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'
To understand the limitation of things
, desire them.' - Lao Tzu
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions
themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign
tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would
not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions
now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant
day into the answer.” – Rilke....
'
People know what they
want because they know what other people want.' – T. Adorno…..
Lightnin’ Hopkins - “The blues is something hard to get acquainted with,
like death.
Can you imagine what I would do if I did all that I can? - Sun Tzu
"Like eros itself, perpetually incomplete but searching for completion anyway."
-David Yaffe on Joni Mitchell's
All I Want
"The
more specific you are, the more general
it'll be." -
Diane Arbus
"We have art so that we may not perish by the truth." - Friedrich Nietzsche
"
Finnegans Wake is more than a book...it contains the world. So owning
it is like having the essence of everything. I feel like it might just as
well be a Sumerian text." - Patti Smith
"There's something vile (and all the more vile because ridiculous) in the
tendency of feeble men to make universal tragedies out of the sad
comedies of their private woes
. - Fernando Pessoa
The reason why the
grave-digger made music
must have been because there was none in his spade. - Herman
Melville,
Moby Dick
Steve Martin quotes David Mamet a lot, to the effect that
''no art comes from the conscious mind.''
"The ordinary desire of everybody to have everybody else think alike with himself
has some explosive implications today." – McLuhan
There they lie, the nursery rhymes so much at the back of our minds that we can’t
remember when we first learned them. What did they give us, so long ago? A suggestion
that mishaps might be funny rather than tragic, that tantrums can be comical
as well as frightening, and that laughter is the cure for practically everything.”
Mother Goose remained so appealing and her rhymes so enduring (calling them “
astonishing,” “golluptious” “pomsidilious
” and “yo-heave-ho-ish”). – Iona Opie
6
Avant Garde Cinema Saved Humanity ?
Marshall McLuhan on William Burroughs
for The Nation Magazine 1964
1. Today men’s nerves surround us; they have gone outside as electrical environment.
The human nervous system itself can be reprogrammed biologically as readily as
any radio network can alter its fare. Burroughs has dedicated Naked Lunch to
the first proposition, and Nova Express (both Grove Press) to the second. Naked
Lunch records private strategies of culture in the electric age. Nova Express
indicates some of the “corporate” responses and adventures of the Subliminal
Kid who is living in a universe which seems to be someone else’s insides. Both
books are a kind of engineer’s report of the terrain hazards and mandatory processes,
which exist in the new electric environment.
2. Burroughs uses what he calls “Brion Gysin’s cut-up method which I call the fold-in
method.” To read the daily newspaper in its entirety is to encounter the method
in all its purity. Similarly, an evening watching television programs is an experience
in a corporate form — an endless succession of impressions and snatches of narrative.
Burroughs is unique only in that he is attempting to reproduce in prose what
we accommodate every day as a commonplace aspect of life in the electric age.
If the corporate life is to be rendered on paper, the method of discontinuous
nonstory must be employed.
3. That man provides the sexual organs of the technological world seems obvious enough
to Burroughs, and such is the stage (or “biological theatre” as he calls it in
Nova Express) for the series of social orgasms brought about by the evolutionary
mutations of man and society. The logic, physical and emotional, of a world in
which we have made our environment out of our own nervous systems, Burroughs
follows everywhere to the peripheral orgasm of the cosmos.
4. Each technological extension involves an act of collective cannibalism. The previous
environment with all its private and social values, is swallowed by the new environment
and reprocessed for whatever values are digestible. Thus, Nature was succeeded
by the mechanical environment and became what we call the “content” of the new
industrial environment. That is, Nature became a vessel of aesthetic and spiritual
values. Again and again the old environment is upgraded into an art form while
the new conditions are regarded as corrupt and degrading. Artists, being experts
in sensory awareness, tend to concentrate on the environmental as the challenging
and dangerous situation. That is why they may seem to be “ahead of their time.”
Actually, they alone have the resources and temerity to live in immediate contact
with the environment of their age. More timid people prefer to accept the content,
the previous environment’s values, as the continuing reality of their time. Our
natural bias is to accept the new gimmick (automaton, say) as a thing that can
be accommodated in the old ethical order.
5. During the process of digestion of the old environment, man finds it expedient
to anesthetize himself as much as possible. He pays as little attention to the
action of the environment as the patient heeds the surgeon’s scalpel. The gulping
or swallowing of Nature by the machine was attended by a complete change of the
ground rules of both the sensory ratios of the individual nervous system and
the patterns of the social order as well. Today, when the environment has become
the extension of the entire mesh of the nervous system, anesthesia numbs our
bodies into hydraulic jacks.
