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Friday, May 28, 2004
Oliver took me to see a screening of DJ Shadow's new DVD, something about "In Tune and In Time," which is basically just concert footage from his 2002 Private Press tour, which O and I have seen live, twice already. Shadow was there to introduce the film saying (I paraphrase) "If you like my music, you'll enjoy this DVD. If you don't, then you'll probably feel like you're in purgatory." Indeed. Nary 5 minutes in, I almost bolted for NAATA's member preview of Takeshi Kitano's glorious Zatoichi, screening across the hall. But you have to live with the consequences of your decisions, so I was in Shadowland for the duration. There was some mildly interesting backstage footage spliced in the middle (by which I was reminded again of how much Shadow reminds me of my friend Charles, the Information Architect with a degree in Library Science -- in fact, that might not be so far off -- Shadow is a librarian of sorts), but for the most part it was scenes (from varying camera angles) of Shadow turning knobs, pushing buttons and scratching turntables in front of a triptych of huge video projections, interspersed with shots of the enthusiastic British crowd and "fancy" video effects merging the projections with the live footage. While the video projections are inventive, they oddly don't translate all that well on the small (or in this case, large) screen, especially if you've seen them before. At any rate, it's not exactly compelling cinema.
But I didn't start this entry to be a hater. I LIKE DJ Shadow. And the barrage of alternately mesmerizing and mind-numbingly similar footage did provide an opportunity for rumination. I've always appreciated Shadow's work for the emotional landscapes it creates, and the pure virtuosity of his sampling, mixing and timing (as one slobbery fan said in the post-screening Q&A, "You're a genius, man."), but I never really thought much about what his songs are about. And to be honest, I still can't figure it out, at least in the conventional sense that songs are ever "about" anything. Oliver says "6 Days" is about war, but I was like, "Which war?" Anyway, it's not like all music has to be explicitly about something, but in music that pairs vocals and sounds, there's usually some verbal content, however mundane. Shadow's songs use verbal samples, but these seem chosen more for their timbre or pacing or rhythm than for what the speaker/singer is actually saying. In some ways it's pure pastiche, in the Frederic Jamesonian sense -- content evacuated of meaning.
Which is not to say that Shadow's work is not evocative, or moving, or at times, transcendent. He's a master of moods, creating driving dance rhythms one minute, and eerie, melancholy melodies the next. But what struck me this time was that all this sentiment is borrowed. The opening strains of Bjork's "Possibly Maybe," despite being slightly distorted, still retain the soaring wistfulness of the original, however displaced. And it's that feeling, more than the notes, that Shadow uses for his own purposes. He's not just mining music archives; he's calling up a repository of our collective emotional (un)consciousness.
I'm sure this has all been said before and better. Now that sampling, re-makes, and endless quotations of quotations are the standard ways in which we experience culture, the distinction between real and fake, authentic and imitation seems irrelevant, yet ever more fascinating. If you had told me 20 years ago that I would enjoy watching a concert where a man stands behind a table tweaking buttons and knobs, I would have said you were crazy. Then I remember that almost exactly 20 years ago, I was bopping around to Depeche Mode -- 3 guys standing impassively behind synthesizers, tweaking knobs and buttons. But at least they had Dave Gahan, shaking his bon-bon down in front.
12:12 PM
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I've been doing some research into Japanese contemporary art and came across Tatsumi Orimoto, a contemporary of Nam June Paik. I don't really know what to make of his performances (from the late 90's and 2000) as "Breadman" except to speculate that it's some kind of statement about starch. (Orimoto ties loaves of French bread to his head, so he's effectively a "breadhead.") Bread vs. rice? Perhaps I'm being essentialist (or at best binaristic), but I can't help seeing the bread as a Western intervention into traditional Japanese diets (which are quickly fading away anyway). I'd like to read "Breadman" as some kind of racial masquerade in which one "becomes the bread," effectively adopting the starch-identity of the West. But then, I admit, I want to see racial masquerade in almost everything. It's probably just blithe, Fluxus-style fun, creating a glitch in the otherwise seamless fabric of everyday life...
