Slash, of the erstwhile Guns n’ Roses (whom I listened to religiously in junior high), and whom I’ve been told is now a neighbor here in our Lower East Side complex, is coming out with an autobiography shortly, a portion of which has been published by the Guardian. Some kwality snips below:

Izzy [Stradlin, Guns N'Roses' rhythm guitarist] made a call and we went over to a friend of a friend who we’ll call ‘Bill’. We’d gotten a taste of smack again in Australia, so the craving was there by the time we got home. Besides, after two years of touring, subconsciously, we both felt that we deserved it. Anyway, Bill had a taste for drugs and always had plenty of every variety; he was also very generous. When you start to get famous at all, a few typical things start happening: in Hollywood, if you’re out at a bar, everyone wants to buy you a drink, you can get into any club; whether you like it or not, you are suddenly a figure on the nightlife circuit. When that started happening to us, there was nothing less interesting that I could have imagined doing with my time. That Hollywood scene was the same old shit, and the more recognisable I was, the less I liked it. The amount of ‘dudes’ who wanted to ‘party with me’ had quadrupled, so I became entirely insular; looking back, it makes complete sense to me that I allowed myself to slip into a seductive heroin comfort zone. I didn’t want to go to strip clubs or look for hot chicks or otherwise exercise my newly found status. All I wanted to do was hang out at Bill’s and do drugs. It turned out to be the start of a long and nightmarish obsession with heroin that lasted from 1989 through 1991….

Soon I started speedballing heavily and really enjoyed the unique brand of hallucinatory paranoia that comes with it. No one had taught me to speedball; I just thought it would be like a narcotic Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. Coke and heroin were two great tastes that I knew would go great together. The rush of the coke would send me up and then the dope would kick in and the trip would take a wonderful turn; and the two would weave in and out of each other from there on out. I’d always end up shooting all of the heroin before I’d mowed through the coke, so usually I’d get wired to the point of an impending heart attack. At the end of those nights, I was also often left with the distinct feeling that I was being watched, so I started to think that walking around my house armed to the teeth was a good idea.

There are shades of Hunter S. Thompson (R.I.P.) in Slash’s retelling, in all its maniacal, drug-fueled outrageousness. But the difference therein is that Slash is all about the matter-of-fact; so remarkable is the complete abscence of rockstar pretension. While Thompson’s prose feverishly incarnated his establishment-crashing hijinks and mind-bending freakouts, Slash’s writing is cucumber-cool; in relief against the deadpan delivery, the contours of his hallucinations (which were every bit as far-gone as the Doctor’s) are all the more exaggerated. The madness seeps off the page and contaminates your banal reality …Makes for a highly entertaining read.

A more literal (har) expression of the aforementioned text/space interrelationship …

Artist Brian Dettmer excavates vintage books and gives dimension to their interior viscera.

Posts from BoingBoing and Centripetal Notion. And links to gallery exhibitions here, here and here.

JG Ballard’s writing room

As an undergraduate architecture student, I often found a strange, ineffable kinship between architecture and english majors.

Maybe it was due to the symmetry between our pursuits of ideal worlds. Or to their difference in kind … The writers, using words, lack materiality of expression yet are equipped with an infinite malleability of meaning. Architects have ‘bricks and mortars,’ but ultimately silent form; it was up to the critics and the theorists (and sometimes, the clients) to derive – often strainingly – the semiotics of their creations. The two occupations revolve around this seemingly exclusive reciprocity, but perhaps it’s this longing, across an unseen, subterranean divide, that fuels and intensifies the mutual appreciation.

Who really knows what it is, but your belief in this mythology of the writer/architect will probably inform your fascination for, and interpretations of, the following photographs, taken of various accomplished writers’ writing spaces.

Alain de Boton

Seamus Heaney

Hanif Kureishi

Mark Haddon

[via The Guardian]

In an effort to muster up an adequate escape velocity to leave my end-of-summer doldrums behind, I have been re-reading Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. There are too many memorable snippets to excise, and anyway it’s the exuberance and vividness of the sometimes stream-of-consciousness writing rather than individual, underlineable passages that matter (Miller, like Nietzsche, refers to his writing as song. And if that is so, then Tropic of Cancer is an opera inverted; extended arias interspersed with the occasional recitative).

BTAIM, two bits that I love:

Walking along the Champs-Elysées I keep thinking of my really superb health. When I say “health” I mean optimism, to be truthful. Incurably optimistic! Still have one foot in the nineteenth century. I’m a bit retarded, like most Americans. Carl finds it disgusting, this optimism. “I have only to talk about a meal,” he say, “and you’re radiant!” It’s a fact. There mere thought of a meal—another meal—rejuvenates me. A meal! That means something to go on—a few solid hours of work, an erection possibly. I don’t deny it. I have health, good solid, animal health. The only thing that stands between me and a future is a meal, another meal.

