Ask Maddox

In a comment on the post on the Lucy Lippard lecture, someone remarked that she didn’t really answer the questions asked from the floor. I'd agree, although it's not that uncommon in a talk like this and it seemed exacerbated by the fact that it was hard to hear the questions. But one question asked that night seemed pretty easy to answer, so I might as well try.

A woman asked if activist art was the same as political art, whether activist art is always political and vice versa. After trying to determine what the questioner said, and then making a self-deprecating comment (refreshing but not that clarifying) about sometimes being sloppy by using these words interchangeably, I didn’t hear Lippard give what should have been a pretty easy answer. At least it seems that way to me, once you start from Lippard’s own formulation of public art, community art, activist art. Political art seems one more in the series. I would define it as art that addresses political or social issues, but does not necessarily seek to bring about social change, which would be the defining characteristic of activist art. Activist art would probably always be political, but political art would not necessarily be activist. Political art includes work that goes for of commentary but remains disengaged from solving the problems. With all of these types of art, different artists and different art works will involve combinations of the categories. Activist art might or might not involve the community. Community art can easily have no activist agenda. Political art might take a public form (e.g., politically-oriented stencil art in a public place).

It was interesting to think about examples of each form in Nashville. Public art we have plenty of – Musica is a pure example, no political content, purely the product of a single artist’s vision, no community involvement. Community art – the dragon in Fannie Mae Dees Park. Political art – say Abby Whisenant’s photos from antiwar protests in DC and a whole range of people who comment on social issues like sexism, homophobia, misogyny, racism, militarism. But now try to come up with a good example of activist art. Something that really seems engaged in changing policy or people’s behavior. That’s a lot harder. Greg Schlanger’s installation at the Tennessee Arts Commission on mountaintop removal mining fits, as did the work Shaun Slifer and Ally Reeves made before they graduated and left town. But I’m not sure there’s much else I can point to with confidence that fits within this framework.

Many of the artists Lippard showed as examples of activist art were working in a medium that you can call performance art – people doing things in public, the artist staging events and encounters. Well, there is very little performance art occurring in Nashville. Heather Spriggs-Thompson has done a number of performance pieces. Tom Thayer’s students did this puppet-based show that clearly had a performance dimension (as I recall the PR on it rejects the phrase performance art). Lippard made a pretty good case that activist art has to get out of the gallery, but maybe this lack of performance-based work does reflect the development level of the local community. We are just getting used to the idea of art in galleries that challenges us more, and artists may not yet have the sense that the gallery could be exhausted for some purposes.

Octavia Butler RIP

Science Fiction writer Octavia Butler died Friday in one of those freakish accidents. She tripped outside her house and hit her head. She was only 58 years old.

Seattle Times obit

I've posted on her books before. The Parable of the Talents and Parable of the Sower are really intriguing views on possible near-term endpoints of current social and political forces.

Weird day. Dennis Weaver also died. He was a lot older. I loved McCloud as a kid. Part of the Sunday Mystery Movie series.

Lucy Lippard’s Vanderbilt lecture

In preparation for Lucy Lippard’s talk last Wednesday at Vanderbilt I’ve been reading her work much more carefully than I ever have – in general I don’t fill my reading time with art criticism. It’s been very stimulating. She’s a fantastic writer and thinker, and during her career she has grappled with how to be a critic, and with the result of very imaginatively structured texts that weave together her judgments, her explanatory description of works, biography, the artist’s own words, and the words of others. This makes her books a little harder to navigate, as you move between a main text and substantial captions that are not to be skipped over, but it creates something that has some chance of standing on its own longer.

The lecture at Vanderbilt, titled “Common Ground: Art and Communities,” was disappointing, as talks often are. To be effective takes very different skills than writing, but I expected more because of the care Lippard has taken with her texts over the years. The lecture was about the community basis for activist art, differentiating it from public art (almost anything in a public space) and community art (the community has a say in the work). Activist art is issue-oriented. It can be public and community-based as well. These distinctions were useful, and she had slides of artists who were new to me, like Suzanne Lacy.

There were things I wished she had addressed more, such as the aesthetics of this art, what differentiates it from community organizing, and some of the implications of art coming from a local source rather than rooted in the major metropolitan cultural centers. I believe she is making a case for this art having value over non-activist art, but I am not sure. Some statements, most of which I think came up in the question period, seemed off mark. She asserted that no one realized that Picasso’s Guernica was about a Fascist bombing. The Modern may not have stressed that information (I remember it just appearing dramatically in front of you as you got out of the elevators), but I think many people who don’t know much about art knew that. A friend of mine in the audience who is not from the art world had the same reaction. In another case someone asked why this stuff wasn’t getting into museums and Lippard encouraged the idea that museums resist it, but she failed to go after a larger point about the institutional context. Often activist art will live best outside the museum. In some cases the forms of the art tie it to a place outside the museum or it takes a form that just cannot be bottled. And a lot of this art is making its way into shows. Of the artists she showed, at this point the Guerilla Girls and the Rural Studio are in the canon, you see Charles Simmonds’ little buildings in many museums, and Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party will be installed in the Brooklyn Museum.

