aneboda

There was once a wardrobe that came from the deep recesses of an ikea in south philly, it’s given name was Aneboda, but we like to call it pain. Two innocent students bought it to hang pretty dresses in but Aneboda was fierce, possibly akin to the snakefish which we all now know bites, trying first for fingers and then for toes. Infact, Aneboda was so nasty that she ended-up with a fierce overbite by the end of the night. One of the assemblers is from Romania where, she claims, “Aneboda” sounds a lot like a word that translates roughly to “terribly wrong.”
A word of advice to those in the market for cheap clothing storage; NEVER PURCHASE THIS EVIL PIECE OF SHIT

The Faun’s Labyrinth

A few friends of mine suggested that I should be blogging with more abandon, frequency. Here goes…
Last night I watched Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, on DVD though I wish I had seen it in theaters. Most striking about the film was the extent to which it brought back a nostalgia for those post-fascist Spanish films of the 70s, particularly those starring a young Ana Torrent, every time cast in a role that fronts her as emblematic of a new Spain. Ivana Baquero, the actress who plays Ofelia in Toro’s film, looks in every way like Ana Torrent, an underscore to Toro taking his place as a contemporary contributer to the genre of political film tempered with the fantasy world of children commenced in Spain by Victor Erice and Carlos Saura. Like Saura and Erice, Toro is careful not to construct the underworld of childhood as an escapist fantasy, rather, he illuminates its most terrifying elements, the gigantic quality of the world, the monstrosities endorsed and made possible by a belief in magic. Indeed the monstrous elements of Ofelia’s world alternately recall Alice in Wonderland (hence the dress her mother sews for her, a version in green of Alice’s blue frock), and the world of Ana Torrent’s character in Erice’s 1973 El Espiritu de la Colmena. Ana’s (also the name of Erice’s character) escape from an oppressive family and countryside life in post-civil war Spain is tempered by a secret friend, a “monster” she finds in a woodshed based largely on James Whale’s “Frankenstein,” the movie which is the first she encounters in her entire life, (and by she I mean the actress and the character, Erice cast Ana Torrent because she had reputedly never seen a motion picture - the look on her face of utter and genuine disbelief when she joins the other children for the screening of “Frankenstein” recalls the face of Ofelia at many moments in Pan’s Labyrinth).
Ana’s fascination rather than horror with the monster she encounters in Whale’s film and later summons in the old shed after her sister, Isabel, tells her that the movie’s monster is still alive (a fugitive soldier finds the shed after jumping off a train and serves the role of the “monster”), is reminiscent of the sometimes impossible-seeming unsquimishness and fearlessness of Ofelia in Toro’s film. It also recalls the immortality of fantasy essential to both films, the endurance of belief in the impossible stretched to the limits of audacity; in each case, the child’s will to fascination overcomes her fear of annhilation and eventually anhilation itself - Frankenstein’s proclivity to kill the little girl in the film doesn’t stop Torrent from befriending him just as Ofelia cannot resist eating of the banquet’s offerings under the ominous ceiling panels that depict the “inhuman” monster’s taste for children, a monster her transgression will awaken.
The benevolent monstrosities of Ofelia’s world are matched in Pan’s Labyrinth with those real monstrosities perpetrated by her step-father, the brutal fascist military captain. When the captain is shot at the end of the film, a bullet pierces his face just beneath his eye, giving him the cyclopic quality of the “fauno,” ruler of the labyrinth, himself. The ocular parallel between the captain and Pan extends to their role in disseminating tasks and orders; the trivial missions upon which Pan sends Ofelia bleakly correspond to the sadistic means the Captain has of extracting information from captured guerrillas or the tests he puts forth whose consequences are always pain and death. This parallel collapses at the end and the most important thing seems to be overcoming that cruel aspect of innocence that encourages following orders without question; the doctor’s final lines to the Captain chide him for not being able to think for himself, just as, contrary to the captain’s orders, he’s put a tortured guerrilla out of his misery with a lethal injection. But, Ofelia, unwilling to “sacrifice the blood of an innocent,” proves her ability to do what her step-father can’t - her innocence is no excuse and neither is her trust of Pan. Questioning the monstrous consists not only of seeing beyond aesthetic monstrosity, but also of the willingness to make aesthetic and social allegiences solid yet provisional. Cinema is key in giving Erice’s Ana this prerogative and the cinematic opulance of Toro’s film is synonymous with the magic of innocence, a magic that is also willing to turn on innocence itself in light of its potential to be exploited.

