John Prine

There are the songs you love, the bands, the singers. And then there is that special subset that you sing. You sing in your head, or you sing outloud. You sing in the kitchen, cooking. You sing on the bike, biking. You sing in the car, all alone, at 2 o’clock in the morning, heading home.

My mom sang in the kitchen. In my memory, most of her songs involved Jesus. My Dad, on the other hand, seemed singularly untouched by popular song culture. It was one of those things that made him an isolato in America. He was also singularly uninterested in sports – I sometimes wonder what kind of American male reared me. I believe the only lyrics he knew, or that he would come out with (save for mouthing the words of Christmas songs) were: “Red sails in the sunset/far over the sea”. Which he would sing mock crooner style, as though singing were an inherently bogus occupation.

All my family followed Mom, in liking to sing.

My life with song really begins when I reached the age of 12. That was when I was given my own room. Before that, my brothers and me all slept together. Since there was five kids, that made sense – but finally as a present my Dad knocked a room out of the part of the basement that was used for storage and as a play area. It was a huge gift to me. My Mom gave birth to me, and I am bound to her in my heart; my Dad, I’m not bound to so much. But I have to remember that, in a sense, giving me that room, he gave birth to the person I became. For good and ill, my adolescence was defined by that room. Virginia Woolf is your best guide to spiritual real estate – she’s damn right, everyone needs, at one point or another, a room of their own.

As we all know, adolescence -m in the U.S. at least – is when we find our own songs, our own soundtrack. Our own singers.
Or never.

Alone in my room (at last!), I furnished it with a clock radio, which I kept tuned, always, to WREK. WREK is the Georgia Tech station. WREK taught me the canon, from Bob Dylan to Frank Zappa, from Leadbelly to Herbie Hancock.
WREK gave me John Prine.

The songbook in my head consists of songs by great singer songwriters and lesser ones. It contains the entirety of “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” a song which has been experimentally proven to last on a ten speed bicycle around the entirety of the Lake Austin bike and hike trail. It also contains numerous Donna Summer songs from the Bad Girls album (from post WREK days). It contains many songs I don’t sing and wish were not in there, but that the internal voice repeats when it hears them, from Lynnard Skinner and Elton John.

In this repertoire, John Prine stands in the upper ranks, next to, say, Neil Young.

At some point in my teenage years, by folks bought a bigass Sears stereo, which was a real piece of furniture, long, wooden (probably pine wood when I think of it, dyed mahogany) with a lid under which there was a record player. You could stand your albums up in a space that was closed by a sliding door. I don’t remember when I bought my first John Prine album or from where (probably from a long lost store called Treasure Island up on Memorial Drive), but I remember what it was: Common Sense. That album I can almost play in my head.

This isn’t to say that Common Sense is absolutely superior to, say, Diamond in the Rough, or other Prine albums. It doesn’t have, for instance, Paradise, a song that is all about the old sadness of American culture, right up there with Woody Guthrie’s Deportees. It doesn’t have the hymn, Diamonds in the Rough, which I like to sing outloud, my own “Red Sails in the Sunset”. It doesn’t have Christmas in Prison.

But its first three or four songs are almost perfect. For instance, the line from Barbara Lewis Hare Krishna Beauregaard, about the passing of the strange American counterculture, “and you talk about/ a paper route/ she’s a shutin without a home” I could put on my resume. Or the line from Common Sense: “it don’t make much sense that common sense/don’t make no sense no more” – which I think about frequently in the age of Trump. And then Middle Man, a song-patter with the usual excellent Prine similes (“Flo talks slow like she’s slow dryin’ paint”). And there is the great, chilling, He was in Heaven Before he Died, with the perfect line “a person can’t tell his best friend he loves him/till time has stopped breathing/ you’re alone on the hill”. Part of having a practical, singing relationship with songs is that these lines are quoted as I remember and heard them. There are two schools about this: one is literalist and insists that departure from the text is an error, and one school that holds that variants are the life of song – it is what inflated a little ditty about a scandal in Troy to the Iliad.

I’m in the latter camp. Elvis Costello in some interview commented about how much he liked Dylan and how much he felt certain of his words were too mumbled, and he quoted an example – which, the interviewer pointed out, was not correct. Costello had the song “wrong”. But he had the song.
All of which is to salute John Prine as he struggles with Corona Virus. Cause I don’t want to wake up some day and realize that part of me – of us – is gone and I said nothing.

