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Duracell

I meant to publish this post two years ago, but apropos of the theme of duration, the birth of my second child has accelerated time and suspended fruition to such an extreme, that I present this missive long after the meme has left the station; now every train of thought crashes with an irresistible cry of "Mama." Perhaps that is the key to endurance: utter absorption in the self--identity (the past), the body (the present), offspring (the future), attenuates time--a parallelism so tidy, my conviction fades. Coincidentally, I watched "The Artist is Present" a few days after my doctor instructed me to go on bed rest for three months, an arduously slow motion struggle to sustain a gestation for as long as possible. The documentary about Marina Abramovic's oeuvre/ corpus and resulting retrospective floored me. Abramovic's feats of endurance reverberated through every cell of my body, particularly her ability to attain transcendent states through excruciating hours of mental and physical stillness. The task of remaining recumbent for three months was a paradox: strenuous stasis, agonizing inertia: it was pure exhaustion to confine myself to a couch. The spectators spilling out of the MOMA sought restraint in the form of a gaze, cultivated from equally self-restraining practices; I was wallowing in a boredom and isolation magnified by pathetic efforts to connect to others through the blogosphere. Her hypnotic escapades ignited my imagination to aestheticize my utterly crucial mission. An excess of movement could result in a terrifying prematurity: an encounter with my sweet, exuberant two-year-old today would underscore how devastating that could have been. Through feats of endurance/duration, the artist may counteract the shrinking attention span of our "hyper-connected" society, as well as suspend the present long enough for the future to humble the self.

#marina abramovic #the artist is present #endurance #duration #pregnancy

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Facebook as Art(ifice)

Social media promises to deliver us from isolation and to connect us to like-minded individuals, but it’s a perilous transaction. What do we give up by putting ourselves out there? What could we subjecting ourselves to when we let our guard down? We take the ease of public broadcast for granted. We passively ingest minutia about people peripheral to our lives. A seemingly effortless time drain, but what could be at stake, especially when its ultimate and unexpected goal occurs: communion between two radically different individuals?

In the 2010 documentary Catfish, a 24-year-old Manhattan photographer and an 8-year-old girl living in rural Michigan become Facebook friends after she sends him a painting of one of his published photographs. Abby is a precocious, talented kid. She continues to send the photographer, Nev (Yaniv Schulman), regular shipments of paintings. Nev also friends her mom, Angela, and the family’s extended network of friends and relations, including Meg, Angela’s older daughter.

(Spoiler Alert:)

After discovering that Meg has claimed authorship of performances by musicians she found online, Nev, Ariel, and Henry begin to doubt the authenticity of the family and their spectacular artistic output.

Rather than abandon the documentary, they pay the family a surprise visit. By choosing to travel to Michigan, Nev and the filmmakers transcend the safe cocoon of the virtual, and what they uncover is brutally stark, real, and even heartbreaking. Abby is not the artist; Meg as they know her does not exist, nor do many of the other Facebook friends connected to the family. Their gentle confrontation of Angela as the single voice and creator of all the other profiles, personalities, and paintings reveals a fertile imagination grappling with extremes of sacrifice, isolation, regret, and possibly delusion. Angela is anchored to home and responsibility, caring for her husband’s severely disabled twin sons. Her husband is oblivious to her nocturnal Facebook adventures, although he does offer startling insight into her personality. In sharp contrast to Angela, Nev and the filmmakers are totally unburdened, unencumbered, with decades of possibility before them. Yet Nev doesn’t recoil from this older, dowdy, dishonest woman he had PG phone sex with who is probably still in love with him. He chooses to delve deeper into the layers of her personality. In a final scene, the wails of her sons in the background, Angela lovingly sketches Nev, and these two individuals, as different as night and day, dissolve the differences between their lives. Truly remarkable is the degree of intricacy and imagination necessary to maintain the web of deceit and to sustain multiple personalities so that they appeared vital and legitimate. Sometimes they wrote on each others' walls. Angela admits that they were all facets of who she could have been--fragments of her abandoned potential, another indication of her self-sacrifice, as they received the credit for her artwork and imagination. I can’t help but think of Fernando Pessoa, the early 20th century Portuguese writer who invented scores of heteronyms--detailed personalities, replete with personal histories, lovers, professions, passions, and astrological charts. Sometimes his heteronyms corresponded with each other. Pessoa attributed his most important works to his heteronyms. A shy, humble, and lonely Lisbon existence perhaps inspired his expansion into multiple voices, allowing for an unrestrained self-expression. Pessoa, lover of paradox, would likely concur that to dissemble the self is to reveal the self.