6. Burroughs disdains the hallucinatory drugs as providing mere “content,” the fantasies,
dreams that money can buy. Junk (heroin) is needed to turn the human body itself
into an environment that includes the universe. The central theme of Naked Lunch
is the strategy of bypassing the new electric environment by becoming an environment
oneself. The moment one achieves this environmental state all things and people
are submitted to you to be processed. Whether a man takes the road of junk or
the road of art, the entire world must submit to his processing. The world becomes
his “content.” He programs the sensory order. 7.
For artists and philosophers, when a technology is new it yields Utopias. Such
is Plato’s Republic in the fifth century B.C., when phonetic writing was being
established. Similarly, More’s Utopia is written in the sixteenth century when
the printed book had just become established. When electric technology was new
and speculative, Alice in Wonderland came as a kind of non-Euclidean space-time
Utopia, a grown-up version of which is the Illuminations of Rimbaud. Like Lewis
Carroll, Rimbaud accepts each object as a world and the world as an object. He
makes a complete break with the established procedure of putting things into
time or space:
That’s she, the little girl behind the rose bushes, and she’s dead. The young
mother, also dead, is coming down the steps. The cousin’s carriage crunches the
sand. The small brother (he’s in India!) over there in the field of pinks, in
front of the sunset. The old men they’ve buried upright in the wall covered with
gilly-flowers.
But when the full consequences of each new technology have been manifested in
new psychic and social forms, then the anti-Utopias appear. Naked Lunch can be
viewed as the anti-Utopia of Illuminations: During the withdrawal the addict
is acutely aware of his surroundings. Sense impressions are sharpened to the
point of hallucination. Familiar objects seem to stir with a writhing furtive
life. The addict is subject to a barrage of sensations external and visceral.
Or to give a concrete example from the symbolist landscape of Naked Lunch:
A guard in a uniform of human skin, black buck jacket with carious yellow teeth
buttons, an elastic pullover shirt in burnished Indian copper […] sandals from
calloused foot soles of young Malayan farmer […]
The key to symbolist perception is in yielding the permission to objects to resonate
with their own time and space. Time and space themselves are subjected to the
uniform and continuous visual processing that provides us with the “connected
and rational” world that is in fact only an isolated fragment of reality — the
visual. There is no uniform and continuous character in the nonvisual modalities
of space and time
. The Symbolists freed themselves from visual conditions into the visionary
world of the iconic and the auditory. Their art, to be visually oriented and
literary man, seems haunted, magical and often incomprehensible. It is, in John
Ruskin’s words:
… the expression, in a moment, by a series of symbols thrown together in bold
and fearless connections; of truths which it would have taken a long time to
express in any verbal way, and of which the connection is left for the beholder
to work out for himself; the gaps, left or overleaped by the haste of the imagination,
forming the grotesque character. (Modern Painters) The art of the interval, rather
than the art of the connection, is not only medieval but Oriental; above all,
it is the art mode of instant electric culture.
8. There are considerable antecedents for the Burroughs attempt to read the language
of the biological theatre and the motives of the Subliminal Kid. Fleurs du Mal
is a vision of the city as the technological extension of man. Baudelaire had
once intended to title the book Les Limbes. The vision of the city as a physiological
and psychic extension of the body he experienced as a nightmare of illness and
self-alienation.
Wyndham Lewis, in his trilogy The Human Age, began with The Childermass.
Its theme is the massacre of innocents and the rape of entire populations by
the popular media of press and film. Later in The Human Age Lewis explores the
psychic mutations of man living in “the magnetic city,” the instant, electric,
and angelic (or diabolic) culture. Lewis views the action in a much more inclusive
way than Burroughs whose world is a paradigm of a future in which there can be
no spectators but only participants. All men are totally involved in the insides
of all men. There is no privacy and no private parts. In a world in which we
are all ingesting and digesting one another there can be no obscenity or pornography
or decency. Such is the law of electric media which stretch the nerves to form
a global membrane of enclosure. 9. The Burroughs diagnosis is that we can avoid
the inevitable “closure” that accompanies each new technology by regarding our
entire gadgetry as junk. Man has hopped himself up by a long series of technological
fixes:
You are all dogs on tape. The entire planet is being developed into terminal
identity and complete surrender.
We can forego the entire legacy of Cain (the inventor of gadgets) by applying
the same formula that works for junk — “apomorphine,” extended to all technology:
Apomorphine is no word and no image — […] It is simply a question of putting
through an inoculation program in the very limited time that remains — Word begets
image and image IS virus —
Burroughs is arguing that the power of the image to beget image, and of technology
to reproduce itself via human intervention, is utterly in excess of our power
to control the psychic and social consequences:
Shut the whole thing right off — Silence — When you answer the machine you provide
it with more recordings to be played back to your “enemies” keep the whole nova
machine running — The Chinese character for “enemy” means to be similar to or
to answer — Don’t answer the machine — Shut if off —
Merely to be in the presence of any machine, or replica of our body or faculties,
is to be close with it. Our sensory ratios shift at once with each encounter
with any fragmented extension of our being. This is a non-stop express of innovation
that cannot be endured indefinitely:
We are just dust falls from demagnetized patterns — Show business —
It is the medium that is the message because the medium creates an environment
that is as indelible as it is lethal. To end the proliferation of lethal new
environmental expression, Burroughs urges a huge collective act of restraint
as well as a nonclosure of sensory modes — “The biological theater of the body
can bear a good deal of new program notes.”