Pick through the ashes/
Of the torch singer’s song…

complete article: the stock market and its problems

In the wake of two major bailouts, a decade apart, following on a crash in 200-2001 and overshadowed by the twin phenomena of de-industrialization and an enormous increase in wealth inequality that should be compared not to the U.S. in the twenties but to Ancien regime France in the 1730s, the question arises: why do we have stock markets?  And, more broadly, why have we allowed, or even encouraged, the burgeoning of financial instruments  in the post Bretton Woods period? The so called shadow markets, or the other kind as well, that advertise themselves as security for other financial instruments, but always not only fail in that responsibility, but always crash themselves, bringing about chain reaction crashes?

Peter L. Bernstein, who was an investor, journalist and economist in one, observed that stock markets have increased in the post-war period from around 50 in 1948 to around 125 in 1998. This speaks to something attractive in the current period about the stock market. He examined the common defense of the market in a great paper entitled Liquidity, Stock Markets and Market Makers, published in 1987 – on the brink of Black Monday, 1987, when the great Reagan stock boom crashed.

Bernstein considers the standard defense of the stock market – that it allows liquidity and is an instrument for efficiency. Stocks, in this story, reward innovation and that kind of efficiency that squeezes profits from enterprises, allocating capital accordingly. On the other side, they punish enterprises that stagnate and that fail to be “efficient”.

Bernstein does not leave the story there. In his paper, he notes that the stock market system is embedded in  and necessary to the corporation system: “One of the great features of that legal creature we call the corporation is how readily it facilitates transferring ownership in business. Perhaps the most impressive consequence of that feature has been the development of organized stock markets.”

From that premise, Bernstein considers a tension – what a Marxist would call a contradiction – between the two poles of efficiency and liquidity:

“There is a tension between liquidity – a market in which we can buy and sell promptly with minimal impact on the price of the stock – and efficiency – a market in which prices move rapidly to reflect all new information as it flows into the marketplace.”

Hark ye at the information talk. One of the fruits of the ‘cyborg revolution” (to use Phllip Mirowski’s phrase) was the recasting of managerial and speculative activity in terms of information. Bernstein’s essay quotes amply from a lecture by Fischer Black entitled “Noise”, which is permeated with the information paradigm. It refers to Claude Shannon’s distinction between signal and noise. Primitively, these terms are just what they seem: if you broadcast a message, there is an amount of static – noise – that adheres to it. If you write down a message, there is a distortion in your handwriting that may make it hard to read. “Noise” is the ‘friction of information. If you exchange information with a person, the tone of your voice and expression on your face, your properties in the socius, all of these come with that information. We realize this at some Piagetian point in youth. Five year olds know how to say ‘yes’ to their parents in a tone that signifies ‘no’ – this is the noise of raising a kid.

To return to the handy information paradigm in economics (and observe my restraint: for those worried that I would get on the warpath about Hayekian ideology, which rode piggyback on Shannon’s communication science, rest assured – that isn’t my concern here) – Bernstein usefully takes from Black the idea, paradoxical as it may seem, that ‘noise’ provides us with the practical solution to our contradiction. Noise traders are essential to the liquidity of the market. In fact, they are as essential as information traders. Noise traders (“who trade on noise as though it were information”) are essential for information traders to have to sell to or buy from: why? Because information traders are, as it were, grouped at the efficiency end. Their “information capital” restricts the incentive to trade “They are reluctant to trade with one another, because, as Black puts it, “a trader with a special piece of information will know that other traders have their own special pieces of information and will therefore not automatically rush out to trade.” The P.T. Barnum principle (there’s a sucker born every minute) has a systematic effect that often rewards suckers and makes them useful, unbeknownst to themselves.

Bernstein’s use of the dichotomy between information traders and noise traders serves as a foundation for making some curious observations.

The one that concerns me is the “orderly” market. The theoretical defense of the stock market is that it discourages “unnecessary” volatility. Prices of stocks should point to some equilibrium valuation of the enterprise that has issued the stock. But there is a problem:

“What happens if the fundamental value or equilibrium level changes, however? In an orderly market, that change may take a long time to appear, as the price meanders rather than leaps to its new equilibrium. In that case, an orderly market is inefficient, in that its price information is giving false signals to potential buyers and sellers. Here is where we would want the noise traders to shut up and where market resiliency is a disadvantage rather than an attraction. In other words, orderly is not always a desirable property of a market.”

