Tempus Non Fugit

Glenn O’Brien and Fabien Baron have become the editorial directors of Interview Magazine and Art in America and Antiques. Twenty years ago they had a dress-rehearsal, Fabien Baron designing and Glenn co-editing (with Ingrid Sischy) about a year’s worth of issues of Interview that were the most effervescent things I’d ever seen on a newsstand. The editorial perspective was dazzling and sly, with a hip sense of sharp wordplay. There was something heart-warming about Fabien Baron’s design; the photos and typographical assemblages were silent sight-gags running along beside the conversations that were audacious, but sweet, in the way that Harpo Marx had been. Then it was all over, for complex managerial reasons. Their first new issue of Interview is on the newsstands and online at the moment, but that’s just the beginning and I’m hugely optimistic about the life they’ll breathe back into the magazine world.

Online media is becoming technically and philosophically refined: the self-publishing platform and toolkit being invented and constantly finessed by WordPress, the aggregation of city desks everywhere being pinned to dynamic maps on Outside.in, the thoughtful examination of the impact and quality of the media messages by Ken Goldberg (now director of the Berkeley Center for New Media), Peter Lunenfeld and Outside.in co-founder Steven Johnson, and the dreaming-out-loud being done by Venture Capitalist Fred Wilson (and his company Union Square Ventures) which have helped incubate the bookmarking system de.licio.us and the comments organising platform Disqus, as well as Outside.in. But the link to the old world, the traditions and innovations of the print world was missing. And now it’s arrived. In a conversational age there’s a lot of blather: ranting on blogs, awkward writing from amateurs and the declining standards in the large media organisations who keep firing editors and subs. Glenn has a grasp of the big picture, a wild, and deep ability to juxtapose, link and pare-down ideas to their essence, and a great sense of humour. I think his manner and style will bring order to the conversations without destroying spontenaiety and naturalness of expression.

In the editor’s letter in the magazine and under the ‘about’ tab on the website Glenn writes about Andy Warhol’s artistic vision of business as art, and building the magazine around transcripts of conversations at a time when tape recorders were beginning to shrink in size and become truly portable. Blogs and their comments are based on a conversational model, but it isn’t always, or often, or maybe even ever, art. The templates that are offered with blogging platforms may be good design, but they aren’t profound. I’ll bet that Glenn and Fabien Baron will be able to make art out of Interview’s history and the opportunities the internet offers for wide-ranging conversation. Keep reading →

^{When Sonny Rollins puts down his saxophone and stops playing, for me, a large measure of what makes music great will disappear. That will be a terrible, terrible moment — a moment I don’t care to even think about.}

^{Gary Giddins. 2002}

^{Sonny Rollins is playing in Sydney for the first time ever in about a month. Ornette Coleman played here for the first time a month ago, and Dave Holland made his first Australian appearance last year. I’d been continually listening to Herbie Hancock’s River: The Joni Letters (a setting of songs by Joni Mitchell, which Dave Holland plays bass on) and the Grinderman album at that time and I was sorry to have missed Dave Holland’s concert but I’m sure he’ll be back, or I can see him play somewhere else in the world sometime. But Ornette Coleman? That might be another matter. It’s a delicate issue with the elderly jazz guys. The advertising doesn’t come right out and say it but there’s the inference that God’s the promoter on these tours, letting these guys have the chance to perform places they’ve never been before whisking them off to the great Birdland in the sky. But a Sonny Rollins or Ornette Coleman performance isn’t something dutiful, to check off a list of 1,000 musicians to see before they die. You have to see them because there’s hardly anybody as alive as them!}

^{In 2000 Gary Giddins wrote: We are witnessing something new in jazz: the triumph of the AARP (American Association of Retired People) musician. Through most of jazz history, elder statesmen were valued for continuing to play well, while the main focus was on younger players whose energy opened new channels. But who today plays with more energy, originality, and purpose than Cecil Taylor, Max Roach, Ornette Coleman, John Lewis, Roy Haynes, Lee Konitz, Sam Rivers, and Sonny Rollins? And which young tenor terror will make an album as strong as This Is What I Do [ by Sonny Rollins, released in 2000].}

