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November 19, 2007
Arts Ecology
Autumn is the time for endless conflicts over what to do and see. San Francisco is overrun with great shows and performances. I was blessed this past weekend with free tix to a couple of stellar shows, first Cirque de Soleil's latest show, Kooza., and then last night at the SF Jazz Festival we caught a fantastic set by Brazil's Caetano Veloso.
I'm actually not as wild about Cirque de Soleil as some folks are, but there's no question that they're a major step up from other circuses. I think it's mainly attributable to the fact that they have so much money, relative to other performance groups. If you ever wanted to peer into the methodology of today's "Arts Success," Cirque de Soleil must be the best place to look. There are corporate sponsors names on every exit of their fancy hi-tech tent/stage. There is an incredible mini-mall of merchandise, from show-related schwag to well-designed, comfortable good looking clothing. There are music CDs, video DVDs, masks, puppets, bags, coffee mugs, kitchen goods, you name it. You can't approach the actual tent for the performance without passing through the merch tent first.
The costumes and staging of the show are truly impressive. The circus performances are sometimes mind-boggling, other times just kind of so-so. Early on I was dismayed at what I experienced as hokey when the big pageantry opening was underway. But I got over it as the show's real talent began showing up; the first half's highlight was the three Mystic Pixies, contortionists who apparently hail from our local School of Circus Arts. Fantastic costumes and gumby-like flexibility! The second half of the show had a number of jugglers and acrobats, but the highlight was two guys running on a huge device that has two stationery circular rat cages held together by an elaborate structure of cross beams. They manipulate the whole thing into spinning around like a ferris wheel on speed, while they jump in and out and around the whole apparatus. It's breathtaking and zany and great!...
Caetano Veloso was awesome. The acoustics at the Nob Hill Masonic Auditorium are superior and his "Band of Sin" was a tight three-piece rock band, clearly fantastic musicians (and very young, apparently friends of his son's) and capable of almost anything. Caetano's charisma and stage presence were completely charming, his voice just a treat, and the 100-minute+ set was full of old and new tunes. Enough Brasileiros were there to give him a good chorus when he wanted sing-alongs, and he was kind enough to speak in English (quite well) from the stage to help everyone understand the music better. And to tell some of his stories, at least obliquely, about his political life in Brazil... it was one of those moments when you realize this guy is in his 60s and won't be touring forever. So we caught him while still very much at his peak of creative beauty, lucky us!
It's interesting to go to these shows where the individual tickets are well in excess of $50 each, and then compare the experience to the shows that are local, much less expensive, but if not just as good in their own ways, maybe even better. Case in point: We saw the Living Word Project's Scourge before it closed on November 15 (it was already being resuscitated by ODC here in the Mission before getting mothballed after a year-long tour). Marc Bamuthi Joseph is the creative director of the Living Word Project and he is just an astonishing talent. Scourge is about Haiti, about being Haitian in the U.S., about race and class, about blackness, whiteness, and so much more. And it's done with dance, music, stunning oratory, bring real history to life in many dimensions at once. I'm sorry this show isn't running indefinitely somewhere so I could send everyone to see it. I haven't enjoyed a show more than Scourge in as long as I can remember.
Then, moving down to the smallest niche in the ecology of the arts scene we find the show I saw in Brooklyn at 123 Tompkins, a show of spoken word, rap, and good ol' poetry. These niches survive because art must be made, not necessarily because it gets paid. The exuberance and passion I saw at 123 Tompkins was not less than I saw at the Living Word show, and might even be more than I saw in the Cirque de Soleil show (though it's hard to compare, to be honest, and maybe pointless to try). The real difference between these different ecological niches in the arts world, beyond the obvious economic ones, are that the progression upwards tends to be based on experience and greater professional polish... but then Scourge was really as crisp and professional as anything I've ever seen...
