"Amidst the soft, productive chatter of clicks and keystrokes,
he makes near-imperceptible tweaks to ODB's face. “It’s a constant
process of getting the skin texture right, the pores, the lips. It’s
something you can keep working on forever,” he tells me with an
exasperated laugh. “How close can you get to what God was trying to do?”....
creepier-
"A Swedish designer is developing a product called Global Chef, which would let companionless peopleprepare and eat meals with (yes, I swear) hologram projections of their loved ones"
except it's not really sampling the dead or digital reanimation but a complicated fakesimile...
".... While the projection’s digital assets are informed
by photos and videos of the deceased artists, they are not, as some
people think, archived footage of the performers, but instead original
composites generated from motion-capture shoots. Eazy-E's shoot was
overseen by his widow Tomica Wright, and his “hologram” is actually a
composite of his three children (all of whom are rappers themselves):
Eric Jr. (Lil Eazy-E) acted as the body double, Derrick (E3) provided
the voice, and Erin—who bears a particularlystriking resemblance
to her father—lip synced Eazy’s lines to provide the facial capture.
The audio and motion capture for ODB’s asset, on the other hand, was
solely provided by his son Young Dirty Bastard—his dad’s spitting image
in name and attitude.
All of which means that these particular holograms were not so much the
work of sorcery or Frankenstein-ian corpse reanimation (“To create a
completely synthetic human being is the most complicated thing that can
be done” is something a person actually had to clarify to the Wall Street Journal immediately
after 2Pac’s performance) but more like the 21st-century version of
Lisa Marie playing tribute to her dad by dressing up like an Elvis
impersonator."
a fakesimile that isn't even playing that well with the punters....
#1 was this post on Anthony Burgess's 1985, a clumsy satire of a trade union dominated Britain of the near future
in similar vein, the 1977 series 1990, set in a bureaucratic dystopia (creator Wilfred Greatorex called it "Nineteen Eighty-Four plus six")
The blurb at YouTube: A nightmare vision of the (then) future UK set in 1990. The permanent
civil service in Britain has taken political control and the population
finds itself living under a totalitarian regime. The Public Control
Department (PCD) of the Home Office monitors all activity, and
ruthlessly suppresses any act of opposition. The story focuses on two
key players -- the supercilious Permanent Secretary at the PCD, Herbert
Skardon (Robert Lang) and a journalist on Britain's last independent
newspaper, Jim Kyle (Edward Woodward).
retro-quotes: a series of germane remarks, by others, plucked from all over the place, and from all over the time -#51
"The
problem is no longer getting people to express themselves, but providing little
gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to
say. Repressive forces don’t stop people from expressing themselves, but
rather, force them to express themselves. What a relief to have nothing to say,
the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the
rare, or ever rarer, the thing that might be worth saying"—Gilles Deleuze, “Mediators”
The Saturday 14th December event is Vault: Music for Silent Gothic Treasures, with eldtrichtronic musicians performing new scores for 110-year-old Gothic films. It's at the BFI Southbank at 8.45 pm.
From the press release:
The
ensemble was put together by Sarah Angliss, a composer, automatist and theremin
player, whose singularly unsettling music was recently heard at the National
Theatre as a tense underscore to Lucy Prebble’s The Effect. Angliss’
music for Gothic film will be performed by her band: recent Ghost Box
collaborators Spacedog. They’ll be joined by Exotic Pylon’s Time Attendant
(Paul Snowdon) who will be supplying a new work on simmering, tabletop
electronics. There will also be some extemporisations from Bela Emerson, a
soloist who works with cello and electronics. Fellow Ghost Box associate Jon
Brooks, composer of the haunting Music for Thomas Carnacki (2011), will
also be creating a studio piece for the event.
Sourced
by Bryony Dixon, the BFI’s curator of silent film, many of the short films
inspiring these musicians were made in the opening years of the twentieth century.
The Legende du fantôme (1908) and early split screen experiment Skulls
Take Over (1901) are on the bill, along with the silent cubist masterpiece The
Fall of the House of Usher (US version, 1928) and more.
“There
is undoubtedly something uncanny about the earliest of these films”, said
Angliss. “Many are stencil-coloured in vibrant hues, adding to that sense of
the familiar taking on a strange cast. They seem to demand music that suggests
rather than points up the horror, a motif that discomforts as it soothes, or a
sweet sound that is somehow sickly, as though heard in a fever. As with vision,
sound for horror can use the art of the almost, inviting the audience to make
unnerving connections of their own.”
Jon
Brooks said “the visuals suggest aural textures reminiscent of painted glass,
to strange derivatives of stringed instruments. Hopefully I've conjured some
playfulness amongst the macabre too."
Adding
to the strangeness are Angliss’ automata, who will also be performing live.
