Love Songs for the 21st Century

Lou Reed performing Berlin, with a children’s choir, in Manchester.

SYDNEY: January 2007. 

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}

The main event the Sydney Festival this year was Lou Reed performing his Berlin album in a theatrical setting, directed by and with a set by painter and film-maker Julian Schnabel and atmospheric videos by Schnabel’s daughter, Lola, with some of the band he made the album with in 1973, and a children’s choir mixed with the unsettling otherworldly beauty of the voice of Antony that’s pitched somewhere beyond human and not quite angelic. The Sydney Festival had helped put the show together with St. Ann’s Warehouse, in New York, where it premiered.

Lou Reed’s album “Berlin,” a song cycle about a romance doomed by drugs, promiscuity and violence, was one of his career’s grand anomalies when it was released in 1973. Instead of the stripped-down rock that made punk archetypes of Mr. Reed’s best-known songs, the sound of “Berlin” was not primal but theatrical, with strings and horns and touches of cabaret. The album was either dismissed as pretentious and overwrought or hailed for its ambition; it didn’t sell, but it garnered some lifelong fans. After 33 years, it had its first staged performance at St. Ann’s Warehouse on Thursday night. There, “Berlin” was less startling but no less ambitious or, in the end, touching. …

Mr. Reed wasn’t revisiting his songs as oldies or artifacts; he was reinhabiting them….The core of “Berlin” is the contrast between feelings — love, anger, grief — and the numbness of pills, casual sex and depression. Caroline and Jim, the couple whose story takes place in Berlin, are not particularly sympathetic, even among the many lowlife characters who have populated Mr. Reed’s songs before and since. She toys with him and sleeps around, growing so cool and withdrawn that “her friends call her Alaska.” He’s a speed freak who beats her black and blue. Eventually, after their children are taken from Caroline as an unfit mother, she commits suicide. In the concluding “Sad Song,” Jim shrugs, “I’m gonna stop wastin’ my time/Somebody else would have broken both of her arms.” …

But the lyrics wonder, “How do you think it feels?,” and the music answers. At first, there are sarcastically upbeat horns and swaggering guitars; later, as things spiral downhill, it is pared down to unadorned guitar or piano and a voice that, in Mr. Reed’s deceptive deadpan, sounds as if it’s choking back all its rage and sorrow. In “The Bed,” which recalls Caroline’s suicide, the pure voices of a children’s choir float in to join the singer as he muses, “Oh, oh, oh, what a feeling,” and linger after he’s done in ghostly, wordless swoops of dissonance that met a stunned silence at St. Ann’s.

Jon Pareles. New York Times. December 16, 2006

Rosanne Cash. family photograhphs from her website.

Also at the Sydney Festival was Rosanne Cash’s staging of her Black Cadillac album, which travels across a landscape of grief. It too was incubated at St. Ann’s Warehouse. Rosanne Cash’s stepmother, June Carter Cash, died in May of 2003 then her father, Johnny Cash, four months later. In May of 2005 her mother, Vivian Liberto Cash Distin, died. (During that time an aunt and a stepsister also died.) The first song she wrote after her father died was God is in the Roses. During a conversation on National Public Radio Scott Simon said, “There are some wonderful lines in here but the one that I think is going to stop a lot of hearts is ‘they’re falling like petals’…” A rose is at its most beautiful when it’s fully open, the petals completely unfurled, just before the flower dies. Rosanne Cash lost a whole generation at once, all of the petals falling from the stem. “It’s an odd feeling,” she said to Scott Simon, “to become the wall between death and the generation behind you and your children.” 

When Ms. Cash was making her album Black Cadillac (Capitol), she ended up thinking not just about them, but also about the long line of her family and a musical heritage that reaches back through country to Celtic music. On Thursday night at St. Ann’s Warehouse, she introduced Black Cadillac in Concert, a performance interspersed with video and ostensibly narration. It looked back to William Cash, a Scottish sailor who came to the United States in 1653; there were recurring images of rivers and oceans. And it dipped into a list of 100 essential country songs her father made for her. With video images of waves overhead, her recorded voice said, “I am at the congruence of sea and dirt, and it becomes a song.” What could have been pretentious was calmly moving….

