From a group of six photos and six words, The Magnetic Fields guru Stephin Merritt picked “1974″ — and an image of a man wearing a kind of suit covered with baby dolls. Two days later, the song they inspired was finished.

A panel of eminent U.S. and European scientists has confirmed the widespread scientific consensus that the Earth's climate is warming due to human activities, but said they and their colleagues should have responded more quickly and effectively to news of an error in a major climate report and hacked researcher e-mails.

In a symposium Friday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement Science, AAAS, the scientific leaders acknowledged errors in a 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and possibly impolitic email exchanges by East Anglian University climate researchers.

But they expressed shock at the political effects of the disclosures and said the impact was far out of proportion to the overwhelming evidence that human activity is changing the Earth’s climate.

via Top Scientists Affirm Consensus on Global Warming.

They expressed shock? Shock!? Sheeze…. Scientists and children….

Welcome to Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, Greil Marcus’s collage-o-phonic booklike substance that rings with voices in a thousand registers.

“As I tried to follow this story [the one he perceives running through chapters filled with medieval heretics, Dadaists, Situationists, and the Sex Pistols: “I am an anti-christ,” sang Johnny Rotten]–the characters changing into each other’s clothes until I gave up trying to make them hold still–what appealed to me were its gaps. and those moments when the story that has lost its voice somehow recovers it, and what happens then…. [quoting an ad for Potlatch he found in a “slick-paper, Belgian neo-surrealist review” dated 1954:] ” ‘Everywhere, youth (as it calls itself) discovers a few blunted knives, a few defused bombs, under thirty years of dust and debris; shaking in its shoes, youth hurls them upon the consenting rabble, which salutes it with its oily laugh.’ ” (20)

Situationist gnome, 1963: “The moment of real poetry brings all the unsettled debts of history back into play.” (21) That’s getting personal: I’ve resisted reading this book for twenty years. Now that I have, and since you’ve read this far, I recommend you do, too. So much for the niceties of the book review. What follows is engagement with Lipstick Traces.

“For years that seemed like decades,” Marcus accurately notes, all you got on the radio was “Fire and Rain, “Stairway to Heaven,” “Behind Blue Eyes” and “Maggie May.” (44) That, and then one day in the 1980s, the music we heard on the radio in the 1970s became classic rock.

Everybody who gives a shit caps on Greil Marcus for what they perceive as a slight or jab at their own history of punk because he starts with the Sex Pistols. But, as he says, “If what is interesting about punk is something other than its function as a musical genre, there is no point in treating it like one.” (77) The whole point is the impossibility of pinpointing the origins of popular cultural phenomena: such things are subject to “blind inheritance,” presumably via memes floating in our shared mental marketplace, as punk inherited from British folk rocker Richard Thompson: “Take the sun from my heart / Let me learn to despise.”

Reading the film Five Millions Years to Earth, “a film make in England in 1967 under the title Quartermass and the Pitt” (80), Marcus writes:

They [the genocidal Martians] meant to perpetuate themselves on earth by making its history–by coding its end in its beginning. A passion for prophecy, it seems, is also a Martian trait: they loved drama as much as death. (81)

And of course it would be impossible to write a “secret history” of the 20th century without including Martians and Cro-Magnons, both of which are present at least in passing.

Really, though, Marcus is writing about “Spectacle,” and its as if he’s wrestling with a ghost or a being made of smoke: the ideas swirl and often slip away from him for pages at a time. The term ‘Spectacle’ had become a fashionable critical commonplace by the 1980s. It was a vague term, devoid of ideas. It simply meant that the image of a thing superseded the thing itself. Thus, “Rambo movies in the U.S.A. could win the Vietnam War backward, that consumers were being seduced by advertisement instead of choosing rationally among products” and “that citizens were voting for actors rather than issues.” In other words, something funny is happening in Lipstick Traces, though it never is exactly clear because Marcus is absolutely subject to epistemological uncertainty if for no other reason than a) not being there personally and b) eyewitness aren’t worth shit but you talk to them anyway.

For situationist Guy Debord, the spectacle was not merely a stoner-paranoid “collection of images, but a social relationship among people, mediated by images.” The spectacle really is a conspiracy of relationships that kept empires running (if rising and falling) just as an engine is a conspiracy of relationships that moves things down the road. The sense of going somewhere is just an illusion, though, as what spectacle gives spectacle also takes away: Anwar Sadat, for instance, “was a [spectacular] hero of the electronic revolution, but also its [spectacularly assassinated] victim.” (97)

But the other side of spectacle is seen in a point made by situationist Veneigem, where “objectivity… meant ‘I love that girl because she is beautiful’; subjectivity meant ‘That girl is beautiful because I love her.’” Such is the power of spectacle that it bends us most certainly to its cultural will but also gives us the power to believe we are able to bend the social fabric our way, and to desire “something different from everyone else.”

