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The George Romero zombie picture is alive and well and its name is Black Hawk Down. Ever since Saving Private Ryan, stuff filmmakers couldn't possibly get away with in a wide-release horror film (such as the dangling viscera excised from Scream) has become perfectly acceptable as long as the movie wraps itself in the flag and pays token homage to our Brave Fighting Boys.
Each of Romero's films (Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead) features an intrepid band of survivors fighting off an army of implacable marching ghouls. The gore factor is straight through the ceiling, and the audience gets a lot of vicarious thrills watching the depersonalized zombies get offed in creative ways (Hey, they're already dead, right? So it's OK!). Also, the audience has no idea which of the (barely sympathetic) good guys will buy the farm, either, so tension is at a maximum throughout. Romero's films are resolutely antiestablishment, and the viewer is constantly reminded that things are going to hell because the people who are supposed to be in charge f-ed up.
Well, same with Black Hawk Down! Instead of zombies, it's hordes of "skinnies"--which is what the Rangers and Delta Force guys called the starving Somalians--who just keep coming and coming no matter how many of them are cut down by machine gun fire. Charges of racism have been leveled at the film because the "skinnies" are all black and the American military guys are all white (save one); inconveniently for the forces of political correctness, that's exactly how it was in Mogadishu in '93.* And gore? You bet! A soldier sees a severed hand (with wristwatch) lying in the dust and he picks it up and stuffs it in his flak jacket; an inexperienced medic plunges his hands into a soldier's ripped open lower abdomen, trying to find (and close) a spurting femoral artery.
And for incompetent leadership, it would hard to find a better image than Sam Shephard gnawing impotently on his knuckles back at HQ, watching his boys get wasted on a live video feed (from surveillance helicopters hovering uselessly over the battleground).
Black Hawk Down, an intense kinetic experience that is beautifully filmed and utterly ambiguous politically, was recently screened for Donald Rumsfeld and various military brass. It's being touted as a patriotic film with great relevance to our recent military adventures.** Maybe when Rumsfeld watched it he was thinking: "We didn't let our troops down the way Clinton did in Mogadishu, by God!" But you can't help but wonder if part of him wasn't also asking: "Exactly what does this candy-ass Hollywood Brit pinko Ridley Scott think he's pulling here?"
*Bootleg copies of the film are reportedly drawing big crowds in Mogadishu. According to an AP story, "the young men cheer...whenever an American [i]s hit, but there [i]s no reaction from the audience when a Somali character [goes] down. [Somali] Mohamed Ali Abdi, who had been living at Bar Ubah junction, where the battle took place, says, "The reality of the Somali character is captured in this movie, but there is not a single word of the Somali language, no Somali music, nothing of our culture. This is absurd, but still they reproduced our sandy streets and battered buildings and the crazy way Somalis just kept on fighting." **Or maybe not. For an excellent summary of how the film gets it right and wrong, see this essay.
Yesterday I visited Jack Featherly's studio in Williamsburg, in connection with some catalog writing we're discussing for his upcoming show at Team Gallery in NYC. His new paintings are sophisticated, dumb abstractions on large wood panels. "Dumb" because they're amorphous, solid-color blobs made with One-Shot sign-painter's enamel, blocked in with spectacularly crude, brushy edges (none of that intricate, Mark Rothko over-and-under stuff here--what Featherly brushes is pretty much what you see). "Sophisticated" because the blobs cover an underlayer, also abstract, that is selectively revealed through sharply delineated windows, created with masking-tape stencils. The stencilled shapes have a focus and precision the blobs mostly lack, although the subject matter--amoeboid ovals, looping, mock-calligraphic scribbles, molecular chains of dung-ball "atoms," and the artist's ever-present signature (rendered big, in various typebook fonts)--is ultimately just as dopey.
