Edward Said has died.

Still working on the apartment, painting the office, unpacking the boxes. I haven't had time to read or even see a movie in about a month. Hopefully this weekend will allow time for reflection and a movie or two. In the meantime, Bill Marsh at the San Diego Poetry Guild reprints Dziga Vertov's We. A Version of a Manifesto

I haven't had time to post lately. I'm preparing to move into an architecturally significant apartment building designed by R.M. Schindler. Most of Schindler's buildings have not aged well; the building I'm moving into certainly needs a good renovation, which I suppose it will receive eventually, since it's protected as an L.A. Historical Building. I'm spending the next few weeks sanding and painting and buffing and cleaning in an attempt to bring the apartment back to its mid-century modernist glory. The Phaidon book on Schindler by Judith Sheine has a passage about the Laurelwood apartments, excerpted below.

The Laurelwood apartments comprise twenty two-bedroom apartments (and two storage units) on a sloping site. They are organized along a central pathway and, angling away from the path at 15 degrees in plan, they step up the site to the top of the hill and then down again, at a 15-degree angle facing downhill. Schindler described his design as trying to give each tenant the feeling of living in their own house and described the reasons for the layout of the design:

"A two-story unit, containing an apartment on each floor, was repeated ten times, grouped in such a fashion as to give each apartment an unobstructed outlook and good exposure. The garages were located near the street and the access to each apartment is obtained through a central garden court. The main windows are turned towards the outside of the lot, and each ground story apartment is given a private garden patio.

"Each second story apartment received a private roof terrace on top of the next unit with unobstructed outlook in all directions.

"Each apartment contains a living-room, dining-room combination, which is separated by glass partition from the kitchen and breakfast nook, in order to obtain the utmost feeling of spaciousness."

The interiors of the apartments are simpler versions of the later Armon house, with glazed nooks protruding into the living/dining space. The exterior vocabulary is relatively simple, enlivened by the planning and massing of the units and the overhanging planes of the roofs. The Schindler Frame construction provided tongue-and-groove decking for the ceilings of the upper units, and Schindler also gave the lower units wood ceilings. He created soundproof air spaces between the walls of the adjoining units and between floors. The exterior is largely of stucco, and the interiors are plaster below the door-height datum and wood above the datum. Plywood built-in storage further articulates the interior spaces. Wood trellises and vertical screens along with curving pipe rails articulate the exterior. The predominant color for stucco and exterior wood was green, to blend in with the foliage, which grew to turn the access path into a linear garden court.

Saw Glauber Rocha's 1964 film Black God, White Devil. Rocha was a member of Brazil's Cinema Novo movement. He also wrote a manifesto called An Aesthetic of Hunger. Black God, White Devil is called Deus eo Diabo na Terra do Sol in the original Portuguese. I assume they translated it this way (rather than the literal God and the Devil in the Land of the Sun) in reference to Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks. Philippe Jalladeau describes the film: "Manuel, a herdsman, and his wife Rosa are on the run because of a bloody conflict with their 'coronel'. The couple joins mystics gathered around Sebastião, a black man who predicts the coming of an apocalyptic upheaval which will turn the Sertão into the sea and the sea into the Sertão. Ignored by Manuel, Rosa's eagerness brings about a violent break-up with the messianic preacher. As they keep travelling, the couple meet the survivors of the gang of cangaceiros led by Lampião. His lieutenant, Corisco, wants to raze Sertão to the ground. He is chased by Antonio das Mortes, the fazendeiros' henchman full of the importance of his murderous fate. The conclusion, announced by a blindman and sung by the chorus, shows Manuel that the earth belongs neither to God nor to the Devil." This is one of the most powerful films I've seen in a long time. The camerawork is reminiscent of early Pasolini, the editing draws on Eisenstein, and the violence prefigures Sam Peckinpah's later blood operas. And the soundtrack is simply amazing. Rocha's films really need to be more readily available -- in fact, Latin American cinema in general needs to be more readily available.

Which will die first? Friendster or flash-mobs? Or are they both already over?

