Just a note to myself to remember two things from tonight’s dinner:
“And Other Delights.” Herb Albert LP collage submitted by Jive Time Records.
The better a song is, the harder it is to craft a remix that does it justice. And sometimes the best remixes are the lightest — the laziest — at the level of execution.
On the other side: my inbox is increasingly clogged with promo “EPs” built from two original songs with at least four remixes, most of which are mediocre in the exact same way. It’s like the producers and the remixers only feel comfortable expressing one idea, the same idea, an idea they learned from reading blogs, the same blogs. I love music, but I also love silence, and the delete button too.
But back to the good songs.
As I wrote before, “You can think about a song – a good song – as a miraculous moment when all the dissonances that frame a person’s life drop out of sight long enough to see how it looks without them. So when a band you like hits that groove, sometimes all you can do is listen, because that moment will be leaving.”
Here are two such songs with their recent remix/edits. First off, “Jarabi” from the gorgeous Afrocubism album:
Download audio file (06 – Jarabi.mp3)
…which gets a kickkicksnare treatment from Subsuelo, who rebrand their creation “Cinco Pasos.” Five steps. Two bodies. One song which is endless, and nobody we trust wouldn’t dance to it. How can real joy be optional?
Download audio file (07 Cinco Pasos.mp3)
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For round two, Caribou (as Daphni) takes on Thomas Mapfumo.
Thing about Thomas Mapfumo & The Blacks Unlimited is that they are even better than their name, even better than their album covers. The style is Chimurgenga, which emerged from Mapfumo reconfiguring traditional Shona music for modern niceties such as the electric guitar, back when he was a Rhodesian chicken farmer.
Download audio file (01 Shumba.mp3)
Thomas Mapfumo & The Blacks Unlimited – Shumba
How can you remix this — and not be an elephant in the flower garden? You can’t. So Canadian producer Caribou treads lightly. He pitches “Shumba” up a bit. Then he stretches it out to more than twice the original length. The resulting tune is released on a 12″ called ‘Edits‘ (not remixes). Fair enough.
Download audio file (Daphni-Mapfumo.mp3)
This game — original and edit, version and stretch — could go on all day. It could go on forever. It does. Frictions of power and access and stewardship notwithstanding, it’s one of the the only games we musicians know how to play with each other.
Chingo Bling is great. He’s way better at being ‘American’ – entrepreneurial, funny, smart — than the entire U.S. government. Hope to have him on the radio show sometime soon, but until then — enjoy this song from his latest mixtape, Back To The Border. The beat he uses was produced by Diplo for Chris Brown’s “Look At Me Now.” On a related note, check out: “Who Runs The World?: On Beyonce, Sampling, Race, and Power .”
Download audio file (10 – Xavier Featuring Biggie Paul & Chingo Bling – I’m Legal Now.mp3)
Various creatures react to the the International Space Station landing underwater.
La Baionnette, « A la diable », revue civile et militaire - Curnonsky & Barklett / Gerda Wegener
The Birthday Party’s “Release the Bats” single came out July 31, 1981. Here’s a slightly later live performance.
Mass’s Labour of Love album came out July 31, 1981. (They were a post-Rema Rema, pre-Renegade Soundwave/Wolfgang Press band.) Here’s “You and I” from it.
You are not thinking hard enough if you are sleeping well. And you would have to be unhinged to take on a subject like the French revolution, or Rembrandt, and not feel some trepidation. There is always the possibility that you will crash and burn and the whole thing will be a horrible, vulgar, self-indulgent mess.
Au Pairs’ “Inconvenience” single came out July 31, 1981.
Debbie Harry’s solo album KooKoo came out July 31, 1981. Here’s an interview from that era.
