maclises

"you are not limited to one room - there are many rooms." - angus maclise from Astral Collapse

what angus maclise gave form to – in sound, in symbols, in living – is a departure. it stands outside in its strangeness, full of reflective creation. i know so little of what he did, but what i have been exposed to makes me happy. it’s a lens for me - one of many i’ve happened across recently, all important nonetheless. to me, it doesn’t impose a mode of life. it suggests one with many faces. like a diamond, residing among others, in the many rooms of being.

for those of you who don’t know of maclise, check out this blastitude article on him.



related - i only just came across the equally wonderful hetty maclise's old site. only skimmed it, but thought i'd pass it along: http://www.phantomlyoracula.com/

A word I don't want to use anymore and the way in which I don't want to use it

Words mean a lot of things, depending on the social circumstances in which they're used. One of the really magical things about language is that it is such a complex, nuanced structure and yet we use it reflexively, without any thought. As we use these words and don't think about them, the complex system of meanings that they have can blend together in our minds--most of the time this is a wonderful thing, but there can often be a very negative side. I don't by any means suggest that language shapes thought in any kind of strongly deterministic sense, but tiny little subconscious cues from the language do tend to carry weight, especially with repetition--if we use a word in a positive sense in one context it can carry that sense over to another context where the use should be less positive, say.

When you begin to think about the words you use reflexively, you can sometimes spot ways that your thinking has been colonized by the needs of the dominant society. On a more prosaic, but probably concretely more important, level, you can also start to see ways that what you say might communicate different things than you intend, depending on who's listening and in what context. I've been thinking about this a lot recently, and thought it might be good to write about some of these words. This may or may not be a series. Should you be so inclined, let me know what you think--about this particular word, about other words, about this whole idea in general. So, the word:

Pioneer(ing)

If you're a fan of any kind of art that at whatever time or place has been considered "avant garde" you've come across this. People frequently use it to talk about, say, early electronic music--Delia Derbyshire or Wendy Carlos or Louis and Bebe Barron or whoever are "pioneers" of electronic music. When people say this, they mean that these artists did things that had never been done before--"went places," metaphorically, that no one had ever been before.

But that's not what a pioneer is. A pioneer is a colonist, a conqueror, a front liner in genocide. A pioneer claims to be the first to go where they go by virtue of redefining those who have already laid down the paths they bulldoze as insignificant, nonexistent in any meaningful sense. A pioneer "discovers" nothing, "invents" nothing; a pioneer is destructive, not creative.

Land is already there. Most of it has had human beings living on or near it for so long that, in terms that we can really feel, you might as well call it forever. Even that which hasn't is occupied--animals, plants, fungi, swarming bacteria, there's life everywhere*, and it's been exploring for a hell of a lot longer than we have--and without, I would venture to guess, this bizarre conceit that it's "discovering" anything.

*And even those places where there is no life--far enough below the Earth's surface, throughout most of the universe, whatever--those places exist, too, with their own perspectives, and have the right to be themselves.

Curiosity and even necessity need not partner with conquest. That we use the word "pioneering" to describe art that "pushes boundaries"--another deeply problematic formulation--reveals the extent to which we have been trained to view these things as inseparable. But the beautiful thing about art--and I use "art" just in the sense of any activity pursued for self-determined reasons--the beautiful thing about art is, or should be, that it's easy to be curious, easy to explore, without conquering anything.

Masculine military, feminine art: or, Ethan thinks out loud, talks out of ass

(I've been poking at this essay, off and on, for the past five days now. If it's a mess, it's because I'm just kind of aggregating it as ideas come to me. If it's really misguided, it's because I'm just thinking out loud, and not very carefully at that. Please, let me know! I want to refine these ideas and get a better understanding of things, and since I realized that wasn't happening with me just writing to myself, I decided to post this one raw.)

UPDATE: Here's Justin's response.
UPDATE II: See bottom of post.

This feminism 101 post by Melissa McEwan is (genuinely) interesting, and I imagine for many people it could actually be quite useful. Given that it's by McEwan, and thus written from her usual mainstream liberal feminist perspective, I have many disagreements with it, but regardless: interesting, useful.

I would like to, more respectfully than my usual, disagree with this aspect of its analysis in particular:

All of which happens inside an environment which is coded masculine to begin with—which is why corporate work is considered serious and important, while the arts, which are coded feminine, are considered unserious and superfluous.

