"Woman in a Mirror"
pp. 80-81
in The Mechanical Bride
(2002 Gingko Press edition) [orig. 1951]
This ad employs the same technique as Picasso in The Mirror. The differences, of course, are obvious enough. By setting a conventional day-self over against a tragic night-self, Picasso is able to provide a time capsule of an entire life. He reduces a full-length novel (or movie) like Madame Bovary to a single image of great intensity. By juxtaposition and contrast he is able to "say" a great deal and to provide much intelligibility for daily life. This artistic discovery for achieving rich implication by withholding the syntactical connection is stated as a principle of modern physics by A.N. Whitehead in Science and the Modern World.In being aware of the bodily experience, we must thereby be aware of aspects of the whole spatio-temporal world as mirrored within the bodily life. ...my theory involves the entire abandonment of the notion that simple location is the primary way in which things are involved in space-time.Which is to say, among other things, that there can be symbolic unity among the most diverse and externally unconnected facts and emotions.
The layout men of the present ad debased this technique by making it a vehicle for "saying" a great deal about sex, stallions, and "ritzy dames" who are provided with custom-built allure.
Debased because of all the sex? Or because the "syntactical connection" is throttled rather than teased?
Working title for my next record:
McLuhan, ibid
"Magic the Changes Mood"
pp. 85-87
In Music Ho! Constant Lambert argues that syncopation in modern music is the symbolist technique of getting cosmic coverage by omission of syntactical connections... That, of course, is the literal Greek sense of "symbol"—the putting together of two unconnected things. (85)We confess ignorance of the Lambert character and, in any case, find this totally unconvincing vis-a-vis "syncopation," which is sort of comically not at all like the Picasso ruse, not even a little bit. We really wish people would stop saying so. To get syncopation you must first have a grid, which is the epitome of "spatial location" and the antithesis of spatio-temporal relativity. Syncopation per se is pure syntax, actually. It's precisely the opposite of what these two proto-hipsters have jointly decided it is. It's more like Mondrian than Picasso. Too literal? Whatever "cosmic coverage" is, it sounds like a second-order effect. Syncopation is first-order, granular, atomic.
The passage keeps going:
The abrupt apposition of images, sounds, rhythms, facts is omnipresent in the modern poem, symphony, dance, and newspaper. Jazz, Lambert suggests, derives from Debussy via New York, rather than from Africa. True or not, it is easy to see that the basic techniques of both high and popular arts are now the same. (85-87)Adorno said something similar to the last sentence. But I wish the deriving of things didn't have to be such a black-and-white "rather than" situation. Are we really doing this again? Is it so hard to accept that more than one thing can be true? (Yes, apparently.)
1 comment:
LeRoi Jones
Blues People (1963)
""Gradually, the New York cabarets began to hear more of the real pure jazz and blues by musicians from Florida, South Caroline, Georgia, Louisiana, etc. What they played was more expressive than had been heard in New York to that time.
. . . . .
You could only hear the blues and real jazz in the gutbucket cabarets where the lower class went. The term 'gutbucket' came from the chitterlings bucket. Chitterlings are the guts of a hog and the practice used to be to take a bucket to the slaughterhouse and get a bucket of guts. Therefore, anything real low down was called gutbucket."
Again, the marvelous paradox created by ghetto reasoning and the social predicates out of which it issued. The Northern musicians who wouldn't play blues or "jass" were quite happy playing American and European popular music, including light opera—anything within the shadowy world of semiclassical music—but all was played in the raggy style of the day, which, of course, had been the result of white dilutions of Negro ragtime styles. And even though the Negro musicians who imitated "popular" ragtime styles were merely trying to reflect the dominant tastes of the day, they still managed to bring a separate cultural knowledge (maintained by the "blue" tones of the Negro church) to their "syncopated music," as it was called then.
"Northern Negro pre-jazz music was almost like the picture within a picture within a picture, and so on, on the cereal package. Ragtime was a Negro music, resulting from the Negro's appropriation of white piano techniques used in show music. Popularized ragtime, which flooded the country with songsheets in the first decade of this century, was a dilution of the Negro style. And finally, the show and "society" music the Negroes in the pre-blues North made was a kind of bouncy, essentially vapid appropriation of the popularized imitations of Negro imitations of white minstrel music, which, as I mentioned earlier, came from white parodies of Negro life and music. And then we can go back even further to the initial "steal" American Negro music is based on, that is, those initial uses Euro-American music was put to by the Afro-American. The hopelessly interwoven fabric of American life where blacks and whites pass so quickly as to become only grays!"
(pp. 110-111)
Post a Comment