Belgian artist FRANS MASEREEL (1889-1972) raged against the stupidity of war as an illustrator for a series of pacifist magazines and books. He was a propagandist, the clarity of his high-contrast style suited equally well to the crude printing-press and the ideological punchline, but his agitprop kept strong strains of slapstick and poetry. He was obsessed with scenes of city life; Stefan Zweig remarked “Everything can perish, books, monuments, pictures and documents, but if Masereel’s woodcuts survive, we could reconstruct the modern world.” There are still a few books and monuments left, but in fact that “modern world” has perished, leaving Masereel’s dream city to haunt the waking hours of our current Metropolis, sending its echoes of spectacle and jolts of political economy. You suspect all the streets connect up from one drawing and print and painting to the next, a borderless warren of pedestrians, police, vagrants, prostitutes, workers, dancers, sex murderers. Every window is a picture frame or comics panel, ready to fix a life story into an image for the alert reporter or voyeur to catch. The sky is a nail bed of smokestacks shooting projectile clouds of steam and pollution upward like ruffled thoughts.
Masereel pioneered a genre sometimes called the “novel without words,” in which a series of images tells a story without the help of caption boxes or word balloons. Graphic novels avant la lettre, they were mixture of comic strip, print cycle, and silent cinema, a utopian stab at a purely visual language, leaping the national boundaries of native tongue and the class boundaries of literacy. In these wordless books, Masereel makes effortless scuttlings from the everyday to the metaphysical; the final image of his masterpiece, Mon Livre D’Heures (1919) (published in English as Passionate Journey), could serve as an emblem of his approach: an angel with a death’s head face and an insouciant gait. Masereel understood that the quotidian without the metaphysical is just a grind, and the metaphysical without the quotidian is just a spangled opiate. He fused them in a silent thunderclap of pure black and pure white.
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On his or her birthday, HiLobrow irregularly pays tribute to one of our high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes. Also born this date: Hilary Putnam.
READ MORE about members of the Modernist generation (1884-93).
Neil Diamond Shilo LP as found and further altered by Alex Coxen.
The Human League’s “Love Action” single came out July 30, 1981. Here’s the original promo video.
“In all of my prints, I collect things that I’ve cut out from Google Satellite View— parking lots, silos, landflls, waste ponds. The view from a satellite is not a human one, nor is it one we were ever really meant to see. But it is precisely from this inhuman point of view that we are able to read our own humanity, in all of its tiny, reliably repetitive marks upon the face of the earth. From this view, the lines that make up basketball courts and the scattered blue rectangles of swimming pools become like hieroglyphs that read: people were here.
“At the same time, like any photograph, satellite imagery is also immediately an image of the past. That is, to look at satellite imagery is to look not only down upon ourselves but back in time, even if only by a matter of hours or days. In recording the moment at which things as bizarre as water parks and racetracks covered the earth, the photograph also implies that moment’s own passing, encoding each tiny structure with vulnerability and pre-emptive nostagia. My desire to collect these pieces stems not only from the fascination of any collector but from a wish to save these low-resolution, sporadically-updated pixels—these strange pictures of ourselves—from time and the ephemerality of the internet.”
jenny odell • satellite collections, via Phil G.
Seventh in a series of posts asking you to look at that forgotten hipster.
Click on image for larger version
This 1913 photo, from the Library of Congress’s Flickr photostream, features the New York Female Giants. That same year, one reads, a team member was arrested for selling a program at their game that was held on a Sunday — thus violating the blue laws.
One can’t help but notice that the team’s catcher — identified at Wikipedia as Miss McCullum — was a hipster.