From her father’s list, she chose the Don Gibson hit “Sea of Heartbreak,” revealing both the plain-spoken sadness and the stoicism. The kinship with her own songs was in the directness, not the twang. She finished the concert with her father’s “Big River,” introducing it as “another water song.” Her father had brought wry amusement to its tale of chasing an unforgettable woman who was always a few cities ahead of him. But when Ms. Cash sang “Big River,” pursuing “that man” instead of “that woman,” she found both the humor and something else her father had written in: the loss of someone truly gone, never to return.

Jon Pareles. New York Times. May 6, 2006

The whole Sydney Festival was embraced by the city and was the most successful on record, the shows sold out, the free events attracted huge crowds. The Festival’s director, Fergus Linehan, said “it broke through to a broader consciousness; the overall event just seemed to be really well loved, people were almost affectionate towards it”. The sorrow and pain and suffering in Lou Reed’s and Rosanne Cash’s performances were received exultantly by the audiences. It was 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.”

The Sydney Festival has been instrumental in recognising 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. The Sydney Festival also presents how dance relates differently to the music being made by these performers, that it’s through dance (or the ritual movement in some abstract theatre pieces) that the symbolic qualities of the music  are most clearly and profoundly evident. The Sydney Festival had a great number of dance performances this year: two of them, Zero Degrees  by Akram Khan and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, and our brief eternity by The Holy Body Tattoo, from dancers who create powerful collaborations with rock and roll musicians and bring the music fully alive not by acting out a story but showing how our movements, how we move through life, marks us and affects the communities we live in. 

The Holy Body Tattoo’s our brief eternity, with pounding musical noise by Jean Yves Theriault that is immersive and inescapable (like the sounds that surround us in cities). It’s a question about compassion framed by the test in Bladerunner that suggests that robots can intellectually appreciate the notion of compassion, but in their eyes it shows that they can’t really feel the emotion. The people in our brief eternity are driven by machines and their movements become machine-like. A ritual bow of respect becomes rote and stripped of meaning by speeding it up and repeating it over-and-over. The question is answered in a text by the science fiction writer William Gibson and Christopher Halcrow, which finds human qualities re-asserting themselves. The text begins and circles around to end with: ‘Somehow, continue:”

 

Zero Degrees

Zero Degrees is the point where states that are each other’s polar opposite meet. The programme lists ‘birth/death, light/dark, chaos/order’. The music is by the sublime Nitin Sawhney whose own albums are assembled from the meeting points between many different cultures and traditions, ancient and contemporary.

 In Zero Degrees he combines cello and violin with the Brazilian surdo drum and the voice of Pakistani-trained Faheem Mazhar. It narrates a train journey from Bangladesh to Calcutta, in which Akram Khan’s dancer is harassed by border guards and finds himself sharing a carriage with a corpse. The piece premiered last year only days after 7/7, the day of the London bombings. “It seemed incredibly in tune with the times,” Sawhney says. “There was the resonance of a dead person on the train, and the growing paranoia that people are quick to exploit. It’s a given that we should be protective of national borders. But why? I’m more interested in humanity than nationality.”

Nitin Sawhney interviewed in The Guardian. April 1, 2006

Nitin Sawhney’s album Beyond Skin exists in the same territory as Zero Degrees. The album stands creation and destruction next to one another, and peace and war, and harmony and social unrest. It begins with a fragment of archival audio, India’s Prime Minister, the leader of a nation that developed Buddhism — an enduring spiritual system stressing non-violence — announcing that it’s conducted tests of a nuclear bomb. The album closes with the leader of the Manhattan Project, Robert Oppenheimer, quoting from the Hindu Scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, in response to the first successful test of an atomic bomb: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

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. 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.” 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.

Collectively the music of Nick Cave, and Lou Reed, and Rosanne Cash, and Nitin Sawhney, 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.

Gospel music bears witness to extreme human suffering but the response to this suffering isn’t despair and devestation, souls are inevitably lifted up, as the voices are raised up in praise, the eyes are lifted up towards the Heavens. There is ultimately hope. The double album that Nick Cave made with a gospel choir, The Abattoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus, has a blossom on the cover, being pollinated by a bird, seen from the vantage of point of someone who is looking up toward the sky. 

