October 2011 Archives

A day in February, 1983. Godfrey Reggio is standing in front of the old Reichstag in Berlin. A tall, gaunt man with pale blue eyes and a graying beard that looks like stubble, he has just presented Koyaanisqatsi at the Berlin Film Festival. The notices have been gratifying. One critic called it "a masterpiece . . .  the highlight of the festival."

Trained from adolescence in the ascetic self-effacement of the Christian Brothers, a rigorous order of Catholic teaching monks, Reggio nonetheless has a self-indulgent urge. He wants to bask in the pleasurable glow of the film's reception. Koyaanisqatsi was, after all, a relentless obsession that claimed seven years of his life.

Yet, staring at the Reichstag, Reggio can't help being assailed by gloomy feelings. Perhaps more than anyone except his chief collaborators -- the composer Philip Glass and the cinematographer Ron Fricke -- he knows what a desperate Valentine he has brought to Berlin.

The message of the film, as defined by its ancient Hopi Indian title, means "life out of balance," "life in turmoil," "life  disintegrating." Indeed, the most tellingly accurate meaning of the word "koyaanisqatsi" is "life that calls for another way of living."

Ruminating on this, Reggio realizes that he has been gazing at the ornate stone edifice for a very long time. Despite the bone-chilling cold, he is fixated. And then it dawns on him that he is looking not at a stone monument but at an hallucination of history, a grandiose embodiment of a vast, devoutly worshipped mystification. The Reichstag, in all its ghostly Nazi glory, shimmers with the mystos of the modern world. More than the Kremlin in Moscow or the Capitol in Washington, it is the supremely haunting symbol of faith in mass society.

He wonders, shivering, if anybody has calculated the radioactive half-life of state mysticism.

Four years later ... a day in July, 1987. Reggio is recounting his Reichstag experience in a bright, brick-lined study tucked at the back of a dark, sprawling factory loft in lower Manhattan. His desk is piled with neatly stacked books, all in the process of being read simultaneously: The Art of Memory, The Age of Illusion, Art and Politics in France: 1918-1940, Black Mask Witness, The Cosmological Eye.

Reggio, who is 6-feet-7 and towers over his visitor, offers a blue velvet armchair by the window. He himself settles into a swivel seat with his back to the makeshift desk, a door laid flat on two small filing cabinets. The brick wall behind him, painted canary yellow, faces a white chalkboard filled with indecipherable diagrams written in green. An orange canopy hangs in a graceful arc from the ceiling.

"Historically, the Reichstag represented the new cathedral, if you will, the new mysticism," Reggio said. "Bismarck created it as a symbol of unification of the nation-states of Germany. Every schoolboy knows that or should. So I was actually in the right place to be trembling."

Sometimes, he says, the most staggering revelations are completely obvious. "It became crystal clear, as I stood there, that the whole East-West conflict is a self-serving fraud," he continued. "It is an enormous diversion perpetrated by the nations of both blocs. The Berlin Wall" -- still standing that summer day -- "is a kind of analogy of this insanity."

This profile was published for the first time in 1987 in German, translated from English by Carl Weissner, in the Munich-based magazine TransAtlantik. In 2000, when Koyaanisqatsi was screened at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, it was published online at MSNBC.com for the first time in English. On that occasion I re-interviewed Reggio for a Q & A, which is included at the end of the profile. The film is being screened this time with live music at Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Hall on Nov. 2 and 3.

If you can't get to the screening of Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi at Avery Fisher Hall (on Nov. 2 and 3 in New York), where Philip Glass's score for the film will be performed live by the New York Philharmonic and the Philip Glass Ensemble, or if you can get over there but can't afford to get in, screw it. You can watch the flick online for free (full screen, too). Music included, of course.

There are five interruptions for one-minute ads, but you can skip each of them after five seconds.

Postscript: As soon as I can get it scanned, I'll post an extensive interview I did with Godfrey Reggio back in the '80s when Koyaanisqatsi was developing its well-earned rep. Whew! He was a fabulous subject.

PPS: Oct. 28 -- It's posted.

Apparently not. I didn't know it,

But Occupy Wall Street's most defining characteristics--its decentralized nature and its intensive process of participatory, consensus-based decision-making--are rooted in other precincts of academe and activism: in the scholarship of anarchism and, specifically, in an ethnography of central Madagascar.

Yes, really. But you knew that. If you didn't, then go read Dan Barrett in The Chronicle of Higher Education on the intellectual roots of the Wall Street protest.

Barrett writes:

It was on this island nation off the coast of Africa that David Graeber, one of the movement's early organizers, who has been called one of its main intellectual sources, spent 20 months between 1989 and 1991. He studied the people of Betafo, a community of descendants of nobles and of slaves, for his 2007 book, Lost People.

Betafo was "a place where the state picked up stakes and left," says Mr. Graeber, an ethnographer, anarchist, and reader in anthropology at the University of London's Goldsmiths campus.

In Betafo he observed what he called "consensus decision-making," where residents made choices in a direct, decentralized way, not through the apparatus of the state. "Basically, people were managing their own affairs autonomously," he says.

The process is what scholars of anarchism call "direct action." ... He transplanted the lessons he learned in Madagascar to the globalism protests in the late 1990s in which he participated, and which some scholars say are the clearest antecedent, in spirit, to Occupy Wall Street.

I'm not sure I believe that. But then I'm not an academic.

In any case, I went downtown to Zuccotti Park to see if it really is the equivalent of Madagascar. My staff of thousands shamed me into it. If intellectuals like Slavoj Zizek, Cornel West, Jeffrey Sachs, Joseph Stigliz, Frances Fox Piven, and Lawrence Lessig, could show their support for the protest, then the least a yahoo like me could do is put in an appearance and take a few snapshots.

