Colin Marshall

"Chiki" is code for "sex"

Susie van der Meer strikes me as an underappreciated recording artist. "Susie van der zuh?", you might ask. Exactly. A German (though an Anglophone vocalist), she's evidently so obscure in North American that her English-language Wikipedia page is a stub and an orphan, which, I hardly need tell you, are two highly demoralizing pieces of Wikipedian terminology.

The page links to her official site, whose interesting parts are all in German and thus not of much use to a citizen of God's America. Luckily, this being 2009, Google Translate can cast light, of a sort, on her bio:

recall: 1997 Susie van der Meer for a season such a great success with their debut album called "Static Warp Bubble" (the one nasty shrinking universe of Star Trek was the world) that their then-record company soon consider was to have to deal with a new girl wonder. That was six years ago. Van der Meer would throw her band, will play tight dress and Vortänzerin. Fuck you.

Who was the last conscious pitched a career? In a country where every day is presented to us that success is worth even the betrayal of ideals, Susie van der Meer chose to retreat into her apartment in Berlin Kreuzberg, in a stereo system is - and what are CDs from TalkTalk and Massive Attack piled by Tricky, The Velvet Underground and PJ Harvey. She worked with various musicians on the soundtrack of "Run Lola Run", "Meschugge" and "Night at the Park." And together with their two comrades, arrangers, producers, brothers in spirit and co-authors Ben Lauber and Moses Schneider (including producer of surrogate Your Ear, Paula and many others), they shuttled between Kreuzberg and New York, because there had been Schneider, together with an American Friend have an offshoot of the "Transporter Room" studios open to what others worked The Strokes on their debut album. Above all, however, took Susie van der Meer, with Schneider and Lauber dozens of songs in many more states of aggregation on.

(Hey, still beats Babelfish.)

So if she's so unknown, how could I have come upon her? As you've probably guessed, German film had something to do with it. After watching Tom Tykwer's Run Lola Run, I decided, like many other viewers, that I had to have the soundtrack. (Rarely does a modern film cooperate with its music quite so effectively.) Given my age and location at the time, this necessitated hopping on by bike, pedaling for no fewer than 45 minutes and hoping the local Borders or the one indie music store in Redmond stocked it. (The latter came through.)

Wedged in between mixes five and 17 of the "I wish I were a hunter, in search of different food" song comes van der Meer's "Somebody Has to Pay":



This track, if memory serves — which it might not, since I last saw the movie over a decade ago — bridges the final shot and the credits. Though it wasn't particularly conspicuous in the picture, it jumped out as the best thing on the disc, perhaps due to its stylistic difference from the rest of it. I listened to it every single say of ninth grade's second and third trimesters, such was my enthusiasm.

You'd think I would have pursued collecting her stuff more aggressively, but yet, eleven-ish years down the line, I only know her work to the extent that I've found songs floating around the net. Until very recently, even YouTube didn't have "Somebody Has to Pay". Now it's got that and her new single, "Gravity":



I've never heard any other singer-songwriters (or whatever the title is) who sound quite like her, much less lady ones. To better place this in the context of personal taste, it's damn rare that I gravitate, as it were, to female vocalists. Usually, unless you're a louche Englishman or a bunch of similarly-dressed black guys, I won't get too excited by your singing. (I do make an exception for semi-reclusive Swedish disco revivalist Sally Shapiro, who sounds as if she stepped straight from the clamshell into the recording studio. But then again, I would go for that.) A lot of the womenfolk who take the mic affect an unconvincing sexiness, which squicks me. Susie van der Meer has something else; her distinctive delivery and the production that surrounds it sound singularly well-suited to one another.

She's got an interesting look, too, which I no doubt overvalue. Her avaliable photos, of which there aren't many, reveal an appearance not displeasing but somehow unconventional in a way I can't quite pin down. Maybe it's an angularity thing, although mode of dress certainly has something to do with. These images take moderate pains to divert attention what appears to be a crooked nose, but I say that's a genuine, all-too-rare source of aesthetic interestingness, not something to be hidden.

The entire package is reason enough to don a pair of hip waders and visit MySpace, where van der Meer has a page with several playable songs. You'll also get an object lesson in why I consider MySpace a throbbing apocalypse of incompetent self-promotion: somebody's embedded a dumb-ass advertisement for their EP in the comments section, which plays automatically. You'll want to swoop down and shut it off before listening to anything. I especially like "Found You" and "Chiki". I suspect that "Chiki" is code for "sex."

The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project: 24. Francis Alÿs' The Politics of Rehearsal (a.k.a. Ensayo 2) (2005)

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The Politics of Rehearsal (a.k.a. Ensayo 2). 29:55 min., b&w, 2005. By Francis Alÿs collaborating with Rafael Ortega:

The Politics of Rehearsal is a metaphor of Latin America's ambigous affair with Modernity, forever arousing, yet always delaying the moment it will happen.

What is it with European artists and Latin America? So many of them seem to be at least deeply fascinated by the region, if not enamored with it, if not total fetishists of it. From the work I've seen, Francis Alÿs doesn't seem to be too much worse about this than the average Latin America-loving Euro-artist; I doubt he showers behind a curtain emblazoned with the face of Che. But it must be said that a full 100 percent of his videos on Ubuweb — that's two, count 'em, two pieces — revolve around the place.

This installment of The Politics of Rehearsal, the second of three "ensayos" — that's "essays," for you non-Hispanophones — grapples with the vexed relationship between Latin America and modernization. It does this in metaphor — Alÿs seems fond of metaphors — by representing the elusive lure of full, first-world development with a dancer rehearsing a striptease.