SIMILAR HILOBROW SERIES: BICYCLE KICK | CECI EST UNE PIPE — a gallery | CHESS MATCH — a gallery | EGGHEAD — a gallery | FILE X — a gallery | HILOBROW COVERS — a gallery
RICHARD LINKLATER (born 1960) has written and/or directed a few enjoyable, meandering films about disaffected types who don’t do a whole lot of anything besides kicking back and philosophizing in leisurely bull sessions; and he’s directed more tightly plotted movies (written by others) about disaffected types who band together to combat a repressive social order. I’ve suggested that his adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly may have been a dialectical synthesis of these modes. Linklater loves discussing the ideas that inform his work; he’s too fond of doing so, really — listening to one of his movies’ DVD commentaries can be a tedious experience. (Is this why the Athenians forced Socrates to drink hemlock; not because they disagreed with his or ideas, or disliked him, but simply to get him to stop talking?) So let’s boil Linklater’s long-winded philosophy of life down to one simple but radical idea: Idling can be a form of activism. For those who need pointers on dodging wage slavery, he’s directed The Newton Boys, the real-life story of a shiftless band of sibling bank robbers; and The School of Rock, in which Jack Black never once ceases to scheme for ways to avoid holding down a job. For those of us already convinced of the merits of not working, he’s made Slacker (in which Austin, Texas, is portrayed as a noncoercive utopia dedicated to jawboning), as well as Waking Life and subUrbia. Just don’t call him a slacktivist — that’s something else altogether.
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On his or her birthday, HiLobrow irregularly pays tribute to one of our high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes. Also born this date: Thorstein Veblen and Alexander Trocchi.
READ MORE about members of the Original Generation X (1954-63).
Tea With Chris is a roundup of recommended links, posted every Friday. Here are a few of our favourite things from the Internet this week:
Chris: Vintage rules list from the Sound Factory, a.k.a. the New York club where Frankie Knuckles once DJed a string of fantastic parties:
Great moments in Lisa Hanawalt’s cartooning-filled review of Transformers 3: “gabardine,” the Tree of Life joke, a drawing of its female lead grotesque enough to please the shade of Basil Wolverton.
During this week’s inspired 24-hour “citizen filibuster” at City Hall, right-wing councilor and glowering henchman Giorgio Mammoliti claimed to be “a fan of the arts.” So he would love David Balzer’s Canadian Art piece about Caravaggio! “One is beguiled by [his] formal bravado and then inevitably brought to a moment of thematic severity and crisis.” Kind of like what Rob Ford is doing to Toronto, though “beguiled” is not the verb I would use.
Carl: Until about this time yesterday, I was going to post poet poet Dionne Brand’s contribution to Toronto’s budget-cuts debate as the most eloquent and moving public discourse of the week. But the marathon “citizen filibuster” at City Hall that ended at something like 8 this morning equalled (and sometimes quoted) Brand over and over again. While the mayor snorted, dozed off, occasionally called names, and talked about football.
Meanwhile, south of the border, politicians acted even more childishly – or in the President’s case, I’m afraid, timidly. What should he have been saying? Something more like what Robert Reich says here: The whole thing is a sham, holding the country’s economy to ransom until the Republicans get their way, which is the wrong way.
But why why why why why why why why on earth are these things in Toronto and Washington happening? Well, it couldn’t be the inherent contradictions of capitalism, could it? I’m not positive but I do know that this video is the most entertaining and lucid consideration of that thesis that I’ve seen in a long time.
(special thanks to Marianne LeNabat and her Facebook friends)
Now, quick! Stop thinking about that and think about how North Carolina motor lodges have changed since 1950s postcards of them to now. One of my favourite things about that site is that sometimes they’ve hardly changed at all, and other times they’ve totally collapsed into ruin. Sometimes the trees have just gotten bigger.
My other favourite thing about it is that I found it through Wendy Spitzer’s tumblr, The Liminal Hymnal. Which is a tumblr but really a blog. Because Wendy is, as she extensively documents, a systematic person, she is doing a project in which she is blogging, also from North Carolina, every day in July. And every day it is worth reading, a nice awkward-confident tour of a complicated person’s singular mind.
Large, cheap bottles of vodka, appropriately named for Nerdtown.
(Sighted at Supreme Liquors, halfway between MIT and Harvard.)
