1. Christian Marclay, “Six New Animations” (Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, through June 28; also at Les Rencontres de la Photographie, Arles, France, July 4-September 25) Marclay, a visual artist who for years worked with musical themes, had a blockbuster in 2010 with his 24-hour video The Clock, a compendium of movie clips where each one showed what time it was in the scene, which was, as you watched in a museum theater, precisely the time your own watch would have told: if it was 2:43 p.m. for you, the woman on the screen fleeing a stalker was passing below a clock that read 2:43 p.m. Marclay’s new work is back down to the scale of the reconstructed album covers and broken LPs he started with. He took his camera out on the streets of his East London neighborhood and photographed what he found on the ground, edited the pictures into sequences, and then speeded them up. The result, a series of short loops that move so quickly you can’t tell when they end or begin, is something like a video flip-book of litter, or maybe what’s left after the end of the world.
Cigarettes comes across as if discarded butts are not only the detritus but the mind of civilization. As the tiny white nubs rush by, you feel each one as a thing in itself; as the texture and color of the sidewalk or the pavement changes in tiny fractions of a second, as each cigarette seems to light the next, you feel the totality. It’s sickening, it’s irresistible; it’s a critique of capitalism, a comment on addiction, and several million people trying to figure out what to do tonight. There is Bottle Caps, Straws, Chewing Gum, and Cotton Buds—for cleaning crystal meth pipes. The most evocative, the most like a diffusion of modern art into real life, into time and money, Malevich into functional objects, is Lids and Straws, a one-minute loop of Starbucks plastic. You just stare at it, as the litter reassembles itself into a statement about balance, affinity, replication, equality—or none of that, merely things insisting that functionality is art, and beautiful, too. “After The Clock,” Marclay said at the gallery one afternoon, looking at Lids and Straws, “people were always asking, ‘What’s the new Clock going to be?’ Well, here it is. These are all drugs—caffeine, sugar, cigarettes—the stimulants we need to live in the city.” A visitor asked Marclay why, unlike so much of his earlier work, there was no musical element. “There’s rhythm,” Marclay said. “So it’s very abstract,” the visitor said. “It’s not abstract,” Marclay said. “This is everyday life. This is the life beneath our feet.”
2. Jon Bon Jovi, “Turn Back Time,” DirecTV commercial (Grey Group) Really, this will live forever: what sounds like a very good Bon Jovi song, but in fact a number dreamed up for the ad, strummed and sung soulfully by an impossibly handsome blonde-grey Jon Bon Jovi, standing behind a couch where a husband and wife sit in front of their TV bereft over the fact that they missed their favorite show. But now DirecTV can give them the irresistibly rhythmic POWER TO TURN BACK TIME! and watch it, while Jon reserves for himself the power to completely upend their lives, first disappearing their irritating second child as if he’d never been born and in a second installment bringing back the guy the wife had a thing for before her husband came into the picture—all while Bon Jovi offers the smallest, most devious smile, promising us that he’s just getting started. It could be the best new series of the year.
3. The Lobster, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, written by Lanthimos and Efthymis Filippou (Element Pictures/A24) Funny before Rachel Weisz shows up, not afterward, with Olivia Colman as the boss of a facility that calls up the boarding school in Never Let Me Go and Léa Seydoux as a puritanical cult leader, this movie doubles down on Invasion of the Body Snatchers so relentlessly that when it was over I wasn’t sure I still had a personality.
4. Don DeLillo, Zero K (Scribner) Speaking of Invasion of the Body Snatchers—somewhere in the general vicinity of Uzbekistan, DeLillo sets a compound where billionaires go to bet on living forever. The tone is that of Todd Haynes’ movie Safe: measured, calm, with hysteria in every reassuring word. It’s scary, but not so much as a scene where the narrator sees a woman standing on a New York street, “arms bent above her head, fingers not quite touching,” a “fixed point in the nonstop swarm,” a prophet of some kind, but without words or signs to say what’s coming, and absolutely nothing passing between the two of them: “I watched her, knowing that I could not invent a single detail of the life that pulsed behind those eyes.”
