Ruminatrix
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Friday, May 09, 2003
Having a Google moment
So the other day I'm looking online for more about the artist Noritoshi Hirakawa, who was mentioned here. There's not a whole lot out there about him. One review of his work published in World Art (Melbourne 1996), by the theorist Catherine Lumby, is entitled "Pubic Image". Quite clever, as one of Hirakawa's shows involved photographs of women he met in Tokyo's streets squatting knickerless in public parks and squares.
But I couldn't find the Lumby article, so I Googled
"pubic+image", kinda wondering what rich mix I'd haul in over the transom.
All but three of the first 50-odd results for that search were typos for "public image" (a few about the band PIL, but most not). It doesn't mean anything, but it's not what I would have expected. Maybe this relates to Jim's open question on the way Google will likely change language. Humor is so un-XML-friendly. Or maybe web-searching is so weirdly literal that we'll just see all our typos immortalized like the strange Cambrian forms of the Burgess Shale.
Lapse
I ask J if she can remember the name of the guys who do our vaccuum cleaner's annual service/HEPA filter fix. She too draws a blank, replying: "But if you hadn't asked me, I could have told you." And she would have, too.
Thursday, May 08, 2003
Exterminate All the Brutes
The New York artist Catherine Chalmer's work involves photographing animals eating each other and large prints of cockroaches. In the latest work cockroaches are shown "executed" in a number of ways -- hanged with thread, electrocuted in a tiny wooden chair, burned at the stake. There's a short intro (groan, NYTimes link).
Behind her animal-scene pieces are two opposed impulses: earlier works de-sentimentalized the natural world, showed its inherent eat-and-be-eaten violence; this is about how humans project their fantasies and fears onto species, a project that had its most notable used in the Nazi cinema -- but is also present in American movies (Them, The Fly) or Paul Verhoeven's kinky Riefensthal-inspired Starship Troopers:
In 2001 an Artnews feature about Ms. Chalmers said she was planning some cockroach executions. Irate letters poured in. A few years before that, during a book signing for "Food Chain," which includes pictures of a snake strangling a rat and a mantis chewing off its mate's head, an angry vegetarian came up to Ms. Chalmers and called her a Nazi.Aha, history rears its ugly head! On a personal note, I never saw a cockroach until I moved to America. So while I don't like them exactly, I just don't feel the visceral hatred of them that Chalmers is invoking in this work. Also, thinking about this as a parent reminds me of how much we anthropomorphize animals when talking with children and how the categories into which we divide them -- pets, zoo and farm animals, "food", vermin, etc, inevitably shape our interactions with them.
The upshot, Ms. Chalmers said, was, "I bent over backwards not to hurt anything." With Hollywood movies no one wonders whether people are actually being killed, she noted. But with video, people expect honesty.
That did not stop her from making a video of roaches in a gas chamber. As the video begins, you see the misty gray air inside the chamber. The roaches are dead on their backs. Then a few legs twitch. Soon the air begins to clear. You can see the bricks of the gas chamber and the little pipe through which the gas came in. More and more roach legs and antennae wiggle. The sounds of whispers, giggling and breathing fill the air. Soon the roaches are crawling everywhere. It is the cockroach equivalent of Martin Amis's Holocaust novel, "Time's Arrow," in which time runs backward.
While making this video, Ms. Chalmers said, she got very upset, not because of the Holocaust parallel but because she thought she had actually put the roaches through an agonizing death. Previously she had always knocked her roaches out by chilling them. But Betty Faber, an entomologist, told her to try carbon dioxide. So she put the roaches in the chamber and with a pipe pumped in the gas from dry ice, which is frozen carbon dioxide. The roaches went into "dramatic convulsions," she said. "They tossed themselves all over the place, threw themselves against the walls. Then they all fell on their backs."
She thought: "I can't show this. It's visually too disturbing." But then, as the videotape kept rolling and the dry ice cleared, the cockroaches rose from the dead. Their legs started kicking. "The most beautiful part is their getting up," Ms. Chalmers said. She decided to show the uncut video from this point on. It shows the cockroaches as survivors. "I wanted to show their character," Ms. Chalmers says. "They keep coming back."
You might think that Ms. Chalmers would have been upset because she had, by effectively reversing the gassing process, given her Holocaust a happy ending. Or you might think that she would have worried that she had compared vermin and Jews, which is what the Nazis did. (Her photographs of lynchings bring up the same problem. She seems to be comparing African-Americans and insects.)
Wednesday, May 07, 2003
Hide and Seek
A former high-lelvel intelleguince official told me that American Special Forces units had been set into Iraq in mid-March, before the start of the air and ground war, to investigate sites suspected of being missile or chemical- and biological-weapon storage depots. "They came up with nothing," the official said. "Never found a single Scud."Here are more leaks from disgruntled spooks to Seymour Hersh on the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, which created the Saddam-Qaeda nexus.
Meanwhile, it appears that at least some of the art in Iraq's National Museum was indeed stashed for safe-keeping before the looters broke in. Stuff was looted, maybe a lot, but not everything.
