Exit-deer: “He left himself with frightening pace”
“Almost every day I can feel myself suffering mainly in the head, I can explain the pain to myself but knowing it comes from an inflammation of my imagination doesn’t prevent it being reality itself. What’s more I’d be crazy not to go crazy. We don’t know what an illness is. On awful hurts we plaster little old words, as if we could think hell with a paper bandage.”
― Hélène Cixous, Hyperdream
“Out of this labyrinth that makes our world
How do we ever know the light inside ourselves?
To know that the skin we wear is raw
That we can be anything if we know anything at all”
Live at Bush Hall, London, in August 2013.
“We want to see their suffering, serenity, humour, even though we don’t know anything about them.”
Directors: Alain Resnais & Chris Marker
Narrator – Jean Négroni
Music – Guy Bernard
A collaborative work by Resnais and Marker, this is a deeply felt study of African art and the decline it underwent as a result of its contact with Western civilization. The film was banned for more than a decade by French censors as an attack on French colonialism, and is now only available to watch in the shortened version I’ve posted here (turn on the subtitles on Youtube if you want English subtitling).
Statues Also Die traces the devastating impact of French colonialism on African art. As Resnais’ co-director, Chris Marker, stated, “We want to see their suffering, serenity, humor, even though we don’t know anything about them.” Their film shows what happens when art loses its connection to its cultural context of production. Witty, thoughtful commentary is combined with images of stark formal beauty in this outcry against the fate of an art once integral to communal life that became debased as it fell victim to the demands of a different system of knowledge and values.
From Wikipedia:
Statues Also Die (French: Les Statues meurent aussi) is a 1953 French essay film directed by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, about historical African art and the effects colonialism has had on how it is perceived. The film won the 1954 Prix Jean Vigo. Because of its criticism of colonialism, the second half of the film was censored in France until the 1960s.
Synopsis
The film exhibits a series of sculptures, masks and other traditional art from Sub-Saharan Africa. The images are frequently set to music and cut to the music’s pace. The narrator focuses on the emotional qualities of the objects, and discusses the perception of African sculptures from a historical and contemporary European perspective. Only occasionally does the film provide the geographical origin, time period or other contextual information about the objects. The idea of a dead statue is explained as a statue which has lost its original significance and become reduced to a museum object, similarly to a dead person who can be found in history books. Interweaved with the objects are a few scenes of Africans performing traditional music and dances, as well as the death of a disemboweled gorilla.
During the last third of the film, the modern commercialisation of African culture is problematised. The film argues that colonial presence has compelled African art to lose much of its idiosyncratic expression, in order to appeal to Western consumers. A mention is made of how African currencies previously had been replaced by European. In the final segment, the film comments on the position of black Africans themselves in contemporary Europe and North America. Footage is seen from a Harlem Globetrotters basketball show, of the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson, and a jazz drummer intercut with scenes from a confrontation between police and labour demonstrators. Lastly the narrator argues that we should regard African and European art history as one inseparable human culture.
“You never seem to be waiting for me, but we kept meeting at every turn of the paths. Behind every bush, at the foot of each statue, near every pond. It is as if it had been only you and I in all that garden.”
— From Last Year at Marienbad, 1961
Alain Resnais and Delphine Seyrig on location shooting “Last Year At Marienbad.”
I made this in 2007 (hence the bad Youtube quality – compressed to all hell).
Old card I found in a mattress shop in Cape Town (artist unknown)
HERE is an article discussing some of the non-“woo” (pseudo-scientific hippie freak-out) reasons why companies like Monsanto pushing genetically modified products are doing evil: the corporate imperatives and corruption surrounding the development of GMOs, how their use disempowers farmers (especially small farmers in non-first world contexts, although this article only talks about the USA) and what we can do about this deception being perpetrated against the world.