Capitalism benefits most from, is powered by, spectacle – and that makes it tricky business, “dangerous,” perhaps criminal. For the situationists, there was a double-edged sword in the thought that “comfort will never be comfortable enough for those who seek what is not on the market.” Therefore, Debord said years later, “Where there was fire, we carried gasoline.”

Punk and the rest of the major phenomena Marcus writes about in Lipstick Traces are basically forms of Sinopean skepticism. Diagnose of Sinope, like punks and situationists, the medieval Japanese poet Ikkyu and Chuang Tzu the aimless wanderer, refused to work, taking up sacred peregrination and (as Diagnose replied when asked what he was doing in Athens) “debasing the currency.”

The situationists practiced the dérive, the art of drifting lost through the streets, seeking “the Northwest passage” of a city, Paris most especially for years on end in the case of Guy Debord. Though they despised surrealism and especially its pope, André Breton, the situationists in their wanderings partook of the surrealists’ disponibilité, a state of existential availability – to anything, everything – an attitude of creative readiness and perpetual resistance to “the Society of the Spectacle.” As William S. Burroughs once said in a parallel context, Spectacle is a “vampiric process;” Burroughs advised resistance through the cultivation of good character.

The situationists, like the punks, “debased the currency”: punk “music” was (per the cliché) an oxymoron: those motherfuckers can’t play. The situations took “official” publications (cartoons that ran in newspapers were a popular target) and practiced détournment, doctoring texts or, like Burroughs, cutting up newspapers and magazines, then pasting them back together at will to new effect. Rock and punk designers took the technique as a signature for gig flyers.

For what if you really could warp reality? What if, through design, you could get people to come to a band’s show and drink too much? Wasn’t that, after all, the goal of every revolutionist? “What if you could really make it happen?” What if the man dreaming he was a butterfly woke up, finding himself a butterfly?

“The spectacle was itself a work of art, an economy of false needs elevated into a tableau of frozen desires, true desires reduced to a cartoon of twitching needs. Spreading the bad paper of détournment until it began to turn up everywhere, the SI [Situationist International] would devalue the currency of the spectacle, and the results would be total inflation.” (168)

As if; but somebody had to try.

Another technique for discovering “psychogeographic” highways and byways, methods for invoking the derive, include “gramologues’ or magical floating words and resonant sounds [that]… are irresistibly and hypnotically engraved on the memory, and they emerge again from the memory with just a little resistance and friction.” (206) Notice that gramologues don’t preclude semantic content and thus include a variety of gnomic utterances we call “catchy phrase”: tag lines, mottos and all manner of cursing would be included here. Gnomic utterances are noted for their suasive power as noted in their deployment in all campaigns of propaganda.

And that in turn points out the danger that rears its head occasionally throughout Marcus’s book: The danger is, per Nietzsche’s warning, that in fighting a monster one risks becoming one. (203) For capitalism and the spectacle are quite adept at détouring the détourners; after all, the practitioners (photographers, designers, writers) are ultimately the same people. Every dropout who tunes in while turning on others must also make a living, and PR is the default calling of every out-of-work revolutionary in need of a paycheck.

Then there’s the psychiatrists, also known as those who play both ends against the middle, who say (these are Richard Huelsenbeck the dadaist’s words, circa 1920 long after he’d switched practices): “Do you understand? We are psychiatrists; we are Germans; we have read Nietzsche; we know that to gaze too long at monsters is to become one – that’s what we get paid for!” (211) Huelsenbeck was always saying, “The dadaist is a man of reality who loves wine, women and advertising.” (213)

The punks couldn’t help but love the gramologues of advertising, even if they hated them, too, rejected their authority, and repelled them with taut fiber, venom and erosive sonic armies. They were born into an unavoidable and irresistible media milieu, so the only strategy left was to détourne the meaning of images of the spectacle: flyers for punk shows still stand as exemplars of graphic design.

The plasticity of meaning is why controlling it matters so much – to the dadaists, the lettrists, the situationists, the punks – who gets to words and gramologues first, who controls the language. Before Dada, there was an ad for Dada Shampoo. (213) And that’s why so many of marks of social identity are rallying cries: paralinguistic, animalistic, and naively musical – catchy, memorable, amusing, provoking things that work especially well when there are crowds of people willing to be entrained. And that’s why the punks stripped playing music down to its pragmatically emotional essentials: one is either wailing in pain or in ecstasy: “you only had to tell the right story, and turn up the volume.” (362)

“Dada!”