I also was surprised by some technical lapses. I expect Vanderbilt to do a better job providing technical support for a speaker. There was no remote control for the projector, so Donald Woodman ran it by hand. There was no microphone set up for questions in the scheduled question and answer period, so Lippard had to spend a fair amount of time trying to figure out what was asked.

Go see Matthew Shipp Friday

Nashville’s biggest jazz concert since McCoy Tyner is coming up this Friday: Matthew Shipp at the Primitive Baptist Church, 4602 Indiana Avenue in Sylvan Park, scheduled to start at 8:00. Also on the bill are Lambchop, playing a very rare Nashville show, and Hands Off Cuba. The fact Lambchop is doing this show gives you some idea about Shipp’s standing. He is one of the most significant jazz pianists in the world today. I think people would probably call him a free jazz player, although it’s hard to know what that means. Lambchop’s website refers to him as an avant-garde pianist. He is a member of saxophonist David Ware’s quartet, and has been one of the primary people involved with the Thirsty Ear Blue Series experiments that cross Free Jazz and electronica (involving people like DJ Spooky). And he has recorded with Yo La Tengo and the Yo Las are very close with Lambchop, so you can some of the connections in bringing Shipp and Lambchop together.

Shipp has a new solo album out on Thirsty Ear and he’s been doing concerts around the country “in support” of it, if you can use such a heavy industry term in his case. This concert came about because John Rogers, former Nashville musician and current New York resident, writer, etc. got a ball rolling and Chris Davis made it happen.

Anyway, to get back to Shipp. (Matthew's website) I know him best from a tremendous album, duets with bassist William Parker called DNA. His playing has a classicism like Cecil Taylor with the ferocity turned down a bit. By that I mean the music works with architectural structures that build up in steps and combinations rather than a purely adrenalin-oriented arc. Shipp plays very clear lines, and in keeping with the ideas on DNA seems to work from small groups of material, a kind of coding similar to the way classical composers grow music out of cells of tones. You also hear bits of new textures emerge from the whole the way musical quotations float into the proceedings in a Charles Ives. The talk of classical forms shouldn’t throw anyone off though – this is passionate music, but Shipp builds up to climaxes rather than dumping them on you. And you don’t mistake the music’s grounding in the harmonic progressions and rhythms of jazz.

This is a chance to see a great musician in his prime at very close quarters. Not to be missed.

Criticism and self-indulgence

“I've never had much faith in art criticism as a primary form because you are leaning on somebody else's work. It's not that it can't be a positive parasitic process, not that you can't bring new insights to the work, or get out the artist's intentions better than the artist himself or herself might be able to do, but I can't think of any criticism that has ever stood up in the long run as a real parallel to the art. Some of the critics we respect the most didn't write good criticism-they were good poets or something. It's self-indulgence when you come right down to it, you like something and you enjoy plunging into it with words. I don't finally know what the hell criti­cism does for anybody except the artist and the writer.”
Lucy Lippard, “Freelancing the Dragon,” From the Center, p. 20 (Dutton 1976)

This is a great quote, and makes several points I believe strongly, like the self-indulgent quality of writing criticism, and the impetus to do, to “plunge in with words.” Her description of criticism by poets and others fits some cases well, like Baudelaire. His criticism makes some fine points, but they mostly take the from of aphorisms isolated in the midst of more topical observations.

There are exceptions to this characterization. Walter Benjamin for instance, unless you want to call him something other than a critic. Susan Sontag for sure, and I think everyone sees her as a critic primarily. Of even more recent people, it seems someone like Tom Frank, and Lippard herself, might hold on and be worth reading years from now.

The final comment in the quote reads initially as a condemnation of criticism, but I’m not so sure it is. If criticism forms a place where a writer and an artist can establish communication, that seems valuable as a human phenomenon. Criticism as a public correspondence, a conversation with a performance dimension. If the artist is one of the two primary beneficiaries of the writing, other people in the society or community benefit by the encouragement the artist gets to keep doing what she does. This view has a strange effect of relegating the general readership to a critical secondary position. Private correspondence does not have the same impact as knowing that the writer made statements in front of anyone who would read or listen. So you need readers, but you need them more as witnesses than as recipients of communication.

After putting it in those terms, I remember my own experiences as a reader of criticism. It spurs my thinking, teaches me things about works of art, and in some cases gives me a feel for an exhibit or movie I won’t see, music I won’t hear. Sure that’s frustrating, and sometimes it serves to make me feel isolated, but it also gives me some of the pleasures at second hand. For some reason, in some frames of mind a review or critical essay is exactly what I want to read.