Nick Cave’s double album Abattoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus is a two part question on the origin of beauty in music. Is it the outcome of a pact made with the devil, a transaction conducted at a deserted back road intersection on a moonless midnight (the moon is a symbol for the death and resurrection of Christ)? Or a gift from the Gods, the lyre given to Orpheus and the supernatural power of his music to move inanimate objects, soothe savage beasts and to reverse death? The answer is neither. The language of the albums is a communal one,  gospel, a music that is an acknowledgement of the pain and darkness in life itself, that finds solace in love: love of god, love of others. A kind of love, Dr. Martin Luther King said, that causes you to love even those whose deeds one hates. “You’ve got to love.”The imagery of springtime is in many of the songs on these double albums, but it’s not the outside world, I think, that Nick’s describing. It’s not as though we’ve suddenly reversed the climate change and flowers bloom again. It’s a flowering of hope in the heart that acknowledges suffering and finds beauty in small communal acts.

I was just a boy when I sat down
To watch the news on TV
I saw some ordinary slaughter
I saw some routine atrocity
My father said, don’t look away
You got to be strong, you got to be bold, now
He said, that in the end it is beauty
That is going to save the world, now

Nature Boy. Nick Cave

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 festival deepens the appreciation of the works in the way that being a lone focus wouldn’t.

The Cast of Came So Far For Beauty on the steps of the Sydney Opera House.

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.

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.

There’s value in hearing an artist talk about their personal reactions to the state of the world: Rosanne Cash collects stories and details that expand our appreciation of their songs.

It’s been a hard summer, all around. The conflict abroad mimics the conflict in my own heart. And vice versa. But what do I have the power to heal, what is within my control? I meditate every single day, and every single day I say, “I surrender my will to the will of the Absolute”. And then I go out and try to inflict my will on every damn thing I cross. Those stones I fill with my heartaches and toss in the ocean come back, as meteors. But. Something is shifting. I feel it. Aren’t you sick to death of waste and misery, violence, hatred and UN-Love?

Rosanne Cash, on her website, August 2, 2006

What the Sydney Festival has done is weave individual voices together, into a conversation.

Night falls softly in Haruki Murakami’s new novel

Dolly the sheep, Photograph by Ninetta at Flickr

In the darkness a beacon is anything that shines, however weakly, however briefly. Standing sentry above the common gloom, Murakami detects phosphorescence everywhere, but chiefly in the auras around people, which glow brightest at night and when combined but fade at dawn, when we go our separate ways. From Walter Kirn’s review of Haruki Murakami’s new novel, After Dark.

In Murakami’s novel, Walter Kirn says, night renders everything blurred and boundariless. “Individuals who were separate during the day begin to lose uniqueness, to leak distinctiveness, melting into a soft psychic collective….  During the wee hours, we’re all in this together, our spirits spooned like lovers’ bodies.” The Wild Sheep Chase begins with an advertising executive receiving a postcard of a pastoral scene, that he incorporates into an advertisement. But in the background on the card is a mutant sheep, with a black star on its back, that has been missing for a number of years. The advertising executive gets caught up in a quest to find that sheep. It’s a hard-boiled detective mystery with a cool blonde, and a strange, mythological figure known as Sheep Man.

The cool blonde has fantastic ears that have magical properties: “She’d show me her ears on occasions,” Murakami wrote, “mostly on sexual occasions. Sex with her ears exposed was an experience I’d never known. When it was raining the smell of rain came through crystal clear. When birds were singing their song was a thing of sheer clarity. I’m at a loss for words, but that was what it was like.” There was a long meditation in Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words, an appreciation of his writing by one of his translators, Jay Rubin, on the role of music, especially jazz, and listening, in Murakami’s novels.

In South of the Border, West of the Sun, named for a Nat King Cole song, the lead character owns a jazz club. It’s a hazy and kind of sadness that’s similar to Disney songs interpreted with a crystalline melancholy by be-bop musicians: John Coltrane’s My Favourite Things, Miles Davis’s Someday My Prince Will Come and Bill Evans’s exquisitely spare rendition of the theme from Disney’s Alice in Wonderland.

Bill Evans’s solos are as “close to pure emotion, produced without impediments as exists in music,” wrote Adam Gopnik. “His music hints at the secret truth that New York is sad before it is busy, and that it is a kind of inverted garden, with all the flowers blooming down in the basements.”

In a scrapbook I’ve saved phrases from the novel that I think of as a jazz musician’s solos:

When I awoke the following  morning, it was April. As delicately rendered as a passage from Truman Capote, fleeting, fragile, beautiful. April, made famous by T. S. Eliot and Count Basie.

