Colin Marshall

The Experimentalismist

I totally knew this wouldn’t win McSweeney’s 2nd Annual Columnist Contest — it didn’t even come close — but I submitted it anyway. Some of the titles of the winners’ columns are In These Deserts: War Stories from Afghanistan, Balls Out: A Column On Being Transgendered, and (runner up) Diversity in the News. Mine is about some radio shows experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage did in Colorado (I first typed "Coloradio") in 1982. It was what I felt like writing about at the time.

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Narrative-eschewing, sternly bearded, and even kind of fearsomely named, Stan Brakhage seemed to embody what people who don’t watch experimental film suspect experimental film is. His is a cinematic oeuvre to which you can lead friends — most of his movies are quite short, some are available on the net, and the rest come in handsome Criterion Collection packages — but from which they won’t necessarily drink. And that’s okay. You have to settle into a very particular mental space to enjoy dozens upon dozens of silent films made of paint, scratches, abstract visual artifacts, and no few discernible representations of the human world. (But when you get there, boy howdy.)

An article on Brakhage’s work would, I suppose, make a decent beginning for a column on avant-garde culture — “The Motion Pictures of Stan Brakhage: No, Really, They’re For Watching”, I could call it — but it would also make a predictable one. Much more interesting to focus on the year this luminary of purely visual film had his own radio show. His goals on the air turn out to have been the same as mine are on this digital page: find something odd and lead your audience through it in as friendly and real-person a way as possible.

For 23 years, Brakhage taught at the University of Colorado. (Two of his students were South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, but that’s another column.) In 1982, KAIR-FM, the campus station, offered Brakhage the opportunity to try his hand in perhaps the medium furthest from his own métier. In these 20 half-hour broadcasts, collectively titled The Test of Time, DJ Brakhage (not that he goes by that name, but some temptations are irresistible) spins the most personally meaningful pieces of recorded sound in his collection, providing copious interstitial commentary all the while. In the same way a Brakhage fan might invite a few buddies over to finally check out his favorite parts of Dog Star Man or the Songs cycle, Brakhage himself sits you down and plays what he finds terribly exciting while telling you exactly why he thinks it is.

You may have guessed that he doesn’t drop the needle on anything particularly Top 40. This is a program that invariably begins with Gregorian chant — “almost church militant,” as Brakhage describes it — and ends with a little something atonal from Charles Ives. Brakhage’s playlists include Chinese music from between 206 B.C. and 618 A.D., microcassette field recordings of street musicians playing goatskin bags, Tennessee Williams speaking lines from The Glass Menagerie (“I hear a terror in that flat reading”), Glenn Gould complaining about his early recording of The Goldberg Variations, and James Joyce reading Ulysses under a thick layer of cylinder hiss.

This could be insufferable if Brakhage presented himself as an anointed emissary of the avant-garde, here to tell an artistically benighted America what’s what. He instead takes the tack of an enthusiastic, sometimes bumbling (if supremely well-spoken) cultural traveler — an outsider even to the outside. “I have to be free in doing this kind of program to be nothing but personal, which is to say, sometimes — often, maybe always — a fool,” he admits early in the series. “I’ll mispronounce things and falter now and again, and my knowledge is one that is amateur, in that sense of ‘lover.’” Despite being out of his domain, he doesn’t seem to actually get much wrong. But that disclaimer, and his manner throughout The Test of Time, struck me as pretty thoroughly disarming nonetheless.

Yet Brakhage had the same attitude within his domain, proudly calling himself an amateur filmmaker, a producer of home movies, reverence of the cinephile community be damned. As an old taped conversation with poet/critic Parker Tyler in episode twelve reveals, he disliked the terms “experimental” and “avant-garde,” finding them badly wanting for descriptive value. Remembering the work of eighty or so filmmakers at a recent exhibition in Brussels, he says, “There were only between twenty and thirty that I would call artists in film. And out of that twenty or thirty there were only maybe ten that I felt had accomplished anything.”

Brakhage’s baby daughter cuts through this high-minded back and forth, and the wailing gives him a good excuse to stop the tape. Coming back on the studio mic, he explains how pained he was by the conversation at the time, how he could never bear to listen to it between then and now. “Yet as I go back to it,” he continues, “it’s the clearest expression that I have ever been able to make of the beginnings and the continuities of my feeling. Parker brought that out in me, however annoying he was in the process.”

The near-superstitious exhumation of the long-buried recording; the frustration with limiting, marginalizing labels; the crying baby — they all exude Brakhage’s humanness. This isn’t the work of a steely, uncompromising artist-philosopher caricature whose every incomprehensible piece speaks only disdain for the insufficiently evolved human race that ignores it. This is the work of an honest appreciator — a lover — who wants to share the visceral thrill he gets from “odd and strange things, records that are out-of-print, poets reading poetry.” (Besides, I’m pretty sure you need a mindset like this to open a broadcast with lines like, “Hi, I'm Stan Brakhage, and today I feel like talking about love of women.”)