It's not as if this is made oblique. The Ubuweb page description quoted above isn't just the Ubuweb page description; it actually appears onscreen, verbatim, during the piece. For just about its entire runtime after a clip of Harry Truman's inauguration speech, a narrator, though one who sounds like the dominant half of a conversation whose other participant is unheard, makes a series of pronouncements about Latin American modernization and how it's like a striptease. No danger of missing the point here, unless this is all a smokescreen for the "real" thrust.

As the voice heard off lectures, we watch the dancer, a pianist, a woman who's probably a director of some kind and, at one point, possibly Alÿs himself. They practice, fine-tune and discuss their allegorical show in a dramatically-lit black-and-white space. The attention naturally goes straight to the dancer, who's the focus of most every shot. She's also the reason I couldn't write this post at the coffee shop, as I'd originally intended. This isn't the evocation of a striptease; it's a genuine striptease, start to finish. (I watched it publicly as long as I could, but we're into nipple territory by 21:58.)

By presenting a stripper who, at least at this streaming resolution, looks genuinely attractive, the ensayo stretches credibility. Credited as "Bella Yao", she's got an intriguing Asiatic look — Merriam-Webster tells me that term "Asiatic" is "sometimes offensive," but I don't buy it — that I didn't expect. But hey, maybe modernization, prosperity, joining up with the first world and all that is a more alluring prospect than the typical hopeless crackhead lolling around a pole. Then again, Ms. Yao clomps around in standard-issue clunky lucite heels (though she removes them off for a couple minutes in the middle) and appears to have a tramp stamp. It's a small one, though.

It's genuinely, entertainingly bizarre to hear some dude intone about "the definition of the temporal," "the structure of temporality" and "the paradox of praxis" while this Asian girl takes it off, puts it back on, and takes it off again. I'm not sure if it's supposed to be as humorous as I found it. Whether or not where the viewer's attention goes speaks volumes about them, I can't say that I've ever seen the intriguing and the deadening framed together so starkly.

One thing today

Gabe Audick asks:

If you could do one thing today — anything in the world — what would it be?

Ah, the classics — this one sits right up there with "What would you do if you were invisible?" That's easier to answer, though, since it's more limited: the specific condition of invisibility versus, uh, total omnipotence. Or does this question grant total omnipotence? It seems to me there are several ways to interpret the set "anything in the world" from which I can choose what to do. While I could break it down into infinitely many differently nuanced versions, I'll go with four today, for brevity's sake:

I have my current skills and resources, but no restrictions. This is the most conservative interpretation, but, in its way, also the most interesting. As Momus once wrote, "The most evocative fantasy is one with only the thinnest membrane between itself and reality; it gets its power from being eminently possible. From being a plan." Unfortunately, I don't know how well-equipped I am to make the most of this scenario. My current resources? Few. My current skills? Practically none. (Besides being a self-facilitating media node, I mean.)

So the question's premise comes down to a grand blow-off of every obligation, deadline and schedule item hovering over me. The obvious substitute for all that junk would be a day-long orgy — wait for the rest of the sentence, now — of making and experiencing interesting things. To prime the pump, I'd watch the most interesting film at hand, which I guess would be Hsiao-hsien Hou's Three Times. I've long wanted to see it but, absent a convincing reason to bump something else from my to-do list in its favor, haven't done so. Plus, I could call it right up on Netflix Instant. Then, a Kobo Abe novel. Probably Secret Rendezvous. Maybe I'd write an essay comparing those two highly uncomparable pieces of culture.

While I'd need to be home for a few hours were I to work on music stuff, it's out in the world for me to do anything else. (By which I mean "out in Santa Barbara," since I can't really go to another city except Carpinteria without violating the "today"-only element of the question.) I imagine that the most efficient strategy to maximize both interesting-thing-making and interesting-thing-experiencing would be to start a project that is the former but which requires the latter. I'd traipse forth with my camera and field recorder, collecting material for a series of experimental psychogeographical semi-documentaries I've been mentally formulating.

Except that Madelaine is out of town today and has my camera with her. DAMNABLE

I have unlimited skills, within the range of human ability. Oh, easy; I'd lay down some tracks. While I likely only have about three-quarters of the gear needed to produce a truly solid sound, I'm sure unlimited musical and technological skill could more or less compensate. And with that unlimited technological skill, I could craft a Myspace Music page that almost isn't hideous. (Okay, that's cheating; to create a non-hideous Myspace profile is to reach beyond mortal ken.) Hell, I could probably crank out an EP and have it on the web by the day's end. As I am, I'd be lucky to have a pre-pre-preliminary version of a song done in 24 hours. And I'd hate it.

I have unlimited (currently extant) resources. So, after I put the finishing touches on my kick-@$$ all-purpose home recording studio and stocked my armory of music and filmmaking gear, you mean? There can be no answer but to travel, as spontaneously and randomness-receptively as possible, in order to fire up my mind's awareness centers that lay dormant way too much of the time.

The question, alas, is where to go, now that the old spin-the-globe-and-put-down a-finger maneuver is cliché and therefore unacceptable. Though I would refuse passage to no country — and with unlimited resources, I'd get to 'em all sooner or later — I do maintain a preferential shortlist. Certainly buying my way onto the next flight to Seoul, for example, would help me get a handle on the language, and fast.

