The Pinocchio Theory – Page 70 – "If you fake the funk, your nose will grow."

Undercurrents

Undercurrents: The Hidden Wiring of Modern Music, edited by Rob Young, is a collection of columns that originally appeared in the music magazine The Wire, dealing with the backgrounds and developments of 20th century experimental music. All in all, I found it a useful volume. If some of the essays are little more than lists strung together with anecdotes, they are at least useful lists. And a number of the essays are truly brilliant and thought-provoking (especially those by Erik Davis, on “the esoteric origins of the phonograph,” Marcus Boon, on the history of drones, Peter Shapiro, on turntablism, and the always insightful David Toop, on a number of subjects .
Still, Undercurrents only intimates, without really discussing, the questions in this realm that most interest me. How important will 20th century experimental currents (whether those of the dadaists and futurists in the first half of the century, or those of John Cage in the second) continue to be in the changed technological and socio-political climate of the 21st? (Might not it be time to leave them all behind?) In what ways are technological experiments with sound charting new, ‘posthuman’ ways of being, or at least possibilities of new perceptions, as Kodwo Eshun argues? What relevance, if any, does the old high/low distinction have in this context (or even the distinction between more fringe and more mainstream pop music, when Timbaland is arguably more experimental – in any meaningful sense of that word – than, say Sonic Youth)? And is there any useful way of hooking up the discussion about formal experimentation with discussions about the socio-cultural dimensions of music, e.g. questions of race in the US? (since both these dimensions are unavoidably important).
I seriously mean all these as open questions, ones I haven’t begun to work out for myself.

Undercurrents: The Hidden Wiring of Modern Music, edited by Rob Young, is a collection of columns that originally appeared in the music magazine The Wire, dealing with the backgrounds and developments of 20th century experimental music. All in all, I found it a useful volume. If some of the essays are little more than lists strung together with anecdotes, they are at least useful lists. And a number of the essays are truly brilliant and thought-provoking (especially those by Erik Davis, on “the esoteric origins of the phonograph,” Marcus Boon, on the history of drones, Peter Shapiro, on turntablism, and the always insightful David Toop, on a number of subjects .
Still, Undercurrents only intimates, without really discussing, the questions in this realm that most interest me. How important will 20th century experimental currents (whether those of the dadaists and futurists in the first half of the century, or those of John Cage in the second) continue to be in the changed technological and socio-political climate of the 21st? (Might not it be time to leave them all behind?) In what ways are technological experiments with sound charting new, ‘posthuman’ ways of being, or at least possibilities of new perceptions, as Kodwo Eshun argues? What relevance, if any, does the old high/low distinction have in this context (or even the distinction between more fringe and more mainstream pop music, when Timbaland is arguably more experimental – in any meaningful sense of that word – than, say Sonic Youth)? And is there any useful way of hooking up the discussion about formal experimentation with discussions about the socio-cultural dimensions of music, e.g. questions of race in the US? (since both these dimensions are unavoidably important). And, how do we situate all these musical developments in the context of the larger McLuhanesque changes in sensibility that “electronic culture,” now in digital form, continues to bring us?
I seriously mean all these as open questions, ones I haven’t begun to work out for myself. Recent books and articles by Eshun, by Simon Reynolds, by Jonathan Sterne (from appearances – I haven’t read it yet), and by Alex Weheliye (warning: may not be accessible except through a college library or some other such gateway) have begun to tackle these questions, but there is still a lot of work to do – not to mention, of course, the continuing inventions by musicians themselves.

21 Grams

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s 21 Grams is an indubitably powerful film in both form/style and content, even if I am not entirely sure how much substance there is behind its marvelous sleight-of-hand. Plus, I have to give it points for being the most relentlessly downbeat film to be given a major Hollywood release since at least Magnolia.
The look of the film is quite impressive. It’s shot mostly in closeups or near-closeups with a restless, unable-to-be-still, handheld camera, in grungy and grotty locations, in various varieties of ugly lighting and color schemes. The chronology is thoroughly scrambled, with the scenes arranged in what’s almost a jigsaw puzzle of fragments. And it only becomes clear a good way into the film how the three major characters are related: Jack (Benicio Del Toro), an ex-con who has become a Christian, and who is seriously trying to reform, but who kills a man and his two daughters in a hit-and-run; Cristina (Naomi Watts), the bereft wife and mother as a result of the hit and run; and Paul (Sean Penn), who receives the dead man’s heart in a transplant. The way the lives of these three come together might seem forced if the film unfolded in chronological order; but the tangled temporality is entirely appropriate to, and expressive of, the tangled nature of their relationships. The acting, of course, is great (I prefer Del Toro here to his Oscar-winning performance in Traffic; although Watts is excellent, she doesn’t equal – and couldn’t, given the nature of the part – her amazing performance in Mulholland Drive).
I can’t help feeling, in retrospect, that the film comes off a bit strained and pretentious: by which I mean that what it delivers is not quite up to the measure of its ambitions, which are vast. But moment by moment, 21 Grams is powerful and compelling, and – though I didn’t love it as much as I did Lost in Translation – I still have to say that few English-language films released this year come anywhere near it.