Which, in turn, is why the National Endowment for the Arts (feminine) is constantly in threat of being defunded, but solemn discussion about reducing the budget for the Defense Department (masculine) is considered a hilarious suggestion

McEwan then goes off of a tangent about Democrats and Republicans, my objection to which I'm sure I don't need to state. But regarding the quoted section: I agree that "the arts" are generally coded feminine, while the military is coded masculine. But the straightforward cause and effect McEwan imputes (i.e., the gender coding is the reason for the difference in funding/support) is, at best, oversimplified.

My immediate reaction on reading it was to say to myself, "No, that's exactly backwards," but it's not. If I were to say that McEwan had it backwards, I'd be saying that the military is coded masculine so that it could be funded better, etc. Which is not the case. Rather, it's an example of the evolution of social norms under the pressures of power, as I've written about before*. McEwan's pairing of the military with the arts is a wonderful opportunity to point this out.

*Re-reading that post, hah, I certainly know more about Naomi Wolf now than I did then, yugh.

There are many ways to determine or define or describe the lineage of our current society, but however you do it, military activities have been coded masculine at pretty much every point in that lineage. The same cannot be said of the feminine coding of the arts; in fact, that coding is extremely recent (think of warrior poets, the machoism of the Romantics, etc.), and even at this point I would suggest that it is not nearly so pervasive as the masculine coding of the military--drumming or electric guitar playing, say, is coded extremely masculine, and think about how many of the last 100 movies you saw were directed by women.

What is the reason for this difference in the vintage and strength of the gender coding of these two pursuits?

Military pursuits are perhaps the most important function of civilization; if not, they are certainly the main mechanism by which civilization maintains itself. For a detailed explanation of this, pick up anything with the name "Derrick Jensen" on it, but briefly: civilization, being the organization of people into cities, means that large numbers of people live on land that cannot itself provide the resources that those people need to live; therefore, civilization must import resources from outside, which requires a constant process of expansion, which inevitably leads to violent conflict. So, for as long as there has been civilization, military activities have been essential for that civilization's survival. As long as there has been civilization, the masculine has been privileged (the reasons for this are hazy, as far as I know, and I'm sure it's not so linear as I'm making it sound, but for now let's accept it as a first principle), and so we see why the masculine coding of the military has been so long-lived and pervasive. And, considering that all of this stuff continues to be true for contemporary society and in addition we've now got the immensely profitable military-industrial complex goin' on, it's easy to see that the selective pressures on the society will keep its evolution proceeding along those lines for the foreseeable future.

Art, though. What's the deal with that? I'm not going to pretend like I know a lot about the history of art's social role, because my understanding is much more of a vague outlines thing than any kind of expert knowledge. So, frankly, I'm going to gloss over the long-view historic thing a bit by saying that, in various ways, for most of civilization's history art has played at best a neutral role as regards the interests of power, but more often and in general has served those interests more than not. Court patronage, nation-building culture, that sort of thing. To a large extent the same is true today.

But things have been changing, and, keeping in mind the admitted vagueness of my knowledge on this subject, I would tentatively place the beginning of the change with (what else?) the industrial revolution, gradual at first but with, as with everything associated with the industrial revolution, a kind of bewildering acceleration in the past hundred years or so. Art, to a certain extent, resists the commodification, the mass-production that comes along with industrial capitalism. Of course, to a much greater extent, it is subsumed within it, I'm not naïve enough to not see that, but at least in concept, the idea of the artist is the idea of the individual, the idea of the art-object is the idea of the idiosyncratic.

Or maybe it's not the difference between concept (artist as individual) versus common reality (artist as producer, or content provider) so much as the idea that art contains within it the possibility of resisting industrial capitalism. As the Situationists would not put it but to use their terms, art, stripped of its official structures, has in it the possibility of détournement--subversion--and of the dérive--spontaneity of a type unusable by power.

So, as capitalism advances, increasingly colonizing all areas of life and the world, art increasingly has to either rebel against it, in which case it is opposed to the interests of power, or serve it, which does not require a recalibration of priorities but does require a huge recalibration of methods (serving the power of a king's court is very different from serving the power of CEOs and part owners). In particular, art that serves the phase of capitalism we currently find ourselves in has to be amenable either to mass production, to marketing, to fashion, to being chintzy, planned-obsolescent, and interchangeable, or to being a trophy for rich people, reflecting back to them their best conception of themselves (in which case it is basically serving the old-fashioned purpose of art, but this is a niche in an expanding market).

At this point I think we can see why a feminine coding of art has been becoming more and more prevalent. On the one hand, art that actually is opposed to power's interests can be dismissed as irrational and meaningless, or even dangerously hysterical. On the other hand, art that serves the needs of production can be treated as subservient and submissive.