Brief, dreamlike, and almost wholly about their own form, Brakhage’s films are often and rightfully compared to poetry. Given his love of actual poetry evident in these broadcasts, perhaps that’s no surprise. What I did find a potential Deep Insight Into the Mind of the Artist is that he approaches pretty much every other type of art he shares on the show as poetry too. Letters from a young Jackson Pollock? Poetry. Fellow film artist Bruce Baillie rambling into a tape recorder as he wends his way through a 1960s road trip of obscure purpose but desperate motivation? Poetry. Orson Welles lampooning Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society? Poetry.

In Program 13, Brakhage discusses his love of James Joyce. “Surprise, surprise,” those still unconvinced might say, “that guy who made those movies nobody understands is a fan of that guy who wrote those novels nobody understands.” Brakhage includes his response in the broadcast: “Certainly, most people find Finnegans Wake impossible, but I don’t, because I always start with just the music, the beautiful sounds of it, and then let whatever it is that will come to me arise from that.”

Or, as one astute YouTube commenter (to whip out a possible oxymoron) typed into the reply section below a clip of Dog Star Man, “Dude, it's not about metaphors, symbolism, or storylines. That's the mistake people make — they think he's trying to make snooty ‘high brow’ art. He's not. His art is primal, not intellectual and certainly not narrative. In other words, Brakhage isn't making ‘movies,’ he's creating a purely sensory experience that stimulates and invigorates your brain.” Couldn’t we use more filmmakers, broadcasters, and cultural curators who do the same?

What Tips Your Wedge?

You know how a lion tamer keeps his deadly cat-beast from attacking just by holding up an old chair? The chair’s legs that confuse the lion; its brain detects four individual points in motion, and they can’t figure out which to focus on and kill. It’s the paralysis of perpetual distraction. (I learned this from watching Errol Morris’ Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control like a dozen times. You only need to watch it once to pick that up, but still, I recommend watching it and the rest of the Morris oeuvre like a dozen times.) Sometimes I feel a lot like that lion. This wouldn’t be so bad, except I also feel a lot like my own tamer.

The chairs I hold in my own face take many forms. Right now, I’m staring at the chair that is Firefox, its row of tabs presenting six effective legs. When I go home tonight, I’ll face my bookshelves, absolutely bristling with the distinctive legginess of yet-unread reading material. All the time I spend today thinking about the things I should be working on will feel just like being surrounded by chairs, all of different shapes and colors, their legs seeming to bend and spin unpredictably.

Surely you’ve been in similar psychological situations. Ultimately unpleasant, definitely, but damn, they’re kind of addictive, aren’t they? When something’s always there to distract you, you don’t really have to address anything in the short term. Why, you could call it an opiate; opiates are distractions almost by definition, I’d say. Perversely, the more I’ve got to do, the more distracting chair legs I desperately seek out. ("Oh, that thing that failed? Not my fault. I was really distracted.") Which is a hell of a danger when you, like me, are specifically into working on a bunch of different things at once.

Asking around the tubes for recommendations as to how to improve my nonexistent self-promotional skills — to, uh, make them exist — a noticed a certain theme in the replies:

• You probably don't want to narrow your interests, but I think if you want to market yourself you need to get yourself more narrowly identified, and then pound the public with that thing.
  
• You seem like an interesting guy, but I don't know how I would describe you to my friends: he's a interviewer/reviewer/commentator/creator/curator? If you could only talk about or do one thing for the rest of your life, what would it be? Pick it then concentrate on that.
  
• If I were you, I'd find a common thread among my projects and unify them, build my brand by creating reliably new content in one outlet.
  
• If you want to move into some kind of work for these things, you gotta pick one area you want to move into, and work on promoting that. Are you gonna be a writer about film, or a musician or what?
  
• Not to say that you can't do a million goofy side projects, but pick the area you want to be the go-to guy for and put the lion's share of your energy into that. Otherwise you're trying to build several different careers at once, or in Seth Godin language, you'll have an unfocused and muddy personal brand.
  
• It seems to me that you are essentially a critic, working in a variety of media, as well as a sometimes filmmaker/DJ/producer of field recordings. That's not a laser beam focus, sure, but it's not as scattered as you make it out to be. I guess my advice is: present yourself cohesively.
  
• Become known for one of these things, let the rest follow.

Some of this echoes the standard injunctions about not being a “jack of all trades.” Point well taken, but it’s only fair to put the phrase in its original context: "Jack of all trades, master of none, though ofttimes better than master of one.” (I’m pretty sure it didn’t start out as a slam.) That’s partially why I’m into engaging in a load of different pursuits in the first place. Another, larger, part must just come down to brain operation. For me, the jack of all trades, master of none lives an infinitely more interesting life — not just offtimes, but alltimes. I can’t make lion brain to concentrate on all the legs of a the chair at once, yet I can’t summon the motivation to kill just one. None interest me in isolation.