Something missing from the Frist’s African art show

To cut to the chase–Christianity and Islam. OK, let’s take a couple of steps back. The Frist Center’s current big show is a selection of African art primarily from the collection of the Seattle Art Museum. It’s a well-done show, chock-full of interesting objects. The primary organization is a sequence of sections that focus on the emblematic art forms of different cultural groups: Asante kente clothe and gold jewelry, Maasai beadwork, Dan masks, and so on. A critical part of the curatorial stance is that these are not archeological remains, but forms currently in use. For example, one of the kente is a pattern (or maybe it’s the cloth) worn by Kwame Nkrumah when he was released from prison by the Brits. Each of these sections has narration from a person from that cultural group, who put the works in cultural context. In almost every case, they refer to how these art objects fit into practices that continue into the present, maybe something they remember as a kid (and a lot of the speakers are relatively young). To stress the quality of the art as living practice, the show ends with work by contemporary Africans.

I reviewed the show in the Scene a few weeks ago: http://www.nashvillescene.com/Stories/Arts/Art/2006/02/02/Africa_as_We_ve_Never_Seen_It/index.shtml but there’s this gap that has been bugging me. The idea is that these artworks represent a contemporary African culture, not some pristine and lost cultural state. The exhibit jumbles artworks dated (generally imprecisely) as 19^th or 20^th century, indicating that you don’t need to segregate older and newer works. I have no trouble going along with that. I like the idea. And they didn’t shy away from works that reflect the contact with the West, which of course has been going on a long time.

But based on what I know about African society, I was surprised to see no reference (that I remember) to Christianity or Islam. As I understand it, a majority of sub-Saharan African identify themselves as Christians. Western Christians frequently hear about the rising influence of their African branches, whether it is in the controversies around homosexuality in the Anglican church or the selection of a new Pope. Several of Carlton Wilkinson’s photos from his travels to Africa show Christianity as part of the life of everyday, contemporary Africans (there were several in his show at the Parthenon, and you can see them over at In the Gallery). The displays in the Frist show don’t stress religious practice and traditional cosmologies, although that does come up from time to time. More of the works had to do with social, “folk” practices like European town festivals that have their roots in non-Christian ideas about the world of spirits.

I can believe that African Christianity is very syncretic, and that folk practices survive alongside the new religion, but I have trouble imagining that Christian images aren’t starting to creep into some of these forms, or that Christianity isn’t adapting some of the forms for worship and evangelism. And then you wonder if the curators have avoided these crossovers in the interests of an idea of authenticity, or a judgment of quality, that second-guesses the Africans themselves.

The same could be said of visual references to Islam, similarly lacking, although my understanding is that Islam is less pervasive than Christianity in sub-Saharan Africa, the focus of this show. And I would expect that Islam is less likely to adapt older cultural forms, but maybe I’m wrong about that.

The one place where I saw the clear presence of Christianity was in video of Ghanaian funerals that involve wood coffins built to look like objects of importance to the deceased. At one point women are dancing around the coffin, and if you look close you see they are all wearing T-shirts with an image of Jesus on them.

I don’t have an answer to whether this show fails to show us this latest step in what African art looks like. Maybe somebody has some insight on it they want to put in a comment. Otherwise, it’s just something I’m going to keep an eye out for. The best answer would be to get to Africa myself. Not sure if that will happen.

A Couple of Fine Printmakers

Jerry Dale McFadden at TAG has a couple of really nice young printmakers on exhibit who are new to Nashville and to his gallery: Valerie Lueth and Paul Roden. They’re also engaged to get married soon and they have plans to open a press together.

Lueth does very detailed etchings that have qualities of cartooning and obsessive drawing, while Roden does politically oriented woodcuts. As a way of encouraging marital concord I suppose the proper stance is to praise each of them equally, or else you’re feeding some sort of movie melodrama. Oh well. Her stuff appealed to me more. She fills most of her pieces with detail, lots of biological, mechanical, and botanical entities that seem to have roots in geometric free association. You see it also in drawings, some of which are built on a base of crossword puzzle-like grids of dark and light squares. But I think the most striking piece in the show is one where she lightens the amount of information. Called Twins, it is a pair of figures partially rendered – faces from the nose up, one set of joined hands, another hand and arm holding a lock of hair, and the torsos ending in cocoon-like bundles rather than legs and feet. Their eyes have no pupils or irises, defined only by the shape of the eyes, but a sense of wariness and inscrutability comes from those shapes and the molding of the cheekbones.

Roden obviously has strong command over the woodblock medium, with the ability to shift between pieces that have that obvious woodblock quality of simple modeling to something closer to drawing. See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil is a really good image, of a charging elephant with especially heavy feet, ridden by three monkeys brandishing swords and holding a large menacing lance. Just to keep the political balance, it is paired with an image of a donkey in a wagon being pushed and pulled by the three blind mice. I think one of the tricks with work like this is how much you are in the mood for political satire and allegory at the time you are looking at it.

Jerry Dale puts a lot of images of his artists on his website. Here’s the page for the Lueth-Roden show, with pictures of the opening:

http://www.tagartgallery.com/

Tomight's Olympics Spectacular

The Europeans do have a way with pageants. I wish I could get my hands on footage of the parade through the streets of Paris for the celebration of the Bicentennial of the Storming of the Bastille in 1989. It was just one odd image after another, ending with Jessye Norman singing La Marseillaise, which was a great touch – on the one hand a simple choice of production values over nationalism, but also making broader claim for the French Revolution as an event that shaped and belongs to the world. I guess. But c’mon, this was a national celebration.