To be continued....? You decide.

UPDATE II: Picador says in comments what I think I was trying to say all along, and is hilarious to boot:

...Power can redefine activities and groups as masculine/feminine, thereby modulating their social status, depending on whether they serve or oppose the interests of Power.

E.g.: if the Pentagon were to determine that US military supremacy could only be assured by deploying legions of pregnant women dressed in pink leotards quoting Andrea Dworkin and blowing soap bubbles, 1) the Pentagon would deploy such forces, and 2) our culture would immediately redefine pregnant women in pink leotards quoting Andrea Dworkin and blowing soap bubbles as supremely masculine and kick-ass.

[Hilarious case-in-point examples elided; see comments.]

...it can be done deliberately, and selectively, by those who control the media discourse regardless of any inherent "masculine" or "feminine" traits of the target... It's not that Group A is demeaned because they are feminine; they are demeaned because they are a threat to power, and power demeans them by deliberately classifying them as feminine.

A wonderful metaphor

This is Richard Wilson speaking about Paul Burwell, as quoted in a Wire article about the Bow Gamelan Ensemble, the music and performance group Burwell and Wilson founded with Anne Bean in 1983. Emphasis is mine.

He was acutely aware that a violin or a drum kit has a history. Someone might tell you that you aren't playing it properly. If you are playing an arc welder no one can tell you that you're doing it wrong. If you go to a scrapyard and find what is deemed detritus you can act freely with it.

Dave Hickey, Air Guitar pages 168-169

(Cross-posted from Commonplace)

The justification for this pretense to disengagement derives from our Victorian habit of marginalizing the experience of art, of treating it as if it were somehow "special"--and, lately, as if it were somehow curable. This is a preposterous assumption to make in a culture that is irrevocably saturated with pictures and music, in which every elevator serves as a combination picture gallery and concert hall. The question of whether we can enjoy, or even decipher, the world we see without the experience of images, or the world we hear without the experience of music, seems to me pretty much a no-brainer. In fact, I cannot imagine a reason for categorizing any part of our involuntary, ordinary experience as "unaesthetic," or for imagining that this quotidian aesthetic experience occludes any "real" or "natural" relationship between ourselves and the world that surrounds us. All we do by ignoring the live effects of art is suppress the fact that these experiences, in one way or another, inform our every waking hour.

In my own case, I can still remember gazing at the lovely, lifting curve of a page upon which Oscar Wilde's argument that "life imitates art" was inscribed and knowing that this was the first "big truth" I had come across in writing. I can remember, as well, standing on the corner of 52nd Street and Third Avenue on a spring afternoon, six feet from a large citizen gouging the pavement with a jackhammer, and thinking about the Ramones, amazed at the preconscious acuity with which I had translated the pneumatic slap of the hammer into eighth-notes and wondering what part, if any, of the pleasures and dangers of the ordinary world might rightly be considered "natural." So it seems to me that, living as we do in the midst of so much ordered light and noise, we must unavoidably internalize certain expectations about their optimal patternings--and that these expectations must be perpetually and involuntarily satisfied, frustrated, and subtly altered every day, all day long, in the midst of things, regardless of what those patterns of light and noise might otherwise signify.

Good stuff from recent days

The hellhole I work in makes me fall way behind on my internettization for the first half of the week, and other aspects of life made me behind to begin with, so here's some good things ("good" referring to the posts themselves, not always their subjects) I would have responded to in the past week or so had time allowed:

what the Tee Vee taught on monogamy. An excellent and hilarious discussion of what's insane in our attitudes towards sex, and as is so often the case, wtTVt can say in a tangential aside what it would take me a thousand words to say. Here, it's this: Yes, it's pop-sci. Smart folk will hate it (assuming, since it's a book, that they — and only they — are the intended audience, adorable smart folk will write squawking reviews: "I already knew all of this!! Not groundbreaking!")

Jack on Mehserle and Grant, summing up the difference in the treatment of violence directed upwards and violence directed downwards in as few words as possible.

For Rhode Island-interested people, stupid Dave Segal posted some pretty cool proposals for a walking bridge where the old 195 bridge used to be. My favorite is the second one he posted, if you take the awful "The Creative Capital!" slogan off of the wall. Team 10's design is also pretty great, and Team 3's would be good if it didn't assume that there would always be swans and lots of fog on the Providence River, which in my experience is not a safe assumption.

I approve of this Postsecret.

Justin's unfinished Ballroom Dream is one of my favorites of his that I've seen. Very cool layering effect achieved just by painting over someone else's mostly-bland painting.

