of the work, which seemed to him far more obviously true than the spectral doctrines of the Christianity whose hold on him had been gradually (though insensibly) loosening. He experienced what he later called his “deconversion,” and this lasted for nearly twenty years. This was the period of Ruskin as political economist—though, thanks to his incapacity to separate the forces that most of us find it convenient to separate, his thoughts about political economy were always connected to his aesthetic convictions and even (though in a new and often subterranean way) to his deep and detailed knowledge of the biblical call to justice.

The major product of this period of Ruskin’s life was the collection of monthly pamphlets known as Fors Clavigera. Ruskin thought of these pamphlets as open letters: the full title of the project was Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain. After decades of work as a historian and critic of art and architecture, Ruskin had come to believe that (1) the arts of his own age were, generally speaking, far less excellent than they should be; (2) that those deficiencies were inevitable by-products of a corrupt system of political economy that promoted profit for the industrialist above all and so enforced impersonal efficiency and productivity over the flourishing of makers and craftsmen; and (3) that, therefore, a critique of political economy must be articulated before anything else. The political economy of Britain had to be altered so that the conditions of labour could be improved so that the arts could be renewed so that persons could thrive once more. Thus Ruskin’s first major exercise in this endeavour was a series of 1857 lectures published as The Political Economy of Art.

EmPHAsis added. I can love some old-fashioned-y-ness, especially retro-fit with eye shadow and boots of punk or, like here, the scholarly sense of seeing so many things as inseparable.

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Hand the match*


In a complete coincidence having nothing whatsoever to with eye shadow or other heretofore smoldering fires in the D.C. area, this terrific digression on Smoke in The Paris Review, courtesy of the late great John Berger, with illustrations by Selçuk Demirel.

* another old-timey saying involving smoking, common among the hobo gentry when one too-many were gathered around your flame.

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Plenty

Even when

Louise Bourgeois: Self Portrait, 2007
there’s plenty wrong, there’s still plenty of the other, too. It just gets crowded out, like blue sky by rain. No need to blow sunshine, just a little pushback – like this digression on the graphic sensibility of Louise Bourgeois:

Born in Paris in 1911, Bourgeois suffered more than the usual number of grievous blows to the psyche, and her inner life stayed tightly wrapped around their memory. War, illness, sexual jealousy, mental instability were all things she witnessed in her first decade, and she never forgot—or forgave—any of them. As a teenager she learned that the attractive young Englishwoman who lived with the family as a tutor was also her father’s mistress, and this betrayal in particular was something she never got over. In addition, or perhaps in response, her mother was fragile and often ill, and young Louise became her companion at various spas and treatment centers; she was released from her caretaker role by her mother’s death when she was twenty-one.
After the loss of her mother, and encouraged by her charming and tyrannical father, Bourgeois started a small business selling works on paper, prints, and illustrated books out of a corner of the family’s tapestry workshop on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. To acquire her stock, she scoured the auction houses and book dealers, and she seems to have absorbed, almost overnight, the dominant graphic styles of the day. She had a particular affinity for Bonnard and Toulouse-Lautrec, as well as other artists who used the illustrated book form, which was then in vogue. Something about these livres d’artiste, as they were known—the way they combined text and pictures, and the way the image was printed from engraving or etching plates, the whole satisfying feel in the hand of beautifully made paper embossed with rectangles of finely drawn tones of gray—formed the template for how Bourgeois would think about her own art, on and off, for the rest of her life.

Have a template for how you think what matters most to you. Seems like all the advice anyone might need.

Image: Louise Borgeois: Self Portrait, 2007. MOMA

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Piggies, markets

A can of worms, wrapped in a puzzle, buried inside an enigma, with a little pink flag sticking up, the only thing visible, while the sound of one hand clapping faintly echoes in the background

:

By the time the subject of the movie finally comes up, we’d already spent half an hour discussing the ossification of our own culture. We talk about how New York City, the place in which Gray set his first five films, has changed so drastically since the mid 1990s; Gray says the Brooklyn of Little Odessa “is totally gone,” and that, while the 1920s tenements in The Immigrant are still there, they now tower above John Varvatos boutiques. Gray specifies that he’s less interested in romanticizing the crime-ridden city of the past than questioning what’s led to the kind of environment in which, he says, one of his friends seems to be the only person actually living in his apartment building on Central Park West, not using it as an investment.

The fundamental issue on Gray’s mind when we talk is how capitalism impacts our priorities as human beings. Saddled with student debt from the moment we set foot in a university, our ability to “study for the sake of learning” is over; instead, we’re “forced to become budding capitalists.” It’s a critique that received major airtime during Bernie Sanders’s campaign, and Gray’s clearly given it some serious thought. “We haven’t figured out a way to monetize integrity, and when you can’t monetize integrity, and you can’t incentivize integrity and incentivize individuality, and you pray at the god of the market, you get a very strange beast that almost consumes itself,” Gray says. “It’s almost like everyone is beholden to this market god, and nobody knows what to do.”

All in one place, this short article has it all. Best of luck to Gray with the The Lost City of Z.

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Formidable Powers of Intervention

This is some incredibly confusing news to decipher, but given the players and subject that’s not too surprising.

The European commission underlined the negative impact of David Cameron’s summit gambit by pledging that the City’s financial institutions would be subject to new regulations hatched in Brussels.

So… the City, as it were, is England’s version of Wall Street, Charlotte and/or wherever else calls itself the center of the financial industry. Cameron evidently went to bat for it, protecting London’s sprawling financial sector from ‘excessive regulation’ at the European summit last week. He either vetoed the EU treaty or it proceeded without him. Whichever, it moves on now without the UK.

Cameron’s move isolated Britain in Europe as seldom before, producing weekend headlines and comment across Europe that the UK was on the way out of the EU.

“We want a strong and constructive Britain in Europe, and we want Britain to be at the centre of Europe, and not on the sidelines,” said Rehn. “If [Cameron’s] move was intended to prevent bankers and financial corporations in the [City of London] from being regulated, that is not going to happen. We must all draw lessons from the financial crisis, and that goes for the financial sector as well.”

It’s almost like a glimpse into the future, where industries sponsors national governments to protect their interests, couched in proprietary language that conflates the country with the industry, and makes their interests one and the same. The future, or the recent past – I can’t figure which.

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America: Too American?

If there are two consecutive sentences in this long article one of which does not smack of the utter idiocy of our present epoch, I can’t find them. The whole thing is summed up in this one sentence:

So thousands of companies here remain stubbornly small — all of which means Italy is a haven for artisans but is in a lousy position to play the global domination game.

Game. Set. Match. Because if you’re not trying to do that, why do anything? Positively everything that is wrong with our present trajectory is contained in that one little nugget. Delusions of scale? Check. Outright antagonism toward localized ventures? Got it. Condescension toward quality as value? In spades.

The thing is, this is also perfectly indicative of the tone of all business reporting; anything that can be interpreted as gains for workers is seen as negative, as is anything which diverts revenue from shareholders. It’s all of an anti-human, anti-person scale piece. As if it is inevitable that the high-quality fabric in question would give way to lower-priced faire from elsewhere because, well, that’s how we define things: down.

But it is rich how Italy is castigated for its lack of competition, as if the U.S. was some kind of hot bed. It is true that companies do most anything to drive others out of business, though in the sense freedom is just another word for a race to the bottom. Even the article sites the thousands of small bakeries in Italy vs. Quiznos here. Enough said. I guess the entire meaning of cheap never occurs to anybody.