Kevin Clark / Toronto City Hall / July 28 2011
Adam Vaughan (click on image for video) / Toronto City Hall / July 28 2011
From “A Few Words of Advice to Singers” in an 1813 songbook called “David’s Harp”:
Let the mouth be opened freely, but not wide, and let the tones proceed from the chest — otherwise they cannot be good.
Avoid singing as though the nose was stopped up; — this is commonly called “singing through the nose,” but it is the very reverse of it, as may be proved by closing the nostrils.
Never attempt to sing a part for which your voice is not calculated; for if you strive to reach tones which are above your compass — your abortive attempt will have a tendency to depress the pitch of the tune and create unpleasant sensations in yourself and others — men who cannot reach F with ease, had better sing Bass.
Stand or sit erect, and avoid all ridiculous gesticulation and affectation; “suit your looks and action to the words,” and if the subject be praise and thanksgiving, you need not look as though you were at a funeral.
Above all, let the melody of the song, be accompanied by the melody of the heart; never losing sight of the important direction of the poet, “Rehearse his praise with awe profound, Let knowledge lead the song; Nor mock him with a solemn sound, Upon a thoughtless tongue.”
No, seriously. Stuffed animals, as in animals that are stuffed.
I am in a place where taxidermy is a primary theme of the decor. This is also part of the decor:
Indeed.
Despite the alarming preponderance of taxidermy, it is an inspirational place because of the company. I’m at the BG Literary annual client retreat. I’ve already had my brain readjusted in several useful ways, and I anticipate many more. On which note, I’ll return to retreating.
On Rock Paper Shotgun, an essay about the ”bizarre, ambitious Spectrum game/band spin-off Frankie Goes To Hollywood – a game of pop music, terraced houses, sperm, Nazi bombers, Reagan spitting at Gorbachev and murder most foul.” (via things magazine) Rachel Lord writes about the history of khaki for DIS magazine, “khaki was a Victorian military breakthrough. A technology, first and foremost, that gave the “Informal Empire” of Great Britain her second wind… When confronted with the realities of non-conventional, guerilla-style warfare in harsh climates against an ever-changing enemy, their primary issue was their inflexibility.” “Instagram is all about death. The 70s filters our parents used, artifacts of cameras we’ve never held. Nostalgia is the negation of death, it proves we are still living even without an identifiable future. Instagram is a machine for producing instant nostalgia, a ward against death…We are told that digital (over)sharing on social networks and the like is a natural human impulse, that we’re merely augmenting extant human needs, the need to communicate, to form social groups. But what if sharing is actually a mourning for what we have lost? Or, that which our lives are now too full to contain.”- James Bridle Geoff Dyer’s first column for the NYT on recursive summarizing in an academic book, not unlike “watching a rolling news program: Coming up on CNN . . . A look ahead to what’s coming up on CNN.” Hito Steyerl, Right in Our Face (e-Flux) The fact is that if I’ve learned one thing in two years of studying how we think about the future, it’s that the one thing that’s sorely lacking in the public imagination is positive ideas about where we should be going. We seem to do everything about our future except try to design it. It’s a funny thing: nobody ever questions your credentials if you predict doom and destruction. But provide a rosy picture of the future, and people demand that you justify yourself. - Karl Schroeder writing for Charles Stross’s blog Cat Vincent looks at films from “The ‘Your Reality Isn’t Real’ Boom of 1999″
Douglas Rushkoff interviews Genesis P‑Orridge in The Believer
Charles Holland considers Iain Sinclair’s problematic recent writing about the London Olympics, ”[There] are strong arguments to be made about the economic and political effect of the games and Sinclair isn’t really making them. Instead he offers anaestheticised vision of, for want of a better term, shittyness. At one point during his film he pointed to a breakers yard and declared it as good as a Joseph Beuys artwork. This is the urban hipster version of shabby chic, an effete observation that recalls the British painters of Saint Ives patronising (in every sense) Alfred Wallis.”