Apart from being economically unsustainable, there are also other compelling health-related reasons why GMOs are a bad idea, which don’t involve a non-specific, irrational fear of genetic mutations being dangerous to consume per se. For example, the seeds are engineered to be resistant to pesticides so that crops can be sprayed and only the weeds growing among the GM plants die. Studies have shown that GM food (or the meat of animals that ate GM food) can be contaminated by traces of the pesticides used during the plants’ growth, pesticides that are teratogenic (causing birth defects) and carcinogenic (causing cancer) to humans. These modifications also lead to resistance in plants and insect pests – “superweeds” and “superbugs” that make sustainable farming more difficult.
If you are South African, please GO HERE to sign a petition as part of the formal public participation process against an application by multinational agricultural company Dow AgroSciences, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Dow Chemical Company, to import GM cottonseed products to South Africa, for use as food, animal feed and in processing.
From The Noise Made By People (Warp Records, 2000).
“The birds are chirping, to and fro
My love, have you forgotten me?
As water can’t cut through the sand
I can’t cut you from my memories
The bridge (between you and I) has broken
The pathway is gone, and the water is so very deep
How am I to find you on the other side, so far away?”
Chhoun Vanna was a Cambodian singer between the 1950s and ’70s. She and her sister Chhoun Malai survived the Khmer Rouge genocide.
Cambodian cover by Ros Sereysothea and Sinn Sisamouth of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Who’ll Stop The Rain?”. They died under unknown circumstances during the Khmer Rouge reign of terror, as did countless other artists and intellectuals murdered in Pol Pot’s Killing Fields, and this recording only survived on tapes smuggled out of the country.
“Long as I remember the rain been comin’ down.
Clouds of mystery pourin’ confusion on the ground.
Good men through the ages, tryin’ to find the sun;
And I wonder, still I wonder, who’ll stop the rain.”
Read more of their story HERE.
To switch for a moment to conceptual language: Power is indeed of the essence of all government, but violence is not. Violence is by nature instrumental; like all means, it always stands in need of guidance and justification through the end it pursues. And what needs justification by something else cannot be the essence of anything. The end of war – end taken in its twofold meaning – is peace or victory; but to the question “And what is the end of peace?” there is no answer. Peace is an absolute, even though in recorded history periods of warfare have nearly always outlasted periods of peace. Power is in the same category; it is, as they say, “an end in itself.” (This, of course, is not to deny that governments pursue policies and employ their power to achieve prescribed goals. But the power structure itself precedes and outlasts all aims, so that power, far from being the means to an end, is actually the very condition enabling a group of people to think and act in terms of the means-end category.)
And since government is essentially organized and institutionalized power, the current question “What is the end of government?” does not make much sense either. The answer will be either question-begging – to enable men to live together – or dangerously utopian – to promote happiness or to realize a classless society or some other nonpolitical ideal, which if tried out in earnest cannot but end in some kind of tyranny.
Power needs no justification, being inherent in the very existence of political communities; what it does need is legitimacy. The common treatment of these two words as synonyms is no less misleading and confusing than the current equation of obedience and support. Power springs up whenever people get together and act in concert, but it derives its legitimacy from the initial getting together rather than from any action that then may follow. Legitimacy, when challenged, bases itself on an appeal to the past, while justification relates to an end that lies in the future.
Violence can be justifiable, but it never will be legitimate. Its justification loses in plausibility the farther its intended end recedes into the future. No one questions the use of violence in self-defense, because the danger is not only clear but also present, and the end justifying the means is immediate.
Power and violence, though they are distinct phenomena, usually appear together. Wherever they are combined, power, we have found, is the primary and predominant factor. The situation, however, is entirely different when we deal with them in their pure states – as, for instance, with foreign invasion and occupation. We saw that the current equation of violence with power rests on government’s being understood as domination of man over man by means of violence. If a foreign conqueror is confronted by an impotent government and by a nation unused to the exercise of political power, it is easy for him to achieve such domination. In all other cases the difficulties are great indeed, and the occupying invader will try immediately to establish Quisling governments, that is, to find a native power base to support his dominion. The head-on clash between Russian tanks and the entirely nonviolent resistance of the Czechoslovak people is a textbook case of a confrontation between violence and power in their pure states. But while domination in such an instance is difficult to achieve, it is not impossible.
