eat that pest

Photograph by deborah lattimore at Flickr.

I have an eggheadish tendency to want to lunge at the science underpinning anything I become interested in. When I learned to cook, in Los Angeles, propped up on the bench in the kitchen was the Chez Panisse cookbook written by Paul Bertolli with its wordy lyricism, describing the nutty smell that arborio rice gave off when it was ready to have the first liquid added, when making risotto. Beside it was Harold McGee’s The Lore and Chemistry of Cooking, with its molecular diagrams and descriptions of the changes in the covalent bonds between food molecules. It’s become my formula, the novel like sweep of a big story that zooms right down to the sub-atomic level to a set of chemical reactions.

The changes made to plants and animals at the molecular level, the unnatural substances added to food, and the poisoning of food, animals and the land are the stories that grip me. I’m ghoulishly drawn to news stories that have horrific overtones, that read like the ’scientific romances’ of H.G. Wells, specifically the human/animal cross-breeding programmes on The Island of Dr. Moreau and the genetically modified foodstuffs in The Food of the Gods. Alongside the news articles I’m also wonkishly working my way through the websites of the federal Government departments overseeing and regulating food production in Australia.

The Department of the Environment and Water oversees the control of the domestic or farm animals, brought with the first European settlers, that have gone feral. And the creatures introduced for biological control whose populations are out of control. The species causing the most problems are the cane toad, the European rabbit, the European red fox, the camel, the cat, the goat, the horse, the pig, and the water buffalo.

These animals have few, if any, natural predators and carry the same diseases as their domesticated counterparts. Their populations can sometimes swell to unruly levels and there’s no foolproof way of controlling them. The Brisbane Courier Mail reports on David Blackwood, a Queensland farmer, who invites hunters onto his farm to shoot the feral deer and goats competing for food with his sheep and cattle, and the wild pigs who destroy fences and drive native animals from their habitats. He believes that the animals should be brought into our food chain, that those killed should be eaten, and that “Australia has only scratched the surface in exporting game meats such as pig and goat.”

He’s enlisting the help of chefs to bolster his case, including the French chef, Stephane Reynaud. I’m constantly drawn to Reynaud’s book Pork & Sons which is displayed on a lectern between the children’s and cooking book sections at the Borders next door to where I live. It has a pale, princess pink cover and giddy porcine line drawings. I keep reaching for it, thinking it’s some new, encyclopaedic children’s book, the tales of an urban pig, like Ian Falconer’s Olivia.

hOly bIbL

Cordero by Zatorski + Zatorski. Photograph courtesy of the artists. 

NOTE:  On Saturday July 21 at 7pm. Zatorski + Zatorski will be showing their movies and discussing them at Greenland Street in Liverpool, in the UK. The event is free but bookings are suggested. e-mail info at afoundation.org.uk

Zatorski + Zatorski question and subvert our expectations through works that can often be seen as video paintings. The artists will introduce a selection of sumptuous video works that explore ideas around mortality. Including ‘Kokoro’, a surreal micro-drama played out by two butterflies in the arena of a female belly button.

Zatorski + Zatorski spent three years translating the entire King James Version of the Bible into the language of text messages. It’s going to be printed as a book, hOly bIbL, but they selected Chapter 20 from Exodus, that contains the ten commandments, and blew it up as an image that covered an entire wall at the Reg Vardy Gallery in Sunderland in the UK. “Exodus, Chapter 20 is a set of universal life codes which has formed the foundation of much of the world’s law systems and the moral framework of the common conscience,” they say, and by translating it into the SMS text they are questioning “the reverence in which we hold words themselves.”

Their work is concerned with mortality, transience and belief. Their projects have a deep conceptual clarity and rich, dark beauty, bringing the timeless myths and insights of the spirit into our own time through translations of the literature of the spirit and works that reference paintings from the era and world of the King James Bible. They speak the language of the spirit through art, rather than focus on individual artworks, and it’s the power and volatility of language as something that’s alive that absorbs them. In 1524 William Tyndale made the first translation of the Bible into the common English language of the day. It was considered an act of heresy and he was eventually burned at the stake. The next version of the Bible translated into the common language of the day, the King James Version, in 1611, has become regarded as one of the heights of literary beauty.

The Christian Bible has always been associated with advances in publishing formats. The very first bible, bound together as a codex, was a streamlining of the scrolls that contained the separate parts of the Hebrew Bible. Gutenberg demonstrated the innovations of his method of printing with movable type by making Bibles as his prototypes. In the twentieth century Sony released its first electronic book reader, the Data Discman, dubbed ’the walkman of words’ with a disc containing the text of the King James Bible. Zatorski + Zatorski place their King James Bible within the publishing world growing up around the mobile phone.

“With around 4 billion text messages per month sent in Britain alone (in the States the figure for the whole of 2006 was roughly 158 billion), SMS text is one of the fastest evolving languages on Earth,” they say. “It is charged with insidiously eroding literacy levels; a phonetic language with flagrant disregard for grammatical conventions, that bastardizes its host for the sake of speed and economy. However it is this very need for character rationing that fuels the inventiveness and humour imbued in SMS translations. It has a prodigious repertoire of emblematic drawings, fashioned using alphabet apostrophes and symbols. It is an anarchic, pragmatic language that never sees pen or paper, bashed out by febrile thumbs and then blasted into the ether. It lives fast and dies young, only existing as a visual form: once enunciated (and thus translated) it ceases to be.”

Zatorski + Zatorski both studied painting and have worked together since 2000: their work is now mostly based around video installations that they refer to as ’video paintings’. “In our video works, the camera remains static, providing a window, stage or picture plane, being more akin to painting than television or film. With a single-take shot, or single viewpoint with few discernable edits, we suggest a single viewer experiencing a real-time scenario.“ They use music composed for films, by Philip Glass, Michael Nyman and Bernard Hermann to accompany the videos.

Many of their works were created when they were artists-in-residence at Durham Cathedral in 2005 and 2006. Their works make reference to saints and passages from the Bible and iconic pieces of religious art, but much of what they captured was just life itself, made sacred by reflecting on it. Animals appear in their video paintings because they were there, birds inhabited the cathedral with them.