“I have what’s called a pattern brain. I pattern music together and I pattern ideas together, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. What I’m intrigued by more and more is that increasingly we live in an emotional time, and people pattern in a much more emotional way than they used to… And the collage with music, they’re much more open to that.” – The Wire interviews Adam Curtis
Germaine Dulac’s The Seashell and the Clergyman (1923,) the “first surrealist film.” Archiving as Presentation. Notes from a recent Warhol Initiative session on ways to “negotiate this tension [between memory and forgetfulness] through archival practices and methodologies that approach the archive as more than just a static repository of past productions.” Mark Changizi: The secret sauce in language and music (Wired UK) A quick summary of findings in his upcoming book, “The fundamental auditory constituents of solid-object events are hits, slides and rings (periodic vibrations of the objects involved in hits or slides), and we find the same three ‘atoms’ in speech: plosives, which sound like hits (t, d, p, etc); fricatives, which sound like slides (f, v, sh, etc); and sonorants, which sound like rings (like a, u, w, r, y, etc)..solid-object events have an identifiable ‘grammar’ of sorts, one that also appears in the patterns across human speech from diverse languages.” This American Life Episode 441, “When Patents Attack!” Music video for “Everytime” by Oi Va Voi The whole issue of digital is so depressing to me; my process is gone. There were all kinds of unknown things that could come out in a photograph, things you didn’t know were there until you saw it; now it’s all so flat. But then I never really saw myself as a photographer. - Nan Goldin in The Guardian
At 3 p.m. today, the Longshot Magazine team will begin work on our third issue. 48 hours later, we’ll close the 60-page book.
Longshot is a crazy project that I cofounded with Sarah Rich and Mat Honan about a year and a half ago. We wanted to marry the networked speed of the Internet with the coherent beauty of print. Amazingly, we realized that almost all of the tools we needed were already available and free; we could create a real, glossy magazine in two days out of nothing but will, goodwill and good luck.
So we did. With the help of thousands of people across the world, we made two issues in 2010, winning a Knight-Batten Award for innovation in journalist in the process. Now we’re back together for our third issue at Gawker’s offices in New York City. (Thanks, Joel Johnson!) The launch announcement will be accompanied by a video from Dustin Grella, creator of the amazing Animation Hotline. So look out for that.
Experimentation is a major part of the Longshot spirit. We like trying new things. And we want share what we learn with everyone else. In that spirit, here are some of the tools that we’ll be using this weekend. It’s worth reflecting on the fact that basically none of them existed five years ago.
HP’s Magcloud: Magcloud is a print-on-demand service that HP runs. We print Longshot through them because they create beautiful, glossy magazines and because we don’t need a chunk of cash upfront to pay magazine printing. They also take care of shipping the magazine out to people who’ve bought it, which means we don’t need a big logistics team to take care of all that. The service costs 20 cents per page, though you can negotiate for slightly lower rates by running one of their ads. That’s not cheap, but it’s not that expensive. There are a couple of other downsides. We don’t really get any positive scaling effects as we sell more magazines. On the other hand, Longshot’s a niche product, so it doesn’t really matter. The other big downside is the international distribution, which is to say it’s pretty scant. You’d be surprised how many Scandinavians and Australians want a 48-hour magazine produced by American nerds.
SubMishMash: The biggest problem with taking thousands of contributions from across the world is intake and triage. How do people actually *send* you their stuff? Once they do, how do you sort through everything? Last issue, we used SubMishMash, and it worked beautifully. We can set up categories to organize the inflow and assign them a status (“In-Progress” &c). As pieces come in, they will be blind-read by at least two people and moved along to story editors or to the holding queue. SubMishMash does cost money, but for most projects, it’ll be a close to trivial expense ($20 for a thousand submissions in a month).
