A Burroughsian Appraisal of a Steely Dan Concert, by William Gibson

A Steely Dan concert is akin to witnessing the passage of a single multiplex vehicle the size of a motorcade or convoy, its various segments comprising limousines, ice-cream wagons, hearses, lunch-carts, ambulances, black marias, and motorcycle outriders, all of it Rolls-grade and lacquered like a tropical beetle. The horns glint, as it rolls majestically past, splendid, a thing of legend, and utterly peculiar unto itself.

William Gibson’s blog

 

“I have always regarded music with lyrics as a species of fiction.” William Gibson

Dock Boggs. From Wikipedia.

When William Gibson released his first novel, Neuromancer, in 1984, he considered opening it with a line from a Velvet Underground song, “Watch out for worlds behind you,” from “Sunday Morning”. In an interview in 1986 he talked about how limiting he found the questions journalists were asking him. They asked only about books that had inspired him, and even more particularly, just science fiction books.

“The trouble with ‘influence’ questions is that they’re usually framed to encourage you to talk about your writing as if you grew up in a world circumscribed by books,” he told Larry McCaffrey. “I’ve been influenced by Lou Reed, for instance, as much as I’ve been by any ‘fiction’ writer.”

William Gibson and Nick Cave have been the two poles of my compass ever since I began reading and hearing their works, from Nick’s first record and Gibson’s first book. What they share is a vision with a level of detail that William Gibson described as ’superspecificity’ and that he learned from Dashiell Hammett.

“I remember being very excited about how he had pushed all of this ordinary stuff until it was different,” he told Larry McCaffrey. “Like American naturalism but cranked up, very intense, almost surreal. You can see this at the beginning of The Maltese Falcon (1930) where he describes all the things in Spade’s office. Hammett may have been the guy who turned me on to the idea of superspecificity, which is largely lacking in most SF description, SF authors tend to use generics.”

Although Gibson is credited with the invention of what we now recognise as the computer era, because he described it so well, and Nick is generally assumed to be inventing scenarios around Old Testament parables, what draws me to their perspectives is how vividly they describe worlds that that are real, that they see because they’re paying attention. Their artistry comes from combining the observations they’ve made about in unusual ways. Their works resemble nothing we’ve ever seen before, in that way, so it’s assumed they must be inventing comic book futures or transcribing fever dreams.

“I suppose I strive for an argot that seems real, but I don’t invent most of what seems exotic or strange in the dialogue,” William Gibson told Larry McCaffrey, “that’s just more collage. There are so many cultures or subcultures today that if you’re willing to listen, you can pick up different phrases, inflections and metaphors everywhere. I use a lot of phrases that seem exotic to everyone but the people who use them.”

My own interests can be cross-faded with Nick’s and William Gibson’s. I’ve always comprehended that their works lay down on paper (or in music, alive in a stretch of time) the soul’s eternal struggle with itself. It’s the sadness at the heart of what they both create that I’m most drawn to: the sorrow that makes it possible to measure happiness. “We each have a need to create and sorrow is a creative act,” Nick said in a lecture about love songs. “The love song is a sad song, it is the sound of sorrow itself. We all experience within us what the Portugese call Suadade, which translates as an inexplicable sense of longing, an unnamed and enigmatic yearning of the soul and it is this feeling that lives in the realms of imagination and inspiration and is the breeding ground for the sad song, for the Love song is the light of God, deep down, blasting through our wounds.” 

Today a list of William Gibson’s ten favourite songs is published on the New York Times book blog. He mentions a song from The Boatman’s Call among his favourites. On his blog, at the time he published Pattern Recognition he expressed admiration for Nick, saying that he’d like to write a novel as good as The Boatman’s Call. Gibson’s description of a song by Dock Boggs, an early twentieth century Appalachian white bluesman, is exactly the feeling I gained from reading William Faulkner’s novels, after they’d been recommended to me by Nick.

