Albondigas soup

Yesterday I hired Sean to do some scanning that I had been putting off for years. At .15 cents a copy, it's a great deal for me and a great job for him. He was super happy he made $15. I started playing around with the images and made a couple of pages for my comic book (the final versions will have more characters and word balloons). These took a life of their own. I'll probably use them for a sequence in which the protagonist, in a hypnotic reverie, reminisces about velvety abondigas soup. What struck me about the images, however, are a number of parallels between what I'm doing at school and what I've been thinking about film.

1. These pages are essentially the final project for Art 200. They are multi-modal compositions that incorporate images from Illustrator and Photoshop. I never made the connection before between multi-modal photo montages and my multi-modal approach to film, but there you are. BTW, the photo of the woman is an authentic old school waxy color xerox from the early eighties.

2. Ever since my dissertation I have been wondering about the "in-between" nature of the computer. I wrote about how abstract expressionist painting disclosed anxiety and process. Painting, as an analog medium doesn't allow you to go back and correct things so "mistakes" became fixed into the substance of the work. The computer, on the other hand, is a simulated world in which nothing is fixed. Layers of imagery exist without commitment leading to a tepid, floating quality. Yet there is an approach that exists outside or between authenticity and simulation and it is this: we bring into our use of a medium our understandings, our perceptions and knowledge. When I'm arranging these pages, I frequently put things at slight angles. These aren't a simulation of hand paste-up. This approach is based on my past experience of doing layout by hand. I'm trying to achieve a slightly off-balance, thrown-together look that echoes my experience and observation doings things in the analog world.

3. One way I make these things is to create obstructions for myself. I just start throwing together pretty much any image into a composition. I then try to work myself out of the mess I created. Sometimes I can't do it. At other times I am. This process of trying to rescue and recover work leads to a specific kind of performative quality.

4. I keep writing about how I dislike artiness. These things do look arty, but for me the resemblance is superficial. I think it has to do with why one does things. I think I dislike artiness when it looks like the use of visual signs to give things the authority of art.

Qualities of performance

It's a little embarrassing. I didn't know I was such a by-the-book modernist when it comes to performance. Here are the qualities of performance I always seem to be looking for—

1. Struggle, working oneself out of a series of difficulties, disclosing the struggle of something coming into being, the struggle of an incongruity with the world. We become embedded in and must work our way through history and the presence of things past.

Practically everything I've written about in this blog is about this in some way. Noise shows the struggle of its inception; we learn as we go. Our mistakes determine the outcome of the film. The film is correction-in-motion. It takes the uncinematic and struggles to make it cinematic enough, mostly just hanging by a thread. Brando struggles through obstacles.  My disaffection for films like Goodfellas in which the cinematic virtuosity is astounding, but it  lacks any sense of wonder or experimentation. It is an ostentatious showy blonde of a movie. The handheld camera in Episode II telegraphing, knowing ahead of time where to focus during the Clone Wars sequence.

2. Becoming engaged with the earth and the elements: weather, aging, chemical process. We, our tools and processes become subject to things and do not make all things subject to us.

This is the problem of Beowolf. We see Beowolf standing there on the ship and yet he is unblinking, impervious to the rain. This makes him seem less heroic, not more. He becomes an object, not a person persevering through the rain which was added only later in post. The characters in episode II talking calmly on helicopter-like gunships like they're on the subway, the only clue to the fact that they are flying is fan-driven hair. The work reveals something about its process whether shot on 3 chip or CMOS or film. The use of faux film techniques evokes the desire to return to a world where we are subject to the earth. Yet, because these effects are digital, they once again become aestheticized as an effect.

3. The lack of self-conscious artistry and overstyling. Being in the moment vs. seeing creation in terms of aesthetic or psychological or social decision-making.

My dislike of conventions that falsely convey authority. Episode II—the overly art-directed Clone Wars, the contrast and composition too perfectly control. Heaven's Gate. Dave McKean.

4. Life and expression—something comes across in the public sphere having a lively quality.

The character has inner necessity. They do things congruent with their speech. It doesn't matter whether actors/animators work inside out or outside in. There just has to be a sense of life, of doing things that make sense, of being a part of a moment happening for the first time. Life is the post position that looks like the pre-position.