^{Village Voice. 21 November 2000.}

^{The same is true for rock and roll. While short-sighted mainstream critics are agog and marvel that musicians they consider Methuselah’s are still able to lift a guitar, the astonishing, vital records I’m hearing are by musicians in their third decade of recording. It’s got to the point where I won’t pick up a rock and roll album unless the musician is at least fifty years old.}

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Thylacine by Alexis Rockman
Beaumaris Zoo soil and acrylic polymer on paper, 2004
9 x 12¼ inches

Don’t be offended if your e-mail isn’t replied to my friend Ken had at the bottom of the “out of town for a few days” notice I received today. “E-mail is a wild animal,” he said. He’s just put a new scientific / art project online so I imagine his e-mail volume exploding. I don’t think that E-Mail would be an alpha predator, something large, lethal and a lone hunter, like a Bengal Tiger, but more like the heat-seeking, tree-dwelling land leeches I’ve been reading about in urban naturalists Margaret Mittelbach and Michael Crewdson’s book Carnivorous Nights.

They came to Australia, with artist Alexis Rockman, to metaphorically and literally search for the Tasmanian Tiger (which graces the header of this blog). They all live in New York. Mittelbach and Crewdson have written stories for the New York Times about the wildlife in the Bronx: coyotes and bald eagles, among the creatures. Although the definition of ‘wild’ becomes fuzzy when I read that they found a taxidermy of a domestic poodle in the archives of the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Before going to Tasmania they spent some time in Sydney. “Animals the size of cats were flying through the air and the city’s residents barely seemed to notice,” they wrote of the flying foxes in the Botanical Gardens that I walk through almost every day. Keep reading →

nerd

an enthusiast whose interest is regarded as too technical or scientific and who seems obsessively wrapped up in it.

 I’m immersed in re-launching my bookbinding business, nutting out the schematics for prototypes for new models made from bamboo, taking my plans for electronic books back to analogue and figuring out how they’ll be manufactured. So it’s to be expected that I fall asleep with visions of formulae dancing in my head. But I’ve had a lot of time recently to catch up on reading and listen to music and go to see works at art galleries. It’s been a long time since I’ve just followed my interests and goofed off without responding to reading and cultural pursuits with sketches and specifications for some kind of book or electronic device. Then I looked at the list of what I’ve been reading, seeing at galleries and listening to, and every single one of the artists is an engineer or have collaborated with engineers to create their works! 

Alexander Calder’s Circus is one of the wonders in my world: animals with bendy wire bodies and abstract fringes and button eyes that have more personality than National Geographic videos of actual animals. I found a wonderful Uncle Fester-ish photograph of him growling with one of the Circus Lions in a new monograph of his work. In an interview in the monograph he talks about studying engineering before becoming a sculptor. Marcel Duchamp said of him:

“Among all artistic “innovations,” that came about after the Great War, Calder’s line was so distant from any established formula that there was a need to invent a new name for his forms in motion: “mobiles”. Through their way of counteracting gravity by gentle movements, they seem to “carry their own particular pleasures, which are quite unlike the pleasure of scratching oneself,” to quote from Plato’s Philebus. A light breeze, an electric motor, or both combined in the action of an electric fan, can set in motion a series of weights, counterweights, and levers that draw unpredictable arabesques in the air, producing a lasting feeling of surprise. Once colour and sound join the party, the symphony is complete and all our senses are called to follow the invisible score. Pure joie de vivre. Calder’s art is the sublimation of a tree in the wind.” Keep reading →

In its praise of U2’s 3D movie The New York Times review spoke of the “multiple planes of information” in the movie: a combination of shots of the audience with high definition surveillance cameras, monster-size projections of the band members, digital artworks and light sequences. Encoded into these planes seems to be fragments of the history of the moving image and allusions to the creation myths of the digital age.