The Tain

China Mieville’s The Tain is a novella, of 70 or so pages, most easily found in Peter Crowther’s anthology, Cities (UK only). It’s an eerie tale, based on Jorge Luis Borges’ fable about the fauna of mirrors. The mirror people, Borges writes, used to be free, but when they invaded our earth they were imprisoned behind their mirrors, and forced by magic to imitate even the least of our gestures. One day, however, Borges continues, the magic will wear off, and the mirror people will escape the mirrors and invade our world…
Mieville’s novella imagines the aftermath of that invasion. It’s partly an uncanny account (reminiscent of a number of last-man science fiction texts) of the horror that ensues for the few human survivors; and partly a poetic meditation on what it might mean to lose resemblance. If we were to lose our reflections, what would become of us? And what would happen to the reflections, when they were no longer constrained to take our own forms upon themselves? On one side, it’s a story of self-alienation; on the other, of an otherness that offers us no common measure by which we could apprehend and describe it. Nonetheless, these two sides do communicate with one another. To say more would spoil the surprises of this beautifully luminous text. (I use the word luminous, even though – or rather precisely because – the tale is awash in strange descriptions of a “hard” light, a light that “was oppressive: it scoured colours of depth”, being without reflections;”no light rebounded, there were no specular highlights”).

Fulltime Killer

Johnny To’s Fulltime Killer is a deliriously operatic gangster movie, about the conflict between two rival hit men. (I mean “operatic” almost literally, since there is opera on the soundtrack during the most insanely deranged action sequences). Though I suppose it could just as well be called a love triangle of sorts, with the female lead (Kelly Lin) as the pivot between the two hitmen: one Chinese, and a flamboyant maniac, played by Andy Lau; the other, Japanese, secretive and reserved, played by Takashi Sorimachi. As these two vie for supremacy, chronology is scrambled, subjectivity is multiplied (as there are at least four first-person voice-over narrators), and the frequent digressions seem to follow a logic of whim and obsession rather than one of narrative (though, surprisingly, everything is pulled together with rigorous coherence by the end, though this coherence includes a Borgesian twist). Language is also tangled, as the film repeatedly switches between Cantonese, Japanese, and English (and, I think, Mandarin as well?). The frequent gunfights are hyper-stylized, but in a far more oblique way than is the case, for instance, in John Woo’s Hong Kong thrillers, which look utterly classical in comparison. That is to say, To’s gunfights are spectacular, but also oddly distanced. The slaughter is so cool and detached that you can’t really identify with the assassins as you do in Woo’s melodramatic, romantic films; nor is it in-your-face, both tongue-in-cheek and over-the-top, calling attention to its own virtuosic excess, in the manner of Tarantino’s Kill Bill. Rather, To creates a cinema of quicksilver, vertiginous displacements, with no stable points of view either in the action sequences or in the overall narrative. Affectively, Fulltime Killer is neither cool and ironic (a la Tarantino) nor hot (a la Woo); I would call it lukewarm, but only if you can imagine a lukewarmness that is a positive quality, pushed to an extreme, rather than signifying not much of anything one way or the other. Fulltime Killer is slippery rather than adhesive, which means that it wears its delirium lightly, making it a thing of gliding surfaces.