And this:

Everything is packed into a second which is either consummated or not consummated. The earth is not an arid plateau of health and comfort, but a great sprawling female with velvet torso that swells and heaves with ocean billows; she squirms beneath a diadem of sweat and anguish. Naked and sexed she rolls among the clouds in the violet light of the stars. All of her, from her generous breasts to her gleaming thighs, blazes with furious ardor. She moves amongst the seasons and the years with a grand whoopla that seizes the torso with paroxysmal fury, that shakes the cobwebs out of the sky; she subsides on her pivotal orbits with volcanic tremors. She is like a doe at times, a doe that has fallen into a snare and lies waiting with beating heart for the cymbals to crash and the dogs to bark. Love and hate, despair, pity, rage, disgust—what are these amidst the fornications of the planets? What is war, disease, cruelty, terror, when night presents the ecstasy of myriad blazing suns? What is this chaff we chew in our sleep if it is not the remembrance of fangwhorl and star cluster.

Whatever one thinks of Henry Miller (and the courts didn’t much, as Tropic of Cancer was banned in the US for a good 30 years on grounds of obscenity), that motherfucker can sing.

The August 21 issue of the New Yorker profiles the posthumously influential Jewish-German critic Walter Benjamin. The article, called ‘The Philosopher Stoned’ and written by Adam Kirsch, is ostensibly an essay on Benjamin’s attempt — an unsuccessful one by any measure — to gain inspiration and insight through the use of hashish. The discussion of the drug’s effect on Benjamin’s life and thinking aren’t particular valuable and merely form bookends for the more interesting central substance of the article, which describe Benjamin’s move away from academic philosophy towards popular criticism (a deflection which would have a positive effect on Benjamin’s thematic and stylistic accessibility), his shallow and facile flirtations with Marxism, and the state of his thinking towards the end of his life in the early 40s, as he struggled to finish his unwieldy Arcades Project with Nazism expanding rapidly across Europe.
 

From illustrator Thomas Fuchs’ collection “GOP100 - Deconstructing Dumbo,” produced around the time the Republican Convention invaded our fair city of New York in that depressing summer of 2004.

It’s now part of a self-published book; get your copy at New York Imposter.

[via Neatorama]

A terrific article in Slate comparing Brazil and V for Vendetta, which opens today.

The writer, Matt Feeney, describes Brazil as the pinnacle of Terry Gilliam’s oeuvre, ripe with playful and baroque details, driven by a mad, romantic momentum. As Feeney says, ‘for much of the film, the atmosphere of frustration and thwarted longing is so pervasive, and so perfectly evoked, as to be almost unbearable.’ Anyone who’s seen the movie knows it to be true; Sam getting together with Jill is the white light, the true salvation. The film progresses through growing states of expectant suspension (powered by Sam’s longing for Jill, shown in trippy, Gilliam-trademarked dream sequences), until they finally get their one night together, their first and their last. Although it’s not happily ever after (their one night may even have been merely a drug-induced hallucination) it’s ok somehow — a connection has been made, there has been closure.

On the other hand, V for Vendetta, Feeney argues, is ideologically monolithic and provides no nuance, chance or accident. Its dogmatic sincerity and lack of self-consciousness sucks out all the air and reduces its characters to lifeless, expository automatons, in service of plot movements rather than their own believable motivations. Anyone who’s read an Ayn Rand novel* knows what Feeney’s talking about here. Or for that matter, seen The Matrix, the previous Wachowski Bros. joint. As characters go, Howard Roark and Morpheus are about as dimensioned and flavorful as gypsum wallboard.

I haven’t seen V, but I recently read the book (which, by the way, wasn’t nearly as good as Alan Moore’s exceptional From Hell). I remember thinking that the book was too goofy, too pop-1984, too comic booky, to work well as a film, unless it was treated by a scriptwriter with exceptional nimbleness and perhaps a sense of irony to cut through the occasional philoso-cheese. With the Wachowskis on screenplay detail, however, I can only imagine the script given shape via their worst instincts, i.e. towards Manichean conflict and pseudo-philosophical mumbo-jumbo that will somehow ‘inform’ the spectacularly stagey kung fu / knife fights and explosions — the last of which will no doubt be, at the end of the day, the most compelling feature of the film. It’s no wonder Alan Moore has disowned cinematic adaptions of his comic book work.

