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imomusThis morning I received a video treatment for a song I wrote about five years ago. I'm not going to tell you what song it was, or many details of the ideas in the treatment, because it wouldn't be fair to the director. All I want to note here -- this continues my text v. texture theme -- is that, based on a few pages of text, I feel I have no way of knowing whether the video will work or not. The treatment is pretty much useless to me. Trying to describe a video with words is like trying to describe a human face or a musical sound with words. I'm not the kind of person who can read a score and hear a symphony in his head. I only know if I like a sound when I hear it. I need to listen, and I need to see.
They're cliches, but they're true: 'Don't tell me, show me!' 'A picture is worth a thousand words.' Imagine you're choosing a lover. Someone offers you a 1000 word textual description of his face. Someone else offers you a photograph. Which do you choose? Would you marry someone based only on a textual correspondence? In the early days of the internet, when computers could do text but hadn't yet mastered pictures or sounds, lots of ASCII romances flourished. Text, it seemed, was incredibly flirty. Almost anyone could be attractive in an e mail, whereas in real life you probably wouldn't look at them twice. On the internet nobody could tell whether you were a dog. That was good, at least for the textually-gifted and the texturally-challenged. 'Don't judge a book by the cover!' In a society governed perhaps too much by the textural and the visual, the early internet seemed like a return to the primacy of the logos.
Douglas Rushkoff wrote a book comparing the early internet to early Judaism. I don't disagree with the analogy. I just disagree that either were a good thing. Both Judaism and the early internet foster de-corporealisation and favour the textual above the textural. This is one of the deepest sicknesses of our culture.
The video treatment is for a song I don't perform much. It's a song which appeals to people who don't much like the rest of my work. It's a somewhat mystical and metaphysical song, a Romantic song, a spiritual quest. Musically, it resembles 'The Bell Dog' by Brian Eno. It has a similar 'where are you?' cadence to the vocal melody, a similar misty electronic atmosphere. It's a song which, unlike the others around it, doesn't deliberately debunk the idea of surface and depth; a 'deep song', then, a song which might even harbour Lorca's duende: 'an air bearing the odor of child's spittle, crushed grass, and the veil of Medusa announcing the unending baptism of all newly-created things.'
My correspondent (not the duende, but the video maker) has chosen an Amercian Abstract Expressionist painter as his visual frame of reference for the video. Again, I won't tell you which one. Suffice to say that it's a painter whose work is highly textural and highly tangible, and yet whose early death brings religion and metaphysics rushing into all commentary about him, along with a weird sort of back door Romanticism. Why is it that 'formalist' critics like Clement Greenberg seemed to need to call on spurious metaphysics to back up the hard, pure, simple and profound 'thisness' of Abstract Expressionist canvases? Were they aware that western culture sees formalism as a vacuum, and abhors it? That textural and formal arguments alone could never make the final sale? That metaphysics -- an appeal to all that's absent and yet real -- would have to be called upon? And can we excuse these 'formalist' critics for calling mostly on eastern metaphysics rather than western? For, if all metaphysics is an attempt to deal with absence, eastern metaphysics has accepted absence as absence, and turned its attention back to present realities (this room, my breathing), whereas western metaphysics has insisted on the reality of what's elsewhere (God, the Platonic ideas) and turned its back on life.
Personally, I vastly prefer the idea of things like 'spiritual wisdom', 'metaphysical insight' and even some kind of pompous 'death, rebirth, and transfiguration' schtick being applied to a painter like Norman Rockwell -- unpretentious, concrete, life-loving and life-transfiguring -- than people like, oh, say, Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko. Transcendence, it seems to me, lurks in the lightness of the everyday. And perhaps the ultimate 'transcendence' is complete acceptance of the literal, the textural, the corporeal, and the tangible.
They're cliches, but they're true: 'Don't tell me, show me!' 'A picture is worth a thousand words.' Imagine you're choosing a lover. Someone offers you a 1000 word textual description of his face. Someone else offers you a photograph. Which do you choose? Would you marry someone based only on a textual correspondence? In the early days of the internet, when computers could do text but hadn't yet mastered pictures or sounds, lots of ASCII romances flourished. Text, it seemed, was incredibly flirty. Almost anyone could be attractive in an e mail, whereas in real life you probably wouldn't look at them twice. On the internet nobody could tell whether you were a dog. That was good, at least for the textually-gifted and the texturally-challenged. 'Don't judge a book by the cover!' In a society governed perhaps too much by the textural and the visual, the early internet seemed like a return to the primacy of the logos.
