Christine Palma
“To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” –Theodor Adorno
Archive for August, 2007
August 28, 2007 at 11:56 pm ·
In homage to this morning’s Full Moon Lunar Eclipse (2 to 4 AM), a revisit of Nam-june Paik’s video installation, "Moon is the Oldest TV," feels appropriate.
Moon is The Oldest Television - 1965-67 (1996)
Nam-june Paik
TV Moniter,projector and video
I.
The Moon vis-à-vis the Beholder
In 1963 America put the first man on the moon, an event broadcast live on television sets around the world. That year, that day, that hour and even those minutes are punched into the timeclock of global consciousness. Two years later, Paik reflects on this event with "Moon is the Oldest TV." The installation is composed of a single row of Philco television sets on individual pedestals. On their screens play a progression of reprocessed black-and-white video footage from full moon to new moon.
The moon as television becomes a metaphor for a philisophical view of parallax. Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek (writes) in his work The Parallax View,
"…the observed distance is not simply subjective, due to the fact that the same object which exists "out there" is seen from two different stances, or points of view.
It is rather that, as Hegel would have put it, subject and object are inherently mediated so that an "epistemological" shift in the subject’s point of view always reflects an ontological shift in the object itself.
Or -to put it in Lacanese- the subject’s gaze is always-already inscribed into the perceived object itself, in the guise of its "blind spot," that which is "in the object more than object itself", the point from which the object itself returns the gaze. Sure the picture is in my eye, but I am also in the picture.
Denial is also an extention of parallax and the moon landing as a staged event is a rock that revisionist historians (negationism) cling to. (Click here for video.)
As I contemplate Paik’s installation and the mythos of moon watching, I am immediately drawn to the Apollo Moon Landing hoax accusations which claim the Apollo Moon landings were faked by NASA.
From Wikipedia:
A year after the first moon landing, Knight Newspapers conducted a poll of 1721 U.S. citizens and found that more than 30 percent of all of the poll’s respondents were "suspicious of NASA’s trips to the Moon" with the number rising to over half in some demographic areas. The Newsweek article that published the poll results noted that among the respondents were "an elderly Philadelphia woman who thought the moon landing had been staged in an Arizona desert" and a "housewife" whose suspicions were based on her belief that her television could not "receive signals from the moon." Another respondent said, "It’s all a deliberate effort to mask problems at home . . . the people are unhappy - and this takes their minds off their problems." …
Fox television’s 2001 TV special "Conspiracy Theory: Did We Really Land on the Moon?" … said roughly 20 percent of the public had doubts about the authenticity of the Apollo program…
A Dittmar Associates poll in 2006 showed that among 18-26 year old college-educated students “27 percent expressed some doubt that NASA went to the Moon, with 10 percent indicating that it was ‘highly unlikely’ that a Moon landing had ever taken place.”
James Oberg, an American journalist who writes about space (and has worked for NASA’s space shuttle program), estimates that "perhaps 10 percent of the population, and up to twice as large in specific demographic groups" believe in the hoax or have some doubts about the Apollo program "It’s not just a few crackpots and their new books and Internet conspiracy sites," Oberg said in 1999. "There are entire subcultures within the U.S., and substantial cultures around the world, that strongly believe the landing was faked. …
Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong in NASA’s training mockup of the Moon and lander module. Hoax proponents say the entire mission was filmed on sets like this training mockup.
|
Our American culture’s shifting regard for the both the physical truth and unifying vision of the Apollo Moon Landing just in the last 45-years, speaks to a jadedness deep in our belief system. We fear being conned. We keep one hand on our wallets. We are pessimistic about our past. We distrust the future.
This nation grown wary of shared feel-good moments is like the frog-in-the-well surrounded by a dark pit of complexity. The only way out, perhaps, is through art. In the literary and visual arts we are willing to suspend our disbelief in order to reach a simpler truth.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Christine Palma |
Permalink
|
Print This Post
|
EMail This Post
Filed under: Cultural Criticism, Moon, Art
August 14, 2007 at 1:29 pm ·
Maurizio Cattelan’s La Nona Oralso (1999)
Venice Biennalle Installation
wax, clothing, polyester resin with metallic powder, volcanic rock, carpet, glass
Maurizio Cattelan’s "La Nona Oralso" (1999, translated as "The Ninth-Hour"), was auctioned off at Christie’s in May of 2001 for $886,000.