Alejandro Jodorowsky received a standing ovation when he presented his 1989 film Santa Sangre at the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival Friday night to a sold out audience. And that was before the movie screened. The legendary director of El Topo and Holy Mountain announced that a new film would be completed by the summer of 2004. That would make it his first in 15 years. Can't wait. Although Santa Sangre isn't quite the mindbender Holy Mountain is, it's still quite interesting, so I wonder if his new film will measure up. It supposedly has a spaghetti western feel to it and will be shot in Italy . . . already sounds promising. But . . . oh no! Marilyn Manson is a cast member! Well, he didn't ruin Lost Highway. But still, why do otherwise intelligent directors insist on putting him in their films? The Internet Movie Database says it's called Sons of El Topo, but Jodorowsky didn't mention he was making a sequel. "This is a film that will not be shown in theaters," he said. "I am a poet, not a robot."

Jodorowsky mentioned, before he exited the stage, that he can no longer watch Santa Sangre. His son Teo, who died recently, plays a character in the film. As the director tried to escape, fans carrying his comic books swarmed around him, begging for autographs. I knew he had a cult following, but the excitement he generated Friday night was beyond belief.

The first half of Santa Sangre is definitely better than the second half. First half: free associative narrative. In one scene a group of happy Down Syndrome kids snort cocaine, which would normally offend me (my brother has Down Syndrome) but somehow works here. Second half: conventional Italian horror film (it was produced by Dario Argento's brother) with a tidy psychological ending. Somewhat of an homage to Psycho.

I recommend anyone and everyone to see Holy Mountain if you can get your hands on it. Allen Klein, the former Beatles manager, owns the rights to the film and has been notoriously stingy with distribution.

There's lots of Jodorowsky information on the internet. Here's a few links:

Rain Taxi Interview
A Jodorowsky resource page
Mexperimental Cinema Essay

An article on the Los Angeles River, featuring poet Lewis Macadams and FoLAR, the Friends of the Los Angeles River.

I've been aware of Stephen Prina ever since I became a fan of the Red Krayola while still in college. So when giant billboards with his name in lights started popping up all over Hollywood a year ago, I was freaked out and slightly amused. Had he signed a deal with Death Row Records? Was he in some sort of competition with Angelyne for the drive-by market share? It was complete saturation, but pretty funny when you consider that he was advertising a show at the MAK Center's Schindler House. Last night I caught his performance of Christian Marclay's Graffiti Composition at the UCLA Hammer Museum. According to the Hammer website, Marclay created Graffiti by plastering blank musical notation paper in public spaces throughout Berlin in 1996, inviting passerby to compose a collaborative symphony. The sheets were later published as an edition of prints and performance copies to be interpreted and played by other musicians. Prina performed in the same museum courtyard where, only a few weeks ago, Lee Ronaldo and Marclay himself kicked out a free-noise traffic jam. Car horns and pedestrian voices filtered in from Wilshire Boulevard. Almost a Cagean experience, and welcome, since I'm too young to have ever seen Maestro Cage.

Here's the play-by-play. Prina waltzed onto a small stage that held an acoustic guitar with electronic pickups, a Yamaha Motif synthesizer, and an empty table. He wore a plaid suit-vest with matching pants, sported a neat John Waters-style moustache, and carried an L.L. Bean bag with his name clearly printed on the front. He unpacked a few tools from his bag of tricks, picked up his acoustic guitar, and, in a very workmanlike manner, played some chords. After a few minutes of abstraction, he deliberately broke a string. He "operated" on his guitar and returned to playing minimal compositions, accompanied by lyrics like "You should just/sing a song/about a dog/or something." He sang Toni (not Anthony) Braxton's hit "Unbreak My Heart" (actually not a bad song when sung by an anti-diva). Photographed his instruments and the audience. Asked for a beer (6 dollars!). Read a few pages from the synthesizer's technical manual, and placed duct tape over the words "Yamaha" and "Motif", which were written on the front of the keyboard. Banged on his guitar with mallets, creating a vibrating, chiming sound. Played a 12-bar scale, slowly then quickly, slowly then quickly. Announced that he would compensate those of us who could not attend the Aimee Mann-Rufus Wainwright concert going on across campus by performing Wainwright's song "One Man Guy". Performed "One Man Guy". Played his guitar with a portable tape recorder, which was playing, again, Toni Braxton's "Unbreak My Heart". It was all very conceptual (befitting Marclay's exhibition, which is filled with one-note installations like glass drumsticks, giant drumkits, vinyl record sculptures, and humorous collages made from a collection of obscure and famous album covers). None of this really measured up to Prina's collaborative work with Mayo Thompson and the Red Krayola. The highlight was when he said, "For those of you who can't read the inscription on my cufflinks, it is in Urdu, made in Nepal, and says 'U.S. Out of the Middle East', dedicated to Claes Oldenburg, and is one half of my 1992 piece 'Haberdashery' ".

