Into the Vortex…

As I was walking back to my office during lunch, I passed a framing shop with a lot of junk in the window - “sexy” pictures, sports images, that sort of thing - and a four-panel image of a smiling child’s face done a la Warhol, like the image here. Who’d'a thunk it, but it is a popular thing - creating a Warhol image of your favorite photo, like putting your kid’s face on your T-shirt. You can do it here!

What got me going was the dizzying irony of it all. The utterly unbearable weight of all the self-referentiality. Warhol runs The Factory where he makes ‘art’ by churning out prints of ‘found’ images. He ‘ironizes’ art, or so the critics said. Did he care, or did he just have fun made lots of money too? His images become so famous that they are “popular” in the truest sense. Now people, wanting to add creative cachet to their pics dress them up in Warhol’s ’style’ to make them seem cool and artsy. Anyway, it’s so decorative.

Of course, Andy understood decorative - that’s all he cared about. He didn’t give a fig for art, so it’s funny that he is the Artist that so many think of now. Art rejecting art and pretending to be life so that years later life can embrace this antithesis of itself and call it art. Truly, we are in the fun-house of images and culture…

…but has it ever been any different? Isn’t that how visual and literary culture change? It just happens faster now. And there is less barrier between the haute culture and everyday culture. It has always been a dreamscape of images and references.

Dead Again

Oops, they did it again.  Mistakes were made.  Another (black) man riddled with bullets on suspicion of carrying a weapon with which to threaten NYPD officers.  Turns out, he had none.  If I were a black man, I’d be afraid to walk the streets of NYC at night…maybe by day too.  If I had a son, I’d fear for him.

Some say, why was Sean Bell hanging out in such a seedy place, a known thug warren?  Shouldn’t he have known better?  [Do we expect to be killed for our poor decisions in entertainment?]  The police were only doing their job - they feared for their lives.  [We pay, and supposedly train them to behave well in such situations.  They behaved like panicked children, and they had the guns.]  The police weren’t murderers!  [Perhaps not, but they certainly didn't act properly.] 

Alas, many claim that there was no racism involved - after all, two of the officers were black or latino.  The fact is, however, that it is only men of color who find themselves at the wrong end of these occassional mistakes.  Why this is so is the real question.  I would lay the blame on the NYPD itself.  The training it gives its men and women before they go out into the community with lethal weapons at the ready is surely abysmal.  One interviewee I heard, an expert on this, said the training is radically contradictory:  If you feel in danger, shoot, vs. Shoot twice, then stop and check.  Not a clear message to take out into the field.  The fact that these incidents continue to happen now and then indicates to me a deeply entrenched attitude of indifference to the consequences of the bad training, the unintended killing of an innocent man of color now and then.

I imagine the mentality goes something like this:  Hey, it’s a jungle out there.  There are a lot of dangerous criminals, and we’re on the front line fighting them.  Yeah, we make mistakes now and then - we don’t want to, we feel bad, but if you want to fight crime, that’s the price.  If you hold us responsible for our mistakes, you’re on your own.  Cut us some slack…

A rather self-serving point of view.  Certainly not a point of view that will help eliminate the problem.

We Were Slaves in Egypt…

 
   

 

When I was a boy, I loved The Ten Commandments. I must have gone to see it three or four times in the theatre, and it wasn’t because I was transfixed by the holiness and religious import of the Passover story. No, I had a crush on Anne Baxter.

In the film, she plays pharaoh’s sister, Nefertiti, who of course, is also, or will be his wife…but it’s Moses she loves. Visiting his slave quarters where he lives with his devoted wife after he has shirked court and high life, she tries once more to win him back before he’s off on the Exodus. “Oh, Moses, Moses, Moses…!” Can you imagine writing that?  Unfortunately, I didn’t find a still of that scene, she in a stunning silver lame dress and lustrous black hair, enviously surveying the slave hut, a society girl who is risking all for her last chance at true love and happiness and hating the humble slave who has won a place besides Moses. Well, she needn’t be too envious: it’s obvious that Moses loves only his Calling now.

Personally, I think the influence of Art Deco is very clear in this film’s costuming.