So you see the same stuff in Cirque de Soleil, and then tonight in the Olympics opening ceremony. The athletes came in accompanied with cheesy 1980s disco music – it’s only fitting that a celebration of winter sports acknowledge the cultural contributions of the Eurotrash, high end Roma moving between ski resorts all winter long. Much opportunity for making fun of costumes. The Jack Abramoff fedora and trenchcoat look seemed popular. The Germans had colorful knit caps with visors for their athletes, but had to put strands of Heidi braids on the ones for the women. That was gratuitous.

The Olympics are now required to have an impenetrable and haphazard allegorical pageant in the opening ceremony. Women in elongated Amy Cutler clothes floated around in midair, a couple of them attached to big balloons of the moon and sun that wandered around aimlessly. A woman, I think she was singing, stood in a clam shell. But she had clothes on. Then there was a dance, and oh yeah, before that there were a couple of guys with things on their backs that shot out sparks like the circular saw girl on Letterman. A driver toured the stage in a Formula 1 racer. And some other stuff I didn’t see. All the time the athletes were standing in this big bowl in the middle of the stadium, like they would pour in water and cook them. It ends with a couple of speeches and the torch thing, which gets you back to Speer, Riefenstahl, and Nuremburg every time. Luciano Pavrotti closed it, nearly, with luridly dyed hair and eyebrows and a rendition of Nessun Dorma. He marshaled his resources for the final climax, and the athletes cheered it like one of their own had come out of retirement to nail a triple axel. Curtain down. But it’s not over yet. Then fireworks shot out of the roof of the stadium.

When the teams march in, a lot of them had digital cameras and were snapping away at the crowd, at themselves. It was cute, and broke the ceremonial illusion with people acting like people, excited to be there. I’ve known a couple of people who competed in the Olympics, not big media star types, and their international competition days were a great ride. For the people I’ve talked to most, they had not previously had a chance to travel, see the world and interact with people from all over.

With their cameras, the marchers are both spectacle and spectator. You can look at this a couple of ways. One is that with those cameras the marchers make the spectacle complete and all-encompassing, in that everyone gets incorporated into in the event in the role of spectator. Not even the actors can get behind the illusion. The other view is what I first mentioned, that exercising acts as an individual in the view of the spectators breaks the smooth image that the spectacle is trying to create. They are engaged in personal actions (getting a picture for their own memory purposes) that do not contribute to the creation of the spectacular form. I don’t remember anyone in Triumph of the Will breaking out of line to wave at the camera.

Thank You Nam June Paik

Nam June Paik died a week ago. Student of John Cage, member of Fluxus, groundbreaking in his use of televisions in and as art. His work always delighted me, even as a kid. This was stuff that made it absolutely clear that contemporary art is lots of fun. It rearranged your perceptions and made for remarkable sensory experiences.

http://www.paikstudios.com/index.html

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-paik31jan31,0,762356.story?coll=la-home-obituaries

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/04/arts/design/04paik.html

Chris Davis back on the air at WRVU

Chris is back on the air at WRVU, thank God. Sundays 10pm-midnight (and two hours after Brian and Elizabeth, who got moved from Saturdays to Sundays 6-8). Chris seemed to be in an apocalyptic mood, seemed like every song was talking about the anti-Christ. He started with a fascinating clip from Elizabeth Clare Prophet, who I think was an old evangelist, giving a sermon about the evils of rock music. She had the strangest delivery, kind of a monotone with a steady rhythm like the words were electronically generated. Here's Chris' playlist from tonight.

http://129.59.202.23/playlistarchive/playlist_detail.php?pop=display_show&sid=226034

And WRVU's website is

http://wrvu.org/

if you want to listen on the internet next week.

Saturday's Alias concert

Alias gave their latest concert Saturday night. The usual sort of mix, perhaps with a higher obscurity quotient.

Listening to Zeneba Bowers play baroque is a real pleasure because of her absolute lack of stiffness. She plays fast parts fleetly, and draws out her lines expressively. She plays this music in a way that does not try to ignore the intervening musical events of Brahms, jazz, and even gypsy violin playing. On this bill she and a small ensemble of cello, harpsichord, and on one piece contrabass, played 17^th century pieces by Bertali and Pandolfi-Mealli. I believe Alias likes to try different things with the instrumentation on baroque music, and this time it was adding the contrabass. I would need to check how unusual it is to use the low orchestral bass in this setting, but to my ears the deep boom of the instrument’s bottom was a surprise, but pleasurable. It also allowed Matt Walker playing cello to switch between the continuo and solo lines. The second piece, the Sonata “La Cesta” by Pandolfi-Mealli, had an odd structure, with rubato fantasia sections dominating. And some of the melodic lines were strained and strange. All of which seemed like it would make this a hard piece to put together beyond finding phrasing moment-to-moment and phrase-by-phrase

The baroque pieces came late in the program. I’m switching everything around, which is consistent with my pick in the Scene where I jumped off from completely the wrong idea of the program order.