9:40 AM
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Thursday, May 20, 2004
Just saw an SF Cinematheque screening with Vietnamese American video artist Nguyen Tan Hoang and was reminded not only how much good work there is out there that rarely gets screened, but also the richness and depth of so-called "experimental" video. Perhaps it's just because I haven't seen any in a while, but I felt much less jaded at this screening than, say watching shorts programs at a film festival. Or perhaps it was because of how it was curated.
SF Cinematheque invited Nguyen to show his own work along with works by other artists who have influenced him. It's an interesting, if not entirely novel notion -- centering a group of works around an "auteur" -- but I think it was particularly effective given the short (10 minutes or less) format of the selected videos. Rather than a festival of feature length films (of which most people can only catch a handful), it was a thematic film festival all in one sitting, allowing you to compare, almost side-by-side, the techniques, strategies and content of a very disparate group of makers.
Nguyen's own work centers around the delineation of a queer Asian American sexuality, but the works he selected dealt with related issues from a wide variety of perspectives. Particularly strong is Robert Blanchon's Let's Just Kiss + Say Goodbye (1995), a compilation of scenes from 80s gay porn videos -- without the sex. It's a collection of narrative scenes full of bad hair, bad acting and even lamer dialogue, but a series of close-ups of the individual actors at the end turns it into a wistful homage to a bygone era. Going beyond the purely "functional" aspects of porn, the piece reveals a surprisingly emotional investment, like saying goodbye to old friends.
Also remarkably rich is Richard Fung's Islands (2002). Taken entirely from the John Huston WWII film Heaven Knows Mr. Allison, the piece uses intertitles to tell the story of Fung's Chinese Trinidadian Uncle Clive, who was hired to appear in the film as an extra playing a Japanese soldier. It's a subtle, yet incredibly powerful indictment of the Hollywood machine (and the imperialistic powers it represents) in which the Caribbean is interchangeable with Southeast Asia, and Chinese Trinidadians are indistinguishable from enemy Japanese. Besides telling the particulars of Uncle Clive's story, it's a statement about the ultimate commensurability of island "others" within the solipsism of Western culture. Most poignantly, Fung repeats the scenes of the Japanese soldiers, which become more and more blurry -- looking for a trace of his uncle that he never finds. It reminds me of that Frantz Fanon quote about sitting in the dark movie theatre, waiting for the film to start: "I wait for me."
Nguyen also screened four of his own pieces. My favorite was K.I.P. (2002), which consists entirely of footage from a "Best of Kip Knoll" gay porn compilation. (Kip Knoll was a big star in the 1970s and early 80s.) Shot from TV playback of the old, much viewed videotape, the piece preserves all the gaps and skips and static in the original tape, overlaid with a faint image of Nguyen's face reflected in the glass of the TV. As the actors gyrate and switch positions, Nguyen's visage vanishes and reappears, most prominent in the darker, still background of the taped image, where the glass is most reflective. He is the consumer of porn, inserting himself into the fantasy, even though, as an Asian American, he is racially excluded from it. His ghostly, contingent image perfectly narrates the fluctuations of identification, longing and difference at the intersection of race and pornography.
11:00 PM
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Monday, May 10, 2004
I finally received my "Oh! Mikey" DVD. It's that Japanese TV show about an American expat family in Japan, in which all the roles are played by mannequins. Suffice to say, it's...weird.
A scant 34 minutes long, the DVD is comprised of a series of short vignettes about the Fuccon (really!) family. As you can imagine, with only mannequins as actors, the scenes are incredibly static. A few involve "animation" -- Mom runs her leg up Dad's under the sheets; Mikey and his cousin "play" on the swings. But most of the movement is of the incidental sort: the mannequins occasionally sway or tilt a bit, unintentionally, in the breeze. This slight movement only serves to underscore their inertia, as do their bright, over-excited voices. The result is a strange kind of puppet theater -- we hear their voices and (thanks to English subtitles) understand their conversations, but without the amplification of facial expressions or gesture. Emanating from an unchanging, wooden smile, all their utterances are curiously flat.
