zan

Thursday, April 30, 2009

Kurt Schwitters, the great dadaist of Cumbria

Philip Oltermann

The Guardian, Tuesday 28 April 2009

Panoramic exterior of the Merz Barn

Panoramic exterior of the Merz Barn. Photograph: Nick May/Littoral

In the Sprengel Museum in Hanover, there is a cheekily doctored portrait of King Edward's eldest son, Prince Albert Victor. Half of his mustachioed face has been blacked out, and a razor blade has been glued across his chest in a reference to the (discredited) claims that the prince was Jack the Ripper. It looks like a piece of pop art, not unlike the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper LP, and so the date comes as a shock: 1947. A scrawl explains that this used to be a portrait of HRH, adding: "Now it is a Merz picture. Sorry!"

The prankster who wrote these words was Kurt Schwitters, one of the most innovative and eccentric artists of the 20th century. In his native Germany, there are schools and streets named after him. In Britain, where Schwitters spent his final 18 years, his legacy has been all but forgotten. Now a group of artists and academics, including Damien Hirst, Antony Gormley and Anish Kapoor, want to change that - by building a Schwitters museum in the crumbling barn near Ambleside in the Lake District where he worked.

The Merz Barn today with a photo installation of the missing Merz Barn wall art work

The Merz Barn today with a photo installation of the missing Merz Barn wall art work, October 2008

Such a picture-postcard setting might seem an unlikely spot for a museum devoted to an artist now seen as one of the leading lights of the very urban dada movement; but Schwitters' life was anything but straightforward. Born in 1887 and brought up in Lower Saxony, he became Hanover's official typographer, establishing a bourgeois lifestyle by the time he came into contact with the more anarchic figures of the Weimar Republic's art world, such as George Grosz and Tristan Tzara.

Schwitters shared their techniques - cutting up newspapers, magazines and photographs and glueing them back together - but not their politics. His approach was also more wide-ranging, incorporating performance poetry, sculpture and architecture. A compulsive hoarder, he gradually transformed his home in Hanover into a sort of walk-in collage of detritus, incorporating paintings, abstract sculptures and found objects. The Merzbau, as Schwitters called this, grew so big that he had to ask his tenant on the floor above to move out so that he could break through the ceiling. (The term Merz was a contraction of the word Kommerz, and became a prefix for his collages.)

Cildo Meireles at Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona

More on: 16 miles of string Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Billy Bang 2000

From UBUWEB

The renowned violinist, composer and improvisor Billy Bang was born in Mobile, Alabama, grew up in the South Bronx, and studied with the brilliant composer-performer Leroy Jenkins. In the 1970's he formed The Survival Ensemble, and later co-founded The String Trio Of New York. Bang has performed and collaborated with such remarkable musicians as Sam Rivers, Frank Lowe, Sun Ra, Don Cherry, Marilyn Crispell and James Blood Ulmer. His enthralling performance on this Roulette TV video opens with the wistfully plaintive blues melody, "Daydreams". Bang extends the opening emotional atmosphere through an astonishing variety of techniques that elicit dramatic and forward-propelling images before returning to the beginning mood. A wonderfully lyric ballad with allusions to play and work songs follows. Dedicated to Bang's friend Dennis Charles who went by the nickname Jazz, this composition is appropriately entitled "One for Jazz". Included in the piece is a poem that was his friend's favorite, authored and spoken here by Bang. The third and last selection is a firey, non-stop cadenza at presto-tempo, "Untitled". Afterwards in his interview, Bang speaks of searching and exploring the components of "Daydreams" and of being "magnetically pulled" into new aspects of the piece. He recalls the combination of Jazz and the European spirit in the AACM, and illuminates the "loft jazz" years in New York, emphasizing the creative persons involved and the development of more open ways of playing.

RESOURCES:

This UbuWeb resource is presented in partnership with Roulette

UbuWeb Film | UbuWeb

Monday, April 27, 2009

Two Poems--By Zbigniew Herbert

Volume 45, Number 16 · October 22, 1998

Two Poems

By Zbigniew Herbert

THREE POEMS BY HEART

I

I can't find the title
of a memory about you
with a hand torn from darkness
I step on fragments of faces
soft friendly profiles
frozen into a hard contour
         circling above my head
         empty as a forehead of air
         a man's silhouette of black paper

II

living—despite
living—against
I reproach myself for the sin of forgetfulness
you left an embrace like a superfluous sweater
a look like a question
our hands won't transmit the shape of your hands
we squander them touching ordinary things
calm as a mirror
not mildewed with breath
the eyes send back the question
every day I renew my sight
every day my touch grows
tickled by the proximity of so many things
life bubbles over like blood
Shadows gently melt
let us not allow the dead to be killed—
perhaps a cloud will transmit remembrance—
a worn profile of Roman coins

