Hmm:

After considering quotes from Jean-Paul Sartre, Agatha Christie and Bob Dylan, among others, the team concluded that the most popular reason for existing was to enjoy life. At least 17% of famous thinkers supported the theory, including Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the US, and the singer Janis Joplin, who after advising "get it while you can", died of a heroin overdose in 1970.

Published in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology this week, the research found the second most popular meaning of life was to "love, help or serve others" - supported by Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Einstein and Jean Jacques Rousseau. But 13% of thinkers, including Napoleon and the physicist Stephen Hawking, concluded that life was "a mystery". A further 11%, including Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, and Joseph Conrad, decided it was "meaningless".

Even the great ones can't give a decent answer to this question. Freud, Kafka, and Conrad excepted, but we knew that already. This little survey also confirms my distate for everything Einstein said that didn't have to do with science.

"Error is the most expensive luxury that man can permit himself; and if the error happens to be a physiological error, then it is perilous to life. What, consequently, has man hitherto paid for most dearly? For his "truths": for they have all been errors in physiologicis--."
- Nietzsche, The Will to Power

From an Amazon.com customer review:

"When you abandon all need for aesthetics and meaning and just let yourself have some fun, Sylvie Vartan actually becomes a real treat."

The Cremaster Cycle by Matthew Barney

Cremaster 1

Seeing one is just a frustrating curiosity. Seeing two deepens the mystery. By the third, if you're anything like me, you are hooked, and the entire series becomes one long mesmerizing dream, with the compelling and uneasy logic that entails. At times grotesque, silly, stupid, and profound, all in all it manages to be deeply moving for me by the end. It's all deeply flawed I think (too much simplistic and uninteresting cross-cutting, sometimes insipid symbolism); but the flaws actually make it easier to get a foot in the door, so to speak, and to crack the easy codes first. Perfect art would be impenetrable, and therefore inhuman. (Barney's comment on a vaseline sculpture: "It failed even more than I thought it would.")

This series of art films started in 1994 with Cremaster 4 and then continued out of order with 1, 5, 2, and finally 3 this year. This actually makes sense, since, in the overall scheme, part 3 represents the height of will, or creation, and is therefore the logical stopping point for such a large undertaking. The numerical end, part 5, represents either transcendence or failed transcendence, something that occurs in 2 as well, which in both cases is represented by willful death (Gary Gilmore or his ancestor Houdini). Part 4 is the appropriate starting point, since it represents striving but not yet attained perfection. The calamity of hubris represented in part 3 concludes the series, and perhaps makes for a sardonic self commentary on the whole series, if not art itself.

I hope to do individual posts for each film, but for now I just wanted to post two of my favorite images from the films. 2 and 5 were my favorites, but I couldn't find my favorite image from 5, an overhead shot of pearls floating in water.

Cremaster 2

I hate to do another Stereolab post but I discovered a rather lovely song from them called "The Black Arts." Normally, Stereolab specialize in quasi-marxist propaganda, which has exactly the same affect on me as their ever-present "ba ba ba's" and "la la la's"--that is, I accept that they are an important part of their aesthetic, but I tend to ignore the actual meaning of the words. On "The Black Arts," Laetitia Sadier sings with rare emotion the following lyrics:

I need somebody, I feel so lonely,
Somebody to share, my scarcity
All cut from the world, unrelated
This time I need somebody, to be family

Coming from this band, always so cold and emotionless, these words have a compelling power. Perhaps its no surprise that by the end of the song Laetitia is overwhelmed by the pulsating rhythms of the song and it's Stereolab back to normal. It's a powerful and painfully transient expression of vulnerability.

I know you doubt it in your dark lonely moments. But how can one doubt for one instant that this isn't proof once and for all that we live in the best of all possible worlds? Random, inexplicable ailments are the spice of life as far as I'm concerned.

Stereolab - Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage In the Milky Night

Growing up along with a band must strongly affect how one enjoys the music. Waiting for each new album, feeling the excitement and inevitable dissapointment of new music from old friends, maybe even feeling surprise when musicians you thought you knew still manage to do something you didn't think they could. I think these relationships are important and complex, and unfortunately I have only a few of them. And many of those relationships ended badly. Maybe one day I can reevaluate the music I loved when I was younger and my tastes were different.

Coming to a band after it's all over produces something totally different. Each sucessive album isn't percieved as a move in this or that direction. Instead it's taken as part of a homogenous whole. Progress, growth, evolution - the hallmarks of any relationship - are removed and replaced by a monolith: the "collected works" syndrome I suppose.

This is Stereolab's worst album. So says almost every source I can find. I think it's beautiful, and it's by far my favorite album by them. This album, coming when it did, after Dots and Loops, another obscure and difficult album of jazzy lounge pop, must have seemed like a slap in the face. Or just laziness perhaps. Stereolab up to their old tricks, spinning their wheels in the mud.

I'm lucky to have missed all that. I can love the album free of expectation, free of investment of heart and mind in music I haven't heard yet. I can take it for what it is; and see its (very) subtle beauty. This makes up a little for the feeling I have that I am a musical archeologist, finding the remains of dead things and breathing life into them after the fact.

Question: Can music be both funny and good?

Cremaster 3 by Matthew Barney

I can't really talk about this movie since I barely understood any of it. But thinking about it, and about my reactions and the reactions of the other people in the audience at a screening yesterday, has brought up a few interesting issues.

