For the most part, I live in the here and now; leaving the past in the past, and the future as something that has yet to materialize. Though at times, all it takes for me to get nostalgic is something as simple (yet monumental) as the opening guitar riff to Nirvana’s “Smells like Teen Spirit”, or the Garfield mug (with its paint faded in peeling) from McDonalds. In this instance, my mind drifted back to what I was doing the other day, which was nothing spectacular (I sat at a bench on the Paseo de San Antonio, across from Philz Coffee, reading Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Storyfor the fifth or twentieth time.)
There was an instance that stood out: this woman walked by, dressed in a flannel-type shirt and skin-tight acid washed jeans. She had the trappings of a suburban, garden-variety, Olympia-drinking hipster. I couldn’t stop thinking about her jeans, or how everything that is old, is new again. Certain articles of clothing should remain dead and buried, but circulation-killing acid washed jeans seen to be one head of a multi-headed, never-dying hydra monster. Another head of said monster reared as she talked on her phone, “… I don’t like that place, there are too many beaners there.” Her racist remark was as casual as her checkerboard Vans. What made her vile comment even viler was that she seemed to be Latina as well (or at the very least, was of some ethnic background.)
Racism is like this old byproduct of humanity’s early days. And in-house racism seems extra-special to me. It is done with underpinning of class, a colonial mindset. A few Latin Americans have perfected this mindset and have added a few pages to the playbook that has survived since the days of the Conquistadores. A cursory glance of either Univisión or Telemundo is recommended to see how class and race are shaped by pop culture. (Side note: Among me and my friends, we always joked how Argentina, the whitest Latin-American country, with their history of Fascist-leanings and their noses forever in the air, were able to do what all the Conquistadores couldn’t.) Soap operas (novellas), especially in México, are their bread and butter. No matter if it is set in a city or in a ranch in some rural outpost, the template never changes: the main and secondary characters are either whiter than blinding light, or are light-skinned mulattos who can pass; the servants and thieves were the usual shade of indigenous brown.
It is a sad day, one of the most influential writers and cultural critics has died. Christopher Hitchens has been and will continue to be a great influence on all The Butchers. We will miss him immeasurably as we search for his brilliant and unique perspective on our absurd world. Rest in peace Great Sir.
So I’m a functional adult, and pretty damn cool. In fact, I am actually way better than you are in just about every way possible. As much as I hate to admit it, a lot of my charm comes from knowing that whenever I take a shit, I actually lose more brain cells (out of my ass) than you actually have in your brain (which is not the same as your ass).
We are all given opportunities to be a part of certain things bigger than us…
Like when the old beaten up fighter gains respect by challenging the badass half his age. Like when the geek gets the girl after a magical kiss that neither of them expected. Like when people stand up and cheer for you, for something you did, and…
… then you go back to your life of pain and welfare.
You might see this as a rant that happens to include movie plots and generic situations that come to mind while typing…
… but I see it as this.
I have the opportunity to have dinner and see a show with people who I REALLY want to be part of my life, and while that is great and all, I really don’t want to fuck things up. That is a really bold statement and, for whatever reason, I decided to write about it.
Here are some of the reasons that I am concerned about tomorrow’s “first date”…
I can’t say a person’s name. Really. It all comes from back in the day when I knew a girl for a long time (her name was Erin) and because I never said her name, she asked me to say her name. Aaron, Eric, blah… anyhow, I fucked up, when I shouldn’t have, and since that day, I hold that with me.
I respect the situation more than I probably should. That leads to bad things, like when you’re white and feel the need to tell the angry Mexicans in the Mission that their rage probably stems from the fact that most people within their ethnic group were beaten over multiple generations and are shown no respect…
Anyhow, this isn’t over…
I really LOVE the opportunity to hang out with people who are awesome. I just don’t have the confidence to question all your life choices, destroy your career, fuck up all that you know is correct… and that really frustrates me.
This is not a movie. This is not some piece of shit documentary showing at the selected art-house theaters in college towns and few hip major cities. This isn’t some pretentious Academy of Art graduate hipster with a super8 camcorder he found in his grandfather’s attic who is obsessively in love with the shitty band his girlfriend plays keyboards in, not knowing while he films the story of their vain rise in the music world that she’s fucking the lead singer when he’s not around. This isn’t some egomaniacal pseudo-auteur with a Jarmusch fascination and an Adderall prescription shooting hours and hours of celluloid of public transit buskers to present what he believes to be “the only real musicians in this culture of capitalist consumption and uneducated conservatism.”