 ”The State officials and some art historians, pointing to Mr. Smithson’s own writing about the ‘Spiral Jetty’ and the film he made about its construction, said he reveled in the juxtaposition of industrialism and beauty, decay and rebith, rot and permanence. The sense of ruined and abandoned hopes interested him,” said Lynne Cooke, the curator at Dia. “He didn’t look for beautiful places, but rather despoiled landscapes where industry and the wild overlap.”

 

^{Robert Smithson. Spiral Jetty.}

^{In the “Vertigo” video the spirals collapse in what looks like an inverted telescopic lens from a camera.}

^{William Gibson reviewed the Vancouver and Seattle shows on the Vertigo tour for Wired. He wrote that the screens behind the band are “12,000 individual spheres of the LED backdrop: daisy-chained pixel units that have unreeled from above while the chaff storm distracted us. Hanging behind and to either side of the band, these seven curtains can be retracted and lowered as needed, throughout the performance. They have a soft, slightly slinky, nicely organic look as they descend, the individual strands suggesting the bioluminescence of deep-sea fish.” Sprockets run along the bottom of the screen directly behind the band, giving the impression of being a frame from a piece of film. The buffalos from the cover of the Greatest Hits album and the “One” video move on this simulacrum of old-fashioned film like a film-motion study by Edward Muybridge, who was an early user of multiple cameras to capture motion. He also invented a zoopraxiscope that projected motion pictures earlier than the celluloid film strip.}

Edward Muybridge Buffalo footage

U2 video for “One”

The buffalo image for the “One” video was taken from a still by artist David Wojnarowicz (who died in 1992).

Buffalo Falling by David Wojnarowicz

^{A characteristic of Julian Opie’s work is that he reduces details on humans to abstract graphics: a dash across a circle to stand in for a head and its facial features, and he represents ordinary human activities - the walking sequence that appears behind the band while they perform “Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own“.}

^{Run Wrake’s movie Run Rabbit is a gory story reminiscent of the horrors of Grimm’s Folk Tales. A young girl and boy capture a rabbit and kill and skin it to make a muff, but they discover a guru in it’s belly. The story ends badly and is a cautionary tale about the consequences of greed. His inspiration was picture cards for children with words written on them, from the Dick and Jane educational series.}

 ^{In the book of interviews, U2 by U2, Bono talks about finding the image COEXIST. “A friend of mine, Emily B.,” he said, “had stumbled upon this piece of graffiti, COEXIST, with the Islamic moon as the C, the Star of David as the X and the Christian cross as the T. It turns out that it was the brainchild of a Polish artist, Piotor Mlodozeniec. It seemed such a powerful symbol of tolerance.”} 

^{Photo by Isc-Hernandez at Flickr.}

^{Bono also has it written on a revolutionary warrior-style headband.}

Photo by M3iLI55@ at Flickr

^{The human elements of the concert play against the technology. While Julian Opie’s nondescript man trundles along Bono has taken off his glasses to sing the song he wrote for his father and sang at his funeral. But he doesn’t make eye contact with the camera, remaining downcast and privately grieving as he sings of being unable to make a connection with his father while he was alive. The radioactive green ectoplasm of the warmth emitted by living objects through night vision glasses begins a battle song, and fighter planes are seen flying low across the screen. But Bono sings beside Larry Mullen playing a stand up drum like the drummer boy from a military band. The combination of traditional human elements and technology is powerfully affecting. But it’s just as effective in low tech. The National Theatre of Scotland showed night-battle footage on a small low-resolution television screen and marched to regimental martial music played by a bagpiper. A few centuries of war imagery were compressed into a few symbols and tore at your heart.}

^{The movie was released by National Geographic using technology that’s mostly been used for nature movies. A trailer for a 3D version of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth preceded U23D. In Paris in the Twentieth Century, written at the turn of the twentieth century,}