Douglas Rushkoff wrote a book comparing the early internet to early Judaism. I don't disagree with the analogy. I just disagree that either were a good thing. Both Judaism and the early internet foster de-corporealisation and favour the textual above the textural. This is one of the deepest sicknesses of our culture.
The video treatment is for a song I don't perform much. It's a song which appeals to people who don't much like the rest of my work. It's a somewhat mystical and metaphysical song, a Romantic song, a spiritual quest. Musically, it resembles 'The Bell Dog' by Brian Eno. It has a similar 'where are you?' cadence to the vocal melody, a similar misty electronic atmosphere. It's a song which, unlike the others around it, doesn't deliberately debunk the idea of surface and depth; a 'deep song', then, a song which might even harbour Lorca's duende: 'an air bearing the odor of child's spittle, crushed grass, and the veil of Medusa announcing the unending baptism of all newly-created things.'
My correspondent (not the duende, but the video maker) has chosen an Amercian Abstract Expressionist painter as his visual frame of reference for the video. Again, I won't tell you which one. Suffice to say that it's a painter whose work is highly textural and highly tangible, and yet whose early death brings religion and metaphysics rushing into all commentary about him, along with a weird sort of back door Romanticism. Why is it that 'formalist' critics like Clement Greenberg seemed to need to call on spurious metaphysics to back up the hard, pure, simple and profound 'thisness' of Abstract Expressionist canvases? Were they aware that western culture sees formalism as a vacuum, and abhors it? That textural and formal arguments alone could never make the final sale? That metaphysics -- an appeal to all that's absent and yet real -- would have to be called upon? And can we excuse these 'formalist' critics for calling mostly on eastern metaphysics rather than western? For, if all metaphysics is an attempt to deal with absence, eastern metaphysics has accepted absence as absence, and turned its attention back to present realities (this room, my breathing), whereas western metaphysics has insisted on the reality of what's elsewhere (God, the Platonic ideas) and turned its back on life.
Personally, I vastly prefer the idea of things like 'spiritual wisdom', 'metaphysical insight' and even some kind of pompous 'death, rebirth, and transfiguration' schtick being applied to a painter like Norman Rockwell -- unpretentious, concrete, life-loving and life-transfiguring -- than people like, oh, say, Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko. Transcendence, it seems to me, lurks in the lightness of the everyday. And perhaps the ultimate 'transcendence' is complete acceptance of the literal, the textural, the corporeal, and the tangible.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-26 12:17 pm (UTC)You're starting to sound like a broken record. You have a world view that could be summed up in a paragraph that dictates your response to every type of art, to the point of caricature. Are you so sure that metaphysics can be banished? I think history shows that it can only be deferred.
That text is not a great medium for describing a face is not a great argument against the medium. Would you trust a song about someone over their photograph? I think you've just grafted text into your anti-metaphysics argument. You've created a rigid grid into which ultimately everything can be placed.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-26 12:27 pm (UTC)(also, Pollock was pretty good at mythologising himself; I don't think he needed that much help from the critics on that front.)
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-26 12:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-26 12:45 pm (UTC)So I should say is 'all that's left is... the abyss of text!' Or perhaps a view of 'contingency' which doesn't require that it be 'triumphed over'. Which brings us back to Rockwell.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-26 12:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-26 01:11 pm (UTC)My records are interesting (perhaps 'interestingly vulnerable') precisely when they dramatize all the conflicts that are evident in this entry. Perhaps they're 'broken records', but maybe broken records sound better to some ears (all those lovely crackles and jumps and skids!) than unbroken ones.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-26 01:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-26 01:53 pm (UTC)Hmm, he must be pretty hungry right now. :-)
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-26 01:54 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-26 01:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-26 02:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-26 02:00 pm (UTC)I often have a squizz at that page, not for the food, but more to see what odd gadgets he's been messing around with lately.
And to see if there is any new music in the pipeline. Besides Sting remixes. He says, bitchily.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-26 04:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-26 04:22 pm (UTC)What's it like, btw (I can't file share at work, unfortunately. It would be lovely to abuse the Uni's T-whatever connection!). I remember quite liking the track he did for the Sounds in Spaces thing at the V&A in London this summer, but not exactly being bowled over by it.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-26 04:28 pm (UTC)But I think it's great, very much in the 'Point' vein; could well be an outtake from that album.
But yeah, it is 'Wired' rather than 'The Wire'. There's a different version of the track on the Matador 15th anniversary box set too.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-27 10:32 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-26 08:41 pm (UTC)