These art forms must be developed

Stranded in Canton just isn’t about anything but itself.

Stuck inside of Memphis: David A. Ross on William Eggleston’s Stranded in Canton

And now, more than thirty years after Eggleston shot some seventy-five tapes comprising over thirty hours of video, his “experiment” has been edited (with documentarian Robert Gordon) into Stranded in Canton–a seventy-seven-minute compilation of portraits, loosely strung together with a voice-over narrative by the artist himself. These tapes have a fever-dream quality, exposing in barely edited real-time chunks a group of the artist’s friends and family–many of whom are characters one would find hard to believe exist if this weren’t such compelling “reality television.” Oddly enough, seen in the context of contemporary reality TV, Eggleston’s somewhat claustrophobic chronicle of people from his own life may seem to some a bit genteel and dated.

For, unlike Cocksucker Blues, Robert Frank’s anguished 1972 cinema-verite documentation of a Rolling Stones tour, or Frederick Wiseman’s rigorous investigative documentaries, such as Titicut Follies (1967), Stranded in Canton relies on a hypercasual, completely personal, and slow-paced approach. With perhaps the exception of the spontaneous geek performance toward the end of Stranded, Eggleston’s simple, unvarnished, and always personalized camera work lends a different kind of authenticity to this deeply moving artifact.

Carried along in its narrative flow by the artist’s voice and a stream of casual musical performances, Stranded contains songs by an assortment of Eggleston’s friends, including Jerry McGill (now in prison for attempted murder), Jim Dickinson (still making music in Mississippi), blues singer Furry Lewis, and a remarkable harmonica player named Johnny Woods, along with frenzied clips of onstage performances by none other than Jerry Lee Lewis and the King himself.

Even given his inexperience with the intricacies of the new video technology, Eggleston was able to bring a distinctive style to this work. Posing silently, his children and his girlfriend at the time are photographed lovingly, in a style reminiscent of his gentler still photography. Using a low-light-level infrared tube and a high-quality lens (Eggleston souped up the camera himself), he was able to record life in dark bars and dimly lit rooms without rendering his subjects in a ghostly pale imagery.

Listening to and watching the artist’s friends, many of whom are raving drunk or stoned on Quaaludes, is not always pleasant. But the intense realism remains compelling, and as we sense that there is no standard narrative payoff looming, we recognize that Eggleston has found a way to use this crude black-and-white camera and recorder to convey as much, if not more, than the optically precise, carefully rendered moments extracted from the flow of time in his still photographs. It seems that he found, in this experiment with moving imagery and the temporality of video, a way inside the subjects of his portraiture, for it is their individual and collective response to his presence that we are actually reading.

What the fuck, has anything got to do with Vietnam?

I’ve been reading a revised edition Stanley Karnow’s history of the Vietnam War and was reminded of  scene near the end of the Big Lebowski in which the Dude chastises Walter for his rambling “eulogy” at Donny’s funeral.

God damn you Walter! You fuckin’ asshole! Everything’s a fuckin’ travesty with you, man! And what was all that shit about Vietnam? What the fuck, has anything got to do with Vietnam? What the fuck are you talking about?

The revised edition of Karnow’s tome was released in the early 90s—just after the Gulf War— and bears the marks of that period. The Gulf War, the first Gulf War,  was, of course, the war that was supposed to exorcise the ghosts of Vietnam. When he declared victory in Iraq George Bush, the first George Bush, proclaimed that the US had kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all. Not unsurprisingly his declaration of mission accomplished was a tad bit early.

I remember reading a lukewarm review of the Big Lebowski when it was first released in 1998 that noted that the film was, for no apparent reason, set several years previously during the run up to the Gulf War. It occurred to me that the reviewer clearly hadn’t given a whole lot of thought to the movie or what it had to say about the Dude and Walter and the generation of Americans they represented.

The Big Lebowski is very much about the shadow the Vietnam War cast over a generation of Americans and the Gulf War, in its own way, was about the very same thing. So it is only natural that in this shaggy dog story is not only a set up of Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles and the classic detective films of the 40s, but also an homage to those great  revisionist noir films of the seventies—Long Goodbye, Parallax View, Night Moves, Cutter’s Way— that owe so much to  Chandler’s convoluted plot lines. Those later films, like their predecessors from post-World War II America, bore the stamp of the War.

The Kennedy assassination, Watergate, and most of all the Vietnam War provided the backdrop for those great films of the seventies. Those films studiously emulated the fatalism and malaise of classic noir while doubling down on the paranoia. These films follow the logic of a nightmare. As with Chandler, the mystery is revealed less as a result of  good detective work than by mere happenstance.