By combining the quest for pure form characteristic of mid-20th-Century abstraction with a cheeky graphic sensibility reminiscent of downtempo electronica packaging, Featherly manages to be sincere without being either starry-eyed or smarmy. The paintings have all the pleasure of a spontaneous "first draft" without indulging in AbEx pretensions about the meaning of same; they take the viewer into an alternate universe of hazy spectral forms without being in denial about the work's status as a "cultural product," to use the artist's term. An old-school purist like Clyfford Still might be appalled by the disjunction of tones, but as Featherly reminds us, one generation's idea of sincerity is not the same as another's. To admit a painting's connections to a stream of commerce, to "lifestyle," to the surrounding visual world of advertising and design, is generally a more honest declaration of intentions today than claiming it is somehow "apart" from such things.
"Given a choice between protecting American civilians and protecting the client regimes that sponsor and coddle those who murder them, the Bush Administration has taken the second option every time. This seems to me impeachable in the profoundest sense of the term." So says Christopher Hitchens in this week's issue of The Nation, criticizing the catering to the Saudi princes* that occurred before and after the massive intelligence failure that was 9/11. I'm glad that Hitchens is finally waking up to how the Bushites put the interests of their business buddies ahead of the lives of Americans--he actually uses the "I"-word!--after he wasted energy the last couple of months bashing Chomsky, Sontag, et al. Now, if he could just extend his own logic to the War Against Afghanistan (which he supported) and see that it was also a case of Bush "taking the second option..."
Also, as long as we're being unpatriotic, isn't it interesting how Mayor Giuliani's "bold, humane leadership" post-9/11 (I wasn't watching TV, so to me he was the same authoritarian sonofabitch he was before the disaster) took attention away from his huge blunder in building a $15 million Emergency Command post inside the World Trade Center? Person of the Year indeed. He owed the city leadership, after that act of swell-headed hubris put us at risk of having no governance whatsoever.
*Even the Wall Street Journal thinks that "Riyadh is at the root of much evil."
The end of the year is approaching, and with critics everywhere publishing their Top Ten lists, I decided to do a narrative wrap-up of stuff I obsessed about in 2001. Organized into the broad categories of "film & TV," "art," "books," "politics," and "music," these events (or things) didn't necessarily happen (or come into existence) during the past year--in the true solipsistic weblog spirit, the only common thread is that they "happened" to yours truly.
Politics. You would have thought that after the Gulf War, when Mr. Cheney used his newfound contacts with the Saudi sheiks to obtain lucrative business contracts for Halliburton while ailing veterans got the shaft, that we'd be a lot more skeptical about rolling out the American War Machine abroad. All it took was one day of (admittedly cataclysmic) mayhem to turn us back into a country of howling football fans, endorsing whatever dubious and unnecessary plans our unelected leaders proposed. I've been enormously thankful for three websites since 9/11, which served as a kind of reality check against the Official Media Version of things: the left/progressive CounterPunch and Cursor and the libertarian site Antiwar.com. The brave dissenting voices on those pages reassured me that the entire country hadn't gone nuts.
Books. In an earlier post, I mentioned that I bought Jonathan Lethem's post-apocalyptic novel Amnesia Moon at the World Trade Center bookstore a few days before 9/11. Further upping my personal "disaster synchronicity factor" (I warned you this would be solipsistic), I also read three novels by Greg Bear over the summer that had a weirdly prescient bearing (no pun intended) on 9/11 events. Blood Music features a frightening trip up the North Tower of the World Trade Center by a young Brooklyn girl who is the sole survivor of a nation-engulfing plague (the tower itself eventually dissolves into organic goo). In the The Forge of God and its sequel Anvil of Stars, Bear deals with the ultimate terrorist event: the reduction of Earth by hostile ETs to a ring of pulverized rock orbiting the Sun. Forge describes, among other things, the ineffectual response to looming global catastrophe by a Bible-thumper in the White House who essentially loses his marbles, while Anvil explores the morality of revenge, as the few survivors who managed to escape Earth head across the galaxy in search of the planet-killers. Published in 1987, Forge vividly captures the unreal-but-doom-laden feel of the mid-'80s, when Reagan was ramping up the nuclear fear factor. It's great to have the Republicans back in office, isn't it?