On a similar scale last night at CounterPULSE there was a release party for the new issue of Other Magazine. There was a whole line-up of singers and poets and speakers but I'm afraid I missed it all, buried in the back office printing out a draft of my almost finished book. But I did get a copy of the new issue on "Dead Magazines" where I actually helped answer a questionnaire about local San Francisco magazines that have gone belly-up in the past decade or so (I was answering on behalf of Processed World, of course). It made me very glad that Other decided to pay attention to some of the publications that preceded them, since from an ecological and creative point of view, our small publishing efforts always depend on the folks who set the stage for us, who came before and blazed the trails, or fell into the pitfalls to save us from the same problem(s)... hopefully! So I wish Other a long and glorious life. They already have an impressive body of work and it just keeps getting better. I'm glad someone is carrying the torch for small, indy, radical, edgy magazines around here....
I want to plug, while I'm doing this survey of recent cultural consumption, the amazing movie "Terror's Advocate" about the French (half Algerian, half Reunion Islander) attorney Jacques Vergès. He's a fascinating and rather creepy character, who first gains fame defending Algerian freedom-fighters (and marrying one of the most famous female bombers), then eventually "disappearing" for 8 years, and then reappearing to carry on his lawyering on behalf of Palestinians, African dictators, and all sorts of unusual and mostly shady characters. You can't help but revisit a great deal of recent history while watching this film and really confronting a lot of your own assumptions and expectations...
I don't have any hard and fast conclusions to draw from this. Just to note that great art is happening in many places all the time, mostly unpaid and unrecognized. But then some of the big-name, big-money stuff is really pretty fantastic too, and you can see how someone like Caetano Veloso is a beloved national treasure in Brazil, and pretty widely revered here and internationally... It's a great pleasure to live in a city that holds so much talent, and is visited regularly by the world's top performers (and interesting movies galore!).
Posted by ccarlsson at 10:04 PM | Comments (0)
November 16, 2007
Precarious Urbanity, Linear History
Back in beautiful San Francisco, where it somehow turned back into summer while I was away. Balmy warm weather the past few days, yum! My week in New York was really interesting for lots of reasons, but one that has really stuck with me is the utter precariousness of the urban fabric. I was lugging my bags through the NYC subway, first the G line which looks like someone forgot it exists, then the L, which had a creek running down the middle of the tracks, and finally the A to JFK which was just my usual experience of the subway there. When I'm standing on a subway platform gazing at the crumbling iron beams or grimy track beds, especially with water dripping everywhere, I marvel that it all keeps going. Add to that the aging water system, the potholed roads, the overheated crappy buildings in the midst of too cold weather... it's a wonder that the city doesn't just collapse. Riding around NYC on bike, gazing from bridges at the endless sprawl of highrises and cityscape, there's something mind-boggling and incomprehensible about all the human effort and just-barely-holding-on-ness that keeps the place running.
I've been reading Alan Weisman's The World Without Us, which is a great book. He writes really well, breezily even, which is odd for a book that takes as its central pretense that all humans have vanished from one day to the next (rapture anyone?) and now he's trying to see how nature and planetary ecology quickly or slowly recapture the artifacts and environments created by humans... from vast monumental architecture to centuries-old fields of cultivated crops, most of it goes really fast. He brings in a lot of good journalistic investigation, talking with scientists and technicians who know a lot about how things work and what it takes to keep it all going, from oil refineries and nuclear plants to agriculture and water systems. He also goes way back in geologic and paleolithic history to compare processes of succession at different periods with our own. From an historical point of view, this book is brilliant at reframing things in much longer terms...
I've been teaching a class in San Francisco history at New College this semester, which is terribly ironic if you know my own long disdain for college and mainstream history, but regardless, it has forced me to re-read a lot of good local history, and reconnect to the cycles that tangibly shape San Francisco's history. The ebb and flow of class struggle is one, real estate speculation and development and its occasional crash is another, and after 150+ years of urban life here, we are starting to see a re-emergence of natural systems that define longer term cycles that far exceed our limited sense of time.