Slavoj Zizek on the death of Charles R. Douglass, the inventor of canned laughter: "So then, would it not be a proper funeral for Charles R. Douglass if a set of sound-machines were to accompany his coffin, generating whispered laments, while his beloved surviving relatives enjoyed a hearty meal, or perhaps got some work done elsewhere? Far from finding it offensive, I think perhaps he would appreciate the recognition of such a burial" Will You Laugh for Me, Please?

During preparations for a dinner party yesterday I was able to catch bits and pieces of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (the beginning and ending, mainly) and the same few scenes from Rebel Without a Cause I always see: the knife fight at the planetarium, the chickie run, and Jimmy's papa in an apron. I should really sit down and watch the whole thing one of these days, even though I've heard every character has a daddy complex and it's almost too much to handle. But Sal Mineo sure does look amazing. Later, I caught Strangers on a Train and was thrilled to find that the carousel could be deadly. Every time I watch a Hitchcock film I'm reminded of the inspired Fordist nightmare he was never able to shoot: the camera slowly follows the construction of a car on a Detroit assembly line, from the very first bolt to the last touch of paint. We see robot arms and mechanized tools constuct the car from scratch. Finally, when the car is finished, the door is opened for the first time. A dead body falls out.

The horror, the horror. Potus and Flotus (or as they prefer to be called, the President and First Lady of the United States) recently went on safari in Africa, where they were shocked to discover that the elephant, sacred symbol of the Republican Party, really has no shame. "This is a White House that plans every trip down to the last detail and plots out every camera angle to make sure that Mr. Bush is always shown in the most presidential and flattering pose possible. So the horror of the White House advance team can only be imagined when Mr. Bush, Laura Bush and one of their twin daughters, Barbara, cameras trained on them as always, pulled up on a dusty drive in the game park in Botswana and encountered a male elephant determinedly but ultimately unsuccessfully trying to mate with a female." Samson Mulugeta of Newsday, who is among the small pool of court reporters allowed to accompany the president, took notes: "As the pool convulsed into giggles, Potus turned back and smiled sheepishly. Barbara threw her head back in embarrassment and covered her face with her hands. Then Potus threw his cap over his face to shield himself from the impending coitus (which never materialized). Flotus's expression was not visible from our angle." No doubt she was horrified. As Potus gave the elephants a relaxing massage, Flotus called out, "O.K. darling, that's enough." (drawn from In and Out of Africa, Bush Is His Usual Brisk Self, by Richard W. Stevenson, New York Times, Sunday, July 13, 2003)

So long Mr. Chumps. I'm travelling to the snowy north to visit my corporate relatives. They may not have internet access, so this blog will be inactive for a few days. Until the weekend . . .

The L.A. County Museum of Art has been screening a film series to coincide with its Modigliani exhibition. The Roaring Twenties in Paris: Silent Classics from the Cinémathèque française showcases nine avant-garde films from the interwar era. Friday night, Jean Epstein's The Fall of the House of Usher was preceded by a series of incredible shorts. Mon dieu, if Bald des quatz'z'arts, an anonymously shot documentary, is any indication of what a 1920s Paris party was like . . . hundreds of suited and well-coiffed men, costumed freaks in lobster-tailed suits, nautical-geared muscle-men carrying nude and bejewelled flappers . . . sailors, turtles, and mermen hoisting banners, screaming "L'Arte!" . . . 8 minutes of pure mosh-pit bacchanalia. Unbelievable. And I could have watched René Clair's 20 minute long Entr'acte (written by Francis Picabia and starring Marcel Duchamp, Erik Satie, and Man Ray) for hours. Balloon-headed dolls expand and collapse. A bearded ballerina dances on glass. Mourners chase a runaway hearse. When they finally catch up to its lost pinewood coffin a magician pops out, jack-in-the-box style, and makes his mourners vanish. Oh living-dead magician, won't you point your wand my way and suck me into your movie? Picabia wrote, "Imagine for a second that this film is a machine gun and that the music of Erik Satie which will accompany it resembles thunder. And see, over the city, this great light which resembles a conflagration!" Unfortunately, Satie's music did not accompany last night's screening. It thundered nonetheless. Clair's later La Tour is a quieter conflagration, an 11 minute meditation on the construction and consecration of the Eiffel Tower. Études de mouvements by Joris Ivens seems a precursor to Tarkovsky's traffic sequence in Solaris. But while Tarkovsky lets the camera linger, Ivens emphasizes speed and movement, both automotively and editorially. And Noël Renard, a minor filmmaker, dedicates Balançoires to "the infinite crowd." A couple of lovebirds romp around a bustling funfair where they get a taste of the afterlife from Fakir, the resident hypnotist. According to Claudine Kaufmann, who presented the films, Renard's reputation as minor is due to his blatant appropriation of avant-garde film techniques. I found his Christian dualism of light and dark, good and evil, heaven and hell unbearably facile. Eugéne Deslaw's city-symphony Montparnasse, by contrast, canvasses the panorama of Parisian life perfectly (or more precisely, the perfect Paris of imagination). After these beauties I found it hard to stomach Usher's petty gothicism. Even Buñuel, Epstein's assistant director, tried to disown it. Perhaps I should watch the film once more, in isolation.