Kickstarter: Longshot’s never going to pay a lot of people’s rents. (That’s not really the point anyway.) But we have been committed to paying people something with any income we generate. For the last two issues, we easily could have paid people in pennies. So, we launched a Kickstarter to generate a little more cash to distribute out to our writers and artists. We raised more than double what we asked for ($17,000) from 473 backers, all of which we’ll plow right back into paying people and keeping the magazine going. Here’s a tip, too. Kickstarter can be a great, self-service ad sales platform. We simply created a $1,000 level backer category and said if you kicked that in, you’d get a full page ad. We sold eight of them. Not bad, considering we have exactly 0 ad sales people.
Soundcloud: WNYC’s Jody Avirgan is heading up a new initiative this go-round called Longshot Radio. He and his awesome team will be collecting audio from around the city and country about our theme. The way Jody puts it, it’ll be like “StoryCorps on speed.” Some of what he gets will be transcribed and put into the magazine A bunch will be on the new issue’s website. And even more will go up on and flow through Soundcloud, an audio hosting service. I also heard that the beats for our radio will be coming courtesy of Sabzi of the Blue Scholars (among other places). Which is awesome.
Google Docs: For editing, Google Docs has proven invaluable. It’s simple, everyone has access to it, and you can’t write over each other’s changes. (If only Movable Type offered that solution). We love it, but only because Erik Malinowski, our managing editor, created an awesome spreadsheet system for interfacing with SubMishMash.
Google Forms: Ok, this is technically in the Google Docs suite, but I want to call it out separately. This time around, in addition to a broad theme, we’ve created five specific requests that people can engage with if they want. In one of them, we’re trying to solicit some structured data. And if that’s what you want from your community, Google Forms is an easy and fast way to get it. The forms take a couple of minutes to build and the data goes straight into a spreadsheet. I’ve got my complaints with Forms, namely that creating a custom look and feel is too hard, but it’s a great tool.
Twitter: If the tools above make the creation of a 48-hour magazine possible, Twitter is what makes it probable. The speed at which our theme and idea can get out to a wide audience is astounding. Instead of trying to buy ads or get media attention, we could simply go straight to our core audience of mediamakers and say, “Hey, dudes, look over here.” And they did by the thousands.
Tumblr: One of the most difficult parts of Longshot is shaping the input we get from contributors. Everybody wants to send their best piece in, but taking everyone’s best shot is not exactly how you put a magazine together. We have a lens that we’re trying to apply to the world. And we’re trying to create a coherent reading experience. So, how do we transmit our vision? First, we do it through our personal communications with people and the overall branding of Longshot. But second, we use Tumblr as a sort-of “moodbook” to show people the kind of stuff that we’re interested in. We could use any blogging platform, of course, but Tumblr is pretty and easy for us to blog on as a group.
Google+: So, I’m really excited about the possibilities to integrate Google Plus into our operations. There are two things I’m thinking about. One, we have a bunch of satellite offices scattered across the world. We want to bring those people into the Longshot experience as much as possible. While I don’t think we’re going to leave a camera running in each place, I do think we’ll try to gather up a bunch of them to have have a big Hangout with the mothership at Gawker. The other possibility — and this could be awesome — is that we might try and do quick focus group testing on prospective covers via Google Hangout. Real magazines pay services to do this. We want to go straight to the people and do it live with our community.
I’m sure our developers, led by Adam Hemphill, are going to use some other interesting stuff. If I can figure out what they’re doing while trying to edit this magazine, I’ll add their tools to the list, too.
The Mo-Dettes’ “Kray Twins” single came out July 29, 1981.