Grizzly Men (for Cody)

The best Halloween costume idea I’ve heard for this year is dressing as Steve Irwin, the crocodile hunter (this runs a close second to going as a bag of spinach). A friend of mine has already bought a giant stuffed sting ray off ebay for the occasion (and no, I don’t know whether he managed to find one with a barb). I think the costume was a subconscious inspiration for a recent video selection (I had been meaning to watch it all year but it’s always checked out), Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man. Herzog’s off-camera voice may be the most entertaining aspect of the film, throwing in comments like “here is where i diffar from treadwell, where treadwell sees the beauty of nature, I see chaos and murdar.” Herzog’s film consists primarily of footage Timothy Treadwell (the “grizzly man”) took of bears but mostly of himself over ten summers in the Alaskan wilderness. This footage bears (no pun intended) such a striking resemblance to Steve Irwin’s crocodile adventures that I could not help thinking that perhaps Irwin had been an aesthetic inspiration for Treadwell’s cinematic craft (and it is his craft that most interests Herzog). For both film-makers, experiencing the “extremes” of nature, or, as Herzog puts it “crossing the line of our human limitations,” has to be performed. The paradoxical desire to go beyond the world of human beings while having this transgression legitimated by the witnessing of that very world seems to me the saddest aspect of watching their footage.

Irwin, it must be argued, especially after the baby-dangling Michael Jacksonesque spectacle, was invested in celebrity while Timothy Treadwell was virtually unknown until Herzog’s film. But Treadwell’s vanity, his insistence upon intervening himself in footage of the bears or acting as their rational narrative voice, is reflective of the life of a failed starlet, a life into which Herzog’s film gives us some insight and this life is not so far fetched, I would argue, from the attention-ravenous Irwin. I juxtapose these characters and their endeavors because they have managed to strike me not only as similar to one another but, taken one by one and especially together, as symptomatic of a strange predicament for masculinity. Of course, there is that “need” for recognition, there are biographical and psychological reasons for those, as Herzog’s film willingly points out for us, but there is also something very true beyond those reasons which makes Herzog’s film as compelling as Irwin’s character. That truth involves the need these men entertain to mediate through film a fundamentally self-centered endeavor. That self, when it is taken to the periphery of human existence, that periphery which only “the wild” can afford, cannot stand to leave behind its image. It could be observed that Treadwell and Irwin are not talking to “us,” or to any specific audience, but to themselves as they are taken by the human world, a world whose determination of masculinity is as inescapable as its encroachment upon these “deadly” animals. The significance of Treadwell and Irwin dying at the hands of those animals who permitted them so many flirtations with death in life, may be precisely the protest it seems. Footage of them and by them is a constant fleshing out not only, in a primitive sense, of a human paradox (we are so small but our intelligence makes us feel so big), but in a sense that is easy to recognize, of what it means to be a man (confronting death in order to dominate it). To die to an animal in an age that invests in the resilience of human life to natural forces of destruction is to die having rejected the apparatus by which that age dictates the purpose, the intention of the individual, especially to men.

My friend Cody, the closest thing I have to the grizzly man, has recently asked me “when the *f* am I coming to town” - if he reads this he’ll know that I’m spending New Years on his couch.

Abe and the Beaver - On the aesthetics of drug campaigns

It is never too late to start blogging. A dear friend, josephkugelmass (wordpress blogger), recently convinced me of this. And, a blog must begin somewhere. This one begins in Philadelphia’s 30th street station.

The Indulgences of Fascism

In her 1975 essay, “Fascinating Fascism,” Susan Sontag cites as an example of the 1930s Art Deco-centered “fascist aesthetic” that statue which looms so large above the main hall of Philadelphia’s 30th St. Station that it often goes unnoticed by rushed commuters, “The same aesthetic responsible for the bronze colossi of Arno Breker—Hitler’s (and, briefly, Cocteau’s) favorite sculptor—and of Josef Thorak also produced the muscle_bound Atlas in front of Manhattan’s Rockefeller Center and the faintly lewd monument to the fallen doughboys, of World War I in Philadelphia’s Thirtieth Street railroad station.” (http://www.anti-rev.org/textes/Sontag74a/index.html). Sontag’s essay was written as a preface to Leni Riefenstahl’s photographic album, The Last of the Nuba, a book that could be seen as a long footnote and tribute to those moments of her unabashed fixation with Jesse Owens in Olympia. For Sontag, Riefenstahl’s work shows us that National Socialism did not merely stand for “brutishness and terror,” but was equally invested in conceiving life as art, “the cult of beauty,” and the “dissolution of alienation in ecstatic feelings of community.” The appeal of Nazi art for Germans, argues Sontag, was that it was emotional, simple and figurative, in sharp contrast with the intellectual demands of modernist art. Of course, for Sontag, Riefenstahl’s work is notable for its “aesthetic excess,” and it is here that I would like to begin.