But at this moment, I'd probably take one bound for Reykjavík instead. The sort of music, art, film — culture of all sorts, really — coming out of Iceland these days tells me it's a place I need to check out post haste. Collaboration with some Icelander on something seems like the "right" thing to do. Naturally, while there, I would immediately begin work on an experimental psychogeographical semi-documentary there. And I'd write an essay or ten about it. Think of the material!

Total omnipotence. If underground comic books and avant-garde literature have taught me anything, it's that people who gain omnipotence always use it to do weird sex stuff, at least at first. When they burn out on that, the problems really begin. I have to believe that total omnipotence is like a dream: you can will whatever you want into reality, but none of it matters. Precisely because you're free to instantiate whatever you want, all of it's stripped of meaning.

Remember discovering the god-mode code for your favorite first-person shooter, and how awesome it seemed at first? Now remember how long you continued to play afterward. Running right up to those cacodemons and punching them out with impunity seemed really cool the first dozen times, but thereafter... what was the point? So much of life's interestingness comes, I'll posit, from finding clever ways around rules, conditions and obstacles; when you lift them, nothing feels interesting anymore.

This could be why pounding my skull against musical projects is interesting, or why trying to find a fresh approach to someone who's been interviewed a thousand times before is interesting, or why shooting experimental psychogeographical semi-documentaries with no planned outcome is interesting. It's all about working against limitations. I guess it's why, whenever I punched in the god-mode code, it wouldn't be long before I'd just start exploring to see if I could walk through any walls and find secret rooms. I'd simply look for another boundary to push against — literally, in this case.

If I recall correctly, Adam Cadre implemented a feature in I-0, his debut work of interactive fiction, which allowed the player to win simply by typing "WIN". This victory came in nothing more than a line of text declaring that the player had won, but still, a victory's a victory. The message is clear: what's the result of success without the process of succeeding? By the same token, I have little interest in pushing a button labeled "YOU CAN BECOME THE GREATEST INTERVIEWER WHO HAS EVER LIVED BY PRESSING THIS BUTTON". Where's the challenge? Where's the fun? Unless, of course, I can figure out a way to use my no doubt high platform as the greatest interviewer who has ever lived to pull ridiculous public stunts...

So my answer is that, granted total omnipotence today, I'd spend the day desperately seeking the boundaries of that omnipotence. But that doesn't make much sense, does it? No wonder Dr. Manhattan looks so bored. Maybe he should try shooting some experimental psychogeographical documentaries.

What I can tell you about interviewing after conducting, editing and broadcasting 100 of them

This week's Marketplace of Ideas, a conversation about the arrow of time with theoretical physicist Sean Carroll, marks the program's 100th interview. Despite that it doesn't quite translate to my having done exactly 100 interviews — some recordings never made the air, and I've interviewed a bunch for other fora — ostensibly nice, round numbers give me pause for reflection. What, after One Hundred Whole Interviews, have I learned about one of my primary crafts?

The lessons I can explain follow. I have no reason to believe they apply only to those conducting weekly 55-minute-ish conversations on public radio. You might well adapt them profitably to other journalistic situations, documentary filmmaking (another interest of mine), interviews of the to-get-a-real-job variety, or even regular old casual interpersonal exchanges. In fact, the more alien the domain to which you bring them, the happier I'll be. Go on, leave a comment about it.

Naturally, I could draw the exact opposite conclusions from all these by interview number 200, but here goes anyway:

Don't write questions. If conventional journalism has taught me anything — and it hasn't — it's to lead counterintuitive, so here's your counterintuition. I, as did every super-novice interviewer except maybe Michael Silverblatt, started out by scripting elaborate sheets of questions ahead of time. This is death. Work from a question sheet, and you kill any chance of organic exchange, of real, vital intellectual back-and-forth. You just tick off the boxes and grind awkwardly forth. Which leads me right into my next point, which should probably be a subpoint of this one...

Interviews are not conversations — conversations are objectively better. As Jack Paar told Dick Cavett, "Kid, don’t do interviews. That’s clipboards, and David Frost, and what’s your pet peeve and favorite movie. Make it a conversation." I once thought of this as a dichotomy between two equal and opposite hosting strategies. In the "facilitated speech," the host's goal is simply to elicit maximally interesting and detailed responses from the guest, minimizing their own presence. In the "conversation," the host both contributes and seeks contribution, potentially even mirroring the guest's role.

I still regard those strategies as opposite, but they sure ain't equal. Perhaps this is an undiplomatic claim to make, but conversations are just better, always and absolutely, than formal, traditionally-conceived interviews. Those strike me as nothing more than hokey by-products of such journalistic rigidities as twitch time limits and miniscule word counts. Planned, borderline-rehearsed simulacra of conversations aren't conversations at all. They can't wander into the unexpected, exciting places genuine conversations do, nor can they hope to arrive at the the surprising, fascinating conclusions genuine conversations do.

We know from everyday experience that doing conversation means sometimes leading, and sometimes being led. Hence the need, even in broadcast situations, to be prepared to...

Follow your guest. Because some broadcasters don't quite grok this, I'm forced to enshrine it as a separate point. This isn't to say that you should follow your guest all the time — certainly you'll want to show the way into promising intellectual territory now and then — but if he seems interested in and enthusiastic about discussing a certain subject, fall in line. It doesn't matter if you hadn't intended to talk about it. It doesn't matter if it doesn't keep with the interview's "theme." It doesn't matter if you don't know anything about it. (After all, you can learn from the guest, then and there.) Scrap your plan and follow.