Here's a little history lesson. I received a response from Albert Onello to my ephemeral but very sincere baseball questions of a few days ago. He writes:

In a very idiosyncratic and labyrinthine journey through blog-land I washed ashore 'Harlequin Knights' and was pleased to spend a few moments 'there'. Noticing a few questions in a recent post, and presuming you're asking these questions sincerely and would like some semblance of an 'answer' to them, I'll offer some response....
 
I think the shortest 9-inning major league game is 51 or 52 minutes, if my memory serves me correctly, in a game that took place I think back around 1920. It was probably the last game of the year and everybody just wanted to go home, so I'd guess things moved along rather briskly.

Why is the bullpen so distant from the dugout? 'Cause pitchers have to warm up during a game, and they can't be too close to the action, both for their safety and the safety of those playing the game. Some 'bullpens' are in fact 'on' the 'field of play', between the foul lines and the stands --- see Wrigley Field, for instance.

Shouldn't pitchers sit with their teammates? Well, in some precincts pitchers are not considered 'ballplayers', they're 'pitchers', and this is maintained only half-kiddingly.

Some relief pitchers do sit in the dugout early in the game, the presumption being that the starting pitcher will do his job and last at least a few innings, meaning that the relief pitcher won't have to be available to warm-up and thus doesn't need to be in the bullpen. Some pitchers would rather be 'out' in the bullpen, however, 'cause things are a little 'looser' out there and there's a chance to relax a bit more (than in the dugout, which is closer to the action and the watchful eyes of manager and coaches). This falls under the same principle as why certain students sit in the back of the class --- their actions are more easily camouflaged from authority figures.... So there's a little more freedom out in the bullpen. Former New York Yankees great Whitey Ford was known to set up a nice brunch buffet out in the bullpen, complete with table and checkered tablecloth --- you can't do that in the dugout. Also, there are *only pitchers in the bullpen, save for a bullpen coach, who was probably a pitcher in his playing days, and a bullpen catcher, who often isn't a playing member of the team, and, on the assumption that like kinds cleave to like kinds, the bullpen is a pitcher's domain.

Nosebleed seats? Well, this has to do with altitude and lack of oxygen, leading to 'nosebleed' with the 'higher up' seats in the stands. A little overstatement there, but you get the idea I'm sure.
 
As for 'road movies', what about 'The Last Detail'? That comes immediately to mind.

Anyway, good luck with your blog. I'll be watching....
 
Sincerely,
 
Albert Onello

Chris Burden has been making model bridges out of Mysto and Meccano Erector sets for several years now. I owned an Erector set once. I think I made an oil barge, destroyed it, and then returned to my Star Wars toys. Last night at his Bridges and Bullets show at the Gagosian gallery, among the Bev Hill party arters and the otherwise underdressed, several new Burden Bridges were unveiled: the Indo-China Bridge, the Tower of London Bridge, the 21' Truss Bridge, the Antique Bridge, and the big big behemoth, the 32 foot Curve Bridge (I'd like to get another B in there). You can find examples of the sort of bridges he builds here. And bullets? Yep, in the back room gold bullets rested in states of well-encased zen. Compared to the bridges (so large and skeletal, always threatening to collapse like a bunch of dominoes) the bullets seemed like puffs of air. I didn't even realize what they were at first . . . lipstick containers? Rumpelstiltskin's golden thimbles? One group of bullets (the round ones) were called Roundies. Another group of bullets (the pointed ones) were called Pointies. Very cute, which I suppose was the point. I liked the turn-of-the-century toy technology, the big boy artist playing with his toys, the unexpected beauty of the golden bullets. But then I read the press release. "Burden's particular interest in bridge construction reflects his fascination with man's basic urge to overcome barriers, to master the forces of nature, to speed travel, link communities, to widen horizons." Master the forces of nature? Speed travel? Was this written in the late 19th century? We laughed and laughed. It's possible that the language here is supposed to mirror early modernist discourse, but it's too naked and uncritical to be taken seriously.

