"New possibilities in Hotel Redemption"

Subject-line of an email I just received.

Good title for an essay or short story, methought.

The Bear

7
I awaken I think. Marshlights
reappear, geese
come trailing again up the flyway.
In her ravine under old snow the dam-bear
lies, licking
lumps of smeared fur
and drizzly eyes into shapes
with her tongue. And one
hairy-soled trudge stuck out before me,
the next groaned out,
the next,
the next,
the rest of my days I spend
wandering: wondering
what, anyway,
was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that
poetry, by which I lived?

(here)

Survival of the cutest

To follow up on the Siegfried & Roy story—who, I gather, use only white tigers in their shows—it seems Roy Horn got what was coming to him when his tiger Montecore attacked and nearly killed him (Oct 2003).

Innocently perusing the archives at ZooBorns I was naturally captivated by this baby white tiger's gaze. In the comments section, however, I found a link to this post on the subject of the birth of white tiger cubs at a different zoo which contains some extremely disturbing, not to mention distressing, information on the status of white tigers. I don't know why I'm surprised, but it certainly put a damper on my unmitigated "cute-response" to those pictures. (The same, of course, goes for Duke the Shar-Pei, a charming little fellow that my sister linked me to). Of course dogs are a different matter (and anyone who so much as glanced at the coverage of this year's Westminster Dog Show, or any dog show ever, cannot have escaped the sense that human breeding practices are well beyond the pale).

"Cute-response" in and of itself is of course a prevalent motivating force in the excessive breeding practices that favour neotenous traits and have led to the creation of such monsters as the Chihuahua and, since the 1970s in the United States at least, of the Shar-Pei. (Beagles, of course a superior breed of dog, live longer than most domestic breeds because they are less in-bred than many other varieties). Cuteness of course also gets used by wildlife protection agencies such as the WWF in order to entice supporters. Pandas, polar bears, tigers, (oh my!) and other "charismatic superfauna" (as they are known in the literature) are consistently used as iconic representatives of a world that needs saving. This is also why it's always Shark Week on The Discovery Channel.

I don't really know where I'm going with this. Mostly, I just wanted to share my discovery regarding white tigers and I suppose ponder the ethics of looking at cute baby animals on the internet whilst simultaneously doing nothing to ameliorate the conditions under which they will live when they grow up, be it in the wild or in captivity.

Quote of the Day

“Roy Horn [of Siegfried & Roy, K.] — who in his memoir defines himself in terms of his animals, and who makes his living using them — could be just the latest stage in the development of man described by Rousseau: savage hunter, barbaric herdsman, civilized farmer, Vegas entertainer.”

Kelly Oliver, “Animal Pedagogy: The Origin of ‘Man’ in Rousseau and Herder.” Culture, Theory & Critique, 2006, 47(2), 107-131 (here, 108).

TNT

One can imagine a group of Documentary Detectives whose sole purpose is to uphold Truth & Truth                      by guaranteeing the the authenticity           of all works. Their seal of approval would                  create a sense of public faith which             could only be main tained if said                     Documentary Detec tives were as fierce               as pit bulls and as scrupulous as saints.            Of course, this is more of the kind of               thing a novelist or playwright would               deal with, and as I am pointedly not a novelist or a playwright I will leave that tale to someone else———

(House of Leaves, p. 144)

On Friday I had the pleasure of hearing Mick Taussig give a paper on the cultural significance of sunsets and liminal states (Schwellenzustände) in general. Walter Benjamin and Marcel Proust came up, as did various indigenous peoples. Nevertheless, it's not entirely accurate to refer to it as a paper; a quasi-poetic meditation on liminality, it wavered uncertainly between art and scholarship and as such partook of its subject matter.

Perhaps understandably, the respondent did not know how to respond. Instead, he chose to show two brief pieces of video art relating to sunsets. I forget what the former was called, but it was a time-lapse shot of the sun rising and setting where the camera was rotated 90° each time, so that the viewer became somewhat disoriented, since the sun now went sideways or downwards as it rose, etc.

The second piece he showed had been released by The Atlas Group and, as he explained, consisted of footage taken by a surveillance camera operator who had taken to repositioning his camera every evening to film the sunset instead of his designated portion of the seaside promenade in Beirut. Operator #17 was eventually sacked, but was nevertheless allowed to keep some of the footage he had shot, and which he then sent to the Atlas Group. You can watch the piece here. As you can see, it is listed under ‘found files’.

The respondent, a well-known scholar within German studies, showed the video and then expounded for a few minutes on the significance of this footage. On the juxtaposition of the Panoptic gaze of the surveillance camera and the aesthetic view of the sunset. The time-stamp at the bottom of the frame serves to remind us of the official, bureaucratic context of the filming-situation, but the footage had to be fast-forwarded in order render the different temporal index of the sunset perceptible. As a result, the passers-by become almost ghostly. Gradually, the camera seems to zoom in on the setting sun so that not only the ghostly presence of the human subjects is eliminated, but also the time-stamp vanishes, leaving only the sun as some universal marker of cyclical and/or natural time.

Or so the story goes. The only problem is that the entire thing is a fiction dreamt up by Walid Raad, the man behind the Atlas Group. To quote the first hit I got on Google yesterday morning when I searched for Beirut sunsets: “There is no Operator 17.”

The actual cameraman is Raad, who possesses the eye and voice of a poet. When I had the opportunity to interview him recently, Raad, who divides his time between Beirut and New York, where he teaches at Cooper Union, told me he filmed the Beirut sunset for years without knowing how or if he would ever use the footage. He came upon the idea for the piece one day while walking along the Corniche with a friend, who suddenly whispered for Raad to lower his voice as they passed one of the numerous minivan walk-up cafes that appear along the promenade. When asked why, his friend joked, “Didn't you know there are security agents filming from those vans?” And though the friend was kidding, Raad thought, who was he to say it wasn't so?

Of course it makes for a better story if the beauty of nature had really struck a blow against the powers of oppression by enchanting this lowly surveillance camera operator, just as Robinson Crusoe or any of myriad utopian ‘found file’ narratives are more exciting if they seem to bleed over into our empirical world, but in an academic context it seems either embarrassingly lax or unconscionably dishonest not to mention the fact that this is a work of fiction. It can work on all the various levels our respondent hinted at, but the polarities have got to be reversed in order for it to remain the same.

Dark Was the Night

I just got my hands on a compilation released on 4AD called Dark Was the Night. When I first saw it announced, I couldn't quite believe the line-up. Pretty much everybody I listen to is represented on here, to the extent that it's almost creepy. Feist, Death Cab (well, Ben Gibbard), Bon Iver, Grizzly Bear, My Brightest Diamond, The Decemberists, Iron & Wine, Cat Power, Sufjan Stevens, Beirut, Andrew Bird; the list goes on and on.

Anyway, my next concern was that these would be throwaway tracks, as sometimes happens with these compilations, but having listened to the entire first half, I can honestly say that there hasn't been a bad track yet. Astonishing.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got some serious listening to do. As, I would argue, have you.

Walking the dog

My New Year's Resolution (besides the usual) was to take more photos. So here are some pictures I took with my new digital SLR down on the farm between Christmas and New Year. Enjoy.