I've been a bit frustrated at how much time I've had to spend reading things I already know, but I still manage to squeeze in other stuff. Peter Matthiessen's article in the latest NY Review of Books on whales, oil and the Inupiat-American life along the melting shores of Alaska is a good window on the climate change story as it relates to the oil industry's rapacious expansion in the Arctic. But the ancient cultures of that region are undergoing shock treatment themselves, as their age-old relationship to large mammals is finally being destroyed by underwater sonar exploration and the receding icepack which is altering migration patterns. Another good read I picked up in New York from my friends at Autonomedia is the annual Sarai Reader, this one #6 on "Turbulence". Francesca was repairing the carrying bag for my folding bike while I read her this article called "Remembering Communism: The Experience of Political Defeat" by Philip Bounds. I'm posting a lengthy excerpt here because I found it quite a lovely passage about time and revolution (though I don't share the author's enthusiasm for the role of contemporary Marxists in social-democratic countries' politics):
Having squared their consciences with the grim realities of recent history (and having convinced themselves that the ’socialist experiment’ was not entirely a waste of time), to what extent have Marxists been able to sustain their faith in Marxism? There is no simple answer to that question. At one extreme there has clearly been a haemorrhaging of the revolutionary left over the last 20 years. Thousands of people for whom Marxism was once a ruling passion have torn up their party cards, made their peace with the market and rued their youthful infatuation with the siren voices of utopia. These are precisely the sort of people to whom the postmodern theorists have drawn our attention disillusioned, apolitical, despairing of human nature.At the opposite extreme, even in countries where Stalinism did its worst, there is still a substantial core of loyalists who insist (or pray) that socialism’s moment has not yet passed. Chastened by their failure to perform the "vanguard" role which Lenin assigned to them, Marxist parties still make an important and largely beneficial contribution to local and national governments in countries as disparate as India, Germany, France and Iraq. Some have even adapted themselves to the emergence of the so-called anti-globalisation movement, supplying an element of theoretical rigour and organisational skill which younger activists have not yet developed. The world is a better place as a result of it.
Yet the truly interesting people are neither the believers nor the disbelievers (the stubborn revolutionaries and the cynical reactionaries, so to speak) but those who come somewhere in the middle--the scores of men and women who retain a yearning for Enlightenment values but no longer call themselves Marxists. The most poignant representatives of this group are those who wallow in a spirit of remembered political passion. Their defining characteristic is a sort of bittersweet yearning for the political certainties of their youth, combined with the melancholic realisation that they can never be recaptured. Like William Wordsworth in early middle age (tearfully affirming that "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive" even as his faith in the French Revolution crumbled), they can be moved beyond reason by the memory of a strike, an eloquent speech or a long-forgotten comrade, only to find themselves snapped back to reality by the high winds of postmodern cynicism.
There is an extremely affecting example of all this in Wolf Biermann’s great essay "Shaking Hands with the Zeitgest " (1992), which describes what happened when Biermann was introduced to Mikhail Gorbachev at a reception in Hamburg in the early 1990s. In spite of the fact that he had not called himself a Marxist in many years (not least because the ruling Socialist Unity Party had expelled him from East Germany for dissident activities), Biermann could only think of one thing to say when Gorbachev stood before him: "I am a Communist". For some moments an electric current of political nostalgia passed between the two men, enough to induce a "romantic revolutionary spasm" in both their bodies. But Biermann’s whole point was that the mood could not last. As Gorbachev shook his hand, "he squeezed meaningfully and tragically, communicating what we both know very well: it doesn’t matter any more"(16). For anyone who fell under the spell of the Marxist left and lived to see the socialist countries collapse, there is something almost painfully moving about the last two sentences of Biermann’s essay: "So we stood there, two survivors by the open grave of a fixed idea. Then we went on our way"(17).