5. Observation trumping artsy-ness potentially leading to invention. Understanding and knowing instead of recycling or the unimaginative use of tropes.

Abuses of the shaky cam as trope. The problems with Stealth. and its self-conscious performance.

Heidegger, performance and Brando

From the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome tread of the worker stares forth. In the stiffly rugged heaviness of the shoes there is the accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge through the far-spreading and ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw mind... In the shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of ripening grain and its unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field. This equipment is pervaded by uncomplaining anxiety as to the certainty of bread, the wordless joy of having once more withstood want, the trembling before the impending childbed and shivering at the surrounding menace of death. This equipment belongs to the earth, and it is protected in the world of the peasant woman. —from Heidegger's Poetry, Language, Thought


The question: why does digital technology seem to be un-motivating when it should be the opposite because it makes creativity so easy? I suspect this has something to do with the way that digital equipment turns artistic activity into a series of aesthetic decisions. At one time, putting together a clean audio chain required a certain kind of skill. In analog electronic audio, there is a constant mechanical battle against buzz, analog oscillators that don't hold their tune, radio interference and noise. In today's world, however, the computer offers so much control that noise becomes an aesthetic decision. Without the constraints of an analog medium, we are left with the music of the imagination. The problem of digital music, then, is that it frames everything in terms of psychology. "The only limit is your imagination." But that's a BIG limitation. It's not possible to create art that discloses a struggle against the earth. We are so removed that we can only wrestle with the world. The solution is to therefore turn to the quality of a performance. We do not need to literally use analog means to express analog consciousness.

This corresponds to my negative orientation toward "arty-ness." Arty-ness discloses imagination, psychology and subjectivity. Arty-ness is the aural or visual chatter that occurs when art becomes aesthetic. This is the art created by a world made subject to the artist. By its nature, the analog-ontological sensibility, on the other hand, is defined by the fact that the artist is made subject to things.

The art of an artist made subject to things is exemplified in the performance of someone like Brando. This is modern acting, the method. In his mumbling, Brando discloses the struggle of mind vs. the earth. In Streetcar, when he speaks while eating a fruit, he remakes Demosthenes for modernity. The post-Adler approach to acting, acting with a ragged edge, is exemplified by its rawness. It is abstract expressionism for the screen.

The question is why this approach still rings true for us. By now, approaching acting as being-in-the-moment should be an anachronism. Yet it is the approach seemingly necessitated by the scrutiny of the camera lens and by the depth of experience we have reading human faces. And watching Brando in The Godfather—speaking through a raspy throat—remains as compelling as it did 40 years ago.

Another discovery

On V: the original miniseries Part II, there is an interesting discovery sequence.

The food service girl steps on gum. She stops to take it off and rests her hand on the wall. She then realizes that her hand is on a time bomb.

I am not immune to this malaise

When I was in grad school in the nineties I didn't have a scanner so I used to go to the computer lab to scan everything I needed in batches. When I needed a font like Bodoni, I would go to a lab, type out the word in Bodoni and then save it as a Photoshop file so I could take it home. Even in the late 90's at CSUN I used to drive 30 miles to ITR to burn backup CD-ROMs. Today it's almost too easy to make things. There's something very un-motivating about having Garage Band sitting on every Mac. Without any significant investment of time, energy or money—without cost—creativity becomes an ever-present possibility that exists in an always-out-of-reach future. Creativity then becomes a purely aesthetic effort divorced from financial and other decisions. It's almost like creativity works better when things aren't too easy.

Demosthenes, transparency + transcendence

Demetrius, the Phalerian, tells us that he was informed by Demosthenes himself, now grown old, that the ways he made use of to remedy his natural bodily infirmities and defects were such as these; his inarticulate and stammering pronunciation he overcame and rendered more distinct by speaking with pebbles in his mouth; his voice he disciplined by declaiming and reciting speeches or verses when he was out of breath, while running or going up steep places; and that in his house he had a large looking-glass, before which he would stand and go through his exercises.  —Demosthenes, by Plutarch


Perhaps there are two ways to think of performing through an obstruction. One approach is transcendent. We transcend the limitations of a medium with our virtuosity. Like spectacular visual effects, photographs that look like paintings, and Michael Jackson. In the other approach, there is no transcendence. We struggle with tools to produce form that never becomes transparent and still maintains its ragged edge. Contemporary theorists would likely think of this as a worn-out cipher for authenticity, the honesty of materials and modernity.