10.
Finnegans Wake
(1939 novel by JAMES JOYCE) provides the closest literary precedent
to Burroughs’ work. From the beginning to end it is occupied with the theme of
“the extensions” of man — weaponry, clothing, languages, number, money, and media
in toto. Joyce works out in detail the sensory shifts involved in each extension
of man, and concludes with the resounding boast:
The keys to. Given!
Like Burroughs, Joyce was sure he had worked out the formula for total cultural
understanding and control. The idea of art as total programming for the environment
is tribal, mental, Egyptian. It is, also, an idea of art to which electric technology
leads quite strongly. We live science fiction. The bomb is our environment. The
bomb is of higher learning all compact, the extension division of the university.
The university has become a global environment. The university now contains the
commercial world, as well as the military and government establishments. To reprogram
the cultures of the globe becomes as natural an undertaking as curriculum revision
in a university. Since new media are new environments that reprocess psyche and
society in successive ways, why not bypass instruction in fragmented subjects
meant for fragmented sections of the society and reprogram the environment itself?
Such is Burroughs’ vision. 11.
It is amusing to read reviews of Burroughs that try to classify his books as
nonbooks or as failed science fiction. It is a little like trying to criticize
the sartorial and verbal manifestations of a man who is knocking on the door
to explain that flames are leaping from the roof of our home. Burroughs is not
asking merit marks as a writer; he is trying to point to the shut-on button of
an active and lethal environmental process.
VISIT=Laughtears.com for MUSIC, FILM, ART, LITERATURE, NEW MEDIA, GAMING, AVANT
GARDE, POETRY, JAZZ, FUNK, COMEDY free events
JOIN IN and READ FINNEGANS WAKE outloud with a group of people every FIRST TUESDAY
at the MARINA DEL REY LIBRARY
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7
My Art Belongs to Venice
Gerry Fialka
Laughtears.com 310-306-7330
How does a beach town become a sacred ground? Gerry Fialka's
interactive workshop probes the enduring existence of artists
in an ever-changing Venice, California. Exploring the intentional
and random roles that creative artists play in the life of
Venice and vice versa, the workshop asks: How can a place affect
the art-making and art-viewing done there, and exert a hidden
influence on the psyches of its creative people? Fialka
surveys the lively history of artists nurtured in Venice,
from the Beats to the Hipsters. This impressive legacy
includes the Cool School superstars, such as Ed Kienholz,
Ed Ruscha, Wallace Berman, Marjorie Cameron, Ed Moses, and
Robert Irwin; notable Boardwalk renegades, such as Sunny
Zorro, Dougo Smith, Diane Butler and Vinny DiGaetano; and
skilled painters, such as Tibor Jankay, Ray Packard, Earl
Newman and Rip Cronk. What threads or themes, if any, can
be said to unite the works of these diverse artists? Artist Mike
Kelley commented that making art is making your sickness
everybody else's sickness. Does that idea of illness
and a unifying disaffection apply to the artwork done in
Venice over the years? As a
cclaimed screenwriter and director
Paul Schrader has said, “The job of the artist is to attempt
to sell out, but fail.” This workshop sees whether
that axiom applies to these many illustrious artists of Venice,
past and present--whether they successfully made failed
attempts to sell out.
Using Venice and its artists as a test case or jumping-off point,
the workshop aims to examine larger questions of why art
is created in the first place. What functions does it serve,
for its creators and its audiences? Equally important, what
terms, priorities, and metaphors make sense to use when talking
about the reasons for art? McLuhan and Warhol both
said that art is anything you can get away with. We
will trace interconnections between the famous ideas of "art
for art's sake" and "the medium is the message." From
another perspective, Marcel Duchamp said that there
is no art without an audience. Can Venice's art community
help us to better understand the audience's role in the creative
process? Returning to
the idea of Venice as a sacred ground, a place of art and
mystery, the workshop will look at how Thornton Wilder
used different metaphors in addressing art's functions. He
wrote, "Art is confession; art is the secret told. . . .
But art is not only the desire to tell one's secret; it is
the desire to tell it and hide it at the same time. And the
secret is nothing more than the whole drama of the inner
life." That framework suggests that we must always
ask, "What is art about, and then what is it
really about?" Together, Fialka and workshop participants
will consider: What is Venice's art
really about?
“The Balinese have no word for art, they do everything
as well as they can.”…. "Art as radar acts as 'an early alarm
system,' as it were, enabling us to discover social and psychic
targets in lots of time to prepare to cope with them." ….
