Can’t offer anything insightful about No Country For Old Men. Probably the best film I’ve seen this year… still holding out for There Will Be Blood. Can’t think of too many other book adaptations that are this good.
I finally got around to reading this lengthy article. Considering I’ve been told about it from an artist, a teacher, a bike messenger, and a graduate, the tag for this blog is probably incorrect. However, maybe the implied exclusivity of the tag will spark an innate sense of envy in you, noble reader, and you’ll be compelled to read through the long article. Really, despite an article that predominantly looks at an indigenous tribe’s language structure and outlines the mounting forces between a feud regarding Chomskyean notions of Universal Grammar, this is an article that anyone can take something from. For example, I get why -and am thrilled by the fact that – the article was the only required reading for a graduate design course.
It’s an article that I’d like to look at through a teacher’s lens, though one whose questions it elicits I’d hope to exhume in the company of others rather than the barren void of an under read blog. Additionally, the article made me think about the concept (be it the well-treaded concept) of recursion. What about recursion in politics or in educative practice? Can we frame ours as a recursive culture? I realize that this makes little sense, but I’m not sure how to fully enunciate this…yet. Read it yourself – maybe you can help unravel this thought for me.
First, I think that this . . . well, frankly I don’t know what to think. I’ve been looking at it on amazon for the better part of a week now and just can’t decide how to feel about it. Obviously this is a giant leap in the advancement of human development. Don’t get me wrong, I am completely repulsed by this, but its sheer existence says something. I’m not sure what. I’m tempted to click “buy” out of spite but don’t think I’d be able to watch it to make a more formative analysis. This really is a case for someone like Chuck Klosterman (and I grew out of my need to ape his writing quirks a couple years ago… at least I hope I did).
Next, as I mentioned yesterday, this week’s book club was of the usual mind blowing variety. A smaller crowd than usual, but I have a feeling the book pushed back against many of our usual attendees. If anything, I’m now left with a feeling of envy that us western folk are relegated to kick around phrases “magic” and “spirits” simply because we need to label that which isn’t natural to us. That is, concepts of spirituality and spells and magic are foreign to commofidied, “proper” Yanks. We give these concepts fancy terms to show we don’t believe they happen, even though Taussig argues they not only happen but they essentially help run or propel the happenings of the ever ubiquitous and undefined “state.” I’d have more to say on this except for the fact that I’m reluctant to say I fully understood the text…which I also suspect was intentional on the author’s part.
Spent a good deal of my afternoon watching this and the other linked exhibits. Just great.
Spent a good deal of the morning subjecting my students to the new Saul Williams album. While I’m not as smitten with it as Ms. Rogers, it is a remarkable album. Wish the album had more Thavius and less Trent…sacrilegious? Probably.
Don’t take the inconsistent updating of this blog as a sign on lethargy or inaction. The fact of the matter is that, in addition to being back on track and teaching, I’m fully immersed in several projects (two of which may have larger implications than I can really predict at the moment).
However, I’m at a real dilemma at the moment.
On one hand there are projects that I’m still wrapping my head around and trying to approach from theoretical perspectives in an effort to maintain level-headedness. Take yesterday; I spent three and a half hours in a meeting that completely reoriented my perspective and feelings about next year. In short I left extremely angry and motivated to pursue…other projects. And as much as I am exploring ideas, avenues of even further exploration, and dialogue with other allies, it is out of place to address any of these topics in any kind of formal manner on this site. To be clear, I’m not at the liberty to talk about certain issues pertinent to the current state and future direction of my high school.
On the other hand, I have other (possibly more upbeat) projects that I’m in the process of developing. I should be talking about these things. However, now more than ever I am becoming wary of concepts like intellectual property and not peacocking ideas that I haven’t either published or presented formally. Selfish, egotistical, and self-righteous? Probably exceedingly so. However, I’m actively pursuing work bordering both research and practical application within the classroom and I’ve heard enough horror stories in such a short time that such ideas remain as fragments on m hard drive rather than diamonds to be mined via google.
This isn’t any kind of rationale for lack of recent posts. I’m merely confronting my need to tangle through various ideas and my need for that entanglement to not be one that is public. Of course, that leaves me in a position, presently, of deciding a course of action for this blog. While I still maintain an interest in documenting and further inquiring into various interests including professional, academic pursuits, I think that this site can only be tangentially connected to these efforts. I’m relegated to pop culture, classroom observations, and pedagogical gizmos as they wash up on a generic shore. Of course, most of my current interests (that currently remain nameless on the digital wilderness) came about through such ad hoc discovery. Likely many things noted here will lead toward more professionally developed ideas, but that’s something to be noticed only when looking back, not to be judged while looking forward.
