| Let me go down in my dreams |
[Nov. 27th, 2009|10:32 pm] |
That last post about Cardboard Village (only a few good songs on that LP BTW) has brought back memories of James Taylor .. he was huge in the early 70s, we went to see him in 1972 in Lexington. I never knew about his heroin use, but listening to him now I'm not surprised. Theres something drifting and gentle yet lost about his style, he seems to be lonely, the sorrow comes through in the music. I think one of the reasons he was so popular was that his music acted as a balm against the Vietnam War, a soothing, reassuring sound, with words of love and friendship. People were hungry for a contrast to the images of war and revolution, they were seeking reassurance and soothing art. So the whole laid-back California early 70s style was born. Simple songs for the Me Generation. I always liked that slogan "Free to be, you and me", too bad it didn't last.
Checking out of a mental institute at the age of 18, James Taylor went first to New York where he busked in the park for change and got hooked on junk. Like some lost character from Milos Forman's under-rated film, Taking Off, (and the connection is there actually with an appearance by the young Carly Simon) Taylor could have easily become a drug casualty like many at that time. But his was a fate too strong to be waylayed by the black rider of death, and drifting to London, he drifted right into Apple Records and Paul McCartney who saw the genius of the 20-year old Taylor. His brother Livingston, in an interview on youtube, says that James couldn't have been anything else, it was either stardom or disaster, and even then I think he probably had a rough road, despite all the perks and Laurel Canyon hideaways. He built his own house on Martha's Vineyard, apparently, which I suppose attests as much to his need to be alone as it does to his self sufficiency. Watching him on youtube, one gets the feeling he's a rather cagey guy, hiding behind the touchy-feely emotive style of his songs. But regardless of who he is as a person, those first few records were amazing. As he says they were mostly written from a pure space before he was discovered and songwriting became a job for him with all the pressures to keep writing hits. James Taylor was part of the soundtrack of my childhood, it recalls that lost time for me. We cant go back again, and living far away in space and in time as I do, well to all my old friends, "I always thought that I'd see you again ...."
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| prague streetview etc |
[Nov. 24th, 2009|02:24 pm] |
So take a cyberwalk in Prague, we've been digitalized, a lovely contrast of alcoholic druggie weirdos and fat old ladies with bitter faces wandering dark cobblestone streets past decaying art nouveau facades
Here is my ideal studio, the tall arched window at the top of Hybernska 28 .. the building is deserted which is odd for the center, probably caught in some legal dispute. Court cases can drag on for years here apparently. But I have seen a light upstairs, so someone is up there, lucky bastards.
Also you'll notice the old Kozene zbozi (Fur goods) shop sign nearby .. a classic of early 60's shop lettering ...
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Listening to Cardboard Village on my way to work this morning, obscure psych folk classic ... "what have they done to the land?"
and also the Megasoid remix of Dead Prez .. it was an invigorating contrast at 7:45 in the AM .. those Dead Prez guys are in your face, not sure what I make of the message, but the rhythms are , how do they say, dope
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1971 Ole Miss campus promotional from UM Media Documentary Projects on Vimeo.
The Cardboard Village early 70s vibe fits perfectly with the old promo film from Ole Miss my Dad told me about. He appears very briefly playing the upright bass at the 10:22 mark. My Dad was 30 in 1971. |
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| everyone is an artist |
[Nov. 20th, 2009|10:04 pm] |
Beautiful documentary from 1987 on Beuys from his childhood in Kleve, through his experiences in the war, to his student days and long depression, through to his dramatic rise as a shamanic provocateur and ecological activist. There are many high points: Queen Bee sculptures, Eurasia, Show Your Wound, I like America, etc ... he radiates spirit and charisma. Very much a man of his times, yet also reaching across time, Beuys dared to reconnect with primal Germanic tribal currents and tried to reclaim psychic territory the Nazis had poisoned through symbolic use. These issues are still raw today.
In a way the fine arts have floundered since the mid-80s with the deaths of Warhol and Beuys, discounting a number of minor names (Koons, Baselitz, etc), it can be said that Beuys and Warhol, while quite different, yet sharing a similar wounded charisma, were the last giants. A great problem is the stress on the individual, a pluralism of competing celebrities, each one trying to overturn a new rock, yet all bent over in the stream, as it were, not creating schools. In addition the media saturation has changed the relationship to art, we have became jaded, the mass public has turned away from the glass bead game of the curators and galleries. Everything moves too quickly, and the hunger for young blood overemphasizes the themes of youth: fashion and melancholy.