Yet these suggestions are also quite helpful, because they point to a strategy I hadn’t thought about before. Despite having gone on and on about the importance of thinking in terms of the “thin end of the wedge” in getting yourself to work on stuff, I’ve never applied the same principle to self-promotion. This is promising: don’t be a laser, be a wedge. Become known for something very specific, but make that the thin end you use to hammer the rest of what B.S. Johnson would have vividly called your "enormous totality" into the public consciousness.

While this would unfortunately constitute insufficiently immediate recognition of my status as a Gen-Y unique snowflake, I suspect it has some application. The trick, if you’re so inclined, is to figure out what specific thing you do makes the best most penetrating tip of the wedge. Someone suggested that I might make a go of “cultural tastemaker.” That still feels a little itchy compared to “cultural stuff-maker,” but if I can make it work, I will branch out to “self-help author” by writing an awful book entitled What Tips Your Wedge?

Bottom of the pyramid

Lucas Brunelle and his buddies bike very fast, against the flow of pedestrian and vehicular traffic, through major cities everywhere. Brunelle himself does it with a couple of video cameras strapped to his head. These are what have come to be called “alleycat races.” They’re unofficial and illegal, they’re almost bizarrely nonlinear, and they pass through pretty much everything in the built environment, no matter how non-bikeable. They’re usually raced by bike messengers on their days off, which I suppose is the only group possessed of the necessary skill set and habituation to street danger. It’s easy to call alleycat races nuts and the people who participate in them nuts for doing so, but you know what? I kind of see the appeal.

I learned about Brunelle and alleycat races in one of his videos screened at the 10th Annual Bicycle Film Festival, which came to Santa Barbara last weekend. I caught the final program of the day, “Urban Bike Shorts”. (Whether or not the pun was intended, but either way, it certainly wasn’t lost on me.) I enjoyed its Japan-related segments and Ari Taub’s mid-80s comedy short On Time, which whipped through NYC at its graffiti’d-est, but I knew I’d like those.

Brunelle’s closer I didn’t expect. Its combined elements — world cities, urban environments and the unconventional use thereof, independent media, transport techology, physical fitness, filmmaking, D.I.Y.ism, proximity to one’s own mortality and the resultant feeling of aliveness — made it pretty much exactly what I wanted to watch right then. Not that I’m about to disassemble my bike, fly to Amsterdam or Tokyo or Munich or Sydney, reassemble my bike, and blast straight up a one-way, but still. In examples of extremity there exist many ideas useful in moderation.

The footage reminded me of something that, growing up a hardcore sit-around kind of kid, I never really imprinted on. Because of that, I still regularly forget it today, even when I should know better. It’s that there is great satisfaction in using your body for stuff. Not specifically to the end of making it look better and boosting your self-confidence or whatever; just in the very act of doing things with it. It’s a pretty standard nerd/geek-axis syndrome: when you’re rewarded for your intellectual efforts and your intellectual efforts alone, you tend to slack off on the other stuff, and you miss out.

Not that there’s less satisfaction in exercising your brain; there’s satisfaction in all of it. I would submit that there is great satisfaction in exercising whatever faculties you happen to have — physical, mental, social, artistic, entrepreneurial — in whatever ways you can. This is how I interpret those weary old commandments about how we should all be eternally grateful for what we’re given. I’ve never understood the literal interpretation. How on Earth to you just “be grateful”? What do you look like while you’re doing it? Should you have a straining facial expression, as if you were trying to open a difficult jar?

So I take having gratitude for something to mean using that something as well as you possibly can, pushing it as far toward its limits as you possibly can. I do find, however, that these somethings exist in a kind of pyramid. Physical fitness seems to be at the bottom of mine: if I stop paying attention to it, I have a hell of a time doing anything else well. Theoretically, I should be able to still write or talk or whatever even if I let myself turn into one of those sponge-bathing types who eventually has to be surgically separated from the couch, but I don’t think I could. Even if it’s been a little too long since I last went out for a run, I can barely process two thoughts in a row. So I guess the message here is, don’t be surprised if, a decade from now, you’re driving through Pusan or someplace and see me cycling by in your lane, going the wrong way. I’m just trying to think.

What I know about the Beatles

Some friends have expressed concern that my knowledge of the Beatles’ catalogue is more or less limited to a song about a raccoon who intends to shoot off the legs of his rival. My excuse is that, growing up, I looked around me and saw that pretty much everyone in the world liked the Beatles, so the job of liking them was already “covered,” in a sense. (As opposed to the job of, say, liking Eberhard Weber.) I thus proceeded through life completely neutral to the Beatles and thus unmoved to seek knowledge about them except for the surprisingly substantial amount I drew from cultural osmosis. Think about if: if you’ve learned about anything via cultural osmosis, it’s the Beatles.

But at least peoples’ disbelief at my unfamiliarity with the Beatles prompts me to write a sequel to my wildly popular “What I know about television” post. If you’re playing the home game the rules or simple: in true philosopher’s fashion, I must write everything I know about the subject at hand without once consulting any resource outside my own mind. No Allmusic, no Wikipedia, no Village Voice’s Best Music Writing 1982, no informationTunes — nothing.