 

More Green

Spring is sprung, and I found myself with a big fat DWR (Design within Reach) catalog on my table that asks the question (square of grass front and center on the cover) “What is green?” Looking through the catalogue, I had the feeling that I was participating in an irony so blatant that I wondered if I was missing a secret joke. From the look of the pages, green is MONEY!

DWR has nice stuff, some fascinating, some beautiful, some just a bit weird. Aside from the odd accessory and some very well designed and affordable chairs, the furnishings it showcases are on the expensive side. Some are extremely expensive, and virtually none of it is for the great mass of the consuming public. Ikea, maybe. Walmart, never! So, green in DWR becomes another in the long series of political/cultural ideologies as fashion statement. In this case, the statement of a certain hip, well heeled, highly educated, and eco-sensitive slice of the consuming public.

I don’t mean to knock DWR - they have nice stuff, as I said. It’s not their fault we live in the silly world we do. Hippydom became a fad too. I recall reading an account of the Arts and Craft movement in America that pointed out that in American houses, the ceiling beams were often simply hollow simulacrae rather than hefty oaken supports - image over substance. So it goes…

Green has been on my mind: Soylent Green, and green architecture reviewed in this nice book from Taschen. It starts with a lengthy philosophical survey/rant on the history of architecture from the eco perspective. It’s hard to tell sometimes whether he is advocating or critiquing the more extreme and outlandish views of the apocalyptic fringe of environmentalism, but the book itself is handsomely done - as always with Taschen - and has some fascinating buildings in it.

Being Concrete

I was familiar with the architectural master, Auguste Perret, through my studies in the history of architecture, but I did not have anything like a proper appreciation of him until I read this new book about him. I recalled him as being praised as a pre-cursor of modernism, and the first to exploit reinforced concrete fully as an aesthetic and structural material. Looking through two histories I have on hand, Pioneers of Modern Design by Hitchcock, and A History of Architecture by Kostoff, I see that he is allotted a few paragraphs, there are pictures of his most famous building (church at Raincy) and then on to the triumphs of the modern movement, particularly Le Corbusier, who studied under Perret, revered him, but also criticized him. It seems that there are few books about him in English, which is why this new Phaidon text is so welcome.

In fact, the criticism went both ways because Perret was not a “modernist,” he was a classicist, and a builder in a very traditional sense. He was a craftsman in concrete, and his buildings are exquisite - I would love to live in one of them. (Perhaps being an engineer, I am closer to his mentality?) He was not at all entranced by Corbu and Mies, and those people - that wasn’t architecture in his eyes. Phillip Johnson relates an annecdote about taking Perret to see his very famous Glass House in Connecticut (…just a chimney over which I draped a thin skin of glass and steel frame…) Shheeesh! Not architecture for Perret! PJ asked if Perret would like to go inside and look around. He replied, “What for? I can see everything from out here?” He was similarly abrupt and caustic about other “modernist masterpieces.” Here was a man who knew what he was about!

Looking through the book I was floored by the sheer beauty of his interiors and facades. I had expected to see intriguing and pleasing designs that were “rational” and “modern,” but his are ravishing, i.e., they are detailed, and lovingly designed - ornament is carefully used to great effect, and the entire impression is one of austere, disciplined, voluptuousness - emphasis on the austere. The tension between the sensual beauty and the intellectual purity of the designs - the spiral stairway shown below is a good example - is a marvel. It reminds me of my favorite authors, Flaubert and Calvino, and their Olympian mastery of tone.

Living Green

With the recent death of Charleton Heston, I took myself to the local library to check out the DVD of the last of his dystopian trilogy that I had not seen, Soylent Green. The other two are The Planet of the Apes, and The Omega Man. These movies have been commented on so much by so many fans and detractors that I don’t have much to add - I just wanted to see Soylent becuase I’d heard about it for so long…yes, I knew the secret before I watched. (Oh, yes, for those of you not in on it, the stuff that everyone eats, Soylent Green, it’s made out of dead people. If this surprises you, you haven’t seen or read much sci-fi.)