We can appreciate Reifenstahl’s work because, setting aside for a moment our consciousness of the aegeus under which it was crafted, much of it is beautiful. What makes it so? I will stick here to The Last of the Nuba and Olympia for it is in these works that we find her fixated upon the body, primarily the Black, masculine body, and it is this feature of her work on the Nuba that makes Sontag’s contribution so interesting. It is also Riefenstahl’s excessive devotion (some might call her a fetishist) to a subject at which her work indulges our desire to look again and again, she gives us shameless excess. This is a similar excess to what we find to a more conservative extent in Liebovitz’s album. If we compare “Fascinating Fascism” to Sontag’s introduction to Annie Liebovitz’s Women, also dedicated to the bodies of a single gender, we find the trust that Liebovitz’s work is not deceiving us into complicity with fascist, racist or otherwise undemocratic ideals which we would expect from Sontag. Let’s suspend our consciousness that Liebovitz was not a Nazi and for all purposes told to us in writing, mostly Sontag’s, that she is also not a Fascist, and compare the photographic work of Liebovitz to Riefenstahl, image to image, rather than descriptive (and, I would argue proscriptive) word to word. But first, Sontag on Liebovitz’s project; “One of the tasks of photography is to disclose, and shape our sense of, the variety of the world. It is not to present ideals. There is no agenda except diversity and interestingness. There are no judgments, which of course is itself a judgment.” Is Sontag’s description of what photography should do an ideal incommensurate with the very character of its medium? Film is a different matter entirely, and here’s why; a photograph doesn’t move, the pose of the body it contains stays the same, it is more uncannily locked within and outside of time than a film clip could ever imagine becoming. Photographs are by nature iconic, for they have the power to repeat which is inscribed in their very presence, they compel us to look, and to look again, this is particularly the case with “good” photographs. They are mesmerizing and singular. Their presence is the receipt of the variety Sontag describes, they can only suggest by proxy those variations of a world fixed within them, a world negotiated foremostly and irreversibly through the eye and presence of the photographer. Liebovitz’s world of women is not the world of most, it is comprised of New York poets, actresses, politicians, CEOs (for many of whom Liebovitz has most likely served as official personal and family photographer – I think here of her sole honor of proving to the world the previously doubted existence of Tom Cruise and Katie Holme’s new baby “Suri” in a recent Vanity Fair), and then there are coal miners and Southern debutantes, bull riders and Houston elite, and these, these are the photographs that compare to Riefenstahl’s collection of the Nuba, for it is these that most wear the mark of the “other” – they are far from the crowd of Liebovitz’s usual suspects and she can only enter their world, it seems, through the remote language of her own, through the explicit markers of props that leave no question in identifying their subject - the debutante ball gowns, the cowboy hats, the perfectly manicured ensemble of upper crust Southern ladies at tea – if it weren’t for these locations, these costumes, these metanymic reminders of what we are looking at, how else would we, her complicit audience, know who they are? As if coalminers never put on dresses, or debutantes don’t play soccer – this is not the variety, it turns out, Liebovitz’s work can afford and so, for social variety, her photographs have in many instances compromised individual variety.