Everything is interesting, properly approached, properly thought about, properly framed, properly discussed. I don't care if your guest wants to talk about their puppy. If they're that consumed with the puppy, there's something interesting about the puppy. It's not your job to steer him away from the puppy; it's your job to find the best angle from which to ask about the puppy, to...

Follow up. I don't remember where I first heard this, but it's become an old interviewer's saw: if a guest says, "And then I killed my entire family and buried them in the back yard," your next question should not be, "So where did you go to high school?" Ideally, everything you ask should flow smoothly from what the guest just said. I realize this isn't always easy; sometimes you've just got to jump the tracks. But if the subject has to change, far better to run with something your guest happened to bring up than to throw the switch yourself.

As elementary-school as this sounds, don't forget to ask your guest for real-world examples. I myself could use some improvement here; I've been complacent about letting abstractions and generalizations slide. It can feel a tad harsh to prod someone with the kind of responses that draw out examples — "Like what?", "Such as?" — and it's especially difficult for someone like me, who hates putting people on the spot, but the concrete provides much richer conversational material.

There's one follow-up technique I like very much, which I've come to call "The Old Distill-and-Expand." When a guest finishes answering a question, I sometimes try to summarize and clarify their answer back to them, asking if I've got it right. The trick to make this more interesting is to take this summary a step further, to extrapolate from it, to make a guess about its implications and see how the guest responds. This routinely gets me pretty compelling material.

Research indirectly by immersing yourself in the subject's world. Reading the guest's book, watching their movie or listening to their album is only step one. (And you'd be astonished how many interviewers don't reach step one.) Use other books, other movies, other music and the awesome power of the internet to get into and absorb the world around the subject, the culture they call home. Check out their other interviews. Look into their influences. Research people around the guest — geographically, intellectually, spiritually — as if you were going to interview them as well.

Only ask questions you're genuinely curious to hear answered. It so comes through when an interviewer asks a question for no better reason than that they assume it "should" be asked. If you don't actually care about the answer to a question, if you're not actually excited to know how the guest will respond, then for the love of YHWH, do not ask it.

(Were I given to dopier names, I would possibly have called this point "Curiosity, curiosity, curiosity," "Keep it curious" or "It's the curiosity, stupid!")

This speaks to a much greater divide that bears on every art form, every craft — probably every pursuit. Are you creating your work because you honestly find it cool, or because you're laboring under the notion that "people" will like it? This fumbly guesswork about the taste of some abstract audience has produced humanity's stupidest, least valuable art. Ditch the "people"-pleasing and make what you like.

The ideal question is askable of no one else, by no one else. And I emphasize the word ideal; most questions won't fit these criteria. While it's theoretically a trivial matter to ask your guest a question only he can answer — get into the specifics of his book, say, or an unusual event in his life — you'll find it's still done with shocking rarity, at least in the mainstream media. Pose a question that could be asked of anyone, "How did you get this idea?" being the most dishearteningly common, and you might as well wave a red flag signaling to the guest that he's in the hands of an idiot.

The "by no one else" part is more neglected, and thus more important. Though some will no doubt challenge me, I think it separates the great interviewers from the mediocre. Nearly every time I watch my favorite interviewers in action — your Roses, your Thorns, your Silverblatts — I think, "Man, only he would have asked that!" I sometimes even think, "Man, only he could have asked that!", which is truly nxtlvl.

Upshot: if you want to interview and you don't have a personality, get one. If you want to interview and you're unwilling to expose your personality, get over yourself. You'll ultimately find you have to...

Reveal your ignorance. Hey, it beats the alternative. There's no shame in not knowing what your guest is talking about; if you don't, chances are a lot of your audience doesn't either. I rarely cringe so sourly as when I'm listening to an interview and it becomes obvious that the host is bluffing his was through something for which he neglected to prepare. I'm not about non-preparation; by all means, prepare as much as possible. But you can't know about everything in heaven and Earth.

Besides, you're in this game to develop, aren't you? Nothing impedes learning, improvement and evolution as much as pretending you already know, have fully improved and are perfectly evolved. Let's not even get into the embarrassment of realizing that you're a thousand steps up your wobbly Jenga tower of half-truths, guesses and elisions with no safe way down in sight.

Get to the human. And get past the boilerplate. The boilerplate is your enemy. If you're talking to a media veteran, someone who's been interviewed countless times before, they will have boilerplate. Behind this boilerplate is a fascinating human being, so you'll need to get around it or punch straight through it to produce so much as a reasonably interesting conversation. Your only tools are your questions.

The most effective weapon is surprise. Some interviewers interpret this as an endorsement of "gotcha" questions, but man, few things are more tiresome than "gotcha" questions. (Need I invoke the wan spectacle of Terry Gross going on the attack when presented with a guest too far outside her own ideological realm?) I mean more the sort of surprise one feels when presented with an entirely different way to think about something familiar. It's the wonderful surprise produced by framing and approach, not the deadening surprise produced by the j'accuse.

Whenever possible, interface with your guest as a human being, with all the complications that entails, rather than as a mere vehicle for ideas. The danger here, of course, is that you might lose sight of the value of ideas and turn into StoryCorps. The trick, to the extent that I've figured it out so far, is to conduct ideas-oriented conversations on a human level. And not, you know, to make Eastern Europeans weep in a bus.

You can't have a worthwhile conversation in seven minutes. If some suit insists you have to, take your skills elsewhere.