“On finally learning to hear this music, you literally become some different, more primal manner of flesh,” writes Gibson. “There is simply nothing else like it. It is an Ur-thing, sere and terrible, yet capable of profound and paradoxical rescue in the very darkest hour. Dock Boggs lived in Wise County, Virginia, not far from where I grew up. I am haunted by the possibility that someone could have listened to this recording in Paris, in 1927, the year it was released.”

Sonny Rollins and William Gibson and Music Writing

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

^{Gary Giddins. 2002}

 

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

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

^{Village Voice. 21 November 2000.}

 

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

U2: Art and Technology

 

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

 

^{Blade Runner city lights}

^{The flickering lights at the beginning of the movie made me think of the night cityscape of San Angeles, seen from above, at the beginning of Ridley Scott’s movie, Blade Runner. The movie had been on Bono’s mind when the band was putting together the Zoo TV tour. “It was our attempt to create a world rather than just songs,” he said, “and it’s a beautiful world. The opening was our manifesto, I have no compass, I have no maps, and I have no reason to go back….The opening was the audio equivalent of Blade Runner’s visuals. If you closed your eyes you could see the neon, the giant LED screens advertising all manner of ephemera.”}

^{The 3D movie begins with a girl, in athletic clothes running through the stadium and towards the stage, that reminded me of Ridley Scott’s 1984 Superbowl ad for Apple’s Macintosh computer. A grey, homogenous group of programmed people sat chanting slogans. The girl throws a discuss and shatters the screen. Apple’s 1984 wasn’t going to be the sinister and rigidly controlled world of George Orwell’s 1984 (or Microsoft’s).}

^{Discs of light spin behind U2 as they begin their first song, “Vertigo”, and shatter the distant screen bands have been trapped in on previous concert films. Stadium rock and roll might only be able to approximate intimacy but U2 filmed in concert in 3D are charmingly real and human and close.}

^{Vertigo is from the album How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. The video made for the song shows a spiral being blasted around the band members in a remote location. The spirals seared into the earth remind me of Robert Smithson’s artwork Spiral Jetty, bulldozed into the shore of a salt lake. It was made in a remote part of Utah that’s currently under threat of destruction from oil drilling. In a story in the New York Times recently, Smithson’s concerns for his artworks seem to line up with U2’s.}

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

Spirals turn up again and again in artworks and nature, and now the digital realm, as an expression of harmony and beauty. It’s the golden section, the golden ratio.

 

 

 

 

^{Robert Smithson. Spiral Jetty.}

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

                                 

^{In concert the spiral Snail image by Run Wrake,is rings of red light that spin behind the band. Saul Bass famously had turning graphic spirals in his title sequence for Alfred Hitchcock’s movie, Vertigo. (Bass’s titles for Hitchcock’s North By Northwest create shifting grids across sites in New York City, and set a perspective for the movie. The shots are framed within grids and planes.)}

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

Edward Muybridge Buffalo footage

U2 video for “One”

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

Buffalo Falling by David Wojnarowicz

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

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

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

^{Photo by Isc-Hernandez at Flickr.}

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

Photo by M3iLI55@ at Flickr

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

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

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

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

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

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

^{Mori Installation. Ken Goldberg, Artwork.}

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

U2 Virtually Real in 3D

 

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The Paris Review.

 

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

 

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

 

Lights go down, it’s dark

 

The jungle in your head

 

A feeling is so much stronger than a thought

 

Your eyes are wide

 

And though your soul

 

It can’t be bought

 

Your mind can wander

 

 

 

Hello hello

 

I’m at a place called Vertigo

 

It’s everything I wish I didn’t know

 

Except you give me something I can feel, feel

 

 

 

The night is full of holes

 

As bullets rip the sky

 

Of ink with gold

 

They twinkle as the

 

Boys play rock and roll

 

 U2 Vertigo

 

 

 

 

 

 

Love of the Common People.

All of us are born explorers. From the very beginning, as infants and young children, we are a curious species of animal. We observe, reach for, and question everything around us. Many of us carry throughout our lives a series of fundamental questions we seek to answer. Who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going? When we consider the intricate patterns of life on earth – how everything connects with everything else – our questioning becomes all inclusive. Where did the earth, and the life forms on it come from? Where are we going? 