^{Verne predicted many of the technologies we’re now living with, and many of their negative social effects. But his epic novels, and those of H. G. Wells, were known as “scientific romances”. While Wells was sending humankind into space and backwards and forwards through time, Verne was making symbolic journeys into the centre of the earth and below the ocean. Dr. Robert Ballard is an explorer-in-residence with National Geographic and is most famous for finding the ship-wreck of The Titanic. His branch of technology is telepresence, sending his robots deep into the ocean where humans can’t physically go, and monitoring them, now over the internet, at a distance. He’s brought up close to the action through the images the robots send to him. The images he’s sent from the submersible robots can be accessed in 3D. “Well, basically, when you’re working closely with a wreck, it’s very easy to get entangled,” he said. “It’s very easy to get in trouble. So the Voyager the Perry Tritech submersible, had stereo eyes provided by NASA Ames. And with this vehicle system you could put on your stereo glasses and all of a sudden you could see in three dimensions, which made it possible to navigate through the wreckage. And it was just like the difference between having one or two eyes. You see depth perception, which is very important in dangerous settings. It made it infinitely easy to manoeuvere.”}

Video footage from Robert Ballard's return to the Titanic in 2004, twenty years after he discovered the wreck.

^{Every journey outwards is also a journey inwards, as Verne suggested, and Dr Ballard was inspired by Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea as he was growing up. He’s also been inspired by Joseph Campbell’s notion of the hero’s journey, being curious and open-hearted enough to go into unexplored spiritual territory. He quotes Campbell saying life is an act of becoming, we never arrive.}

^{Ken Goldberg is an artist and scientist who also works in the field of telepresence. He created the first telerobotic art project on the internet, which was a series of artefacts from Journey to the Centre of the Earth buried in a sandbox. People could operate a blower over the internet to blow sand away from the objects, and then try to identify them in a forum. His next project was the Telegarden, a robot arm that could be controlled over the internet to plant seeds, water, and weed a garden plot. Many of his other projects also have a direct connection to land art. Mori is a monitoring of the seismic activity of the Hayward Fault that runs under San Francisco turned into sound and organised into a form of music. For the hundredth anniversary of the 1904 earthquake in San Francisco a principal dancer from the San Francisco Ballet improvised a dance in real-time to the sound from the fault.}

^{Mori Installation. Ken Goldberg, Artwork.}

^{Other, more recent projects, look at the implications of surveillance technology. One mimicking John Baldessari’s bubbles of colour obscuring the faces of people in photographs with live surveillance footage. And a robotic camera intended to be set in remote areas for researchers to monitor wildlife collaboratively from their separate universities, was set up on the back deck of Craigslist founder Craig Newmark’s house at the edge of the Sutro Forest in San Francisco and a community of users identified birds caught on the video footage.}

^{In concert U2 uses surveillance camera footage, described by William Gibson in his Wired review.}

^{Willie Williams is this show’s Man Behind the Curtain. Everyone tells me I have to see him, especially his collection of screengrabs from the remote-control surveillance cameras he’s built into the Vertigo node to provide images for the giant scrim screens. … From Yorkshire by way of London punk, he met U2 in 1982, and the rest is entertainment history. His innovations have become industry standard. His cameras, he tells me, are capable of picking out eyelashes - in the dark.}

^{“It’s only about a week ago that I’ve started doing this,” says Williams modestly as we watch a slide show of gorgeously lo-res surveillance stills on his PowerBook. “I’m trying not to be self-conscious about it. To begin with I was just playing, really. And they’re quite difficult to control with a little PlayStation set, but that’s all part of the joy of it. I’m trying not to overthink it.” He had a PlayStation handset modified to allow him to control a number of small, infrared, black-and-white cameras, originally intending to use them to obtain covert imagery of the crowd, which he then mixes for display on the various screens above the stage. Mind you don’t pick your nose at a U2 concert. Williams quickly discovered that his cameras offered him extraordinary views of the band in performance, and he’s been happily collecting these at every show. “It’s a great way of involving the audience. The physical nature of the set uses the fact that the audience wants to be part of the show.”}