– Marshall McLuhan
"If it commands attention it's culture. If it matches the
couch it's art." - Robert Williams
"One is an artist as the cost of regarding that which all non-artists
call 'form' as content, as 'the matter itself.' To be sure,
then one belongs in a topsy-turvy world: for henceforth content
becomes something merely formal - our life included." - Friedrich
Nietzsche
"Art as a radar environment takes on the function of indispensable
perceptual training rather than the role of a privileged
diet for the elite." - W.T. Gordon
Marshall McLuhan’s Tetrad:
1) What does it enhance or intensify? 2) What does it render
obsolete or replace? 3) What does it bring back that was
previously obsolesced? 4) What does it become when pressed
to an extreme, what does it flip into? We are probing
the psychic and social effects of the environments created
by the invention. Every invention (from philosophy to cellphones) generates
environments that provide services and disservices, and none
of them reflect how the invention was originally intended
to be used (= its content). For example, the CAR: ENH= private
mobility, OBS=horse & buggy, RET=knight in shining armor,
REV=bomb, home, traffic jam.
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8
"The point of the
Narcissus myth is not that people are prone to fall
in love with their own images but that people fall in love
with extensions of themselves which they are convinced are
not extensions of themselves. This provides, I think, a fairly
good image of all of our technologies, and it directs us
towards a basic issue, the idolatry of technology as involving
a psychic numbness." And " Holmes genius
for constructing patterns from chaotic surface events is
a critical perceptual tactic for the electronic/information
age ..." – McLuhan “All situations are composed
of an area of attention [figure] and a very much larger (subliminal)
area of inattention [ground] ….Figures rise out of, and recede
back into, ground….for example, at a lecture, the attention
will shift from the speaker’s words to his gestures, to the
hum of the lighting or street sounds, or to the feel of the
chair or a memory or association or smell, each new figure
alternatively displaces the others into ground…The ground
of any technology is both the situation that gives rise to
it as well as the whole environment (medium) of services
and disservices that the technology brings with it. These
are side effects and impose themselves willy-nilly as a new
form of culture”.-Robert Dobbs McLuhan:“Film
is high-definition pictures. You don’t have to fill in the
blanks, so you’re detached and can think critically. Radio,
telephone—they give you less to go on, and you have to fill
out the message with your own story. But they’re still relatively
hot. At the far end of the gamut is TV. It’s cool, low definition;
you get completely absorbed in processing the bombardment
of dots, hypnotized. It’s also non-sequential, like newspapers.
Movies flow narratively, sequentially, the way we see. TV
throws everything at us holus-bolus like sound. We can see
only one thing at a time, but we can hear many things at
once, even around corners. That’s why film is an eye medium
and TV an ear medium.”
The phonetic alphabet fell like a bombshell on tribal man.
The printing press hit him like a hydrogen bomb. Now
we’ve been blitzkreiged by TV. The horseless
buggy was the only way people could describe the automobile.
Families whose wealth was based on carriages and buggy
whips soon went bankrupt. Horsepower moved from animals
into cars. The wheel extends
the foot in an automobile. In this way the wheel amplifies
the power and speed of the foot, but at the same time
it amputates. In the act of pressing the gas peddle,
the foot becomes so specialized it no longer performs
its original function, which is to walk. If
the wheel is an extension of the foot, then money is
an extension of muscle, radio an amplification of the
human voice, and the hydrogen bomb an outgrowth of teeth
and fingernails. Why should the sending
or receiving of a telegram seem more dramatic than even
the ringing of a telephone? What do
you think Hitler meant when he said: “I go my way with
the assurance of a sleepwalker?” –MM Laughtears.com
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9
Probe the hidden psychic effects of human inventions
(words, cars, philosophy, art, cellphones, etc) as
extensions of our senses. Marshall McLuhan explored
how artists reveal these effects so we can learn
to cope with their disservices, and flip them into
services. Consider his aphorisms like "We shape our
tools then they shape us" and how they can be reinvented.
For example, he updated it: "We shape our tools and
thereafter our tools ape us." McLuhan reworded Robert
Browning's "Our reach should exceed our grasp or
what is heaven for?" into "Our reach should exceed
our grasp or what is a metaphor? (meta for)." Contemplate
& reword these: "If it works, it's obsolete."
... "You mean my whole fallacy is wrong." ... "Carefully
make plans then do the opposite." ... "The Balinese
have no word for art they do everything as well as
they can." ... "How about technologies as the collective
unconscious and art as the collective unconsciousness?”
... "The artists of our culture, 'the antennae of
the race,' have tuned in to the new ground and begun
exploring discontinuity and simultaneity." ..."Understanding
is not having a point of view."... "Everybody experiences
far more than he understands. Yet it is experience,
rather than understanding, that influences behavior."
