Left to his own devices…

Much as Keanu and Sandra proved years ago, I demonstrate that it takes more than a camera and a bus to make art.

techical difficulties; coming soon

It’s always a good idea if you take out a camera to have some idea of what you plan to shoot. I’m not a camera guy, so I pretty much pointed the thing out the window and hoped that something interesting would emerge once I edited all the footage.

It didn’t happen.

Seriously, unless you’re really into traffic, this video has nothing for you. But if you should watch it, take comfort in the fact that you’ll need to endure this experience for less than four minutes, while I spent over four hours riding on this damn bus!

I had a year of instruction in the German language a long time ago, and it is with great humility and all honesty that I admit that despite my lack of proficiency in that language, I would have had about as easy a time comprehending Benjamin’s point in his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction if I had read it in the original German.  Instead I had the misfortune to muddle through a version of it that had been translated to English, but apparently had not been translated for idiots such as myself.

Look I admit I am a a Philistine, which is to say that the only thing I have less use for than art is artistic criticism.  As best as I can figure, Benjamin posits that the development of mechanically reproducible art forms (such as printing, photography, and film) destroyed the concept of “aura” in art.  “Aura” seems to be connected to the concept of authenticity, tradition, and “cult value”.

Going back through time, works of art had a ritual value (such as statues in a temple, or paintings in a church) and could only be appreciated in the time or physical space they existed.  Photography, film, printing, and sound recording all changed that.  No longer would one have to be in the church to hear the choir sing, one could listen to it in his home.  Nor would one need to venture to Rome and enter the Sistine Chapel to appreciate Michelangelo’s famed work on the ceiling, because photographic representations could be produced and distributed to those without the time, money, or inclination to travel to see it in person. Separated from the hajj once required to experience a work, art lost its ritual value.

The concept of authenticity of a piece also became meaningless when art forms such as photography and film came into being in which multiple copies could be produced from a photographic or film negative, none of which would have any more claim to being the “true” representation of the work than any of the others.   There was a democratizing element to this process, in that the these forms allowed for “simultaneous collective experience” for the masses gathered in theater audiences.

As far as I understand the concept of “aura”, I don’t know if I buy completely the notion that mechanical reproduction of art changed it absolutely.  Even though we can now watch a film over and over and over again, there is still something special about the first time one views it (or the first time one sees a photograph or hears a song) that affects one in a way that future viewings may not.   I saw Jaws in a theater with friends when I was very young, and we all chose to sit in the front row.  Each time the shark attacked, we instinctively hopped up on our seats, trying to put distance between ourselves and the carnage on the screen.  The terror and excitement I felt upon that initial viewing I’ve only felt the hollowest echoes in the countless other times I’ve seen that movie.  That experience is tied to a time and place no less than any live performance given before the advent of recording technology.

One of the happiest days in the year for those of us who belong to Red Sox Nation is Yankee Elimination Day, which SoSHers such as myself celebrate in haiku:

Yankees’ sad lament:
Elimination Day comes
earlier each year.

A great job by the Red Sox overcoming all the injuries they suffered this season and the distraction of the whole Manny mess (I still miss him) to clinch a spot in the playoffs and ensure themselves the opportunity to defend their title.

Here’s the video DinoJam? Michael, Young Taek, and I made in yesterday’s Comm Lab:

Click To Play

From my performance, you can see that you don’t have to eat ham to be one.

In his book Orality and Literacy, Walter J. Ong spends the first three chapters defining and discussing oral culture before dedicating the fourth chapter to its usurper, literate culture.

Oral cultures, which Ong defines as cultures which have no knowledge of writing at all, are more numerous, both currently (of the 3000 languages currently spoken, Ong acknowledges that only 78 have developed a literature), and throughout human history (where the numbers climb to tens of thousand languages spoken, maybe 106 of which have developed a literature).  Thought and expression in such cultures, Ong asserts, tend to exhibit the following nine characteristics: additive rather than subordinative, aggregate rather than analytic, redundant, traditionalist, close to the human lifeworld, agonistically toned, empathetic rather than objective, homeostatic, and situational rather than abstract.  These characteristics can be thought of as arising from the constraints of a culture in which the only “recording device” available is human memory, and the main transmission device is public speaking.