^{Reminding him of his punk past, I ask where he sees this sort of technology going. “What I’m enjoying,” Williams tells me, “is that the technology is becoming affordable enough that younger bands are interested in doing something with it. At the end of the ’90s, the live-music industry was dividing. There was the large-show, big-ticket nostalgia bands, the Eagles or whatever, but it wasn’t anything to do with a rock show. That was where the production values were. The younger bands had no interest. Starting with Radiohead, though, I’m now seeing younger bands who are interested in the technology and where it can go. It’s part of their language, really.” He smiles. “When you’ve got cell phones that can make movies, it’s suddenly not so gauche to put some energy into your visual presentation.” Williams leans back in his chair and grins. “We’re thinking of webcasting concerts through U2.com, but part of the deal would be that subscribers could only watch us if we can watch them, through their home webcams, and then we’d all get to watch those images ”}

U2 at the screening of their 3D movie at Sundance. Photo by MyBono at Flickr.

At the beginning of the last decade of the twentieth century I wrote a magazine article about the launch of the Next computer, which Steve Jobs created while he was briefly exiled from Apple. It was a phenomenally powerful machine which anticipated the silky, dense imagery-driven capabilities of today’s computers. It was expensive and pitched to the thinkers, poets, mathematicians and artists creating and researching within universities. Steve Jobs had positioned the computer as another artist’s tool, that a new generation of aspiring Michelangelo’s might use to re-tell the timeless stories that our cultures are built upon. The article was illustrated with a detail from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel fresco where God reaches out and sparks life in Adam who is reaching out to him, but in this instance Adam‘s hand is emerging from the Next computer screen.

That illustration came to mind when I went to see the U2 digital 3D concert movie this week and Bono reached out his hand, seeming so present and alive in front of me that I reflexively reached out my own hand to him. This is William Gibson’s vision of virtual reality completely realised, an additional layer of experience that naturally melds with your material existence. The digital 3D movie was shot on the South American leg of U2’s Vertigo tour. William Gibson wrote about the Seattle and Vancouver concerts of that tour in Wired.

“My wife and I stand in Seattle’s Key Arena, noses level with the lower swoop of what U2 calls the Ellipse, the elevated stage loop the band traverses in performance. We’re here because U2 is the early 21st century’s biggest - and arguably most technologically innovative - touring group, the one that continues to define and redefine the spectacle that is arena rock. For more than a decade, they’ve been driving both the technology and the form of the megatour while providing huge audiences with a powerful yet intricately managed sense of intimacy.”

 

William Gibson. U2’s City of Blinding Lights: 12,000 daisy-chained LEDs. Spycams controlled bya PlayStation. The Vertigo tour is a monster concert machine - and the ultimate rock-and-roll R&D lab.

 The band’s conceptual mastery of the technology and the movie’s polish made the 3D effect seem natural and inevitable and instantly familiar. Gibson asked The Edge about the technological artworks displayed during the concerts and the band’s collaboration with artists. “It’s a co-op,” replied The Edge. “It’s finding like-minded people who have something to contribute. Ever since ZooTV, we’ve found people who’ve got stuff, and we go delving through their collection of images. But in the end, all of the imagery is there to underscore what the music is already saying. It’s a way to shed light from another angle.” One form of light they deal with is spiritual, and the Christian symbols in Bono’s lyrics are given a context, in 3D, that makes it apparent that the songs are animated with the same kind of urge to ponder the human relationship with God that underpins religious art, with an intimacy that’s profoundly new.

In the same week I saw excerpts from the video imagery that Bill Viola created for the staging ofWagner’Tristan and Isolde by the L.A. Philharmonic, and I heard him speak at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Bill Viola talked about developing as an artist while video technology was also developing, that he studied engineering alongside art in order to have a hand in creating the tools he needed to realize his vision. With high definition video he said he now feels that he has a full palette of tools. He showed an excerpt from his new work, Ocean Without a Shore. A black and white surveillance video camera from the 1970’s filmed people walking towards an invisible wall of water. As the actors broke through the wall (a laminar flow that takes three days to calibrate) they became ultra-real, shot in the kind of high-definition digital colour video cameras that George Lucas shoots movies with. The work ponders the way that the dead, or how they remain spiritually with us, ebbs and flows.

