Thursday, October 28, 2010

1993 Journal - Part II




April 1, 1993 - Is history only the record of violent struggle? -  poems,  sculptures, paintings, plays, all hold up in spite of war, prosecution, terror, despair. But then they too break. History may be nothing more than a chronology of breaking points, fractures in the earth of mind. Creative ideas, the tough bits that other ideas break over. Our cultural genome, the part that survives - the bits that live on.

How we fill the hours of this day is not part of our human mythos. This it is not history, nor is it taught, so it cannot be culture. Something about that average life must transcend, must either create a line of poetry, out of the wastes of boredom, or create new forms from old, or, react in anger and strike effectively against the status quo to enter the cultural genome. Artist and terrorist are alike finally, though at different poles. So many terrorists are merely those that wished to change the world, and so enter the mythology, and are not remembered as terrorists, but as heroes by some, as history makers by others, and as villains by most.

It is the same with art. There is art, and there is bad art, which is not remembered at all.

When much time has passed, all names dissolve into one or two names, a king, a president, a nation. And then when that is done, and the parade has gone by, those names in turn dissolve and form, a single letter, (cf. Robert Graves).

This is a record of mass dissolving into information. A length of theoretical string will break again and again, but only at its weakest points. Inevitably what remains is a record of tearing apart, of strengths and weakness at each frayed end.

The toss and tumult of politics and intense personal life, is made by coloring, accentuating, forgetting, inflaming, designing, and changing. What changes is ready for change.

A superstring concept of clumping . . .

Mythos, the historical fruit of many minds, lives for generations, compresses all this information, into a single story which pervades every medium. Itself it is a thing without form, though it possesses the ultimate intelligence, meaning, and is hence limitless in detail. A people struggles for generations, and somehow, everything useful that that is learned is put into their mythos, their mythtype. All details may be reconstructed from such tales of enormous power.

There is a way to take any mythos and unlock every detail it contains. It will say everything, but it will make it a story, and it will forget that time existed. So for time-bound creatures as ourselves, these stories will always be mysterious.

I remember those seeds and shells, that we as children were given as a surprise years ago. Placed in water they opened up and released an underwater world of fish, seaweed, and mermaids. The shells were scallops that had been harvested, and the world of fish and mermaids they let loose were cutouts of paper and string. But a child sees this, and finds it real.

A myth is such a seed, dormant in dessication, but in each telling, releases some hidden bit of meaning.

Cottage Street, home, many weeks without Ami and the children, blissfully quiet, but incredibly painful looking for work, not enough money to buy the barest art supplies. This computer has been purchased with credit, a plausible tool to increase our joint earning power, secretly I have it for another agenda.

Many sculpture forms and ideas swimming around inside of me. Incredibly frustrating and painful not having the materials, or tools to express them. I am determined to find a schedule, a job that supports us, and living arrangements where my art is possible, has the space, tools, and materials that it needs. This will be difficult. My art needs my energies focused as never before. I need this personally for my own sanity and mental health.

Tuesday April 20, 1993 - Much to and fro about the company, also a lot of time spent looking for new jobs and job ideas. Spent 3 days in the Boston area training on a new real-time editing system called the AVID, very excited about this. Ami and I trying harder than ever to make long term plans. Slowly, out of all the bits and pieces of my thinking and the company debacle emerges a picture of the world we live in. I am beginning to see things, I'm re-reading old books, nosing about my writing and drawing, feeling the sculpture urge as strongly as ever. The kids are faster growing than April sprouts, plastering the house with their poops, forcing Ami to do four or five laundries a week. The stress of parenthood. My sister Barbie is living with us, and comes out in the morning with giggles about our childrearing headaches.

At home in the evenings I play at designing neural networks (I have yet to put one together that works) but am genuinely fascinated. Some video production houses have responded positively to my resume and a job seems possible. Ami and I talk long hours about the future, whether to move to India or stay in the Northeast.