#Angela Wesselman-Pierce #Ariel Schulman #Catfish #Facebook #Fernando Pessoa #Henry Joost #Yaniv Schulman #documentary #film #heteronyms #social media

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Fragments from the Future

Can a tweet serve as a medium of introspection? I recently read Jennifer Egan’s story, Black Box, published in The New Yorker, June 4 & 11th, 2012 and @NYerFiction. She told The New Yorker’s Page-Turner blog, “my hope was to tell a story whose shape would emerge from the lessons the narrator derived from each step in the action, rather than from descriptions of the action itself.” Egan also endeavored to write a story in list form, and to crossover into a new genre. Her experiment culminated in the serialized, Sci-Fi Twitter story. My relationship with the medium is limited. I haven’t encountered much Twitter fiction. The phrase kind of rubs me the wrong way, but I respect all the forward-thinking literati who have embraced it has a fictional form. Using Twitter solely to triangulate the location of taco trucks around Los Angeles doesn’t mean that I’ve closed myself off to all the possibilities of the medium. And the 140 character limit sounds more liberating than confining. Yay for brevity and succinctness.

Black Box is captivating, interior, and expansive all at once. The female narrator is a beautiful, patriotic spy implanted with all kinds of nano surveillance technology (mimicking the micro sentence structure and trajectory of “beauty” as it careens toward the synthetic). The agent uses sex to infiltrate powerful cartels connected by moonlit speedboat journeys along the Mediterranean. Think Miami Vice meets Neuromancer, from the perspective of a very self-aware woman. As usual, form befits content on Egan’s page/screen. A more traditional structure could render this particular plot cliché.

Most striking about this narrative is that it is both present and reflective. The action is live, but filtered through the narrator’s attempts to reconcile the potential bodily/psychological damage of her mission with its contribution to the greater good/national security. Egan accomplishes exactly what she set out to do, and the staccato paragraph structure only accelerates the tension and action, while the absence of elaborate description and contextualization stimulates the reader’s imagination acutely. In the early 90’s, Carol Maso published Ava, a novel comprised of memory fragments, narrated by a dying woman in her late thirties. There are stylistic similarities between Ava and Black Box: both unfold in short, sentence-length paragraphs and the space between them; in both, female narrators transcend the physical, taking account of their respective missions and lovers. Yet each exists in a distinct temporal plane. Ava, dwelling in the past, is fugal, nonlinear, and associative; Black Box is linear and kinetic, invested in an uncertain future.

#Black Box #Carol Maso #Fiction #Jennifer Egan #The New Yorker #Twitter #literature

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Variations on Melodrama, Part 2

                       Still from Head On

I've become hypersensitive to realism in cinema since becoming a parent. Story lines that portray the sacrifice and suffering of innocents, war, oppression, or physical or psychological degeneration are more or less unwatchable to me, unless they are so highly stylized that an over-the-top theatricality--usually steeped in the unmistakable aura of an auteur--forms a barrier between my fragile emotions/susceptible imagination and the graphic narrative. The subtle and the unseen leave me on the edge of my seat; heavy-handed dramatics are anesthetizing. A healthy dose of melodrama suspends my disbelief just long enough to be transported without being traumatized.

I’ve compiled a list of films I’ll characterize as “Modern Melodrama,” which I define as narratives involving grave themes, personal loss, or historical aftermaths transformed by aesthetic vision, pop culture references, or the absurd:

Head On: In Fatih Akin's film, the volatile relationship between Sibel and Cahut traverses extremes of self-hatred, love, denial, and Turkish-German identity. All About My Mother: Death, disease, and drug addiction have never been so vibrant in Pedro Almodóvar's telenovelistic homage to Tennessee Williams.

The Marriage of Maria Braun: The enchanting, entrepreneurial Maria Braun is the embodiment of the German economic miracle in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's film. Wild At Heart: David Lynch's road trip movie is a virtuosic vortex of familial dysfunction and Americana at its most grotesque. Inglorious Basterds: Cinephilia is the secret weapon against the SS in Quentin Tarantino's Nazi retribution film.

#David Lynch #Fatih Akin #Modern Melodrama #Pedro Almodóvar #Quentin Tarantino #Rainer Werner Fassbinder #film

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Variations on Melodrama, Part 1

Still from Melancholia: http://www.melancholiathemovie.com

Justine’s suffering and Claire’s sense of foreboding are palpable yet restrained, set among a backdrop of a manicured estate, and a baroque, ill-fated wedding ceremony, all funded by the enlightenment-minded John, for whom science is as useless a crutch as wealth. His off-camera overdose in the stables establishes the ineptitude of reason before melancholy’s inexorable trajectory. His suicide leaves Claire to fend for herself, her son, and her sister Justine, whose clairvoyance and apathy have fortified her with a certain grace in the presence of disaster. Justine’s resignation is heroic, as she possesses the imagination to concoct a talisman that comforts the child in the moments leading up to the collision.  The world ends in von Trier’s film, and its aftermath lingers, as do all events that trigger episodes of PTSD. The heartache and anxiety that I harbored left me suspicious of early May’s Supermoon, late May’s solar eclipse, and June’s transit of Venus; every astronomical phenomenon has foreshadowed disaster ever since. After Dancer in the Dark, I felt as if my best friend had died, for weeks afterward. I’ve mourned for Bjork, for Emily Watson, for Charlotte Gainsbourg, and even for Nicole Kidman. His later films, often set on an imaginary American soil, evoke the remote and myopic musings of an imploding new world that remorselessly crushes the innocent with a sinister grin on its face. I struggle to retain a glimmer of most films I watch; a von Trier film leaves an indelible residue. I tend to despise blatantly emotionally manipulative films; I admire his most outrageous transgressions of cinematic sadism. Perhaps it has something to do with my fondness for his earlier work. The image of an overgrown “infant” Udo Kier suspended in the room of a haunted hospital is fundamental for me: imagine The Kingdom, a two-part miniseries made for Danish television, as a playful, absurdist encapsulation of many of the themes that have plagued von Trier throughout the years.