The potential energy of the individual in the crowd inspired Debord to remark, “the future belongs to the passerby.” Readiness, disponibilité, to make answer to a passing look, to make responsibility out of the flow of anonymity is what distinguishes psychogeography, “the science fiction of urban planning.” (362)

(In his tale of two cities, latter-day science fiction situationist China Miéville takes psychogeography to its logical extreme. The City and the City is a hard-boiled murder investigation in overlapping twin cities whose inhabitants practice cognitive blindness in order not to see across state lines and “unsee” the other side of the street and its passersby. The derive is co-opted by authoritarian ideology through a détournment of cultural norms and social codes.)

We will not be prisoners to the fiction of utility, say the punks through Marcus’s trace detection system. And Marcus is no prisoner to the utility of literary criticism, and so has fun, chews, digresses. (369) With Marcus, we are always at the crossroads, one of the great themes of popular music since about the time people first met up there and had a jam session, “and, instead of passing by with eyes averted,” we pause and recognize that “Now, damn the consequences, we have met,” as D.H. Lawrence put it. (366)

Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book at www.curledup.com. © Brian Charles Clark, 2010

Farber wrote scores of film reviews for The Nation, Time, The New Republic and other publications. But his reviews rarely fit into the “first this, then that, and I liked it because” box that most reviewers cram themselves into. Farber mused on the beauty of images, confronted actors’ choices, challenged directors, and digressed down rarely trod paths in order to introduce pertinent impertinences and relevant social revelations.

Farber was a self-described champion of “termite art”: he loved eccentric virtuosity rather than “white elephants,” conformist monstrosities that “pin the viewer to the wall and slug him with wet towels of artiness and significance.” Termite art, in contrast, is “ornery, wasteful, stubbornly self-involved, doing go-for-broke art and not caring what comes of it.” White elephant art was seamless mass in “pursuit of… continuity” and “harmony,” while termite art participated in the world: it is “an act of observing and being in the world” and

goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, like as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.

Farber taught film classes at UC San Diego that, as professors at the university are (or at least were) wont to do, made huge demands on the student. You’d have to not only watch every film listed on the syllabus but remember every detail, too. Farber tore down the idea that a film is a whole, with first this, then that happening – which is, of course, the way the vast majority of people watch films. Indeed, per Farber, most people aren’t watching so much as being pickled in white elephant shit. In his classes, says Duncan Shepherd, who wrote film reviews for the San Diego Reader, “It wasn’t so much what he had to say… so much as it was the whole way he went about things, famously showing films in pieces, switching back and forth from one film to another, ranging from Griffin to Goddard, Bugs Bunny to Yasujiro Oz,” and playing clips without sound, backwards, mixed in with slides of paintings, and so on. Farber taught his students to observe, to ravage like termites.

The hundreds of film reviews in this book are, in short, a guide to Western culture in the 20th century. Your guide is witty, scathing, unforgiving, and never so high-browed that he’s afraid to love a good roll in the mud. One quote, from a 1953 review, will have to suffice: “Stalag 17 is a crude, cliché-ridden glimpse of a Nazi prison camp that I hated to see end.”

Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book at www.curledup.com. © Brian Charles Clark, 2010

Witold Gombrowicz is a novelist of psychological entanglements, and Pornografia is a novel of erotic entanglement. It is often cruel and sometimes cruelly funny. It is a novel by a man certain that language in some profound way determines ontology, that what we hear and say sculpts the way we are.

Set in a country idyll with the war roaring dully in the background, two refugee intellectuals conspire to contrive a liaison between a pair of kids who have grown up together there in the Polish countryside. Pornografia is an unholy little novel, chillingly dark, at times dripping with cynicism, but at its best beset by bracing, high-brow hilarity and jaded, deeply sublimated hysteria. First published in 1966, it’s only recently that readers have begun to talk about Gombrowicz as a Latin American writer rather than a Polish one. The question of influence is good, if ultimately divisive. Division is precisely Gombrowicz’s strength; you imagine he not only enjoys taking the frog apart with a tiny knife, he begins to split the world apart as if it were empirically just an intimately interbleeding network of heartbeats.

In 1939, Gombrowicz left Poland, escaping to Argentina, where he lived for the rest of his life. I think, as best he could, he 86ed the invasion of Poland by Germany in the fall of ’39 from his life while embracing it as an element in his biography. He wasn’t so much guilty as alive and smart. And that hurt, in that way that surviving disaster sometimes does. So he kept that quiet, at first, then, later, leaked it as attitude, insolence and fiction.