G___ and M___ came over on Sunday, last week. The day before, they had both told all their friends that M___ was eleven weeks pregnant. Now, as we sat on our living room floor watching “Star Wars”, she stood up suddenly and dashed to the bathroom. Ami went with her, and then came back a short time later to look for a jar. G___ took the jar into the bathroom. The fetus and placenta had come out. Even at eleven weeks they saw the little body, and the bones, and described the placenta as having a cluster of swollen vessels ‘ like an aneurysm’. G___ excused himself and took the jar over to his biology lab to immerse the remnants of their child in some formaldehyde.

When he got back we resumed watching the movie. On one level it had a been a pregnancy that they had only been hopeful about for a short time. On another level, it was a real death, but one that we couldn't really understand in many ways. We all sat there wondering which it was. I was first puzzled why G___ wanted to preserve the remains - but later I thought to honor them - what else does one do? Later, trying to make light of the incident, he said he wanted to dissect it. His softer side was showing.

M___ tried to be strong, but I could see she was near tears the whole day, holding back hysteria, holding back on a pit inside of her, that she was terrified of looking into.

She insisted on driving home.

Saturday April 24, 1993 - Ideas for the structure of a book, talks with Ami, thoughts about media, nationalism, etc.

Monday April 26, 1993 - Daffodils are up, filling the passageway at the back of the building with a heady scent. Yesterday I read through a lot of outdated Vanity Fair magazines, and went through scenting all the samples for the perfume ads.

Some of the new smells are quite daring in their resemblance to different body parts.

On the Floor


Blimey having said that I thought
of Brian Blamey's steel bits,
the Berkeley Square job.
Tungsten carbide, solid metal in line.
Paint factors on the Tottenham Court Road
       bought for 50 quid
Nigel Barnes broadcloth plaid.
not a tweed at all.
Phil turned Bruno’s letter ,
          over to the Sandwich Box lawyers 
In Hackney Wick .
Shashi Kapoor’s secretary
walked back home in the dark.
       Frail little thing.
Jack Barclay drilled through
  the Rolls-Royce dealer's wall.
Paul Bradley, that codger
     hunkered towards her door,
sometime past ten o’clock.
I know, because
    I sprinkled flour on the floor.
Notes of an afternoon hour.

Media Journal Entry

March 23, 1993

A software theory of film - a la McLuhan:

The yolk of one medium is the embryo of another. The metal age allowed electricity to be processed, and in the age of the steam engine it was the telegraph, which made it possible to keep track of many thousands of steam locomotives and their carriages. Alongside the movement of heavy quantities of steel, and passengers, flashed electric information.

Eventually the telegraph metamorphosed into the computer, which today is the machine for managing  a new sort of content, software. The software today is both subject, and new machine both, as discussed above.

The technological processes behind filmmaking enabled the manipulation of many psychological and physiological principles embedded in man's being. Film as it were, became a machine to lead the heart, to inspire passion. Initially, as a means of communication and propaganda, it occasionally took form as art. But the idiom progressed, and the language of psychological manipulation became commonplace, films became predictable in their ability to perform a task and achieve a measurable reaction. (cf. advertising). At this point the film as a thought process, became the machine, operating with the assistance of another older mechanism, film technology.

So what today is the subject of film? Do we answer this by considering all forms that streamed images take, whether over the television, on the growing computer network, or in the cinema theatre?

It is no accident that the heyday of the 35mm film as shown to millions around the world, coincided almost exactly with the changeover from steam locomotive technology to the use of the automobile, and from the telegraph to the telephone.

Whereas the locomotive's 'movements' were managed via the telegraph line beside the track, and thus followed a very centralized, urban central layout, the automobile enabled a broader point to point methods of transportation. Telephone wires aided and abetted a similar form of physical transportation.