“A couple weeks ago, I was listening to a story by NPR’s Planet Money team about “Toxie” a toxic asset they had purchased to follow and help tell the story of the recent financial meltdown. One of the mortgages in Toxie was on a home bought for investment in Bradenton, Florida, and the team took a look at housing in the area. Many homes there are empty and have been for years. Huge developments sit partially completed among densely built up neighborhoods and swampland. A guest stated that there were “enough housing lots in Charlotte County to last for more than 100 years”. Boom and bust residential development has drastically affected parts of southwest Florida for decades now, and I spent some time (with the help of Google Earth), looking around the area. With permission from the fine folks at Google, here are a few glimpses at development in southwest Florida. (26 photos total)”
Human landscapes in SW Florida - The Big Picture - Boston.com, via danw
I’m very excited to present this video. It’s a short Behind The Scenes look at our Beyond Digital: Morocco art project. You can also check out my series of Fader posts, and the BD website itself, but this video is by far the best summary and explanation of what we were up to in June, and in so doing it provides glimpses of what’s to come: an incredible photo series by John Francis Peters; poignant video essays by Maggie Schmitt and Juan Alcon Duran; my free Max4Live audio tools suite, Sufi Plug-Ins; Maghrebi percussion sample pack & music by Maga Bo; and more… We are also doing an event in Tangier on September 9th, info next week.
Auto-tune lovers take note: the video previews a snippet from the best auto-tune interview ever, when we spoke with Moroccan pop star Adil El Miloudi in his home.
Adil El Miloudi: “Autotune gives you a ‘me’ that is better.”
To celebrate the one-year anniversary of 4CP, HiLobrow has invited guest curators to assemble themed comic-book-detail galleries from 4CP’s collection. Click here to see all galleries.
Lust
Gluttony
Greed
Sloth
Despair
Wrath
Envy
Pride/Vanity
SIMILAR HILOBROW SERIES: CHESS MATCH — a gallery | FILE X — a gallery | KIRB YOUR ENTHUSIASM — 25 Jack Kirby panels | SECRET PANEL —Silver Age comics’ double entendres | SKRULLICISM | CURATED: 4CP FTW by John Hilgart | FANCHILD by Adam McGovern
Silent screen siren THEDA BARA (Theodosia Barr Goodman, 1885-1955) staked her claim early in the black-and-white of silent cinema. A nice Jewish girl from Ohio, Bara exaggerated her dark good looks into a Delacroix-like orientalism, becoming the first celluloid sex symbol. Everything about silent film was exaggerated: the eyes, the gestures, the slapstick, the pathos; as if stark contrast in mascara and morality could compensate for the lack of sound. The word “vamp,” from Bara’s nickname The Vamp, entered the language as a corruption of vampire — something seductive, rapacious, and eternally young, which is not a bad description of cinema itself. Sadly, only six complete prints of her more than forty films still exist, as the others were destroyed in a film vault fire. But unlike many of her contemporaries, who attempted the jump to “talking pictures” with varying degrees of success, Bara knew that limits were no liability. She never spoke onscreen.
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On his or her birthday, HiLobrow irregularly pays tribute to one of our high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes. Also born this date: Don Marquis and Jean Baudrillard.
READ MORE about members of the Modernist Generation (1884-93).
In early April this year, the educated upper and middle classes and youth in India’s urban centres rallied behind an unlikely hero, 72-year-old anti-corruption activist Anna Hazare, from a small village in Maharashtra. Anna Hazare adopted a favoured protest tactic of Mahatma Gandhi, the fast until death to shame the Government into considering an anti-corruption bill and enacting it into law.
Hazare’s use of the fast showed how the symbolism of this act has changed since Gandhi’s time. Gandhi’s own understanding of the fast was that it was first and foremost a self-directed act, designed to purify the self of its own selfish excesses. When it came to protesting against the State, he used non-violent resistance as his main political method. But since then, and as we saw here, fasting has become politicised – turned into the ‘hunger strike’ and used as a protest weapon against the State.
The semiotics of the protest also revealed an interesting amalgam of symbolism brought in to strengthen the protestors’ halo and just cause.
