Link number one is Google’s latest trick. Google Street View allows you take street level tours of five major American cities. It’s creepy and helpful and mesmerizing and a technological wonder. My only complaint is that there’s no Atlanta. I don’t know how long it will take them to add new cities, but for now I’ll visit the apartments of friends in New York.
Link number two is really two links. In my note to remind about posting this I wrote, “Artist has art down.” followed by the link to a Studio 360 interview with the artist Richard Serra. He makes these incredible, incredibly large, sculptures. His largest works allow you to literally walk around inside them, experiencing the curves and paths and light and sounds of giant pieces of metal. At one point in the excellent piece Serra says of being inside one of the sculptures, “The content and subject matter is your experience, not the depicted object of the representation….This is your experience unmediated in relation to your walking. You don’t have to know anything about anything. You don’t have know anything about sculpture; you don’t have to know anything.” Serra has hit on just what I think is most precious about art. If I were a better writer, this blog would be more about stuff I do than stuff I think and observe. That is to say, if I were a better artist, I could offer you, the reader, more experience than content. Serra has a show at MOMA. I wish I could go, but all I can do is encourage any of you in New York to check it out.
Diligent readers of this blog will know that I am a little obsessed with how memory literally changes your perceptions of your environment. Last week I got locked out of our apartment and I had to call Beki. I looked through my wallet and found the number and code for a calling card that I bought over a year ago. Handling the piece of paper brought back the feeling of being back in Sarasota, working at New College. I dialed the numbers and everything around me shifted. The light seemed different. The feeling of air on my skin felt different. I was experiencing things as though I was in Sarasota, even though I’m on the other side of the country, 7000 feet above sea level, with little to no bodies of water within twenty miles.
I struggle with describing these kinds of events. Once again it’s something were art triumphs over mere description. A good artist could create a work that would allow you to somehow share in the experience. At best I can tell you how to create it yourself. It’s conceptual installation art.
1) Don’t prepare yourself for the experience
2) Stumble upon some kind of artifact from another part of your life. This artifact should be closely tied to an environment. I primarily used my calling card in Sarasota. I remember using it in the strong light of Florida and the crisp air of “Spring” (which, in Florida, is from February to June).
3) Let the change in perception take hold. Don’t try and keep it or think about too much in moment.
4) Focus a little on just where the memory is coming from.
5) Wait for the feeling to wear off, it won’t take long.
I recommend this article by Jonathan Lethem. It’s a funny, serious essay on intellectual and property rights. It also includes a clever works appropriated section at the end. Lethem basically argues for a realistic and reasonable understanding of how creative works are created (he even ventures briefly, but fascinatingly, into the realm of natural sciences). For Lethem, the world is awash in plagiarism, some good and some bad. Nabokov’s masterpiece, Lolita, is no less important once we learn that he might have lifted the story (down to the name of the title character) from some one named Heinz von Lichberg. Lethem, drawing on surrealist ideas of newness, is a proponent of the idea that art must be at least in part a gift culture, not exclusively a commodity culture. He doesn’t advocate the kind of plagiarism that we think of as immoral (“For the moment I’m grateful to be making a living, and so must ask that for a limited time…you please respect my small, treasured usemonopolies”), but he is all for an abandonment of copyright law as it is currently understood. To this end, he’s waived most of the movie rights to his current novel, You Don’t Love Me, Yet (which I’m currently enjoying), and he’s put up a bunch of short stories and song lyrics on his website for use in films and dramatic adaptations and new music.
The idea of intellectual property has fascinated me for a few years; it was one of the things that got me interested in studying law, though I’ve lost sight of that in recent months. I could easily see myself dealing with these kinds of things as a profession. I’m in agreement with much of what Lethem has to say. Without the ability to borrow and be influenced we lose the ability to create. In writing this blog, I’ve often found myself re-appropriating things my friends, family, and TV/Radio/Books/Internet have said. More often than not my sentence is in a different context and often modified to fit my needs, but I’m still taking from others and, in the most negative phrasing, passing it off as my own. Of course, those originators are probably often not the originators either. Lethem would say, and I would agree, that there’s no need to be concerned with these kinds of appropriations and re-appropriations and re-re-appropriations, it’s just the way the world works. The lines between appropriation and theft can be thin, but it seems to often be clear. One could divide the plaigarisms into the important, benign and the malicious. If this true, then in designing and implementing our laws, we ought to be concerned with protecting from the malicious and encouraging the important. I’m no legal expert (yet), but it seems that our laws should be able to serve a proactive purpose and not just a prohibitive one.
I went with Leslie, Dave, Ben, and Mike to see 300 this evening. It was disappointing. That's saying a lot, because I expected to dislike it. I wasn't a fan of Sin City (another film based on a comic by Frank Miller), so I was expecting have similar feelings about 300. I expected to think it was neat looking for the first fifteen to twenty minutes and then have a strong desire to either take a nap or leave. Both films are entirely devoid of any kind of meaning, relying entirely on creating a unique visual experience and lots of “cool” deaths. I'm rarely impressed by “cool” deaths, they just feel pathetic. I'm slightly more swayed in a video game like Prince of Persia, but for the most part I find them dull at best and barbaric and pathetic at worst. I am, however, willing to take a peak at truly good visuals. Both Sing City and 300 are all about the presentation.
Unfortunately the visuals in both films can't hold my attention for very long. I saw everything I needed to see in Sin City after the first scene and the same holds true for 300. My hope with 300 was that I would get to see poetry in motion. Unfortunately this only happened once. They rest of the film was a series of tableaus. Tableaus are great, but what's the point of film if you have are stationary pictures? Why not sell me a really neat PowerPoint presentation? I'll take ballet over this stuff any day.
A few nights ago Beki and I had a conversation about whether or not there was really a place for “escapists” films. I get frustrated by folks saying, “It was just a silly movie and that's all it was trying to be. I don't always want my entertainment to be serious or important.” I certainly understand this sentiment; I've said it myself, and I certainly have a love for mindless films (I'm a huge fan of the The Transporter movies and look forward to seeing Crank). But I'm not sure that we should demand nothing of our escapist films. I think we ought to demand that they not be demeaning and condescending. Beki held up the new Hugh Grant film Music and Lyrics as a good example. One of my favorite bloggers also wrote a post that made a similar argument. I think they're both right on. A film like 300 is nothing more than two hours of harmful stereotypes about what makes “men” “Men” and “women” “Women”, stupid platitudes, and stupid amounts of blood.
I'm all for pretty movies, but let's keep them to twenty minutes if that's they are.
My days at work have been spent reconciling a general ledger account for all of January and February. This means that I get to listen to a lot of radio and audio books. I'm currently listening to Ann Patchett's Bel Canto. I like the book, but the first twenty pages (I'm guessing since I'm listening not reading) are sublime. It's hypnotizing. The narration travels from person to person, but not in Mrs. Dalloway way. The description of a short series of events flows unlike anything else I've read. Next time you're in a library or bookstore pick it up and read the first dozen pages.
Much of the book is about music, and it's some of the finest writing about music I've come across. Here we're dealing with the sublimity of the world's finest soprano. Music plays unifier and pacifier for a group of terrorists and their hostages. I'm always excited to come across great music writing. I guess it's because I'm so affected by music and it plays such an important part of my life. Having some one else describe their experience of art is endlessly fascinating. I often find it difficult to express the impact of music on myself and others. I'm not always sure how worth it it is to describe art (I'm all about the experience, but I'll save you my theories about art for now), but when some one like Patchett does it, I'm all for it.
I'm going to see Pan's Labyrinth tonight. Wish me luck.