In 2006, it sold for $3 Million.
Also known as "Pope Struck by a Meteorite," Cattelan defends his installation at the 2000 Venice Biennale with a glib statement,
"In the end it is only a piece of wax."
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Christine Palma |
Permalink
|
Print This Post
|
EMail This Post
Filed under: Religion, Site-Specific Installation, Sculpture, Nature, Art
August 14, 2007 at 11:48 am ·
It used to be that on an occassion like the Perseid or Leonid meteor showers, I’d be in my car in a heartbeat, headed into the desert, passing Gorman, away from the light pollution of cities.
This year, I content myself by feasting on artists’ interpretations of these events.
In honor of the Perseid Meteor Shower, Belly-Timber has created:
The Swift-Tuttle Dark Chocolate Espresso Berry Comet Truffle!
Click here to view the step-by-step process.
Posted by Christine Palma |
Permalink
|
Print This Post
|
EMail This Post
Filed under: Food, Nature, Art
August 13, 2007 at 4:47 pm ·
I was an impressionable age twelve when I first saw Ingmar Bergman’s "Fanny and Alexander."
Perhaps the power of Bergman’s storytelling in this film comes from the bleak psychological landscape the two children occupy and the interior life they must create, a daydream to escape the nightmare.
When we leave the theater, it’s inevitable that we’ve taken along some of Berman’s personal ghosts. Fanny and Alexander is a ghost story then, and hidden within is the narrative of Bergman’s harrowing childhood and it’s stored emotion.
The scene most vivid for me occurs when Alexander, caught stealing a fig, is beaten by his new step-father, the town Bishop.
This sequence was later fleshed out for me in Alice Miller’s "Drama of the Gifted Child." 1
She writes:
Disregard for those who are smaller and weaker is thus the best defense against a breakthrough of one’s own feelings of helpessness: it is an expression of this split-off weakness. The strong person who - because he has experienced it - knows that he, too, carries this weakness within himself does not need to demonstrate his strength through contempt.
Many adults first become aware of their feelings of helplessness, jealousy and loneliness through their own children, since they had no chance to acknowledge and experience these feelings consciously in childhood….
The suffering that was not consciously felt as a child can be avoided by delegating it to ones own children…
Ingmar Bergman spoke on a television program with more understanding and greater –although only intelectual– awareness about the implications of his own childhood, which he described as one long story of humiliation….
Bergman, the younger son of a Protestant pastor, described in this television show interview a scene that often occured during his childhood: His older brother has just been beaten by his father. Now their mother is daubing his brothers bleeding back with cotton, while he himself sits watching. The adult Bergman described this scene without apparent agitation, coldly. One could see him as a child, quietly sitting and watching. He surely did not run away, or close his eyes, or cry. One has the impression that this scene did take place in reality, but was at the same time a covering memory for what he himself went through. It is unlikely that only his brother was beaten by his father.
Sometimes people are convinced that it was just their siblings who suffered humiliation. Only in therapy can they remember –with feelings of rage and helplessness, of anger and indignation– of how humiliated and deserted they felt when they themselves were mercilessly beaten by their beloved father.
Ingmar Bergman, however, had another means, apart from projection and denial, of dealing with his suffering: He could make films and thereby delegate his unfelt feelings to the spectator. We as the movie audience are asked to endure those feelings that he, the son of such a father, could not experience overtly but nevertheless carried within himself. We sit before the screen confronted, the way that small boy once was, with all the cruelty "our brother" has to endure, and feel hardy able or willing to take in all this brutality with authentic feelings; we ward them off.
Bergman also spoke regretfully of his failure to see through Nazism before 1945, although as an adolescent he often visited Germany during Hitler’s period. I see this blindness as a consequence of his childhood. Cruelty was the familiar air he had breathed from early on, so why should cruelty and disdain for others have caught his attention…
If we want to avoid unconsciously motivated exploitation and disrespect of the child, we must first gain a conscious awareness of these dangers…
There are various means of developing this sensitivity. We may, for instance, observe children who are strangers to us and attempt to feel empathy for them in their situation. But we must above all, come to have empathy for our own fate. Our feelings will always reveal the true story, which noone else knows and which only we can discover.