* Just a sidenote, speaking as an erstwhile architect: if you ever meet an architect at a social function, or saddle up to one at the bar, PLEASE DO NOT ask him/her if he/she ever read The Fountainhead, and if that goddamned book ‘inspired’ them to go into architecture. That is grounds for immediate dismissal, no matter how cute you may or may not be.

 

I became aware of George Packer’s writing during the run-up to the Iraq War. In and around 2002, the war-bent Bush Whitehouse and its cabinet/cabal of neoconservatives were pushing full throttle towards an invasion of Iraq. But behind them, mostly hidden in their wake, thousands of more reflective, liberal viewpoints were being quietly pulled along. Not all of them were, as you might expect, reflexively anti-war; they saw that there were indeed tangible and concrete benefits to ousting Saddam’s Baathist regime and opening up the possibility for a liberal democracy to take root in the center of the Middle East, without, at the same time, remaining undisturbed by and uncritical towards the potential costs and perils of an assault and occupation. Packer, a liberal reporter for The New Yorker, took the difficult, ambivalent position of being anti-war (he came of age after all in post-Vietnam America) but also too smart and sensitive (and for better or for worse, hopeful) to ignore the possibilities that a truly liberated Iraq could entail. Of all the ‘liberal hawks’ punditing around at the time (others that I remember reading included Jacob Weisberg of Slate, Thomas Friedman of The New York Times, Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek. There was also Christopher Hitchens of Slate — prior to that, Vanity Fair and The Nation –, but I found his stridency and rhetorical smugness enormously off-putting), Packer stood out for me for what I can only say was his writings’ sense of nuance. That admiration only deepened once the war had actually gotten underway, when he began writing war dispatches for the New Yorker from within Iraq itself, reporting on the occupation with a deeply intelligent and humane eye.

His book, The Assassin’s Gate: America in Iraq, which I finished last month, is in many ways his coverage of the war expanded into book form. It contains two thematic sections; the first covers the ramp up to the war, the second, the aftermath. Packer discusses at length the philosophical origins of Paul Wolfowitz’s neoconservatism (extrapolated — or corrupted – from Leo Strauss’ teachings at the University of Chicago), as well as the political jockeying of Iraqi exiles (including the thinker Kanan Makiya, and the now discredited Ahmed Chalabi) in the U.S., who for opportunistic or utopian reasons, agitated and lobbied for a military confrontation with Saddam. He also discusses the ideological lines that 9/11 and Iraq broke apart, and their reconstitution in new and uneasy patterns:

Ideas as big as [establishing a liberal democracy in Iraq] attracted strange bedfellows. The pairings both for and against grew so weirdly promiscuous that it was less useful to think in terms of left and right than of interventionists and anti-interventionists, or revolutionaries and realists. Old-fashioned realists from the Republican establishment found themselves on the same side of the debate as anti-imperialist leftists and far-right isolationists, while liberal veterans of humanitarian war became uneasy allies of administration hawks. Brent Scowcroft was tangled up with Gore Vidal and Pat Buchanan; Michael Ignatieff woke up next to Paul Wolfowitz. [The leftist intellectual Paul] Berman wondered whether he and the believers in the administration even wanted the same thing. “I’m not sure we’re speaking the same language because I don’t know how to judge the language of the neoconservatives,” he said one night in his apartment. “If the language is sincere, and there is an idealism among the neocons that echoes and reflects in some way the language of the liberal interventionalists of the nineties, well, that would be a good thing. It’s true that neoconservatism had a left-wing origin, and were it to turn out to the case — which I’m extremely skeptical about — that some of the neocons would return to their earliest intellectual roots, that would be excellent.” But if this warplane ever took off, “liberal interventionists of the nineties” would not be at the controls. So the administration’s intentions mattered greatly. “It’s extremely hard to judge what the people in the administration really do think,” Berman said. “On what points are they sincere? On what points are they hypocritical? They haven’t allowed us to be able to tell.

But after the war began, it wasn’t even anymore a question of the Bush administration’s original intentions, be they thoughtful, cynical, or insane. Moreover, Packer would argue, history’s judgment will fall on Bush’s arrogance, incuriosity, and incompetent handling of the occupation on Iraqi soil and in Iraqi hearts and minds, directly and unmediated. The second portion of the book, the remaining 350 pages, is comprised of Packer’s boots-on-the-ground reporting, the dirty, messy counterpart to the heady theorizations that conjured the war into actual being. He reports on the realities of the American boots on increasingly hostile ground, speaking to Americans and Iraqis alike (including a young State Dept administrator — a former scholar — named Drew Erdmann; a vibrant, secular young Iraqi woman named Aseel, who took to the new mandate of wearing veils unkindly; and a tough, sincere Captain named John Prior who seemed to be keeping street order through force of will along; many of these character had appeared in his New Yorker articles), and tracing many of the hardships and setbacks to policy decisions that were misinformed at best, and criminally negligent at worst. As Packer says in the book, and which he’s said since (in interviews on the Daily Show and the Colbert Report, for instance); history will judge Bush and the neocons very harshly for their fatal blunderings in Iraq.