I'd say this quote from Beuys sums up our sickness and malaise, yet in his typically grand romantic style:
"In our age of materialism the elements of mystery and soul are destroyed along with the longing for our inner god. That's why I embarked on this anthropological concept to try to make people aware that they are the highest form of life and the embodiment of soul."
Yet we are not aware, we let the material world crush us and live like slaves tied to a system of wealth production. If we could live in a free society where Beuy's maxim "everyone is an artist" could be realized, how different our lives would be ... these concepts of radical freedom are threatening, and Beuys saw the self as divided, with the Berlin Wall as an embodiment of our divided souls.
The Wall came down twenty years ago, but we are still divided. |
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| jugendstil reflections |
[Nov. 17th, 2009|10:57 pm] |
I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.
I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
I've been circling for thousands of years
and I still don't know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?
--- Rainer Maria Rilke
I was talking with my friend Ken the other night about how well we can know ourselves. Ken is more grounded than I am, things seem more simple for him. I am more troubled, I feel that we can never know ourselves. Life remains a mystery for me, cruel and meaningless at times, yet with moments of flashing beauty.
I'm reading a biography of Rilke. He truly lived his life in widening circles, like an expanding ripple. Wise beyond his years, ever striving, a solitary man who fell in love again and again, yet ran from the ties of relationships. "Art is the road to fulfillment for the individual, for the solitary .. (it) goes from the lonely to the lonely, in a vaulting arch high above the people."
 After two trips to Russia, at the age of 24, Rilke came to the artist colony of Worpswede outside Bremen on the invitation of Heinrich Vogeler, pictured here, the jugendstil illustrator, architect and designer, somewhat in the mold of William Morris. He spent hours in conversation there with Paula Becker and Clara Westhoff and his heart trembled with the love of nature and the delicate beauty of the land. Long talks on Cezanne and the nature of art, etc. Paula was taken and so he chose Clara. Yet it wouldn't last long, for soon he was off to Paris to work for Auguste Rodin. He was always dashing off somewhere, finding lodging in chateaus, rich benefactors, a grant from Wittgenstein, etc ...
The question of the role of art was the great debate of the time, for the people, as Vogeler believed, having gravitated to the theories of Proudhon .. yet after emigrating to the USSR he died in exile in Kazakhstan, losing his way in the dreams of a socialist realism. Or rather is art only a spark of joy for the "enlightened", the lonely souls communicating through the page one to the other, arching over the people, plebian below, as Rilke believed.
So many movements have come and gone, like art nouveau/jugendstil/secession crushed on the anvil of war and progress. The faded nouveau facades of apartment blocks hark back to those golden days, the days of dreams for a new century. Spring (freuhling) and Birth were common metaphors. And what of our own time, a mere hundred years on? We no longer live in a contemplative era, the poetic has been left to despair, and the hopes of an integration of art with culture, of an integrated architecture with daily life, of an arts and crafts movement .. it all seems so quaint and hopeful, yet impossible in the face of global capital and its flux of crises. But I think the question at its base remains the same: What is life for? And how should society and the flows of capital be structured? I would hope we could look again to the seasons, to the life of the flowers, to find a longing for something more, a common purpose, a desire for the good. It should be simple. |
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| misty morning |
[Nov. 14th, 2009|01:59 pm] |
I went for a walk this morning with Domik on Vitkov Hill near our apartment. That crazy tower there is the retrofuture TV tower which looms over Žižkov. One of those wonderful foggy mornings .. one of the nice things about the Czech Republic is that the seasons are pretty well-defined. So I am enjoying Autumn. The Liberty Monument to the Unknown Soldier on top of the hill with the massive equestrian statue of Jan Žižka has recently been renovated. There are lovely mosaics inside by Švabinsky dedicated to the Czech Legions from WWI. The soldiers in Russia wandered all over and found themselves stuck in Vladivostok .. its a pretty interesting story.
