Showing posts with label Repetition. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Repetition. Show all posts
Saturday, July 28, 2012
Sunday, February 19, 2012
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Cure - Kiyoshi Kurosawa (1997)
Article on Cure on strictly film school
An Interview with Kiyoshi Kurosawa (2003)
Cure: Confusion and Sophistication
Saturday, October 16, 2010
How Should a Person Be, Teenager Hamlet and Don’t Go to School: MFA, Oct. 14, 2010
Granted, it is a bit much to be cataloging articles that include the mention of one's own projects. But it was bound to happen: my theoretical concerns have a lot to do with what's happening in a space beyond these reassuringly (to me) static, impersonal texts. Carl Wilson's most excellent article on being "life-sampled." Of critical interest: relationships as units of exchange.
Source.
"There are many tests and lessons involved in being a close part but not a collaborator in other people’s projects. Some have to do with ego, with the way the bubble can envelop you in warm inclusion but then pop you out into chilly dispossession. It’s good for the metabolism to get used to the coming-and-going. More importantly it’s really educational to be sampled – that is, to be reproduced, in snippets, to be recontextualized and rewritten, to meet a blurry third-gen doppleganger who sounds more like someone else."
Tonight, in a couple of hours, three of my closest friends are holding a launch party for the results of their three respective long-term projects, a novel and a movie and an album.
They all examine the relationship of life to art, using the people and places right around them as their subjects and sources. (It’s less obvious with the album, but we tend to forget that almost always when a band plays, we’re listening to a set of dynamic relationships in space; the “community band” element of Tomboyfriend emphasizes that.) They also served as each others’ characters and aides-de-camp.
The launch party takes place in a bar basically across the street from the apartment where I lived in the years they worked on their projects. And that seems apt. I was a participant too: I played a plump, pasty-skinned, city-slickened swamp ghost in the play-within-the-movie, the “ex-husband” around the peripheries of the action of the novel, and the music critic doing what he can do for friends-within-a-band. But mostly I was in another room, at middle distance, framed by a window, finishing my own project, my own book about art and life, which likewise involved them, though mostly less visibly. I almost wish I hadn’t finished it so long ago so I could be launching it tonight too. Instead, I marked the occasion by moving out of that apartment.
There are many tests and lessons involved in being a close part but not a collaborator in other people’s projects. Some have to do with ego, with the way the bubble can envelop you in warm inclusion but then pop you out into chilly dispossession. It’s good for the metabolism to get used to the coming-and-going.
More importantly it’s really educational to be sampled – that is, to be reproduced, in snippets, to be recontextualized and rewritten, to meet a blurry third-gen doppleganger who sounds more like someone else. Most of us aren’t 1970s funk musicians so we’re probably more accustomed to being on the other side. We may be accustomed to being linked or quoted in social media, but being sampled is a more intense sense of self-displacement. To adapt to your life being sampled may be a 21st-century necessity.
That it’s a little harder than you expect gives you sympathy for some of those older artists who take the copyright issue so much more personally than the scope of the financial issues involved. There’s the nightmare vision of being disassembled and reassembled atom by atom in a Star Trek transporter, but put back together in an utterly wrong order. (See also Cronenberg’s The Fly.) Or the subtler nightmare of being reassembled perfectly and yet no longer being “right.” Yet it is also deeply meditative, allowing oneself to be copied, mistranslated: When you think, “Wait, that’s no longer myself,” the next natural step is to wonder whether it was yourself to begin with and whether there is such an animal as yourself or whether you would recognize it if you met it.
So sweetly intoxicating to dare to think not, especially when a crowd of people are daring it with you (out of bravado, perhaps, too proud to be the one to say no, but it doesn’t really matter why, only that you did). It’s becoming the done thing, perhaps, in commercial and fame-economy culture to look at reality as a liquid commodity, worth more in exchange than in savings. But when what you’re buying with it is a dispersal rather than a magnification of self, it seems different enough to matter, which may be as far away from a dominant paradigm as one is usually able to get.
Source.
"There are many tests and lessons involved in being a close part but not a collaborator in other people’s projects. Some have to do with ego, with the way the bubble can envelop you in warm inclusion but then pop you out into chilly dispossession. It’s good for the metabolism to get used to the coming-and-going. More importantly it’s really educational to be sampled – that is, to be reproduced, in snippets, to be recontextualized and rewritten, to meet a blurry third-gen doppleganger who sounds more like someone else."