It is easy to read over economist’s prose, which seems to be iced over just to make the laiety glide slip and tumble, never noticing the enormities beneath his or her feet. Bernstein’s caveat here is basically that, in solving the paradox posed by liquidity and efficiency, we slip out of the true information defense of the market and admit that it is laced with false information – or false “signals”. Because these are not immediately corrected – because the market is constructed to slow volatility (especially going down – an asymmetry that comes with wanting to sell stuff), over time synchronous and chronic missignalling can and will happen. Whether the signaling is about the value of Latin American mines (the cause of one of the first stock crashes, in 1830, when the Bank of England nearly went bankrupt) or the supposed risk insured construction of mortgage backed securities, something is going to be going wrong. This is not a contingent truth, but simply a result of the rules of the market. It is as if you constructed a board game in which the very rules incentivized cheating and covering up the cheating.

  II.

Bridges sometimes collapse. Yet few people would argue an anti-bridge position from that fact.

But what if bridges collapsed in unison? What if one bridge collapsing in the U.S. caused half the bridges in the U.S. to collapse, which in turn caused bridges to collapse in China, Japan, and Europe? Would this change how we thought about bridges?

In 2008, according to D. McKennie, the collapse of the NY stock market caused other markets to collapse as well, so that at the end of 2008 35 trillion dollars worth of equity wealth was wiped out. This is rather like my case of the bridge. The bridge is probably the most efficient means to get people across rivers and abysses, but we would certainly want them to be built with maximum attention to safety if they threatened to bring about world-wide catastrophe if just one collapsed.

In actual fact, unlike bridges, there is one market more than any other that has the capacity to bring all others down in its fall, and that is the NYSE. However, this doesn’t really effect too much my parallel: we would in fact seemingly want to make sure the NYSE is the best secured stock market in the world given the structure of the international economy. And we would want a clear idea of what it does best.

That idea is not helped by a theory that says: bridges always operate efficiently, so that we don’t want to interfere with their building. Or the idea that if bridges went down and killed millions of people, but millions more than that theoretically flowed over them, everything is cool. 

My analogy is straining at the bit, or has broken the leash, at this point. The point, this point, is that we don’t know if stock markets are the most efficient ways to allocate capital if we don’t include in our overview the fact that markets collapse. 

When they collapse, there are always economists to say that the collapse only costs unreal money money in excess of the value actually destroyed. Which is another way of saying that the efficiency of the market is paid for by each stock by some speculative prime – some effect of the  famous price to earnings ratio. That is, for most companies listed on the stock exchange, the value of the companies assets and revenue are exponentially less than their capitalization. This is the root of Piketty’s theory of the inequality structurally produced by capitalism.

In terms of efficiencies, the premium put on capitalization seems oddly inefficient – do we really need to attract investment by creating these chances for extraordinary wealth for the speculators? It is a question that has been posed before, in the progressive era, when laws were considered to put a cap on the amount an enterprise could be capitalized over its non-capitalized value. This progressive proposal has fallen in the dust, along with so many others. But as the financial markets both increase inequality and seem inherently prone to massive government supports due to the crises endogenous to their structures, we have to start dusting off these proposals again. We have to start thinking about the abnormal size of the financial market in proportion to its function, and the price we want to pay for this system of corporate ownership. A question should haunt us: Does capitalism have to be this way?    

why do we have stock markets

In the wake of two major bailouts, a decade apart, following on a crash in 200-2001 and overshadowed by the twin phenomena of de-industrialization and an enormous increase in wealth inequality that should be compared not to the U.S. in the twenties but to Ancien regime France in the 1730s, the question arises: why do we have stock markets?  And, more broadly, why have we allowed, or even encouraged, the burgeoning of financial instruments  in the post Bretton Woods period? The so called shadow markets, or the other kind as well, that advertise themselves as security for other financial instruments, but always not only fail in that responsibility, but always crash themselves, bringing about chain reaction crashes?

Peter L. Bernstein, who was an investor, journalist and economist in one, observed that stock markets have increased in the post-war period from around 50 in 1948 to around 125 in 1998. This speaks to something attractive in the current period about the stock market. He examined the common defense of the market in a great paper entitled Liquidity, Stock Markets and Market Makers, published in 1987 – on the brink of Black Monday, 1987, when the great Reagan stock boom crashed.