One of their most beautiful, and technically extraordinary works, Cordero, recreates Francisco Zurbaran’s 17^th century painting of a sweet, docile sacrificial lamb symbolically representing Christ‘s sacrifice. It’s an image that still speaks to our time. Matthew Scully used it on the cover of his book, Dominion: The Power of Men, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy. The lamb depicted in Cordero was one of a number that died naturally in the field during a cold snap that spring and the video painting is silent. “We were particularly interested in the fact that we are using a time-based medium to depict something that doesn’t move because it’s dead. The pixels on the screen move, so that if you were really to look you would notice that it is moving image, but otherwise at first glance you would not be sure whether it was a still image and therefore whether or not the lamb is alive. The absolute serenity is only broken momentarily by the arrival of a finch. The small bird lands on the binding of the lambs feet, appearing to inspect, or caress, the wounds.” The enduring value of sacred art is the stillness and contemplation that Cordero inspires, and that it’s in contemplating death that we become aware of the fragility and fleeting happiness of life and therefore value it more.

the CULINARY William Gibson

Thank you, “24 Hours of Flickr”!, Photograph at the Golden Gate Bridge by deborah lattimore at Flickr.

One of the stories in William Gibson’s first collection of short stories was set in what’s now a food market in Vancouver. The Winter Market, from the collection Burning Chrome (1984) he says is based on “Vancouver’s Granville Island, centered around Granville Island Market (produce and food fair) is a very successful (and pleasant) retrofit of an under-bridge urban island that previously was heavily industrial. When the story was written, the retrofit was recent, and I dirtied it up for requisite punky near-future effect. Have regretted never having explored it prior to its regooding. It works as well as it has because it’s been very tightly and intelligently limited as to types of business. No fast food franchises, and a certain percentage of retail space must be marine-related, nautical.”

In William Gibson’s Bridge trilogy (Virtual Light - Idoru – All Tomorrow’s Parties) an earthquake has all but destroyed San Francisco and a makeshift refugee community springs up on the Golden Gate Bridge. Shinya Yamazaki, a Japanese student of existential sociology, visits San Francisco to study the bridge community. The imminent breakdown of the community is signalled by a branch of the global convenience-store franchise, Lucky Dragon, opening on the bridge.

Food and the way it’s prepared, and how people consume it, contribute to the details that bring his world and characters alive. His writing isn’t futuristic he says, he’s imaginatively sketching in the present moment. The food anchors us clearly in time, makes the connection with now:

“Yamazaki returns with antibiotics, packaged foods, coffee in self-heating tins. He wears a black nylon flight-jacket and carries these things, along with his notebook, in a blue mesh bag.” All Tomorrow’s Parties. (1999)

Pattern Recognition, published in 2004, was set in an undisguised present. Cayce is a cool-hunter with an allergic reaction to marketing that makes her a dowser, an arbiter of the effectiveness of branding messages. In London she goes to dinner with the head of an advertising agency she consults for, whose wife, once a bit-player in an X-Files like television programme now sells organic cosmetics.

Stonestreet, at the wet bar sculpted into a corner of the kitchen’s granite island, passes her, at her request, a tall glass of ice and fizzy water, garnished with a twist of lemon….

“How do you think we look,” Bigend asks, “to the future?” He looks as though he’s somehow, in spite of the evening’s cunningly vegan cuisine, been infused with live extract of hot beef. He’s florid, glossy, bright-eyed, very likely bushy tailed as well. The dinner conversation has been mercifully uneventful, with no mention of Dorotea or Blue Ant, and for this Cayce is grateful.

Helena, Stonestreet’s wife, has been lecturing them about the uses, even today, in cosmetics of reprocessed bovine neurological material, having gotten there via a discussion, over her stuffed eggplant, of spongiform encephalopathy as the price of forcing herbivores into an apocalyptically unnatural cannibalism.

In October, on his blog, William Gibson defined the world and title of his new novel, Spook Country, that will be released in a couple of months from now.

Spook: as spectre, ghost, revenant, remnant of death, the madness lingering after the corpse is sloughed off. Slang for intelligence agent; agent of uncertainty, agent of fear, agent of fright.
 
Country: in the mind or in reality. The World. The United States of America, New Improved Edition. What lies before you. What lies behind. Where your bed is made.
 
Spook Country: the place where we have all landed, few by choice, and where we are learning to live. The country inside and outside of the skull. The soul, haunted by the past, of what was, of what might have been. The realization that not all forking paths are equal — some go down in value.

As befits a story with surveillance at its heart it was written under the watchful glare of the readers who logged onto his blog, and segments from it, unannounced, just began showing up there in the middle of last year. And one of the first segments that appeared, on June 11, was a meditation on convenience food.

Sometimes, if Brown was hungry at the end of the day, and in a certain mood, they’d go to Gray’s Papaya for the recession special. Milgrim always got the orangeade with his, because it seemed more honestly a drink, less juice-like. You could get actual juices there, but not with the recession special, and juice didn’t seem like part of the Gray’s experience, which was about grilled beef franks, soft white buns, and watery, sugary drinks, consumed standing up, under brilliant, buzzing fluorescent light.

When they were staying at the New Yorker, as it seemed they were again tonight, Gray’s was only two blocks up 8th Avenue. Milgrim was comforted by Gray’s Papaya. He remembered when the two franks and drink that was the recession special had been $1.95.

 

Something Four-Legged in the Fish Case: ENDANGERED FOOD

Tsukiji Fish Market’s Tuna Carcasses, Photograph by mikeleeorg at Flickr.