But it would be wrong to end on such an agonistic note. Chronic nostalgics like Biermann should not simply be dismissed as the casualties of a shattered utopian dream. In a curious way, even as they reconcile themselves to a life without political hope, they continue to resist some of the modern world’s most disabling illusions. As has often been pointed out, not least by the great Marxist critic John Berger, nothing has been a greater source of psychological anguish over the last two centuries than our strictly linear conception of time. At some point in the early 19th century, largely because of the rapid and cataclysmic changes which industrial capitalism brought in its wake, men and women began to behave as if time consists of a series of discrete moments which disappear forever as soon as they pass. The prevailing assumption is that all of us have been liberated from the enormous weight of history; and that each set of circumstances is eventually cancelled out by the events that succeed it, leaving no traces in the sands of time. However, as Berger has repeatedly argued, this unquestioned emphasis on linearity leaves far too much out. By emphasising the pristine newness of every moment we experience, we have begun to lose the sense that the human personality is defined as much by "ineluctable" and "continuous" events and dispositions as by the realities of social change. Blinded by neophilia, we compromise our understanding of "birth, sexual attraction, social cooperation, death"(18).
Moreover, there is an obvious sense in which the modern idea of time deprives us of the crucial experience of "timelessness". If human beings are to enjoy any measure of happiness, or so Berger implied, they must somehow believe that their most important experiences, values and relationships are destined to last. No one can thrive on the assumption that every change of circumstances casts him adrift from his past. The great problem with the modern age is that it has no language in which to talk of such things:
The 19th-century discovery of history as the terrain of human freedom deposited the continuous within the flow of history i.e., the continuous was that which had a longer duration than the ephemeral. Previously, the continuous was thought of as the unchanging or timeless existing outside the flow of history.(19)The virtue of the post-Marxist nostalgics is that their whole way of life is an affront to linearity. Nearly all of them seem to live in two periods of history at the same time. Acutely aware of the bleakness of the modern age, the very texture of their experience seems to hark back to a lost world--a world of endless meetings in draughty halls, intensive study of dog-eared ’Marxist classics’, impassioned conversations in city streets, awestruck obeisance before the power of the working class.(20) It is impossible to read a page of their work without experiencing the past as a living force, reaching down into the present and providing a residue of remembered hope. Even as they withdraw from politics and retreat into their memories, men like Biermann remind us of the overwhelming power of our revolutionary traditions. It is an irony which Marx himself would surely have appreciated.
(The Sarai Reader is a remarkable journal publishing in New Delhi, India. I have them all, which you can get from Autonomedia, but the contents are all online too at their website that I linked to above.)
Living during our long, surprisingly slow decline in America, it's easy to lose sight of the larger historic dynamics unfolding unless you make an effort to seek out sources for such perspectives. I still like Asia Times as a daily news source, in large part because they so often publish intelligent, long essays that put things in historic perspective, see global events without the narrow blinkers of U.S. pundits (even pwogwessives in the U.S. tend to ignore or remain blind to global processes that exceed the self-regard of Americans).
It must also be noted that there are historic developments unfolding right in front of us here all the time too. These days there's a nearly year-long sit-in occupying some oak trees at UC Berkeley. The university has now enclosed the protesters inside two fences, gotten a court order to end the protest, and just yesterday a solidarity rally that marched to it led to several arrests. By coincidence I was attending a lecture on campus (by Jean Pfaelzer on her excellent new history about anti-Chinese violence in the western U.S. Driven Out) and took a stroll over to the protest perimeter afterwards. Here's a couple of photos:
This protest, which resembles some of the direct action in the redwood trees of northern California over the past decades, as well as the anti-roads movement in the UK, has a simple goal of deterring the university from ripping down some old oak trees to build an athletic facility (this spot happens to be a stone's throw from the Hayward Fault, which runs beneath the nearby Memorial Stadium and perpetually threatens a number of radiological sites on campus). While this has been going on, the University has signed a heinous deal with the oil giant BP to accept a half billion dollars in exchange for allowing BP to have its own private lab on campus, to do research into GMO biofuels, and to own the results of the use of this public facility. (This deal is a harbinger of much more to come, thanks to Senator Dianne "Bush's most reliable Democrat" Feinstein and her husband, UC Regent and war profiteer Richard Blum.)