Adaptation

Madelaine went on an Orson Welles kick not long ago, during which she discovered an archive of his Mercury Theatre on the Air programs from the 1930s. ("Discovered" is probably an overstatement; it's linked on the show's Wikipedia page.) While the hick-spooking adaptation of H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds remains far and away Mercury's best-known production, I find none more compelling than its (much-truncated) version of Carl Ewald's novella My Little Boy.

Ewald, a writer so obscure that he's only covered in the Danish Wikipedia, seems to have been a Darwin-loving social critic known primarily for penning a series of strange, didactic-sounding fairy tales with bleak outlooks. "My Little Boy", in its original text (Google Books scan here), is neither terribly strange nor all that didactic, though it does ultimately dive into a bit of bleakness.

The story, in both prose and broadcast editions, follows a father's attempts to instill in his son the appropriate values: don't spend the biscuit money on lollipops, don't beat up Jews, animals in zoos are probably miserable, etc. Though he must ultimately surrender the boy to school and thus to society, he does his utmost in the meantime. But this father, who also narrates, is already compromised; some of the values he's pressured to instill aren't the ones he'd prefer, and he's not entirely principle-adherent himself anyway. A dried-out aunt all but strongarms the father into telling his son that he shouldn't have two sweethearts. (The book offers a delightful dinnertime scene when our hero openly, ruthlessly skewers the woman's sanctimoniousness.) When his son asks if he follows all ten commandments, the father responds, "Ye-e-es."

This lends the text a certain jaunty humor, as this well-meaning dad sardonically chafes against various types of societal nonsense. While many of the challenges encountered are somewhat specific to the Copenhagen of Ewald's time, if not unique to it, most are generalizable to the extent that they're still relevant today. Those that survive in Welles' stripped-down radio script certainly are; it was probably wise of him to excise the whole sequence where a deadly scarlet fever leaves the local circle of young chums in ruins. I'm still not sure what our narrator means when he insists to his little boy that "two plus two are never four," but it's for damn sure that schools remain in the peg-hammering business.

So Ewald's is a decent little novella, but the real magic happens when Welles gets his hands on it. This is not because, taking the role of the father, Citizen Kane himself breathes just the sort of life into the character that the prose suggests. No, his performance seems almost directly at odds with the father in the book, and the resulting tension makes the program one I cant help but listen to over and over again. Welles delivers the father's bemused with with the solemnity and gravitas of a parody of Orson Welles, creating a pervasive, unshakably ominous feeling that interestings-up the material enormously. And I don't even know if he intended it.

I had an Orson Welles kick of my own, back in fourth grade. I'd been assigned a research project on a "dead American" of my choice, if memory serves, and I couldn't come up with a single dead American about whom I gave a damn. My dad, possibly extrapolating from my interest in radio, brought up Welles' name. Though only vaguely aware of the guy, I ran with it, as it saved me from having to do a presentation on my fallback, Groucho Marx, a figure I had no interest in then and even less in now. (But given another dead-American project in fifth grade, I mystifyingly chose John Muir, who makes Groucho look like Brian Eno.) So I got up in front of my class and talked about spooking hicks for half an hour.

Only now do I realize that I really should have been more into Welles all along, given that I share with the man the insatiable tendencies — diseases, really — (a) not to confine ourselves to one form and (b) to do things because people specifically tell us not to. The main difference is that Welles broadcast My Little Boy and War of the Worlds at age 23, then went on to make Citizen Kate at 25. Whereas I am 25 and writing a blog post about Orson Welles. what the hell

Speculative temporary futures, Detroit ed.

Detroit, Michigan's Craigslist apartment-listings page is just... insanity. Look at it. A one-bedroom for $450? A two-bedroom for $525? A three-bed, three-bath house for $1300?

By comparison, here's the Santa Barbara page:

So, a "spacious studio" for $975. If you're quick enough to snag it. And yes, location, location, location: Santa Barbara is a clean, prosperous beachside community, whereas Detroit has become a byword for "burnt-out urban hellhole." But still, such numbers make me wonder. One grinds through quite a lot of inconsequential bullshit to make rent in a town where a reasonably-located one-bedroom might easily run you $1500. What if I was paying only $450 for rent? Or if I split that? Imagine the work — the real work, not the fake stuff — on which I could concentrate. Media is more or less my thang, and Detroit's no media capital, but it's not as if I'd stay there forever.

But, ah, the crime, the decay, the roving gangs of dispossessed auto workers: all valid concerns, and not ones I could pretend to explain away. (Let's not even get into the weather, which forces me consider that whole side of North America effectively uninhabitable.) The fact of the matter is that I've long held the desire to live in a "bad" place, to better balance out the yin and the yang of life, etc. (This active seeking of unpleasantness is different from masochism, for reasons which will come to me.) Bad isn't bad, but nor is it good; it just... is, providing much-needed contrast. I suppose I could simply move to some non-Park Slope part of Brooklyn and wallow in garbage for a while, but that's not particularly enterprising.

I think a lot about (a) the nature of cities, (b) doing bold, unusual "stunts" as a way to live life to its fullest, (c) deliberately time-limiting what I enter into and (d) my ultimate goal of telling geography to take its strictures and shove them. Suddenly pulling stakes up from S.B., driving them into the rich, steel shaving-filled Detroit soil and remaining there for like a year or two would definitely tie those threads together. Not that my chance of actually doing so exceeds, oh, one percent — if that — but it remains a fun thought experiment.

