Six of One, Half Dozen of the Other

I was napping earlier this evening when I was woken up by high-pitched strains of Puccini's Madame Butterfly playing on channel 13. I don't know much (i.e. almost anything, except for when my parents took me to see Carmen with them when I was six and I threw a temper tantrum because I was so bored) about opera but watching it in my extremely fuzzy state, I just thought woah the movie version of this with Jeremy Irons is wayyyy better. I'm a phillistine.

It got me to thinking about how ghettoized the different art forms are and how some arts are just irrelevant to most people except their practitioners. Sure poetry seems like the most important thing in the world to me, but that's only because I'm a poet. Then I scoffed and thought yeah, but nothing beats the arch silliness of modern dance but then I thought you're just as likely to meet someone who calls themselves a postmodern poet with a straight face as you are to meet a dancer who calls themselves a postmodern dancer. So maybe it's a toss up between modern dance and modern poetry.

But then, there's opera: opera is an art form that's so colossally expensive to stage that it's existence is bound to the conservative tastes and money of its patrons, so it hasn't really progressed since the 19th century. What's worse? The delusional, solopsistic, self-importance of postmodern art forms or the bourgeoise relic that is opera.

War Averted, People Still Dying

The above picture is from a rally held two weeks ago in Bogota in protest of paramilitary violence during the week when it seemed that Colombia and Venezuela were definitely going to go to war. This was a tacit anti-war, anti-Uribe protest. Since the rally where this picture was taken, four of the rally's organizers have been murdered by paramilitaries.

In a previous post, I briefly explained the on-going Chavez/Uribe conflict. Since I wrote that post, many things have happened: the Colombian military bombed the Ecuador-Colombia border to kill a FARC leader encamped there, Chavez denounced this bombing as a violation of Ecuador's sovereignty, Colombia was on the brink of war with Venzuela and Ecuador, and then all parties retreated from their war-mongering and decided that no one has the resources or the energy to fight a war, at least for now. What was curiously absent from the coverage of the Colombia-Ecuador-Venezuela conflict was any mention of the huge role that paramilitary violence plays in the narco-trafficking/guerilla situation in Colombia, how paramilitarism perpetuates violence and guerilla terrorism. In Colombia, the paramilitary purports to combat the FARC. Paramilitaries are often ex-servicemen from the legit military that act as the government's covert anti-terrorism arm but they have more leeway for violence–they kidnap, torture, and murder the opposition (which includes non-FARC affiliated leftists, journalists, and civilians) without being held accountable because they are not officially connected to the state, only secretly sanctioned and supported by the state. The paramilitary is partially funded and armed by the government (therefore indirectly by the American government) and by various wealthy right wing Colombians.

Paramilitarism is not a uniquely Colombian problem, it's a Latin American problem: paramilitarism arises as a reactionary force against guerilla activity (which tends to be Marxist in flavor). Alberto Fujimori, ex-president of Peru has recently been extradited back to Peru from Japan on charges that he used paramilitary death squads during the 1990's to crush Marxist guerilla groups, the Shining Path and Tupac Amaru. The left in Colombia argues that paramilitary violence is just as bad as guerilla violence, that in fact paramilitaries often mask their crimes as guerilla crimes. In the great morass that constitutes the constant Colombian civil war, the paramilitary has played the role of blurring the boundaries between right wing Catholic ideology, state-sponsored terror, and narco-trafficking by partaking in all three and playing one side against the other. The left in Colombia recognizes that there can be no peace until not only the FARC and narco-trafficking is eradicated but until the paramilitaries are eradicated, yet the Colombian government and the media can barely admit that the paramilitary exists.

Happy Birthday, Hollis!

I didn't actually know it's Hollis Frampton's birthday today–I just happened to look up his wikipedia page and there it was: March 11th, 1936. Fortuitous. In honor, I'm posting Nostalgia (1971), one of my favorite films ever. Hollis Frampton died of cancer in 1984.

(The embedded video above is only a clip from YouTube; for the high quality full version of the film, click on the Nostalgia link, which will take you to UBUWEB.)

Thanks, David Simon, for Ruining My Life

I just finished the last episode of the fourth season of The Wire. If any one wants to have an epic cry with me about the impossibility of justice, the falling short of even the best intentions, the ugliness and sloth of bureaucracies, the mercilessness of the drug trade, and the utter failure of the public school system, please don't hold back.

"Who me I'm in the kitten / business"

Philip Whalen and Aram Saroyan collaborated on this project called "The Children." Saroyan took the pictures while traveling around the world when he was fourteen, not much older than many of his subjects. Whalen wrote the text much later.

This to me, is a perfect example of a successful collaboration between a poet and a photographer, which is an extremely difficult kind of collaboration to pull off in the first place. In a photo/poetry collaboration you always run the risk of the poetry being explained by the photographs, but here the poems impose layers on top of the photographs, they deepen the mystery and whimsy of the pictures. There are pictures taken in Belgrade, in many towns in Italy, and in America. The poems that accompany the American pictures contrast in tone with the poems that accompany the Italy and Belgrade photos; they have the same playfulness, but a political urgency enters their tone and a considerable amount of innocence drops out of the poems:

I keep trying to figure it out
I spent one fortune getting
Dick Nixon elected,
I spent another one on the CIA
I borrowed money from the bank
to support our local police.
What the fuck is the MATTER?
Why don't I get anything
for my money?

Feelings are Facts

On Saturday, I went to P.S. 1 for their Women in Experimental Film event. Films by Carollee Schneeman, Barabara Hammer, Marie Menken, Marjorie Keller, Peggy Ahwesh, Barabara Rubin, and Abigail Child were screened and afterwards there was a panel discussion featuring some of the filmmakers and contributers to the recently released Women's Experimental Cinema.