Film and TV. Japanese animation has been a subject of much enjoyment and "independent study" this year. It blows me away that an entire country prefers moving drawings to live action shows for their prime time entertainment. I'd love to live in a nation where a great mystical work like Princess Mononoke isn't just the highest-grossing animated film of all time, but the highest grossing film, and where subversive psychodramas involving cyborgs and folkloric demons are discussed at the water cooler. (Instead, I live in a country that adores Titanic and Survivor. Ookay.) I've watched and rewatched tapes of Neon Genesis Evangelion, which was a hit series in Japan several years ago, and continue to find in it new levels of psychological complexity and political paranoia. I love the series' mood of melancholy, and its use of subtle visual details (rather than explanatory chatter) to move the story along. I've learned a lot about it and other shows from Susan Napier's book Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke. Napier, a professor of Japanese lit at the U. Of Texas, provides a cultural context that helps explain the themes of mechanization, sex, and apocalyptic feeling that run through so much anime. For my own thoughts on the 2001 rerelease of Akira, please check out this recent post.
Art. 2001 was a banner year for shows involving "the computer"; gradually this device that has touched every aspect of contemporary life is making its way into the last pocket of medieval resistance--the art world. Right now there are several camps operating: (1) Artists who aren't giving up painting, sculpture, photography, and installation art, but feel the need to "respond" in some way to the computer (for an excellent round-up of so-called digitally-inspired shows in 2001, please see this post by my friend Hector Pitts); (2) "Net artists," doing the types of interactive and data-crunching projects (frequently covered by New York Times cyber-critic Matthew Mirapaul) that are conceptually interesting but make little concession to the needs and pleasures of meat space (a few things in this category are good, of course, such as the jodi.org website and Michael Ensdorf's excellent video piece Momentary Distractions); and finally, (3) Fine art-trained artists who question the logic and look of the computer, while at the same time using it to make "decelerated" objects for contemplation in a gallery environment (I include myself in this somewhat paradoxical category, and this weblog will be devoted, off-and-on, to other artists with the same concerns).
Music. I spent most of 2000 dj-ing at a bar in lower Manhattan, and gave myself a crash course in recent electronic dance music. I started out the year playing a lot of hiphop and electro but by the fall I had settled into more pub-friendly deep house and 2-step garage discs. I'm still keeping up in 2001, but my consumption dropped off once I stopped receiving my weekly cut of the bar (after 10 months, I was worn out, so I retired in Nov. of 2000--for now). One of my most interesting "discoveries" was Dusseldorf producer Stefan Schwander, who records as Antonelli Electr. and rhythm_maker. His tracks are minimal but eminently listenable; I'm astonished by his ability to get such warmth and depth out of fairly simple loops. And the production is exquisite--every beat and chime feels wrapped in velvet. Although I like a variety of dance subgenres, I prefer Detroit (Juan Atkins)-style tracks and German "deep minimal techno house" for home listening; this is music that thrives both in the foreground and the background.
This page is proud to announce that the Doris Piserchia Website and the Tom Moody Web Site (the "main site" link above) have recently moved to Digital Media Tree, after originally being hosted on a server that has famously gone bankr$pt. While the emphasis at the Tree is on individual (and group) weblogs, the DP and TM sites are organized as traditional, fixed-structure websites; both are being updated regularly, however. Also, the following have been added to the TM site: the full text, with additional images, of the Art Papers article "Palo Alto Dreamin': Towards a New Digital Expression(ism)," and an "author's cut" of a review of Nina Katchadourian's "Mended Spiderwebs" show at Debs & Co., which appeared in the Summer 1999 issue of Artforum.
My painting archive has recently been revamped. I've created thumbnail pages for the year 2001 and the years 1996-1999, so clicking through the slideshows is less of a stab in the dark. Most of the actual artwork, by the way, is done using Paintbrush, a kind of toy program that shipped with Windows pre-'95 (the current version, MSPaint, is vastly inferior). Raw material in the form of spheres, dots, and scribbles is printed out on the EPSON 2000P and then assembled by hand into collages with a quirky physical presence, unfortunately not always translatable into jpegs. I'm interested in combining outdated styles (cubism, AbEx, color field painting) with outdated computer technology to create weirdly ahistorical hybrids, clunky but (hopefully) ingratiating.