Packer, however, doesn’t give the other side a free pass, either. And that’s because to him there are still elements of good faith alive — but slipping away — in Iraq whose human dimensions get lost underneath the bigger stories of ideological clashes and policy breakdowns.

With their eyes turned to such lofty matters [i.e. 'the war against WMDs, solving the Arab-Israeli conflict, more recently the war against terrorism and a model of democracy], few prowar ideologues allowed the bad news from Iraq to break their stride. Either they refused to credit it, blaming the media and the defeatists for hiding the truth, or they continued to take such a long view of history that a hundred Iraqis or a dozen Americans blown up in a suicide bombing hardly factored. But this was just as true on the antiwar side of the ledger. Experience taught me that the individual stories of Iraqis struggling against danger and the odds to create a better life for themselves and their country were impatiently flicked aside as soon as I tried to tell them. The retort was swift and sure: “This war is illegal, it’s immoral. Nothing good can come of a lie.” In spite of the enormous stakes and the terrible alternatives, most antiwar pundits and politicians showed no interest in success. When Iraqis risked their lives to vote, Arianna Huffington dismissed the elections as a “Kodak moment.” It was Bush’s war, and if it failed, it would be Bush’s failure.

He goes further to ask, however noble the abstract principles, if we were ever up for the work it would take to do it right — if we could walk the walk this time:

America in the early twenty-first century seemed politically too partisan, divided, and small to manage something as vast and difficult as Iraq. Condoleeza Rice and other leading officials were fond of comparing Iraq with postwar Germany. But there was a great gulf between the tremendous thought and effort of the best minds that had gone into defeating fascism and rebuilding Germany and Japan, and the peevish, self-serving attention paid to Iraq. One produced the Amery’s four-hundred-page manual on the occupation of Germany; the other produced talking points.

It’s a moving, thoughtful book, and I certainly would not be surprised if it wins the Pulitzer for non-fiction this year. It’s a terrible thought, ultimately, that the sort of insights contained in the book won’t be able to repair the extensive damage that has already been done. We will have to be satisfied with the hope that Iraq will reach some measure of political stability by the next generation (that is, if it hasn’t fallen into an intractable, decades-long sectarian civil war), and that in as yet unwritten histories that the Bush gang will take its deserving place amongst the worst administrations in American history.

Another favorite, Fareed Zakaria, wrote a review of the book for the Times.

More recently, the Sunday Times Magazine published a piece — ‘After Neoconservatism’ – by Francis Fukuyama (distilled from a larger forthcoming book called America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Newconservative Legacy).

 

I was nervous when Michel Gondry said he was pursuing a solo project — aka, sans Charles Kauffman as his screenwriter – after the symbiotic genius of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; Gondry is a certified master of visual sleight-of-hand, but could he manage to tell a coherent story without Kauffman’s narrative compass?

Apparently he’s recruited graphic novelist Daniel Clowes, of Eightball and Ghost World fame, to write a screen adaptation of the Rudy Rucker novel Master of Space and Time. So instead of Kauffman’s dense, narrative conceits, we can probably expect something a lot more linear and subdued (I am judging from having read much of Clowes’, but none of Rucker’s, work — ok, Master of Space and Time is now in my Amazon shopping cart). Suffice it to say, I am fairly tweaked about this development.

[from SuicideGirls (interview with Gondry forthcoming), via BoingBoing]

 

I picked up The Book of Probes from the always excellent Reed Space while wandering the LES a couple of weekends ago. The book could easily be one of those vaguely pretentious, eyecandy / Big Idea books that stimulates your impulse-buy nerve, and then gets put on the shelf or on the coffee table once you get home, never to be opened again. Those art books that disappointingly turn out more farty than arty … 

It’s the sad fact that the über-hotshot designer David Carson, who put together the visuals for the book, for me represents the worst of that pretentious, pseudo-artistic/literary tendency due to his work for the erstwhile late ’90s magazine Raygun (a magazine whose graphic anarchy pushed itself to the very edge of legibility). Yes, Carson’s art direction was certainly eye-popping and unprecedented (upside-down, backwards copy, articles that begin on the cover, articles written in some kind of since-clichéd ’broken typewriter’ typeface, etc), but it was in service to writing that was utterly disposable, even shoddy. Nothing transcendent came out of the relationship. Raygun was in the end all skin and no brains …

But in support of the evocative, epigrammatic writing of late Canadian media mystic Marshall McLuhan (of ‘Global Village’ and ‘the medium is the message’ fame), Carson’s aggressive design sensibility is given a second life, and the two elements on the page (MM’s words and DC’s visuals) find a clear and powerful synthesis.