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The Beatles were an English band in the 1960s and seem to remain, even half-dead and 40 years defunct, the most popular one in the world. Depending on the album, they either get labeled as pop, rock, or something in between. Most people I know have gone through a period of strong enthusiasm for the Beatles’ music, usually in youth or adolescence. (Some never leave their “Beatles = music = Beatles” phase, and I don’t know if it’s a coincidence that they tend to come off slightly socially and/or intellectually arrested in general.) The typical Beatles-listening trajectory I observe goes like this:

1. “Wow, their early, poppy songs are fun!”
2. “No, the stuff that came after their early, poppy songs is better.”
3. “Actually, it’s their later, more conceptual albums that best showcase their musical genius.”
4. “But wait — I’ve just listened to the early, poppy songs 10,000 times each and discovered their still-unsurpassed true musical genius laying just beneath a veneer of silliness and disposability! Of course!”

I read that Bill Clinton once said something about how the Beatles embodied everything in the 1960s. This was in an article by P.J. O’Rourke, who added that Clinton’s pronouncement means that everything in the 1960s was either brilliant but troubled, earnest but flaky, stupid, or Paul McCartney. Maybe this is the key to the band’s entire essence or whatever, but I feel like the Beatles must have stumbled upon a way to combine extreme datedness — even people who aren’t Bill Clinton go around talking about how the Beatles are the sixties — with extreme timelessness. Kids born in 2000 seem don’t seem less pro-Beatles than their last few waves of predecessors.

The actual Beatles are John Lennon, George Harrison, Ringo Starr, and the aforementioned Paul McCartney. (I hear there was a “fifth Beatle” early on, Pete Best, who now seems to satirize his own unfortunate place in pop history professionally.) Like most Baby Boomer icons, they’re all just a few years too old to be Baby Boomers themselves. I think they all sang on one song or another, but played different instruments. Every fan seems to have a favorite Beatle, and some can get truly creepy about it. I saw one guy’s blog that was mostly erotic sketches of George Harrison.

I get the impression that Lennon is regarded as the “best” Beatle, but how much of that comes from his musical sensibilities, how much from his (nowadays hard to interpret) political sensibilities, and how much from his untimely death remains unclear. He also has a couple musician sons, one of whom I could have written a post three times this long. (Guess which; it’s not the one you think.) McCartney must be the most successful of the four, since he’s never stopped recording, performing at large-scale sporting events, and being alive. Yet, whether because of his goofy side projects, his often unflattering choices in female companionship, or the impudence implicit in outliving the deified Lennon (I remember seeing a giant billboard in San Fransisco that just said, “Imagine John Lennon alive today”), he doesn’t seem to get much respect.

Lennon and McCartney are, I think, the “primary” Beatles, since I hear them talked about the most and since so much of the sheet music for the group’s most popular songs bears a “Lennon/McCartney” songwriting credit. This makes Harrison and Starr the “secondary” Beatles. I don’t know much about either of them, but then again, I don’t know much about the Beatles. I understand that Harrison, who died in I believe 2001, was hardcore into transcendental meditation and left behind a whole slew of intriguing-looking solo albums. (I also remember hearing that, during some recording session wherein an engineer explained the benefits of plugging the guitar straight into the mixing board, he asked if their voices could be plugged directly into the board.) Starr sang “Yellow Submarine”, I’m pretty sure, and these days he seems best known as an eccentric who says “peace and love” a lot on YouTube.

I’m 90 percent sure that all the Beatles’ studio albums were recorded and released between 1962 and 1970. There were a bunch of very short ones early in the decade, which I guess is how they did pop albums in those days. They had titles like Meet the Beatles, Beatles for Sale, Beatles Beatles Beatles Beatles, and There Are Beatles on This Record. I am also aware of a compilation where they’re dressed as butchers on the cover, surrounded by fake baby limbs.

Then came the stuff with much better sleeve images and (I presume) more songs, like Revolver and, uh, Rubber Soul. I gather that most “iconic” Beatles albums are Abbey Road, though I hear suspiciously little about that isn’t to do with that cover image of the guys walking across the street, and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which I hear about constantly but vaguely. From what I can tell, it seems too bizarre for such mainstream success, but I chalk the apparent contradiction up to pure Beatlepower. There’s also another one, Let it Be, which Phil Spector or some producer of a similar aesthetic was supposed to have ruined with an excess of strings. Should’ve dragged the Wall of Sound down from the attic.

Oh crap, I almost forgot The White Album, which isn’t really called that. It’s official title is The Beatles, which I found out in like the mid-2000s. This is the Beatles album I know best, since it’s the one that has “Rocky Raccoon”. I don’t know what else is on it. I know Danger Mouse mixed it together with Jay-Z’s (?) The Black Album, a project which people really like the idea of.