Well, I guess I'm now offically rambling beyond any reasonable length... if you read this far, you must really be bored at work! I'll stop now, but for the sake of a Nowtopian conclusion, I'll throw up some images of the new 9th Avenue sidepath in NYC for bicycles:
I had a bunch of photos of more NYC graffiti too, including a mural of street writers, but I'll save it for another time...
Posted by ccarlsson at 11:35 AM | Comments (1)
November 10, 2007
Now Playing in New York!
I'm in New York visiting my lovely daughter, Francesca, and having a fun time all around. I came with a new folding bicycle (downtube) that I picked up so I could arrive and head straight over the Williamsburg Bridge with F. to her class at CUNY Grad Center in midtown Manhattan. I took a red-eye flight on Jetblue which was ok, but therefore I only slept about 2 hours before arriving at 4:30 a.m. PST (7:30 here). It took me the airtrain and 3 subways to get to Francesca's place in Bedford-Stuyvesant at Myrtle/Willoughby... and nearly 2 hours too... still I arrived in plenty of time (though the bag Downtube sold me extra to carry the bike in came perilously close to losing its carry straps, now repaired by Francesca).
We went to her class on "Environmental Psychology" (?) and entered a great discussion on one of my favorite topics, public space. I was really impressed with the tenor of the class, the diversity of the 20+ students (from all over the place: Jamaica, India, Costa Rica, Boston, Portland, SF, Hungary, Italy... and more), and the intelligence of the conversation. I piped up of course, bringing up the recurrent problem of discussing public space as though it were primarily an architecture problem, rather than a problem of how we live, what kind of public lives do we have anyway, etc.? I was well received, in fact, the woman from Hungary was a big Critical Mass organizer there, so she was very surprised that I popped up in her class as the father of one of her co-students... funny!
Anyway, here's a shot of me and Francesca on the Williamsburg bridge and also one of me with a partial view of my new folding bike:
On Thursday we hung around Brooklyn, went to the Park Slope co-op (where I had to get a guest pass to even visit the place... strange) and made a big chicken dinner with her very cool housemates, drank a lot of wine, and had also as guests two of Francesca's new pals from a new social center two blocks away called 123. F is volunteering there on Thursdays when they have an afterschool program for local kids (the place has only been open since September and it's already quite the hit with locals). 123 (Tompkins, off Myrtle in Brooklyn) is co-rented by a bike co-op in the basement, much like other bike co-ops everywhere in N. America now, a DIY facility to make or repair your own bike; also the local Anarchist Black Cross (!) who is conducting some kind of prisoner letter writing program; some overlapping Freegans, and then the youth programming that F is working with.
In fact, tonight we went to a whole spoken word evening there, quite impressive. My faves were a Nuyorican poet who calls himself Ol Soul... here's a slightly blurry view of him.
Coupla other guys I really liked were a fella going by the moniker Khalil Khan who did an awesome piece he called "Working Class Blues", and a super articulate, very self-possessed poet named Justin Woo, who had a whole passle of good words--he's in the midst of writing 100 poems in 100 days so if you check out his myspace link there, you can find out more about that...
We had a fun day today before this evening's impressive show. We got going around midday from Brooklyn, happily under gray but not raining skies (last night I got thoroughly soaked bicycling across Brooklyn to see old pal Chris W at Prospect Park SW, at least 2 miles from here), and took a circuitous route up through Queens to the Queensborough Bridge on our way to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There's an exhibit of Lorenzo Ghiberti's "Gates of Paradise" that we wanted to see, which was ok, though far from overwhelming. But we discovered there an exhibit called "Impressed by Light" about British paper negative photography in the mid-19th century that was really great. At another part of the photography in the Met we found this odd set of images of water towers which I found somehow compelling:
After the crosstown bike ride and a couple of hours at the museum we made our way to Cafe Sabarsky but it was so crowded we went downstairs to the companion facility that has the same food without the old wooden atmosphere... I got this photo of Francesca's new haircut over lunch!