But most Russian connections are airbrushed out these days, and sadly, in my opinion, they decided to remove the old socialist sculptures behind the monument. There are some photos on this flickr page .. I understand on a certain level why all hammers/sickles need to be removed, but I find it a bit revisionist. Another example is the old marble mural at Anděl which was a grand depiction of Czech/Russian brotherhood, haha, torn apart to make room for an Albert grocery store. I'm not surprised they got rid of it, but I liked it.
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| Halloween walk |
[Nov. 4th, 2009|09:23 pm] |
We went out walking last Saturday and met these friendly witches near the town of Srni in the Šumava forest. Seems that the local hotel? was putting on a halloween walk for kids. Dominik was already spooked by the atmosphere of the dark woods and when we saw the witches he held on pretty bravely. But the skeleton and ghost around the corner was too much and he was crying for quite a while. He finally settled down once back inside the car. Lightweight city kid I guess.
( more photos below the cut )
Life is so strange
Meanwhile forever away on the plane of memory and cyberspace, a comment over on facebook triggered memories of Missing Persons. I always liked this band, the shattered mirror in the video, putting together the pieces of a puzzle. And their other hit, Words: Do you hear me, do you care? ...
Watching Missing Persons led to investigating Lady Gaga... the music is forgettable, but the style is very visual, reminded me somehow of Matthew Barney. Funny how she projects this sense of celebrity and cult-like star status to the point that it comes true. Make the dream real. It takes power and a lot of luck to do that. Admittedly she's just a pastiche of a lot of older tropes, but kids today have no idea and she is selling the same old dream of sex once again, yet now it's almost post sexual .. kill your boyfriend and get another, its all just a "love game", materialist to the core .. sad isn't it, the way we became objects
Missing Persons was more original, that early 80s energy of punk still lingering, like in Liquid Sky, for example |
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| The Christ of Abu Ghraib |
[Oct. 24th, 2009|11:07 pm] |
http://www.counterpunch.org/davis06192004.html
http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2009/07/christianity-will-be-victorious-but-only-in-defeat
I'm finishing my book on Girard. As I've read somewhere online Girard is a theologian disguised as a post-modern cultural critic. But as the writer, Chris Fleming, points out, modernism is itself an extension of Christian values, hidden in a secular cloak. Girard seems to agree with Kierkegaard that "the official prevailing proclamation of Christianity is a conspiracy against the Bible." The argument akin to PKD's is touched on: that from 380AD when Christianity is united with the vision of the Roman Empire, the whole pacifist message of Christ becomes perverted. To look at the images from Abu Ghraib is to know that a terrible sickness has come to occupy our minds .. its like a fog that covers over the truth, this media sphere of charged images, a sexuality turned against itself, a thirst for violence that implicates the audience. The Davis article I linked to above is quite insightful on this point.
Yet I read Girard is a friend of the neocons behind Facebook, and it does seem that there is a conservative bent to his message. (One wonders how the people behind faceboook see the world .. what is there goal? Data-mining? And to what end?) Fleming assures the reader that Girard is not longing for a Hobbesian absolutist state. He quotes Girard, "From the moment cultural forms start to dissolve, any attempt to reconstitute them artificially can only result in the most appalling tyranny." Nevertheless I have to wonder at the reasons he emphasizes in the interview linked to above the conflict between Christianity and Islam. Why does he draw a line in the sand? I would think he could see clearly the way Muslims are being scapegoated today. The military industrial complex needs an enemy. Our program is not one of peace.
As to the horrors of the apocalypse, Girard states that no one could do it better than the daily newspaper. For if there is a judgement of God, a punishment for mankind, it is simply that He has abandoned us, He has left us to our own devices. And look how well we are doing on our own. |
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| Zizek on Democracy Now .. again |
[Oct. 20th, 2009|11:17 pm] |
"But I see more hope at this moment with you in United States than with Europe. Europe is now, I think, in great decline."
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/10/15/slovenian_philosopher_slavoj_zizek_on_the
"... when things started to move, capitalism always engendered a push toward some kind of democracy. No longer. I claim that what is now emerging in the Far East started—it started in Singapore, this kind of so-called, again, authoritarian capitalism. I think something new is emerging: a capitalism even more dynamic —than our own, but which, even in long term, doesn’t need democracy." |
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