Tonight, in a couple of hours, three of my closest friends are holding a launch party for the results of their three respective long-term projects, a novel and a movie and an album.
They all examine the relationship of life to art, using the people and places right around them as their subjects and sources. (It’s less obvious with the album, but we tend to forget that almost always when a band plays, we’re listening to a set of dynamic relationships in space; the “community band” element of Tomboyfriend emphasizes that.) They also served as each others’ characters and aides-de-camp.
The launch party takes place in a bar basically across the street from the apartment where I lived in the years they worked on their projects. And that seems apt. I was a participant too: I played a plump, pasty-skinned, city-slickened swamp ghost in the play-within-the-movie, the “ex-husband” around the peripheries of the action of the novel, and the music critic doing what he can do for friends-within-a-band. But mostly I was in another room, at middle distance, framed by a window, finishing my own project, my own book about art and life, which likewise involved them, though mostly less visibly. I almost wish I hadn’t finished it so long ago so I could be launching it tonight too. Instead, I marked the occasion by moving out of that apartment.
There are many tests and lessons involved in being a close part but not a collaborator in other people’s projects. Some have to do with ego, with the way the bubble can envelop you in warm inclusion but then pop you out into chilly dispossession. It’s good for the metabolism to get used to the coming-and-going.
More importantly it’s really educational to be sampled – that is, to be reproduced, in snippets, to be recontextualized and rewritten, to meet a blurry third-gen doppleganger who sounds more like someone else. Most of us aren’t 1970s funk musicians so we’re probably more accustomed to being on the other side. We may be accustomed to being linked or quoted in social media, but being sampled is a more intense sense of self-displacement. To adapt to your life being sampled may be a 21st-century necessity.
That it’s a little harder than you expect gives you sympathy for some of those older artists who take the copyright issue so much more personally than the scope of the financial issues involved. There’s the nightmare vision of being disassembled and reassembled atom by atom in a Star Trek transporter, but put back together in an utterly wrong order. (See also Cronenberg’s The Fly.) Or the subtler nightmare of being reassembled perfectly and yet no longer being “right.” Yet it is also deeply meditative, allowing oneself to be copied, mistranslated: When you think, “Wait, that’s no longer myself,” the next natural step is to wonder whether it was yourself to begin with and whether there is such an animal as yourself or whether you would recognize it if you met it.
So sweetly intoxicating to dare to think not, especially when a crowd of people are daring it with you (out of bravado, perhaps, too proud to be the one to say no, but it doesn’t really matter why, only that you did). It’s becoming the done thing, perhaps, in commercial and fame-economy culture to look at reality as a liquid commodity, worth more in exchange than in savings. But when what you’re buying with it is a dispersal rather than a magnification of self, it seems different enough to matter, which may be as far away from a dominant paradigm as one is usually able to get.
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Friday, September 3, 2010
Saturday, August 14, 2010
Organs of Computation - A Talk with Steven Pinker
Source.
An article that first came to me via Misha Glouberman and his School of Learning (-esque) lay-course in Happiness, this is an informal discussion on a lot of juicy subjects dear to the thought of Steven Pinker.
Themes include how biological organisms look to repeat themselves, how our thinking on thought may be misrepresented by our desire for aesthetics, how robots fail to advance to the computational elegance of a four year old girl, how the Internet can be construed as basically an evolution in language, Rube Goldberg machines, complexity, the sometimes unfortunate plight of happiness within equilibrium-based decision-making, why magical thinking is not illogical but perhaps an evolutionarily vestige system, and why a mind is more like a computer than a toilet.
What I want to be an intentional joke is, perhaps, not. On the introductory page the article repeats its first several paragraphs, underlining the point that processing is often inelegant, and complex systems the work of machines within machines.
An article that first came to me via Misha Glouberman and his School of Learning (-esque) lay-course in Happiness, this is an informal discussion on a lot of juicy subjects dear to the thought of Steven Pinker.