Alas, the fact stands that I haven't yet built up enough fame and/or location-independent viability to move wherever I please, just 'cause. (Or am I only telling myself that, as an excuse not to pack boxes?) But when I do, I'll keep an eye out for the kind of city that's just overlooked, damaged or depressed enough to become a subcultural hotbed of the next decade. With sufficient craft, you can make a tasty meal from dented, discounted cans; by the same token, you can found aesthetic, intellectual and cultural movements in places where they nearly pay you to rent housing.

Detroit's current nowhere-to-go-but-up ethos — city motto: "Speramus Meliora; Resurget Cineribus" — appeals to me on this level. I was talking to a fellow journalist just last weekend, a Detroit native who came to Southern California in the mid-2000s, about the long-running will-it-or-won't-it conversation re: his hometown's potential revival. He didn't seem sorry to have traded the negative aspects of Detroit for those of Santa Barbara. But then, what I don't appreciate about S.B. now, I would certainly appreciate after a stint in a place like Detroit. Kinda like how, after seven years in S.B., I can actually muster enthusiasm for the very sort of stuff from which a Detroiter seeks flight.

(But as long as Los Angeles' Koreatown still offers sub-$1000 one-bedrooms, Motor City's gonna have to wait.)

So what doesn't suck, then?

M.J. Walters, who looks to have an interesting making-of-a-life blog, asks,

As you know, cinema is stubbornly sticking to narrative-driven films because people are programmed to love stories and it's a money-making business. Video games is another business where stories are becoming more key, and non-linear stories have a chance there...

But if you see cinema as closer to the visual arts than literature/theatre, perhaps it needs to become more elitist - or for there to be at least a genre of film is are more like the video installations you see in contemporary art.

Educating people to enjoy cinema on levels above story is going to be a helluva challenge :-) how many people actually attempt to really understand paintings? As opposed to consuming them in galleries because they know it's a cultured thing to do? And half the pleasure is seeing a one-of-a-kind object...

But I agree that plot has little to do with a film's more complex pleasures. It is, though, I think, a basic strand that very successfully holds the other complex strands together.

As you can tell I'm a writer, so of course I'm totally biased ;-) what films do you admire (that I have a shot of getting hold of!) that pulls off what you are saying successfully?

Since this came in response to a post even heavier on the Peter Greenaway talk than usual, I suppose it's somehow both a cop-out and the perfect answer to say that, well, Greenaway's films pull it off successfully. Though I haven't seen all of them, he's easily the most intellectually inspiring filmmaker I know. I would recommend The Draughtsman's Contract, A Zed & Two Noughts and 8½ Women from his library, thought that last one is a somewhat controversial entry. Certain fans think it a lesser work, and it's more a Fellini homage than anything, but boy, do I love it.



He's done other movies that I suspect break that devil plot addiction and win decisive artistic victories in so doing, such as The Pillow Book. I understand that the French media reacted to it my crying, "This isn't a film! This is a CD-ROM!" (It was 1996, mind.) By all accounts, this objection delighted Greenaway himself. Nevertheless, it won Un Certain Regard, so maybe the French like their CD-ROMs after all.



If Greenaway takes my personal throne for intellectual inspiration, Werner Herzog sits in the one labeled "visceral inspiration." He, too, accomplishes greater cinema than most without unnecessary suckling of the plot bottle, especially in the case of his projects that fall into the crack between documentary and feature. Check out Fata Morgana, The Wild Blue Yonder (a sci-fi picture constructed with old NASA footage, underwater video and a wild-eyed Brad Dourif performance) and The White Diamond for examples.



Europeans aside, I think it's Asian directors who have really grasped the power of cinema's no-plot elements in the past decade. I can think of two who squeeze in and share the most-aesthetically-inspiring throne. Hirokazu Kore-eda, the maker of my favorite film, Maborosi (my 3Quarksdaily writeup of which is here), was something of an early adopter in this sense. Thailand's Apichatpong Weerasethakul does even better at the specific game of crafting experiences that don't even really need a storyline to produce infinite rewatchability, like Syndromes and a Century (my 3Quarksdaily writeup of which is here).



But the absolute master of not needing plot, at least in terms of those producing primarily standard feature-length films, is Taiwan's Ming-liang Tsai. This dude just busts out masterpieces like he doesn't even care, rarely if ever feeling the need to jerk his characters around on the marionette strings. Goodbye Dragon Inn, one of my ten favorites of the 2000s, expresses so much about the life of the film-lover without needing any narrative prodding beyond getting a handful of characters into a decrepit movie theater on a rainy night to watch one final screening of an early-60s martial arts costume drama. But everything I've seen from him is good; I wrote up What Time is it There?, Goodbye Dragon Inn's predecessor, on 3QD.

Thinking about it now, I realize that all my favorite directors do this, to a substantial extent. The list goes on and on from here: Abbas Kiarostami (Close-Up 3QD writeup), Chris Marker (Sans Soleil 3QD writeup), the better Jim Jarmusch like Dead Man and The Limits of Control... no surprise, I suppose.

The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project: 23. Francis Alÿs' When Faith Moves Mountains (2002)

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When Faith Moves Mountains. 15:00 min., color, 2002. By Francis Alÿs, collaborating with Rafael Ortega and Cuauhtémoc Medina. Ubuweb's description:

On April 11th 2002, 500 volunteers were called in order to form a line to move a sand dune situated in the surroundings of the city of Lima. This human comb progressed pushing forward a certain quantity of sand with shovels in order to move the dune from its original position. The actual displacement was of an infinitesimal proportion, but not its metaphorical resonance.