Another recent impulse purchase that escaped coffee table purgatory was the fabulous book Hidden Track: How Visual Culture is Going Places, a survey book of primarily graphic artists (such as Ryan McGuiness and Pleix’s Genevieve Gauckler) who are moving their flat media into the volumetric.

From the book description:

‘From surface and into space is the overlying design trend these days. Graphic designers and urban artists are creating objects and interiors, moving into art galleries and museums worldwide. Designs, artworks and illustrations are emerging into the third-dimension increasingly featuring ornamental and sculptural objects. Hidden Track documents this movement introducing protagonists and their spaces that are taking current visual culture out of the underground to the the level of high culture.’

I became a fan of Malcolm Gladwell late in the game, in January 2004, after he wrote an extraordinary article in the New Yorker which took apart commonly-held (and thereby dangerous) perceptions about the safety of SUVs. I’ve followed his articles since, as well as read (like everybody else) The Tipping Point (although out of laziness more than anything else I have not yet read Blink), and his m.o. has since become discernible; he begins with a seemingly intuitive, common-sensical viewpoint — big, bulky cars are safer to be in; pit bulls are violent and dangerous and should be banned – and then, over the course of the article, through some alchemic, almost ineffable process, he arrives at the exact opposite conclusion. 

A deceptively neutral writing style is a big part of it. He takes a strong position in every piece he writes, but there’s no heated rhetoric, no too-clever conceits, no literary fireworks, no emotional manipulation – his arguments are issued in an orderly, logical, irresistible cascade, the language cool and precise. They move past all standard bullshit detection defenses and nestle in your mindspace until some cleverer argument or better science can come along and dislodge them, because party lines and kneejerk cynicism and angry outrage just don’t suffice as persuasive counterarguments here.  Truly, reading Gladwell is like butter …

Last week’s New Yorker contains a piece he wrote about pit bulls, and how their (unfair) persecution problematizes the practice of profiling (Gladwell is against it).

And speaking of profiles, there is one about Gladwell in the last New York Times Book Review.

 

I went to see a lovely little exhibition at the Japan Society last week which the photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto curated, called History of History.

I first came across Sugimoto’s photographs at the ICA in London almost 10 years ago. What really struck me then was his work’s conceptual elegance; for one series, Sugimoto took his camera into old school movie theater palaces and in a single, super-long exposure, photographed the entire run of a movie in one frame. The glowing screen in his shots became a palimpsest; a static distillation of a much larger span of time and vision. In another series, Sugimoto traveled to coastlines all over the world and photographed the horizon line at each one. Every image in the series is compositionally identical — the sky and the water are evenly split across the middle of each frame — but the aesthetic variation between them is unexpectedly wide. Light, humidity levels, wind conditions, temperature, sea composition affected the images, blurring the horizon line, changing the color and texture of the water, opening up a range of emotional responses in the viewer, from a foreboding to pleasant excitement to a sense of deep calm. There is some sort of inversion is taking place here, a blending of the romantic sublime with eastern minimalism. But whereas both had reductive aims — the sublime was about capturing the terrifying grandeur of nature on a canvas, and minimalism was concerned with rendering formal and material essences — Sugimoto’s sea photographs begin with a given, seemingly plain proposition — the simple meeting of the atmosphere with a large body of water — and expands on the variational infinitude of that encounter.

The exhibit only had a few of his photographs, and was comprised instead mainly of curated ‘objects’ — scrolls, textiles, masks, but also fossils and ancient tools — Sugimoto’s intention is probably intentionally slippery, but what I understood was that he juxtaposes natural and man-made (and occasionally ‘art-historical’) objects in order to illustrate parallel evolutions of matter through time. And to show how ultimately he is agnostic to the question of whether it’s the timeless or the artificial that exerts a greater influence on his work.

As a side-note, I picked up this monograph of Sugimoto’s work (which I believe the Hirshorn in D.C. printed) at the MoMA Bookstore a few months ago. It is more expensive but the quality of the reproductions is superior to that of many photography monographs which MoMA puts out, which, imho, are generally cruddy, dotty garbage.