This is not a movie. This is not some meta-documentary about the process of making a failed documentary about the Salton Sea artist scene being destroyed my meth amphetamines inspired by Charlie Kaufman’s adaptation of Adaptation after dropping out of college because there was nothing there for him to learn and he “just needed to get out in the shit, in the real world, and immerse [himself] in the lives of real people in order to truly capture how they live.” This is not some pathetic fluff piece about some schizophrenic performance artist who sculpts giraffe heads from his own feces on stage and has subsequently been arrested and banned from multiple cities in what the director sees as an “outrageous suppression of both the arts and our basic right to freedom of speech and expression” regardless of the risks to public health and simple decency.
This is a performance. This is an actual band comprised of professional musicians led by a man with actual singing talent and an undeniable stage presence. This is a theater and musicianship merged together at its best with a brilliant self-awareness and highly effective take on both inspirations. This is comedy and entertainment in its purest form, with great laughs being drawn from the audience who are, at times, made willing participants. This a jazz group playing Top 40 hits of the last three decades in a complete tongue-in-cheek lounge style punctuated by the tightness of the musicianship and brilliant showmanship of the lead singer who can only be described as a cross between Dean Martin and Jon Lovitz (without even completely nailing down his uniqueness). This is hours of preparation and development blessed with a natural sense of comedic timing that leaves the crowd laughing, even when they should be confused, offended, appalled, or even disturbed. These are artists who have found a way to entertain through a combination of the obsolete and the mundane, bringing brilliance into otherwise drab and overwrought art forms, and through persistence of personality and thousands of hours of practice have succeeded in breathing new life into a fading form of public presentation.
This is a performance. This is Richard Cheese and Lounge Against the Machine.
This is not a movie. This is not some crappy film projected onto a moth eaten screen in some shit-hole theater with a bunch of morons laughing at all the wrong jokes and wiping their fat, sugar-coated, hands all over the hideous burgundy velvet-wrapped seats as they spill popcorn all over the poorly lit aisles. This is not some high-definition top-of-the-line technology on a wide format flat-panel television in my friends’ living room where the cheap beer and cigarette breaks interrupt us constantly. This is not some ripped download on my laptop in my bedroom at two in the afternoon when I’m trying to pretend I’m not hung-over, but unwilling to use my head for anything that resembles thought and avoiding movement because of the shards of glass that shoot throughout my blood stream with every cough and shudder.
This is not a movie. This is not overblown special effects distracting you from a razor-thin plotline and dialogue written by a hydrocephalic teenager on Ritalin being phoned in by hack actors who get by on good looks and back room blow jobs. This is not a soundtrack anchored down thoroughly by shitty songs from today’s popular bands to create emotional responses that the horrible script and banal actors couldn’t evoke if their life depended upon it. This is not chopped up strips of film slapped together by an editor fresh out of the UCLA film department with a worthless degree and delusions of grandeur pretending that non-chronological structuring is avant-garde or anything more than pseudo-intellectual pretension.
This is a play. This is a real theater, with a hand built set back dropping the actors who have spent weeks perfecting their motions for hours of lines that they have memorized. Night after night they perform in front of an audience, and only have one chance to get it right for each member of the audience. They have no cutting room floor for their mistakes to dissolve into. They have no photo processing effects to disguise the faces they make. They have to convey line after memorized line with clarity and timing more precise than the atomic clock in order to evoke the emotions of the audience, no matter what emotion, be it humor or tragedy, appall or shock. They have no green screen to create the illusion of scene long after they have retired to their trailers to snort lines of cocaine off transvestite hookers’ asses. They have to pretend like little boys and girls playing in a fort built of couch cushions with such intensity that the audience is sucked in entirely, forgetting that they are sharing this space in a building in downtown wherever, with their lives on hold for an hour, maybe two. This is where audience members have a sense of participation, throughout their stifled coughs and intense fascination. This is where actors have to time their lines to react to the audience’s laughter or gasps of surprise. This is where thespians truly perfect their art.
Christina Taylor Green was only nine years old the day she was killed in a random attack. Jared Lee Loughner awaits trial for her death, the deaths of five others, and the wounding of another fourteen bystanders, including his stated target, United States Representative Gabrielle Giffords.
The bleeding-heart liberals declare that this is proof that we need to ban guns in this country to prevent exactly this type of event. The radical right-wingers declare that this is proof that we need to arm all citizens of the nation to prevent exactly this type of event. The evangelicals declare that this is what happens in a society that has abandoned God. The pessimists declare that this is why mankind will never survive itself.