These include a polyphonic, robotic carillon (bell playing machine) and Hugo,
the roboticised head of a ventriloquist’s dummy who is of the same vintage as
some of the films. The event will be directed by Emma Kilbey. After the BFI
Southbank performance there are plans to tour Vault around Gothic revivalist
buildings around the UK.
The musicians
Sarah
Angliss
- composer; multi-instrumentalist (including theremin, modular synth and other
live electronics); automatist.
Another example: this group Public Service Broadcasting, and their cackhanded attempt to mainstream Ghost Box et l. A blurb: "Through their uniquely spell-binding live AV Transmissions audiences
will witness the band weave samples from old public information films,
archive footage and propaganda material around live drums, guitar, banjo
and electronics as they teach the lessons of the past through the music
of the future - beaming our past back at us through vintage TV sets and
state of the art modern video projection devices."
The sound though is closer to Propellerheads with a proggy live-played whiff of I dunno, Levitation thrown in, and even - quel horreur - a tinge of Mumford on certain songs.
On their 2013 album Inform- Educate - Entertain
the reference points in terms of paternalist-pedagogic-Britain-of-yore are not the usual Ghost Box/Mordant etc 60s/70s ones (Penguins, Open University, spooky kids TV, Radiophonics etc) but the 1940s: rationing, the Blitz, Stafford Cripps, the Beveridge Report....
One really hopes the "keep calm and carry on" / "pull together" vibes are not meant to align with Cameron and the New Austerity.
Just to show their hauntological allegiance they have a tune called "Roygbiv" but I'm damned if I can hear the Boards of Canada original in there.
PSB reminded me a bit of this spoof of Forties nostalgia in Rock Follies, when the Little Ladies's svengali Stavros decides that with the UK economy in crisis circa 1975, ‘Austerity Rock’ will
be the next big thing.The Little Ladies
are remodeled as 1940s nostalgia act The Victory Girls, singing songs like ‘Where’s My Gasmask,’ ‘I’ll Be a War Bride’
and ‘Glenn Miller is Missing.’ Stavros also builds Blitz Club, which is styled as a
London tube station turned bomb shelter, with deliberately grotty grub
purchased using a ration card, and a simulated air raid.
Also reminded me of this: Roxy's "The Bob Medley" - BOB. standing for Battle of Britain -
Are books and literature in a state of crisis these
days?....
"I certainly hope they’re in a state of crisis. The moment they’re
not, they’ll probably cease to matter much. Maintaining a state of
crisis around matters that many people might considered settled – What
is it to be a person? What is it to tell a story? – is the first job of
literary art. Nothing keeps the novel livelier and more relevant than
those ceaseless “Is the novel dead?” essays, for example. The markets
live by the competition of fear and greed, they say, and literature
lives by the struggle between hope and despair over certain fundamental
concerns such as whether life can be fruitfully represented at all.
Crisis and criticism go hand in hand…"
Not totally convinced by this (sometimes proclamations of moribundness point to actual states of incontrovertible and irreversible decline) . But certainly the idea of a relationship between criticism and crisis fits my own bi-polar relationship with pop history and pop temporality -- rush followed by crash, speed giving way to slowdown, phases of unilinear surge alternating with phases of directionless stagnation.
Reversing the logical sequence: first, the critique / rebuttal / counterblast.... Sam Sacks in the New Yorker , starts with a swipe against the tradition of "death of the novel" essays ("the vocabulary of literary ennui is
now so familiar that it produces its own kind of boredom"), then moves to take issue with a post by novelist/critic Tim Parks at New York Review of Books blog, titled "Trapped Inside the Novel", which Sacks calls "an honest, provocative, and maddeningly wrongheaded meditation about his
unhappiness with what he calls “traditional novels.”:
"He feels “trapped” within the
expected forms of fiction writing, especially those of realistic fiction. These
books’ basic traits, he thinks—“the dilemma, the dramatic crisis, the pathos,
the wise sadness, and more in general a suffering made bearable, or even noble
through aesthetic form”—have become mannered and artificial to the point of
irrelevance...Parks isn’t talking only about
mediocre novels when he invokes the tyranny of tradition. By his way of
thinking, anyone who uses elements of conventional forms has done so out of
either unthinking habit or unwilling necessity"
Sacks counter this with the "fresh content in familiar forms" argument: "for many, if not
most, writers, things like plot, character development, and catharsis are not
narrative fallbacks but dynamic tools that give shape to the stories they’re
passionate to tell or develop ideas that are uppermost on their minds.... It is a flighty kind of world view that
automatically equates oldness with staleness. Missing from Parks’s essay is the
recognition that talent transmutes tradition. Gifted writers can make
accustomed methods feel as new and vital as a work explicitly devoted to
structural innovation"
Sacks also does the "actually, the problem is you" move, a tactic rather familiar to me having been on its receiving end more times than I can count in the last three years!