Dr. Boli misinforms us about the French. Nutella On Toast in comments reminds us that the same is unfortunately true of all foreigners.

We kill other species in lots of different creative ways. Increased UV exposure is burning whales.

Eric Garris on the FBI's detention of David House and seizure of his computer, not even for any bullshit criminal charges, only for working with the Bradley Manning Support Network.

I'm sincerely recommending that you read a Melissa McEwan post

Or, actually, don't read it. Just look at the pictures.



It's pictures she took from a kind of Chick Tracts alternative promoting Halloween themed Christianity*. The art is kind of incredible, and actually, though I hate to pay McEwan a compliment, improved by her photography; the angles and colors and distortion and so on all add up to create a legitimately bizarre aesthetic that I respond to pretty strongly.



McEwan, of course, is too busy being a liberal to appreciate any of this, which is why I recommend that you look at the pictures and skip the text. Her need for outrage (or "contemptuousness" as she generally prefers we pretend it to be) does not allow her to say "The message is a bit silly, but the execution is beautiful." Everything, for a liberal, is goodthinkful or ungoodthinkful, with no other possibilities admissable (with the exception of occasional bouts of excruciating self-righteous ambivalence, as with the soul-wrenching experience of watching movies featuring actors who signed the Free Polanski petition, say).



The nice thing about realizing that all this "culture war" nonsense is just such a crock is that you gain some distance. Look, liberals. This booklet thing is goofy. No child who gets it in their Halloween sack is gonna be convinced by it. They won't even be interested in it except insofar as they'll be pissed off that they can't eat it. So it's in your hands. Sure, make fun of the message. But can't you just stop being terrified of the evil Christianists for long enough to realize that the thing is kind of cool?



After all, if it isn't, why did you take so many pictures of it?

*I'm behind on my internet life, so I'm only getting to Halloween now. Sometime around January I may write something about election day.

Yesterday was a good day

Yesterday was Foo Fest here in Providence, the annual birthday block party for AS220, the open gallery/performance/artist's/living space downtown. The Baronette and I went down a couple of times, first in the early afternoon to visit the Anarchist Book Fair, where we bought a few things from the AK Press booth (I got this and this, she got this and this, if you're wondering). I had a nice, admittedly sort of vapid (my fault) short conversation with the woman working the booth about how all the best writers are anarchists. Then we kind of meandered home and shelved the books and relaxed for a while.

Then, later on in the evening, we walked back downtown, an extremely pleasant three mile walk through about seven different types of city environments, to see fucking ESG, who played to a packed, blocked off street full of people enjoying the hell out of it. From the moment I heard, a few months ago, that ESG was going to be playing Foo Fest, to the moment the sisters got on stage, I had a hard time believing I was going to actually see them. And then I saw them. And they were phenomenal.



The bands I'm used to seeing around here are all kind of the same, and I'm sick of it. It's usually a bunch of self-consciously scruffy 20 or 30-ish white guys* playing an update on either stoner metal or no wave, to my ears adding very little to either field. So in contrast it was refreshing to see a bunch of ordinary women who looked like no one so much as the people I ride the bus with every day creating extraordinary music with nothing but a standard drumset, a hand drum set, a bass, some other various hand percussion objects picked up from time to time, and vocals (and, for one beautiful song, one note on a guitar, over and over).



It didn't sound like their records, and I didn't expect it to. It's thirty years later now, and, obviously, Martin Hannett wasn't there. And he didn't need to be, of course. ESG was there. And they were obviously thrilled to be there, or anywhere, playing to an audience of people who are loving it, who are calling out the names of songs they want to hear, thirty years later, twenty years after releasing an EP titled Sample Credits Don't Pay Our Bills**.



It may seem strange for me to say this while idolizing this one particular band, but: we can all create beautiful things. We don't need to rely on other people to do it for us. I don't mean to say to stop listening to other people's music or looking at other people's paintings or reading other people's books or anything; there should be dialogue, always, and dialogue involves at least two parties, not just one. But one of those parties should always be us.



The best shows I've been to in recent years (The Homosexuals, ESG, the Girls Rock RI show last month that I meant to write about but didn't but which was fucking amazing) have all reminded me of this. Art that only dazzles, that only makes you want to applaud the artist, is shitty art. Art that makes you want to live and create is good art. This was good art.

*Which unfortunately describes me as well.
**Not to say that playing Foo Fest means they're financially set now or anything. But it must feel so wonderful to be recognized for the brilliant people they are.

UPDATE This post of Richard's applies, and I wish I had read it before writing this instead of right after!