The restaurant’s owner, Shigekazu Ozoe, 56, said the current situation reminded him of the last time he had no tuna to sell — in 1973, during a scare over mercury poisoning in oceans when customers refused to buy it. At that time, he tried to find other red-colored substitutes like smoked deer meat and raw horse, a local delicacy in some parts of Japan. “We tasted it, and horse sushi was pretty good,” he recalled. “It was soft, easy to bite off, had no smell.” If worse comes to worst, he said, he could always try horse and deer again. The only drawback he remembered was customers objecting to red meat in the glass display case on the counter of his sushi bar. “One customer pointed and said: ‘You have something four-legged in your fish case? That’s eerie!’ ”

Martin Fackler. New York Times. 25.6.07

The New York Times science published an article in May on the disappearance of tuna from waters around the world. The growing global fashion for sushi, and satellite technology and spotters in airplanes have made tuna hunting more precise. Most vulnerable is an apparently distinct population of Bluefin tuna that breeds in the Gulf of Mexico. Researchers tracked fish implanted with electronic tags on their journeys. “They found that the tuna that spawn in the west, which are most severely depleted, are further threatened by an ever-broadening gantlet of hooks, seines, harpoons, traps and now farm-style pens, in which netted fish are raised and fattened – all to supply the Japanese sushi trade.” Dr. Barbara A. Bock, a marine biologist at Stanford said that the tuna, which can grow to a half a ton in size and live for forty years, is “slipping off the earth.”

Our focus is on local food, keeping food close, consuming what’s near, but what of our global responsibilities, where boundaries of responsibility are unclear? Who owns the notion of sushi and the right to serve it with its finest ingredient? What are our responbilities to any endangered food species? Gordon Ramsay was forced to take endangered bluefin tuna off his menus at this restaurants in London after criticism from the Government and conservation groups.

But chefs are in a quandary even when they try to make environmentally sensitive decisions. Keith Frogget, chef and co-owner of the Scaramouche restaurant in Toronto, was aware of the depletion of wild fish species and chose to serve farmed salmon instead. “Last year, for example, he was using organically raised farmed salmon from the West Coast on his menus,” wrote the Canadian Broadcasting Commission. “‘We got a call from the Monterey Bay Aquarium pointing out that they were having some difficulties with the impact that these farms were having on the environment,’ he explains. The chef immediately discontinued using that product, turning instead to a sea cod farm in the Shetland Islands because ‘it is pretty environmentally sound.’ There is no by-catch involved in the raising of the fish and they rotate their pens as well and don’t continually farm in the same area of the ocean. They give the ocean bed a chance to replenish itself.”

The Ethicurean tagged a San Francisco Chronicle story about the rising demand for the caviar of the Caspian sea creating a poaching frenzy of the Sturgeon that produces the caviar. The female beluga’s fifty pounds of caviar can fetch between $10,000 and $15,000 on the market and the 250-million year old species has been almost fished-out in the last twenty years.

“In 2005, the United States listed beluga as a threatened species and banned all imports” writes the San Francisco Chronicle. “In Europe, the pearly black eggs sell for between $2,500 and $4,000 a pound. U.S. consumers are left with wild Caspian sevruga and ossetra, farmed American white sturgeon or farmed French Siberian sturgeon.” The Ethicurean said that its eyebrows were raised by “the unconscionably blithe sidebar that ran with it, supposedly about how guilt-free California farmed caviar is widely available, but mostly urging caviar lovers to go Kazakhstan and buy some black-market caviar while it still exists.”

SLEEPING BEAUTY at the Malthouse Theatre, in Melbourne

Around you …, Photograph by JoanLovesPaper at Flickr.

Bill Moyers:  What happens when a society no longer embraces a powerful mythology?

Joseph Campbell: What we’ve got on our hands. If you want to find out what it means to have a society without any rituals, read the New York Times.

Bill Moyers: And you’d find?

Joseph Campbell: The news of the day, including destructive and violent acts by young people who don’t know how to behave in a civilised society.

Bill Moyers: Society has provided them no rituals by which they become members of the tribe, of the community. All children need to be twice born, to learn to function rationally in the present world, leaving childhood behind. I think of that passage in the first book of Corinthians: “When I was a child, I spake as child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”

^{The Power of Myth. Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers}

Haruki Murakami’s new novel, After Dark, is an existential twist on the story of Sleeping Beauty. Mari sits in a diner near the magic hour of midnight, reading, while her fashion model sister Eri sleeps a deep fairytale temporary-suspension-of-life kind of sleep. Mari is drawn into a strange, violent underworld by a jazz musician, who once dreamed of being the sleeping sister’s handsome prince. He sits with the studious younger sister and orders chicken salad and toast. A unplugged television in the sleeping sister’s room screens an incomprehensibly symbolic image. There’s music, too, much of it jazz. Some of it the “languorous, sensual music of Duke Ellington. Music for the middle of the night.”  This is an urban version of the Grimm’s midnight forest.

Beginning in a few days the Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne is a version of Sleeping Beauty that operates in a dark dreamworld too. The tagline on the programme is a quote from Elias Canetti: “All the things one has forgotten scream for help in our dreams.” The show has music at its heart, by Nick Cave and Elvis Costello and David Bowie.

Mythology is the device that anchors us in time. The timeless stories of the human condition are brought into our own time by writers and artists and dancers and musicians. These artforms all bleed into one another these days, but it’s particularly rock and roll musicians, a generation of mature performers, who are creating the great symbolic works of our age around their music and presenting them in theatre productions in Australia. The Sydney Festival has been instrumental, too, this year staging theatrical presentations of Lou Reed’s Berlin album, a story of a troubled couple spiralling down into despair and violence , Rosanne Cash’s Black Cadillac album, a chronicle of her response to the death of both her parents, her stepmother, an aunt and a stepsister within an eighteen month period. The Malthouse, the Sydney Festival, and St. Ann’ Warehouse in New York (which developed Lou Reed’s and Rosanne Cash’s shows) recognise that a generation of rock musicians, now mature, is engaging the world and the community, and that their music deserves a reflective hearing: something that brings out its symbolism, not treating it as prose or a verb, not treating it as a barely disguised narration of actual events in a performer’s life.

It was the Sydney Festival’s staging of Came So Far For Beauty in 2005, an appreciation of the songs of Leonard Cohen by a generation of singers and songwriters who’d been inspired by him, that set the ball rolling. The show was produced by Hal Willner, whose albums of interpretations of music by Nino Rota, Thelonious Monk, Harold Arlen, Charles Mingus, and classic Disney Themes re-interpret the standards and bring them alive for a new generation. So many rock and roll musicians in such an intelligent setting, within a sharp arts festival was galvanizing, for the musicians and the audience. It’s only the field of criticism that hasn’t caught on and begun appreciating this mature form of rock and roll music.