Themes include how biological organisms look to repeat themselves, how our thinking on thought may be misrepresented by our desire for aesthetics, how robots fail to advance to the computational elegance of a four year old girl, how the Internet can be construed as basically an evolution in language, Rube Goldberg machines, complexity, the sometimes unfortunate plight of happiness within equilibrium-based decision-making, why magical thinking is not illogical but perhaps an evolutionarily vestige system, and why a mind is more like a computer than a toilet.
What I want to be an intentional joke is, perhaps, not. On the introductory page the article repeats its first several paragraphs, underlining the point that processing is often inelegant, and complex systems the work of machines within machines.
Thursday, August 5, 2010
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Marx is, besides a feisty piece of polemic, a place where Marxian ideas on Fate occur.
Repetition is explicitly a facet of time in this description.
Excerpt:
"Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Caussidière for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848 to 1851[66] for the Montagne of 1793 to 1795, the nephew for the uncle. And the same caricature occurs in the circumstances of the second edition of the Eighteenth Brumaire.
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. Thus Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793-95. In like manner, the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue.
When we think about this conjuring up of the dead of world history, a salient difference reveals itself. Camille Desmoulins, Danton, Robespierre, St. Just, Napoleon, the heroes as well as the parties and the masses of the old French Revolution, performed the task of their time – that of unchaining and establishing modern bourgeois society – in Roman costumes and with Roman phrases. The first one destroyed the feudal foundation and cut off the feudal heads that had grown on it. The other created inside France the only conditions under which free competition could be developed, parceled-out land properly used, and the unfettered productive power of the nation employed; and beyond the French borders it swept away feudal institutions everywhere, to provide, as far as necessary, bourgeois society in France with an appropriate up-to-date environment on the European continent. Once the new social formation was established, the antediluvian colossi disappeared and with them also the resurrected Romanism – the Brutuses, the Gracchi, the publicolas, the tribunes, the senators, and Caesar himself. Bourgeois society in its sober reality bred its own true interpreters and spokesmen in the Says, Cousins, Royer-Collards, Benjamin Constants, and Guizots; its real military leaders sat behind the office desk and the hog-headed Louis XVIII was its political chief. Entirely absorbed in the production of wealth and in peaceful competitive struggle, it no longer remembered that the ghosts of the Roman period had watched over its cradle."
Repetition is explicitly a facet of time in this description.
Excerpt:
"Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Caussidière for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848 to 1851[66] for the Montagne of 1793 to 1795, the nephew for the uncle. And the same caricature occurs in the circumstances of the second edition of the Eighteenth Brumaire.Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. Thus Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793-95. In like manner, the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue.
When we think about this conjuring up of the dead of world history, a salient difference reveals itself. Camille Desmoulins, Danton, Robespierre, St. Just, Napoleon, the heroes as well as the parties and the masses of the old French Revolution, performed the task of their time – that of unchaining and establishing modern bourgeois society – in Roman costumes and with Roman phrases. The first one destroyed the feudal foundation and cut off the feudal heads that had grown on it. The other created inside France the only conditions under which free competition could be developed, parceled-out land properly used, and the unfettered productive power of the nation employed; and beyond the French borders it swept away feudal institutions everywhere, to provide, as far as necessary, bourgeois society in France with an appropriate up-to-date environment on the European continent. Once the new social formation was established, the antediluvian colossi disappeared and with them also the resurrected Romanism – the Brutuses, the Gracchi, the publicolas, the tribunes, the senators, and Caesar himself. Bourgeois society in its sober reality bred its own true interpreters and spokesmen in the Says, Cousins, Royer-Collards, Benjamin Constants, and Guizots; its real military leaders sat behind the office desk and the hog-headed Louis XVIII was its political chief. Entirely absorbed in the production of wealth and in peaceful competitive struggle, it no longer remembered that the ghosts of the Roman period had watched over its cradle."
Monday, August 2, 2010
The Repetitions and Passivities of Andy Warhol
An interesting 1968 article on Warhol by William S. Wilson, PRINCE Of BOREDOM.
"When Warhol shows repetition as an ideal of mindlessness, like an ideal it recedes from the grasp of man, who is condemned to variety, novelty and precarious margins."
"When Warhol shows repetition as an ideal of mindlessness, like an ideal it recedes from the grasp of man, who is condemned to variety, novelty and precarious margins."
War Rugs from Afghanistan
War rugs from Afghanistan exhibit at the Toronto textile museum.