For example, an image of Mother India, portrayed as a typical Hindu Goddess, was superimposed upon a map of India, symbolising the protest as a patriotic movement to restore the glory of the nation which has fallen, due to the actions of corrupt politicians. The image showed her holding the Indian flag in her left hand and waving it, while holding up her right hand in the gesture of a blessing – all to encourage her devotees, the patriotic middle class in their just fight.
India has always been portrayed as the ‘mother’ in all of its languages, in contrast to some other cultures, such as Germany, which represent their country as a ‘father’. So a popular chant is ‘bharat mata ki jai’, which would be translated as ‘Victory to Mother India’ or ‘Hail Mother India’.
It’s the custom in India when setting forth on a venture of any kind to seek the blessings of parents, especially your mother. So, the protestors’ portrayal of Mother India blessing her children showed that they were embarking on a new mission to save the nation.
They also put up a huge banner featuring a warlike call to have strength. All the Indian heroes of the Independence struggle and prior were depicted on the banner – as if to indicate that their soul and spirit were now invoked in the battle, making their spiritual blessing available to the modern warriors fighting to save the country.
Anna Hazare, the rural activist and contemporary hero wearing the Gandhian mantle, dressed as befits this symbolic lineage – in white khaki with the trademark white cap of the people’s hero. There was nothing flashy, trendy or designer in his attire to take away from the Gandhian image.
Modern protests would however be incomplete without two new elements – the televised debate and the candle-lit vigil. So, not only did TV cameras cover the man undergoing his fast for 36 hours, they set up temporary interview spots on the site and staged televised debates with various political celebrities who added their mite and sound bite to the battle. Finally, citizens around the country showed their solidarity with the cause by setting up candle-lit vigils in their towns on the evenings of the three-day fast. Of course, Facebook, Twitter and all manner of social media were liberally used to swell the numbers of protestors.
Contemporary middle-class protest in India is thus positioned as being clean and positive – the ‘good’ fight against the cancer of corruption. It is a fight that is blessed by the legendary heroes of the motherland, drawing inspiration from the master protestor, Mahatma Gandhi, televised and debated by intellectually minded citizens and finally, touching the hearts of millions of ordinary people throughout the country. What could be a more noble play – for power to influence the government?
© Hamsini Shivakumar 2011
Rosa Menkman meditates on the occurrence and aesthetics of the glitch amidst software and hardware obseletion in her essay Glitch Studies Manifesto. This essay was part of the Institute of Network Culture‘s second collection of texts titled Video Vortex Reader II that critically explores the shifting dynamics and expanding field of online video. See below for an excerpt, full essay here.
Technological Progress is an Ill-Fated Dogma
In the beginning it was calm… Then humans built technologies and the first forms of mechanical noise were born. Since that time, artists migrated from the grain, the scratching and burning of celluloid (A Colour Box by Len Lye, 1937) to the magnetic distortion and scanning lines of the cathode ray tube (as explored by Nam June Paik in MagnetTV in 1965). Subsequently digital noise materialized and artists wandered the planes of phosphor burnin, as Cory Arcangel did so wittily in Panasonic TH-42PWD8UK Plasma Screen Burn, in 2007. With the arrival of LCD (liquid crystal display) technologies, dead pixels were rubbed, bugs were trapped between liquid crystals or plastic displays and violent screen crack LCDperformances took place (of which my favorite is %SCR2, by Jodi / webcrash2800 in 2009). Today artists even surf eBay to buy readymade LCDs with T-con board failure or photo cameras with loose CCD (charged coupled device) chips (the latter I too exploited in The Collapse of PAL, 2010).
Thanks to Library Bazaar, I now know about the Kickstarter project of Robert Dawson who is traveling the country taking photos of libraries. If you’re not familiar with Kickstarter, it’s a way to crowdsource fundraising for creative-type projects. I’ve supported a few things including the GET LAMP text adventure documentary and a recent MC Frontalot video. If Dawson is coming to your town, or even near it, I’d suggest giving him a call.