Not only are none of these views helpful; none of them are correct, and all of them are dangerous
The hyper-reactionism of many is the type of misguided response that has led to the riots in the aftermath of the Rodney King and Oscar Grant trials, the Salem Witch Trials, the violent radical fundamentalists of many religions, and the rise of fascism. Regardless of the fear, frustration, or anger felt, it is extremely dangerous to simply react, without clear thought, to an event, real or perceived, and use that as a basis for world changing policies or beliefs.
While I was recently celebrating my birthday at Sodini's in North Beach with 16 of my closest friends, I spied this quote from Frank Sinatra on a wall plaque:
"I feel sorry for people who don't drink. When they wake up in the morning, that's as good as they're going to feel all day."
It's one I'd never heard before, and I realize now, one year older and in my relatively sober state, how absolutely true it is. When I was in my 20's, I was looking for romantic compatibility. In my 30's, I sought gastronomic compatibility. Now, firmly in my 40's, I'm searching for someone who’s hepatologically compatible. In other words, I'm looking for a partner with a liver of gold.
While I can and do socialize with people that don't drink, I can't help but think of all the interesting stories they'll never have - all the embarrassing moments, the questionable decisions, the hangovers, the loss of motor control, the inside jokes, the inappropriate behavior and the compromising photos that are stock in trade among drinkers and are as much a part of the bonding experience - if not more - than the drink itself. Teetotalers thank their lucky stars that they haven't had these kind of experiences, while recovering alcoholics thank their higher power that these days are behind them. In both cases, I'm afraid, they are completely missing the point. Whatever their rationale for non-consumption is, they've severely limited their chances to be more than bit players in my reality show. To them, I feel like using the line that Campbell Scott said to Jesse Eisenberg in the woefully under-appreciated Roger Dodger: "You drink that drink! Alcohol has been a social lubricant for thousands of years. What do you think, you're going to sit here tonight and reinvent the wheel?"
Do I drink more now than I did when I was living in New York? Yes - Indubitably. But I like my job and my new roommates and have more friends and more fun here than I do in NYC. Coincidence? Bullshit. Not directly related? Prove it. My first bonding experience with my work colleagues (now friends) was at pub quiz my first week in town, when I somehow singlehandedly delivered a second-place finish (and a free pitcher of Bass) by being the only one in a group of ten who knew that Cracked Rear View was the name of the breakthrough album from Hootie and the Blowfish. Would I have been able to recall that information while sober? Hell no, since listening to Hootie under the influence was the only way that music was even remotely palatable. The same tipsy victory roar emanating from our table in support of our intellectual silver medal would have been met with disdain from sober folk.
I read a quote recently from George Nathan, who wrote: "I drink to make other people interesting." I would say the converse is also true - people are more interesting if they drink. They're generally more unafraid of life, of being judged. Like me for instance. If I wasn’t more interesting under the influence, would sixteen people I hadn’t known three months ago be joining me for dinner and drinks? And from my side, the fear of being viewed askew for the trouble I might get in that night was non-existent. These people already knew my most embarrassing moment, the telling of which is kind of a rite of passage for new employees, and went a little something like this:
About 15 years ago, I was living and working in Central Asia, in a country called Uzbekistan, which is spiritually, culturally, and geographically halfway between Russia and Afghanistan. That is to say, you had the Muslim tradition of hospitality, paradoxically mixed with the Russian ideal of heavy social drinking. As I was the first white businessman to ever step foot in the city, I was constantly being invited to dinner parties, since I was viewed as a kind of cultural curiosity – literally, a party piece. On one particular evening, my head translator had invited me to his friend’s retirement party. My translator sat to my left. The host’s brother – let’s call him Akhmed - a xenophobe as well as a stickler for tradition - sat on my right. Throughout the night, there were a lot of vodka toasts made to this, that, and the other thing. Usually, at similar parties, I could get away with taking a small sip with every toast and put my shot glass down. Akhmed was having none of it, inspecting my glass with every toast and making sure I finished every drop. Nine, ten, eleven toasts and subsequent shots went by. That little bitch Akhmed wouldn’t let up, showing me a spiteful smile full of gold teeth each time he refilled my glass. After the twelfth and final shot I turned to my translator and told him that I could not, would not, possibly drink another drop. Now, instead of one enemy at the table, I had two. My translator explained that if I refused to consume, I would be insulting him, the guests, the host, and the person being toasted. No sooner had he explained this than the host rose to make the thirteenth toast of the night. My head began to swim and my stomach began to flutter, and I realized that I was in dire straits. He finished the toast, and all the glasses at the table went up, save one - mine. Akhmed protested, and the host turned a baleful eye towards me. I asked my translator to help explain my predicament, but he refused. The mood at the table grew dark, or perhaps it was my eyesight. Approximately 23 seconds later, I was on my knees in the bathroom, engaging in reverse peristalsis. As I cleaned up and returned to the table, all eyes were on me, all faces with jaws dropped, shaking their heads, following my every step from the bathroom. What I had failed to take into account was that the proximity of the bathroom and its paper-thin walls to the dining room ensured that every single man at the table had heard every syllable of my conversion with the Porcelain God. I sat down gently but the collective faces of the party were still on me. My translator asked me in a whisper “you know what happened, don’t you?”