Bill Viola said of the exquisite, lifelike detail in Northern European Renaissance painting, “that’s HD.” We can now take technology for granted and see the common spirit in works created in different media, in different ages, and we can concentrate on the experience of the works. Bill Viola’s parents have died in the last few years and he recalled being at a gallery and standing in front of a Renaissance painting of the Virgin Mary and beginning to weep. He wasn’t an artist considering the technique and materials and concept of an artwork but a human being taking his cares and troubles to Mother Mary, he said. U2 are unavoidable but I’ve never really paid close attention to them, and in the few days since I’ve seen the movie I’ve looked up videos of their songs on YouTube. Bono has performed new lyrics he’s written for Ave Maria, alongside Luciano Pavarotti singing the traditional, ancient hymn-version. Bono takes his cares and troubles to Mother Mary. “Where is the justice in this world,” he asks her. “The wicked make so much noise, Mother. The righteous stay oddly still. With no wisdom all the riches in the world leave us poor tonight.”

It’s taken all of this endlessly perfect digital technology to remind us how human the members of U2 are. In the regular world their technological inventiveness can seem tricky and trendy self-promotion. But this says more about marketing than U2. Recorded music has always had a dual identity, singles and albums played on radio and music videos are simultaneously artworks and advertisements for the artworks. In William Gibson’s twenty-first century novels, Pattern Recognition and Spook Country, the prime villain is Hubertus Bigend, the Belgian owner of a global advertising agency. He creates an ethically dubious form of viral marketing by having people in bars covertly recommend products during the course of normal conversations. And he tries to find a marketing advantage in he way that most inventive applications of new technologies are created by either artists or the military. 

On the ZOO TV tour U2 played in front of television footage pulled in from satellite dishes they brought to the arenas with them. “We’ve spent a crazy time dissecting TV and adverts to make a parody of the chaos they cause,” Bono said at the time. “The irony is that ZOO TV has now been taken over by the advertising world and at the moment there are three or four international campaigns inspired by what we did.”

U2 seem sincere, close-up in 3D, in a way that minimizes the marketing aspect. They can seem bombastic and cartoonishly oversize in the regular world, but within the infinite vista and scalelessness of the digital realm, in 3D, are just life size. “Saint” Bono’s concerns, that can seem self-aggrandizing and overwrought in their global scope, within the digital world, with its natural tendency to create links and form clusters is heartfelt, inclusive and far-sighted. In 3D why they write their music becomes apparent. They were once four young men growing up in a country torn apart by war and terrorism, where the symbols of love and peace, from the Bible, had been turned into the instruments of war. It seems remarkable that armed with only drums, guitar and voice they dreamed of making those symbols stand for peace again.

The larger than life symbol in the concert is the Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr. In 2004 King’s widow Coretta Scott King, acknowledged Bono’s humanitarian work. 

At the event, Bono became emotional as he discussed the impact Dr. King had on him growing up in Ireland during that country’s civil war, according to the Associated Press. He said, “We despaired for the lack of vision of the kind Dr. King gave to people in the South,” and added that he wrote the 1984 hit “Pride (In The Name Of Love)” based on King’s teachings. Bono also said, “When Dr. King spoke about having a dream, he wasn’t just talking about an American dream. It can be an African dream, an Irish dream. That’s why I’m excited to be here.”

U2 performs “Pride” in Brazil, on the Vertigo tour.

US Senator Barack Obama, campaigning to become President, uses U2’s song “City of Blinding Lights” in his appearances. It’s not a stirring anthem but a quiet musing about the alienating quality of contemporary urban life. It presents uncertainty. He made a speech at the groundbreaking ceremony for a memorial to Dr King in 2006 that dwelt on triumphing over uncertainty and flaws.