Bernstein considers the standard defense of the stock market – that it allows liquidity and is an instrument for efficiency. Stocks, in this story, reward innovation and that kind of efficiency that squeezes profits from enterprises, allocating capital accordingly. On the other side, they punish enterprises that stagnate and that fail to be “efficient”.

Bernstein does not leave the story there. In his paper, he notes that the stock market system is embedded in  and necessary to the corporation system: “One of the great features of that legal creature we call the corporation is how readily it facilitates transferring ownership in business. Perhaps the most impressive consequence of that feature has been the development of organized stock markets.”

From that premise, Bernstein considers a tension – what a Marxist would call a contradiction – between the two poles of efficiency and liquidity:

“There is a tension between liquidity – a market in which we can buy and sell promptly with minimal impact on the price of the stock – and efficiency – a market in which prices move rapidly to reflect all new information as it flows into the marketplace.”

Hark ye at the information talk. One of the fruits of the ‘cyborg revolution” (to use Phllip Mirowski’s phrase) was the recasting of managerial and speculative activity in terms of information. Bernstein’s essay quotes amply from a lecture by Fischer Black entitled “Noise”, which is permeated with the information paradigm. It refers to Claude Shannon’s distinction between signal and noise. Primitively, these terms are just what they seem: if you broadcast a message, there is an amount of static – noise – that adheres to it. If you write down a message, there is a distortion in your handwriting that may make it hard to read. “Noise” is the ‘friction of information. If you exchange information with a person, the tone of your voice and expression on your face, your properties in the socius, all of these come with that information. We realize this at some Piagetian point in youth. Five year olds know how to say ‘yes’ to their parents in a tone that signifies ‘no’ – this is the noise of raising a kid.

To return to the handy information paradigm in economics (and observe my restraint: for those worried that I would get on the warpath about Hayekian ideology, which rode piggyback on Shannon’s communication science, rest assured – that isn’t my concern here) – Bernstein usefully takes from Black the idea, paradoxical as it may seem, that ‘noise’ provides us with the practical solution to our contradiction. Noise traders are essential to the liquidity of the market. In fact, they are as essential as information traders. Noise traders (“who trade on noise as though it were information”) are essential for information traders to have to sell to or buy from: why? Because information traders are, as it were, grouped at the efficiency end. Their “information capital” restricts the incentive to trade “They are reluctant to trade with one another, because, as Black puts it, “a trader with a special piece of information will know that other traders have their own special pieces of information and will therefore not automatically rush out to trade.” The P.T. Barnum principle (there’s a sucker born every minute) has a systematic effect that often rewards suckers and makes them useful, unbeknownst to themselves.

TO BE CONTINUED

Santa Monica 2012

What’s escape to the mapless girl
Lugging earbait on Wiltshire and Fifth
Jilling the edge of tonight’s magnesium splendor?
Disappear, baby, down the convenient alley
To end up in someone’s car.
All that suck n fuck machinery
-- Set in motion to produce this drop?
… as ratcatchers in prowlers come howling to a stop.

- Karen Chamisso

Rachel Kushner's Mars Room take 2

At the dawn of movie-making, there were no stars. Indeed, as film historian Michael Newton writes, the actors were:

“… puppets, mannequins, and not expected to reveal through their external image a complex inner life. Those early bioscope models were anonymous, subordinate to the piece of film itself; indeed, the earliest films were ‘performed by people who were anything but actors’, sometimes literally just folk picked up in a café.³ Erwin Panofsky remarks that the cast of a prestige 1905 production of Faust are ‘characteristically “unknown”’.

“Even then, however, the camera seems to pick out certain people. Newton cites a short story by Rudyard Kipling, Mrs. Bathurst, in which the narrator sees a film that documents a London crowd crossing a bridge and sees someone he knows, Mrs. Bathurst: ‘There was no mistakin’ the walk in a hundred thousand’ and ‘She walked on and on till she melted out of the picture – like – like a shadow jumpin’ over a candle.’ The film transmits the unique ‘blindish look’ she has, preserving in light that something that was hers, while not being her, merely a trace, both a mere picture and a mock-up of the real thing.”