Heston was a remarkable actor - extremely limited and generally totally unconvincing, I think - but one of kind. Who else could teeter on the edge of camp in total seriousness? This film plods along as a police procedural after making a great start during the opening sequence simply by using a rapid montage of still photographs of life from 1900 to the date of the story, 2040. In a series of images, we watch the environment and civilization going to hell through pollution and overpopulation - there’s even mention of the Greenhouse Effect. E.G. Robinson, in his last role, does add some emotional heft to the story, but for the most part, it’s like a TV movie.

Omega Man, if you can take it, is even worse. The opening scene of Heston tooling around a depopulated LA in a 70’s gas guzzler is a good one, but that’s about the last cinematic plus this film has to offer. You might find the film of interest for its wacky, but also daring treatment of race - Heston has a sexual affair with a big-afro black woman. No question, that was pushing it a bit in the early 70s.

Jesus came to complete the Old Law, so after being Moses, it makes sense that Heston would be Christ too. He dies for his role in the apocalyptic sins of humanity (he developed the bacillus that kills everyone) but as he destroys with science, he saves with his science, and his blood. The final scene shows him being embraced in a pose taken from hundreds of Depositions, after dieing in a cruciform position and having his side pierced by a lance from the deformed zombies he is constantly battling. The saving serum for humanity is made from his blood itself.

Then there is Apes, which in itself, with its sequels, has become a cultural touchstone of sorts. How strange, I think, that the movie reverses the logic of the Pierre Boule original book.  (Boule seems virtually unkown in the Anglophone world, despite his large impact on pop culture in the 60s and 70s.)  In that story, Heston’s character escapes from the Ape planet and returns to Earth. When he steps out onto the tarmac, he is greeted by apes. Sledgehammer irony, but pretty good anyway!

Stranger still to think about the other blockbuster adaptation of a Boule novel, the Bridge on the River Kwai. In that novel, a British commander is so proud of and obsessed with the accomplishments of his men who have been forced to build an important bridge for their Japanese captors - the enemy, in case you weren’t around for WWII - that he kills a British commando sent out to destroy the structure. That dark irony was too much for Hollywood, so in the movie, he realizes his ghastly mistake and sets the charges to destroy the bridge himself just in time.

The Unbearable Pain of Mindfulness

The goal of enlightenment, mindfulness, being-here-now, is much sought after these days…perhaps always. Many associate it with zen or other varieties of Buddhism, and eastern religion. It is, I think, generally discussed as a state that partakes of bliss - certainly a cessation of earthly pain. Odd, then, that it is so hard to attain; that our minds and beings seem to actively frustrate our attainment of the state. Perhaps we don’t want enlightenment?

I am beginning to suspect that mindfulness is so difficult to achieve not only because it is difficult per se, but because we actively flee from it, just as some flee from love that they claim they want. Like love, mindfulness can bring pain, terrific pain?

I am lying on my bed - I have no obligations - I am free to do what I want. I need think of nothing - do nothing. My free time, free to attend to the moment, appreciate the here and now…My mind is racing like a formula one car engine, but not in gear, a high pitch scream - - “What shall I do?” Most times, I would dive into a book, do some chores, clean, watch a movie, kill time surfing the Net, read the paper, but at this moment, I don’t feel drawn to any of that. Just sit and attend, observe yourself observing the universe…and what happens? A high pitched whine as of an engine running at full-tilt without load…will it explode?

To simply spend such times attending to the what-is is so painful, so disorienting, so explosive in its energy, the tendency is to rush to fill the time with something more trivial that will get the mind in gear and discharge its energy safely. Perhaps that is the real difficulty in mindfulness. Not that we cannot stop the incessant chatter of our minds no matter how much we want to, say we want to, but that we do not want to!

The alternative is to be left naked, still, simply sitting and observing the nature of what-is at the moment. The light filtering in from the window. The complexity and simplicity of the tree branches. The calming geometry of my room. The rebus of my history that is the clutter of knick knacks around me. The then and the now…The unfathomable indifference of everything to the trivial thing that is me. The weight of the universe pressing down on a single point on my head where my mind perceives it and comprehends it…without a reciprocating care or concern. It’s too much to bear!! Where is that crossword puzzle!!