By his own accounts, he was a man frequently racked with doubt, a man not without flaws, a man who, like Moses before him, more than once questioned why he had been chosen for so arduous a task - the task of leading a people to freedom, the task of healing the festering wounds of a nation’s original sin.

 

And yet lead a nation he did. Through words he gave voice to the voiceless. Through deeds he gave courage to the faint of heart. By dint of vision, and determination, and most of all faith in the redeeming power of love, he endured the humiliation of arrest, the loneliness of a prison cell, the constant threats to his life, until he finally inspired a nation to transform itself, and begin to live up to the meaning of its creed.

 

Like Moses before him, he would never live to see the Promised Land. But from the mountain top, he pointed the way for us - a land no longer torn asunder with racial hatred and ethnic strife, a land that measured itself by how it treats the least of these, a land in which strength is defined not simply by the capacity to wage war but by the determination to forge peace - a land in which all of God’s children might come together in a spirit of brotherhood.

 

We have not yet arrived at this longed for place. For all the progress we have made, there are times when the land of our dreams recedes from us - when we are lost, wandering spirits, content with our suspicions and our angers, our long-held grudges and petty disputes, our frantic diversions and tribal allegiances.

Filming the movie at concerts in Buenos Aires, Santiago, Mexico City and Sao Paulo emphasized the connection U2 feels to those who are struggling, worldwide. The South American countries have fiery and exuberant, warm cultures, Bono said, that he identifies with. And, like Ireland, these countries have experienced the furious passion of religious conflicts, terrorism, war and poverty. I was surprised to read a description of religions as “spiritual technologies” in Karen Armstrong’s The Great Transformation, a study of the age in which the compassionate responses of Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism developed in a savage and violent world. But in William Gibson’s science fiction novels of the twentieth century, those who pursue the magical new technologies in hope of attaining power, immortality and riches seem limited and lacking in character, while the seemingly less fortunate characters have an inner dimension, unquestioningly linking up older spiritual systems with new technologies. Christian motifs already intermingled with Cuban voodoo, co-exist with synthetic realities. In Buddhism all is illusory. The wholly digital Japanese Idoru evokes the practical mysticism of Tibetan Buddhists, seeing nothing contradictory in believing in seemingly arcane magic but willingly adapting and giving up beliefs if science proves them untenable. The Latin cultures already have a form of virtual reality that requires no digital equipment, in the magical realism of their literature. In an interview I read with Gabriel Garcia Marquez he said that the realism in his novels isn’t “magical” but that all of the fantastic events in One Hundred Years of Solitude are absolutely real.

“It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is there’s not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination….[The tone] was based on the way my Grandmother used to tell her stories. She told things that sounded supernatural and fantastic, but she told them with complete naturalness. “

Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The Paris Review.

Towards the end of the movie the digital effects appear to be suffering from vertigo, slogans, then individual words, then just letters, in English and Spanish, rushing then subsiding until the band is alone onstage. There is no heart-stopping finale that induces euphoria, just something that’s more in line with the resolute calm that I experienced at the end of hearing the Dalai Lama speak (as a human being, not within a religious ceremony) at a crammed sports arena in Melbourne.

When I came out of the cinema Keanu Reeves was arriving for the premiere of his new James Ellroy police drama, Street Kings, in the same cinema complex. The actual, flesh-and-blood Keanu Reeves seemed less real than the digital Bono. People pushed and shoved behind the barricade of a shabby red carpet, to take photos of him with their mobile phones. It was a diminished and tacky approximation of the old-fashioned heady glamour that the ritual of a premiere is supposed to invoke. The closeness and warmth of 3D redefines intimacy. We no longer need to parade the actual human beings in front of the film in order to feel a genuine connection to them. As Neo in The Matrix Keanu Reeves questioned the nature of reality and human life experience. In the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik wrote that The Matrix “spoke to an old nightmare. The basic conceit of The Matrix - the notion that the material world is a malevolent delusion, designed by the forces of evil with the purpose of keeping people in a state of slavery, has a history. It is most famous as the belief for which the medieval Christian sect known as the Cathars fought and died, and in great numbers too. The Cathars were sure that the material world was a phantasm created by Satan, and that Jesus of Nazareth - their Neo - had shown mankind a way beyond that matrix by standing outside it and seeing through it. The Cathars were fighting a losing battle, but the interesting thing was that they were fighting at all. It is not unusual to take up a sword and die for a belief. It is unusual to take up a sword to die for the belief that swords do not exist.”

