Sir Barken Hyena writes:
Post-Kraftwerk, I dragged my ragged soul up the coast for some renewal in Santa Barbara, prettiest goldang place this side of the nape of Scarlett Johansson’s neck. My awesome hosts, Paleo Retiree and Question Lady, kept me busy with food, cocktails and camaraderie while walking the streets of this stunning town. Here are some snaps.
Blowhard, Esq. writes:
Fenster writes:
The Diggers’ famous but enigmatic 1% Free poster?
or the 20% free you get with New York Style Original Crispy Bagel Chips?
Bonus!
If pictures don’t tell the story, here are some moving pictures with words.
The late Peter Berg describing the Digger logic in creating the 1% poster.
How to manufacture bagel chips.
Sir Barken Hyena writes:
A few weeks back in my Vinyl Review I mentioned the upcoming Kraftwerk show, which I was graciously invited to attend by Blowhard, Esq and his entourage of colorful weirdos. (One of whom, a certain Miss Berry, gave me some real juicy dirt on Mr Blowhard, Esq. that I would love to share here, but – so far at least – decency has forbidden me).
It was a splendid evening of louder-than-fuck pumping beats, shiny electronic soundscapes, melodies cute and tinkly, and sweeping and grand. The Kraftwerk aesthetic is a one of kind thing, which they’ve pursued with a focused vengeance since the Radio-Activity album (1975). Man, did they ever stand out in the shaggy, hairy mid-1970s.
The Eagles vs Kraftwerk
Well, we all know who won that particular Kulturkampf.
My artist friend Gareth Kaple calls them “the most important band since the Beatles”, which, big a fan as I am took me aback. But it’s hard to debunk. They have no where near the fame of course, but their influence is similarly vast, running from Bowie to Punk to Dance to Electronica to Techno Pop and more, lots more. Daft Punk to Depeche Mode, thousands of bands just wouldn’t have happened without them.
We are the 8-bit robots
What’s the secret? They’ve made this modern life, dominated by electricity at a distance, the primary subject of their art. Now, that electric world is the basis for virtually all of our art and culture, most of which is distanced from the feel and tenor of atoms and electrons. Let’s look at our friends the Eagles again for a minute. Redolent of the past aren’t they (and weed and underarm sweat too, I bet)? They could be a bunch of 19th-century longshoreman, except they use hair conditioner and blow dryers. This is a band every last bit as dependent on modern electronics as Kraftwerk, but they use it to mostly hide that fact and present a down home and natural image that is anything but. Yeah, I kind of hate The Eagles.
But Kraftwerk embraced electricity with no apology, front and center. The discord and alienation is exposed, not at all hidden, but so is the wonder and glee. The surfaces are entirely modern, a glass and chrome world but with the darkness and danger intact (“radioactivity, it’s in the air, for you and me”). They aren’t trying to put a gloss on our life today, they simply build the world of their art from the true stuff of today. I think everybody feels like Kraftwerk these days, some of the time.
And we are dancing mechanik
Frank Gehry’s playful and ugly Walt Disney Concert Hall might have been the perfect place to see them, because of a somewhat similar conceptual basis. Kraftwerk apparently agreed, since they integrated 3D models of the concert hall into the (also 3D) multimedia presentation. (I wrote a bit about my reactions to the hall earlier.) And the acoustics were stunning, you could feel the bass in your spine yet it was clear and pure. Simply the best sounding high volume concert I have ever attended.
A word about electronic performances. In this day and age of super powered laptops, it’s possible to automate an entire electronic music show, just hitting “play” and letting it run. The running joke has been that laptop performers are actually checking their email and surfing porn on stage. And some of them probably are. As you can see from the above image, we couldn’t really see what they were doing. But rather than trying to counter that impression, they used it. It was quite clear they were doing *something* up there, we could see their hands and feet moving around and clicking or tapping to the music, but what exactly were they doing? What kind of odd devices were under their hands? It left a real sense of mystery about just what these Machine Men were doing up there. In fact, improvisation is a significant part of their performance, which accounts for the sheer pumping drama and excitement of it all. I wasn’t sitting still for one moment.
A fine evening spent with good friends and consummate artists, what more could you ask for?
Fenster writes:
The 2012 film A Late Quartet concerns a series of events that threatens the stability of a world-renowned string quartet, a group that has been together for 25 years.
Events are set in motion when the group’s cellist (Christopher Walken) is diagnosed with a debilitiating illness. When he announces his decision to play one final concert and then retire, the cohesion of the group is shattered as the other members react to the news in different ways, each evidencing issues that had been held in check by the stability that the group work afforded.
