There is a special exhibit of some of Manny Farber's abstract and more recent representational work at PS.1 in Long Island City, New York through January 16, 2005.

Manny Farber is someone who sits slightly off to the side somewhere in the pantheon of great neo-sinceritists (bottom of page). It would be no exaggeration to say that he represents the best of what American artists can be. There is something straightforward and brash about everything he does, in both his painting and his criticism. At the same time he is relentlessly intelligent and a sly humor always shines through. He can be a complete asshole. But you always forgive him for it because he is always giving you something.

The great thing about Farber's return to representation is precisely that. It is a return. Neo-sinceritists always prefer the thing the second time around. His work over the last fifteen years looks like the vision of someone who has passed through abstraction and seen the world anew. Everything is jumbled out and flat at the same time. It is as if he learned how large space can be by flying off into the purity of it with his non-representational stuff and then came back to the world to show us something new. "I'm giving it to you all at once," he's saying. And he can. His whole attitude is just big enough to get away with it. That is pretty American too. It can be kind of annoying but he does it with joy, the pure joy of having the world at your disposal and feeling that you understand a few things. The older Farber gets the larger his artistic generosity gets. His canvasses feel like they could go on and on for miles; miles and miles of pointless wonderful crap.

In one of the paintings at PS.1 there is a tabletop, as in most of his recent work, and an open notepad on the tabletop. Written on it is the following sentence.

do all things at once, yoga, writing, fucking, painting, teaching.

And he does. The amazing thing about Farber's film criticism is that it is just like his paintings. He tries to look at the whole film at once. An old friend of mine, Toshi Yano, likes to eat his candy in one bite. He doesn't want to have to wait for the flavor. Farber wants to see films as closely as possible, so close it is almost like he wants to be up there with all the sounds and colors, he wants to be INSIDE the movie; not IN the movie, INSIDE the movie. He says,

I grew up in the days when the movies never stopped, screens always filled. Something very beautiful about that constant flow of images. The lack of commercialism in terms of ads, the relationship to the audience wasn't so strong. You were divided, you were enclosed by the movie--terrific.

Farber never cared where a movie was coming from or if it had the right pedigree. He loves crap as long as there is enough of it. He loves a beautiful moment coming out from the middle of nowhere.


- posted by morgan @ 7:35 PM

 
The debates about the city versus the country have been around since the city and the country have. In historical terms, it touches on the very origin of human beings as human beings, the social animal. I've reflected on this matter in past Idle Chatters. The posting on September 14th, 2004, deals with this issue specifically and references other threads in the question.

Any simple opposition between the city and the country is going to leave things out, tell only part of the story. Still, it is interesting that the recent elections here in the US raise the question anew. There has been much talk of the red states and the blue states. Less discussed has been the breakdown along finer grain. Looking at a county by county map you can see that, in many ways, the election was a battle between the city and the country, or between urban life and rural life. This is an oversimplification, of course, especially if you start to add suburban areas and such into the matrix. Large stretches of American real estate are now covered by a not-quite-city/not-quite-country grey area.

But the opposition remains.

Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit published an interesting if skeletal book not so long ago called Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of it's Enemies. One of the key things that the occidentalist despises, they contend, is the 'frivolous cosmopolitanism' of the big city. It must be cancelled, balanced, purified, negated, even destroyed.

The city and its vices indeed. Soft and sickly on the one hand, it is dangerous and invidious on the other. Of course, it is certainly not the case that all Republicans hate the city in the name of some pure communion with man and/or nature that exists outside its boundaries. As has been noted time and time again, the other side of the Republican Party is best satirized by the rapacious glee of the Gordon Gecko, hardly a fan of the simple country life. But all movements have their tensions. An interesting tension of the current breakdown of American politics shows that while we project our concern for the anti-Occidental forces around the globe, we ought not forget that a version of the same battle rages across the counties of our own heartland too, in little skirmishes between red and blue.

A final query might be posed to those on the Left who are inclined to associate the city with the nasty vices of capitalist excess. What's wrong with a little excess when we're the only ones who will have you? You're not wanted in the country, but the decadents always have an extra seat at the table.

- posted by morgan @ 7:09 PM

 
ODB, the Ol' Dirty Bastard, has died.

Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of his resume will concede that he wasn't exactly setting himself up for old age. He was a man born to die. He had a proclivity for getting shot that would do a gunslinger proud. Or maybe it is all lies. But then, that fits the old gunslingers too.

Born as Russell Jones and known as Rusty, Old Dirty Bastard later came to call himself Big Baby Jesus and died as Dirk McGirk. An unobjectionable, if brief, biography can be found here.