“Of course,” I replied softly. “I had too much to drink.”
“You are mistaken, my friend. It was not the vodka. Our host was toasting the memory of his recently passed grandmother. By refusing to drink, you angered her spirit, which entered you and cursed your stomach. THAT is why you ended up in the bathroom,” he lectured.
I could call it one man’s delusion except that every man at the table felt as he did, and that’s Central Asia for you.
Now, here’s the thing: not only do I have a great story, but I have a great drinking story, and a story that I can use to bond with people - the sober ones who are merely amused, and the drinkers like myself, who have, in some shape or form, been there, done that.
“What is true art” is a problematic question…much more so than seeking the identification of art itself: in relation to the object, what is it about that object that exalts it above everydayness into its carrying the signature of human intentionality, and thus, the attachment of meaning to its frame. An object can have both intentionality and meaning and still not be art. So let’s take an object that has both intentionality and meaning, and make it beautiful…is it art then? Well, a wall clock can be all of these things, but it is most of the time not art, it’s a craft, though perhaps an artfully made craft. We are now thrown into the relative world of opinion, where there are no rules, only the spherical thoughts and proclamations of well intentioned individuals, both artist and not.
Henceforth, there is something extra that art needs to be art. It is this and only this: power. Art is a discourse, one whose identity is constantly changing due to the machinations of curators, critics, collectors, theoreticians, students, and artists themselves. The reality of art is a consensual reality within which all of these people often passively agree to a collective hallucination. It is inauthentic to say “art is this” or “art is that.” As is any discourse, the discourse of art, and thus its definition, is changing moment to moment.
Power as a concept has been articulated best by Nietzsche, and under his influence, the philosopher Michel Foucault went further. Foucault proposed a model for power by giving us an image: the Panopticon. The Panopticon is a multi-sided prison, shaped much like a hexagon or some such thing. At each side there is a prison cell, and at the top of the building there is a prison tower which cannot be seen by cells at the ground floor. Prisoners inhabit these cells, and they never know whether they are being watched or not. Therefore, there is no need of a guard since the prisoners police their own behavior. Such as it is with discourse…I am a mental patient because of psychiatric discourse. I am an artist because I am shaped by the discourse of art. Under the watchful eyes of those that shape the discourse of art, I respond to art as a discourse and modify my own behavior, whether that means accepting the publicly sanctioned truth of art or rejecting it. Even those that supposedly define the discourse of art are shaped by it; the power of art transcends its discursive legions.
Truth in art lies in power. What art is, what art is “true”, is sanctioned by a schema of arbiters. Curators, critics, and collectors are the gate keepers. They decide whether a work of art is authentic, exciting, and worthy of exposure to a supposedly knowledge hungry public.
However, apart from this, how can we ask what true art is without getting lost in a sea of opinion? The answer is easy, but also harrowing. Foucault was asked once that since he believed that power was inescapable, how can one possibly transcend it? Predictably, he answered that it is impossible to escape power’s influence, but none the less, one must resist for resistance’s sake. It is the same for art I believe. The institution of art martials its power to fix the definition of what is “true” about art, and it is up to those who have been marginalized by it to step up and shake the foundations of said institution, even given the fact that all that they do will simply also be marginalized and incorporated into a new and “truer” art carcass. A professor of mine proclaimed that art school was a prison, thus equating professors with prison guards and students with prisoners. However, next to the prison lay a river, and it was the ever flowing and ever changing meaning of art…life giving and annihilating, as it is a river that can cleave through mountains. Even if all we can do is stare at the water through our prison bars, we can know that freedom exists out there somewhere, and that without our struggle it could never exist at all.
