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My Christmas Dream (I know I promised these recitations would be sporadic; I lied)
I was working manual labor, with a crew of guys' guys I had to get along with. We walked down a long dirt road to the work site. The bosses fed us a kind of "meat roll" of pork and scrambled eggs with pieces of shrimp hanging out of it--not on plates; you picked it up off the ground and ate it with your hands. The job consisted of leveling a vast patch of slushy ice, which had formed ridges and mounds and had to be smoothed out. Its texture was more like ice cream--it came in supercold, viscous clumps. I had to get down on my knees to push the slush off a big central mound; from my vantage point there, I surveyed the work site. In addition to men, my co-workers included giant oxen covered with ice crystals, and "rock demons"--blond colored featureless humanoids resembling something out of a Jack Kirby comic. I looked up and was shocked to see that the work site sat at the base of an immense tube reaching up hundreds of feet, with walls of smoothly polished wood. Instead of sky overhead, there was a ceiling of loose, dripping ice. I couldn't fathom why it didn't fall on us; it was very ominous.
If you're mulling over a last-minute holiday gift, please consider donating to the Washington Youth Garden, a program associated with the National Arboretum. Someone very close to me knows a lot about the program and says every penny is well spent. [begin rant] I realize our economy is dependent on consumer spending at Christmastime, but when you have influential Republicans such as Grover Norquist saying "My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub,” someone is obviously going to have to take up the slack. My own beliefs on charitable services are that they should be publicly funded, and if private, that the donee receive the gift without being forced to accept Jesus Christ as his or her personal savior (the so-called "faith-based" plan). Churches should just give and not expect zombie-like allegiance from recipients. Why is that so hard? [end rant]
Here are the best two quotes to emerge from media coverage of the Iraq war so far, right up there with "We had to destroy the village in order to save it," from an unnamed and possible fictitious major in the Vietnam era. These are better because they're completely attributable. Please mention them to at least one person today, ideally from the Bush camp, so you can watch her or him sputter.
Quote 1 (from Diane Sawyer's ABC interview with the President):
SAWYER: But stated as a hard fact, that there were weapons of mass destruction, as opposed to the possibility that he could move to acquire those weapons still --
BUSH: So what’s the difference?
Quote 2: "With a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them." --Lt. Col. Nathan Sassaman, quoted in the New York Times.
Lucas makes savvy, witty use of the medium with her disc, exploring a nebulous realm between the camera and the playback turntables, sound and physical space, performance and documentation. The camera is mounted on a DJ's turntable, spinning and rewinding as the artist looks down on it. Her head bobs into the frame from different compass points as if she were moving back and forth from a mixing board or record crates. The spatial orientation isn't entirely certain to the viewer, though; the rotating image makes you think at times that you're being tricked, and that the "ceiling" is actually a wall, with the sight line of the camera aimed towards it from a normal, standing position. Either way, the occasional synchronous rewinding of image and sound (and a kind of intermediate zigzag pattern that is a cartoon of rapid forward and backward movement) suggests that the artist is scratching the video as it is being filmed.
As it turns out, Lucas's visualization of "video on vinyl" exceeds the capabilities of Sengmüller's actual technology. In a live VJ-ing performance on the Vinyl Video website, you can see the VJs adjusting the speeds of various records, fading 2 discs, and moving the needle around to different points on the record but never backwards-scratching the image. In a sense, Lucas has created the ideal dj tool for this technology: VJs could put her disc on the platter and "air scratch" so people think they're manipulating the time-sequence of the piece. Which is kind of a shame, because it would be interesting to see what a VJ would do backward-scratching in real time Lucas's own, prerecorded facsimile: the image would run forward, of course, but the overall potential for spatiotemporal confusion would edge towards the head-exploding. Even without that capability, the smeared content can be sped up, slowed down, and skipped around in, with the space of the piece relative to the viewer becoming even more uncertain.
With the deadpan Lucas as your towheaded starship trooper guide, "Scratch It" simulates a trip down the Ketamine hole in a clubland-style funhouse. Walls spin, time and space refracts, the techno score plinks and howls. DJ Spooky has spoken of "dub architecture," but what he's shown by way of example--writhing 3-D computer graffiti tags floating over shots of building interiors--falls short of the cross-disciplinary cutting and splicing that phrase conjures. Lucas scratches space the way Lee Perry deforms recorded musical performance: instead of echoes and filters, she uses perceptual and conceptual slippages among camera, performer, and background.
Another Lucas project taking place in an ambiguous narrative space is here.
New York City just unveiled the plan for the new Fascism Tower--oh, sorry, Freedom Tower--that will once again disrupt the balance of the lower Manhattan skyline and give terrorists everywhere a goal to destroy. Yay! Just what we needed. Our Republican mayor and governor think the design for the "1776" foot tall building--the World's Tallest, until it's destroyed--is super-grand. The architect, Daniel Libeskind, and the developer, Larry Silverstein, agreed on the height of the building, just not the design and usage of the top 30 (largely ornamental) floors. Somehow we have got to adjust our notion that pride and patriotism always means a monster phallus.
According to press accounts Libeskind "compromised" with Silverstein's architect on the final design (the latter wants bird-slaughtering, supposedly power-generating windmills on the top floors): now, our only hope is that Libeskind plans to pull a Howard Roark and will blow up the building in the dead of night once it's completed (Roark, a character in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, did that after a developer incorrectly completed his design.*) Also, this is all contingent on shyster Larry getting the double payment he is seeking from insurance companies for his claim that two buildings were destroyed on 9/11. He needs 7 billion, not 3.5, to complete the project. C'mon, courts!
UPDATE: NY Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp gets paid the big bucks to write meaningless phrases. Here's the essence of his lead today about the newly unveiled World Trade Center design: "Sir, what you have produced is, if I may say so, a...piece of architecture."
Here's what they'd get if they hired me:
"Pointing its taloned middle finger at the sky, the new design says, 'Fuck you, we need a big building complex downtown and this is what you're going to get.' The most intriguing aspect of the project is that it is both fascist--with menacing sharp angles and a haughty disdain for the scale of the surrounding buildings--and treehugging, with the top floors devoted to power generation by wind. The latter is really just a sop to environmental sentiment, however--besides killing untold numbers of birds, the giant fans will only supply a portion of the building's greedy power suckage."
Times editors: "Tom, what you've written here is a...piece of criticism. Now, get out."
*UPDATE 2/DISCLAIMER: In the movie version of The Fountainhead, no one dies when Roark blows up his own building. He is put on trial for a property crime, makes a stirring speech to the jury about the glories of American individualism, and is acquitted.