What to say about Ol' Dirty, Big Baby Jesus, McGirk? I loved him somehow though I never knew him. He was a mess. His albums are a mess. He was constantly fucking things up and he was never a very good person. His sexist, offensive, often downright insane lyrics are simply indefensible. But I loved him.

The album Nigga Please is a great album. Everything ODB contributed to Wu Tang is great, though some of it is more great than other of it. His voice is amazing. His rap diction, to coin a ridiculous term, will never be duplicated; nor should it be; it made no sense. But it was great.

He exposed all the bullshit of R&B with one lyric. "I don't have a problem with you fuckin' me, but I gotta little problem with you not fuckin' me," he wrote. That pretty much sums it up. All the pretensions of Rhythm and Blues got thrown out the window with that. "Here's the story," he said "and it aint pretty, but still, I'd like to get laid right now."

ODB had a great love of crack cocaine and he wasn't too proud to point it out. I've never smoked crack but I'd like to try it in honor of the Big Baby Jesus. He was honest about crack, it felt good and he liked to smoke it.

What I think about ODB is that he worshipped life in all its weirdness and complexity. He saw the world as an amazing and stupendous and absurd thing and he made miraculous and fucking hilarious/beautiful music as his abbreviated tribute to that world. At the same time he was in a lot of pain. It was an ongoing train wreck for him. And his music is a comedy and a tragedy that matches that mood. Few have done it so well.

If I had to tell you what I think I would say that ODB's death is a bookend to the untimely death of Otis Redding. These were big giant men who had something to say to us but didn't have the equipment to stay here for as long as we would have liked.

But I loved him. I was always there trying to understand him. And I want to mark that down somewhere.

- posted by Editor @ 8:57 PM

 
Soccer is the world sport. If you aren't conversant in its language then to some degree you are isolating yourself from a global dialogue. It is a funny situation for Americans. English, to all extents and purposes, has become the lingua franca. Any doubt to this fact should have been dispelled when Oxford Classical Texts began publishing its prefaces in English instead of Latin. Or one could dispel doubts by traveling to any non-English speaking country and listening to the role that English plays in all manner of public and private life.

As an American, or Brit, your own language is now the world's language, like it or not. That much is easy. But learning to love soccer takes some commitment. You have to teach yourself the specific rhythms and tensions of the game.

I will never forget an afternoon spent watching a European Cup match between England and Spain at a cafe in Salamanca. The English rags had been up to their usual fun in the preceding days. "We Hate the Spaniards and Their Dirty Paella," they claimed along with other slurs at Spanish women and allusions to Spanish fascism. The Spanish press reproduced the attacks with glee.

The match started with a bang and never let up. The Spaniards were consistently on the attack. The English, with a vaguely Italian strategy, pulled back on defense in order to parry strike after strike from the Spaniards. At each shot just wide of the goal the mood in the cafe became simultaneously more frustrated and excited.

At one point, after a bad call on an off-sides against the Spaniards I yelled out "Come On!" The cafe became dead silent for a moment. Everyone looked over at me. "I'm an American," I said to no one and everyone, "I'm rooting for Spain." A cheer went up and everyone turned back to the game. A beer appeared at my table.

At the very end of the game, England managed a counter strike at a Spanish thrust and scored a goal. The mood in the cafe collapsed. The air went out of the entire city. I felt like shit for two days.

There is no other sport that keeps you waiting for so long and then delivers you into ecstasy or despair so quickly. When an important goal happens you can barely believe it for a few seconds. It seems like it couldn't be real. Maybe it is a clip from another game. There is something ritualistic about the way a goal scorer goes into hysterics after scoring a goal. But it is also the necessary release that comes after achieving the impossible. No one can believe what just happened, least of all the person responsible.

At a ratty roadside stop along the highway in Vietnam, on the road from Hue to Hanoi late at night, the bus stopped for a bathroom break and a little food. It was a balmy night and the kitchen and the bathroom were too close together. Still, the food was fresh and every plate had a huge pile of mint leaves.

A TV blared a soccer match from a corner of the room. Slowly, everyone sauntered over to check it out. Most of us grasped a Bia Huda in one hand. It was a club match from the English Premier league. I don't even remember who was playing. I think Tottenham may have been one of the teams. The game was scoreless. Fifteen minutes or so left to play. The bus was supposed to leave. But both teams were playing up and down the field. Long passing shots cleared whole swaths of green like the Germans used to do when Klinsman was still around.

A shot on goal on one side and then a few seconds later the ball was down at the other side for another shot. The bus was not going to leave until the game was over. With a few seconds left someone scored. We all cheered. None of us really had a dog in the fight. We were just glad to have seen it. We felt like something miraculous had happened.

- posted by Editor @ 7:44 PM