In Chapter 4, Ong describes how literate culture, born of oral culture, fulfilled its oedipal destiny of killing its parent.  Ong asks us to consider writing as a technology, one which eventually became so pervasive to those who adopted it that it made it impossible for them to conceive of their purely oral predecessors without reference to some construct of literate culture.

But the trade-off was more than worth it, because writing freed people from the constraints of oral culture, allowing for abstract thought, science, time, precision, and study.

Yet Ong manages the neat trick of making his reader appreciate writing as the greatest technological innovation in human history, while simultaneously making him wish it have never been invented. I found the experience of reading the first four chapters of Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy ponderous in every sense of the word. My main problem with getting into the text was the author’s habit of citing his references parenthetically (see pretty much any page of the book).

At first I thought maybe this was his way of cleverly allowing the reader to escape the bounds of his chirographic culture by imagining Ong as an ancient orator delivering his treatise in a clearing, his parenthetical references whispered asides to his audience crediting the sources of his accumulated wisdom. But then I realized that of course that couldn’t be the case, because that sort of attribution is characteristic of a literal culture, and would undermine his theory. Still, the idea of him standing in front of me, spewing his discourse within a stone’s throw, and trust me, there would have been stones thrown, was the only pleasure I took in reading this book.

(It didn’t surprise me to discover that the man was a Jesuit. As a graduate of a Catholic high school, I can honestly state that his kind have a history of bedeviling me.)

At least when this priest tortured you, he threw in a dance number

While he’s now with his Lord, were Ong alive, I would point him here for a review on the use of footnotes and endnotes, the employment of which would have alleviated the irritation I experienced every time I came across his method of sourcing his work, and told him, “Let your prose flow, padre.”

(There were moments when reading this work when I thought this assignment was actually a secret ad campaign for the new Coen brothers movie Burn After Reading since that what I felt like doing to the book once I finished the reading assignment.)

But I did think about how ingrained chirographic thinking is in our modern society: so much so that even our devices originally developed for oral communications–cellphones–now have the capacity for communicating through text, which is increasingly the mode in which they are used to connect people with one another. The iconic image from my youth of a teenager communicating with her peers would be that of Marcia Brady laying on her bed chatting with one of her friends on her princess phone. For someone of the current generation, it would probably be one of a teenager with her thumbs tapping out a mini-symphony on a tiny keypad to text message her “BFF”.

Even people from my relatively older generation are in on the act. While I am still resistant to text messaging (I never do it, because I am literally all thumbs), I have noticed that the multiple weekly phone calls I used to share with my closest friends as recently as ten years ago have been replaced by a steady stream of daily e-mails.

Now some of that change is obviously due to the convenience–we don’t have to make the time for an e-mail the way we would a phone call which would command our attention at the moment. But e-mail also offers the advantage of allowing each of us to organize our thoughts and edit our responses to one another in ways not afforded by verbal communication. (Aspects of the “distance” afforded by writing.) It allows us to send information (sports stats, links to videos, and political articles) more efficiently than we could by talking with one another. (Sending a link as opposed to suggesting that one google “Obama ad on McCain’s dishonorable campaign.”)

Even in the era of YouTube and streaming video, we still use this relatively new tool, the internet, primarily to retrieve sources of text. It’s just how we’re wired.

So I was not all that pleased with this assignment about going to see The Waterfalls, mostly because I could not shake the words of my late one-time fiancee Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, who once told me, by the roar of the fire of my house she had set ablaze, “Gordie, don’t go chasing waterfalls, stick to the rivers and the lakes that you’re used to.”

I still miss you, Boo.

But Marianne being heartless, I made my way to the Brooklyn Bridge to see if I could see what these “Waterfalls” were all about.