Seventies noir seems to me to be hyper-aware of itself as genre and even as it studiously follows the rules of noir as delineated in previous movies, it examines its assumptions and repurposes those clichés to its own ends. The best directors—Altman and Penn— know that the audience is as big a fan of those movies as they are. A subtext running underneath all of this was an examination of the archetype of masculinity— the tight lipped, no nonsense American male—as defined in so many Hollywood films of the period. Pick at random, any Humphrey Bogart or John Wayne role.  The idea of castng Elliot Gould as Phillip Marlowe is far better than the film itself.

All of this is in the Big Lebowski. But, like the man says, History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.  By the time we get to Lebowski, the paranoia is all pot-induced.

Rhodesia

I wouldn’t call it nostalgia, but I can’t help but notice how whenever I am reading an old book or magazine my eyes are inevitably drawn to the page wherever I see the acronym U.S.S.R. I do miss these old formations, all the debris of the Cold War—Peking, Mao Tse-Tung, N.A.T.O., S.E.A.T.O., and U.S.A. The style guides have all changed; the punctuation of ellipsis is now thought superfluous. But I sincerely miss all those full stops. You can imagination my excitement whenever I see the word coöperation.

Its fascinating to me how the Cold War, a reality that I assumed would be with me for my entire life, ended so suddenly and vanished so completely that it is now difficult for me to comprehend what it was that had defined my adolescence.  I’m not really talking about the great events of Cold War—Korea, Cuba, Hungary, Berlin. That was my father’s life, events that I knew from old news reports. Black and white news reports, it had happened that long ago. I’m talking about growing up in the shadow of those events, having my life defined by people whose lives were defined by those events. Growing up in the shadow of fear, being told that I should be afraid. That I should be thankful and afraid. I knew Brezhnev, Chernenko, and Andropov, and I wasn’t afraid. Even so, it was surprising, is still surprising, to think that the Soviet Union could vanish just like that. The Evil Empire, gone. Just like that. It’s almost as though they were nothing more than a paper tiger.

The past decade and the language of the “War on Terror” has given me a little perspective on how this game is played. For that, at least, I suppose I should be thankful to Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and company. Wars never really end. New enemies—an Axis of Evil, for example— always emerge enabling the eternal struggle to continue.

Now when I was little I had a passion for maps. I would lose myself in the glories of exploration…though, of course, there were no blank spaces left on the globe, nothing left to be discovered. This was not the age of exploration or colonialism. My discoveries were more academic, a kind of armchair colonialism by which I collected the names of nations, cities, and rivers.

I loved pouring over old maps and comparing the borders of the countries I found them. And Africa was especially interesting because it seemed to be always changing. I knew that there had been a time when the whole of the continent had been swallowed up by a few primary colors which had run over all its borders. But by the time of my childhood, most of Africa had been divvied up into candy-colored pastels—four is all it took.

And I watched this happen with great fascination. I knew nothing of these countries or their cultures. I knew only the names of these nations and their landmarks and the color assigned to them by the geographers, but these too were changing. The first place I noticed disappear was Rhodesia, I think. Suddenly, it was Zimbabwe. I watched my father’s world disappear. Magical names appeared suddenly, a proliferation of Z’s, which seemed to emphasize their exoticism: Zimbabwe, Zaire, Zambia, Mozambique.

90°

Today we took a short trip to Copenhagen which, as is common with short trips, was anything but short. My wife does not know her way around the capital, and our ability to navigate our way home was exasperated by the fact that the streets do not run north/south or east/west nor do they predictably cross one another at right angles.  It doesn’t help that the streets are not clearly marked.

As we drove in circles around Nørrebro, I couldn’t help but notice that while the city itself is not laid out on a grid, practically every other man-made thing in Copenhagen is based on a geometry that is strictly orthogonal.

90º angles are a constant of the human environment. The fundamental shapes we use to organize space (rectangles, squares, cubes and the like) are the natural products of right angles. Whenever we design, arrange, or build we generally work with 90º angles— not necessarily because it’s the best design, but because its the easiest for us to conceptualize and build.

Nørrebro sprang up in the 19th century when Copenhagen expanded beyond the old ramparts. It is a  good place to see the slum tenements that were built to house the working classes created by the industrial revolution. Every building was at its a core a large rectangular block, which in turn consisted of multiple smaller rectangular shapes.  I’m guessing that the roads that laid beyond the Nørrebrogade must have been quite old otherwise they too would manifest the same preference for orthogonal geometry.