Above the street in Buenos Aires, Gombrowicz wrote a career of large intellectual appetites. His opus includes a major dent in the history of Argentinean theatre – but, in the 20th century, Argentina was so intellectually close to (some would say preoccupied with) French, Spanish and Italian thought that it is easy to see why Gombrowicz was mistaken for a European writer.

To my mind, Gombrowicz is in fictional league with the likes of John le Carré, who also writes as if he thinks that people can be made by the words shared by two or more people. Usually two. When a third is introduced, per Charles Sanders Peirce, randomness, sway and betrayal wag people’s tails (money and sex are the typical thirds played upon in the Gombrowiczian personality trade). Made here means made real: made to act in a certain way; to command; to be taken under the confidence or control of another.

The difference between the crypto-modernist spy novelist, whose philosophical imperatives and narrative interests significantly overlap those of Gombrowicz, is that Gombrowicz practiced point of view from the terrorist’s self-explosion while le Carré at the last minute rips the point of view from the victim to the perpetrator so that, at the wall, we witness the shooting of children, animals and, at his most wrenching, the beloved. With Gombrowicz, though, things are always kept at a distance.

And that’s the rip-off with most of modernism, and post-modernism, too: you never get to love the characters. You’re minimally or otherwise challenged to recognize them as antecedents, precedents and portents, without ever being rationed the responsibility of response in the dialogical sense of the word.

Like 1970’s-era J.G. Ballard (especially The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash), Gombrowicz’s novels make for a fascinating read, but don’t expect to be more than intellectually engaged.

Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book at www.curledup.com. © Brian Charles Clark, 2010

Gain

Not Clare, the transnational corporation whose history is charted across three generations in this saga of a novel. The company makes soap — a cleaning product that offers the homemaker so much to gain. And the company, of course, has gained, prodigiously, over the years: it has profited immensely.

Clare manufacturers its products in Lacewood, Illinois, where Laura Bodey is an estate agent. Laura has ovarian cancer. Her story – of her illness and how, as she disintegrates, her family reunites around her – is intertwined with the story of Clare International.

Long before the novel makes the facts plain, we’ve already drawn connections: our chemistry is killing us. The brilliant Powers draws parallels and cycles in abundance but, to his credit, he never once hits over the head with any moralizing message.

Perennial plants flower and die, and so do people and industries, he implies. It’s the way of the world. We can change things, perhaps and, after reading Gain, we may well join one crusade or another, seeking justice for victims of industries focused on nothing but gain or, contrarily, seeking to eliminate the tort system that is, at this point, the victim’s only source of recompense and punishment for the polluters who make us sick. Either way, or no way, that’ll be what you got out of the novel, not what’s there.Gain is a history of a cancer, then, but also a history of the American corporation — a frightening parallel, but also apropos. Clare starts out as just a few people but, because they are incorporated, they have all the rights of individuals but none of the responsibilities. In our lust to profit and consume in an environment unfettered by regulation or consequence, we too quickly forget this strange contortion of the Fourteenth Amendment. Written to declare the personhood of those held as slaves and thus set them free, it quickly came to be wielded as a blunt instrument in the creation of corporate personhood.

Corporations attained the rights of individuals (without the responsibilities – that is, they cannot easily and directly be held responsible of their actions) through a reading, an interpretation of the word “person,” in the U.S. constitution. So Powers is riffing on a cycle of healing and sickness: in the hands of a great writer, reading is curative. In the hands of lawyers, though, interpretative powers can be perverted and make us sick.

Gain is, in short, a brilliant, exhilarating novel that, like all Powers’ novels, deserves and rewards our closest reading. Richard Powers is without a doubt one of the two or three best living writers working in the English language. With Gain, he flexed his considerable muscles, letting us see ourselves through both the wide-angle lens of history and the microscope of the cancerous body. Gain is a major achievement, a novel of conscience for a largely unconscious culture. And he didn’t stop with Gain. Soon after came novels about terrorism, the environment, race and, most recently, a return to science in a novel about the creativity of genetic engineering (and the engineering of creative writing).

If you care about ideas and their power in the world, you should be reading Richard Powers.

Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book at www.curledup.com. © Brian Charles Clark, 2010

Can we crown them kings of the one-take music video yet?

Hell yes.

OK Go – This Too Shall Pass from OK Go on Vimeo.

Boa Sr, who lived through the 2004 tsunami, the Japanese occupation and diseases brought by British settlers, was the last native of the island chain who was fluent in Bo.

Taking its name from a now-extinct tribe, Bo is one of the 10 Great Andamanese languages, which are thought to date back to pre-Neolithic human settlement of southeast Asia.

via Ancient tribal language becomes extinct as last speaker dies | World news | guardian.co.uk.