John Cage in 1989.

In January, 1960 the top rated CBS television game show I’ve Got a Secret featured one of its most unusual celebrity guests. Crew cut, bow-tied, genial host Garry Moore introduced a lanky, tall man in a dark suit. His name was John Cage and Moore called him, “probably one of the most controversial figures in the musical world today.” Normally, the show’s guest whispers a secret to the host as a scroll reveals it to the at home audience. The panel then proceeds to question the guest, in order to guess his secret.

Cage whispers to Moore that he is going to perform one of his compositions called “Water Walk,” so titled because he employs a pitcher of water, and he walks around the “instruments.” The instruments include traditional ones such as a grand piano, 2 cymbals, and a few small pitch pipes. But the audience begins to laugh as the scroll continues: a rubber duck, an electric mixer, ice cubes, a seltzer siphon, a steam pressure cooker, an iron pipe, a bath tub, and five radios, the laughter increasing as each instrument is listed. Moore consults with his producer and decides to eliminate the Q and A part of the segment, the game itself, and tells the panel what Cage is going to do. A curtain parts revealing what appears to be the stored contents of someone’s garage. A certain ad hoc element is added to the performance “score” when Moore explains a jurisdictional labor union dispute, unresolved at show time, about the five radios, a fight over which local has the right to plug in the radios. Cage offers a solution that is in keeping with what promises to be a Dadaesque event, a kind of acoustic parallel to Jean Tinguely’s Homage to New York, the subject of my last blog essay. The difference here is that Tinguely’s performance was for a few hundred upscale MoMA guests. Cage’s music is going to be seen and heard by a TV masscult audience of millions, most of whom have no idea he is America’s leading avant-garde composer, but who think he’s some eccentric crank from Stony Point, New York. Continue reading ‘John Cage: A Juilliard Centennial’

Flannery O'Connor's First Communion, age 7.

“Lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy.” This may have been Flannery O’ Connor’s terse judgment on the constricted confines of her family home, Andalusia, a few miles north of the Georgia town of Milledgeville. But in a small bedroom of that house, at first on a battered typewriter and late in life on a new electric, the writer created a world of the hardest edged and most memorable characters in all of American fiction.

O'Connor's first floor study and bedroom, her crutches in fg.

Born in Savannah, most of her teen years were lived on Greene Street in Milledgeville. It was only a few blocks to her college, Georgia State College for Women, but it was a distance that less than a decade later she would find intolerably painful to walk. After college, O’Connor studied writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and was resident at the artists’ colony Yaddo in upstate New York. The New York intellectual community, including Robert and Sally Fitzgerald with whom she briefly lived in their Connecticut garage apartment, quickly embraced her for her distinctive literary voice. He was a poet and brilliant translator of Greek and Latin classics; O’Connor was writing her first novel Wise Blood. She reworked its storyline to incorporate the guilt-ridden character Hazel Motes’ self-inflicted blinding with lime as a parallel to the Oedipus Rex translation that occupied Fitzgerald. Continue reading ‘Flannery O’Connor: Andalusia in Milledgeville’

They glide over the smooth, damp sands at the tide line like endoskeletons of some Jurassic raptor. Their creator, an obsessive yet whimsical Dutchman named Theo Jansen hovers over them like a cautious parent at his child’s first bicycle ride. And dogging Jansen’s own heels is his omnipresent Coton de Tulear pooch, Murphy. If Murphy were a sheepdog, you can bet he’d be herding the fragile “sand beasts” between the breaking surf and the low dunes that lay a football field length up the slightly sloping strand. The beach here at Scheveningen, Holland, with its tight, fine texture is an ideal parade ground for the army of “kinetic sculptures” that have occupied Jansen’s mind for over two decades.

And for the past ten years German film documentarian Alexander Schlichter has been tracking the progress of Jansen’s beasts as they have evolved, generation to generation, like some Darwinian rare species. One of the most beautiful and complex of his kinetic sculptures is the “Animaris Umeris,” a delicate but imposing piece that moves like a cavalry troop in formation, its guidons waving in the onshore breezes. Continue reading ‘The Strandbeests of Theo Jansen’

WWI battlefield scene from the 1927 motion picture “Wings.”

ONE

On January 18, 2012, the silent film Wings, directed by William Wellman, was screened in the Academy’s Goldwyn Theater in a new restoration, with color tinting duplicating the original Handschiegl process, and featuring live organ accompaniment by Clark Wilson. But this was in no way a recreation of the original release. In 1927, Wings was heralded for its lustrous 35mm. imagery and for thrilling aerial stunts done in a pre-rear screen era, every frame captured as real events on nitrate negative film. This Academy screening, however, was made from a DCP, a digital file, and shown on the Academy’s 2 K Barco digital projector. Like many of the treasures of the silent and early sound eras, the original negative is long lost; the restoration was made from the Cinemateque Française fifth generation print using state of the art digital technology to restore (as far as possible) the shimmering glow of the black and white nitrate film original.

Several weeks after this screening, the Sci-Tech Council of the Academy released The Digital Dilemma 2 report, the long awaited follow-up to its 2007 paper that discusses preservation and archiving in the digital age. That original paper explained challenges confronting the major studios; the TDD 2 paper focuses more narrowly on indie and independent movies as well as on audiovisual archives. Continue reading ‘THE DIGITAL DILEMMA 2′

Are we living in a golden age of photojournalism? Has the artful sophistication of today’s image makers so unbalanced the hoary “picture/ thousand word” equation that some of the news we read is the photo caption?

Multiple broadcasts, print and Internet platforms swamp us with a daily, even hourly, flood of ongoing and one-off news events from every corner of the earth. We are drowning in images: from the most august, traditional sources made by those dedicated and gifted photographers who are keenly aware of every nuance inside the frame, to ragged grab shots caught on the fly by a bystander’s iPhone, and more and more, those of social or political activists caught in the fray of an unfolding crisis. Where, in such a democratic cacophony of images, do we find some hierarchy of trust, truth and (god forbid) artistic insight? Is it even possible to do, or if so, how? In a world of seeming infinite visual mashups is the concept of photojournalism itself as obsolete as last year’s digital photo printer?

An examination of the thirteen pages of The New York Times “Sunday Review” section of December 25 offers dramatic color images of 2011 from the pages of the Times under the headings “Natural Disaster,” “Occupy Wall Street,” “Arab Spring,” “The World,” and “The Nation.” A double page centerfold is Tyler Hicks’ intense portrait of Libyan rebel fighters near Ras Lanuf reacting after a NATO airstrike against Qaddafi forces in March. It evokes the immersive immediacy of a “You Are There” French heroic salon painting of the 19th century. Delacroix and Gericault seem to loom just beyond the borders of the frame. Hicks’ chiaroscuro photo represents the highest level of an artist engaging the viewer with the drama of a singular moment frozen in the undifferentiated flux of time.

Libyan rebel fighters near Ras lanuf. Photo by Tyler Hicks.

Continue reading ‘The New York Times: “The Year in Pictures”’