Any design that includes two perpendicular lines creates a right angle. And once you introduce a right angle into a design,  you’ve created a problem that is best solved by the addition of more right angles as every right angle is naturally complemented by another right angle. If you agree that straight lines are desirable, orthogonal geometry is the easiest way to ensure that surfaces uniformly lay flat against one another. The most efficient way to organize space within a rectangle is with more rectangles. The funny thing, to me at least, is that this is also aesthetically pleasing. Grids satisfy our sense of order, proportion, and pattern.

Bricks

Copenhagen seems to have been built almost entirely out of brick.  The city was founded in 11th century, which would mean that its birth roughly coincided with the introduction and widespread use of baked red brick  in northern Europe. Denmark—the entire Baltic region, in fact— lacks the natural resources to build using stone and so fired brick was encouraged.

The use of fired brick was furthered by the lack of timber as well.  Several royal decrees issued in the 15th century expressly forbid the building of houses of wood because timber was scarce and what little resources that were available were needed to outfit the royal navy. Many older houses and barns mix half-timber construction with unfired clay or red brick construction. Frequently the half-timber construction in these buildings is flimsy or uses inferior, crooked beams. Wood was so precious that the beams in houses and barns was often salvaged from shipwrecks. Finally, following styles developed in northern Germany, the use of timber was eliminated altogether.

The earliest examples of mud bricks can be found at Çayönü (7200 to 6600 BCE). Nearby Catalhoyuk (6800-5000 BCE) is one of the first examples of urban planning. The city consisted of rectangular mud brick houses that were built immediately adjacent to one another around courtyards.   I gather that the term for this is orthogonal urbanism. All of the houses are built according to the same basic plan. And that plan did not include doorways. Houses were entered from above.

The earliest architecture was surely not built up at right angles. Certainly, nothing was built with four corners before mankind settled down into a sedentary existence.  Yurts, tipis, and the like–all buildings that is designed to be transported– are cylindrical.  And that is to be expected from the materials used to build these structures:  hide, canvas, bark, or cloth draped over a skeleton of wood or bone (Mammoth tusks and whale bone). The materials may be easily rolled up and transported.

Paleolithic and neolithic religious and ceremonial structures (stone circles) and the like are all cylindrical. This is probably because they were based on an tradition of temporary wooden structures.  Look beneath Stonehenge and you’ll find a long history of wooden structures. This tradition continues right up into the bronze age with the burial mounds.

Vernacular architecture aside, the rectangle must of came late to the human environment. Right angles don’t really occur in nature. You’ll find it in some crystals pyrite, flourite halite and the like. But apart from that, are there any other examples in the natural environment.

Acedia

I am now, I think, completely indifferent to my books. And I do not know if this is a good thing. I don’t know that I have risen above my greedy little mind, libido sciendi and all that, so much as I have been overtaken by apathy.

The curiosity that compelled me to acquire books is the very thing, I think, that prevents me from reading and enjoying them.  Well, maybe not curiosity itself but the first cousin of curiosity. It was my curiosity and acquisitiveness that  compelled me to snatch them up. It is my magpie mind and its need for constant stimulation that makes it very difficult for me to care about what I have before me.  Nothing holds my interest very long.

I have found it very difficult to focus on one thing for any extended period and consequently do not enjoy reading at all. I should think that that part of my brain is so atrophied at this point that it is difficult for me to read at all. The facility, the naturalness is gone. Reading is difficult; it is an arduous task. I now catch my mind running off, I wake suddenly and realize that I have skimmed several sentences or paragraphs. It takes a concerted effort on to return to the page and reread that which is in front of me.

“When you do something, you should burn yourself completely, like a good bonfire, leaving no trace of yourself” Shunryu Suzuki

And now I wonder if living in Denmark has revealed something to me that was masked over in California. In these past six months I have purchased next to nothing for myself. Sure I’ve bought some lumber and a few office supplies, but none of the things that it gave me so much pleasure  to acquire in the past– books, hand tools, music. I never realized the extend to which acquiring things was a great part of maintaining my happiness. Well, not so much maintaining happiness as holding my despair momentarily at bay. I bought things reflexively. And I felt better.

But buying things whether they be cars, clothes, books, music, or fine art is merely a kind of pseudo-creativity. Its the easiest way to express oneself, stake out an identity, bond with a tribe, pull rank, dazzle friends with your good taste.

Of course, we do not have the money to throw around on books or tools. But then there is nothing here that I wish to buy. I do miss the used bookstores in San Francisco and Berkeley.  The library here in Roskilde has a lot of books in English.  But for some reason borrowing books doesn’t give me the same frisson. Why is that?