...When U.S. forces -- and journalists -- first visited the museum after days of looting, they saw hundreds of empty display cases. Iraqi antiquities officials called the theft the ``crime of the century,'' and questioned why American troops hadn't moved quicker to safeguard the collection.Lastly, if an American mobile exploitation team's "hunters" do indeed locate a seventh-century Babylonian Talmud said to be in a Baghdad basement, where does the scroll belong? Is it an Iraqi antiquity, and therefore part of of that nation's cultural heritage? Or do we draw the line against the plunder of Iraqi antiquities in some other way? If so, why?
Upon closer inspection, however, American investigators and museum officials found that only 17 cases had been broken into. Thirty-eight items have now been confirmed missing and 22 damaged in the main gallery -- far less than originally feared, Bogdanos said.
But no one knows the status of tens of thousands of antiquities kept at storage sites across the city, or an untold number of smaller, portable items that museum officials removed for safekeeping months before the war.
Museum officials are trying to draw up inventories of these sites, but film negatives and files were destroyed when administrative offices were trashed. The museum used antiquated, unstandardized pen-and-ink records, and some inventories are years out of date.
Despite the frustrations, at least 671 items have been returned to the museum since officials began broadcasting appeals over the coalition's Information Radio.
Hundreds of them were laid out Tuesday on a table in the reading room of the museum library, where officials had separated genuine artifacts from fakes -- many of which were collected by the institution to keep them off the black market.
Tuesday, May 06, 2003
Lilya & Lucia
Saw Lilya 4 Ever after seeing several disparate reviewers praise it highly. It is very powerful, with a go-for-broke performance by Oksana Akinshina in the title role of a Russian teen in a dead-end city (filmed in Tallinn, Estonia). Lilya, left behind by her mother who's chasing the American dream and an aunt who just wants her apartment, first gets involved in prostitution to survive, then is lured to Sweden by traffickers. Not to give too much away, it's a pretty tough story, with feral adults preying on teens. The children of the projects see no future in Russia and believe that "life is elsewhere", across the sea. But if Malmo, the Swedish city in which Lilya becomes trapped, is slightly cleaner than Tallinn, it's no less hellish for being free of weeds and broken windows.
Comparisons to Bresson, Lars Von Trier, Wenders and others have been made, but at the end the film feels somewhat one-dimensional. There's no letup, no love -- only sexual exploitation and violence. More important, no laughter or hope -- only glue-sniffing and vodka binges. Soundtrack: Rammstein meets Tatu. Still, it does make me want to see the director Lukas Moodysson's earler film Together, a comedy about commune-dwellers in seventies Sweden. At least, I think so.
Several women at one of my workplaces recommended Lucia y el Sexo (Sex and Lucia), now out on DVD/video. The title is misleading (Lucia isn't as central a character as Lilya, and although there is quite a bit of carnality (both "real" and in the imaginations of all the characters -- they are Spanish, after all), Lucia is also about story-telling, parenthood, time, chance and destiny, the restorative power of sea. It features circular plotlines, Oedipal moments and a pinch of magical realism -- as in Lilya the dead are a continuing presence to the living.
So Julio Medem's Lucia is as different in temperature from Lilya as the Baltic from the Balearics. Women are their own agents of desire here, unlike in Lilya's world of relentless exploitation. This makes for a much richer movie -- I thought of Kieslowski's Red, of Y Tu Mama Tambien and a wonderful flick from Macedonia Before the Rain. As in the movies of Almodovar -- one of the actors plays the crazy nurse Benigno in Talk to Her -- tragedy and comedy are never far apart. Worth a look.
Monday, May 05, 2003
Cow-Tipping, Anyone?
"We are at the tipping point with spam. But with the bills before us now, I fear we will be on the wrong side of the cow."d
-- David Sorkin, Associate Professor at the John Marshall Law School in Chicago, quoted in NYT story "Finding a Solution to the Secret World of Spam". (05/05/2003)
Got the Gladwell regerence, but what's the cow thing? Inquiring Ruminatrices want to know......
Urformen (1928) and Kunstformen (1899-1904)
Saw these plant plates the other day -- I can't recall where -- and bookmarked'em. Then Cory posted a link. So I wasn't going to. But I changed ny mind, perhaps because there's a kinship with these Haeckel plates -- from which the image at the head of this page comes.