1. Miller, Alice. The Drama of the GIfted Child: The Search for the True Self. 1981. New York: Basic Books, 1997.
For more about this film, here’s the Wikipedia entry
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Christine Palma |
Permalink
|
Print This Post
|
EMail This Post
Filed under: Cinema, Into the Dark Wood
August 10, 2007 at 1:02 am ·
Tommy - if he had a proper doggy emergency kit:
From The American Red Cross’ website:
In the event of a disaster, if you must evacuate, the most important thing you can do to protect your pets is to evacuate them, too. Leaving pets behind, even if you try to create a safe place for them, is likely to result in their being injured, lost, or worse. So prepare now for the day when you and your pets may have to leave your home.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Christine Palma |
Permalink
|
Print This Post
|
EMail This Post
Filed under: Earthquake, Animals
August 9, 2007 at 2:27 pm ·
Reported by BBC News:
Medical firm Johnson & Johnson (J&J) is suing the American Red Cross, alleging the charity has misused the famous red cross symbol for commercial purposes.
J&J said a deal with the charity’s founder in 1895 gave it the "exclusive use" of the symbol as a trademark for drug, chemical and surgical products.
It said American Red Cross had violated this agreement by licensing the symbol to other firms to sell certain goods.
The charity described the lawsuit as "obscene".
The hairs they’ll be splitting in court will be over what "drug, chemical and surgical products," Johnson & Johnson’s commercial domain, encompasses versus The American Red Cross’ right to license its trademark to Target and Wallmart for the manufacture and commercial sale of "health and safety kits," including "medical gloves, nail clippers, combs and toothbrushes" which compete with Johnson & Johnson in the marketplace.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Christine Palma |
Permalink
|
Print This Post
|
EMail This Post
Filed under: Logos, Legal Battles, Trademarks, Advertising, Branding, authenticity
August 1, 2007 at 6:24 pm ·
We’ve had 115 degree temperatures in the Valley, and I’m nostalgic for my apartment in Santa Monica and the cooler weather.
During the California Wildfires of 2003, I lived ten short blocks from the ocean. Once seated on the beach I could fill my lungs with fresh air while the downdraft over the rest of LA County was hot and polluted with ash.
Holding hands as we walked past Shutter’s and the other luxury hotels on the boardwalk, my date, a proponent of radical liberalism, joked that he wanted to hire a limo to take me up to watch the burn. After all, what better expression of "the sublime" than a bottle of Pol Roger and a fireside limousine ride set to Bach.
"Grotesque dichotomy" would have been a better term. I made a mental short list:
•Sitting on the bluffs at Loyola Marymount where I watched plumes of smoke rise over Los Angeles during the 1992 Rodney King riots
•Living in the shelter of my home office next to the Newport Bay estuary where I watched the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks on CNN
•Voting Nader in 2000, not for his platform, but for the "idea" of a third party; thinking that the dot-com boom would take care of domestic policy and taking national security and foreign policy for granted.
•Enjoying a white Winter up in Lake Arrowhead despite the uncertainty of New Years Eve 1999 (fears of Y2K disaster, terrrorist threat, the millenium "event horizon")
Click here for fullsize.
From The Farmer’s Almanac:
The Full Buck Moon - July 29, 2007
Full moon names date back to Native Americans, of what is now the northern and eastern United States. The tribes kept track of the seasons by giving distinctive names to each recurring full moon. Their names were applied to the entire month in which each occurred. There was some variation in the moon names, but in general, the same ones were current throughout the Algonquin tribes from New England to Lake Superior.
European settlers followed that custom and created some of their own names. Since the lunar month is only 29 days long on the average, the full Moon dates shift from year to year.
Since July is normally the month when the new antlers of buck deer push out of their foreheads in coatings of velvety fur, the full moon of this moon is called the full Buck Moon.
Sometimes this moon was also often called the Full Thunder Moon, because thunderstorms are most frequent during this time. Another name for this month’s Moon was the Full Hay Moon.
Posted by Christine Palma |
Permalink
|
Print This Post
|
EMail This Post
Filed under: Nature, Into the Dark Wood