Before the baroque pieces came the best performance of the night, Michael Samis playing an elegy for solo cello by John Tavener called Thrinos or Threnos (the Alias program had the latter spelling, but I’ve found the former on a listing of his works and on recordings). Tavener is a British convert to the Russian Orthodox Church, and writes in an intensely mystical, modal style. I hadn’t listened to his music before writing this pick, but I liked it. He can pull off this musical mysticism. Samis’ performance was thrilling in its silences. It seems like he held them a little longer, which creates the tension of waiting and of approaching letting the performance fall into pieces but pulling up before it does, and he tended well to the ends of notes and beginnings. There were a very small number of miniscule infelicities of execution, which one noticed only because this piece is so simple as to make it unforgiving. It requires a virtuosity of concentration.

The program contained pieces that were not really the best examples of their genre, like the Pandolfi-Mealli. Hearing Chausson’s Chanson Perpetuelle live made it much clearer to me how sturdy and four-square it is, in contrast to Debussy who was active about the same time. The group also played a septet for winds, strings, and piano by Stravinsky that Bowers described as rarely heard, and you could see why. It was Stravinsky, so there were interesting aspects, like the use of baroque forms, the timbres of the families of instruments in the ensemble, and a modified serialism based on an 8-note cell that ends up sounding more polytonal than atonal. However, the melodies themselves were awkward, which is often my reaction to Stravinsky’s later works (i.e., after the heavily Russian works of his first period).

The concert had two premieres. One was a scherzo for String Quartet by a young violinist and composer currently based in Florida, Piotr Szewczyk. It was based on the half-diminished scale, and seemed a lot like Bartok. I was thinking Bartok’s 4^th quartet used the same scale, but that’s not quite right. The best part of Szewczyk’s piece was a con sordino interlude before the last rush of scherzo material.

The other premiere was a piece for viola, cello, and jazz trio by Matt Walker. It took a theme from the second movement of Beethoven’s 5^th Symphony, gave it swing phrasing and used that as the basis for a series of mostly written sections that included solos. The piece stayed in a consistently pre-bop swing style. Think Duke Ellington’s version of the Nutcracker Suite. And in a way it didn’t sound that different from Hot Club of Cowtown. Walker had a jazz-based piece on Alias’s concert last Spring, and while this one worked better, I’m not convinced this is fertile territory for him. His jazz writing is pretty simplistic. Solos for viola and cello were stiff, although Walker was better playing his own material than the violist. The solos by the jazz trio were stronger – they sounded improvised. Which could be because they were improvised, or because those musicians (David Huntsinger, Jack Jezzro, and Christopher Norton) have a better idea how to make the music sound improvised. One of the problems with this piece is that it wasn’t really a jazz-classical hybrid, but more of a swing revival work, only without the energy of improvisation. The idea of using the Beethoven theme as a jazz tune is fun, but I’d rather hear Hot Club of Cowtown or the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra do it. Turning jazz into a piece of classical chamber music doesn’t improve it. Walker obviously loves jazz, and I hope he is getting a chance to play the music in its usual settings. I know he plays guitar, but I hope he is trying it on cello – there’s good precedents for it going back to Fred Katz in the Chico Hamilton Quintet and Ray Brown and leading up to guys like Erik Friedlander and Fred Lonberg-Holm.

Next Alias concert is Sunday, May 7 at Vanderbilt/Blair School.

Hustle and Flow, as informative as Dr. Phil

I saw Hustle and Flow on DVD last weekend. A masterpiece of location scouting. The exterior scenes really take in Memphis, lots of workaday parts of the city. The muggy Delta climate is a practically a character in the film. And the interiors look like places you might find in a Southern inner city neighborhood (I’m thinking of the scene in the market where DJay meets up with Clyde).

The basic plot was the same as every other music story. Guy from a down and out situation has dream of becoming a star and lifting himself out of his surroundings, he gets a lucky break, suffers a setback, then receives redemption and gets his shot at the big time. In this case the main character is a pimp with a heart of gold, although they don’t entirely romanticize the guy.

Even if the overall plot arc was pat, the movie has well-observed moments between characters. At one point DJay is telling Shug, who is pregnant with his child and more or less his romantic interest (it’s not clear there really is such a thing in this milieu, another one of the angles that seem honest) that he wants to stop pimping and selling pot. This actress is a little bug-eyed anyway (not unappealing though), but when he starts talking like this she looks even more like a deer in the headlights. The scene cracked me up, because it reminded me of the reaction I get at home when I start on some idle discourse speculating about potential futures that has that whiff of mid-life crisis that comes so easily to people who are, well, in mid-life. It had not occurred to me that even if you are a pimp and a small-time drug dealer, no woman wants to hear the phrase “I’ve got to make a change.” Who knew? If “stay the course” is preferred in this situation, little wonder, even in my somewhat less tawdry circumstances, I don’t always receive unbridled enthusiasm when I start going on about my life.

nym 310 Chestnut

A new group of Watkins students got into the one-night event act last Saturday with a show at 310 Chestnut. It unusually coherent and ambitious, with the pieces organized around explorations of language. Even the show title was intriguing, ____nym, with references to all of the switching implied by the “nym” suffix.