Foreward to the reader

Reading the prefaces, forewords, and introductions to spirituality books always gives my inner anthropologist a chuckle. I’m thinking of mostly of the Shambhala and New Directions paperbacks that were published in the late sixties and early seventies.  Collections of Zen or Sufi wisdom, Thomas Merton essays, stuff like that.

The preface was inevitably always addressed to a “young person” and the author strains to impress upon the reader the relevancy of the book to the modern world. The text that follows, we were assured, is both timely and timeless. By the time I acquired these books in the eighties, the language used in these prefaces was already hopelessly dated.

And that threw me off. I remember the introductions more than I remember the books themselves. But the  introduction is, generally, the first thing I read when I buy a book.  Maybe I couldn’t focus on one thing long enough to give  these books my full attention, or maybe I just never got around to reading them at all.

I do know. Rather, I can now acknowledge that I was more interested in the “history of ideas” than I was ever interested in literature per se. To this day I’d rather read Isaiah Berlin’s introduction to Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons than the novel itself. And I was always much more interested in what the Russian novel  could tell me about people in a particular place and time than I was ever interested in the character of  Bazarov, Olenin, Count Vronsky, or Rashkolnikov.

Great Expectations

Great Novels are known for their great openings– statements (pronouncements even) that grab your attention and pull you into the book. Naturally, the passages that come immediately to mind are the ones that were introduced to me as “great”. I was taught that they were important or memorable. They were introduced as great men that demanded my respect.

Where did I first read or hear the opening line from Anna Karenina?  “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” I certainly knew the quote before I read the book.  Actually, the first time I read the sentence I was surprised to find it there. I thought it was the opening to War and Peace.

A few of these great openings I know without having ever read the great novels to which they belong. Have I ever really read Dickens? I know I bought a copy of Great Expectations in Rome and carried it around with me for that entire summer, but I don’t think I even finished it. I am pretty sure that I took that Penguin paperback with me to Guatemala two years later and left it there.

Also, I knew  “Call Me Ishmael” from Moby Dick long before I ever attempted to read that particular tome.  I am now 0 for 4. And I’ve actually finished The Confidence Man three times.

This  is my favorite great opening. The first couple of sentences  from The Fish Can Sing by Halldór Laxness, the last writer I really cared about.

A wise man once said that next to losing its mother, there is nothing more healthy for a child than to lose its father. And though I would never subscribe to such a statement wholeheartedly, I would be the last person to reject it out of hand.

I think studying literature in college destroyed my interest or enjoyment in reading novels. Critical theory, that was the end.  Bakhtin, Dostoevsky, polyphony. What made Dostoevsky a great writer and a great thinker, is what distinguished him from Tolstoy. Where Dostoevsky channeled the multitude of human voices, Tolstoy gave us a god-like pronouncements.  If I remember correctly, the opening to Anna  Karenina came in for particular criticism. The problem being, Tolstoy’s authorial (or authoritarian) voice. A statement of irrefutable fact that defines the world of the novel.

Like opening of this post– “Great Novels are known for their great openings”  I winced writing it, but couldn’t find a way around it. To me, there is something inherently false about such assertions. False, not because the statement itself is wrong. But because the certainty itself is wrong.

That’s why I think I really like the Laxness quote. It’s quite nuanced.

What would I do if I were not afraid?

It’s a question that begs more questions. Which is, I suppose, the point. The question might just as easily be stated as “What do you really want to do?”  But no. An obstacle is placed in the way.  You do not do what you want to do because you are afraid of something.

So, it is more a statement than a query.

And you are asked to challenge this assertion–who said I was afraid?– or examine your fears. Either way, the problem of fear, which initially seems to be extraneous or at least secondary to the problem  becomes the central problem.

So what about fear?

On natural logic and speech habits

Poor, arid, and, in appearance, deformed

I am not ignorant how hard a thing it is to weed out of men’s minds such inveterate opinions as have taken root there, and been confirmed in them by the authority of most eloquent writers; especially seeing true (that is, accurate) Philosophy professedly rejects not only the paint and false colours of language, but even the very ornaments and graces of the same; and the first grounds of all science are not only not beautiful, but poor, arid, and, in appearance, deformed.

Though I am at a loss for words to explain myself, I don’t believe for a minute that my thoughts are limited or warped by the boundaries of language. And I do not believe that true philosophy and language are antithetical.

The above quote comes from Hobbes, of course– the man who championed Thucydides at the expense of Herodotus. Because, you know, Herodotus made shit up. While Thucydides, like a fly on the wall, faithfully recorded every rhetorical flourish of history’s great men.