I can, however, share my thoughts on tonight’s fantastic book club. I think that will happen tomorrow.
And so we saw the King Lear last night. It was glorious. There is something magical in the fact that the entire production was done without microphones in a theater the size of Royce Hall. By no means am I equipped with the expertise to offer any critical revelation or opinion on the production. Suffice it to say that I was impressed and that I’ll avoid the kind of sophomoric humor that could have followed the gasps heard from audience members when Gandalf displayed his “wizard staff,” his “precious,” or his little “Bilbo Baggins” (I realize how sophomoric that actually was, but I couldn’t resist). Also seen last night in attendance: Alfred “The Man” Molina, Neil Patrick Harris, and John Lithgow.
For no good reason the ol’ lady and I watched The Karate Kid for the umpteenth time tonight. Although Gomez’ obsession with “Sweep the leg” has become infectious, my new favorite line comes as an off the cuff diss at young Daniel-san: “It must be Take-A-Worm-For-A-Walk Week.”
Just brilliant.
This post also serves as a reminder for me to type up my ideas on the LA River/LA Sustainability curricula and Ringtones as Resistance before I forget about them.
I’m quite disturbed by this – I saw it on TV tonight shortly after the discussion about protests and puppets. There is something scary in the commercial. That it’s selling vodka furthers the problem for me.
Reminds me a bit of dialogue at the recent workshop I presented: a teacher completely disregarded an merit of a certian graffiti artist because he was later commissioned to paint for Disney…
Returned from meeting number two of a focused book club entitled “Planet of the Humans.” The club, its organizer, and meeting location all deserve elaborate, extensive posts; not something I’m going to do quite yet. While books one and two focused on specific relationships with nature, tonight’s discussion looked specifically at human interactions with other humans. Though relying on a yet officially published book, the evening’s participants were provided with a digital manuscript for reading. Specifically looking at giant puppets in today’s protests, the conversation led to discussions of the role of the artist and the teacher as well as the nature of swarm theory and animal behavior in groups. I’m particularly interested in the larger stories being told in today’s protests – at least as described by Graeber. Speaking in generalities that do not do justice to the book’s deliberate pacing, the media and the state (as enacted by police force) are telling a story of activists and anarchists as villains. The image of the smashed Starbucks is symbol of the repugnant behavior that is a detriment to our way of life. At the same time, the other agents in the protest story, the anarchists, are trying to reframe the story – they are creating a carnival and symbolic projection of utopia through puppets and the careful reinterpretation of space; a smashed window is more than just a smashed window: it becomes a portal into other possibilities. As an English teacher, it’s these kinds of stories that I’m interested in telling. I’ve toyed with the idea of writing about the concept of the teacher as griot, something I’ve visualized for a couple years now but haven’t quite framed as something truly coherent. At the same time, I’m gearing up for (re)telling a new story with my students when I go back on track in two weeks. Maybe that story is the same one as the story discussed tonight. Really a remarkable book club and something I’m valuing for its direct application within my classroom and in relation to my own (constantly redeveloping) pedagogy. Six more books to go.
So the Final Cut of Blade Runner has smoked me out of my blogging shell for the time being. I’m sure I won’t be saying anything that hasn’t already been said. The film is brilliant, huge, and so quintessentially L.A.
My relationship with this film is one that I don’t think I’ve ever shared. At the age of nine, my father took me to see the Director’s Cut of the film. The film profoundly scared me. I was affected by Blade Runner in a way no other film had ever done so. My mother, of course, was likely pissed off at my dad for even thinking of taking me to see the film at such an impressionable age – being a little kid, I was truly frightened by the film. It’s imagery, humanistic themes, and miasmic blend of language was lost on me. I saw violent killings, that creepy origami guy, and the insanely scary blond haired acrobatic duo. I distinctly remember the Vangelis score enthralling and terrifying in its scope. By default, Blade Runner was also the first noir film I ever really paid attention to at the time.