Most of the featured filmmakers rose out of the overlapping and interlocking American avant-garde of the 60's, the Warhol/Factory scene, the conceptual art movement, and the feminist movement. Some of the films were not my bag, but it was amazing to be able to see more Barbara Hammer and to be exposed for the first time to Marjorie Keller. Because a lot of the stuff that was shown was grounded in 60's experimentalism there was a lot of vagina iconography–Christmas on Earth, a film by Barbara Rubin, the first happening film, involved orgies between painted people set to a soundtrack of the Rolling Stones and Dylan with a close-up of a a labia super-imposed over every shot. While I think the use of this kind of iconography was probably really important for its time, I'm not really sure it transcends its moment. Robin Blaetz, the editor of Women's Experimental Cinema stated in her introduction to the panel that she didn't want to present female filmmakers in the book as engaging in one monolithic practice with a a unified aesthetic, and indeed there was much variety in the kinds of films that were shown. However, if there is an aesthetic that can be called "feminist and avant-garde" in cinema it wouldn't be so much in the aesthetic of the films, but in a certain way of using the camera to examine the world, exemplified to me by Barbara Hammer's and Marjorie Keller's films, an experimentalism grounded in emotional honesty.

I've been totally bowled over by Barabara Hammer films twice now, but because her films are distributed through the Film-maker's Cooperative and mainly screened at film festivals it's hard to catch her work. I saw Resisting Paradise at the New Paltz Feminist Film Festival some years ago, her experimental documentary about Cassis, the French seaside town where many Impressionist painters made their work and where many German later intellectuals took refuge during World War II. The film also chronicles the struggles of French Resistance members. One of the central narratives of Resisting Paradise is that of Walter Benjamin's passage across the Pyrenees from France into Spain, his attempt at escaping the Gestapo and his subsequent suicide. Hammer interviews Lisa Fittko, the woman who lead the ill Benjamin across the mountains and who helped many other Germans to safety. The film stunningly weaves together the lives of many people who fate brought to Cassis with photographs, found footage, contemporary documentary footage, and a technique which involves washes of water color over-layed onto the film. Hammer presents the history of Cassis in an impressionistic manner, through color and stories and music; her mode of story-telling is by nature meandering and ruminatory rather than presenting the totalizing sweep of history. I suspect much of Resisting Paradise was made using an optical printer (a machine whose inner workings I am not entirely familiar with but I do know that it magically turns still photographs into moving image images). Sanctus, screened on Saturday, is a film made using entirely found footage of human and animal x-rays and an optical printer: a body turns in an x-ray machine and you can see that it's a woman when white the outlines of breasts can be seen hanging around the ribcage, a skeleton drinks water and it quickly slides down the esophagus, a skeleton applies lipstick while looking in a compact mirror. The film is all about the color and music and editing; Sanctus is much more of a self-consciously experimental, non-narrative film than the documentary I'd previously seen, but seeing it foregrounded for me how much of a master of color and sound Hammer is.

Marjorie Keller's Herein is an experimental documentary about Keller's on the Lower East Side life after SDS (a group which eventually evolved into the Weather Underground), a loose philosophical editing together of footage she shot in her LES tenement: interviews with her neighbors telling stories about the neighborhood, the day to day movements of the drug addicts and prostitutes who move outside her building, and her own thoughts on what she was reading and what she was interested in at the time (Emma Goldman's autobiography). Herein is very much an essay film and emerges as a powerful document of Keller's own life (she died young at 43).

Neither Here Nor There, but.....

So this is usually not the place I'd tell personal stories, but this incident that happened to me yesterday was so infuriating that I must share.

Yesterday evening, I'm rushing to get to the 68th street subway before the Steinway street Salvation Army closes because I saw some bookshelves which could have possibly been the bookshelves of dreams (they later turned out not to be). I'm crossing Park Avenue with a bunch of other pedestrians when a red light forces us all to stop on an island. There's a guy walking in front of me on his cellphone who was distracted and walking slowly in front of me in a way that permitted me to neither walk ahead of him or fall behind him completely. Anyone accustomed to walking during rush hour will be familiar with this "I will neither shit not get off the pot" attitude on the part of other pedestrians. The guy's a douchey well-dressed white man in his mid-forties. In my rush to get out of his way, I graze his loafers (I was wearing heavy boots at the time, so it must have felt to him like I kicked him). The next thing I know, I'm laying flat on my face in 0ncoming traffic in the middle of Park Avenue. I look up and the guy is running away and the other pedestrians who'd been standing on the island start yelling, "He tripped you! He did it on purpose!" Dazed, I get up, and start chasing the guy down the street screaming WHAT THE FUCK?! YOU FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT! YOU TRIPPED ME, MOTHERFUCKER! The guy turns around and yells, "You kicked me" and keeps running, dodging me by running across 68th just before a bunch of taxis get in the way of me catching him (he did this while continuing to talk on his cell phone). Meanwhile, everyone on 68th has stopped to observe the spectacle and people are yelling at him "You did that on purpose!" and just as the guy is getting away by running back to 68th and Park, another dude starts yelling at the running douche, "You like to pick on girls, buddy?" and then I just gave up and stopped chasing him.

Here we witness the worst of NY humanity and the best of NY humanity: this rich smug fucking coward and the other pedestrians, a punk rock girl working as a dog walker and the random guy who both stuck up for me. Seriously dude, if you're so mad that I "kicked" you, asshole, why don't you say something about it, instead of endangering my life by making me fly into the middle of traffic? And if you're such a big strong man and you're gonna physically punk me out, don't run away! That's the worst fucking part: he ran away.

Censorship Is Real

China and the U.S.