Dr. Robert Ballard

Thirteen years ago I mailed Nick a letter that described how I’d begun to recognise symbols from ancient Greek and Roman myths in his songs. I gave it a heading: The Love Songs of Nick Cave. The mythological symbols identified even his darkest, bloodiest songs as love songs for all of humanity, grappling with love as agape, a selfless love of others. It wasn’t yet fashionable to call them love songs. At that time The Murder Ballads album was newly released and Nick was recording the spare, crystalline outlines of the songs for The Boatman’s Call album (which he sent me on cassette).

            I was beginning to delve deeply into Buddhism at the time, and the songs on the cassette – those that appeared on The Boatman’s Call and those that emerged later, on the B-Sides and Rarities set – made reference to The Gospel of Thomas, a Christian scripture discovered in 1945 that has parallels with the Buddha’s teachings of inner divinity and a sense of personal responsibility. Elaine Pagels opens her study of The Gospel of Thomas with a quote from the video artist, Bill Viola: ‘It’s an invisible world out there, and we’re living in it.’

            I carried around Nick’s songs on my Walkman and they operated as a field guide to this invisible world, through them I could recognise the spirit alive (or not) in the people of the city. When I reached for the words to describe something inexpressible, frequently those words were from Nick’s songs. For instance, young, affluent men in trendy business suits holding fistfuls of hip techno-devices who were sitting on Melbourne’s free City Circle tram, looked straight through a disabled man struggling and lurching as he tried to swing his crutches and himself onto the tram. ‘But watch the one falling in the street,’ Nick sang in ‘As I Sat Sadly By Her Side’. ‘See him gesture to his neighbours. See him trampled beneath their feet.’ 

            And I comprehended the title of the Let Love In album when I saw a blind man with his guide dog busking on Swanston Street in Melbourne. He played a voluptuous acoustic Spanish guitar and wore two hearing aids. His singing had a distant quality, as if he were remembering the music rather than hearing it as he played. His music was magnificently sad, reminiscent of Portuguese fado ballads. At the end of the Eagles song, ‘Desperado‘, after he’d sung the lines ‘you’d better let somebody love you, before it’s too late’ he reached around and stroked the muzzle of his guide dog.  It occurred to me that to ‘let love in’ is to be humble enough, to strip away one’s defences enough, to accept love.

            I gain insights from Nick’s songs in the same way that he gathers the insights to write them, by bringing them into the life of the city. He drives around, without destination, just listening, soaking in the world around him. I first heard the new Bad Seeds album Dig, Lazarus Dig!!! while Nick was in Sydney for the Grinderman tour in October of 2007, driving around Sydney’s inner city and North Shore with him, along the harbour, on a cool, clear Monday morning. The sounds of the city are in the dazzling beauty of the musical arrangements of the album: temple bells clanking like heavy machinery and a sensual groove, sunshine reflected from the surfaces of buildings and water turned into sound.

            Lazarus digs the dark, funky underworld of New York City in the 1970’s. Maybe he’s buying branded ‘blue magic’ heroin supplied by the drug lord from Ridley Scott’s new movie American Gangster, who has it shipped from Vietnam in military coffins with the bodies of soldiers returning home. Lazarus experiences the spiritual sugar-rush of San Francisco in the aftermath of the summer of love. Joan Didion chronicled this time but while readers saw the era’s treacly reaching for peace and love, baby, she was writing about the absence of a core myth to guide people. She saw the coming of an apocalypse that WB Yeats had alluded to in his poem ‘The Second Coming’ in 1919. ’Anarchy has been ‘loosed upon the world’ and ‘the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.’ Nick’s itinerary for Lazarus includes Los Angeles, probably at the time that Dennis Wilson from the Beach Boys crossed paths with Charles Manson. Lazarus may have been in Los Angeles when a musician from a band making music that sounded like sunshine itself crossed paths with a murderous figure with a messiah complex. This allusion is mystifying: are you referring to the Bad Seeds? Please clarify! Lazarus may be brought back from the dead but he isn’t reborn. He falls on hard times, becomes homeless, goes mad and becomes violent.

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