Nine years later and I was writing an academic essay on Blade Runner for a class on Interracial Dynamics. It was the second quarter of my freshman year at UCLA, and at the class screening of the film, I’m shocked to find I’m one of only a small throng of students that has actually seen the film before. The film is every bit as epic I’d remembered it when I was nine and the handful of times I had watched it since then (having grown a little braver with age).
The film’s current (and final?) form is a marked improvement. The film breathes slowly, deliberately. It allows its themes to unfold more humanely than before. It hurts to watch the replicants “retire,” to question and resist mortality, to persevere in the face of hatred. Is Blade Runner our modern Frankenstein (and by default our “Modern Prometheus”)? I’d posit an answer if I wasn’t so worried that it would be a cross-referenced indicator in your voight-kampff test.
So thumbing through the new issue of Urb, I was stoked to see my editor, Joshua Glazer, mention a reading at Family Bookstore that went down in March. It reminded me of an interview I did for a now defunct Website five years ago. Not my best work, but I’m always a fan of what Ian says. For the sake of posterity, I’m reposting the original interview I did. Enjoy… or not.
A Constitutional Crime with Ian Svenonius
By Antero Garcia
Ian Svenonius, lead singer of Weird War, is perched on a folding chair in the hidden innards of the Henry Fonda Theater. As sedate as he appears, in an hour he will be belting out piercing gospel-tinged screams and falling to his knees a la James Brown during his band’s performance. Ian has an iconoclastic voice that he uses as a tool for preaching revolutionary politics in such bands as Nation of Ulysses, the Make-Up, and now Weird War (formerly the Scene Creamers).
With their recently released sophomore album, If You Can’t Beat ‘Em Bite ‘Em on Drag City, Weird War have confronted listeners with near-childish sounding melodies. The chanting lyrics, fuzzed-out guitars and ploddingly simple drum and bass rhythms also contain some of the most politically confrontational songs released today. Though his lyrics are deceivingly simplistic, they are rife with political meaning and Svenonius is quick to point this out in his signature highbrow vocabulary.
Antero Garcia: How’s the tour been treating you?
Ian Svenonius: It’s the second to last show for us before heading back to d.c., going well.
AG: What are those buttons you’re wearing?
IS: This is a Walkmen button and this is the republic of Vietnam
AG: Kind of along those lines, you were pretty sincere about the Mao quotes used in the album?
IS: It’s not really Mao. It’s an idea that has been appropriated by him. It’s really revolutionary politics, meaning that despite insurmountable funds, you have to focus – even if you’re feeling like a struggle is futile. If you focus on destroying the enemy like eating a meal: one bite at a time, then it can be achieved -the piece meal solution. Mao equates killing the enemy with eating a meal. You can never conceive of eating a meal in one bite. It’s a support of revolutionary struggle.
AG: Would you consider Weird War “punk?”
IS: I don’t want to use the word punk because I feel it’s so overused. I feel like people don’t let anything die. If you were to look at these things, it sounds like ska and punk and it all coexists. We need new terms. It’s aggressive rock and roll for sure.
Michelle Mae [Bassist, from the band’s dressing room]: It’s not punk! It’s nuclear diarrhea.
IS: Yeah, exactly. Punk is an interesting term, like what does it mean? I just wrote an essay on punk and rock and roll music appropriating gay culture, but in the ’60s people called that sound garage rock. Punk has become like Christianity where people don’t know exactly what it defines.
AG: Weird War have done a lot of label jumping, one of the first things I heard from Weird War was the contribution to the concept album Colonel Pumpernickel on Off Records.
IS: That was one of the first recordings as Weird War, and Make-Up was still together. We’re not a group in the strict sense of other rock and roll bands, it’s an umbrella organization. For instance were touring with the drummer from Dirtbombs right now, Ben Blackwell.
AG: Does that also go along with the band changing names? You were called the Scene Creamers when you came through LA last fall and now you’re back to Weird War.
IS: We were always Weird War and then we started working with new people and changed to the Scene Creamers and then in a legal dispute we lost that name and went back to Weird War. Someone else had coined it it was a long and boring story. We like the name weird war.
AG: I’ve got to ask about the rumor that Rick Rubin originally approached you to front the ex-Rage Against the Machine band.
IS: That’s a rumor… a conversation Rick and I had… in the newspaper it sounds like a big thing but it wasn’t.
AG: Your songs break away from the typical “verse-chorus verse” formula. TO an extent they feel like simple riffs and chord vamps.