And an essay on Kharms and the OBERIU group by Eugene Ostashevsky at New American Writing.

"Daniil Kharms was: a pipe-smoking St. Petersburg bachelor, an author of stories for children, a wearer of outlandish clothes and pseudonyms, a regular arrestee for alleged political offences including spying for a foreign power, and a member of OBERIU, the Union of Realist Art. He was also an absurdist poet and prose writer of the 20s, 30s and early 40s - perhaps the St Petersburg poet and prosist of his generation." from The Other St. Petersburg

I've been a fan of Kharms ever since I discovered his work a few years ago. His stories take me back to the days when I believed a litter of goblins lived beneath my bed and sent me covert messages at night.

More Daniil Kharms at danielcharms.com

Limetree reads Skunk Hour line for line. Having never read Lowell, I should admit I feel a bit unqualified to discuss in-depth the dispute currently raging between Ron, Brian, Kent and the others. I was always warned away from Lowell. Still, I'm following the debate like mad.

Funny, but in college at UC Santa Cruz the first book of poetry I was asked to read on a course syllabus was In the American Tree.

An Encounter

On one occasion a man went off to work and on the way he met another man who, having bought a loaf of Polish bread, was on his way home.

And that's just about all there is to it.

--by Daniil Kharms, the Soviet absurdist, via The Scampton Veterinary Optician

Last night at Edison Field the Royals blanked the Angels and I had many questions. Why is the bullpen so distant from the dugout? Shouldn’t the pitchers sit with their teammates? What’s the record for the shortest nine-inning game? Why do they call them nosebleed seats? Fortunately on the way to the ballpark I found a chapbook by Juliana Spahr hidden in the backseat of my housemate’s car entitled Uneveness & The Blood Sonnets (you can read an early excerpt here, via How2. The chapbook version is much revised). Spahr is a poet and professor at the University of Hawaii, Manoa and, along with Jena Osman, edits the journal Chain. Uneveness charts Spahr's relocation to Hawaii with two friends and their consequent colonial jitters. They wonder whether they can in good faith live in a place with a history of colonialism. "Then they began to realize that it was hard to find a place that had not been colonized by someone at some time." Spahr eloquently recounts in her narrative how she managed to come to terms with her place in the island's history. Most importantly she continues to learn from other writers, including Hawaiian writers and post-colonial writers whom she had previously found irrelevant to her work. In time, living in Hawaii and reading all the available poetry (including poetry of the sovereignty movement) leads Spahr and her friends to re-evaluate the "radical" poetic practices they had been taught in graduate school: "It wasn't that they had to give up their love of the radical as defined as modernist techniques," she writes. "It was that they had to resee the radical, to see it as the continent not the mainland or as one space in a sea of islands. They began to see poetry as a series of contiguous systems, systems that didn't merge but that were beside one another."

Reading this, I couldn't help but think of the current contretemps between Ron Silliman and Brian Kim Stefans. And hear a proto-echo of the "Seventeenth Way" Kent Johnson mentions in his letter to Limetree. I don't wish to speak for Spahr, so I won't, but it seems to me that we should situate our writing practices historically. I don't see the current value in an us against them poetics, a School of Quietude with Lowell, et al versus a Post Avant with a who knows who. So maybe Ron is still operating under an historically bygone perspective . . . maybe it was a necessary position in the 1960s and 70s but is now no longer relevant. Like the radical who won't shake hands with the democrat. Maybe even Ron could learn something from Lowell, if only negatively. Once I watched D.A. Pennebaker's documentary Don't Look Back with my dad. When it came to the scene where Dylan mean-spiritedly disses Donovan in a guitar duel by singing a biting It's All Over Now Baby Blue, my dad became enraged. He couldn't understand why they weren't playing together. You know, jamming. I asked my dad, "Do you really think Donovan had anything to teach Bob Dylan?" My dad, a huge Dylan fan, who wouldn't be caught dead with a Donovan record, considered this for a minute, then said, "Yeah. He couldn't teach him very much, but he could teach him something."