The sorrow and pain and suffering presented in Lou Reed’s and Rosanne Cash’s performances were received exultantly by the audiences. It became clear that Lou Reed wasn’t being ironic, ten years ago or perhaps more, when in an introduction to a book of his lyrics he described his songs as “compassionate”. His songs are so devoid of opinion and judgement and sentiment that we can see the whole world, how these people were shaped by their circumstances and we can ’suffer with’ them. The Sydney Festival programme quotes David Bowie saying, “He supplied us with the street and landscape. And we peopled it.” In Rosanne Cash’s concert the redemptive quality of sadness became evident, that it’s through sadness we appreciate the fleeting beauty of life, and can value it more. “Loss is cumulative,” she writes on her website. “But so is poetry, and art, and faith, and Love. I know now that what survives of my parents, what is truly mine, are their best qualities, which I am free to adopt, and the accumulation of their millions of acts of service to me.”

There’s no simple way to encapsulate what these musicians are doing. Their musical styles are too various, the themes of their music too broad and diverse.  The most useful way to group them is by intent: their music is partly the general definition of folk music as being ‘by and for the common people.’ It’s easier to say what this music isn’t. Although it beats with a similar heart it isn’t the same as the concerts that have grouped musicians together in response to cataclysms: George Harrison’s Bangladesh, Bob Geldof’s Live Aid, Willie Nelson’s Farm Aid, Al Gore’s recently announced Live Earth, a global twenty four hour concert to be staged in July. And it isn’t sympathy for issues, the concerns of the non-musical humanitarian projects of celebrity musicians for debt relief in third world countries or to prevent A.I.D.S. And it isn’t essays of a situation: Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, a portrait of the Vietnam War and the state of the world at that time, or the Dirty Dozen Brass Band’s re-interpretation of that album in response to Hurricane Katrina’s devestation of New Orleans.

What’s different in the symbolic rock and roll is the scale of the topic — everyday, ordinary moments in life that are the same whether you are a globally famous rock and roll musician or a poor citizen of a besieged nation — and the scale and position of the musicians, who depict themselves standing among people, beside them, with them, not as figures whose celebrity have them looming larger than the population as a focus and a rallying point.  Of Black Cadillac Rosanne Cash said, “My hope is that people bring their own lives to it, that they’re not just hung up on the back story”.

Collectively the music of Nick Cave, and Lou Reed, and Rosanne Cash,and those who share their perspective, addresses the spirit and has some of the beauty of the group of voices speaking in the common language of the day that made the King James Edition of the Bible, when spoken aloud, such glorious music. Nick Cave and Lou Reed have both used gospel gospel choirs at recent concerts and this is an especially powerful symbol. This music of the downtrodden and beleagured, bearing witness, has always been Nick’s reference point. The volumes of his lyrics printed as books have begun with a quote from the Book of Job, “and I alone am escaped to tell thee”, not the words of Job, being tormented and tested by God, but Job’s servants, who were allowed to escape in order to tell Job of the calamities that befell his family and servants and animals.

 The song that draws the perspective for this symbolic music is Nick Cave’s As I Sat Sadly By Her Side. It seems like one of those Renaissance perspective judging devices. The co-ordinates given are universal, as though we’re viewing the song from the position that the Apollo 8 astronauts had, looking back at the earth and seeing one world, undivided. The song is a conversation between a man and a woman, God and humanity, Nick and himself, Nick and his audience, as each of these figures sits beside one another, describing what they see out in the world and in their own hearts. The song has the rhythm of a strong heartbeat and advocates not looking and thinking and talking about the world, but moving out into the world, walking among people.

Nick Cave’s album Let Love In in 1994 begins a mythological journey that moves him from youth to maturity. His whole world and all he believes in implodes. In the song Lay Me Low, his young self dies in order to be reborn into a community directed way of living, but what he also lays to rest is the grotesque caricature that had grown up around him that’s made reference to in music profiles and interviews. The Murder Ballads album has him moving through the dark forest of original experience (depicted as the midnight woods of Grimms Folk Tales), and like Dante moving through his labyrinth, Nick’s guides — in this case Bob Dylan — can only go so far with him. He is about to move into new territory, to remake the role of the singer and songwriter as a mature artist, for his own time. When he re-emerges into the light, on the Boatman’s Call album, he questions the nature of light itself: rejecting the mystical spotlight shone from a God that moves life mysteriously from the Heavens, to the idea of the light within, the sense of personal responsibility and inner divinity represented by the figure of Jesus Christ in the Gospel of Thomas, a scripture discovered in 1945.

Rock and roll was born out of youthful rebellion. There are great numbers of bands and individuals who refuse to grow up, who live in a state of arrested development, perpetually in their early twenties, and another set of bands and individuals reforming or relaunching their careers, in their fifties, to reclaim the success and glory they experienced in their twenties. This has nothing to do with the mature rock and roll artist, whose references have become symbolic and need to be enlivened by the listeners in their own lives, but the music media insists on reading these songs as prose, as literal autobiography rather than as poetry, metaphors. There’s little to be gained, any more, by interviewing musicians and trying to pin autobiographical details onto parts of their songs, by trying to find a thread that links the wildness of youth to the bruised wisdom of the adult. There’s little wonder Nick Cave, though polite, is cold and impatient in interviews, little wonder that Lou Reed loses his temper. Their stories and symbols aren’t ones they’re inventing, they’re observing or quoting. They’re familiar stories becoming more beloved in their retelling, reflecting our world, in our time, as a mythical realm.

There are no deliberate links between the works of these artists, they just live in the same world, see the same things, question their consciences in ways that line up with one another. A mature artist’s work is inflected to the community and the examination of the community strengthens their work. So the addition of the works of painters, guest musicians, films, in a stage setting, and being part of a theatre’s run or a festival deepens the appreciation of the works in the way that being a lone focus wouldn’t.