III

the women on our street
were plain and good
they patiently carried from the markets
bouquets of nourishing vegetables
the children on our street
scourge of cats
the pigeons—
                  softly gray
a Poet's statue was in the park
children would roll their hoops
and colorful shouts
birds sat on the Poet's hand
read his silence
on summer evenings wives
waited patiently for lips
smelling of familiar tobacco
         women could not answer
         their children: will he return
         when the city was setting
         they put the fire out with hands
         pressing their eyes
         the children on our street
         had a difficult death
         pigeons fell lightly
         like shot down air
now the lips of the Poet
form an empty horizon
birds children and wives cannot live
in the city's funereal shells
in cold eiderdowns of ashes
the city stands over water
smooth as the memory of a mirror
it reflects in the water from the bottom
and flies to a high star
where a distant fire is burning
like a page of the Iliad

CERNUNNOS

The new gods walked behind the Roman army at a suitable distance, so
Venus' swaying hips and Bacchus' uncontrolled fits of laughter would not seem improper. Ashes were still warm, ants and beetles solemnly burying the barbarian heroes.The old gods watched the entrance of the new ones from behind trees,
without sympathy but with admiration. The white, hairless bodies seemed weak yet attractive.Despite difficulties with language a summit meeting took place. After
a few conferences, spheres of influence were divided up. The old gods were content with minor positions in the provinces. But for important ceremonies their figures were carved in stone—crumbly sandstone—together with the gods of the conquerors.The real shadow on the collaboration was cast by Cernunnos. Although
he adopted a Latin ending on the advice of his colleagues, no laurel could conceal his spreading, constantly growing horns.This is why he usually resided in distant woods. Often he could be
seen in the dark meadows at dusk. In one hand he holds a serpent with a lamb's head, with the other he draws signs on the air that are completely incomprehensible.
(Translated from the Polish by John and Bogdana Carpenter)

Friday, April 24, 2009

Escape from the Zombie Food Court

Joe Bageant recently spoke at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University at Lexington, and the Adler School of Professional Psychology in Chicago, where he was invited to speak on American consciousness and what he dubbed "The American Hologram," in his book, Deer Hunting With Jesus. Here is a text version of the talks, assembled from his remarks at all three schools.

By Joe Bageant

I just returned from several months in Central America. And the day I returned I had iguana eggs for breakfast, airline pretzels for lunch and a $7 shot of Jack Daniels for dinner at the Houston Airport, where I spent two hours listening to a Christian religious fanatic tell about Obama running a worldwide child porn ring out of the White House. Entering the country shoeless through airport homeland security, holding up my pants because they don't let old men wear suspenders through security, well, I knew I was back home in the land of the free.

Anyway, here I am with you good people asking myself the first logical question: What the hell is a redneck writer supposed to say to a prestigious school of psychology? Why of all places am I here? It is intimidating as hell. But as Janna Henning and Sharrod Taylor here have reassured me that all I need to do is talk about is what I write about. And what I write about is Americans, and why we think and behave the way we so. To do that here today I am forced to talk about three things -- corporations, television and human spirituality.

Playlist 68 -- spring 2009

Friday, April 17, 2009

The Realtime Genie

Image via CrunchBase

The Realtime Genie

14 Comments

by Steve Gillmor on April 14, 2009

genie1 The realtime lashback has been surprisingly tame given the emotional challenges it presents. FriendFeed’s decision to double down on realtime streaming of text has had several primary effects: increased usage, swarming behavior around live events, and pushback from some who fled Twitter to FriendFeed in search of more contemplative dialogue.

What happens when a realtime conversation is possible? We already know the answer: IM. We are gently queried for permission to engage, and with social contract in hand we answer questions, catch up from where we last left off, and negotiate the outline of our next meeting. Attempts at hanging around on either end are met with increased irritation masked by politeness, until finally a rapid-fire l8r kthxbye cya dance wears out any remaining welcome.

But realtime swarms have new dynamics, not readily understood or guided by agreed-upon ground rules. Where IRCs and attached video chats hew to explicit or implicit boundaries, realtime threads need their own rationale for existence to get much beyond the IM formula. For some, a debate is hung off of a blog post or podcast, with representatives of the pro and con perspectives managing the conversation flow. For others, the “post” is a statement of thesis, a challenge to engage. When oldtimers criticize these threads as nothing new, they’re usually right.

Why, then, are so many of us so energized by this frontier? First, we are tired of RSS, tired of the mediocrity of the good-enough flow of half-facts and pseudo insight. Yes, I’m tired of my own bullshit, but only of my inability to adequately describe what’s in front of us. Normally I expect the pragmatic enterprise……..