Violence, we must remember, does not depend on numbers or opinions, but on implements, and the implements of violence, as I mentioned before, like all other tools, increase and multiply human strength. Those who oppose violence with mere power will soon find that they are confronted not by men but by men’s artifacts, whose inhumanity and destructive effectiveness increase in proportion to the distance separating the opponents. Violence can always destroy power; out of the barrel of a gun grows the most effective command, resulting in the most instant and perfect obedience. What never can grow out of it is power.
“We must be entirely clear about this: the history of people is littered with attempts to legislate against love or marriage across class, caste, and race. But there is no scientific basis or genetic rationale for love. There is only the grace of God. There is no scientific justification for prejudice and discrimination, ever. And nor is there any moral justification. Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa, among others, attest to these facts.”
— Desmond Tutu reacting against the proposed enactment of homophobic legislation in Uganda. Read more about it HERE.
Released on 19 February 2014 – Translation of lyrics into English by Julia Ioffe*:
$50 billion and a rainbow ray
Rodnina and Kabayeva will pass you the torch
They’ll teach you to submit and cry in the camps
Fireworks for the bosses. Hail, Duce!
Sochi is blocked, Olympus is under surveillance
Special forces, weapons, crowds of cops
FSB — argument, Interior Ministry — Argument
On [state-owned] Channel 1 — applause
Putin will teach you to love the Motherland
In Russia, the spring can come suddenly
Greetings to the Messiah in the form of a volley from
Aurora, the prosecutor is determined to be rude
He needs resistance, not pretty eyes
A bird cage for protest, vodka, nesting doll
Jail for the Bolotnaya [activists], drinks, caviar
The Constitution is in a noose, [environmental activist] Vitishko is in jail
Stability, food packets, fence, watch tower
Putin will teach you to love the Motherland
They will turn off [opposition TV] Dozhd’s broadcast
The gay parade has been sent to the outhouse
A two-point bathroom is the priority
The verdict for Russia is jail for six years
Putin will teach you to love the Motherland
Motherland
Motherland
Motherland
* Read the original article with explanatory links on selected words for better understanding of the context HERE.
To research (English definition): “To search for something.”
Rechercher (French definition): “To search for, to look for” and also “to search again, to look for again”.
Both “search” and “research” are the same word in French, it seems. This makes sense: even if something was once common knowledge, after it is hidden it is no longer “there”; it has fallen from awareness. So you have to seek for it again, that which is not there. In “research”, you never know what is actually there until you find it, or there would be no need to look. You dis-cover it again, un-cover it anew.
Archives are fascinating places of preservation-with-intent to look in, and they are always tantalisingly incomplete, however exhaustive… But nothing beats the thrill of finding a treasure hoard saved by happenstance.
To “ondersoek” , in Afrikaans, is to look under other things… The term implies a palimpsestic patina, an accretion, a build-up of layers that must be lifted, peeled off to see underneath… the mother lode, the genealogy. Sometimes you know exactly what you are looking for; sometimes you don’t. You may only have a misty hope that there is anything there at all. It can be useful to lose focus, too, because you become open to other routes, other offshoots, that may take you further than your original hunch.
On Saturday, in a poky little shop in Kalk Bay, I found a trove of old sheet music: popular tunes from the 1920s and 1930s, the top few layers of it in torn, grubby disarray. A thrill ran through my fingertips as I started re-moving each sheet from the pile, putting it aside systematically. There was nothing of great interest until I got quite a way below the dusty surface layers, where most people’s patience obviously runs out (this is the trick with digging – to delve deeper, to expend more energy, more time than everyone else – om onder te soek, for there lies the gold). There was no way I could stop.
Buried in the pile, under piano exercise books, I found something that really astounded me… it almost made me shout for joy: many, many of the scores had ukulele chord diagrams on them! In all the popular sheet music I had ever been acquainted with before this, these diagrams were provided for guitar – with five lines for the five strings. These all had only four lines. It became clear to me on seeing this that, along with piano, ukulele was most likely the popular amateur instrument of choice back in the 1920s to 1940s, and not guitar. It makes sense when you listen to the jazziness of the pop arrangements of the time, and how well the chord progressions work technically with a ukulele’s tuning – GCEA. I would suppose that the guitar ousted the uke in popularity with the ascent of blues and rock and folk, in which different chords and tunings predominate, and for which the guitar’s EADGBE tuning is a more natural fit… How lovely to realise that this instrument I play very amateurishly, considered a funny curiosity by most these days, was accorded far more value in the past!