Unwrap those symbols and you’ll find Holly Golightly’s restlessness and loneliness as an eccentric, casual quest for adventure, the first line of the Wasteland, T. S. Eliot’s poem that describes not a landscape but the frozen souls of people living inauthentic lives, deadened to the sweetness of compassion, and a romantic portrait of an unreal Paris by someone who’d never been there: lyricist Yip Harburg dreamed it up from travel brochures. In South of the Border, West of the Sun, the jazz club owner meets again a woman who’d been a childhood friend, an unusual, beautiful girl with a limp. He regrets having disregarded this childhood friendship.

I should have stayed as close as I could to her. I needed her, and she needed me. But my self-consciousness was too strong, and I was afraid of being hurt. Her gentle touch warmed my heart for days. At the same time it confused me, and made me perplexed, even sad in a way. How could I possibly come to terms with that warmth.

The novel ends with the childhood friend gone again, in mysterious circumstances, but the jazz club owner believes it’s forever. He takes stock of his life and approaches, regretfully, the pain he’s caused his wife and children. There’s a quiet hope stirring in his heart, the possibility of happiness somewhere on the horizon, his heart is thawing, warming. The failure to connect has permeated this novel.

But no matter how advanced the system, no matter how precise, unless we have the will to communicate, there is no connection. And even supposing the will is there, there are times like now when we don’t know the number, we misdial. We are an imperfect and unrepentant species.

Haruki Murakami wrote about his obsession with jazz in the New York Times.

Whether in music or in fiction, the most basic thing is rhythm. Your style needs to have good, natural, steady rhythm, or people won’t keep reading your work. I learned the importance of rhythm from music — and mainly from jazz. Next comes melody — which, in literature, means the appropriate arrangement of the words to match the rhythm. If the way the words fit the rhythm is smooth and beautiful, you can’t ask for anything more. Next is harmony — the internal mental sounds that support the words. Then comes the part I like best: free improvisation. Through some special channel, the story comes welling out freely from inside. All I have to do is get into the flow. Finally comes what may be the most important thing: that high you experience upon completing a work — upon ending your “performance” and feeling you have succeeded in reaching a place that is new and meaningful. And if all goes well, you get to share that sense of elevation with your readers (your audience). That is a marvelous culmination that can be achieved in no other way. Practically everything I know about writing, then, I learned from music.

The Future is Veal

 

The Calf Bearer – Athens, Acropolis Museum, published at Flickr by Schumata.

“The Moschophoros (calf-bearer). Archaic statue of a bearded man carrying a calf on his shoulders. The eyes of the figure were inset. According to the inscription on the base, it was offered by Rhombos. Dated to 570 B.C”

William Gibson interviewed by Donna McMahon on the SF site in January, 2003.

You’ve been talking for a long time now about the demise of sub-cultures, that they’re co-opted by marketing forces before they become established. Can you give me an example?

Well, my model for that has always been how long it took to recommodify whatever it was that was happening in the 60s and sell it back to the people who were actually living it. It took three or four years. It was still relatively clumsy. By 1977, it only took about a year and a half for punk to be recommodified and sold back. And whatever was going on in Seattle with Nirvana — from its discovery it took about three months before there were models on the catwalks in Paris wearing clothing based on what these kids wore on Sentinel Hill in Seattle.What that says to me is that the future of that stuff is veal. It never gets to mature because it’s too valuable. And I suspect it’s because whatever that was was an organic function of industrial civilization. We are now post-industrial and we no longer grow bohemias in the same way. I’m wondering where they are? Where’s the new equivalent?

our brief eternity: The Holy Body Tattoo at the Sydney Festival

_{photo credit: Tessa Bartholomeusz}

The waters rise through the roots of the cities;

deer in the streets of downtown Detroit,

an iris bursts the Paris pavement,

the old, the modern, deconstructs into fern curl,

flowers nodding by a wall.

_{our brief eternity by William Gibson and Christoper Halcrow.}

Since my return to Melbourne after seeing the opening night of The Holy Body Tattoo’s dance piece our brief eternity at the Opera House during the Sydney Festival, I encounter the show’s themes everywhere. What I mean is that phrases from William Gibson and Christopher Halcrow’s poem that are projected throughout the show, catch at my heart and seem to hover, like headlines or captions above the things that I’ve seen or read since, that move me.