Back to 30th St. Station – Abe and the Beaver miss you

I wanted this discussion to in some way investigate how photography, when it is good, carries a special privilege, a privilege defined by the circumstances of its medium and how that medium negotiates an image between its author, spectator and time, to compel, iconize and mesmerize. The ultimate extension of Sontag’s discussion of the mechanics of Nazi art, Art Deco and what became “pop art,” the subtle and less subtle (but always simple) tools of propaganda, as she demonstrates, has been and continues to be advertising. Here, I want to juxtapose in discussion what is already in physical juxtaposition in the great hall of Philadelphia’s 30th St. Station, Thorak’s “fascist” monument and two enormous banners depicting Abe Lincoln and a beaver which flank it on both sides. The company behind this campaign (a company whose name appears unprominantly) has bought out every billboard and space for a billboard in the entire station and placed one of three or four photographs in each possible place, (Lincoln and beaver on see-saw, in attic playing chess, carrying a jump-rope, etc). The relentless repetition of the images is annoying (particularly for commuters that enjoy getting to the station a little early) and the inescapable nature of the images cannot help but make one intimately aware of the eye’s persistent search, in passing or while waiting, for some fixed image upon which to gaze – to pass the time in meditation upon that which is not passing. Hence the power of the photographic image, good or bad. Each image of Abe and the beaver carries the title “theymissyou.com,” and for a non-tv watching subject such as myself, it has been a baffling project (as I resist giving-in and going straight to the website for clarification) to guess what Abe and the beaver are trying to sell me. I had them pegged for anti-depressant spokescharacters, cures for bipolarity or other medically described forms of occasional madness. Finally, my friend Aaron Moscowitz who runs The Biomedical Research Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to uncovering and undoing the self-interested work drug companies have put into medicine (www.brefnet.org/news ), explained that Abe and Beaver want to sell me sleeping pills. But, why Lincoln and a beaver? Random is random is random, but wait, Mr. Moscovitz has read his Freud, and the answer is; the “beaver” and “Abe Lincoln” are both slang ways of referring to the vagina. I was shocked. But, no, I thought, it can’t be so obvious. But, yes, there must be some reason for choosing these characters and

not smurfs (copyright purposes not withstanding) or little red riding hood, or Elvis. The indirect nature of this art-image and its implications are anything but simple, what is simple in the way that Sontag’s “fascist aesthetic” might accept as its own, are the images themselves, and their repetition, a facet of their overwhelmingly ubiquitous presence at 30th St. (at the time I am writing this, there is no other advertisement in the entire station), which underlines the simplicity of the images (there is not a new image for every billboard, and on the suburban rail tracks there are two images distributed dozens of times, side by side) to the point of making them absurd. To be sure, the absurd nature of the photographic subjects (Abe and the beaver) matches the distribution of the images; both are in excess of the childish simplicity of the compositions themselves. Certainly, repetition was an aspect of the very simplicity of Riefenstahl’s work for Sontag; that which aligned it well with the political agenda of fascists. At the same time though, the repetition of subject matter - yet another Nuban man in The Last of the Nuba, yet another diver in Olympia, yet another rally in Triumph of the Will, repetition that gave a peculiarly atemporal character to the content, the meantime, of otherwise scatological narratives, accounts for its excesses, and excess is always unwieldy material for propaganda because its meaning, like the meaning of so much “absurd” avant-gardism, is difficult to fix, to control. Vertov, a lesser acclaimed early 20th century documentary film-maker, experienced the consequences of this realization when, under Stalin, his compelling, yet collage-like film-work, could find no endorsement from the Soviet Union.
To return to Abe and the beaver, we find the excesses of this image, excesses that would afford its reception an exit from the simple message which is “buy our product,” also already determined. It is ugly to look at because it has caught-up with our most lewd thoughts, it has caught us making sense in this taboo way, it has tempted us to stop and contemplate its content by promising us the refreshingly marvelous absurd and its message is uncompromisingly clear in breaking this promise – we are acting under the auspices of its omnipresent gaze, just as Abe and the beaver have us surrounded at the heart of our freedom to come and go, looking at us as we enter, as we wait and again as we leave, they not only see us in the bedroom, they see our dirty thoughts which take place in the bedroom, dirty thoughts about what transpires in bedrooms and beyond them. Like Slavoj Zizek’s description of the ideological saturation of our jouissance (of which, as he prefers to claim, chocolate laxatives are most fittingly emblematic), the most insidious mechanism of capitalism is its conquering of our enjoyment, that our escape is also always already determined. Modern advertising exemplified by Abe and the Beaver proves false Josef Goebbel’s claim regarding the nature of propaganda that “Propaganda ceases to function once it is recognized as such,” with the overwhelming reality that today’s ideology allays simplicity with an imperializing claim over the fecundity of still images, the image’s new power is to provoke in the subject a submission that is most akin to Freud’s fetishist, “Je sais bien, mais comme meme.” [“I know very well, but all the same.”]. Perhaps beyond this is the collision of affects most commonly experienced in train stations and inherent to the “problem” Abe and the beaver’s product promises to fix, that, what is more, and perhaps more frightening, “I don’t have time to know this,” for, “I don’t even have time to sleep.”