The best part were the sounds. Ken Nakamura’s Grain was a single grain of rice put on a spindle and rotating rapidly against a turntable stylus. The playback was a sweet rumble that varied within a narrow range. The piece had several levels of significance, like the presumed fragility of the setup, the centrality of a rice grain in the hands of a guy with a Japanese surname, and all the details of the construction, like the way the tone arm was lodged in the pedestal.

Parker ClenDening’s video with a title something like It’s OK to Get Mad showed someone dropping jars on a kitchen floor, edited to creation a steady stream of popping sounds that spelled out the title phrase in Morse code. Parker’s brother Will told me that the action in the video derived from something there mother would do when they got mad, give them a jar to break. My favorite part of this was the sound, which was juicy and contained the hollowness of the jars.

Other language elements in the show included Braille (Matt Christy), graphs of three versions of spoken phrase (Amethyst Stark), Christina Wing’s riffs on Barbara Kruger-like combinations of text overlaid on photos, and Chris Doubler’s video of women’s lips mutely mouthing words.

Allison Boyd did an installation that flashed images of dictionary entries and isolated words or parts of words on the wall of an alcove draped in white sheets. The words were usually blurry or moved too quickly to focus on, and the light cane in and out with a strobe effect. The effect was strongest if you sat in the schoolroom chair set down just inside the alcove. The movement of the light and the difficulty focusing quickly sucked you into this space.

The work on display Saturday night speaks well for the vitality of the Watkins program. Even with everything that went on last year, and with Barbara Yontz leaving this year, it looks like it is possible that there is still plenty of energy among the students.

Cast King show in Nashville Feb 3

Here’s notice from Chris Davis on a show coming up that looks great,
at the Primitive Baptist Church (that’s at 4602 Indiana, which I
think is in Sylvan Park). I haven't heard of this guy, but he sounds
like a direct line back to what lies underneath country music.


Feb. 3rd, 7 pm, $6. 

Cast King (Sun Records recording artist with Country Drifters and
Miller Sisters; recently released debut album under his own name on
Locust Records; Old Sand Mountain, ALA)
John Allingham
Dan Tyler 
John Smiff XXV

There will be a potluck dinner beforehand starting at 6 pm. Attendees
are invited to bring a covered dish. Vegetarian dishes welcome. 

Bio information on Cast King is available at www.locustmusic.com 

A google search for Cast King should lead you to an Alabama
folklore Society web page with an excellent radio show featuring
some of the early 1950s sides King cut for Sun Records in his
group the Country Drifters and as a sideman with the Miller
Sisters. King also cut around 6 unreleased masters for Sun that
hopefully will see the light of day (past status as bonus tracks on
a multi-benjamin Bear Family box). 

John Allingham is co-leader of The Cherry Blossoms and The
Brambles and the leader of Arizona Drains.

Dan Tyler bio information available at www.dantyler.com 

John Smiff XXV is the stage name of clothing designer and
visual artist Michael Enright. 

Friendly people in Memphis

I was in Memphis Friday for Susan Maakestad’s opening at Rhodes College and met a few people. Here’s some of the folks, the ones with websites I could track down:

Elizabeth Alley
http://www.elizabethalley.com/

Hamlett Dobbins
http://www.hamlettdobbins.com/index.php

Beth Edwards
http://www.bethedwards.com/

Larry Edwards
http://www.mredwards.com/

Don Estes
http://www.destes.netfirms.com/

And here’s Susan’s website
http://www.susanmaakestad.com/home.html

So Guilty

This week 24 came back on the air, with 4 hours of grab you by the lapels and throw you onto the couch programming. It’s well done, and has a movie star and Actor as the lead, so it’s not technically a guilty pleasure. Except that it is, and guilty in a more literal way. It no less than draws you into complicity into human rights and international law violations. The current regimen of torture and extra-legal action is significantly abetted by the “24 Scenario.” You have in your custody a terrorist – mastermind or stooge – who holds the critical piece of information that will allow you to stop a dreadful attack in its tracks, but you must act within the next 15 minutes (timed either to fit in this hour’s episode or as a cliffhanger to next week). Should you torture the suspect? Of course, and Jack and his buds will show you how it’s done.

The problem with the 24 Scenario is that it is not clear it has ever arisen outside of TV and movies. In the real world, it seems like either you carefully construct intelligence and stop something before it gets too far (with unglamorous things like a border guard in Washington getting suspicious and doing a careful check of that car trunk), or it’s too late and you pick up the pieces and try to find the guilty. And from what I’ve read, torture doesn’t figure in carefully assembled, reliable intelligence. But we’ve never seen what that looks like – it’s secret after all. We do see 24, and on 24 we see this scenario, multiple times. The scenario has a similar ontological standing to anything we might have learned about but have not experienced first hand. By securing a place for this scenario in many consciousnesses, the TV show creates the conditions under which we can imagine and accept torture and see it as useful.