Walter Benjamin recommended "mastery, not of nature
itself, but of the relationship between nature and
humanity."
McLuhan called his probing process "applied Joyce"
examining
Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, which
must be read outloud with a group of people. Joyce
sought epiphanies in everydayness, satirized information
overload, and invented language about language with
new words like "laughtears" and "feelful thinkamalinks."
"Artists live in the present and write a detailed
history of the future." - Wyndham Lewis
"This concern which interests us more than anything
else: the blurring of the distinction between art
and life." - Marcel Duchamp...
"Choose a job you love, and you will never have to
work a day in your life." - Confucius ..."Get
your job and your life as mixed up as possible" -?
"Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the
comfortable" - Banksy
"Art
is anything you can get away with." - Andy Warhol...
"Most people don't know what they like, they like
what they know." - Igor Stravinsky
"I am a failure, but not a miserable failure"
- Frank Zappa.... "Ever tried. Ever failed.
No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. -
Samuel Beckett...."Success consists of going from
failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm." -
Winston Churchill.
"Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your
work. Note just what it is about your work that critics
don't like - then cultivate it." - Jean Cocteau…
"The goal of the artist is to attempt to sell out,
but fail." - Paul Schrader
Moshe Feldenkrais said that it is literally possible
to identify a weakness and incorporate it to become
a strength. We are normally taught to overcome a
weakness. Turn breakdowns into breakthroughs, flip
rejection into redirection. …"I have forced myself
to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming
to my own tastes." -Marcel Duchamp
"I remember the images I filmed.... They have substituted
themselves for my memory. They are my memory. I wonder
how people remember things who don't film, don't
photograph, don't tape. How has mankind managed to
remember? I know: it wrote the Bible. The new Bible
will be an eternal magnetic tape of a time that will
have to reread itself constantly just to know it
existed." -
Sans Soleil by Chris Marker, who said:“I
betrayed Gutenberg for McLuhan long ago.”
Page 2 of 2
"The key is to bring the audience up onto the stage and
into the scene with you. It is they who must give
you even more than you give them in way of imagination
and creative power." - Ruth Draper...“The pressure
of experimentation is greater than the fear of embarrassment.
That is the essence of art.” - Wolfgang Tillmans....“Art
is a lie that tells the truth.” - Pablo Picasso…"The
artists that I'm interested in are the ones that
make a picture of the times they live in....The eye
always craves what it doesn't see." - Marilyn Minter
…."Art is confession; art is the secret told. . .
. But art is not only the desire to tell one's secret;
it is the desire to tell it and hide it at the same
time.” - Thorton Wilder …"My task as a poet entails
the work of seeing the world without language and
then bringing that seeing into language." - Gary
Snyder
"I would like to think that the sounds people do
hear in a concert could make them more aware of the
sounds they hear in the street, or out in the country,
or anywhere they may be...I prefer laughter to tears."
- John Cage
"Life is short, break the rules, forgive quickly,
kiss slowly, love truly, laugh uncontrollably, and
never regret anything that made you smile. Twenty
years from now you will be more disappointed by the
things you didn't do than by the ones you did. So
throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor.
Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream.
Discover.” - Mark Twain
"There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening
that is translated through you into action, and because
there is only one of you in all of time, this expression
is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist
through any other medium and it will be lost. The
world will not have it. It is not your business to
determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how
it compares with other expressions. It is your business
to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the
channel open. You do not even have to believe in
yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself
open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep
the channel open. ... No artist is pleased. [There
is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is
only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest
that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than
the others." - Martha Graham
"The real secret of life - to be completely engaged
with what you are doing in the here and now. Instead
of calling it work, realize it is play." - Alan Watts... "Bob Fosse's
dancers seemed as if they were playing at dancing
more than actually dancing." - Sam Wasson...
"Who can tell the dancer from the dance?" - W.B.
Yeats
“Objects are unobservable. Only relationships among
objects are observable. So if you think that the
question, ‘Will we ever learn?’ implies a goal, a
particular point and time we will arrive at, a particular
object, we will never know that. Because objects
like that do not exist, only relationships among
objects exist. It is like asking, ‘Will there ever
be silence?’ It's like, ‘Will you ever die?’ Well,
you'll never know because to be dead is a specific
experience that seems to imply isolation which could
not be known. Because nothing exists in isolation,
you will never experience death. You will only experience
those things that involve relationships. The end
point of time, death, cannot be experienced because
it's not a relationship among events." - Robert Dobbs
Marshall McLuhan’s Tetrad:
1) What does it enhance or intensify? 2) What does
it render obsolete or replace? 3) What does it bring
back that was previously obsolesced? 4) What does
it become when pressed to an extreme, what does it
flip into? We are probing the psychic and social
effects of the environments created by the invention.
Every invention (from philosophy to cellphones)
generates environments that provide services and
disservices, and none of them reflect how the invention
was originally intended to be used (= its content).