I suppose it's almost a biologically determined drive that causes us to make meaning out of the chaos of our perceptions. In some complex and tortuous way it probable helps us to reproduce. Sanity (a prerequisite for membership to any group) can be defined as a sufficient overlap in the meanings that individuals make of their surroundings. (I could be more rigorous and claim that it's only shared action that defines groups, but that is too obvious a point to labor over here. In any case, we can't know for sure that shared thoughts produce identical actions but we will take that on faith for now. It's a far greater crime to act crazy than think crazy.)

Imagine we find some people in front of an strange and provocative work of art devoid of all context (that is, any apparatus for determining its "meaning"). A painting perhaps, like this one:

I can imagine several reactions. Perhaps someone with an art degree will place it in a historical context, the history of abstract painting. "It looks like so-and-so's paintings." Some meaning is thereby generated, but it's clearly fraudulent in a sense, something created by the viewer through his or her personal history and knowledge. There can be no way to connect the work to the meaning that viewer creates outside that viewer's mind except through duplication of said viewer's experiences. Simply put, we can't understand the painting the way he does without his knowledge.

But suppose another viewer takes one look and proclaims the painting to be meaningless trash, and simply walks away and never considers the painting again. "Ah," might say the art degree holder, "it's simply meaningless to you. If you knew about such-and-such it would make much more sense to you." So suppose he listens to the other man, and comes to some terms with the painting by learning about abstract art.

Fair enough, and it's probably true. But what's the point of this exercise? It's something we do on a fairly regular basis I think, and art simply makes the process explicit and hyper-conscious.

Those who like to connect everything to the political might suggest that doing these things helps us to reframe our perceptions of the world, make us self-conscious about the meanings we make. I think this is probably true as well, but it reduces the enjoyment of art to a civic duty, a petty liberal mind-opener. What a bore.

I don't mean to suggest that the above isn't a valid position, but I do want to deny it as the primary function of art.

Why can't we see our tendency to make meaning from chaos as the pointless exercise it is? Why must we make connections and causal inferences in art when it is clearly superfluous to survival? "But what's the point of that painting?" The question offends me. Of course it's pointless. What's the point of making up points when they aren't needed?

Sitting in front of a painting like this, and watching the people gather round and hearing the cogs in their heads turn and turn, making meaning from nothing, like God on the first day of creation, would make clear to one how foolish and sad we are sometimes. How predictable. How silly.

Could we just look at it? Can it just be? Without meaning.

"You know you can get tired of anything. You can even get tired of being afraid."
-Miles Davis

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

A rare horror classic that still holds up, and stil manages to be scary. One shot in particular makes the film a masterpiece, as it encapsulates everything that is great about the movie into one image. As the doctor looks out of his window he sees a perfectly normal looking town, but he knows that it is false, evil. Simply through context (and absolutely no manipulation of the image itself) the film is able to make the familiar and comforting into something alien and disturbing; something that has the form of virtue but not the substance.

Rock 101

A wonderful article about an academic music conference. Nicely straddles the line between "this is bullshit" and "what can we learn from this?" Plus, it includes a fine appreciation of Justin Timberlake's "Cry Me a River" towards the end.

Night and Fog

You can't tell from that picture, but that's Auschwitz as it stood in 1955, when Alain Resnais made Night and Fog, a short documentary about the Holocaust. Resnais' film is perhaps the most powerful document of that catastrophe I have ever seen, mainly because it declines to provoke our emotions too much. Resnais lets the facts speak for themselves. The film almost plays like a tour of the camps, with tracking shots slowly passing by bunks, toilets, or ovens, all with the same semi-detached air about itself. We learn how long it took to build a camp, how far the train journey was to get there, how many officers were present. We learn that there were jails(!) with cells that allowed neither standing up-right nor lying down. We learn that going to the toilet was a life and death experience; to pass blood meant it was over for you. We learn that German soldiers kept prisoners as sex slaves. We find that each camp was like a self sustaing city, with all the business and day to day life that entails. We find out that the wives of officers were bored, and that they wished the war would end soon. We see what's left of the camps. We look and fail to understand. We see German officers denying responsibility. "I was not responsible," say the men. "Then who is responsible?" replies the narrator. Taking his cues from Adorno ("there can be no poetry after Auschwitz"), Resnais declines any metaphysical comfort. He leaves us with only inexplicable facts.

The lyrics to ABBA's "Knowing Me, Knowing You":

No more carefree laughter
Silence ever after
Walking through an empty house, tears in my eyes
Here is where the story ends, this is goodbye

Knowing me, knowing you (ah-haa)
There is nothing we can do
Knowing me, knowing you (ah-haa)
We just have to face it, this time we're through
(This time we're through, this time we're through
This time we're through, we're really through)
Breaking up is never easy, I know but I have to go
(I have to go this time
I have to go, this time I know)
Knowing me, knowing you
It's the best I can do

Mem'ries (mem'ries), good days (good days), bad days (bad days)
They'll be (they'll be), with me (with me) always (always)
In these old familiar rooms children would play
Now there's only emptiness, nothing to say

Knowing me, knowing you (ah-haa)
There is nothing we can do
Knowing me, knowing you (ah-haa)
We just have to face it, this time we're through
(This time we're through, this time we're through
This time we're through, we're really through)
Breaking up is never easy, I know but I have to go
(I have to go this time
I have to go, this time I know)
Knowing me, knowing you
It's the best I can do

Odd material for a pop song. Not just the subject of breaking up (since the song explicitly alludes to the most famous break up song of all), but the resignation in the lyrics, a sort of giving up on happiness. What I like best is the echo in the refrain, where a male voice repeats the chorus behind the female lead, as if he is realizing the same thing as her at the same time. Rarely does pop music tackle such subjects with so much maturity and wisdom, and, ultimately, with as much complexity as life.

Still more proof that we live in the best of all possible worlds.