After having more or less grown up, I was sure my window of effective Beatles exposure had closed. It seems to me that the Beatles need to get you when you’re quite young if they’re really going to matter to you. A near-perfect second chance came along in the form of those big Beatles in Stereo and Beatles in Mono box sets, but in the event, I proved too cheap to shell out the 200 simoleons. Ted suggests that I sit down with the Beatles compete works’ — though for some reason I associate the spelling “compleat” with them — and read Ian Macdonald's Revolution in the Head, which discusses every song individually. That wouldn’t make for too bad a weekend, would it?

(If you thought this was bad, you’re really not going to like what I know about Bob Dylan.)

Strangle the mushrooms

It’s no accident Douglas Coupland’s name has come up a lot here lately; I’ve spend the past few weeks reading all his novels, chronologically. I’m up to his ninth, Eleanor Rigby, which I understand is also the name of a Beatles song. (The only Beatles song I know is “Rocky Raccoon”.) So far, it’s about a fat middle-aged spinster, desperately lonely to the point of resignation, who doesn’t even remember the one time she had sex, which resulted in a son with MS she gives up for adoption only to have return twenty years later. This character, Liz Dunn, doesn’t seem like the type from whom I’d stand to learn anything, but near the beginning of the book she says something that refreshed in my mind a notion of near-revelation-grade importance.

Liz says that, if she could tell her younger self one thing, it would be to stop worrying so much. Sound like threadbare advice though this may, I only had to ponder it a moment to get all, “Whoa — whoa.” Yes, there is a very real sense in which Bobby McFerrin beat me to this bottomlessly profound message, but it’s the very intersection of repetition and sheer inanity that makes it so ignorable in the first place. Reflect for a moment on how much time you’ve squandered thinking over and re-thinking over dire (and practically always unrealized) outcomes in the past. (“What if I can’t figure out to write the next sentence? What if this blog post doesn’t turn out? What if this idea is too vague to get across?”) How likely is it that you’re doing the very same thing today? Whoa — whoa.

Plunk this one straight into the “Life’s too short” bucket. Given my fixation on my own mortality — and desire to take the future-based view — I’m surprised I hadn’t given serious thought sooner to put worry into the whole threescore-and-ten context. Maybe I just couldn’t bear to calculate just how much of my life I burnt as a squirrely little kid, computing the gory details of every possible embarrassment (and many impossible embarrassments) ahead. But lately I’ve put a more concerted effort toward strangling worry in the crib, as it were. I don’t know if worry-inclined humans — and I’m far from the worst in that department — can prevent worries from sprouting like fields of poison mushrooms, but maybe they can build the habit of refraining from picking and eat them. My point is: strangle the mushrooms.

Again, I rack my brain looking for a way to make this sound non-stupid. What I seem to have realized — and maybe you already knew this — is that behind the platitudes about not worrying is that worrying has no actual value but as a self-distraction, and distraction is a Bad Thing Indeed. It’s an issue of doing versus having done; worrying might feel appropriate in the moment, but it couldn’t be less cool later on. How easy to fall into the trap of telling yourself that, by way of your obsessive worrying, you’re preparing yourself for the future. At least it’s pretty easy for me to fall into that trap, and if I’m honest with myself, I know I’m doing nothing of the kind. To the extent that I let myself worry, I let myself become the male equivalent of Liz Dunn: comfortable, in a sense, but aimless, unaccomplished, detached from society, and haunted by this weird gnawing feeling.

But yes, to answer your question, I am getting “DON’T WORRY, BE HAPPY” tattooed on my chest in Olde English lettering.

Early CGI, Esperanto, and space cats

My relationship with anime has been pretty fraught. I was nuts for the stuff from ages ten through, oh, thirteen and a half, but then my fervor cooled. I more or less turned against it when the combined effort of the 2000s and the DVD medium overturned the log of anime fandom and revealed all the squirmy, icky subcultures thriving beneath. In middle school, I longed for the company of other anime fans; by the end of high school, I wanted little more out of my social life than to put as much distance between me and “those hoodie-clad mouth-breathers” as possible.

Older and marginally wiser, I’ve attained enough psychological stability to understand that (a) watching anime won’t necessarily taint me by association, and (b) Sturgeon’s Second Law, which dictated that 90 percent of everything is “crud,” applies just as well for anime as for anything else — one needs to filter, and filter aggressively, to enjoy. I think I’m going to handle anime-with a simple time-based filter: as long as it’s at least, oh, 25 years old, I’ll watch it.

Such a rule has the advantage of sifting out the present’s flash-in-the-pan chaff so I won’t have to, sure, but a 25-year anime statute of limitations also keeps my viewing centered on a time when the form was... different. I’m not a things-were-better-before kind of guy, and I won’t even claim that anime as a whole was somehow a “higher” art back then. There’s just something special about the pure aesthetics of the anime of the late 1970s and early 1980s that seems to have since been extinguished. Maybe a real otaku could tell me what’s changed; I can’t pin it down, but something has.

