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Category: performance

My Identity is a Sledgehammer

Published May 17, 2008 by cgerrish

My Head was a Sledgehammer by Richard Foreman

Perhaps the problem with online identity is with the word itself. The word carries a big payload, Freud might say it’s overdetermined, in the same way as a dream image. And as we chase online identity, we go charging down corridors to find a hall of mirrors.

The theater and writing of Richard Foreman forced its way into the conversation as I tried to deepen the question. Especially his play “My Head was a Sledgehammer,” and this bit of dialogue:

In  a certain play entitled “My Head Was a Sledgehammer,” a certain character falls deeply in love with his mirror image, although his mirror image doesn’t resemble him in many important ways. But is a much more beautiful image…

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is the intersection of a world filled with ambiguity and a world purged of ambiguity. Encoding identity and attempting to make all its attributes visible, discrete and parsable is a form of extreme technological optimism with a hidden set of metaphysical assumptions.

Ben Brantley, in his review of Foreman’s play says:

Ultimately, there are no concrete answers in this endlessly mutating universe. Mr. Foreman, as always, seems far more interested in journeys than in destinations, in the intransitive rather than the transitive. And if “Sledgehammer” has a moral, it seems to be that to try to reduce life to a formula is to deny its confounding multiplicity.

When we wade out from the shallow waters we promptly get out of our depth. When we think of online identity perhaps we need something simpler. I’m me, and my online identity is a sledgehammer I use for certain tasks.

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The Thinking Reed: David Sanborn on @NewsGang

Published April 26, 2008 by cgerrish

The passion of David Sanborn as a player is acknowledged even by god. In the video above, watch Clapton’s face as Sanborn goes way outside and passionate on Hendrix’s Little Wing. It’s not a question of technique, but rather something deeper that is expressed through music. Standing on the stage next to the player, or from a distance through the lens of a video, you recognize that passion when you see it.

On the April 23, 2008 edition of NewsGang, that passion surfaced again. Sanborn picked up the riff and took some long solos on the current state of the American soul. It was blues writ large. Listening to the MP3 a few days later walking the streets of downtown San Francisco, his words blended with some stanzas from Allen Ginsberg’s Howl.

and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in
the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the
suffering of America’s naked mind for love into
an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone
cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio…

  The way the Ginsberg talks about the breath line of the poem relates directly to saxophone and the music of expression:

Ideally each line of Howl is a single breath unit. My breath is long–
that’s the measure, one physical-mental inspiration of thought contained in the elastic of a breath.

The breath line poem was handed down from William Blake, through folk music, through Walt Whitman, all the way to Ginsberg and the saxophone solo. We use it to bring bodily into the world our fear of the dark potentialities of the human soul. But for Whitman and Ginsberg, America’s potential was much greater than the darkness at the edge of town. Sanborn’s solo veers into the darkness and dissonance of our possible futures, but keeps returning to the promise of the American experiment.

We live in interesting times and as Ginsberg once said, “The universe is a new flower. America will be discovered.”

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Conversations by means other than language

Published April 24, 2008 by cgerrish

There’s something so perfect about this video that I’ve returned to it several times. It’s been featured in lots of main stream media, but it’s a kind of exemplar. It’s a perfect conversation between a song written by Jonathan Coulton and a dance by an actress named Emily. I’m not sure how many times the song has been heard, but Emily’s performance has been seen more than 300,000 times. It’s a conversation between two artists on a single theme. Each performance is at a very high level, each performance brings something out of the other. When the cost of the technology falls away, it’s the art, the talent and the people that shine through.

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A Recording Organism contra The Figure Signaling Through the Flames

Published April 2, 2008 by cgerrish

Antonin Artaud

When we look to the new, the thing that really connects: it’s technology like a punch in the face, a figure signaling through the flames. It’s not the code, it’s the hunger, the blood, the bone and muscle. It’s the electricity that connects one human soul to another. And it’s the connectors that allow that surge of power to flow freely from one node to the next in the network.

Fragments from the introduction to Theater and its Double by Antonin Artaud:

“What is more important, it seems to me, is not so much to defend culture whose existence has never kept a man from going hungry, as to extract, from what is called culture, ideas whose compelling force is identical with that of hunger.”

“If confusion is the sign of the times, I see at the root of this confusion a rupture between things and words, between things and the ideas and signs that are their representation.”

“A protest against the idea of culture as distinct from life–as if there were culture on one side and life on the other, as if true culture were not a refined means of understanding and exercising life.”

“We must believe in a sense of life renewed by the theater, a sense of life in which man makes himself master of what does not yet exist, and brings it in to being. and everything that has not yet been born can still be brought to life if we are not satisfied to remain mere recording organisms.”

“Furthermore, when we speak the word life, it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know it from the surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach, and if there is one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames.”

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