5. Thalia Zedek Band, “Afloat,” from Eve (Thrill Jockey) Through Live Skull, through Come, Zedek’s guitar always bore weight—you could feel the whole 20th century catastrophe bearing down on it. That weight is still there, as through a long instrumental introduction—enveloping, full of confidence, elegiac—you find yourself at a funeral for someone you’ve never met. With Hilken Mancini coming in as a second vocal behind Zedek’s lead, there’s a sense of looking back, from a long time ago—or a sense of someone imagining looking back, because that means they didn’t go down in the flood the song describes. Lyric clichés float on the song—“the rains come down,” “rivers rise,” “higher ground”—until a line makes its way out that is not a cliché: “What we left behind, someone else will find.” This could play next to Geeshie Wiley’s “Last Kind Words Blues”—the exit is that final.
6. and 7. Jonathan Weisman, “The Nazi Tweets of ‘Trump God Emperor’,” (The New York Times, May 26) and Yamiche Alcindor, “Die-Hard Bernie Sanders Backers See F.B.I. as Answer to Their Prayers,” (The New York Times, May 27) Weisman tweeted “an essay by Robert Kagan on the emergence of fascism in the United States,” and the result, keyed by Weisman’s last name, was an avalanche: “Trump God Emperor sent me the Nazi iconography of the shiftless, hooknosed Jew. I was served an image of the gates of Auschwitz, the famous words ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ replaced without irony with ‘Machen Amerika Great.’” That was just the start. “‘I found the Menorah you were looking for,’” another Trump celebrant tweeted: “it was a candelabrum made of the number six million.” “I am not the first Jewish journalist to experience the onslaught,” Weisman wrote. “Julia Ioffe was served up on social media in concentration camp garb and worse after Trump supporters took umbrage with her profile of Melania Trump in GQ magazine. The would-be first lady later told an interviewer that Ms. Ioffe had provoked it. The anti-Semitic hate hurled at the conservative commentator Bethany Mandel prompted her to buy a gun.” But in its way, Yamiche Alcindor’s straight report on a Bernie Sanders rally was just as bad. “Victor Vizcarra, 48, of Los Angeles, said he would much prefer Mr. Trump to Mrs. Clinton,” Alcindor wrote. “Though he said he disagreed with some of Mr. Trump’s policies, he added that he had watched ‘The Apprentice’ and expected that a Trump presidency would be more exciting than a ‘boring’ Clinton administration.
“‘A dark side of me wants to see what happens if Trump is in,’ said Mr. Vizcarra, who works in information technology,” Alcindor went on. “‘There is going to be some kind of change, and even if it’s like a Nazi-type change, people are so drama-filled. They want to see stuff like that happen. It’s like reality TV. You don’t want to just see everybody be happy with each other. You want to see someone fighting somebody.’”
In between these two news stories are two broader stories that go to the heart of contemporary life. As the radical sociologist Georges Bataille wrote in “The Notion of Expenditure” in 1933, any society can find itself drawn irrevocably to actions “with no end beyond themselves,” to a game of life in which one gambles not to win but to lose, to create “catastrophes that, while conforming to well-defined needs, provoke tumultuous depressions, crises of dread and, in the final analysis, a certain orgiastic state.” That is, the other side of fascism is nihilism, and citizens like Victor Vizcarra speak for a deep desire, shared by millions, not to change America but to blow it up, to be rid forever of the oppressions of liberty, justice, equality, fairness, and democracy—and that includes self-described so-called progressives who would never admit that anyone like Victor Vizcarra could speak for them. And the other side of that story is the incomprehension on the part of so many professional rationalists as to what politics is: an argument about the good.
Fascists and nihilists don’t care about contradictions—all they want is someone to smash people not like them. Liberal commentators tut-tutting over the not-rich voting-against-their-own-interests could not be more obtuse in their blinkered idea of what politics is about and what it’s for: one’s own interest isn’t merely a matter of who will put more dollars in your pocket. It’s a decision about what kind of country you want to live in, and how you can be permitted to define yourself. People aren’t stupid, and their votes aren’t bought. Independence Day: Resurgence opens this month; you can see America destroyed before it gets saved. Those who want a more gratifying ending, that orgiastic state, can stay home, save their money, turn on the news, and root.