I first suspected this when I realized that 1984’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is my favorite movie by anime directer Hayao Miyazaki, probably the best-known guy in the industry. He’s since cranked out picture after picture, each of which gets wilder acclaim for its visuals than the last. Yet I don’t think he ever surpassed the look of Nausicaä. This clarified in my mind when my friend Kyle introduced me to his favorite anime film of all time, 1979’s The Castle of Cagliostro, just one chapter in the ongoing saga of beloved thief Lupin III. He followed that up with 1981’s The Fantastic Adventures of Unico, one part of a trilogy in which a wee unicorn goes around making various creatures happy at first against their will, but then not.

What is it about late seventies/early eighties anime? Is it in the character designs? Is it in some sort of visual purity? But I like their music better, too; is it thus in some broader audiovisual aesthetic, an overall philosophy of anime art that somehow shifted in, like, 1987? All I know for sure is that I’m jonesing to watch Gisaburo Sugii’s Night on the Galactic Railroad, a 1985 film scored by one of the Yellow Magic Orchestra that appears to be mainly about early CGI, Esperanto, and space cats:


But where to find a (non-YouTube-y) copy?

Systems analyst

This week’s Marketplace of Ideas, just up today, is a conversation with Chris Guillebeau, the dude who writes the blog The Art of Non-Conformity (which is now the book The Art of Non-Conformity). He’s the best kind of guest: a creator whose work fascinates me and is pretty much exactly what I need at the moment. He’s all about encouraging you to scrap pre-made life templates and do your own thang, but he exudes absolutely none of that sketchy cellphone-salesman vibe I tend to get from the bottom eight-ninths of the “lifestyle design” internet crowd.

A big part of what I drew from his book is that, while it’s all well and good to aspire to the life well lived, you could use at least a semi-clear idea of what that might be to you. A surprising number of people, no matter how often or intensely they fantasize, seem wrong-footed when confronted with the question of what, if all the constraints of time and money were lifted, they would actually do. I leapt straight to my wrong foot, anyway, when I asked myself that. I seem to recall Chris writing something in his book about how few people would really be satisfied by buying yachts or sipping poolside margaritas all day. I know I wouldn’t; I suppose I know it so well that I’ve never even bothered imaging those things.

There’s a bit in The Art of Non-Conformity about imagining your ideal day. It’s a decent hack — oh yes, I’ve signed onto that term — to figure out the broad directions in which to engineer your very existence, a scale not easy to force your mind straight into. I tried writing my own ideal-day qualities down, and they’re equally interpretable as ideal-life qualities, given that the day is in some sense life’s microcosm:

• Creating media (be it writing, sound, image, film, video, radio, etc.)
• Being in a place that I’m not in the majority of the time (and the swifter among you realize the implication: I wouldn’t be in any one place a majority of the time)
• Exercising in some form (running, cycling, yoga, climbing, what have you, though I haven’t climbed in quite some time and my bike’s front wheel is doing this weird thing where it pushes its brakes back and forth)
• Communicating with neato people (in whatever form it takes, and preferably in more than one language, meaning the fire under my drive to attain bare-bones competence in more than one language needs all the wood it can get)
• Working on several projects that are chronologically discrete (i.e., they don’t stretch out open-endedly and indefinitely toward the grave)
• Learning in some previously unexplored subject area, sub-subject, or sub-sub-subject-area (by reading, visiting, eating, listening, talking, Googling — hell, any method’s fair game)
• Engaging in one or more ongoing “life experiments,” which Chris writes about in his book but which Boing Boing founder Mark Frauenfelder and I will discuss in next week’s MOI, so more on these later (suffice to say that they’re about placing certain unusual conditions on your own life and seeing what happens — he moved to the South Pacific, for instance)

Clearly, there is only one life for me: the life of the systems analyst.

Moments of Clarity

Buying a read bean bun at a Japanese market. Watching a steam pipe in an Apichatpong Weerasethakul movie. Glancing at a bunch of Douglas Coupland novels on a shelf. Running. Staring at a city map. Reading Brian Eno’s diary entry for April 17, 1995. Few and far between though they may be, these moments of clarity — nay, these Moments of Clarity — always repay the wait.

Clarity, I’m starting to suspect, is something I need more than money or even time to accomplishing my goals. The problem is that it’s also a hell of a lot more flaky-sounding. I mean, “clarity”? Sheezus. Yet I do find that my worst frustrations come when I’m not thinking clearly enough to act decisively — should I use that em dash or not? Em dash or not? Em dash or not? — and that most of my peak performance happens in a relative void of mental clutter. Sometimes just defining a desired outcome in my imagination is enough to power me forward, though there are days when even that seems like a Herculean task.

In these aforementioned Moments of Clarity, though, it’s like my entire life falls into order, however micro-briefly. In that tiny window, it’s like the compass stops spinning and just points: I know just what I must achieve and just what I must do to achieve it. Still, it’s more of a gestalt; I can’t verbalize it enough to, like, convince anybody, or even to jot it down in a Moleskine for later reference. Hence all the time I shamefully watch myself pouring time straight down the drain, like a bloodshot meth-head pounding desperately on the tin doors of each and every trailer lab, searching for the one that can make it to give me just the right high. I compulsively walk library shelves, scanning for just the right typographical unconventionality; I comb the net for just the right early video art; I flip through magazines from the nineties, looking for just the right union of form and substance. All in the name of inspiration, but all, typically, for naught.

