July 2010 Archives
A recent reminder about the "incredible translation job" done on Mary Beach's Die Elektrische Banane by Walter Hartmann and Gregor Pott got me to thinking that somebody should say it: James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake meets William Burroughs' Naked Lunch in that book.
It's not the particulars of the subject matter so much as Beach's attitude of mind, which is both tough and funny (see her collages), and the style of the prose, which deploys straight writing, cut-ups, and dream language, that make the connection.
So let's see what I mean. Here's a sample of the straight writing from the least experimental section of the book, which runs for 24 pages like so:
Back in the Mother Country in a resort hotel in the south of England a man with alopoecia a wide toothy smile was having tea with his one-eyed bewigged mother in the lounge of a hotel on the water front. At intervals he would break out with inanities about the weather and various deities trying to prove to the other uncaring tea-drinkers in the lounge the importance of his existence. And his old mother would nod with approval every time he opened his mouth (and that was all the time he even read the newspaper out loud). She fidgeted with her hearing aid as the waitress passed with a tray full of cakes and scones. Two yoyos in a dead heat I thought to myself. I was always doing that it seemed but this time I had no one to talk to so I talked to myself. The one-eyed mother sipped her tea her little finger crooked daintily over her saucer. She bit first into a cucumber sandwich and then into a watercress sandwich making a disgusting clicking sound with her false teeth. And her hairless son scanned the back pages of the newspaper. Reading a paragraph out loud describing the crippling cyclone in faraway Bangladesh. And then further on he read about a lynching that had taken place in not so faraway America. Three million and two people caught in a trap. The futility of trying to escape. Invisible prisons on the one hand and a visible one on the other. They couldn't escape you know there was no means of transportation. And so were allowed to perish within spitting distance of the mainland and no one seemed to care at all. And apparently two black men were unceremoniously strung up in front of their jail. And no one seemed to care about them either. Just an item in the newspaper. Something to read about while having tea.
More from the e-mail bag:
Ah yes, what a BOLD approach to human physiognomy, I must admit, in those collages you show here! And yet, being a Höch aficionado I'll have to insist it wasn't Mr Paolozzi but Hannah Höch who first applied a human silhouette cut-out in her collage work, back in 1931, in Die starken Männer. In fact already her 1919 work Da Dandy features the silhouette of a male head in profile, which she filled with clippings of female faces. And 1918 was the year when that famed and fab dada couple, Höch and Hausmann, invented the photo montage, I'm told? At right: Die starken Männer,
Collage by Hannah Höch, 1931
VG Bild-Kunst
Photo: Liedtke & Michel I'm sure you're all familiar with her paintings where Höch liked to transfer collage work onto canvas, and I especially love her 1925 painting Roma (featuring Asta Nielsen and Mussolini) where Höch also included two negative forms, i.e. painting the Nielsen composite photosources sans those parts she had cut out and used in her center montage ?? which obviously shows Asta N. urging Mussolini (after his seizing power in 1922) to get the hell out of Rome... Ach, what a great and free spirit, our girl from Gotha? After ditching that bitchy Hausmann guy Hannah shacked up with the female Dutch writer Til Brugman in 1926 and in 1938 married Dr Kurt Heinz Matthies whom she'd met on on a Dolomiten Wandertour; Herr Dr Matthies being much younger than her (two decades, sources say). Like in her essay DIE ERSTEN FOTOMONTAGEN she wrote: "Ein wundersames Neuland, das zu entdecken als erste Voraussetzung hat: Hemmungslosigkeit. Aber nicht Disziplinlosigkeit." -- zohara
News from the e-mail bag:
Austrian Federal Government cancels Vienna Philharmonic funding contract, but transfers money to twin orchestra, the Vienna State Opera By William Osborne On October 16, 2000, the Austrian Federal Government signed a contract with the Vienna Philharmonic that gave the orchestra yearly funding of $2.91 million (€2.29 million) for a period of 10 years.[1] In return, the Philharmonic agreed to offer women equal employment opportunity.[2] Nevertheless, over the last 13 years the 124-member orchestra has only increased its representation of women from one to three.[3]
Gone. But not forgotten. There will be a funeral service open to the public on Saturday, July 17th, 11:45 a.m.-3 p.m, at St. Marks Church-in-the-Bowery, 131 E.10th St., in Manhattan.
The first time Auntie Foo checked in, an anonymous comment arrived with savvy guesswork about auntie's identity and some excellent info and illustrations about the art of collage.