Friday Night

Claire Denis’ Friday Night is the story of a one-night stand. It’s a film in which almost nothing happens: a woman meets a man, they spend the night together, she leaves. The actors and characters are middle-aged and non-glamorous; as the film takes place mostly at night, and mostly in close-ups, there’s very little to see. (There are no establishing shots; the camera roves about restlessly, but always within a very constricted space; cuts to new angles tend to emphasize visual configurations that would be striking if only they were able to emerge more clearly from the darkness). There’s also very little dialog, though there is a nearly omnipresent musical score, which varies from techno abstraction to a tone of what is not quite melancholy or longing or excitement, but somehow a sparer analogue of such feelings.
Denis thus stylizes and abstracts things to the extreme, while at the same time she dwells relentlessly, and exclusively, on the banal, the ordinary and the everyday. It’s this (seeming) contradiction that accounts for the power of her films. You have to watch Friday Night with a kind of rapt concentration, if you are to watch it at all; precisely because there is so little to see. Your attention is focused on tiny details, and on emotions and sensations that are barely above the threshold of awareness. And you realize that there is nothing here but these tiny details. Watching the film is almost a kind of spiritual discipline – albeit one that is focused on the body, and not the soul. Bare flesh, mere flesh, is really all there is. A hand grips another hand, or moves down a thigh. A face is enigmatically lost in thought; or is it fantasy? The more we register the intensity of its expression, the less idea we have of what it might mean. Denis pushes to the limit of sexual feeling and desire: not a Bataillean limit of excess (that would more be the case with her previous film, Trouble Every Day, which I wrote about here), but a limit of near anonymity. Friday Night is a passionate film, but not an emotional one – I don’t mean that its passion is cold, but rather that it is so nearly anonymous, so impersonal or pre-personal, so nocturnal. Not the dream of an ultimate orgasm, or a life-shattering experience, but of an event whose singularity is such that it cannot be incorporated into your personality, your identity, your ongoing sense of yourself.

Claire Denis’ Friday Night is the story of a one-night stand. It’s a film in which almost nothing happens: a woman meets a man, they spend the night together, she leaves. The actors and characters are middle-aged and non-glamorous; as the film takes place mostly at night, and mostly in close-ups, there’s very little to see. (There are no establishing shots; the camera roves about restlessly, but always within a very constricted space; cuts to new angles tend to emphasize visual configurations that would be striking if only they were able to emerge more clearly from the darkness). There’s also very little dialog, though there is a nearly omnipresent musical score, which varies from techno abstraction to a tone of what is not quite melancholy or longing or excitement, but somehow a sparer analogue of such feelings.
Denis thus stylizes and abstracts things to the extreme, while at the same time she dwells relentlessly, and exclusively, on the banal, the ordinary and the everyday. It’s this (seeming) contradiction that accounts for the power of her films. You have to watch Friday Night with a kind of rapt concentration, if you are to watch it at all; precisely because there is so little to see. Your attention is focused on tiny details, and on emotions and sensations that are barely above the threshold of awareness. And you realize that there is nothing here but these tiny details. Watching the film is almost a kind of spiritual discipline – albeit one that is focused on the body, and not the soul. Bare flesh, mere flesh, is really all there is. A hand grips another hand, or moves down a thigh. A face is enigmatically lost in thought; or is it fantasy? The more we register the intensity of its expression, the less idea we have of what the person is actually thinking. Denis pushes to the limit of sexual feeling and desire: not a Bataillean limit of excess (that would more be the case with her previous film, Trouble Every Day, which I wrote about here), but a limit of near anonymity. Friday Night is a passionate film, but not an emotional one – I don’t mean that its passion is cold, but rather that it is so nearly anonymous, so impersonal or pre-personal, so nocturnal. Not the dream of an ultimate orgasm, or a life-shattering experience, but of an event that is so singular, and so evanescent, that it has no significance: it cannot be incorporated into your personality, your identity, your ongoing sense of yourself.

Gilbert Simondon

Gilbert Simondon (1926-1987) is another obscure French philosopher championed by Gilles Deleuze. I’ve just finished reading his book L’individu et sa genese physico-biologique. (The Individual and its Physico-biological Individuation; It doesn’t seem to have been translated into English, aside from the Introduction which appeared in Zone 6: Incorporations). And once again, as with other forgotten thinkers recommended by Deleuze, Simondon has proved a revelation, both for his influence upon Deleuze, and for what his own thought suggests.

Louis Riel

Chester Brown’s graphic novel Louis Riel, which he has been working on and publishing in serial form since 1999, is finally done, and published as a single volume. I couldn’t be happier…

Chester Brown’s graphic novel Louis Riel, which he has been working on and publishing in serial form since 1999, is finally done, and published as a single volume. I couldn’t be happier…
Continue reading “Louis Riel”

Literary Darwinism?