Films, achieving their economic zenith immediately prior  to WWII, gave life to the new and emerging form, video and television, over a long and protracted development period which has not ended yet. We may still see films in theaters, just as we occasionally ride trains. The metaphor extends further: a film is viewed by many persons at once whereas a videotape or a television broadcast is consumed in the the privacy of the home. One is centralized, the other localized. One is high resolution shared by many, the other low resolution shared by few. The train carriage carried many persons at once, from urban center to urban center, the auto transports usually a few or a single person point to point each according to his needs.

The telegraph, signaling the late arrival of a particular train, served as the information link for managing the physical unit. A station master knows the whereabouts of all due trains and when they will arrive. An inevitable, and predictable medium, this is what classifies filmmaking as one of the first of many new information technologies. The 5:45 will come through. Film functions by a clock - though it is not interactive. Once a soundtrack has been added, and is viewed in respectful silence by an audience that though gathered in a public space, respects the private reaction to the film with little or no social intercourse before or during the projection. The development from film to television to internet shared films and YouTube all mark a continuation of this development towards privacy and user interaction.

The film is in this sense a visual train. You must board on time, and when the train stops, there are no more images to be seen.

Film scripts may then be seen as software equivalents to the train tracks themselves, as material or content for the simple linear processor, the projector, engine or computer. In fact, present computer design emulates the film medium in many respects, its linearity, one-frame-at-a-time,reversibility, numerical addressing. A reel of film, with all its hypothetical addresses, counted in feet and frames, provides the sound editor with a precise means of locating a desired effect. The medium is a simple program, run in a linear fashion, but the output is not linked with itself. The feedback and branching components are missing. Human beings read films, the same way that trains read tracks. Films do not as yet read other films. Nor do films read human beings. Computer programs do read other computer programs, and are just beginning to read human beings.

It is precisely this linearity, and its limitation, the Von-Neuman bottleneck, that impedes computer advances to this day. Parallelism, long understood by any mechanical engineer who builds locomotives, paper mills, or any machine that employs simultaneously moving parts, has yet to find its exact equivalent in motion pictures or television, or the computer sciences.

We may imagine information technologies then as being at an infantile stage, similar to the axe blade which was capable of one use at a time, and unable to put to work many of the advanced concepts of co-ordination, parallel action, and scheduling, that operate in even the simplest mechanical device with moving parts.

Computers today, though less parallel, than the 'machine' that cranks out the New York Times. Admittedly it is a factory environment, employing thousands of people, but one that is massively parallel. Computers rely for the most part on brute speed, and employ single processors - that is they perform one step at a time.

Computer networks are poised at the edge of an equivalent advance. Many computers, in communication with each other, work simultaneously, and draw their material from common databases. Yet the programming itself, is at present worked out laboriously in simple strings. And the processor sees them in strings, and handles them thus.

If the stuff of all human-created media is "stringing", ie. linking together of processes, and if our endeavor is to produce a 'machine', (remember in this model a thought process is also a 'machine'), which in turn reflects and emulates from our mythos, then we have to be concerned that what is leading the whole circus parade, are our mythologies, which I can show have not changed much in several thousand years. We know our reasoning, and thought to be ultimately parallel - our frustration arises from the fact that all our outputs have been about only one aspect of our natures, a creature that thinks in logical strings, reads in sentences, reasons in sequence.

Machine mind is a program, with an expected result. Rituals on the other hand do not have the expected result, yet, the programming inside of us that makes machines, and thinks like machines, are ritually embedded.

Our only output free of linear process oriented thinking, are our arts, religion, and myth. None of these have a 'result'.

Yet they hover over everything else that we are and do.

Art remains the one realm where we are at a loss to explain the whole 'why'. It is there, reflects our being, the essence of it, and defies us to find a bottom. As the vehicle for religion and myth, it is limitless as our own souls, which yield to become the soul of the universe itself.

So is art the perfect machine? Yes if we accept the criteria of infinite parallel processes. Subject? Ourselves and everything Else. It may even one day lead us to successfully break down that distinction.