A bit of sleuthing revealed that the anonymous commenter was Walter Hartmann, an old associate of Carl Weissner, Jorg Fauser, and Jurgen Ploog, from their GASOLIN 23 years.
Auntie Foo is, of course, a nomme de collage. Hartmann's guess was, "mebbe i'm wrong BUT it smell a wee bit FLYPAPER, doesnt it? norm ogue mustill." My lips are sealed.
Meanwhile, Hartmann has followed up with incidental intelligence about collagists on his side of the pond who offer their own eye-poop.
"Brion Gysin: Dream Machine" opens today at the New Museum, in New York, and runs through Oct. 3. It is the first U.S. retrospective of Gysin's work as painter, performer, poet, and writer. Here's the museum's spiel:
Working simultaneously in a variety of mediums, Gysin was an irrepressible inventor, serial collaborator, and subversive spirit whose considerable innovations continue to influence musicians and writers, as well as visual and new media artists today. The exhibition will include over 300 drawings, books, paintings, photo-collages, films, slide projections, and sound works, as well as an original Dreamachine -- a kinetic light sculpture that utilizes the flicker effect to induce visions when experienced with closed eyes. ...In 1959, Gysin created the Cut-Up Method, in which words and phrases were literally cut up into pieces and then rearranged to untether them from their received meanings and reveal new ones. His Cut-Up experiments, which he shared with his lifelong friend and collaborator William S. Burroughs, culminated in Burroughs and Gysin's The Third Mind, a book-length collage manifesto on the Cut-Up Method and its uses. Transferring this notion to experimenting with tape-recorded poems manipulated by a computer algorithm, Gysin created sound poetry and was among the earliest users of the computer in art. At the same creative moment, Gysin conceived of the Dreamachine.
Which reminds me (again): Once upon a time, Brion Gysin let the mice in. That was way back in 1960. It became the title of a book published in 1973 by Something Else Press, which traced the origin of "cut-ups" as a technique applied to writing by Gysin and William Burroughs, a literary "method," if you will, that gained notoriety following the publication of Burroughs's partially cut-up "Naked Lunch."
In an editor's note to "Brion Gysin Let the Mice In," I pointed out that their first cut-ups were published in "Minutes to Go" and "The Exterminator," to which "Mice" was intended as a companion. I also noted that the title came via Gregory Corso. Gysin wrote me from Tangier:
The original text included the words "said Gregory Corso in 1960," and they consequently appeared in the cut up text, also. Gregory disassociated himself from the whole idea so thoroughly that I agreed with Bill Levy of Insect Trust Gazette that he should be edited out and, now, I rather regret it but there was Gregory's voice in there, squalling away to be let out of there, so we took the scissors to him.
"Those first cut-ups tested the potency of words. Further investigations tested the influence of other sensory input," I wrote somewhat tendentiously. "Ian Sommerville and Brion Gysin designed a dream machine on which a patent was granted in 1961. William Burroughs explored a vast subject throughout the Sixties. He formulated, described, and applied to his literary work certain discoveries about Control -- of consciousness and society -- through sound & image. Certainly, it is difficult to think of any writer of fiction who paid so much attention to theorizing the discrete psychoactive suggestiveness of words."
Mike Lawrence's two-hour documentary -- featuring Simone Dinnerstein, the Emerson String Quartet, Joshua Bell, and Philip Glass, to name just a few -- has its San Francisco premiere on July 14 at the Sundance Cinema Kabuki Theater.
Patty Gessner, executive producer of the San Francisco Classical Voice, set up the screening as a fund-raiser for the SFCV Web site, which was founded in 1998 and which sees itself as "the hub for classical music" in the Bay Area. (Gessner, the former director of marketing for the San Francisco Symphony, is "a big fan" of the film, Lawrence says.) The premiere's media sponsor will be KDFC-FM, said to be the most popular classical station in the country.
Meanwhile, GREAT PERFORMANCES is considering the film for a PBS broadcast, and Sony Masterworks is exploring the possibility of distributing the DVD. Anya Grundmann, the executive producer of NPR Music, has requested a DVD. "And thanks to Mike Hawley's friendship with Steve Jobs," Lawrence says, "Apple's iTunes store is considering streaming the documentary."Whatever happens with those prospects, Bach & friends heads back East in the fall. The Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University, Lawrence's alma mater, will sponsor the Baltimore premiere at the Charles Theater on Oct. 3.
Postscript: Michael Zwiebach's interview with the filmmaker -- "Shooting, and Loving, Bach" -- pretty much tells it all, and it's fun to read.
Does this film by Andres Serrano and Francesco Carrozzini have the July 4th holiday written all over it, or wot?