#Bjork #Charlotte Gainsbourg #Emily Watson #Goethe #Kirsten Dunst #Lars von Trier #Melancholia #Nicole Kidman #Romanticism #The Kingdom #The Sorrows of Young Werther #Udo Kier #film

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Peripatetics and Fugue States

I just finished reading Teju Cole’s Open City, a 2011 novel that subtly intimates its soon-to-be status as a classic. Despite its post-9/11 New York City setting, Cole’s book has a density and lyricism that feels more reminiscent of the early 20th century than the 21st. References to psychoanalysis, post-colonialism, war, birds, death, violence, and classical music, mediated through Julius, a contemporary flâneur and psychiatric resident, are thoroughly integrated within the characterization of the narrator. Born and raised in Nigeria to a German mother and a Nigerian father, Julius skirts the periphery of many identities, at times clashing with the multicultural urban spaces he occupies. Allusion, along with vignettes of childhood memories and present-day observations and interactions, comprise a wandering, deeply nuanced subjectivity that eludes obvious assimilation or gratuitous intellectualism. I rarely encounter sentences as graceful and substantial as Cole’s in new fiction.

"This strangest of islands, I thought, as I looked out to the sea, this island that turned in on itself, and from which water had been banished. The shore was a carapace, permeable only at certain selected points. Where in this riverine city could one fully sense a riverbank? Everything was built up, in concrete and stone, and the millions who lived on the tiny interior had scant sense about what flowed around them. The water was a kind of embarrassing secret, the unloved daughter, neglected, while the parks were doted on, fussed over, overused. I stood on the promenade and looked out across the water into the unresponsive night." (p. 54)

Joan Didion is my Los Angeles, Georges Perec my Paris, and now Teju Cole my New York.

#Open City #Teju Cole #contemporary literature #post-9/11 literature #literature

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Voyeur of Voyeurs, Part 2

Still from Caché: moviescreenshots.blogspot.com

Examples are steeped in the photographic, the meta-literary, and the self-reflexive, in resonance with those who are being watched or are doing the watching:

1. Caché -- Michael Haneke's film implicates the viewer in the act of surveillance, asking us to pardon or punish the bourgeois protagonist. Video recordings of his life--sent from anonymous sources--arrive on his doorstop and at the television studio where he works, forcing him to confront unsettling memories, and eventually, to witness a haunting act.

2. The Shadow -- Sophie Calle asked her mother to hire a private detective to follow her around Paris. Unaware of the set up, the detective photographed Calle from a distance as she led him to spaces that were meaningful to her.  The artist seeks to verify her existence through a stranger's attentive eyes.

3. The Continuity of Parks -- In Julio Cortazár’s short story, a narrator whose existence hangs on a thread of suspense is engrossed in the thrilling plot of his own impending demise, doubling the act of reading. The story within the story links victim and audience, destabilizing our own existence as we hang on to every word.

Click through to contribute more examples in the comments section.

#Julio Cortazar #Michael Haneke #Sophie Calle #Spectator #Voyeur #film #literature #art #performance art

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Voyeur of Voyeurs, Part 1

In my kindergarten class portrait, I’m the one staring at the boy next to me as the other children look directly into the lens. The shoot presented an opportunity to steal a look while boy in the green adidas tracksuit’s focus was directed elsewhere. The photograph reveals an early tendency toward a camera-mediated form of observation that eventually evolves into one that seeks the empathy of spectatorship.

Different varieties of voyeurism exist. I’m not interested in spying on the transgressors of public and private, the exhibitionist performers of lurid acts or outrageous practitioners of self presentation. The nature of my staring problem is reflexive rather than one-sided. I’m fascinated by other spectators.

When I lived in New York, I loved watching people sizing each other up and checking each other out on the subway. Now I live in Los Angeles, and all the oglers of beauty, surly mean girls, wide-eyed tourists, and artist types doing research for their screenplays are spread out among cafes, bus tours, and jammed boulevards. Meager options for public transit in LA mean fewer outlets for a voyeur of voyeurs--but here, a movie industry obsessed with desire and escapism feeds the phenomenon.

#Ghostbusters #Los Angeles #New York #spectator #voyeur #film