This is less a piece of video art on the displacement-by-volunteer of a big Peruvian sand dune than a mini-documentary on the displacement-by-volunteer of a big Peruvian sand dune. Though I do find the effort itself fascinating, there isn't much going on here in the form department. It's footage of the preparation, footage of the process, interviews with participants and shots of the gaunt, none-too-in-place-looking Alÿs staring up at the immobile dune that is his rival.

Should I stop right here? Is it my place to comment on the project documented, or should The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project concern itself only with the specifically audiovisual elements of these pieces, or go further? I suppose I could spill a healthy amount of digital ink on some of When Faith Moves Mountains' most striking images, but it won't mean much without context.

In order to move the dune, Alÿs and his collaborators recruited 500 locals, many of whom seem to be college students, to don identical t-shirts, form a line and slowly advance across it, shoveling all the way. The video gives a final dune-displacement distance of 10cm, which is small enough to be plausible. Provided a close look at the line's actual technique, though, it's still somewhat difficult to believe. But hey, it ain't about literally getting an enormous pile of sand from one place to another, very similar place; it's about mobilizing the humanity and firing the will to give it a shot.

The "faith" of the title seems ambiguous. This is South America, yes, and I understand a certain amount of religion goes on there, but direct references to god in the video are few, if there are any at all. (And Alÿs himself is a Belgian, one of those nationalities that I just can't picture doing anything god-y in this day and age.) The faith could equally be faith in oneself and one's collaborators to pull off neato art stunts, or, as Tao Lin said, "doing really ‘retarded’ things in order to relieve boredom, like buying a large billboard on Houston street and putting a hamster drawing on it."

Plus, they also created something that is, aesthetically speaking, pretty damn cool. At one point, someone mentions the purely geometrical difficulty of getting a line to move over the surface of a cone, but the striking picture of a thin, white-and-blue (most of the diggers wear jeans) arc gradually crossing a vast brownness as hazy sand clouds blow across turns out to have been well worth the blood, sweat and sandpants.

Why movies suck

Well, not all movies. Just the vast majority of them. Or at least the vast majority to which I've been exposed. Sturgeon's Second Law, which dictates that 90 percent of everything is crud, applies as much in cinema as anywhere else — maybe more so. And this comes from someone who loves the medium, though I love cinema in the same way that a parent loves a lazy, generally stupid child who occasionally rises from the couch to display a flash of brilliant promise. These moments come just often enough to allow me to me hold out the vain hope that the kid won't spend the rest of my life drinking beer and TiVoing things in the basement.

One complicating factor is that we're not talking about a thirteen-year-old, nor a thirty-year-old, nor even a fifty-year-old. The wastrel son that is film has had over a century to get his act together, and still, as Robert Altman said to Doug Aitken, "We're at the very beginning of what films can really be. We haven't come close to the medium's full potential yet. Everything is still so linear." Despite having done more than his part to move the form forward before he shuffled from this mortal coil, Altman's judgment remains accurate.

Reading Vernon and Marguerite Gras' compilation of interviews with Peter Greenaway, my conception of the problem grew much clearer. While I'm still not sure why cinema remains so stubbornly in its state of arrested development, I've now got a better understanding of the state itself. First, here's a Choice Thought what I previously quoted Greenaway as having (all bolding mine):

In an interview, you said that cinema is too important to hand over to the storytellers.

That statement has brought me grief, especially in England. It appears that English and, even more so, American films are perfect in recounting a straight line narrative. They achieve it through the use of suspense and asking the viewers to identify with the main characters. That accounts for all those psychological dramas.

I think that the greatest art works — and I exclude those found in film — have had far greater means at their disposal. Only cinema narrows its concern down to its content, that is to its story. It should, instead, concern itself with its form, its structure. Artistically, film is a very rich medium; it has so many indescribable possibilities, and hardly anyone uses them. It seems to me that the majority of directors make their films with only one eye open and their arms tied behind them. The capability of film to become an extraordinary and astonishing medium is completely ignored. One should not tell stories as straight line narratives. There are so many other possibilities, and film would only enrich them.

In 1985, he told Michael Ciment:

Cinema is only 90 years old and I would like to relate it back to its predecessors, which, in my view, are the visual arts. I know that others see cinema as more closely related to theater and literature. But that's not how I see it. It is quite possible that in the coming decades cinema will either transform itself completely or disappear.

In 1989, he told Andreas Kilb:

It's impossible for cinema to be a window to the world, a slice of life. Everything that I do is self-reflexive in this sense, filled with signs which emphasize the artificiality of the action, like the curtains in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover which are drawn apart at the beginning of the film and closed again at the film's end. My working methods and my cultural background are more Apollonian, rational — and have little to do with conventional narrative cinema. My stories are very classic and simply constructed; first, a prologue, then three acts, and an epilogue. For I truly believe that what matters is not what happens, but how it happens.

In 1991, he told Marlene Rodgers:

I'm not particularly interested in contemporary psychodrama — with all that pseudo-supermarket Freudian analysis of character which becomes so boring — that has now been going on so long, especially in dominant cinema, which itself seems to be simply an illustrational medium, illustrating novels all the time, not even twentieth-century novels but nineteenth-century novels. I mean, what film can you see that's actually taken cognizance of James Joyce, for example? I've made comments about cinema not reaching Cubism yet, but there hasn't even been an awareness of Joyce.