My friend, collaborator, and artist Steven Leyba has been interested in searching out a collective definition as to what art "is" by posing the question to an array of different practitioners. In his film What is Art? Inside the Mind of the Artist as They Speak the Truth, he interviews such legendary figures as David J of Bauhaus, Genesis P'orridge of Throbbing Gristle, and H.R. Giger. Check out the trailer below.
If you're interested, the film can be purchased here on DVD for $15. Steven will also be creating a book on the theme of what constitutes true art, and the above text is my submission to its collection of articles.
Rene Magritte's classic painting states "This is not a pipe." With the inception of semiotics, fine artists from all over the world became obsessed with pointing out the difference between referring to an object in written or verbal language, versus one in three dimensional space, as in installation or sculpture, text about something in a painting, an object in a photograph, etc. What does a painting of a pipe have to do with a real pipe? There's a entire class at the San Francisco Art Institute entitled "Visual Translations" that deals with this topic. Martha Rosler brought the issue into video art with her Semiotics of the Kitchen in 1975. Here it is below for your reference, if at least for a minute:
This is not, however, a bankrupt line of reasoning, but rather a fascinating and even psychedelic discourse that has occupied me throughout my time in art academia, at least in cursory glance to the ideas of Jacques Derridas, but most recently I've become aware of the contributions that the filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini has made to the world of semiotics, at least tangentially via film theory. Pasolini was always a semiotician who was almost thoroughly rebuked by other theorists, his contributions to the field being disregarded at the time of his writing, though in recent times he has had at least some acknowledgement for them outside the field of film theory. I'll priviledge you with a quote from his seminal text Heretical Empiricism:
"Let us consider: in a film a shot of a boy with black curly hair and black laughing eyes, a face covered with acne, a slightly swollen throat, like that of someone hyperthyroidal, and an amusing, festive expression which emanates from his entire being. Does this shot of a film perhaps refer to a social pact made of symbols, which cinema would be if defined by analogy to "langue" (written language)? Yes, it does refer to this social pact, but this social pact, not being symbolic, cannot be distinguished from reality."
This is a very controversial, if not somewhat ambiguous, statement of the nature of the signifier in cinema. If "a pipe" in written language refers to an actual pipe, what does, in cinema, a shot of a pipe refer to? This next quote, also from Heretical Empricism, further illustrates the issue, at least in cinematic terms:
"Let us consider a pure sequence shot: that is, the audiovisual reproduction, taken from a subjective point of view, of a fragment of the infinite succession of things and actions which I could potentially reproduce. Such a pure sequence shot would be constituted by an extraordinarily boring succession of insignificant things and actions. What happens to me and appears before me in five minutes of my life would become, when projected on a screen, something absolutely without interest, completely irrelevant. This does not occur in reality, because my body is living and those five minutes are five minutes of vital soliloquy by reality with itself."
Well, in the 1960s, Structuralist cinema took on just this boring task. While not necessarily sharing Pasolini's exact concerns, Structuralist filmmakers such as the Canadian Michael Snow set out to question the fundamentals of film language, atomizing it down into its components, such as the shot, the dolly, the zoom, etc. Michael Snow's Wavelength consists of a twenty minute zoom across a room into a postcard, of, well, waves (sea waves). During the filming, people enter and exit the room, seemingly unaware of the camera's presence. It is just as Pasolini describes... that a real experience could be reduced to a boring and meaningless cinematic experience. Such experiments did however consequently make viewers more aware of cinematic space versus real space, because they would inevitably get bored and start looking around the theater, looking at the other viewers faces to see how they were reacting to the work, and generally becoming very aware of how different this film was compared to, I don't know, being hypnotized by the Wizard of Oz or something. Here, check out Wavelength for just a minute to see what I mean:
Inevitably, as Pasolini states, we get to the "various conscious ceremonial acts; from the archaic magic ones to those established by the norms of good behavior of contemporary bourgeois culture. And finally, and always imperceptibly, reaching the various symbolic but not sign-dependent languages of humanity: the languages in which man, to express himself, uses his own body, his own form. Religious representations, mimes, dances, theatrical productions belong to THESE TYPES OF REPRESENTATIONAL, LIVING LANGUAGES. And so, too, cinema."