What this little discovery means for me, practically, is that I can now play all these very old jazzy tunes with no in-depth knowledge of musical theory. Even the songs I have never heard before can be found with a bit of effort on the internet, listened to, and re-played, provided someone else along the way has seen their value. As long as they were ever recorded, be it on wax cylinder or 78rpm, they may have been digitised. And, as they spin up on my hard drive, a vortex is created, opening a wormhole back to the instant that band played for the first time as the cylinder turned. And the song comes back from the dead as my fingers form the chord shapes, stutters back to life as I sing my breath into the words. Technology is powerful magic, all the more so when it takes account of its historicity.
Information technology is not only about making the future more slick and manageable; it is also about keeping the past accessible… Essentially it is about conquering linear time and space. The prolific recording of moments allows us to live unconstrained by the present moment and space we’re in, almost continuously if we so wish… (For example, people sit on Facebook as they are out for coffee with a friend. Once they have “checked in” at the cafe, they check out what other people are doing elsewhere on their phones, then frame themselves carefully for a photo in that space and capture the moment, uploading it to join the feed for others who are moving through spaces connected via radio waves to know about. Very little other than eating, drinking and self-referential preening is going on in most coffee spots.)
The sheer volume of recording that goes on now is unprecedented. Imagine reading Twitter logs in a century – every ordinary so-and-so with a Twitter account, with their own account of an event… The hyper(in)significance of every moment of our lives being documented is overwhelming to think about. How will historians of the future ever manage to filter out the noise from the signal and deduce anything?
Or, will the noise be the signal – the fragments the whole? How does this affect our memories, our critical faculties, our creativity, our relationships? New technologies confer on us immense power that should be used wisely and with sober discernment, not trivially… as that dumb what’s-her-face model Leandra found out last week when tweeting 140 racially offensive characters cost her her modelling career and dignity, with satisfying, devastating swiftness!
So, anyway, I pulled out a large wad of music sheets; slowly, carefully replaced what I didn’t take for someone else to find. Tried to conceal my excitement as I got to the till; thwacked the pile down and asked nonchalantly, “How much for this old stuff?”
“Two rand a sheet.” After counting to fifteen the old guy stopped and said “I can’t be bothered to count higher than fifteen – it’s yours for thirty bucks.”
I paid thirty rand for all of it. That’s less than a cocktail or a sandwich in the seaside cafes lining that road. So few people seem to see value in this stuff. Not even antique dealers. To them it’s just quaint ephemera.
Research involves following the intuition, the hunch that something lies hidden out of time, out of sight, out of mind: perhaps recorded imperfectly, decaying, deliberately saved. Or, like these priceless music sheets, just debris left in a place where it makes no sense to anyone who has stumbled across it yet… In danger of being lost forever if someone doesn’t come along with enough focused curiosity to re-cognise it as valuable, to think it back into meaningful connection with right now.
To me, the serendipity of finds like Saturday’s feels more than coincidental. If the person looking didn’t happen to be me there at that precise moment, it would probably have been a non-event. Even if it were the me of last year leafing through, I wouldn’t have known what I was looking for. Would have seen the music but not had a ukulele and maybe not noticed that the chord diagrams had only four strings, not five. The me of just a few months back would have seen the music with interest but not known the extent of the 78rpm archive online (having become aware of the degree of coverage of obscure songs through something I have been working on in the past month) and so left it because I didn’t know the songs and didn’t know there was a way to hear them. I don’t often look through second hand stores these days, broke as I am. On Saturday, something compelled me to step inside as I was passing. It felt as if me and the music were drawn together. It felt magical.
“I thought: I want to make a kind of music that had the long Now and the big Here in it, and for me that meant this idea of expanding the music out to the horizons. In terms of space, you were not aware of the edges of the music. I wanted to make a music where you just wouldn’t know what was music and what wasn’t… a music that included rather than excluded; a music that didn’t have a beginning and an end… This is the sense of making the Now longer.”