In today’s Science section of The New York Times, there’s an article about so-called “Darwinian literary studies,” which purports to find confirmation of evolutionary psychology in works of literature. Female college students were given two passages from Sir Walter Scott, one describing one of Scott’s “dark heroes, rebellious and promiscuous,” and the other describing one of Scott’s “proper heroes, law-abiding and monogamous.” And lo and behold, it turned out that “the women preferred the proper heroes for long-term unions,” but said that the dark heroes “appealed to them most for short-term affairs.”
The psychologist who did this study says that it “demonstrates that the distinction between long-term and short-term mating strategies” postulated by evolutionary psychology “is instinctive.” The reasoning seems to be that only biological “instinct” could explain the response to a two-centuries-old text by women today.
Of course, this is nonsense. Nobody who knows anything about the history of popular culture, or for that matter who has ever gone to the movies or watched TV, will be the least bit surprised that the stereotypes that Scott drew upon, and contributed to, two hundred years ago are still stereotypes today. The cliches and commonplaces that the evolutionary psychologists draw upon when they make their theories are the same ones that Scott drew upon when he wrote his novels. The study proves nothing whatsoever, because it is completely tautological; it is just like Wittgenstein’s witticism about the man who bought several copies of the newspaper in order to assure himself that what it said was true.
Actually, I think that there is a use for Darwinism in literary studies. But it is not this drivel about literature confirming the hoariest cliches about innate instinct and male/female behavior. It is rather what Morse Peckham suggested years ago: that mutation due to “accident, or chance, or randomness” plays a crucial part in cultural innovation, just as it does in biological evolution. So it is “the brain’s capacity to produce random responses” that causes “the indetermination in human behavior of response to any given stimulus”; this indetermination, in turn, is why we have cultural variability and cultural change, and why no society succeeds in totally controlling the behavior of its members. Continual mutation, not a fixed, innate “human nature” is the lesson that literary study can profitably extract from biology.

In today’s Science section of The New York Times, there’s an article about so-called “Darwinian literary studies,” which purports to find confirmation of evolutionary psychology in works of literature. Female college students were given two passages from Sir Walter Scott, one describing one of Scott’s “dark heroes, rebellious and promiscuous,” and the other describing one of Scott’s “proper heroes, law-abiding and monogamous.” And lo and behold, it turned out that “the women preferred the proper heroes for long-term unions,” but said that the dark heroes “appealed to them most for short-term affairs.”
The psychologist who did this study says that it “demonstrates that the distinction between long-term and short-term mating strategies” postulated by evolutionary psychology “is instinctive.” The reasoning seems to be that only biological “instinct” could explain the response to a two-centuries-old text by women today.
Of course, this is nonsense. Nobody who knows anything about the history of popular culture, or for that matter who has ever gone to the movies or watched TV, will be the least bit surprised that the stereotypes that Scott drew upon, and contributed to, two hundred years ago are still stereotypes today. The cliches and commonplaces that the evolutionary psychologists draw upon when they make their theories are the same ones that Scott drew upon when he wrote his novels. The study proves nothing whatsoever, because it is completely tautological; it is just like Wittgenstein’s witticism about the man who bought several copies of the newspaper in order to assure himself that what it said was true.
Actually, I think that there is a use for Darwinism in literary studies. But it is not this drivel about literature confirming the hoariest cliches about innate instinct and male/female behavior. It is rather what Morse Peckham suggested years ago: that mutation due to “accident, or chance, or randomness” plays a crucial part in cultural innovation, just as it does in biological evolution. It is “the brain’s capacity to produce random responses,” Peckham says, that causes “the indetermination in human behavior of response to any given stimulus”; this indetermination, in turn, is why meanings can never be fixed once and for all (as the deconstructionists are always reminding us), why we have cultural variability and cultural change, and why no society succeeds in totally controlling the behavior of its members. Continual mutation, not a fixed, innate “human nature,” is the lesson that literary study can profitably extract from biology. And it is by drawing on these Darwinian lessons about mutation that Peckham anticipated most of what theorists like Derrida and Foucault said, only without the European metaphysical baggage.