For example, the CAR: ENH= private mobility, OBS=horse
& buggy, RET=knight in shining armor, REV=bomb,
home, traffic jam
++++++++++
10
FILM CAN'T KILL YOU BUT WHY TAKE A CHANCE
Gerry Fialka
310 -306-7330
pfsuzy@aol.com
Laughtears.com McLuhan's percept:
"May I suggest art in the electronic age is not a form of
self-expression, but a kind of research & probing.
It is not a private need of expression that motivates
the artist, but the need of involvement in the total
audience. This is humanism in reverse, art in the electric
age is the experience, not of the individual, but of
a collectivity." Probe "rearview-mirrorism" - when new
media looks backwards for content and meaning. When
McLuhan yelped "The future of the future is the present,"
he was revealing that the artist lives in the present
and writes a detailed history of the future. "It's
misleading to suppose there's any basic difference between
education and entertainment. This distinction merely
relieves people of the responsibility of looking into
the matter. It's like setting up a distinction between
didactic and lyric poetry on the ground that one teaches,
the other pleases. However, it's always been true that
whatever pleases teaches more effectively." - McLuhan,
THE BROTHER SIDE OF THE WAKE - Gerry Fialka
and friends reinvent (and reimagine, expound,
understand, interpret,
translate, articulate, resuscitate, expose, enhance,
evoke, de-make) the Orson Welles film
The Other Side of the Wind via the Mennipean
satire of James Joyce and much more. Delve deep into
the hidden psychic effects of the philosophy that the
journey is more important then the destination. What
are the motives and consequences of Chris Marker's probing
of the inability to escape time? Why even make a film
when you can just live life as if it is a film? As it
lives in your imagination? Consider these quotes from Orson
Welles and others:"Who do I have to (expletive)
to get out of this picture?""The great danger for any
artist is to find himself comfortable. It's his duty
to find the point of maximum discomfort, to search it
out." “You could almost say a director is a man who presides
over accidents!” "One should make movies innocently —
the way Adam and Eve named the animals, their first day
in the garden…Learn from your own
interior vision of things, as if there had never
been a D.W.Griffith, or a Eisenstein, or a
JohnFord, or a Jean Renoir, or anybody." “There
are only two things it is ever seemly for an intelligent
person to be thinking. One is: ‘What did God mean by
creating the world?’ And the other? ‘
What do I do next?’”AND consider these quotes
by others... Peter Viertel wrote that John Houston
enjoyed working on the Welles film because it was a perilous
undertaking and he enjoyed "an adventure shared by desperate
people that finally came to
nothing." The
gods graciously give us a first verse for
nothing; but it is our task to finish the second, which
must harmonise with the first and not be too unworthy
of its
supernatural
brother
.” - Paul
Valéry"Nothing is what I want." - Frank Zappa "I
started out with nothing and still have most of it left."
- ? "Pull the wool over your own eyes." -
? “What he creates he has to wreck.”-
film critic in
The Other Side of the Wind Jean Renoir: "A
director makes only one movie in his life. Then he breaks
it up and makes it again." " The voyage will
not teach you anything if you do not accord it the right
to destroy you." - Nicolas Bouvier "An artist never really
finishes his work, he merely abandons it." - Paul Valery
Michelangelo Antonioni: "The greatest danger for those
working in cinema is the extraordinary possibilities
it offers for lying." Director Gus Van Sant proclaimed
that film making devastated his life. Orson Bean said
movies saved his life. RIA (Reverse Intuition Aberations)
Film can't kill you... unless you are sitting in the wrong
movie theater, when real bullets start to fly....
or you believe folks like this: "I've always considered movies
evil; the day cinema was invented was a black day for
mankind," Kenneth Anger, or... Frank Capra: "Film is
a disease. When it infects your bloodstream, it takes
over as the number one hormone; it bosses the enzymes;
directs the pineal gland; plays Iago to your psyche.
As with heroin, the antidote to film is more film." "It
makes me into a clown,” noted the supposedly Teutonic
Werner Herzog. “That happens to everyone. Just look at
Orson Welles, or even people like Truffaut. They have
become clowns. What we do as filmmakers... it's immaterial.
It's only projection of light." Darren Aronofsky told
Elvis Mitchell that filmmakers should become performance
artists because the chemicals involved in filmmaking
are destroying mother nature. Director Richard Foreman
wrote a play entitled
“Film is Evil, Radio is Good”. Joshua Oppenheimer says, "Films
can't
change the society, they can simply open the space for discussion
which can lead to social change and start new forms of
social activism." As readers of this essay, we can bypass
the
environments created by cinema (the so-called “subliminal
effects”) and just become environments ourselves. Indeed,
“If the images of the present don't change, then change
the images of the past," proclaimed Chris Marker. Meanwhile,
Joshua Oppenheimer's two films
“The Act of Killing“
and “The Look of Silence“ offer
revealing
rejoinders to these two quotations: "Those who cannot remember
the past are
condemned to repeat it," from George Santayana, and
"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,"
by James Joyce. The killers of Communists in Oppenheimer's
films keep repeating, "The past is past," as if we didn’t
know that already. Don’t they realize that all times
happening now? Can we reprogram the environments of our
inventions? Can we de-hypnotize
ourselves and hack our own perceptions? Let us propagate
the aspiration of Wyndham
Lewis "Artists live in the
present and write a detailed
history of the future." In fact, the past has seen us looking
for guidance to the screen.