So, the "social pact" of the array of signifiers of a young italian boy's face is "not symbolic," and therefore "cannot be distinguished from reality." They are cinematic signs, not symbols, and therefore they cannot be distinguished from reality, and perhaps can be more real in their realtion to the real than the word "pipe." But, at the same time, cinema is one of the various "symbolic but not sign-dependent languages of humanity." So, which is it? Is it a network of visual signifiers or symbols? A symbol has a message, a history, a metonymic identity. A signifier has an object in reality. Pasolini makes both of these contentions in the same text, and not only that, but within two pages of eachother. His message is therefore ambiguous at best, but it does lead me to reflect on my own opinions. He contends that film has a special relationship to reality because cinema is like "writing on burning paper." You can describe a sequence of actions on a page, but once you decide to film that sequence of actions, you now have to consider that this sequence will now be rendered within time due to the nature of the medium. Written language is to a certain degree fixed, but the cinema can capture something as it unfolds in time. Pasolini therefore extends the notion of the written text to a cinematic text: the text of action, of behavior. This is not even meaningless if you are dealing with a still shot of a pipe, because it may appear to be still, and therefore timeless as in a photograph, but it is not. It is being filmed in the fourth dimension... as the recording of it is being projected, you may be fooled into thinking that nothing is happening, but there indeed is something happening, the pipe is existing in time. Does this have a priveledged relation to reality over, say, a painting of a pipe, or a photograph of one, or a written description of a pipe? All good questions. Clearly, the action of objects or bodies on the screen can exist as texts, as visual signifiers, as symbols. They can be all three at the same time, and more. It's really just a matter of conscious experience in relation to the medium. Pasolini himself in his film Mamma Roma experiments with these different modes. He restages the last supper in the first scene in a wedding feast, unfolds the symbolically Freudian dream of an Italian prostitute (its subject being her son and his father), and mocks up the said Prostitute's son's death visually in the mode of the crucifixion. The following film of mine deals with the "still" in relation to industrial environments, and it will be important for you to watch this, as it contextualizes the rest of this article. Try to watch the whole thing, will you? Chris Marker's Le Jetee, a narrative film made entirely of cinematic stills, was inspirational with respect to this work of mine. It's called The Circle to Vanish:
Why do I even bother with these ideas? Well, it's not a long story, with it's real life duration being about one year, while I've been immersed in my graduate level art studies. Last year I took a class called Style Wars that dealt with different theories of style in general. As a final project, I chose to deal with Industrial Music style. In searching for images for my presentation, I ran across such items as this:
Clearly, Goth and Industrial subculture has opted to appropriate the gas mask as a symbol. It has a rich history: gas warfare and the subsequent societal paranoia of being gassed. Pasolini himself tries to break down the components of cinematic laguage into its respective parts. Not just down to the shot, but down to the objects in a shot, just as one would break down a one sentence description of a real life situation into its component words and even syllables. Want to portray a teacher teaching a class? Obviously, you don't place a college professor in front of a firing range. Well, you could. It would be an unorthodox college course, but you could. Anyway, you put him in a lecture hall in front of a blackboard. The objects of the shot are its signifiers, and so too, symbols, and their network constitutes Pasolini's "social pact." A real life situation is described and given meaning. The social pact of a goth girl wearing a gas mask cashes in on the gas mask's social history as symbol and signifier. The social pact of the below picture elicits a different meaning:
Pretty trippy, huh? Dogs in gas masks, a soldier at ready in his. The gas mask in this shot is not just signifier, but it is history being made, and its placement within the matrix of the photograph constitutes a different world. You can place the object in different contexts and exploit its history, make it mean different things, and not just describe an objective situation. The punks did this with fashion in the 1970s. Safety pins were no longer used for sewing, and bondage gear was no longer used for sexual sadism. These things were worn in absurd relation. Bruce Conner did it with found footage, and the Surrealists did it with collage. Negativland would be and is proud.