Though it’s tough to trace out the cause and effect precisely, I fear I’ve never successfully induced a Moment of Clarity. They seem to come unpredictably, of their own accord, in a pattern of settings that looks absolutely nonsensical but nevertheless feels exactly right. But that doesn’t stop me from endless application of what I yesterday called “clarifying devices”: Aim for the life well lived. Would I respect me? Do things slower. Do things faster. Do hard things. Do hard things in a way that makes them seem like easy things. Fortune favors the bold. Fortune favors the stealthy. Be less autistic. Focus harder. Is there a possibility of failure? Reward is proportional to risk. Add more personality. Subtract more personality. Only have epic goals. Only have eminently doable goals. Don’t have goals. Are you producing? Aim for the general. Aim for the niche. Only connect. Is this remarkable?

Isn’t this search for clarity about finding ways to get your brain excited, as much as anything else? I find that the more junk is floating around my mind, the harder it becomes to get excited enough about something to actually work on it, or even to draw inspiration from it. Mental noise feels as if it weakens mental stimulation, whether it’s from the worthy stuff (that article you’ve been writing) or the less so (trending Twitter topics). And what prevents me from dropping myself into meaningful work more powerfully than anything else? Fear of insufficient mental stimulation ahead — fear of boredom.

Even though I rarely experience anything that could be called boredom, some sort of primal terror of it keeps me from spending as much effort on promising pursuits as I could. I think it helps to take some time to crank down my average volume of mental input so as to boost my sensitivity to it when it really matters. I guess I can see why David Lynch meditates so much. I was just this morning listening to Mark Maron talk to Judd Apatow on WTF about how sure they are that a couple fifteen-minute sessions a day could totally transform their lives — if only they could bring themselves do it. I have to believe that, when your level of ambient mental static gets down there toward zero, clarity-hunting isn’t an issue and the world around you becomes a hell of a lot more interesting. It’s the same principle that makes a humble slice of turkey taste like such a flavor explosion after you’ve endured a monthlong beans-and-plain-yogurt diet. Maybe I should invest in one of those sensory deprivation tanks from 1982.

The life well lived

The current Marketplace of Ideas interview, now available in podcast form, is with Jesse Thorn and Adam Lisagor, creators of the men’s style web series Put This On. I’d already been following their videos and associated blog — naturally, as both enterprises are both damn well-crafted and damn useful — but only during research for this conversation did I come across a post of Jesse’s that highlighted this quote from another style blog: “We worry that too many guys will get caught up in the hype, forget that fashion is just one component of style, and that style is just one component of a good life.”

This threw light on the question that consumes me perhaps more fully than any other: What is the life well lived? This concern might sound insufferably first-world, I suppose, but (a) I live in the first world and (b) even some starving peasant shivering in a ditch aspires to a better life than the one they’re living. But that wretch’s vision of the life well lived is different from mine, as is yours. (I do hope you aren’t reading this from a ditch.) Just as there are as many ways to dress as there are people to wear clothes, there are as many lives well lived as there are people to live them &mdashy; or, more accurately, to iterate toward them. Some, not me, might imagine it as involving high-class prostitutes and cigars lit with Ben Franklin’s face. Others, also not me, might think of a big house filled with ten grandkids. Whatever does it for ya. As Mama Celeste would say, abbondanza.

I certainly consider personal aesthetics — as well as all the other kinds — integral to the live-well-lived project. If I didn’t, that quote presumably wouldn’t have resonated so strongly with me in the first place. But I think I can put dressing well and everything else besides under a single banner: earning your own respect. I would imagine is very, very hard to earn your respect in an Ed Hardy shirt and flip-flops. At least I couldn’t do it. Nor could I earn my own respect while locked into the same daily routine, or while not making anything, or while encircled by discarded pizza boxes.

And ah, it all comes back to the “Would I respect me?” test. I’d call it the WIRM test if not for all the distasteful fantasy associations (“wyrm”) that acronym brings to mind. I know I bring it up a lot, but it’s so very, very handy. In fact, it’s such a elegant frame-of-mind hack that I cannot possibly have thought it up myself; surely it was an act of subconscious theft. Wherever it came from, it’s a clarifying device, and everyone needs clarifying devices, right? And sure, I’m well aware of the dangers of leaning too heavily on clarifying devices, but damn, not having any renders me pretty much immobile.

So the better I dress, the closer I come to answering “yes” to (at least one dimension of) “Would I respect me?” Now, even so, I’m nowhere close to an unqualified “yes,” but if I ever get there, I should walk into the sea. I guess this leaves me in the awkward position of wanting Put This On to push me closer to the water?