As an art, filmmaking must be analyzed in a method that is released from these strictures of linearity. Films exists in a space time, a diegesis, outside that of the metronomic progression of events. The time sequence within a film is something quite outside of real time and even the order of the shots as they are projected. It is therefore apropos to consider the shots in a film as if they were edited in different order. It is indeed correct, and with this in mind, to project a film backwards, and all the shots contained within it in any order at all. Ken Jacobs is a good example of a filmmaker experimenting with this concept. Mythologies may be the only structures that exhibit time reversal invariance, primarily because they are ritually based. Zeus descends / ascends to and from Olympus.

The 'meaning' of a film, its 'freight' as a common carrier, is larger, and independent of the means by which it is rigorously, and most often, exhibited. As a work of art, it bears meanings which stand up to the stresses of being presented out of context. Each piece is important, and can be as powerful as the whole.

Film delights in being broken, into shards.

Art Crush, Twinkle Boy


Our rush to win, to borrow raw,
always wills a way out.
Observe, as we speak of
her money jungle.

Way hot, full-assed, dark
soft cooking white.
All we question, night bird,
uses part childhood sleep.

Try a good society girl, all drunk.
Then he follows a vintage laugh.

Chat, dress nude,
Married, a serious chocolate King
smokes, rolls a masterpiece,
crazy, a little sexual,

She understands free heart.


with N____ K____, March 13, 2007, 62, 63, 64

The Muse Poems:

   1  2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9
10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18
19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27
28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36
37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45
46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54
55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63
64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72
73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81

Then



She's crazy,
have patience,
 . . . so choose,

What deep society is under my storm.

So delight in anger,
how to improve almost
as only can
a king.

I have him at night,
Rosy,
I feel you.

Don't jealous boy
destroy my new feeling.

I have intimacy more,
for your favorite cooking.

Observe,
A mind of spirit and endeavor.

What a girl feels
she gives to your trance

Why would a friend
crush me?


with JF, January 5, 2007, 63, 64, 65

The Muse Poems:

   1  2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9
10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18
19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27
28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36
37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45
46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54
55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63
64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72
73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81

All Motion


I feel your motion start me questioning,
 so let's fly with a glass, stranger.
Tropical, can we?

I'll present psychedelic observations . . .
   some pain, under repressed peace.
Take up a rainbow, with positive kids.

No glorious awesome electric fantasy . . .
Mama's song would pulse soft perfect drugs.
Understand absurd sex,
   Our sound communicates a story.

Try a life-like vintage body,
   face angry despair with raw denial.

Those silhouettes become energy.


with Layna Roberts, January 6, 2007, 
64, 65, 66
photo: J. Feliu

  The Muse Poems:

   1  2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9
10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18
19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27
28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36
37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45
46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54
55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63
64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72
73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81

Butte Chaumont




The trees of Butte Chaumont!
I know their shapes,
their branches, forked,
they took the same turns I took.
We know each other.
and when I first see them again
their needles tremble.

Antoine Gasq makes sculptures
at one-one-eight Rue des Couronnes.
I stopped in to visit him,
his face whitened when he saw me
“It is not possible” he said, in French.

“Mark I was just talking about you,
. . . five minutes ago,
for the first time I think,
. . . in years.”

“Do you recognize this?” he asked, and patted a table covered with figures.
“I think of you every time I put something down”, he said.

Pictures of his children dusty with plaster,
Were tacked above the desk.
Six years ago, before I saw him last
the first was not born.
He is working well
And about to move to a bigger studio
in the suburbs.

He turns to a cabinet and produces some cognac.
Time for a break.
He pours two glasses, on the old table.

"Salut!"

The girls at the Patisserie on Rue de Belleville
are grown up, and probably married.

I recognized them,
They did not recognize me.

I bought a pear tart,
which they wrapped in the same paper
just as their mother wrapped sweets
when they were little and watching
how she did things.

Some things do not change.



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