Tetrad
-
1) What does it enhance or intensify? 2) What does it
render obsolete or replace? 3) What does it bring
back that was previously obsolesced? 4) What does
it become when pressed to an extreme, what does it
flip into?
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11
Laughtears.com Text from Sans Soleil
1983 film by Chris Marker
"Because I know that time is always time And
place is always and only place And
what is actual is actual only for one time”
– TS Eliot. The first image he
told me about was of three children on a road
in Iceland, in 1965. He said that for him it
was the image of happiness and also that he had
tried several times to link it to other images,
but it never worked. He wrote me: one day I'll
have to put it all alone at the beginning of
a film with a long piece of black leader; if
they don't see happiness in the picture, at least
they'll see the black. He wrote: I'm just back
from Hokkaido, the Northern Island. Rich and
hurried Japanese take the plane, others take
the ferry: waiting, immobility, snatches of sleep.
Curiously all of that makes me think of a past
or future war: night trains, air raids, fallout
shelters, small fragments of war enshrined in
everyday life. He liked the fragility of those
moments suspended in time. Those memories whose
only function had been to leave behind nothing
but memories. He wrote: I've been round the world
several times and now only banality still interests
me. On this trip I've tracked it with the relentlessness
of a bounty hunter. At dawn we'll be in Tokyo.
…He wrote me: I will have spent my life trying
to understand the function of remembering, which
is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather
its lining. We do not remember, we rewrite memory
much as history is rewritten. How can one remember
thirst?... A people of nothing, a
people of emptiness, a vertical people. Frankly,
have you ever heard of anything stupider than
to say to people as they teach in film schools,
not to look at the camera? …
And only for one place". Video games
are the first stage in a plan for machines to
help the human race, the only plan that offers
a future for intelligence. For the moment, the
inseparable philosophy of our time is contained
in the Pac-Man. I didn't know when I was sacrificing
all my hundred yen coins to him that he was going
to conquer the world. Perhaps because he is the
most perfect graphic metaphor of man's fate.
He puts into true perspective the balance of
power between the individual and the environment.
And he tells us soberly that though there may
be honor in carrying out the greatest number
of victorious attacks, it always comes a cropper.
…And beneath each of these faces a memory. And
in place of what we were told had been forged
into a collective memory, a thousand memories
of men who parade their personal laceration in
the great wound of history. In Portugal—raised
up in its turn by the breaking wave of Bissau—Miguel
Torga, who had struggled all his life against
the dictatorship wrote: “Every protagonist represents
only himself; in place of a change in the social
setting he seeks simply in the revolutionary
act the sublimation of his own image.” That's
the way the breakers recede. And so predictably
that one has to believe in
a kind of amnesia of the future that history distributes
through mercy or calculation to those whom it
recruits: Amilcar murdered by members of his
own party, the liberated areas fallen under the
yoke of bloody petty tyrants liquidated in their
turn by a central power to whose stability everyone
paid homage until the military coup. That's how
history advances, plugging its memory as one
plugs one's ears. Luis exiled to Cuba, Nino
discovering in his turn plots woven against
him, can be cited reciprocally to appear before
the bar of history. She doesn't care, she understands
nothing, she has only one friend, the one Brando
spoke of in Apocalypse: horror. That has a name
and a face. I'm writing you all this from another
world, a world of appearances. In a way the two
worlds communicate with each other. Memory is
to one what history is to the other: an impossibility.
Legends are born out of the need to decipher
the indecipherable. Memories must make do with
their delirium, with their drift. A moment stopped
would burn like a frame of film blocked before
the furnace of the projector. Madness protects,
as fever does
. I envy Hayao in his 'zone,' he plays with the signs
of his memory. He pins them down and decorates
them like insects that would have flown beyond
time, and which he could contemplate from a point
outside of time: the only eternity we have left.
I look at his machines. I think of a world where
each memory could create its own legend. He
wrote me that only one film had been capable
of portraying impossible memory—insane memory:
Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. In the spiral of the
titles he saw time covering a field ever wider
as it moved away, a cyclone whose present moment
contains motionless the eye. …That's for a start.
Now why this cut in time, this connection of
memories? That's just it, he can't understand.
He hasn't come from another planet he comes from
our future, four thousand and one: the time when
the human brain has reached the era of full employment.