A year or so ago I used to just read the online versions of my favourite newspapers — The New York Times, The Calcutta Telegraph, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, The San Francisco Chronicle — and then, for no particular reason, I started signing up for the newsletters that came from online publications. This wasn’t intentional but when I look at my subscriptions file it’s stuffed with publications devoted to ethics and the environment: I read Treehugger and Worldchanging before The New York Times these days. And I skim about four or five others. The day after I saw our brief eternity I was glancing through an e-mail from The Huffington Post and chills ran down my spine while reading Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s story. It sounded as if he was reciting the poem from our brief eternity.

“Last week I saw robins and bluebirds in upstate New York where they don’t usually arrive before April.

Crocuses and daffodils were in bloom everywhere.

A friend ate asparagus he harvested in the normally frozen Catskills in the first week of January.

Turtles in downstate New York, like bears in Scandinavia, forgot to hibernate for the first time in human history.”

The Holy Body Tattoo is a concept as a company name: The way we move through life, our actions and movements, mark our spirits indelibly as if they’re tattooed there. our brief eternity is ten years old. It was written roughly ten years after William Gibson’s first novel Neuromancer was released in that pile up of cultural artefacts that seemed to symbolise the end of the world — punk rock, the movie Bladerunner, Apple’s personal computer, the Sony Walkman (the last great analog device).

The prologue to Bladerunner is that human beings have destroyed all animal and plant life and have relocated to Mars where they’re issued a humanoid companion programmed with “memories”. All that’s left on earth are the desperate, the disfigured and those who’ve stubbornly refused to leave. There’s a sequence from Philip K. Dick’s novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? that didn’t make it into Bladerunner, that I copied into one of my scrapbooks and didn’t footnote properly.

“Don’t the androids keep you company? I heard a commercial on –… I understood that the androids helped.”

“The androids,” she said, “are lonely too.”

Several androids escape from their owners and travel to earth, determined to have an authentic existence. Earth might be ruined, they might be programmed to shut down in a few years, but at least they will have lived full lives within a community. our brief eternity begins with a fragment of audio from Bladerunner. Deckard, the android hunter, who turns out to be an android himself, is being given the ‘Voight-Kampff Empathy Test’ that’s all that’s able to determine that the androids aren’t fully human; they can mimic compassionate responses when shown images of suffering, but their eyes give them away and show that they don’t really feel compassion.

In our brief eternity the dancers perform repetitive, mechanistic movements driven by mind-numbing industrial noise and the anxiety of following machines and keeping up and reaching for the next new toy, the cooler and richer format, exhausts the soul as much as the body. Technology’s power to confound and disappoint as much as dazzle us and expand our abilities is William Gibson’s message too, and in all of his writing there’s a spiritual yearning, a drawing of the stories and myths of the spirit (from just about every world religion) into the developing technological worlds. In his books people inevitably end up with nothing but each other and their recognition of the value of the human bonds is their salvation. This is ultimately the message of our brief eternity, too, which begins with the words “Somehow, continue:” and circles back to them at the close of the show as the humans stand together quietly, peacefully.

The show’s designer Steven R. Gilmore described William Gibson and Christopher Halcrow’s poem to me as “an extended haiku”. Something that I read about the intention of the haiku form applies to our brief eternity: “Its practice has come to seem nearly inseperable from a pilgrimage through natural and human landscapes, an outward journey that’s vividly an inwardly journey too.”

The Holy Body Tattoo’s movements are symbolic, they don’t act out the words of the text but with the rapidly accelerating wildness of the world’s weather, and the dramatic effects of thedrought  in Australian cities the connection to dead earth setting of Bladerunner seems literally true, realism not metaphor. In Melbourne lawns have become dustbowls and hundred year old trees, stressed into an early autumn mode, are shedding their leaves or losing limbs or falling down dead. Smoke from Victorian bushfires stung the eyes in Sydney on the day that our brief eternity opened. Massive storms were hitting the Western Australian coastline. Robot dog explorers are still on Mars, sending photos of a terrain that shows evidence of once having water.

The haiku is a form that reflects upon nature and the seasons as a way of appreciating the stages of life, happiness emerging from contemplating sadness and an appreciation for life from acknowledging its fragility and impermanence.  William Gibson’s poem and our brief eternity contain within them a measured hopefulness, the promise of rebirth and renewal.

There is the possibility of laughter.