The Tiger Lillies have made an entire career of telling mythologically profound stories in a theatrical setting, through music. They’ve staged a version of Hans Christian Anderson’s Little Match Girl. “Andersen’s fairy tales corresponded to the urge to speak out for a writer who did not come from a genteel class, but from the lower ranks of society, deprived and uneducated,” they say. “ Unlike traditional fairy tales, set in distant lands “once upon a time”, Andersen set his tales in the familiar and contemporary world, making fantastic descriptions stem from realistic ones and investing everyday objects with life and magical powers. His imaginative spirit transfigured the real world and opened up another one, wonderful and spiritual. However, his fairy tales cast a shadow. They are as mournful as they are wonderful: they caught the spirit of dissolution contained in those times, caused by the disappearance of an old world, gradually replaced by the modern one born with the industrial revolution of the 19th century.”

A Dark Food Fairytale

sleeping woman, Photograph by la-la-laine.

Haruki Murakami’s new novel, After Dark, is an existential twist on the story of Sleeping Beauty. Mari sits in a diner near the magic hour of midnight, reading, while her beautiful sister Eri sleeps a deep fairytale temporary-suspension-of-life kind of sleep. Mari is drawn into a strange, violent underworld by a jazz musician, who once dreamed of being the sleeping sister’s handsome prince. He sits with the studious younger sister and orders chicken salad and toast. Television screens and mobile phones carry warnings of doom. This is an urban version of the Grimm’s midnight forest.

“You don’t like chicken?” he asks.

“It’s not that,” Mari says. “But I make a point of not eating chicken out.”

“Why not?”

“Especially the chicken they serve in chain restaurants — they’re full of weird drugs. Growth hormones and stuff. The chickens are locked in these dark, narrow cages, and given all these shots, and their feed is full of chemicals, and they’re put on conveyor belts, and machines cut their heads off and pluck them…”

“Whoa!” he says with a smile. “Chicken salad a la George Orwell!”

God is in the Roses

 Photograph by D Minton at Flickr.

Yahoo! is bringing back one of the company’s founders, Jerry Yang, to revitalise the company, which has lost ground to Google in its core businesses, and never latched on fast enough to the coolest of the social networking phenomenons. Jerry Yang is 38 years old. In the past few days I’ve been reading posts by venture capitalist Fred Wilson about age and innovation in technology. He pointed out that fifteen to twenty year olds are the ones building and launching “authentic web services that fill a real need in the market,” and that he was aware of a number of forty to fifty year olds who are facing a “what to do next?” crisis. His posts on age attracted a stream of criticism.  “I am not an ageist” he defended. “I would gladly back an entrepreneur who was 80 if they were doing something interesting.” 

The suggestion is that Yahoo! is becoming a content-driven company. I wonder if the quiet things I like best about Yahoo! — Flickr, de.licio.us, the plain news headlines on the home tab in my inbox — escaped being given a few Yahoo! exclamation points because no-one knew how to ‘monetize’ them? But I’d gladly pay a subscription cost to keep them quiet, and a little bit extra to strip graphics and features away from the Yahoo! interface on my 3G phone. I want ‘rich’ content: The Ethicurean’s  digest of news feeds harvested and commented upon, The New York Times ‘Select’ with its small roster of columnists and few special guest columnists whose columns have a (usually) short run, haute nerd blogs with egghead content — Bldgblog and Detritus — Ken Goldberg’s telerobotic art projects on the internet, and the savvy community news portal Outside.in.

The Webby Awards have become a measure of the internet, a state-of-play report about the business and culture of the web. The 11th annual Webby Awards have just been presented in New York. The innovations that founder Tiffany Shlain set in place still form the backbone of the Webby Awards: the five-word acceptance speeches, the popularity vote, the People’s Choice awards, running alongside the official awards and the awards show itself as a form of entertainment, now a global, dazzling very showbizzy form of entertainment.

What’s less remarked on is another of her innovations, The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, the forming of a group of the internet’s inventors, artists, philosphers and business leaders who vote on the official awards. The internet is now mature enough for the Webby’s to be able to offer “lifetime achievement” awards to the people, some from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, who created the structure and conventions that keep it free as a communications medium.

A few years ago Tiffany brought in a company to oversee the day-to-day operations of the Webby Awards — she’s now described as an ambassador — and she’s created a film production company and think tank, the Moxie Institute, to create films that have a strong social message, that have discussion notes created around them. It seems like a step sideways into something quiet, a paddling backstream a little, until you realise that she’s always said that the most important thing about the internet is that it’s a communications medium, and what she’s bringing to the internet now is a new vein of rich content that suits the mature medium, that connects people around ideas.

It’s biotechnology not computer technology that’s thought of as both a saviour and satan today and she’s creating a feature-length documentary, The Declaration of Interdependence, that addresses this issue. “I’m developing a new film and art installation that explores connections between honey bees, fertility, crime, Botox, bacteria, ethical codes, computer codes, genetic codes, dress codes, and an array of other elements, illuminating some surprising links between our actions in the 21st Century” she says.

Before he died, Joseph Campbell, who connected up myths and legends across cultures and through time said the mythology of the age we’re now in would have to encompass the whole world, and be human-centred again. We have to be able to turn off the machines and reconnect with human intuition, he said. Tiffany has caught exactly the mythological mood of the times when she says that her new film will explore the connections between issues that are not obvious, forming illuminating non-sequiturs that a database can’t be taught to predict. “In a time when both politicians and the media focus on isolating issues,” she says, “we can be more aware by illuminating the surprising and complex links between issues.” 

Tiffany’s movies aren’t poetry, the fast moving juxtaposition of images and forming of connections seems to be how the brain responds to poetry, a thinking — and feeling — process made visual, outside the brain. She stresses the continuity of the cycle of life, and of family. The foundation image is a woman heavily pregnant with a photograph of the earth superimposed on her stomach. Tiffany’s father, Leonard Shlain, who has written books on the connections between art and science is a contributor to the movie. Her daughter is named for the birthplace of her grandparents.