The film is a lot of things, including, per the above, a wonderful study in both individual psychology and group dynamics. The script is literate and powerful, and it takes seriously not only the music itself but the choices the characters make as musicians. That is, their work and their art are treated with a respect that is not common in many films, where such details are often treated as grist for the melodramatic mill. I wrote about Mado that it was uncommon in how it took the details of real estate seriously. The same thing is true here with respect to being an artist in a string quartet for a quarter of a century.
The acting is wonderful, too. You have Walken and Philip Seymour Hoffman as two of the leads and that would be more than enough. But the first violinist is also played impeccably by a guy named Mark Ivanir, who I know I have seen before but could not really place. The quartet is rounded out by Catherine Keener on viola. Keener has long been one of my favorite actresses since she is so damn good at comedy played with fingernails running down a blackboard in the background. But here she’s more than just good at mining murky places for laughs. Here it is murky all the way down, and that is true of all four. In the end, it’s mostly a tragedy.
The tension between tragedy and comedy got played out in an interesting way for me in this film.
We tend to think of the relationship between tragedy and comedy in terms of a strict polarity
like yin and yang.
The yin-yang formulation invites us to think of polarities as equal-but-opposite but it is not clear to me that this is the actual relationship between comedy and tragedy. Consider how often we come to tragedy through comedy: the laughing through pain, the funny moment that disturbs. But is it as common to come to comedy through tragedy? It seems to me that that is harder to do.
I think you find some of that counterintuitive approach in this film. By the end you cannot help but see what fools those mortals be. It didn’t cause a chuckle, exactly, but there was some dark comedy lurking in there somewhere.
Blowhard, Esq. writes:
Orange County’s Bowers Museum is currently running an exhibition by an extraordinary artist named Shashi Dhoj Tulachand, a Nepalese Buddhist monk. Each of the nine thangkas, or temple murals, stands approximately 6.5-7 feet tall and is about 4 feet wide. The paintings, completed by Tulachand himself, are all masterpieces of composition, draughtsmanship, color, and painstaking detail. If you’re in the Los Angeles or Orange County areas, I encourage you to see them for yourself, as my crappy snapz don’t do them justice. Nevertheless, here’s a taste of Tulachand’s religious psychedelia.
Blowhard, Esq. writes:
When he was 90, Sophocles was sued by his sons who argued their father was incapable of managing his financial affairs. They charged the playwright with “paranoia,” which was the ancient Greek equivalent of saying he had Alzheimer’s disease. Sophocles defended himself by reading to the jury lines from a play he was working on, “Oedipus at Colonus,” which coincidentally is a play about old age. At the conclusion of his reading Sophocles asked, “Do you think that’s the work of an idiot?”
The jury acquitted him.
Related
epiminondas writes:
Blowhard, Esq. writes:
Grace Kelly in Hitchcock’s TO CATCH A THIEF (1955)
Click on the images to enlarge.
Eddie Pensier writes:
The Beard: This common trend suggests that the clean-shaven, well-groomed man is overly civilized, untrustworthy, wimpy and cunning. Men with beards are real and rugged, but because of the beard, they don’t have to act it. Without effort on the part of their owners, beards display irrefutable maleness and a bold promotion of one’s own authenticity. The hipster beard wants to convey a sense of dominant character and personality, uniqueness, impatience with silly games, and a clear-eyed, worldly realism, like a late nineteenth-century frigate captain in enemy waters. But because the beard took on a soft, Jesus-y feel beginning in the 1960s that flowed into the early 1970s, the hipster beard now bears both crosses in an uncomfortable tension: a tough, straightforward character who still understands your feelings. The beard has returned, in this sense, to its Romantic roots as evidence of its wearer’s proximity to nature. It connects the contemporary Romantic to his inner animalism, his hormonal tether to the wild and biological self, his opposition to the civilized, bourgeois society: no tricks, no cunning, no fake, polite crap. Just mano a mano. The beard thus resolutely evidences its opposition to the white-collar world’s prohibition of it, conveying a sense of trendy insubordination…But the hipster beard, unlike the non-hipster beard, rides the coattails of manly cheekiness, saying, “What this beard appears to be, I am not”…Hipster beards only look like real-guy beards. Attempting sincere presentation of the brawny, unadorned self, hipsters are weighted down by the transparency of the attempt, preventing them from being what they want to be.
Hipster actor Penn Badgley, with beard
Blowhard, Esq.
Callowman
Sherbrooke
Eddie Pensier
Enzo Nakamura
Epaminondas
Fabrizio del Wrongo
Fenster
Brundle Guy
Glynn Marshes
Paleo Retiree
Atypical Neurotic
Question Lady
Sax von Stroheim
Sir Barken Hyena
The Mistaken
Uncouth Reflections 