We are discovered by others of our own kind, old differences worn smooth by the extremity of our age, erasing race, savageries of language.

Religion is a small smooth stone we take in turn into our mouths to hold.

To find a place beyond the signs free of our sleepless, our terrible inheritance, a country of of simple actions of seeds, of rain, of wind, our tasks our anchor.

Culture consists of sharing water, the gathering of food, defense against the hungry signs of the ancestors, the loss of an individual utterly reconfigures the whole; be vigilant…

Somehow, continue:

_{William Gibson & Christopher Halcrow}.

The Holy Body Tattoo

Thinking Broadly About the Risk of GMO’s

. Tales From The Rice Bowl – A Story Of Essential Consumption . Photograph by 3amfromkyoto at Flickr. 

The issues surrounding food production in Australia are so overwhelmingly large and urgent that it’s hard to pause for a moment and think carefully, weighing up the risks and rewards of actions that overlap between complex fields of study and competing interests. There are lists now of which Australian cities are likely to run out of water first — Melbourne in perhaps 63 weeks — and irrigation has already been halted for food production in the Murray Darling region, and if we widen our perspective to include the urgent concerns of our near-Asian neighbours we’re faced with the global threats of bird flu that might mutate into strains that cross from infected to healthy humans, creating a pandemic, and the world’s population rising fast, with no commensurate increase in our ability to be able to feed everyone. So, is it irresponsible not to genetically retool our foodstuffs to make them more environmentally flexible, gird them to prevent disease, and boost their nutritional value to address world hunger?

When those broad ethical concerns are translated into genetically modified foodstuffs, measuring their safety becomes the concern of the Food Standards Australia and New Zealand (FSANZ) division of the Federal Government. It’s a two part process: first the Office of Gene Technology Regulator, reviews the organisms according to the guidelines in the Gene Technology Act 2000 ” in order to protect the health and safety of Australians and the Australian environment by identifying risks posed by or as a result of gene technology, and to manage those risks by regulating certain dealings with genetically modified organisms.”

If those genetically modified organisms are to become food for human consumption, FSANZ carries out further reviews, “after the OGTR has decided they are safe in the form of crops to be released into the environment, Food Standards Australia New Zealand does its own checks to see whether they are safe for humans to eat. We have a special Food Standard Standard 1.5.2. – foods produced using gene technology – that regulates the sale of GM foods in Australia and New Zealand. The standard has two provisions – a mandatory pre-market safety assessment requirement and a mandatory labelling requirement.”

The risks seem almost unmeasurably complex. If we start to use food crops to produce medicine how do we regulate the doses? What happens if we unknowingly mix different kinds of medicinal foodstuffs, or mix medicinal foodstuffs with traditional medicines? How do we measure the safety of a processed ready-to-eat meal made with gm drought resistant grains, transgenic frost resistant tomatoes, milk designed to prevent birth defects, and chicken genetically modified to resist bird flu? Are we at risk from genetically modified foodstuffs fed to the animals we eat? What happens if transgenic creatures accidentally mate and it exposes some trait we hadn’t bargained on and don’t want?

“This is the key issue for the second generation GMOs” Jack Heinemann told me by e-mail. “The first generation was plants with altered agronomic qualities, intended to be in other respects substantially equivalent to conventional. Second generation are designed to be significantly different either because they produce pharmaceuticals or other industrial chemicals or have purposely altered nutritional qualities.”

Jack Heinemann is a professor of molecular biology in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and director of its Center for Integrated Research in Biosafety. He carries out a broad and complex assessment of the risks of genetically modified and engineered organisms with a particular focus on horizontal gene transfer, where genetic material is passed between organisms by methods other than direct breeding. The Centre for Integrated Research in Biosafety is independent of commercial interests in GMO products, transdisciplinary and involved with international collaborative projects. “INBI brings together scientists skilled in biotechnology research and safety assessment and social scientists with experience in the evaluation of the ethical, social, cultural and political impacts of novel technologies. This team is committed to working collaboratively across disciplinary boundaries and to modelling new forms of integrated research.”

I asked Jack if there’s a short description of how this process works.“No, except to say that it is hard and that is why so few people do it” he replied. “It requires natural scientists like myself to take a genuine interest in law, regulation, gender and culture (at the research level), and for social scientists to acquire a reasonable standard of knowledge about particular aspects of the natural sciences. Not many folks are prepared to do this in such depth, and among them only a handful are interested in this particular topic. More importantly, it is a combination of skills that we don’t find easy to sell to the funding agencies, possibly because they don’t have people who understand the value of the skills mixture or how difficult it is to develop this mixture and maintain it.”