The site certainly looked like an exercise in "democracy without a government." It was busy, crawling with participants, as well as onlookers like me. Everybody was up to something, or so it seemed, and none of the anarchists looked outraged or angry -- not even the sign-carrier whose sign said "I'm union / I vote / I'm pissed / So I'm here" (is he a secret "Follies" fan?) or the guy I saw reading the Constitution out loud, word for word, like a well-mannered street corner preacher.

What I didn't see there were the 1 percenters, the ones that the economist Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate and professor at Columbia University, has described in Vanity Fair, of all places, as "the upper 1 percent of Americans [who] are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation's income every year."

It's possible some were strolling around incognito on their lunch hour. But nobody was carrying issues of Vanity Fair, and I didn't see any copies of the magazine at the library stand. If 1 percenters were at Zuccotti Park, they definitely were not carrying signs and they certainly weren't wearing t-shirts like these. I didn't see the officer behind the skinny tie, either.

I did see a lot of excellent hand-drawn opinions, including a stylish flower-power throwback. Have a look at some more snapshots I took that give the flavor of Manhattan's Madagascar.

In 1989, Michael Lawrence filmed Steve Jobs for Memory & Imagination: New Pathways to the Library of Congress. "I remember very fondly every minute of the time I spent with him," Lawrence messages in an email. "I still have the NeXT coffee mug he gave me."

"Like so many people around the world," he writes, "I have been thinking of him since his passing. I could not have made BACH & friends without his computers and software." A few years ago, Lawrence posted a clip of Jobs, excerpted from Memory & Imagination. "It has been viewed over 400,000 times -- 34,000 views just yesterday alone," he says. Now, as a tribute to Jobs, he has put together a series of clips from that flick, which includes a conversation between Jobs and Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog. Have a look at it.

Click to watch.

Lawrence adds:

I didn't know Steve Jobs loved Bach until Mike Hawley asked me to send Steve and his wife Laurene a copy of BACH & friends. Steve was one of Mike's closest personal friends. I found this quote of Steve's talking of Bach in Return to the Little Kingdom: How Apple and Steve Jobs Changed the World, by Michael Moritz:

"I had been listening to a lot of Bach. All of a sudden the wheat field was playing Bach. It was the most wonderful experience of my life up to that point. I felt like the conductor of this symphony with Bach coming through the wheat field."

I haven't read the Moritz book, so I don't know the circumstances of that experience. But it sounds like a pretty great acid trip. My favorite quote comes from Memory & Imagination, in which Jobs defines a computer as "the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds."

The "vulgo:cynicism" of Carl Weissner's Die Abenteuer von Trashman -- his term for the humor of his latest book -- was already on display in last year's Manhattan Muffdiver.

Both books, from Vienna-based Milena Verlag, are written in German. Although I read German desperately, like a beachcomber sifting sand on a bad day, even I could make out the tone.

Vulgo-cynicism certainly describes the tone of the two books he wrote in English. I can read them, easily: The Braille Film, a Burroughsian cut-up text published decades ago in San Francisco by Nova Broadcast Press (aka Yours Truly), and Death in Paris, published online in 2009 by RealityStudio, which I think of as stripped-down Chandler with value-added vulgarity.

The Adventures of Trashman is Carl's New York night journal of 1968, a year he spent hanging out mainly on the Lower East Side with poets and artists and other riffraff. He messages in an email that Trashman "begins with a fantasy -- imagine, a Lambert Hendricks Ross Hotel on First Avenue. Hyrch! -- and ends with the god's honest troof. No, it doesn't: The letter to Burroughs is ALSO pure fiction. What the hell, I LIKE fiction."

Fifty-four years ago two undercover cops in San Francisco arrested a clerk at City Lights Bookstore for selling them an "obscene" book of poetry. The clerk was Shigeyoshi Murao. The book was Allen Ginsberg's Howl. Several months later, on October 3rd, a municipal court judge ruled that the book was protected by the First Amendment because it had "redeeming social importance."

If not for the bust and the trial, Howl might never have become as important as it did, either culturally or literarily. More than a million copies are now in print. Further, the ruling made way for the publication in the U.S. of such forbidden books as D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterly's Lover, Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, and William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch.

Shig Murao (right) and Lawrence Ferlinghetti at the Howl trial.
The 54th anniversary of Judge Clayton W. Horn's historic decision would not, ordinarily, be marked for celebration. But Richard Reynolds, the former communications director of Mother Jones, has done it by taking the occasion to post an unusual Web site, Shigmurao.org. The site pays tribute to a book clerk who was "much more than a clerk," he notes, and "in danger of being written out of the history of City Lights and of the San Francisco Beat era."

As Reynold points out, "When Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman made their film of the trial in 2010, for instance, Shig was nowhere to be seen. Yet at the trial itself, Shig and Lawrence Ferlinghetti [poet, publisher, and owner of City Lights] were codefendants and sat next to each other throughout the proceedings." Furthermore it was Shig, he writes, who "managed the bookstore for its first twenty-two years and crafted the unique atmosphere that made San Francisco's legendary bookstore into the storied institution it remains today."

It's no surprise that Hollywood or, in this case, an indie flick with a maverick star (James Franco), will distort history because of a misguided need to simplify and streamline. What Reynolds doesn't say is that the flick was a complete bore, let alone a distortion. So for a detailed taste of the authentic, including primary materials, have a look at the site that Reynolds has put together. It's a many-layered labor of love and, unlike the flick, both entertaining and enlightening.

(Full disclosure: Shig hired me as a book clerk at City Lights back in the '60s.)

(Crossposted at HuffPo)