"If Parks’s essay were strictly part
of a memoir, there would be no cause to object. But he is also a critic, and,
to a dangerous extent, he is putting forth his disillusion as a judgment on the
state of literature. This tendency to project one’s own cynicism onto the books
that failed to magically prevent it has become a little too frequent these
days, and it needs challenging."
There is also the "if you expect too much, you set yourself up for disappointment" argument:
"... Implicit in Parks’s essay is
a discontented yearning for something quite different from ingenuity—the
groundbreaking, paradigm-shifting “way forward” that he desires sounds oddly
salvational, a newly discovered way of seeing that will break him out of his
present funk like a religious epiphany. Yet to imbue something as abstract as
narrative form with talismanic, revelatory properties is to insure the very
disillusionment that he is desperate to dispel."
Now, the original Parks post and its subsequent elaboration in a follow-up titled "Literature Without Style". Starts with his own dissatisfaction with the phenomelogical gap between long-form narrative and the fragmented, connected digireality we inhabit, while acknowledging that such fiction is still hugely popular, precisely because "its very distance, in most cases, from the texture of modern
life, the impression it can give of shape, continuity, and hence
meaning, may be its most reassuring and attractive aspect."
Then reiterates his own dissatisfaction:
"My problem with the grand traditional novel—or rather traditional
narrative in general, short stories included—is the vision of character,
the constant reinforcement of a fictional selfhood that accumulates
meaning through suffering and the overcoming of suffering. At once a
palace built of words and a trajectory propelled by syntax, the self
connects effortlessly with the past and launches bravely into the
future. Challenged, perhaps thwarted by circumstance, it nevertheless
survives, with its harvest of bittersweet consolation, and newly
acquired knowledge.... the tendency to reinforce in the reader the habit of projecting his or
her life as a meaningful story, a narrative that will very likely become
a trap, leading to inevitable disappointment followed by the
much-prized (and I suspect overrated) wisdom of maturity, is nigh on
universal. Likewise, and intrinsic to this approach, is the invitation
to shift our attention away from the moment, away from any real savoring
of present experience, toward the past that brought us to this point
and the future that will likely result. The present is allowed to have
significance only in so far as it constitutes a position in a story
line. Intellect, analysis, and calculation are privileged over sense and
immediate perception; the whole mind is pushed toward the unceasing
construction of meaning, of narrative intelligibility, of underlying
structure, without which life is assumed to be unimaginable or
unbearable."
Contrasts the modernist strategies of language and style (Beckett et al) with surfeit of "passable imitations of our much-celebrated nineteenth-century
novels" and argues that "the problem lies exactly in feeling that one’s skills are only suitable
for a project that no longer makes sense... [These narratives]'s very facility becomes an obstacle to exploring some more satisfactory form."
In the "Literature Without Style" follow-up, Parks explores the stylistic innovations of Henry Green and F. Scott Fitzgerald and argues that these elements are almost impossible to translate into foreign languages. Then he circles around to more swipes against retro-fiction, specifically Booker prize winning The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton, an "eight-hundred-page mystery story set
in 1860s New Zealand":
"Removing us from the present, pastiching what the modern ear assumes the
eloquence of the past to have been, the writer can appear “stylish” without
appealing to anything in his readership’s immediate experience. Catton’s prose
has been likened to that of Dickens in The Pickwick Papers. But for
readers who followed Pickwick in the 1830s, the book was drenched in
references to the world they shared and the language itself was not so far away
from what could be heard and read every day.. If one translates Dickens into another language, an enormous amount is
lost; even for the Londoner reading him today, half the references mean
nothing. But Neuman’s and Catton’s novels have dispensed in advance with
this intense engagement with a local or national readership and seem
set to lose very little as they move around the world in different
languages..."
His melancholy conclusion:
"Such is the future of literature and literary style in a global age:
historical novels, fantasy, vast international conspiracies, works that visit
and revisit the places a world culture has made us all familiar with; in short
an idea of literature that may give pleasure but rarely excites at the
linguistic level, rarely threatens, electrifies, reminds us of, and
simultaneously undermines the way we make up the world in our own language.
Perhaps it is this development that has made me weary with so much contemporary
fiction."
Reminded me of a thought, which may or not be true, but seemed potentially true:
Things that we think of as "classic" today almost always were innovative in their own time (Dickens being a good example).
To reproduce or imitate or model oneself on the classic is necessarily to forego for oneself the very quality of newness that led to the object of admiration/emulation ever having acquired the status of classic.
Being "classic" in the present requires having once been insistently not-classic... perhaps even opposed to the classic.