So, anyway, in my work I usually set out to portray and poeticize abandoned, industrial, and post-apocalyptic environments, as you saw in the previous film. Last semester I was working on it, and I wanted to introduce into to it a unique symbology. A grouping of symbols in a symbolic situation that would serve to enhance the industrial qualities of the images that I was presenting on screen. Industrial in the sense that I was invoking the various themes laid out within say, this early Industrial Records image that really inspired me... the association of the body with an industrial environment, or in the case of the next film I'll show you, the body in relation to an environment symbolizing death:
For me, even if it is not apparent, death was in some way a thematic in The Circle to Vanish. So, industriality, the circularity of life and death, and the introduction of the "play" of symbols within the text of my film. Half asleep some months earlier, I thought to film a friend of mine hula-hooping in the Piedmont, Oakland graveyard wearing a gas mask. So, we shot the thing, and incidentally she decided to wear a school-girl outfit for it too. Well, the footage didn't fit with the film of mine that I just showed you. I showed the hula-hooping footage to one professor, who said it was campy and useless. Then months later, I showed it to another, and he said it was just flat out absurd. Still, I wanted to use it. A friend of mine had the idea to maybe de-campify it by cutting it together with more serious footage. Well, in my dedication to using the material, that's what I did. What is a gas mask's purpose? To protect a soldier or citizen from poison gas during warfare or the conditions of a war. So, working with found footage, I sought to ground or stabilize the image of the gas mask with found footage that explored its history as both symbol and signifier, and thus the history of gas warfare. After cutting the film together, I showed it to the second professor again. The effect was entirely different. He was moved by the hula-hooping, gas mask wearing school girl. The graveyard setting, made relevant by its relation to the death imbued footage of two world wars, ceased to be simply a cliche'd student filming location. The footage worked. So, Pasolini, gas masks, Magritte, et al. In the past few weeks, all of these seemingly unrelated things sort of came together for me. I was looking for a way to present yet another film and theoretical text on this blog, so here you have it. I apologize if it isn't phD quality, if I've misused and misquoted the theoreticians in the article, misunderstood their ideas, and if my logic is utterly illogical and if it is overwhelmed by holes. Well, I try, I really do. Feel free to contact me with your condemnations. Anyway, you want to see the film, right? It's entitled The Eternal Recurrence. I named it that after the philosophical concept of the same name introduced by Nietzsche. It was his own version of reincarnation in a sense. When we die, we become again, and we live the same life that we lived before, if not exactly the same. For him also, warfare has always had a forming relation on culture. I thought that war in general seems to have a circularity to it, and a certain absurdity. Hence, the hula-hoop. So, not to delay things any further, the film...
Greetings from the abyss. My name is Charles Chadwick. I am an experimental filmmaker and graduate student hailing from San Francisco, California...Treasure Island. The last location is important, as I will explain later in this entry. I have been invited to share with you on this blog the work that I do, and, though I was not explicitly instructed to do so, I will try to contextualize the things that I have made in the world that created them. This is also important, because I believe that all of us are subject to a certain myth: the myth that we are somehow other to our world. We are beings that were born "into" rather than out of the world that we inhabit. We are sinners... but our sin is not that we disobeyed God. It is a sin that is alive and affirmed every day... we believe that we are somehow individuals. We believe that we are "other..." somnambulists who wander through the absurd fiction that is our industrialized life. We have created a world on top of a world. A simulation. We are born...and as children we are unaware of our supposed separation. There is no ontic separation between us and our environment. We are where we are and that is enough... there is no idealized past to return to, and no perfect future to pursue. The moment, our eternity, is enough. There is no death, though not for long. Soon, we are called to look in the mirror... a call that comes not from our parents, but from somewhere fated within... our consciousness achieves an opacity on that phenomenological screen that is a mirror... we are self aware. We exist. We are a body. As we age however, this realization that could have been treated with care: our conscious realization that we constitute a unified awakening from and within a larger phenomenal whole, is divided... we now have a soul. In a body. That is damned to crawl upon the earth....separated from perfection....with its only consolation being that if it behaves, and obeys, then perhaps it will be restored to its "paradise lost" when it is time upon the earth is through. Life is purgatory. That is the fiction. "Be yourself." That is the fiction. There is no "yourself" to try to be. As Sartre would repeat: the being of consciousness is consciousness of being. We are not somehow pilots in charge of fleshly puppets, awkwardly wandering through physical space in Frankensteinian awkwardness. We are. And then, when our bodies die, we aren't. A life is a momentary emergence of a conscious force from the world that dreamed it....and as surreal as its existence was...its avant-garde play of illusions that it belived to be so important was just as any performance: a simulation. A mask upon the way that things really were. It forgot that the play wasn't real. The stage was divested of lights before...
So that's where I find myself. Or rather, that's where I am. I am in the simulation. I'm trying my best to use this brief intermission to describe to you what it is that I try to do: I "create," or rather, disclose distractions. I create distractions for myself, and hopefully for others, to wake myself up from the grand distraction. I am, in fact, engaging in a form of terrorism. Terrorism involves a healthy dose of fatalism: I am aware that my cause, while just in my own mind, is somewhat hopeless. If I am failing to realize who I really am, how could everyone else succeed? All of us are failing. My only hope is that there might be one brief moment, one site of weakness, where I could perhaps detonate a charge of true meaning, and maybe succeed at a process that other artists have failed to complete for the whole of human history: myth. There are millions of people that are myth's devotees... they have become convinced that its stories are real. And there are a not so sizable minority that have not fallen for the spell: myth is a lesson... a means to truth. A vehicle in the search for meaning. I am one of the millions... billions actually... that have been seduced. Sure, I have my moments, but I am, for the most part, asleep. I am standing upon the Leviathan, or rather, I am the Leviathan, and I don't even know it.