Saturday, May 03, 2003
The letters of the alphabet give birth to man and woman
Francois Bizot's memoir The Gate tells of the author's life as a prisoner of the Khmer Rouge during 1971. Fluent in Khmer and married to a local woman, Bizot was doing ethnographic research on Cambodian Buddhism when he was captured in an ambush and held under suspicion of being a spy. Striking details -- the beauty of the peasant girls who come to spit on the freakishly tall farang, the feeling of the stocks being shut on his ankles in the evening, personal hygiene, his emotional breakdowns -- are interspersed (intertwingled?) with wry observations on the all parties to the conflict. He's arrogant but very lucid:
I could not bear to be taken for an American... Not because of the events in Vietnam; for many of the local peasantry, attached to their traditions and resistant to the new ideologies, the Communist revolution was a disruption of their age-old way of life.But that's nothing compared to his observation of the KR themselves. When a group of prisoners from the Lon Nol army arrive in the camp, one tries to give Bizot a prayer-cloth covered with magical letters and diagrams -- an amulet for his protection. A KR guard takes it away, telling him that such counter-revolutionary materials are being confiscated and remade into underwear "before the material could get bloodstained." Bizot drily notes:
Rather it was the Americans' uncouth methods, their crass ignorance of the milieu in which they had intervened, their clumsy demagogy, their misplaced clear conscience, and that easy-going childlike sincerity that bordered on foolishness. They were total strangers in the area, driven by cliches about Asia worthy of the flimsiest tourist guides, and they behaved accordingly.
[This] shows just how far the KR revolution was willing to go to debase a traditional system of values.To place letters of Buddhist doctrine in contact with regions of the body considered "impure" was an absolute sacrilege, one no peasant would risk commiting. Only town dwellers would be capable of such iconoclastic radicalism.Then Bizot's chief KR interrogator engages him in a series of long conversations...It's a stunning, deeply humane work and beautifully written.
The majority [of the KR] were poorly integrated Sino-Khmer, the sons of shopkeepers or frustrated employees. Having replaced the traditional village structure with the fraternal solidarity of the resistance, motivated by sincere idealism, and appalled by the gap between rich and poor, they had shared an existence outside of the rural world, which they knew nothing about. None of them had ever tended rice fields. The way they roamed through the countryside proved they had no respect for crops, gardens, trees or pathways....
Paradoxically, these city folk, who loathed the plow, the soil, the palm groves and domestic animals, who disliked the open, rustic life of the villagers, idealized the Khmer peasants as a stereotype of perpetual revolution: a model of simplicity, endurance, and patriotism, the standard against which the new man would be measured, liberated from religious taboos. In this contradictory scenario, Buddhism was to be replaced by objectives dear to the Angkar [i.e. the Organization] in order to ensure the triumph of equality and justice. The Khmer theorists had substitiued the Angkar for Dhamma, the personification of Teaching, the Primordial Being at the beginning of the world, whose body, composed of the letters of the alphabet, gave birth to the first man and woman.
Friday, May 02, 2003
Off, Over and Out
A day off, no work, just some domestic chores -- painting some shelves, laundry, throwing out old stuff -- and a walk in the sun. Three film trailers that had been parked in our back yard for close to a month (guys were sometimes moving gear at three a.m. right outside our uncurtained windows) vanished last night, opening up our little space to the sun.
Now it's just sparrows I can hear. It's a beautiful spring afternoon and I'm going to pick up a paycheck. Even knowing that thunder-showers have been forecast for later today can't ruin the calm. Arcadia in the city.
Thursday, May 01, 2003
Let's Make a Deal
This week marks the two-hundredth anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the size of the United States. The LP deal (background to the negotiations here) covered all land from the Mississippi to the Rockies except for the Red River Basin (acquired 1818) and the Texas Territory (annexed 1845). The price: 828,000 square miles for a mere $15 million.
The French were weakened first by defeat of their Navy at the hands of the Royal Navy, then by the uprising of Toussaint L'Ouverture against the sugar planters in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic). Vast fortunes were lost in this revolution, among the planters and the traders of the French Atlantic ports of Nantes, La Rochelle and Bordeaux -- as a child I saw quaint watercolours of the Haiti plantations in La Rochelle's "Museum of the New World."
This bloody war was to grind on until 1804 at a frightful cost on both sides, with tens of thousands dying either in punitive massacres or of yellow fever. Only 7,000 French troops of an army of 60,000 led by Napoleon's brother-in-law General Leclerc survived to surrender in 1804 (Leclerc died of the fever). Among the casualties were 4,000 members of the 5,000-strong volunteer Polish Legion, who must have wondered why the hell they had been to repress the values of Liberte, Fraternite, Egalite in this faraway island.
So France had to sell sooner or later and preferred to get something rather than lose sovereignty altogether, as happened to Spain in 1898. Was the LP more significant than the much cheaper Seward's Folly of 1867 ($7m to Russia for the 598,000 square miles of Alaska)? Sure. For better or worse -- and for the Indian tribes things were about to get irreversibly worse -- without LP the great expansion westward under Andrew Jackson would be unimaginable. We won't see that sort of population influx into Alaska any time soon.
But France also sold because Napoleon, still titular "First Consul" of a quasi-Republic, was planning to invade Britain and to attack other European powers. Although France was at peace in 1803, the future Emperor sold the Louisiana Territory to finance these wars. Despite the defeat at Trafalgar, at first Napoleon was spectacularly successful, defeating Austria (1805) Prussia (1806) and Russia (1807) in turn. Then came the long slow haemorrage of Spain and the catastrophic Russian campaign of 1812.
Military campaigns cost money, wars are very expensive to fight. And the debts which fund them can lead to the fall of empires.
And a happy May Day to one and all...