Kish Kash

I didn’t immediately fall in love with Basement Jaxx‘ new album Kish Kash the way I did with their previous two albums (Remedy and Rooty). I mean,those were almost perfect pop recaords: taking house and electronic dance in such new directions that they seemed to be entirely original and new, and to fulfill some sort of Platonic ideal of what pop music was supposed to be. But Kish Kash has grown on me with repeated listenings, and now I’m convinced it is as great as anything else Basement Jaxx has done.
I think my delayed response has something to do with the new album’s gigantism: it stretches its songs to almost operatic proportions (not in length but in density — i.e. heavier and more densely orchestrated), so that they aren’t as clean and neatly defined and graceful as the songs on the previous albums were. And I usually find that sort of thing annoying, in pop. But what’s converted me this time is the fact that Basement Jaxx do in fact achieve their ambition: the emotions in these songs are larger than life, which means that they are both intense and also strangely frozen (the same sort of distancing effect one gets in good melodrama). The effect is totally gorgeous, and the album covers a lot of ground in terms of different genres, all of which get reflected, amplified, and put onstage, as it were. Basement Jaxx go beyond the house/dance framework of their previous records to a more extensive sort of funk. Indeed, the music recalls both the ambitions and the stylistics of Prince in the 1980s; and if it doesn’t have the dynamic personality of Prince, it does have the dexterity, virtuosity, and range. And as for the personality: the album, as usual, has great guest performers singing for them, most notably Meshell and Dizzee Rascal and Siouxie Sioux (!) (as well as Lisa Kekaula – I don’t know who she is, but she is fabulous).

The Salt Roads

Nalo Hopkinson‘s new novel, The Salt Roads, is, I think, the best book she has done. Rather than fantastic fiction set in future (Brown Girl in the Ring) or alternative (Midnight Robber) worlds, The Salt Roads is a work of historical fiction, albeit a “magical realist” rather than a naturalistic one. It weaves together the stories of three black women from different places and times, who each has her own inclinations and moods: Mer, a slave on a plantation in 18th century Haiti, who does not live to see liberation; Meritet, slave/prostitute in 4th-century Alexandria, who ends up becoming a kind of saint (claimed by the Christians though not really one of them); and Jeanne Duvall, for many years Charles Baudelaire’s mistress. All three women are inhabited, at one point or another by a spirit, the loa/goddess Ezili (I think – the word “loa” is never actually used in the text), whose free-floating voice and perspective provide a counterpoint to those of the three women. (There are also a few passages written in an omniscient third person).
The Salt Roads is a dense and passionate book, fluctuating between visionary hopes of revolution and a better world, and the grimly pragmatic necessity of negotiating possibilities of resignation at least, and perhaps even flashes of happiness, in oppressive and straightened circumstances. Hopkinson’s work is similar to a number of other recent books by other black women authors (the book jacket blurbs compare her to Toni Morrison and Edwige Danticat); but what’s unique to her is the particular voice that speaks in this book: or perhaps I should say voice(s), because of the way she/it is both one and many; the transversal communication of the three women through Ezili, in a way that doesn’t absorb them into one (they never become aware of one another), but also doesn’t permit them to remain in isolation from one another, is what gives this novel its emotional resonance, as it reminds its readers of what black women have historically had to face (and to a great extent, still do) in a way that is necessarily unfamiliar to white male readers such as myself; but also without giving a simplistic, inspirational message of fortitude and strength in the face of adversity, which is something many white (and a few black as well) readers like to get from black women’s texts.
I’m describing this novel from the outside, I fear, having read it in constant consciousness that it is not addressed to me; but the strength of The Salt Roads, I think, resides precisely in its outsideness, its indirectness, its non-address. This means, among other things, that it cannot be pigeonholed as an exercise in “identity politics” – even as it also (rightly) rejects the way that accusations of “identity politics” are often a cover, and a crass excuse, for ignoring and dismissing the injuries of class, race, and gender altogether.
Nothing’s really resolved in this book, precisely as nothing’s really resolved in the course of history (situations shift, and their problems may be forgotten but are not resolved/redeemed for good). All three women end by finding a sort of happiness, but not one that erases the scars of the past, or changes the conditions that produced all that suffering. What we’re left with, instead, is a series of flashes, or glimpses, of happiness and pain, of beauty and horror, of ecstatic (and not-so-ecstatic) sexuality, and of the small details of everyday life, in 19th century France, 18th century Haiti, 4th century Alexandria and Palestine. This book is a journey, not for the sake of some goal or final resting point, but for the sake of the journey itself.