So, I weave these distractions in an attempt to wake myself up, and to wake you up. To what? To the fact that you are dying, and that you are surrounded by death. No amount of pretending will change this fact. It is bad faith to believe otherwise. But also a healthy reminder: you are eternal. Not eternal in heaven, but eternal now, and only now. You have as much in common with astral bodies as you do with your next door neighbor. To forget this is to remain as alienated from the world as you now may feel. If I may be presumptuous, I will say that I am one of the good artists. Not that my skill is all that great, nor that I necessarily do good work, but only that my intentions are good. I will deceive you, but only so that I may educate you. There are those artists, if they can indeed be worthy to be called artists, that want to deceive you to make you forget that you are dying. They want to somehow convince you that death isn't part of what it is to be eternal. They are the men that paint the corpses for the funeral, to preserve the illusions of the mourners. For those of you that have visited San Francisco, or for that matter, any modern city, behold what painter Thomas Kinkade would have you believe is the identity of my fair city:
That is Powell street, or what he would have you believe constitutes the authentic spirit of San Francisco. This is actually closer to the truth:
So, in this I can assure you, I am not that kind of artist. I am more like a forensic pathologist. It is my job to find out how things died. The results of my research are neutral... you can do with them what you will. Some people will choose to despair, some people will become more conscious of there own mortality, and thus maybe take it upon themselves to become aware of what it is like to live, and what it is like to die. To get as far away from pretending not to die, and thus pretending that the eternal now is not important.
After writing this, I am tired. It is three in the morning. But as the day ends for me, thus emerges a final metaphor: Treasure Island. Treasure Island is a man-made island that was constructed for the 1939 World's Fair in San Francisco. Beaten down as the country was from the great depression, F.D.R., at the urging of local San Francisco politicians, thought that such a grand display of ingenuity and artistry would bring hope of a better future to the country, and to hopefully show the world that the United States was a country of peace and imbued with a spirit of international cooperation. Treasure Island was Disneyland, or rather, if you've been there, Epcot Center. Here is some old archival footage of the fair:
Ironically enough, following this World War II broke out, and the US became the enemy of many of the countries is idealized as international partners in the Exposition. The federal government decided to re-purpose Treasure Island as a Naval Base. Its grand simulacre were destroyed and remade into mess halls and airplane hangers. It played an integral role in the war, but also an integral role in the cold war. Following WWII, nuclear experimentation was conducted on the island. Scientists would intentionally irradiate aircraft on the island and attempt to find ways in which to decontaminate it (using everything from bleach to citric acid). Eventually however, wars, including cold ones, ended. The Navy decided to abandon Treasure Island. What remained was a surreal wasteland, irradiated and contaminated. Circa 2003, when I first discovered the place, there was a movie theater with a flier still up advertising super8 movies every Saturday night. There was a withered old miniature golf course, a decaying Bowling Alley, and of course, a nuclear waste dump consisting of dumpsters full of radioactive material. I was charmed by Treasure Island. Thus, my decision to live there. Currently, much of its decaying architecture is being bulldozed to make way for yet another redevelopment project: expensive condos for the bourgoisie, shopping centers, etc. Treasure Island, from its inception, has been a site of continual death and rebirth... and obviously, not always for the best.
It is in this spirit that I present to you my film Genetic Reclamation Area. It is my attempt at showing the true Treasure Island; its decayed an ambivalent core. Soon, the corpse will be painted again... the island will become a playground for the pseudo-rich of San Francisco, and the purgatorial wasteland that was the Treasure Island I found will be swept away forever. As I hopefully have explained well, Treasure Island is a fitting lesson that humanity can create for itself, virtually out of nothing, dreams for the best and dreams for the worst. What I was trying to get at with this film was: what was behind the dream? Well, without further distraction, a dream for you that lies behind the dream:
José-Ariel Cuevas
For the most part, I live in the here and now; leaving the past in the past, and the future as something that has yet to materialize. Though at times, all it takes for me to get nostalgic is something as simple (yet monumental) as the opening guitar riff to Nirvana’s “Smells like Teen Spirit”, or the Garfield mug (with its paint faded in peeling) from McDonalds. In this instance, my mind drifted back to what I was doing the other day, which was nothing spectacular (I sat at a bench on the Paseo de San Antonio, across from Philz Coffee, reading Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story for the fifth or twentieth time.)