In 1992, he told Suzanna Turman:

I sincerely believe that in all cultural activity, content atrophies very rapidly, and all you're left with is form and strategy. Then there is a way in which the form and the strategy themselves become the content. I don't think you can get away from the fact that anything that moves through time has some sort of narrative. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten is a narrative — beginning, middle, and end. But I have a great distrust of narrative. I can write stories extremely easily, and I feel that narrative writing is extremely facile. I have an antipathy to the psycho-drama, too, which I think is too easy. I do feel that we ought to look for other ways of explaining the human condition, apart from this sort of pocketbook Freud — it isn't even Freudian, because it's still stuck somewhere in the middle of the 19th century, or associated with Jane Austen, for God's sake —

Hey, I like Jane Austen!

I do, too! I suppose the European novel took an interesting turn with her writing, but I still feel that cinema basically is illustration of the 19th century novel, ways and means of examining the world very much in the way that perhaps Dickens organized his narrative scheme. And, you know, American cinema is a bit like telling children stories, to placate them — make sure the moral code is all right, and now we'll tuck you up in the bed, and everything will be all right, give you a kiss, goodnight, see you in the morning.

In 1997, he told John Petrakis:

I feel that the cinema we've got after 100 years is in some cases not a cinema at all, but a history of illustrated text. The English Patient, for example. Why do people bother? Why do they spend money, patience, time, and activity perverting one work of art into another? We know cinema is very hybrid, very mongrel, and still hasn't found an autonomy for itself. But I don't think it should be used simply to illustrate literature.

[ ...]

I don't think cinema is a good narrative medium. If you want to tell a story, become a writer. Don't get involved in cinema. Cinema is about other things. I know we excuse cinema because it's not very old, but one of the great things about the twentieth century was the taking away what for many years had been regarded as the main props. So, melody's been taken away from music, figuration's been taken away from painting. And there's a way, I feel, that narrative should be taken out of cinema, so it can get on with what I believe it can really do.

That same year, he told Lawrence Chua:

In Asian calligraphy, we have the possibility of an image being a text, a text being an image at one and the same time. Wouldn't this be a good way to consider the possibility of a reinvention of cinema? I believe that cinema is in need of reinvention. In the West we have continually separated the image and the text, and one would imagine that cinema would be the ideal place in which to remarry these two notions. But alas, it does not seem to have been the case. The Pillow Book is another attempt to readdress my particular anxiety or disenchantment about a cinema which is primarily text before it can be image.

The essential problem is, I submit, a grotesque form-content mismatch. Then again, common filmmaking procedures pretty much out-and-out ask for it. If I'm pointing the finger, I'll point it at that bane of cinema, the standard-format screenplay. So many films are conceived dead as these stuttering, Courier New'd abominations, it's hardly surprising that they translate so anemically to the expansive artistic bandwidth of even the lowest-grade film. Pick up a movie at random, and chances are it's simply one of these hacked-out bundles of utterances whitewashed with the thinnest possible audiovisual layer. Greenaway is too kind. They're not illustrated novels; they're illustrated screenplays.

I recently read Rick Schmidt's Feature Filmmaking at Used Car Prices, one of the several books on budget movie production I've been schlepping around since high school. The main text is reasonably solid, but I found the foreword gripping. Written by the film scholar Ray Carney in his usual oft-criticized-as-acerbic style, it fires a salvo in, well, the war on cinematic mediocrity:

One of the most limiting aspects of American film is that the plot is all that matters at virtually every stage of the process. Movies are pitched, scripted and budgeted on the basis of the cleverness of their plots. In the directing and editing process, characterization, emotional nuance, mood and psychology are thrown to the winds to keep the plot zipping along from event to event. Filmmakers like Spielberg actually pride themselves on "telling a good story" in this children's-book sense of the phrase. The great works of literature — Huckleberry Finn, Paradise Lost, Shakespeare's plays — are not reducible to their plots. Only hacks like O. Henry and Agatha Christie confused narrative art with "telling a good story" in Spielberg's sense. No one ever sat through the classics of cinema for their plots. Who ever watched The Passion of Joan of Arc for its plot? Reduced to their plots, Ozu's movies are hokey melodramas. Plot has almost nothing to do with a great film's complex pleasures.

Quieting the tubes

Though this is an ugly, pointless debate to get near, I don't think of print media and the net as necessarily in competition. To my mind, all the major "shifts," "revolutions," "upheavals," etc. in cultural delivery systems currently underway boil down to one concept: the accelerating alignment of form and substance. Material suited to books, books are taking. Material suite to magazines, magazines are taking. What the web does well — which happens to include a load of the stuff print used to do — the web's taking.

I'm far from one of those but-can-you-take-net-device-x-into-the-bathtub people, but I do find that books (and some magazines) consistently whip the web in terms of aesthetic experience. There's just so much clutter online. True, we're happily past the days of elaborately tiled backgrounds, marquee headers and rotating flaming skulls, but I see no reason pages still need as much noise as they carry. A variety of plug-ins and applications have surfaced to combat this, but their ingenuity usually seems to lag a step or two behind that of the noisemakers.

Experimental poet Christian Bök, whose Twitter feed serves up perhaps the web's most compelling mixtures of links — "an online dictionary of near rhymes," "they convert disco music into chiptunes" and "some unflattering photos of me in the rictus of performance," all in the past four days — uses one of the best. It's Quietube, a browser button that strips all the text and imagery from your streaming video provider of choice to provide a much more pleasurable viewing experience:

As Edward Tufte says, no matter how cool your interface is, it would be better if there were less of it. Hey, Quietube guys: how much do you want to work your magic on the rest of the internet? Name your price.