Symbolic connections and associations may be all we have. We can’t hope to understand anything in a world of rapid change, William Gibson said in the documentary No Maps For These Territories, all we can hope to do is make the present moment coherent. His first novel, Neuromancer, (1984) is a young man’s book he said, and he doesn’t have access to that person any more. Young people break down the system, tear down worlds, that’s their function. Mature artists rebuild worlds, reach out and form communities.  Gibson’s most recently released novel, Pattern Recognition (2003), stressed the need for human connections and genuine messages in a world of pervasive marketing. [note: his new novel, Spook Country, is to be released later this year]

His books have become deeply symbolic. Cayce Pollard, the lead character in Pattern Recognition, is the daughter of an ex-espionage agent who disappeared on September 11 in New York City. At the moment the first plane hit the World Trade Centre he has Cayce walking past the window of an antique store and seeing a single petal fall from a rose. In a post on his blog called “PETAL-FALL SOURCECODE, 9.20.01” he explains that the store is E.Buk, in Soho.

Gazing into E. Buk’s window, for me, has been like gazing into the back reaches of some cave where Manhattan stores its dreams. There is no knowing what might appear there. Once, a stove-sized, florally ornate cast-iron fragment that might have been a leftover part of the Brooklyn Bridge. Once, a lovingly-crafted plywood box containing exquisitely painted models of every ballistic missile in the arsenals of the US and the USSR at the time of its making. This last, redolent of both the Cold War and the Cuban missile crisis, had particularly held my attention. It was obviously a military learning-aid, and I wondered what sort of lectures it had illustrated. It seemed, then, a relic from a dark and terrible time that I remembered increasingly as a dream, a very bad dream, of childhood.

But the image that kept coming to me, last week, was of the dust that must be settling on the ledge of E. Buk’s window, more or less between Houston and Canal Streets. And in that dust, surely, the stuff of the atomized dead.

The stuff of pyre and blasted dreams.

The image of the dust in E.Buk’s window gave Gibson an image to hang his hurt on, he said. The idea of rose petals falling is an image Rosanne Cash hung her hurt on as well, when her mother, her stepmother and her father, an aunt and a stepsister all died within an eighteen month period. A rose is at its most beautiful when it’s fully open, the petals completely unfurled, just before the flower dies. The first song she wrote after the death of her father was God is in the Roses. She lost a whole generation at once, all the petals falling from the stem. “It’s an odd feeling,” she said to Scott Simon during a conversation on NPR, “to become the wall between death and the generation behind you and your children.” 

The telling of stories, personal stories, the world’s stories, the enduring stories of mythology, is increasingly drifting towards the internet. Much of it is being made shorter, shinier, sillier, sharper, to be beamed onto small screens, or dance in front of the eyes. In the past the deep, important stories about society and the issues of the day have been in newspapers, which, in their print form have become all but dinosaurs, while media companies, increasingly beholden to their stockholders rather than the public, try, largely unsuccessfully, to figure out how to make rich revenue streams online. “A form of journalism will continue to exist, of course,” writes former Sydney Morning Herald editor Eric Beecher in The Monthly. “But increasingly it is likely to be populist and simplistic, celebrity-focused and entertainment-based: the kind that attracts large audiences and doesn’t need too much time, thought or money. What will fade away, or exist only in rare pockets, will be the deep, quality journalism which is heavily funded by those media owners who regard it as a public trust.”

Jeff Jarvis on Buzz Machine seeks thoughts about the future of the newspaper. “I’ve been asked to write an essay envisioning the newspaper in 2020″ he wrote. “I think that’s the wrong way to envision it. Instead, I want to think about what (local) news, information, and community can and will be like a dozen years from now. Rather than starting with an existing operation, start with the opportunities and then figure out how to fit into them.” Catch the rose petals as they’re falling is my suggestion.

Tiger Lillies in Melbourne

Eindhoven (Sep 05) – The Tiger Lillies, Photograph by Tim George. See his photographs here, on Flickr.

“What I do is against the mainstream in many respects; against daytime TV and the mindless blandity of contemporary, mainstream culture that doesn’t confront issues in any kind of way. It’s all beautiful healthy young people smiling and selling products. It’s all fake. I try and confront things with humour and intelligence, irony and sadness – I’m just trying to look at things and talk about them in interesting ways. I don’t want to have to limit myself to singing about how beautiful this girl is, and what a great pair of tits, or eyes . . .”

Martyn Jacques from the Tiger Lillies, quoted in The Age, February 7, 2007. 

Another story from the Age asked him for his definition of happiness. 

“To live unattached from all things and in harmony with them.” 

On a hellishly hot Saturday night in Melbourne a week ago, the Tiger Lillies performed at the North Melbourne Town Hall. Most of the room was set with tables to sketch the illusion of a cabaret. At 7.30 p.m a shabby crowd wandered in wearing shorts and t-shirts, gardening clothes, what they might have worn to the cricket. They drank beer from bottles. And the Tiger Lillies cast a spell: it became a glamorous, illicit midnight world, created with clarity and precision. It seems perverse to ascribe subtlety and beauty and an aching affection, bordering on sweetness, for the downtrodden to the Tiger Lillies because mostly what’s written about them seems to be a garish sketch of their colourful surfaces, a catalogue of the perversions they list, and a census of the communities that they chronicle, all outcasts and losers and itinerants: pirates, freaks, circus folk.  The press is literal, as if the writers believe that the Tiger Lillies really ARE pirates and vagabonds and circus performers who personally practise the perversities they sing of. The press page of the Tiger Lillies website acknowledges this cultivating of surfaces: there’s a list of articles that’s a “convenient collection for busy press people,” and even a page of quick quotes of “praise and damnation.”

The first words of praise are from Alex Kapranos, the singer from Franz Ferdinand,

There is nothing else like them. Any description of them is an injustice – they are completely peerless.  – Alex Kapranos of Franz Ferdinand

Alex Kapranos’ book Sound Bites, a collection of essays about places he’s eaten and people he’s met, are illuminating and entertaining observations of the world: “Whether it’s munching donuts with cops in Brooklyn, swallowing bull’s balls with the band in Buenos Aires or queuing for a saveloy in South Shields, these are surprising and vivid snapshots. Funny, poignant, sickening or sexual, depending on the situation.”