Repetitive, pixelated, simplified design elements, the iconic medallions of traditional textile-weaving--and strangely reminiscent of low resolution video games--eerily emboss these rugs, reflecting on the terrors of modern global policing.
Naive Capitalism
We are not here to make friends.
An interesting thing about this millennium's first decade's love affair with reality television is how quickly the genre used up the conceit it was, somehow, in documentarian fashion, about an unbarred relationship between camera and life, yet continued to draw an audience specifically fascinated with its reality version of a game show.
Instead of the promised reality, which mostly took the form of scheduled asides, scenarios akin to amateur improv games and actors whose vitality was in their unschooled quipping and mugging, the genre is more notable for the universe it inaugurated of its own evolving, self-recycling conventions. Internally self-regulating, the show's hastily turned-over casts came equipped in advance with strict truisms learned from earlier runs, communal experience evolved into iron-clad rules of engagement. Participants quickly sorted themselves into either the heroes or villains of sentimental tele-novels. Hastily shedding any semblance of individual subjectivity, the borrowed morality and self-conscious aims of these shows' villains, part talent show competitors, part talk-show trash of a debased (yet voluntarily simulated) humanity, when allotted their moment before the camera, often echoed this shrewd popular conception (see clip above) of how one is supposed to be, in reality, which is a game, which requires winners, and winning is good. Call it naive or folk capitalism.
*
Yet why not make friends? And why this fascination with the question? For the question is at the pounding, wounded heart of all this plaster-thin, byzantine interpersonal wrangling. Is it misrecognition of the terms of the game: that to deny subjectivity and worthiness in others nearby is tantamount to emptying the playing field, thereby handing over victory to the most nihilistic of competitors by default? Is it magical, ritualistic logic? That to sacrifice friends in this small game of a television series is to gain them all in the bigger one, that worthy field of engagement these contestants often address in the footlights, when talking to camera, "America." Is it a defensive or apprehensive gesture: One prefers, ultimately, the fair shot of a game than the trauma-inducing, commonly emotionally asymmetrical experience of a friend? Is it compulsive: We often destroy what is actually good for us in favor of what we think is good, based on whispers, limp willingness towards seductions and candy-coated delusions? Or are these contestants simply the bottom-crop of aspiring entertainers whom they appear to be, trying to clock in some valuable screen time, deftly intuiting that an audience needs a structure and that there's power in repetition and the familiar, like melodramatic plotting and a tag-phrase. Moreover, that to portray a cringe-worthy stock villain might be the more lucrative route to an on-screen career than actually "winning" these games; witness the fame industry's main tools for fascination: hating on, and scandal. For, important to note, as a strategy, not making friends only ever yielded mixed results (community-building or the esteem of one's peers was as valid an angle to win on these shows). That the contestants would be or should have been aware of this make their ad nauseum quoting of the platitude all the more quizzical. Not making friends was never a winning strategy in itself.
An interesting thing about this millennium's first decade's love affair with reality television is how quickly the genre used up the conceit it was, somehow, in documentarian fashion, about an unbarred relationship between camera and life, yet continued to draw an audience specifically fascinated with its reality version of a game show.
Instead of the promised reality, which mostly took the form of scheduled asides, scenarios akin to amateur improv games and actors whose vitality was in their unschooled quipping and mugging, the genre is more notable for the universe it inaugurated of its own evolving, self-recycling conventions. Internally self-regulating, the show's hastily turned-over casts came equipped in advance with strict truisms learned from earlier runs, communal experience evolved into iron-clad rules of engagement. Participants quickly sorted themselves into either the heroes or villains of sentimental tele-novels. Hastily shedding any semblance of individual subjectivity, the borrowed morality and self-conscious aims of these shows' villains, part talent show competitors, part talk-show trash of a debased (yet voluntarily simulated) humanity, when allotted their moment before the camera, often echoed this shrewd popular conception (see clip above) of how one is supposed to be, in reality, which is a game, which requires winners, and winning is good. Call it naive or folk capitalism.