Everything works to perfection, all that we allow
to slumber, including memory. Logical consequence:
total recall is memory anesthetized. After so
many stories of men who had lost their memory,
here is the story of one who has lost forgetting,
and who—through some peculiarity of his nature—instead
of drawing pride from the fact and scorning mankind
of the past and its shadows, turned to it first
with curiosity and then with compassion….Brooding
at the end of the world on my island of Sal in
the company of my prancing dogs I remember that
month of January in Tokyo, or rather I remember
the images I filmed of the month of January in
Tokyo. They have substituted themselves for my
memory. They are my memory. I wonder how people
remember things who don't film, don't photograph,
don't tape. How has mankind managed to remember?
I know: it wrote the Bible. The new Bible will
be an eternal magnetic tape of a time that will
have to reread itself constantly just to know
it existed.
+++++++++++++++
12
Mackdaddy founder of avant-funksters Black Shoe Polish, Gerry
Fialka and Brad Kay, music historian and jazz pianist
supreme probe the motives and consequences of the Minstrel
Show, voluntary Negritude, Afrofuturism (Sun Ra, Jimi
Hendrix), the relationship of Duke Ellington & Marshal
McLuhan, and Lenny Bruce & Frank Zappa, who said,
“
I'm not black, but there's a whole lots a times I
wish I could say I'm not white.” Why do
whites emulate blacks? Shoe fly in da buttermilk. Trading
dozens. If ya can't dazzle'em wif yer brilliance, baffle
wif yer bullshit. Gwine up to Hebbin. Louie Armstrong's
white pot dealer Mezz Mezzrow writes that from the moment
he heard jazz he "was going to be a Negro musician, hipping
[teaching] the world about the blues the way only Negroes
can." "I'm playing dark history. It's beyond black. I'm
dealing with the dark things of the cosmos." - Sun Ra.
"We just play
Black, We play what the day recommends." - Miles
Davis. "In my kosmos, there will be no feeva of dischord."
- Krazy Kat. "I've got a move that tells me what to do."
- James Brown. Black jazz icon
Ornette Coleman said to Keith Jarrett: "
Man, you've got to be black. You just
have to be black! " Jarrett, who
is White (Scottish & Hungarian with zero African,
though he looks otherwise), to Ornette Coleman: "
I know. I know. I'm working on it."
+++++++++
13
Laughtears.com WRITEfly
What I like
in a
good author
is not what he says but what he whispers. -
Logan Pearsall Smith
"
Writing is easy
: You just stare at a blank page your
forehead bleeds
." - Gene
Fowler
There goes another novel - Balzac referring to ejaculation
If my books had been any worse
, I should not
have been
invited to Hollywood, and
if
they
had been any
better, I should not have come." -
Raymond Chandler
“I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator
of literature has something on his mind other
than the history of literature so far. Literature
should not disappear up its own asshole, so to
speak.” - Kurt Vonnegut
If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say
anything at all.
- conventional instruction on etiquette
If you haven’t anything nice to say about anyone,
come sit by me. -
Alice Roosevelt Longworth
There is only one thing that can kill movies
and that is education. -
Will Rogers
"Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains,
no matter how improbable,
must be the truth
." -
Arthur Conan Doyle
A
s for
the critics
-
don't even ignore
them. -
Samuel Goldwyn
The truth which makes men free is for the most part
the truth
which
men
prefer not to hear. -
Herbert Agate
"All Moansday
, Tearsday, Wailsday, Thumpsday, Frightday, and Shatterday"
and "
My consumers are they not my producers
?
"
James Joyce
, Finnegans Wake
The length of a film should be directly related to
the endurance of the human bladder. - Alfred
Hitchcock.
If at first you don't succeed, try again. Then quit.
There's no use being a damn fool about it. - W.C.Fields
"
Art, like morality
, consists in drawing the line somewhere." - Gilbert
K.
Chesterton
I think it's the duty of the
comedian
to find out where the
line
is drawn and
cross
it deliberately. -
George Carlin
Hockey is a sport for white men. Basketball is a
sport for black men. Golf is a sport for white
men dressed like black pimps. - Tiger Woods
Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.
- Napolean Bonaparte
The real comic novel
has to do with man's recognition of his unimportance
in the universe. -
Anthony Burgess
If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will
get you there. - George Harrison via Lewis
Carroll
"He had felt like a man rushing to catch a train
he was anxious to miss." - Helen Hudson
" Genius is childhood recalled at will." - Charles
Bauderlaire. "Ask questions a child would ask."
- Albert Einstein.
Jean Cocteau declared, "What one should do with the
young is to give them a portable camera and forbid
them to observe any rules except those they invent
for themselves as they go along. Let them write
without being afraid of making mistakes."
There is an old saying in Silicon Valley that if
you are not paying for the product, you are the
product
.
++++++++++++++++