“I don’t know how many times Prague has been invaded,” he writes, “but tonight it seems to have been invaded by wankers: British wankers, German wankers, North African wankers and American wankers. A tourist in his early 20s is explaining to another tourist in her early 20s that he is not a tourist: he is a ‘traveller’. They have a tourist map spread on the cafe table in front of them, by the English translation of the menu. He is saying that his experience is richer. He looks, smells and acts like a tourist. I don’t get it.”

“I’m a tourist,” Kapranos continues. “I tour the world. I don’t feel I have to excuse myself.”

Alex Kapranos interviewed at World Hum.com

The Tiger Lillies are constantly in motion too, constantly travelling.

The second item of praise on the list begins “This delicious dark cabaret is Kurt Weill as …” I’m out of my depth writing about theatre and the politically-inflected European musical theatre of the 1920’s and the 1930’s. I feel qualified to write about the Marx Brothers, and I will, but there’s an obvious point to be made: Bertolt Brecht, and his Threepenny Opera, written and staged in Germany just after the end of the First World War, is something the Tiger Lillies constantly refer to. Music writers cite this in their articles as if it’s just another band name, Kurt Weill is just another pop star (a golden oldie, perhaps, but a hitmaker in his day) and the cabaret was just another gig in a rough part of town. The entertainment articles footnote these things unquestioningly. One of the factors that led me to abandon music writing very early on in my career is that I never knew what to make of band names: I was too earnest about finding meaning in them. Google Franz Ferdinand and the Austrian duke whose assassination set in place a chain of events that triggered World War I comes fifth in a list behind websites and citations for the Scottish pop band that’s named for him. But the world in the aftermath of the war following the death of the original Franz Ferdinand is the time when Brecht wrote his Threepenny Opera, an adaptation of the Beggars Opera from 1728, dragging a high art into the street and roughing it up.  Read enough of the quick bites for journalists on the Tiger Lillies site and the references are as strongly stressed as if they were flashing on a billboard behind the band. It isn’t enough to note the words (as if they were just decorative and shorn of meaning, as English words sometimes are on t-shirts in Japan). At a site devoted to the history of the Threepenny Opera the theatre critic Kenneth Tynan says “It sets reality to music” and Bob Dylan says “I was aroused straightaway by the raw intensity of the songs.” 

By showing with biting humor what the world would be like if it were inhabited by crooks and hypocrites, The Threepenny Opera does more good than all the dreams of noble souls.
               —Kurt Weill, from a letter to Lotte Lenya, May 11, 1945

Just like two hundred years ago we have a social order in which virtually all levels, albeit in a wide variety of ways, pay respect to moral principles not by leading a moral life but by living off morality.                —Bertolt Brecht quoted in an article in Augsburger Neueste Nachrichten, January 9, 1929

Everything about the Tiger Lillies has the appearance of being carefully composed, there isn’t a superfluous gesture, no halting banter, the exclamation marks and props and sound effects and little bits of pantomimery – the clown’s traditional bag of rude tricks – are obvious and well-timed: Yet all of this adds up to a snapshot of the world, as it really is, scrubbed of make-up and without artifice, that could break your heart. The show in Melbourne began with a call to the audience to roll up for the circus, but it was as if the Tiger Lillies music was holding up an enormous mirror pointed at the audience, and reflecting back what it saw there, the animal acts and lewd longings were reportage by the Tiger Lillies, not descriptions of their own activities. The audience laughed at the Tiger Lillies songs and were really laughing at themselves: the court jester was the one who could tell the King the truth without losing his head.

Many of the Tiger Lillies Circus songs do double duty as part of the soundtrack to Circa, a tango-based dance performance that the Tiger Lillies performed with The Holy Body Tattoo.

A celebration of the sensual forces of submission and control. Circa is imbued with the dark beauty of decay and the (unspoken) language of desire. Saturated with smoky tango and cabaret debauchery, it is a raw duet evocative of the tangled rituals of foreplay, unfulfilled desires embraced, the imprints of old lives, and a shadowy yet uncompromising eroticism.

The Holy Body Tattoo website.

Circa is a latin term for an imprecise measuring of a period of time: marked perhaps more by something symbolic, attitudes and philosophies rather than specific events that can be reliably fixed on a calendar. Projected through the performance are images of Paris, where the tango expressed the political unrest and turbulence of Argentina in the 1950’s, and the artform that had emerged from the brothels in Beunos Aires to become a glamorous global phenomenon descended back into the brothels and became marginal, and hidden again.

And then he [Thomas Mann] says, “The writer must be true to truth.” And that’s a killer, because the only way you can describe a human being truly is by describing his imperfections. The perfect human being is uninteresting — the Buddha who leaves the world, you know. It is the imperfections of life that are lovable. And when the writer sends a dart of the true word, it hurts. But it goes with love. This is what Mann called “erotic irony,” the love for that which you are killing with your cruel, analytical word.

The Power of Myth. Joseph Campbell.

The Circus Songs and Circa feature a version of Stephen Sondheim’s Send in the Clowns. In circus lore the when there’s an accident or disaster the clowns are sent in to distract the audience. In actual circuses the song may also have been used to alert people backstage to the injury of a performer. In the Circus Songs Pretty Lisa is tattooed head-to-toe by her pimp so that he can hit her and the bruises won’t show. When the Tiger Lillies play beauty straight, without the distraction of comedy, and without the colourful images that hide the bruises it’s almost unbearably painful. The second half of the Tiger Lillies performance in Melbourne began with a few quiet songs that Martyn Jacques played on the piano, lilting and slow and crystalline on the surface and bruised underneath, that reminded me of the collaborations between Billie Holiday and Lester Young.