Of course, the thing about 24 is that most of the time the torture doesn’t really help. It can’t – if it did, things would get resolved and then what we do for the next 18 hours? Watch Jack and the CTU crew fill out paper work. What did Jack get from torturing Paul, Audrey’s husband, last season? Nothing, other than losing his girlfriend. For some reason when you’re dating a woman, she hates it if you subject her husband to excruciating pain, even if the guy’s a drip and she wants to be rid of him.

But I like 24. It works really well as TV. It is, like all TV shows, a procedural. I do not mean a procedural in the terms of investigative procedures, because I have a sneaking suspicion real spies don’t look and act like this and don’t work in offices that look like that. No, it’s a procedural about the mechanics of putting together a television show. First you set up your entertainment value proposition – we’re going to run one story over 24 episodes spread over several months of broadcast. Then you have to create mechanisms to deliver on it. So you have the clips at the beginning that give just enough for anyone to pick up on what follows. You throw in characters who exist solely to propel the plot by consistently making the wrong choice, which reshuffles the deck. Kim, Wayne, and now Derek this season. If Jack says stay put, they invariably run out and try unsuccessfully to fix things themselves. And you hold characters in reserve, like throwing Tony into a coma in the first few minutes, where he will be parked until it’s time for him to revive and jump back to action at a critical moment. And so on.

24 does this well, reliably stepping on the gas every time it looks like the machine might come to an idle. But I can’t help worry that if people in The Hague found out about the pleasure I’m getting from the show, they would be obligated to send a team of agents to surround the compound here in Tennessee, extract me and whisk me away to face justice.

All you need is anxiety

On red eye flights, your connection to reality comes unmoored. The whole business gets started when everything is shutting down, the streets are dark, the airport is closing up. Once the flight gets going, maybe I sleep, but more often I go into a semi-conscious stasis. That’s where I found myself on the redeye I took last week. So I watched the TV without the sound, listened to my iPod instead.

After the movie they show segments from TV shows. There were three segments. One was Rachel Ray doing a travel piece where she went to Jackson Hole and showed how you can eat out for $40 a day, breakfast, lunch, dinner and a snack all at cool places. Then there was a 20/20 segment with two reports, one on people whose kids eat so compulsively that they have to lock up food (there was a CSI episode on this syndrome this season so it must be a vital part of the culture), and parents who put their teenagers under surveillance, all of which seemed to be inspired by one guy’s book. Finally there was a bit by someone named Katie Brown who does home décor and cooking. She’s hyper like Rachel Ray, with the hand gestures and all, but not quite as cute.

These segments were consumed with anxiety, one after another. It’s obvious with the 20/20 stuff. The first bit, about the eating disorder, a biological problem where the person does not receive the signals that they are full and will eat so much to do damage to themselves, is no doubt extremely rare, but it gives every parent whose kid is overweight (or not) a reason to freak out even more. About something that basically won’t happen. Then you show families who have introduced the surveillance regimen into their households: video monitors, GPS tracking on the car. The footage made it seem like the kids were kind of going along with it. Of course I’m not listening to the soundtrack during any of this.

OK, the anxiety is easy to see there. Do my kids have a debilitating eating disease? Should I be using technology to keep a closer eye on them? But it’s there in the food and decorating too. Rachel Ray’s piece says you need to take the right kind of vacation, but make sure you eat at nice places but don’t get in over your head with the cost. Rachel will ease your concerns about how to take the right kind of vacation and not feel your poverty too much or feel like you don’t know what’s good. Moreover, the segment tells you these are things you should be worried about. Then it tells you a solution to the problem it has posited. There’s an easier solution to the “problem” of your vacation. Don’t accept the premise that it is a problem. But this is hard, because the creation of these false problematics is infused throughout the information environment in which you live. The obvious methods of entertainment, like an appealing host, pull you in and make the anxiety familiar and comforting.

Katie Brown also helps you solve problems you might not know you had. How to throw a charming dinner party. How often are you really doing that? In the atomized world we live in, you don’t entertain the boss like Blondie and Dagwood did very damned often. And she remodels this couple’s living room using very inexpensive materials (how can I have a fabulous house without much money to spend on it) and ends up with something more color coordinated but uglier and colder than the original room. With some really strange features like candle wall sconces made from copper tubes.

Sitting there in a transcontinental daze, I marveled at how unhealthy every bit of the video stream was. No comfort, no ease, no health. No pleasure, only the chance that you might avoid some humiliation by adopting things endorsed somewhere out there.

What Is Spanish Key Doing In This Movie?

I’ve been getting caught up on my 2004 movies. A bit of time warp, but it’s like the after-Christmas sale. If you wait until the movies go from the movie theatre to the video store and in there from new releases to the regular stock, they charge you less and let you keep them longer. So you can actually get around to watching the movie. It’s the same principle as waiting to buy music until you find the CD used. Cheaper, but definitely takes you out of currency.