The conversations themselves start out inane in the extreme, exploring such topics as brushing one's teeth and whether or not Mikey should go to school on Sunday. Each scene (or "joke") ends with a peal of the Fuccon's idiotic laughter, which lasts too long and sounds both forced and fake. I can't help thinking it's a critique of American family sitcoms, but that seems almost too easy. One-dimensional characters, too-zippy one liners and canned laughter aren't all that hard to make fun of. Oh! Mikey makes these conventions literal, rendering them as the static, generic tropes they are.
I suppose it's not so different from a character like Mr. Bill. You're laughing at the show's conceit as much, if not more so, than its content. But thankfully, the episodes go beyond the basic set-up. The series manages to take lifeless, largely motionless, Norman Rockwellesque mannequins and actually imbue them with personality. In one episode, Mikey's teacher pays a visit to the house. A nice, collegiate-looking mannequin, Mikey's teacher doesn't speak directly to others. All of his conversations are conducted through the intermediary of his mother, a stern older woman in a purple suit. Although the Fuccons seem to take it in stride, this ventriloquism is creepy: the teacher is a grown man who can only find a voice through his mother, a kind of reverse Norman Bates. It's also a puppet show within a puppet show, as the teacher orchestrates his mother's conversation (although she sometimes resists or argues with him).
Perhaps most interesting is the role of race in the show. Why did the show's producers choose a white American family? Why not a Japanese family? The show is certainly a critique/parody of American sitcoms, and it's not a huge stretch to extend that critique to Americans themselves. The implication of course is that we are superficial, stupid and vacuous -- yet not unloveable. It's nothing we don't already know -- in some ways, it's not unlike the stereotypes we cherish of "those wacky Japanese."
Japanese pop culture is a source of fascination for Americans in no small part because of the ways in which we see it echo/absorb/transform our own culture. But Oh! Mikey takes that relationship one step further, turning its gaze back upon American pop culture itself, with bizarre results.
10:31 PM
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Thursday, May 06, 2004
I used to hate the New Yorker, mostly for aesthetic and demographic reasons -- it always seemed so mired in the snootiness of an era long defunct -- you know, New York as the center of the universe (it's true!) with the provinces struggling and aspiring to catch up. One of the things I've realized now that I live in a "second-tier" city is that the provinces aren't really looking towards the center per se (which actually should fuel my disdain for the New Yorker) and the New Yorker isn't really pretending that they are. Its snootiness has evolved, in other words. Which is all just a long weird way of introducing a quote I found in there, in an article about A.J. Liebling (famed New Yorker writer): "Cynicism is often the shamefaced product of inexperience."
I was having a discussion with some friends the other night, wondering if I'm growing conservative in my old age. One of them suggested that perhaps I'm "not conservative, just jaded." You know, too much water under the bridge, been there seen that, etc. etc. That may be the case, but I was struck by Liebling's assertion -- I believe I was much more cynical, or at least feigned cynicism, in my younger days, and now that I'm older, find myself more deeply touched by things in a way that can only be described as "Hallmark." I've grown mushy with age. How embarrassing.
Still, it seems that I've become somehow more human in the process. A tad less judgmental, a little more vulnerable. And maybe those are things that only come with age, and the courage (and experience) to put oneself out there. Cynicism is really just self-protection. Give me nostalgia, empathy, compassion any day.
11:55 PM
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Wednesday, May 05, 2004
Long promised, my PopMatters essay, "Can the Subaltern Sing? or Who's Ashamed of William Hung?" came out today. And it has received unsolicited comments already (!) from someone I don't even know: "I really think you have expressed what is happening better than anyone I've read so far." Yay.
9:42 AM
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