Her bluesy vocal style brought a slow and rough quality to the jazz standards that were often upbeat and light. This combination made for poignant and distinctive renditions of songs that were already standards. By slowing the tone with emotive vocals that reset the timing and rhythm, she added a new dimension to jazz singing. With John Hammond’s support, Holiday spent much of the 1930s working with a range of great jazz musicians, including Benny Goodman, Teddy Wilson, Duke Ellington, Ben Webster, and most importantly, the saxophonist Lester Young. Together, Young and Holiday would create some of the greatest jazz recordings of all time. They were close friends throughout their lives—giving each other their now-famous nicknames of “Lady Day” and the “Prez.” Sympathetic to Holiday’s unique style, Young helped her create music that would best highlight her unconventional talents. With songs like “This Year’s Kisses” and “Mean To Me,” the two composed a perfect collaboration.

It was not, however, until 1939, with her song “Strange Fruit,” that Holiday found her real audience. A deeply powerful song about lynching, “Strange Fruit” was a revelation in its disturbing and emotional condemnation of racism. Holiday’s voice could be both quiet and strong at the same time. Songs such as “God Bless the Child” and “Gloomy Sunday” expressed not only her undeniable talent, but her incredible pain as well. Due to constant racial attacks, Holiday had a difficult time touring and spent much of the 1940s working in New York. While her popularity was growing, Holiday’s personal life remained troubled. Though one of the highest paid performers of the time, much of her income went to pay for her serious drug addictions. Though plagued by health problems, bad relationships, and addiction, Holiday remained an unequaled performer.

American Masters. PBS Series.

A hush fell over the audience. Martyn Jacques stood up from the piano and shuffled over to the microphone, strapping on his accordion. He sang a rough, majestic song from the point of view of Heroin, the drug glorifying itself as a king and worshipful figure, revealing that the tragic figures the Tiger Lillies sing about may not be looking for entertainment and an adrenalin rush, for kicks, but just to deaden the pain. Buddhism begins with the premise that all life is suffering and the way to alleviate that suffering is to recognise the suffering of others, to suffer with them, and to alleviate pain where we can. Where there’s no compassion the only way to live with pain may be to dull it, the Tiger Lillies’ presentation of the beguiling sensuality of Heroin’s lure was possibly the most shocking and disturbing part of their show.

Their adaptation of some bits of literary flotsam and jetsam by Edward Gorey who was inspired by Victoriana, set to music with the Kronos Quartet, illustrates what happens when sensuality is denied and demonised as it was in Victorian times. “Moral Puritanism can screw things up” Alex Kapranos said about British food. “Britain‘s cuisine was ruined by the Victorians and their uptight sense of protestant guilt when encountering anything vaguely sensual, including food that tasted stronger than potatoes that had been boiled for six hours.”

Imagine what it was like for Gorey to try to put himself over before he’d become the macabre sensation he is today. Consider the reaction of Robert Gottlieb — then at Simon & Schuster and later the editor of the New Yorker — when Gorey’s agent presented him with “The Loathsome Couple,” a tale based on the story of a British couple who murdered several children, only to be caught when they dropped photographs depicting their handiwork on a crowded bus. (The book’s frontispiece declares, “This book may prove to be its author’s most unpleasant ever.”) Gottlieb rejected the book on the grounds that it wasn’t funny. An astonished Gorey replied, “Well, Bob, it wasn’t supposed to be funny; what a peculiar reaction.”

But, of course, “The Loathsome Couple” is hysterically funny. You will be forgiven for finding the juxtaposition of child murders with helpless laughter outrageously blasphemous. The humor in this story comes from the sheer blandness of it all. Mona and Harold, the hapless villains, move from their dismal childhoods to dismal adulthoods of petty crime, to an unsuccessful union (they “fumble with each other in a cold woodshed” after a crime film, and when they attempt to make love, their “strenuous and prolonged efforts came to nothing”) to embarking on their “life’s work” — luring small children to their deaths in a rented “remote and undesirable villa.” To celebrate their first kill, Harold and Mona dine on “cornflakes and treacle, turnip sandwiches and artificial grape soda.”

The problem would persist throughout Gorey’s career. Is he writing humor? Are dead people funny? Maybe it’s literature: Gorey’s prose reads by turns like haiku, or Dadaist automatic writing, and employs more words from the OED than Joyce’s does. But his books are illustrated, recalling the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Georges Barbier and Goya. Does that make it art? And they’re small, borrowing the nonsense of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, coupled with the grim infanticides of the Brothers Grimm. Could they be books for children?

Edward Gorey Interview. Salon.com

The Tiger Lillies are true and respectful to the theatrical and musical traditions they spring from but what they are also part of is a mature branch of rock and roll that’s keeping mythological symbols alive and re-interpreting them for our time. These musicians — a group that includes Lou Reed, Tom Waits, Nick Cave, Rosanne Cash, Bruce Springsteen — use sadness in a way that’s interpreted too literally by the music press, and the full spectrum of sadness, its redemptive quality, and how it’s only through understanding sadness that we can appreciate happiness, isn’t remarked upon. The Tiger Lillies have the opposite problem: comedy and comic touches in music is perhaps even more misunderstood than sadness, more easily dismissed and its sad touches, the value of the fury and savage deeds that the Tiger Lillies so amusingly portray, isn’t assessed, isn’t something we recognise as a reflection of something inside all of us. The Tiger Lillies are heroes.  

“The hero’s journey isn’t to deny reason. To the contrary, by overcoming the dark passions, the hero symbolises our ability to control the irrational savage within us.” Campbell had lamented on other occasions our failure “to admit within ourselves the carnivorous, lecherous fever” that is endemic to human nature. Now he was describing the hero’s journey not as a courageous act but as a life lived in self-discovery. Ironically, to Campbell the end of the hero’s journey is not the aggrandizement of the hero. “It is,” he said in one of his lectures, “not to identify oneself with any of the figures or powers experienced. The Indian yogi, striving for release, identifies himself with the Light and never returns. But no one with a will to the service of others would permit himself such an escape. The ultimate aim of the quest must be neither release nor ecstasy for oneself, but the wisdom and power to serve others.” One of hte many distinctions between the celebrity and the hero, he said, is that one lives only for self while the other acts to redeem society.

The Power of Myth. Bill Moyers with Joseph Campbell.