One of my 2004 movies was Collateral. It’s a Michael Mann flick about a contract killer (Tom Cruise) and the cab driver (Jamie Foxx) he hijacks to carry him around town for a series of hits. It’s set in LA, and Mann gets some of Southern California’s visual qualities dead on, like the in-between spaces, under freeways or the more or less empty spaces along roads in industrial areas or warehouse districts. When he isn’t busy executing someone, the hitman rattles on like Dr. Phil, helping the driver be more self-assertive and face up to his relationship with his mother. I would say the film is a crypto-comedy, but I don’t think I can convince myself of that.

One scene has been bugging me since I saw it. One of the hits takes places in a swanky night club, with a jazz band on the stand. The band is a conventional combo, tenor, trumpet, and rhythm section. At least that’s what you see. When the band starts playing, what comes out is Miles Davis from Bitches Brew, the track Spanish Key. The music doesn’t go with that band, not the instruments visible, not the physical exertions of the musicians. Where are the electric pianos? Where is Bennie Maupin playing bass clarinet? And anyway, its a landmark performance from a landmark album. You know where it comes from. After the band gets done, the hitman, the cabdriver, and the trumpet player, who also owns the club, sit down for a conversation mostly taken up with the trumpet player telling a story about the time he sat in with Miles. You hear Miles in a kind of ventriloquism and then immediately the characters start talking about him, like they knew what the guys were playing on the soundtrack even though they were obviously making different kinds of noises themselves if they were making sound at all. Then Tom Cruise kills the guy, scene ends.

My initial reaction was this was just messy, like poorly synchronized overdubs. The guy doesn’t acknowledge that anyone who listens to jazz much would know that this band isn’t playing that music. But something related happens elsewhere in the film. Early on, Jamie Foxx is giving Jada Pinkett Smith a ride and when he fiddles with the volume on the radio she comments that he likes the classics too (the two characters of course share a deep connection). The sound track sounds like James Newton Howard’s score, not classics either of the symphonic or popular types, but the dialogue makes it clear they are talking about classical music even though that’s not what you hear.

So this starts to look like alienation internalized into the features of the film that acknowledges illusion on several possible levels by creating a discontinuity between the sound and the visuals. It reminds you of the illusion of natural experience in the intangible light and sound environment of the film. The illusion of continuity and coherence in the field of sensory experience. And the artificiality in the soundtrack tells you that you are looking at a story.

Like the some of the hitman’s bit with the driver, which are either comedic or ridiculous, I can’t decide whether I think Mann is trying to create a complicated phenomenological situation within the film (like Terrence Malick). Mann does seem to be someone who would have those aspirations, but that means I’d have to watch this film a bunch more to get the point and get beyond just having the suspicion there might be one.

Rau exhibit at State Museum ends next weekend

Everyone in the Nashville area, if you haven't been down to see the Rau Collection at the State Museum, it's closing next weekend adn you should really try to get down and see it. The collection has an El Greco, a Cezanne, and multiple Monets and Pissaros, but I think the greatest pleasures are in the paintings by people you haven't heard or don't usually give much thought to. The German section of the show had a couple of those for me: a Cranach version of a round-faced Judith holding Holofernes' head with two sweet attending maidens, and Judith seems to have a hat that doubles as a red halo - not sure what that means; or a painting by someone named Jakob Strub that scatters martyred legionnaires on the throny branches of trees. I was talking to Bob Durham about the show, and he was really into a couple of the older Italian portraits, one was an anonymous painting of an old woman, with text added to the painting describing who she was (a cook and a chambermaid). Some of what got Bob about these paintings was the technical means with which the flesh of the portrait is conjured up.

I'm told that attendance has really picked up the last few weeks, which is good to hear. The paintings ought to be seen, and the people at the State Museum deserve the satisfaction of getting a good response to their efforts to bring the show here.

The show's last day is this Sunday, Jan. 15.

http://www.theraucollection.com/data/exhibition.html

Anthony Appiah's Idea of the Cosmopolitan

The link is for an excerpt from a book coming out later this month by Kwame Anthony Appiah, a philosophy professor from Princeton (who left Harvard a couple of years in the dust-up between Larry Summers and the African/African-American Studies faculty). It looks like the book is good. While it seems to minimize the pain and loss from social, economic, cultural, and environmental disruption that occurs in the globalized world, there are things here I find immensely appealing. A decentered view of the world that sees influence between people that is mutual, not uni-directional–Now you look at Africa not because you want to fix it or save it, but because you can’t avoid its impact on you as well as yours on it. The embrace of heterogeneity as a moral stance. Fallibilism. The simple need to get used to one another. “I am human; nothing human is alien to me.” How you embrace cultural diversity as both desirable and inevitable but also resist cultural and social practices that themselves do not tolerate that diversity – once you let go of trying to maintain cultures in their purity, but assume that they are in a constant state intermingling, you have no reason to venerate what interferes with liberty.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/01/magazine/01cosmopolitan.html