It is a commonplace to say that Mary Pickford was the first star. Newton accords that honor to a French comedian, Max Lindner. It is clarifying,however, to remember 19^thcentury  theater and opera, for definitely there were divas and “stars”. By the end of the 18^thcentury, the great actor or actress had even become respectable. Before the 18^thcentury, theater was, technically, a demi-monde for the Church – both Catholic and Protestant. In one of those moments in the French Revolution that seem to cast shadows down to us, the Assembly debated making actors and executioners full citizens – and ended up adding Jews to that list. Clement-Tonnerre made the speech introducing the civil rights bill.

“Passing to actors, he demonstrated that, in their regard, the prejudice is established on what they are under the dependence of public opinion. “This dependence makes our glory and it flays them,” he cries. “Honest citizens can represent on the stage the chef-d’oeuvres of the human spirit, works filled with the healthy philosophy that, thus put in a position where every human can appreciate it, has prepared, successfully, the revolution that is now in operation, and you tell them: you are Comediens du Roi, you occupy the national theater, and you are criminal (infame)! The law must not let this crime subsist.”” (from Gaston Maugras’ Les comediens hors la lois).

What was the eeriness of the actor about? I’d suggest that we look at a doctrine made famous by Ernst Kantorowicz’s study, The King’s Two Bodies. The Sovereign was invested with a pollical body as well as one of flesh. Similarly, the actor is both the actor and the “part” – an uncomfortable parody, perhaps, of the miracle of the Eucharist. There was a “star system” in the 19^th century, in which opera and theater were the great popular as well as high cultural arts, but it was metaphysically different from what happened with the movies. Though Rachilde [Proust’s composite portrait of the great diva] played the part of Berenice, people did not go to the theater to see Rachilde, they went to see Rachilde play the part of Berenice.

But in the movies, the character – with the character’s name – is swept up in if not identical to the actor. Even as the actor is more than the part. Jake Geddes is different from Jack Nicholson, but it is forgivable if people substitute Jack Nicholson for Geddes when they talk about the movie. A theater part lives on – Hamlet did not die with Garrick, nor with Olivier – but the movie part is a more ambiguous kind of aesthetic creature.

…

I am pulling all this out to try to explain my impression of the cinematic quality of Rachel Kushner’s novels. We still use the old Greek system for thinking of the novel, with the hero or protagonist and the secondary characters – the rounds and the flats, to use E.M. Forster’s terms. The roundedness is supposed to refer to some psychological completeness, some depth that can be evoked but not, if the round effect works, exhaustively shown. Myself, II think it might be more interesting and capture more of the way we read novels – or the way I read novels, given all the cultural syrop I’ve absorbed through every medium – by referencing the star system. I’ve read many novels with round and flat characters, but the novels that mark me with being of my time, so to speak, have stars. Both Reno in The Flamethrowers and Romy Hall (named for a star, Romy Schneider) in The Mars Room are bit parts, extras, but both are written as stars. The seem at once to be perfectly integrated into their parts and to be playing them – a sovereign shuffle. They are unknown celebrities.

I would like to be able to explain this quality by reducing ii to its devices. 

 ....

In The Man Without Qualities, an important Habsburg official, Count Leinsdorf, is shown in relation to Ulrich, the MWQ himself, and Diotima, his cousin, a socialite who is determined to be a “spiritual” force in Austria by holding a salon in which she mingled noteworthies of various types from finance, art, academia, and politics. Count Leinsdorf is the main attraction in the salon; he goes out of friendship, but, as well, because he thinks of Diotima as holding an “office”:

“Every person,” he would say, “performs an office within the state; the worker, the prince, the artisan, are all civil servants.” This was an emanation of his always and under all circumstances impartial way of thinking, ignorant of bias, and in his eyes even the ladies and gentlemen of the highest society performed a significant if not readily definable office when they chatted with learned experts on the Bogazköy inscriptions or the question of lamellibranchiate mollusks, while eyeing the wives of prominent financiers.”

The duality of the person and the office – which is extended here indefinitely – is structurally like the difference between the actor and the part in a movie, or like the “vehicle” and the gene in neo-Darwinism, or like the King in his body and the King as the body politics in early modern theory. There are enormous variations in the signifying of these dualities. For the novelist, there is always the temptation to make the character stand in for the type – to give the character, as it were, an “office within the state”. This way of reading character is mainstream among critics, I think, who suffer from an obscure embarrassment with regard to stories – it seems that the story can’t justify itself, except with children. The story has to be justified by reference to its “office” in the state – to its illustration of ethico-political principles.