8. Small Glories, Wondrous Traveler (MFM) From Winnipeg: Cara Luft plays banjo, JD Edwards plays guitar, and in moments they find the darkening chord change the best bluegrass—from the Stanley Brothers to Be Good Tanyas—has always hidden in the sweet slide of the rhythm, the tiny shift where the person telling the story suddenly understands it.
9. Laura Oldfield Ford, Hermes Chthonius (SoundCloud) and as part of the exhibition “Chthonic Reverb” (Grand Union Gallery, Birmingham, UK, June 17-August 5) Ford, born in West Yorkshire in 1973, who from 2005 to 2009 published the zine Savage Messiah, a street walking excavation of the ruins of present-day London—it was collected in 2011 by Verso—has never accepted stable time. The past is always present, but it isn’t history: it’s a promise just over the horizon, or a hand in a horror movie pulling you down. In this 36-minute soundwork, she’s traversing Birmingham, looking for “the psychic contours of a city,” speaking quietly into a tape recorder, traffic humming around her, sometimes the noise of crowds or small groups of people, pop songs occasionally mixed in, and you are following the trail of a woman who seems to remember 1974 as if she were her own aunt, the one the rest of the family never talked about, so that when she says 2016 it barely feels real. “You keep finding the embers,” she says, with previous allusions to IRA bombings and urban riots as a rolling backdrop: “Places you must have seen from car windows 23 years ago.”
There is the building that once housed the Birmingham Press Club: “They used to have the upstairs, a litany of names, they’ve all been here, Bernard Ingham, Margaret Thatcher, Enoch Powell, Barbara Cartland, Earl Spencer, Cliff Richard—it’s all too much,” she says of the specter of bland power, of seeing herself on the same stairs, in their footsteps. “This is where it was all concocted”—a conspiracy of government officials, pop stars, romance novelists—“in those rooms upstairs.”
She looks at graffiti on a pub: “A refusal to accept what England has become, they hover above the walls as a negative ambiance,” a gateway “into those undercurrents of excess, violence, destruction for its own sake. You’ve tuned into the undercurrent that speaks of refusal, a hatred of doing the right thing.” It’s a civil war of the dead, people turning into specters as she passes them, as she does to them. At the very end you hear Rod Stewart, with “You Wear It Well,” from 1972, the sound rickety and distant, as if you’re listening not to a record but to the woman you’ve been listening to remembering what it was to hear him sing it at a show she attended before she was born, and it’s never sounded more true.
10. Marlene Marder, 1954-2016 The first single by Kleenex, a punk band from Zurich, appeared in 1978; their second album, and their last, after Kimberly Clark complained and they changed their name to Liliput, came out in 1983. Across those mere five years their music was made of glee and dread, playground chants back-flipping into songs about rape; there was nothing like it before and there’s been nothing like it since. Marlene Marder was the guitarist: she could go from the primitive to the grand and back again without turning her head. She died of cancer in Zurich on May 15; just a month before, She Shreds magazine, celebrating its 10th anniversary, reprised an interview with Marder from its second issue, from just four years ago, and its ending says as much about why good punk records, regardless of when they were made, always sound like the first word, never the last. “What is your favorite setup now?” asked Kana Harris. “It is still my Fender Strat with Marshall MS-4,” Marder said. “You’ve also been an activist for environmental protection, going to college for it and working for the World Wildlife Fund,” Harris said. “Do you feel your music is inspired by activism?” “I guess our music was inspired by that time, maybe activism, too, art and DIY,” said Marder. “We didn’t think much in such terms, we just played. We never ever had the idea that our music would last this long.” “What did you learn from playing in a band that you were able to take with you into this career?” Harris asked finally. “I learned that everything is possible,” Marder said. She would have said it plainly, as if it were never in doubt; that’s the woman I knew.
Source: Pitchfork – Features