The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project: 43. Alex Bag's Untitled Fall '95 (1995)

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Untitled Fall '95. 56:58 min., color, 1995. By Alex Bag. Ubuweb's description:

Bag, at the time an art student, "plays" Bag the art student. In a series of deadpan performances, Bag gathers fragments of pop detritus, fashioning a thoroughly mediated document that is at once a celebration and a record of loss. With the narrative inevitability of a TV serial, the eight diaristic segments trace a woman's struggle to make sense of her experience at art school. As each installment marks the start of a new semester, Bag's character addresses the camera with her latest observations and frustrations.

Interspersed between these confessions are eight set-pieces, in which Bag performs scenes from the background noise of her imagination: a pretentious visiting artist, London shop-girls discussing their punk band, a Ronald MacDonald puppet attempting to pick up a Hello Kitty doll, the singer Bjork explaining how television works. These surreal episodes sketch out what Bag sees as the simultaneous attraction and repulsion of contemporary youth culture, and teeter on the divide between parody and complicity.

How apropos I mentioned my use of Ubuweb as art school in the previous writeup. Not only is Untitled Fall '95 about art school, it's by an art school student. You see, she's well-known now, but back in the days of Melrose Place and Beavis and Butt-head — both of which are name-checked in the video — Alex Bag was just another kid at NYC's School of Visual Arts. Steering by the tried and true principle of "video what you know," she put together this saga of urban art-school life.

The chapters of this semi-fictional academic career, each of which takes place at the beginning of a new semester, are sort of proto-vlogs. The first has the bright red-haired Bag chatting into the camera about how "stoked" she is to finally be around "people who, like, understand me." As the semesters pass, her appearance changes and her on-camera intake of coffee and cigarettes increases. She announces her decision to "do the fine arts thing," because "advertising is so evil" and "I'm not going to kiss anyone's ass, basically." She's reasonably heartened to notice "big improvements in my shading and foreshortening," but then finds her self stuck writing "these really boring papers." By the time her hair assumes a bob-like shape and she gains a pair of retro Far Side glasses, she's met this RISD guy who impresses her by being "into all these really specific things."

School takes a turn for the worse around the sixth semester. Having dyed her hair black and picked up a nose ring, she admits to being "a little bit depressed," that "everything goes all wrong when I'm forced to explain my work," that she thinks "I shouldn't have to stand next to my thing and explain why I made it." She moans about having to endure her classmates' questions during critiques, having to explain endlessly how "my parents" and "high school" "fucked me up." She complains about the supposed superiority of everybody else at SVA, asking, "What is the point of making work for people who are so smart, they don't even watch TV?"

As the end of art school approaches, she appears to have imbibed that classic cocktail of bitterness and negativity. She's realized that "artists are so boring." She's been "reduced to applying for these really lame jobs." She "can't wait for it to end." She's "scared for it to end." Her one green shoot is the promise of the gritty but kaleidoscopic outside world, which offers an endless array of real, tangible things that may or may not be art-related. At least it's an escape route from the world which keeps her head "buried in some post-structuralist, anti-Lacan, MIT Press thing."

It's in her final couple semesters that her internal pendulum swings to an almost sympathetic position. Despite patches of transcendence and optimism, her history at SVA has been one of complaint. She "decides" to pursue fine art because she can't stand commercialism, yet she resents her professors' insufficient mastery of current pop culture. She's wowed by the presence of other artists, yet she also can't stand them. She works for a successful artist whose practice of hiring students to to his gruntwork she finds loathsome yet somehow inspiring. She doesn't care if she ever makes money from her work, yet she does. "I'm the first to admit that I'm a mass of self-contradictions," she says to the camera, "but I don't think there's anything wrong with that." She finishes off with a cri de coeur against those most villainous of Gen-X villains, those "selling my culture back to me."

It's kind of funny that we postmillennials don't seem to care about that thing, though I'm not quite sure what to make of it. Despite the generational divide, though — and despite the fact that I go to Ubuweb, not SVA — I can feel the resonance in this character's apparently potent combination of camaraderie and spite, confidence and wariness, optimism and dread. True, in many ways she cuts a ridiculous figure: taken from certain angles, she seems vapid, bombastic, directionless, entitled, unreasonably demanding. But maybe there's nothing wrong with that.

While these segments could hold their own simply strung together one after the other, Bag intersperses them with a series of bizarre vignettes. Each stars different eccentrics, all played by Bag herself with what must have been an epic raid on the theater department's costume closet. An unappealingly coiffed guest lecturer medicatedly describes her 365-screen installation and how "it's not as impactful" seeing the videos sequentially instead. A couple slack-jawed Brits yammer on to one another about how boring everything is except for punk rock songs whose lyrics yammer on about how boring everything is. Androgynous teenagers have an after-school-special moment. Bag stares, somehow both in astonishment and with deeply dead eyes, at a video of Björk disassembling a television set. Is the whole lesser or greater than the sum? I'm not sure I'd want to take it apart to find out.