After that we had a nice ride through Central Park during the golden light of late afternoon
and not long after that we were passing by Herald Square where the following photo of Francesca riding on a tiny one-block dedicated bike lane was taken.
Much as the NYC police have been completely out of control attacking Critical Mass here, it's an odd truth that at the same time the city has been putting in bike lanes all over the place. Way more than you'd find in San Francisco (of course NYC is way bigger and has way more of everything than SF), and though I detest the stupidity of white stripe bike lanes that barely alter the streetscape, they are often an improvement over nothing at all. On many big streets in Brooklyn, especially, I've been glad to find lanes painted for my cycling comfort. I understand NYC is putting in a dedicated sidepath, separated from traffic like the photo above, along 9th Avenue for a good stretch. That'll be great. Why can't San Francisco do that, given our huge number of daily cyclists and dire need for safer road conditions?... hmmmmm?...
After an obligatory stop at the Strand bookstore (I found a book on NYC riots 1712-1875!) we hopped across the street to catch the new Robert Redford film Lions for Lambs... omigod! it's awful! Watch out! Stay away! stay away!... We almost walked out several times as the bombastic music soared, the flags flew, the insipid earnestness of the unbelievably stiff dialogue fell like boulders on our ears... and to top it all off the movie makes no sense, it starts several potentially interesting plot lines and finishes only one, and that only partially. Mostly it's a tedious 100 minutes of hearing the same old platitudes about the war uttered by the up-n-coming Republican senator (Tom Cruise playing Gavin Newsom) to a career-weary, sold out journalist (Meryl Streep playing some weird combined version of Judith Miller and Barbara Walters) who can only nod and sputter the occasional vague objection, but finally plays her role as an insider journalist in spite of it causing her a mild moral crisis. Meanwhile on the west coast, Robert Redford playing an earnestly liberal professor at an unnamed college is having a 7:30 a.m. session with a bored student he has decided "has potential"... to make his case to the student that he should resume his motivated behavior in his classroom and to go well beyond the classroom into public life, Redford uses the example of two guys who were students of his earlier, a black guy and a latino guy, best buddies, who after engaging in a completely implausible class debate with an incoherent, badly presented argument, announce that they've enlisted so they can go where history is being made... intending to come back as a black and latino war veterans with credibility and re-enter college on Uncle Sam's nickel... the earnest naivete of their portrayal is juxtaposed to their being stranded on a snowy mountaintop in Afghanistan after the Senator's "new strategy" has already failed in the teeth of the local resistance... much ado is being made about the effort to rescue them, predator drone video is being piped into a command center both in Bagram and at the Pentagon, but they're finally wiped out by the guerrillas, only after running out of ammo and standing up in driving snow to face their fate... ick! The whole thing is just so patently absurd and frustrating...
You could say this is a great example of an earnest Hollywood liberal (Redford, who produced it) showing just how confused and clueless he is about this war. He does clearly want to make the antiwar argument, that politician's egos are sending soldiers to their deaths, but he also wants to reinforce the stupidity that there is something noble about serving American empire... ack...
ok, well, it's late at night and I'm enjoying a short NY vacation. It got me going again on the blog, so hopefully I'll be able to re-establish some kind of weekly rhythm...
On a last note, here's an image from the ground on the Williamsburg Bridge. Of course New York is full of tons of graffiti, and occasionally a good stencil on the ground, but not nearly as artistic as what we're seeing these days in SF.... anyway, here's the trees, no forest to be found!
Posted by ccarlsson at 08:36 PM | Comments (4)