In his book on rave culture, Generation E, Simon Reynolds bemoans the inadequacy of rock criticism to describe/interpret dance music: "The materials with which the techno auteur works--timbre/texture, rhythm, and space--are precisely the elements that rock criticism ignores in favor of meaning, which is extracted almost exclusively from close study of lyrics and persona. Rock critics use techniques borrowed from literary criticism or sociology to interpret rock in terms of the singer's biography/neurosis or the music's social relevance. Devoid of text, dance music and ambient are better understood through metaphors from the visual arts: 'the soundscape,' 'aural decor,' 'a soundtrack for an imaginary movie,' 'audio-sculpture.'"
If only visual arts criticism were concerned with talking intelligently about "timbre/texture, rhythm, and space"! Unfortunately art critics do the same thing with art that Reynolds says rock critics do with dance music: they ignore the perceptual phenomena and start hunting for texts. If they're not up to the job of supplying verbal equivalents for visual experience (and most of them aren't), they're likely to dismiss the art as vapid eye candy. Gradually artists, too, give up, and begin to make work with "text," either imbedded in the piece so critics can "discover" it, or overtly expressed so that it can be parroted in reviews. A sign of the mass resignation of artists to curatorial/critical preferences is the December Artforum cover, which shows thumbnails of the "Best of 2001." It is telling that out of fifteen images, the cover features only one painting (by Luc Tuymans) and one sculpture/installation (by Thomas Hirschhorn) and the rest of it's basically photography.
Writers feel more comfortable talking about photography because it's a storytelling medium, as well as the language of "the media." Yet some of the most interesting artworks being made are closer to electronic dance music--abstract, evocative experiences that one could spend days coming up with metaphors to describe. (Examples are some of the digital paintings discussed elsewhere this log; the logic even extends to more traditional abstract painting by Albert Oehlen, Carl Ostendarp, and Sarah Morris--all of whom have excellent shows up in Manhattan right now.) This isn't "stupid" work--if anything it's smarter because of the convolutions it goes through to defeat precise description. But that's its Catch-22; the better it succeeds in rendering the viewer speechless, the less likely it is to find an intelligent critical advocate.
If you write a so-called realistic novel in America--whether it's about the mores of upper-middle-class Connecticut WASPs or growing up in the 'hood in Detroit--your book will be marketed as "fiction" or "literature" and it will never have to "transcend genre." If your aim is satirical allegory, depicting present reality through the distorting lens of the fantastic, you will likely be consigned to the "horror" or "science fiction" fields, literary ghettos that are hard to escape. Gradually the writings of authors such as Philip Dick and J. G. Ballard, which endured years of "peeled eyeball" covers and incomprehension by would-be escapists and lit profs alike, are coming to be recognized as some of the most important writing of the last century. Their books aren't just about "people," in the old 18th Century novel sense, but how a technologically-transformed environment is changing people. Not every writer is lucky enough to get out of the pulp graveyard, however. Doris Piserchia's writing of the '70s and early '80s took a hard look at life in America during that period, just as Dick's did in the '50s and '60s, and reflected it back disguised as "harmless fantasy." Some of her books were more escapist than others--at least four of them seem squarely aimed at brainy teenage girls--but that was a necessity of working in the marketplace, and even those books are full of weird, subversive elements.
As someone who wants to see Piserchia's work survive and be discussed seriously, then, it's with some trepidation that I present the latest additions the The Doris Piserchia Website: the book cover gallery for 1973-77 and the book cover gallery for 1978-83. Here's a slice of marketing from the Great American kitsch factory guaranteed to send Connecticut WASP-fanciers screaming for the exits. But despite their potentially marginalizing influence, there's a lot to be said for these dumb covers--particularly the ones painted by H. R. Van Dongen, whose old school/modern sensibility is strangely matched to Piserchia's. The other (mostly-unknown) artists who labored to find some visual equivalent to her oddball visions should be saluted, too, as torrid and dated as their efforts often are. The only truly bad covers are the later ones by Kelly Freas, which commit the unforgivable crime of making Piserchia look cornball.