There is that. And there is ordinary life, in which people do indeed take characters as role models, but mainly in terms of excitement: it is some taste of existential excitement that ordinary life craves in music, in movies, in novels, in poems.

Movies, I think, long ago became the central aesthetic object in the West due to the way that the part and the actor seem to merge and separate – the dancer could and could not be told apart from the dance, either on the screen or in “real” life, which unrolled like a movie itself, in celebrity-centered media.

The axis of the Mars Room is just this kind of duality: Romy Hall, as a stripper named “Vanessa”, attracts a mook, a fan, who becomes her stalker: Creepy Kennedy, as Hall thinks of him. How can we tell the stripper from the strip? Creepy Kennedy can’t: he can’t understand his own relationship, as stalker, to “Vanessa”.

Reno – another nickname, or star name – in The Flamethrowers takes a job at a film lab as a “China girl” – that is, she is used, filmed, in order to get the fleshtones right for films in something called a “film leader” – all artefacts of analogue film of the period. She is anonymous, her job consisting of looking as “representative” as possible – which means Caucasian and “comely”, in spite of the name of the “official function”.  

“Most people didn’t know China girls existed. The lab technicians knew. The projectionists knew. They had fovorites, faces of obsession, and evn if I liked the idea of my own fleeting by, I knew the technicians looked at the frames more closely, and I liked that, too. I was and was not posing for them. Pieces of film leader were collected and traded like baseball cards. Marvin and Eric preferred a polished look. “The problem with the girl-next-door thing”, Marvin said, “is that with recent Kodachrome its actually the girl next door. Her name is Lauren and we grew up together in Rochester.” The girls, mostly secretaries in film labs, weren’t exactly pinups, but the plainer-looking China girls were traded just as heavily. The allure was partly about speed: run through a projector they flashed by so fast they had to be instantly reconstructed in the mind. “The thing suppressed as an intrusion,” Eric said, “is almost always worth looking at.” Their ordinariness was part of their appeal: real but unreachable women who left no sense of who they were. No clue but a Kodak color bar, which was no clue at all.”

The China girl is the anti-star, the bit player par excellence; at the same time, the China girl, too, has a double existence – shares, on the most miniscule scale, the division between the actor and the part. This is the abyss – molecular, suppressed – which Kushner finds worth looking at, and elevates into a principle of character construction.

As well, into a principle of form. In the Flamethrowers, the form of the monologue – the characters are always telling stories, giving the novel a sort of “All about Eve” feel, without Eve here having any ambition at all – surrounds the substance, which is about an art scene in which film has a central role. The New York art scene of the 70s. In The Mars Room, while there are many movie references, the whole movie motif is absent. This is an underworld, a dangerous classes, novel, split up between the monologue and the quasi-indirect mode of discourse, which Pasolini hailed as an important resource of film. These characters are just the type who do not “fulfill” a state office, who flee from the office – strippers, drug dealers, chiselers, mooks, dopers, uncared for children, careless parents, growing up in the interstices of society and waiting – not to be discovered by Hollywood, but to be discovered by the Incarceration state, as they inevitably will be. 

Rachel Kushner's The Mars Room - take one

Emily Rust, in “Hitting the "Vérité Jackpot": The Ecstatic Profits of Freeze-Framed Violence” (Cinema Journal 2011) has remarked that:

“… a number of American films from the late 1960s and early 1970s conspicuously employ freeze-frames in scenes of protracted brutality. The documentary In the Year of the Pig (Emile de Antonio, 1968) as well as the fiction films Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (George Roy Hill, 1969), Joe (John G. Avildsen, 1970), and The Parallax View (Alan J. Pakula, 1974), in addition to the primary subjects of this essay - Gimme Shelter and Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero, 1968) - are but a few examples.”

Rust, shrewdly, conjoins violence at the highest levels – John F. Kennedy’s assassination as the prototype – to the popularity of this technique. The assassination films – in particular, the Zapruder tape – have been obsessively scanned and stopped, as though an explanation lurked in the absolute stillness imposed by the freeze frame. A stillness that, in good old high modernist fashion, comments on its own medium – since film is, after all, a sort of mirage, the movement being of the strip of film conveying a sense of the seamless jointing of the object. Zeno’s arrow at the boxoffice.