A 1989 documentary on Brian Eno’s work in ambient sound.
MINDBLOWING.
The Known Universe takes viewers from the Himalayas through our atmosphere and the inky black of space to the afterglow of the Big Bang. Every star, planet, and quasar seen in the film is possible because of the world’s most complete four-dimensional map of the universe, the Digital Universe Atlas that is maintained and updated by astrophysicists at the American Museum of Natural History. The film, created by the Museum, was part of an exhibition, Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe, at the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan through May 2010.
Data: Digital Universe, American Museum of Natural History
Visualization Software: Uniview by SCISS
Director: Carter Emmart
Curator: Ben R. Oppenheimer
Producer: Michael Hoffman
Executive Producer: Ro Kinzler
Co-Executive Producer: Martin Brauen
Manager, Digital Universe Atlas: Brian Abbott
Music: Suke Cerulo
“Often the object of a desire, when desire is transformed into hope, becomes more real than reality itself.”
— Umberto Eco
That it is!
The Cole Porter song, as performed by Ann Miller (phenomenally!) in the 1953 MGM film adaptation of the Broadway musical, Kiss Me, Kate.
From the George Formby vehicle, Trouble Brewing (1939), also featuring Googie Withers, Gus McNaughton, Garry Marsh and Esma Cannon. This little number was composed by George Formby with Harry Gifford and Fred E. Cliffe, and is full of his trademark innuendo delivered with fumbling, faux naïveté.
This Guardian review of a biography on Formby published in 2001 is worth taking a look at if you’re interested in the strange, sad man behind the goofy grin and banjolele.
“What a drag it is getting old…”
Released as a single in 1966, this song was also the first track on the Stones’ album Aftermath, their first full record of original songs – their previous offerings to date had been larded with blues covers.
Mick Jagger on the song: “It’s about drug dependence, but in a sort of like spoofy way. As a songwriter, I didn’t really think about addressing things like that. It was just every day stuff that you I’d observe and write about. It’s what writing is for really. There is a sort of naivety, but there’s also a lot of humour in those songs. They’re a lot based on humour. It was almost like a different band, a different world, a different view when we wrote them.” (SOURCE)
What does a day in the life of a woman look like? Maybe it’s easier to see if the woman is a man. Oppressed Majority (2010) is a French short by Éléonore Pourriat which uses role reversals to shine a new light on the micro-aggressions and macro-aggressions that are an all-too-common part of the female experience. Via wifey.tv.
One of the b-sides off the Everything’s Gone Green 12″ single (Factory Benelux, 1981), New Order’s third single release after the demise of Joy Division following Ian Curtis’ death. Continue reading
“In struggling against anguish one never produces serenity; the struggle against anguish only produces new forms of anguish.” ― Simone Weil
Jun Togawa, bananas.
Hard to believe. Another gone to heroin.
“Democracy is an empty lie
Dead like our yesterdays tonight…”
Different, more jangly than the album version on Generation Terrorists (one of my “desert island” CDs in the ’90s, and ironically not available on Youtube due to label restrictions), this track appears on the NME compilation A Taste Of Heavenly, released in 2002. You can hear the album version HERE, or listen to the whole album from start to finish HERE.
The twins do a Bruce Springsteen cover live on FM 94/9 in 2006.
American Bandstand, 6 June 1964.
Chinese New Year today reminded me of this line, from Suede’s 1994 non-album single, Stay Together. I have the cassette single of this track in a box somewhere. Released on Nude Records, it was the last song put out by the band in its original line-up before Bernard Butler left (and I lost interest, because that alchemy that tends to arise out of creative friction in bands was gone). I must say that the video, which I saw for the first time now — we very rarely got to see “alternative” music videos on South African TV back then — is pretty crap compared to other Suede videos I have seen. Anyway. Here’s to the Year of the Horse being a vast improvement on the Year of the Snake just past.
Megan Mitchell – “Gash” (2012)
Check out more of her work related to wounds and healing HERE.
fleurmach 