Maybe we can look at Demosthenes in two ways. In the received view, Demosthenes learned to transcend his speech impediment by filling his mouth with stones. But perhaps the "distinct" speech he learned didn't refer to a clarity of pronunciation, but a clarity of expression. Perhaps he didn't overcome his stammering but learned to use it for rhetorical effect.

Light, glass, gears, plastic + performance

I mentioned yesterday that kinetic light pieces fascinate me when they are done mechanically, but are highly uninteresting to me when done via software (e.g., a screensaver). I wonder if this has something to do with the "performing through obstruction" idea that I was thinking about last year.

I'm sure Wilfred felt his Lumia was possible only because of the machine. But I suspect his devices were like vacuum-tube based computers; the idea and the potential far exceeded the hardware. I wonder if Wilfred's machine was simultaneously expressive and obstructive? The machine made Wilfred's work possible but the process of combining light, glass, gears and plastic to simulate the floating quality of modern painting via light was bound by numerous engineering concerns. Perhaps it is this tension that makes the work interesting.

This reminds me of John Knoll's description of his experiences with optical printing. Knoll has spoken of the tension-filled dance that accompanied an optical print run in which a number of elements had to be combined. Perhaps the charm of technologies-on-the-edge is not that they evoke technological mastery, but that they disclose a lack of it. The machines are doing things for which they are ill-suited. It is the tension between control and a lack of control that generates a performance. This may explain why certain computer-based effects are so unsatisfying; the match between concept and machine is so well aligned, that the performance is lost. This is the phenomenon of the screensaver—the perfect realization of machine-based abstraction, yet artistically empty.

This idea seems consistent with my love of misusing technologies. My friend Ward made fun of me saying, "Not everything is a transistor radio that you can turn into a bubble machine." But maybe that's why I keep trying—because it is in the ability to expressively use a mismatched technology (performing through an obstruction) that a performance arises.

Maintaining conflict

Last month I wrote about the problem that occurs when dialogue doesn't match actions. I think the problem comes in extending conflict. Conflict is interesting. But it can be hard thinking of a good reason to keep the conflict going. It therefore makes sense why chase scenes are popular. They work because they extend conflict. What doesn't work is when you say, "leave me alone" and then you just stand there waiting to be accosted (unless that is part of the character, of course.) An old dramatic adage says that in a scene, each person needs to want something. But it might be just as reasonable to say that in a scene, there ought to be conflict, logically extended.

Modern art surprise

On the way to the Wilfred piece I walked through the LACMA modern gallery and was sort of shocked. Usually when I look at modern art I find it to be masculine and tough-looking. But yesterday, everything seemed wispy and arty. One of the Kienholz pieces in particular struck me (History as a planter, left) . In my mind Kienholz's work looks dense and grimy with roplex as thick as gravy. But the piece I saw looked contrived. The brushwork in particular was very self-consciously arty. It reminded me of a bad performance, someone trying to get across the idea of grit but being too civilized to get it right.

The Lumia, screensavers

I went to LACMA yesterday to see Thomas Wilfred's Luccata Opus 162 drawn by Chris Meyer's discussion of it in his provideocoalition blog. The title says it all; this machine-driven light piece comes from that 20th century 'let's use music as a  metaphor for visual abstraction' school of thought. The piece is a disappointment only because you can't see the machinery—the light is rear projected in an enclosed box. I was surprised to see how precise the mechanical motion was. I was expecting to see the subtle shaking you get from dolly tracks—analog interference that occurs despite the gears. But the only thing that wasn't smooth was the 'stepping' that accompanied the fading images, almost as if Wilfred was using cheap potentiometers.

I've been wondering why I find these abstract light machines so compelling when I find screensavers, which produce a very similar effect, so uninteresting.