Rust’s makes a useful historical comparison, leaving adrift, however, the question of why violence and the freeze frame waited for the 60s:  “Like the slow motion and superimposition of experimental works of the 1920s, the early use of freeze-frames signaled the transformative power of cinematic vision, which promised to unveil alternatives to conventional perception and experience. Freeze-frames from the late 1960s and early 1970s share this revelatory spirit, but the relationship between photography and cinema that they mobilize also reflects and reaffirms the quest for authenticity that animates the period's preoccupations with ecstatic practices and violence.”

Left out of Rust’s catalogue of freeze frames in narrative film is Truffaut’s famous ending of The 400 Blows. In Truffault’s film the interest is less forensic than narrative – or, to make a distinction that is less confusing, the position of the freeze frame at the end of Truffaut’s film gives it a narrative weight that is absent from a freeze frame that allows us to gaze, say, at Kennedy’s head being blown apart. The motive force that drives the movie resolves itself here by – not resolving itself. The arrow stops, to reflect on the impossibility of its stopping.

All of this freeze frame rap has to do with something that isn’t a film: it is Rachel Kushner’s Mars Room, which I recently finished and am thinking about. As in The Flamethrowers, Kushner’s book ends with a woman going into the mountains and coming to some kind of endpoint to a theme in her life – to, in a sense, her narrative position in the story. All the references I’m making to 60s and 70s films are relevant to Kushner’s practice – her novels are startlingly cinematic, not in the sense that one feels that they are simply props for a future screenplay – which is what most action novels aspire to (I should say used to aspire to – now they aspire to being video games), but in the sense that they are thought through in a cinematic way. Just as the freeze frame in the sixties and seventies films so often meant: there’s nowhere else to go in this society – so, too, the ”freeze frame” that ends The Mars Room means: stories like these have an energy that finds no outlet – just as people like these have an energy that finds no outlet. Spinoza, somewhere, says that if a thrown stone could think, it would think, I'm doing this of my own free will. Imagine that stone having doubts. The story of Romy Hall, the main character in The Mars Room, is a correlative to the society of deaths of despair, which is the epidemic that was occurring, in the States, before our current epidemic.

I’m gonna continue this on another post.

Buddha's parable of the burning house - Brecht

This is a  good time to read Brecht. Here’s a translation of my own of Brecht’s Buddha’s parable of the burning house - Def plaguetime reading

Gotama, the Buddha, taught

the doctrine of the wheel of lust, on which we are broken

and advised the undoing of desire

and going wishless into Nothing, which he called Nirvana.

One day a pupil asked him,

What is this Nothing, Master? We all wish

To

throw off all desire, as  you advice, but tell us

If this Nothing in which we will enter

Is something like being one with all creation when one lies in water, floating, in the afternoon,

Almost without thought, at ease in the water, or like

Falling asleep, hardly knowing one has

Tossed away the blanket, quickly sinking –

Whether this nothing is joyful, a good nothing,

Or whether this nothing of yours is only simply nothing,

cold, empty and meaningless.

The Buddha was silent  for a long while then he said

There is no answer to your question.

But

towards evening when that crowd all went away

The Buddha sat under the fig tree and told the others

Who had not asked a question the following parable:

Recently, I saw a house burning. The flames licked the roof.

I saw

that there were people still inside it.  I stood at the door

And

called them, that it would be best to act quickly and get out because

There was a fire under the roof.  But the people seemed to be in no hurry.

One asked me, while the heat was already singeing his eyebrows,

What

it was like outside, for instance, was it raining or windy?

Was there some other house to go to?

Without answering, I went away.

These, I thought, have to burn before they stop asking questions.

In truth, my friends, to those whom the floor is not so hot

That they would rather exchange it for any other than remain there, to those

I have nothing to say.  

Thus spake Gotama the Buddha.

However, even we ourselves, who are

Not concerned with the art of enduring all things,

But are concerned with the art of not-enduring them

Of offering all kinds of earthly suggestions and teaching people

To

cast off human pain -we too think that

In the face of those who, seeing the bomber squads flying over the capital cities

Are still asking questions like, what do you think, and how are you conceiving this

And what will become of their savings accounts and best clothes

If everything is thrown upside down

We have nothing to say.