In June the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) released a background study paper he’s written called A Typology of the Effects of (Trans)Gene Flow on the Conservation and Sustainable Use of Genetic Resources.

 

“The consequences of transgene flow are difficult to generalize. This is because of the variety of transgenes being developed, plants being made transgenic, environments in which GM plants are being introduced, legal systems operating worldwide, and stakeholder motivations,” he writes. “The only generalization that is possible is that transgene flow offers no intended benefits. Gene flow may not always be harmful, but it is highly unlikely to offer a fortuitous or designed advantage for those in the biotechnology industry, farmers that adopt GM crops, farmers that choose not to, those who value the present biodiversity of plants and wildlife, or those who monitor GM presence for safety or regulatory reasons. Gene flow potentially undermines the revenue of developers when those who do not buy transgenic seed nevertheless benefit from its agronomic properties. Simultaneously the industry may have increased costs from protecting their intellectual property, or exposure to additional liabilities. Farmers who do or do not adopt GM crops gain nothing from the flow of transgenes to wild relatives or to neighbors’ farms. They may even incur liabilities if transgenes do flow. Non-GM farmers also risk losing differentiated market certifications.”

By the end of last year FSANZ calculated that it had approved “31 different GM foods, including modifications of corn, cottonseed (the oil of which is edible), canola, soy, sugar beet and potato.” The complexity of dealing with the practical realities of the risks of genetically modified foodstuffs when they’re backed and introduced by a global agribusiness company is highlighted in application by Monsanto to bring into Australia the LYO38 strain of corn genetically modified to carry increased levels of the amino acid lysine, that’s intented to be imported in a processed form.

“There is no indication yet whether farmers will seek this corn for feed, so at present the corn’s main consumer will be human beings,” Jack said. “Presently it will be grown in the United States where it will co-mingle in silos with food corn, and cross pollinate corn intended for human food. Most will be harvested for use as animal feed (at least initially), with the rest being milled for processed food with the corn intended for humans. In time, it might be used in food aid (ostensibly to supplement the diets of Africans, for example), or it may be grown commonly because there are no regulatory barriers to its presence in the human corn supply.”

The Centre for Integrated Research in Biosafety is concerned about the risks that might come from this corn being cooked. “LY038 has high concentrations of compounds that are known to produce food hazards when heated with the sugars found in corn. The modification results in highly elevated concentrations of lysine (total), free lysine (not in protein), saccharopine, α-aminoadipic acid, cadaverine and pipecolic acid, all of which may be converted into advanced glycoxidation endproducts (AGEs) during cooking and processing. AGEs are implicated in the development of complications from a variety of dietary-related diseases including diabetes and Alzheimer’s, as well as cancer, and the normal effects of aging. AGE content in food increases with cooking and food processing temperatures and pressures.” (The full submission can be found here.) (FSANZ addresses the Centre’s concerns about this corn on its website.)

Jack Heinemann is one of the sources Denise Caruso drew upon for her appeal to broaden the assessment of risk from genetically modified organisms in her book INTERVENTION: Confronting the Real Risks of Genetic Engineering and Life on a Biotech Planet. She suggests bringing more voices into the debate, from other branches of science, arts and humanities and the general public to augment the discussions between scientists directly involved in gene research and government agencies and business. “More than a decade ago, risk scholars figured out that the problems with assessing the risks of scientific interventions wasn’t so much a failure of traditional analysis per se, but a failure to involve other people in the process, people who inevitably have important knowledge and perspectives to contribute. With so much at stake, this failure to enlarge the conversation about risk is no longer tenable,” she writes. “The mantra in the U.S. has always been ‘let the market decide,’ but if the market is obfuscating or ignoring the risks of the technologies it invents and sells, how do we intervene to change course? The most effective way is through better regulation and better advice-giving to lawmakers. First, we must ask our governments to adopt these more inclusive assessment methods. And until they do, we can learn to use them ourselves, to powerful effect. Contrary to popular belief, people have consistently proven themselves smarter and more capable of understanding the complexities of risk than decision makers give us credit for. Now we have a way to prove it.”