Lights go down, it’s dark

 

The jungle in your head

 

A feeling is so much stronger than a thought

 

Your eyes are wide

 

And though your soul

 

It can’t be bought

 

Your mind can wander

 

 

 

Hello hello

 

I’m at a place called Vertigo

 

It’s everything I wish I didn’t know

 

Except you give me something I can feel, feel

 

 

 

The night is full of holes

 

As bullets rip the sky

 

Of ink with gold

 

They twinkle as the

 

Boys play rock and roll

 

 U2 Vertigo

 

 

Nick Cave’s albums operate as a Zen paradox for me. As soon as I stop listening to them I start hearing them. Not the songs themselves, exactly, but the atmosphere of the songs. It will seem as if the world is illustrating Nick’s songs rather than the reverse. I’ve just submitted the final draft of an essay on the mythological symbols in his songs to Karen Welberry, who is co-editing a collection of studies of Nick’s songs that’s being published later this year by the academic publisher, Ashgate. I’d been working on it for twelve years, from the Let Love In album to DIG!!! LAZARUS, DIG!!! As soon as I hit ‘send’ on the document it felt as if the floor opened up and I was hurtled into Lazarus-world, that the essay was just beginning rather than finished.

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There’s Definitely Something Going On Upstairs

At roughly 1pm on Monday 22 October 2007 I was driving around Sydney’s inner city and North Shore with Nick Cave, listening to the new Bad Seeds album DIG!!! LAZARUS, DIG!!! It was the perfect way to hear it. The sounds of the city are in the dazzling beauty of the musical arrangements, temple bells clanking like heavy machinery and a sensual groove, sunshine reflected from the surfaces of buildings and water turned into sound.

Lazarus digs the dark, funky underworld of New York City in the 1970’s. Maybe he’s buying branded ‘blue magic’ heroin supplied by the drug lord from Ridley Scott’s new movie American Gangster, who has it shipped from Vietnam in military coffins with the bodies of soldiers returning home. Lazarus experiences the spiritual sugar-rush of San Francisco in the aftermath of the summer of love. Joan Didion chronicled this time but while readers saw the era’s treacly reaching for peace and love, baby she was writing about the absence of a core myth to guide people. She saw the coming of an apocalypse that WB Yeats had alluded to in his poem “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” in 1919.¹ Anarchy has been “loosed upon the world” and “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

Lazarus may have been in Los Angeles when a musician from a band making music that sounded like sunshine itself crossed paths with a murderous figure with a messiah complex. Lazarus isn’t reborn. He falls on hard times, becomes homeless, goes mad and becomes violent.

At the end of the nineteenth century a predatory mysticism exploited the incorporeal advances in science - the x-ray, recorded projected sound, electricity - and created a fad for contacting the spirit world. The recorded sound industry was pioneered by a company whose logo was an image of a dog sitting on a coffin listening to a machine playing a recording of his dead master‘s voice. At the turn of this century two robots, Spirit and Opportunity - reminiscent of Sony‘s robot dog Aibo - were listening for the voices of the dead on Mars.

On their website in early 2008 the Bad Seeds sat at a table in a Victorian drawing room, around an antique ouija board and Nick, a medium in a jewelled turban, made a show of contacting the spirit world. In one session he conjured up an image of a skeleton on a sheet. In another session the table moved up into the air, seemingly of its own accord. The message the spirit world kept sending was the title of the album, DIG!!! LAZARUS, DIG !!! Keep reading →