IS: They’re kind of based on grooves, but they’re all written. They’re not just vamps. Like “Store Bought Pot,” we were trying to make a linear song. It’s loosely inspired by Funkadelic’s “Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow.” It’s different, but the drumbeat’s inspired by Donnie Hathaway. That’s how our songs are. They’re a pastiche of things that inspire us. The lyrics have to do with Babylon.
AG: So there is a definite hip-hop influence to the music?
IS: Influenced by that and the presentation of hip-hop albums, as they’re kind of a drama that’s played out over the course of a record. That’s something that has been lost in rock and roll albums. Instead of just a collection of songs, hip-hop records are a cycle, like an opera. We wanted to do something like that.
AG: How does that work in If You Can’t Beat ‘Em Bite ‘Em?
IS: We end with “One by One,” and begin with “Music for Masturbation.” We begin with this bizarre fascism that’s based on sexual anxiety. “Music for Masturbation” is also a thing where music has become a religion with no believers. Without any interaction. And it ends with this inspirational hymn of religion. It’s not done in a gospel manner, but in it’s lyrics.
AG: Would it be fair to say that “AK-47” is the emotional climax for the album?
IS: That’s the centerpiece of the album. Right now with rock and roll, music is without content. The problem is right now there s a lot of revisionism in rock and roll when in actuality culture is the greatest weapon, it’s the most potent weapon. The CIA has a station in Hollywood where they screen all of the scripts coming out. The US army subsidizes films that say what they want. The Sum of All Fears was subsidized by the army to the tune of millions and millions of dollars. It’s censorship on a level that hasn’t been seen since World War II. You know that movie with Matt Damon with memory loss….
AG: The Bourne Identity?
IS: Yeah, that wasn’t subsidized because they thought it was anti military. That’s a great big movie. So the idea that rock and roll is intrinsically apolitical or shouldn’t have any meaning is just a lie. Lyndon La Rouche even talks about the paradigm shift that occurred when the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan show. Everybody talks about the effect of Elvis Presley. The idea that is institutionalized in rock and roll now is really cheating everybody to say that you’re involved in it. If you’re involved in it with no meaning that’s bogus. So “AK-47” addresses the technology gap. Every weapon that we have has been cataloged by the UN, which is essentially a US foreign policy front. We invade a country with overwhelming military superiority, and we see this and say, ‘Well, is a Vietnam kind of situation even possible now? Guerilla struggle still possible?’ I think there’s some imbalance in the technology.
AG: Do you think it’s possible?
IS: Well that’s what the song questions. We have technology that is overwhelmingly superior for killing people. The military industrial complex is a huge moneymaker, war makes a lot of money. “AK-47” is like people against technology. The FLSN, FARC, SWAPO, NPLA, etc. all these organizations rely on incredibly simple machines like the AK-47 to succeed. And that’s still happening. It’s a song of affirmation.
AG: You’re talking about Weird War countering the apathy so prevelant in rock music, but at the same time you’re opening for a band who’s current single, “The Rat” is about introversion and being completely apathetic.
IS: Right, and I love the Walkmen. I think political songs are usually a drag. But the revisionism happening now is a band that only writes nothing and is mining either soul or funk. There are only so many things you can relive – it’s all nostalgia, it’s an art show essentially. The Walkmen are nothing like that, they’re making weird music that sounds nothing like what’s been done.
AG: I’d say the same thing about Weird War.
IS: We’re a culmination of so many things. Influences are unavoidable, they’re great but when I say horrible I’m talking about groups that are like, ‘We’re cloning New Order!’ They’re not bringing anything. They’re cheating us in a way. To me we’re supposed to be forward thrusting, but college football players have been having ’80s night for the past five years. If you’re an ’80s band you’re following the tastes of a fraternity. It’s pathetic.
AG: You’ve talked about how audiences today are more diverse, you get the casual fan who may not know much about Weird War, compared to the ’80s and early ’90s underground scene where a room would be filled with die hard fans.
IS: It’s because the underground has been kind of demolished. The independent network separate from the mainstream is gone. The lines have all been blurred. One of the positive outcomes of that is there won’t be as much insularity, self-navel gazing any more – examining yourself. High art is very insurant; it refers to itself which is why people are alienated by it, except for a cabal of art people. There’s no popular high art. It’s so self-referential and only refers to its own self-aesthetic. You don’t want underground rock and roll to be like that because it’s such an important historical cultural tool.