*
Yet why not make friends? And why this fascination with the question? For the question is at the pounding, wounded heart of all this plaster-thin, byzantine interpersonal wrangling. Is it misrecognition of the terms of the game: that to deny subjectivity and worthiness in others nearby is tantamount to emptying the playing field, thereby handing over victory to the most nihilistic of competitors by default? Is it magical, ritualistic logic? That to sacrifice friends in this small game of a television series is to gain them all in the bigger one, that worthy field of engagement these contestants often address in the footlights, when talking to camera, "America." Is it a defensive or apprehensive gesture: One prefers, ultimately, the fair shot of a game than the trauma-inducing, commonly emotionally asymmetrical experience of a friend? Is it compulsive: We often destroy what is actually good for us in favor of what we think is good, based on whispers, limp willingness towards seductions and candy-coated delusions? Or are these contestants simply the bottom-crop of aspiring entertainers whom they appear to be, trying to clock in some valuable screen time, deftly intuiting that an audience needs a structure and that there's power in repetition and the familiar, like melodramatic plotting and a tag-phrase. Moreover, that to portray a cringe-worthy stock villain might be the more lucrative route to an on-screen career than actually "winning" these games; witness the fame industry's main tools for fascination: hating on, and scandal. For, important to note, as a strategy, not making friends only ever yielded mixed results (community-building or the esteem of one's peers was as valid an angle to win on these shows). That the contestants would be or should have been aware of this make their ad nauseum quoting of the platitude all the more quizzical. Not making friends was never a winning strategy in itself.
Saturday, July 31, 2010
DSM-IV list of symptoms for autism
Source.
Wikipedia's main entry on autism.
In the diagnostic manual used to classify disabilities, the DSM-IV (American Psychiatric Association, 1994), “autistic disorder” is listed as a category under the heading of “Pervasive Developmental Disorders.” A diagnosis of autistic disorder is made when an individual displays 6 or more of 12 symptoms listed across three major areas: social interaction, communication, and behavior. Examples below.
Problems in social relatedness and communication.
Difficulty in mixing with other children; prefers to be alone; aloof, regal manner; difficulty in expressing needs; uses gestures or pointing instead of words.
Abnormal responses to one or a combination of senses; such as sight, hearing, touch, balance, smell, taste, reaction to pain.
Sustained odd play.
Have odd mannerisms such as rocking back and forth, hand flapping, walking on tip-toes or head banging.
Uneven gross/fine motor skills.
Not responsive to verbal cues, acts as deaf.
Little or no eye contact.
Insistence on sameness; resist changes in routine.
Noticeable physical over-activity or extreme under-activity.
Tantrums; displays extreme distress for no apparent reason.
Speech and language absence or delays. Inappropriate laughing and giggling.
Echolalia (repeating words or phrases in place of normal language).
Abnormal ways of relating to people, objects and events.
Inappropriate attachment to objects.
Don't seek cuddling.
Spins objects.
Not fully knowing how to hold a conversation, thinking about what the other person in a conversation understands and believes, and tuning in to the meta-linguistic signals of the other person, such as facial expression, tone of voice and body language.
Wikipedia's main entry on autism.
In the diagnostic manual used to classify disabilities, the DSM-IV (American Psychiatric Association, 1994), “autistic disorder” is listed as a category under the heading of “Pervasive Developmental Disorders.” A diagnosis of autistic disorder is made when an individual displays 6 or more of 12 symptoms listed across three major areas: social interaction, communication, and behavior. Examples below.
Problems in social relatedness and communication.
Difficulty in mixing with other children; prefers to be alone; aloof, regal manner; difficulty in expressing needs; uses gestures or pointing instead of words.
Abnormal responses to one or a combination of senses; such as sight, hearing, touch, balance, smell, taste, reaction to pain.
Sustained odd play.
Have odd mannerisms such as rocking back and forth, hand flapping, walking on tip-toes or head banging.
Uneven gross/fine motor skills.
Not responsive to verbal cues, acts as deaf.
Little or no eye contact.
Insistence on sameness; resist changes in routine.
Noticeable physical over-activity or extreme under-activity.
Tantrums; displays extreme distress for no apparent reason.
Speech and language absence or delays. Inappropriate laughing and giggling.
Echolalia (repeating words or phrases in place of normal language).
Abnormal ways of relating to people, objects and events.
Inappropriate attachment to objects.
Don't seek cuddling.
Spins objects.
Not fully knowing how to hold a conversation, thinking about what the other person in a conversation understands and believes, and tuning in to the meta-linguistic signals of the other person, such as facial expression, tone of voice and body language.
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