I’m a walker; I really like to walk, so rather than take the rat-tunnel train to Brooklyn and approach the bridge from the B-side, I walked downtown and walked over the bridge.

Walking across the bridge affords one a great view of the city, and over the course of the trip, great views of three of the “waterfalls”, but it always a little weird doing so because it’s usually a little crowded on the crossing, and the experience evokes a scene from a disaster movie. You know, those movies in which some disaster has befallen the city, and refugees go streaming out of Manhattan to try to escape whatever is threatening the city.

This feeling always gives me the urge to start running while pointing frantically over my shoulder and screaming,
“GODZIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIILLAAAAAAAAAAAA!”
Where exactly are these waterfalls I keep hearing about?

Fortunately, before I started screaming and instigating a panic, I wheeled around and my eye caught the twin lights of the WTC tribute, and realizing that it was the evening of September 10, the night before a day New Yorkers tend to be a little sensitive about, I restrained myself.

I made it across the bridge without incident, and made my way around to Pier 1, which offered an excellent view of the waterfall under the Brooklyn Bridge, and decent views of the other three. The structure of the one under the bridge was impressive, so I guess the artist deserves some credit for the accomplishment, but I wasn’t overawed by the experience. But it did make me think of the worst scene in one of my favorite movies, Michael Mann’s 1992 version of The Last of the Mohicans, which stars the greatest actor alive today, Daniel Day Lewis.

In the scene, which is supposed to be very romantic but I have a hard time finding it so, Hawkeye (DDL) and his love Cora Munro (played by the lovely Madeline Stowe) are huddled with their company in a cave under a waterfall trying to hide from a Huron war party led by the villainous Magua, who has sworn to “put the children of Grey Hair (Cora’s father, Colonel Munro) under my knife.” As Magua and his murderous fellows are approaching their hiding spot, Hawkeye tells Cora, in effect, “here’s my plan, I’m taking off with my dad and my brother, and we’re going to leave you in the path of this dude who’s sworn to kill you and your sister. If he doesn’t kill you right off, do whatever he says….and I mean whatever he says…and I WILL FIND YOU!”
(Shockingly, this works, but then again, he’s Daniel Day Lewis, dammit!)

Only the great DDL could get away
with running out on his lady when things get tight.

This leads to the best scene in the movie, because Magua in fact does not kill Cora right off, but rather takes her to the chief of the Hurons, the great Sachem, and announces his plan to burn the Munro women (both Cora and her sister Alice) in the tribe’s ceremonial fires, and then lead the Huron tribe on a capitalist-imperialistic path that will make them “as strong as the whites, no less than the whites.”

At this point, Daniel Day Lewis shows up, and morphing into a combination of Bono and Karl Marx, invents socialism on the spot by castigating Magua with the words:

Would the Huron have need for more land than a man can use?

Would the Huron make his Algonquin brothers foolish with whiskey and convince them to trap all the animals in the forest and trade their furs for beads and strong whiskey?

These are not the ways of the Huron. These are the ways of the Yengeese and La Francois and their European masters infected with the sickness of greed!

Magua’s heart is twisted…and in his anger, he would make himself into that which twisted him.

I am Nathaniel of the Yengeese; Hawkeye, adopted son of Chingachgook, of the Mohican

people …This belt, which is a record of my father’s people’s time, speaks for my truth.

Sadly for the Huron, Sachem heeds Hawkeye’s advice, thus dooming his people to two centuries of oppression by capitalist-imperialistic white men, which only ends when the Huron build casinos and rob the white man of his money, thus in effect, finally adopting the path Magua laid out for his people long ago.

While I was pondering all of this, darkness descended on the city, which presented the Waterfalls in their best light. All lit up in the darkness, the structures of the ones in the distance rendered invisible, each waterfall seemed like a torrent of light cascading out of a slit torn open in the low-hanging sky by some deity.

And I thought to myself, the only way these waterfalls could be more beautiful would be if the artist chose to project a series of images on these curtains of water…perhaps a film…maybe even a great film like…
The Last of the Mohicans.