The images here are taken from a photo essay published in the DenverPost.com, where there are many more to look at. They are the remarkable work of David Guttenfelder, the chief Asia photographer for The Associated Press, who over the past seven years has documented the lives of American troops in Afghanistan.

See an excellent July 2009 NYT interview/article on Guttenfelder’s Afghanistan photojournalism here. He said: “Some people, especially print correspondents, are looking at the conflict from any number of levels and often from 30,000 feet. For photographers, there’s really no other way to tell the story but in the micro way, the intimate level. The closer you can get to the company or platoon or squad level, to a few individuals out in the field, the better the work will end up. They allow you in. That’s the only way for a photographer to get down and as close to the ground as possible.”

The captions below are Guttenfelder’s (my added comments in brackets).

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A U.S. Marine from the 2nd MEB, 2nd Battalion, 3rd Marines, checks behind a compound wall during a patrol near the town of Golestan in Afghanistan’s Farah province Friday, June 12, 2009. AP Photo/David Guttenfelder (What must it be like to creep around a blind corner, not knowing if you will meet a bullet?)

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U.S Marines from the 2nd MEB, 2nd Battalion, 3rd Marines battle Taliban fighters inside a mud walled compound near Now Zad in Afghanistan’s Helmand province Saturday June 20, 2009. AP Photo/David Guttenfelder

Guttenfelder on this photo from the NYT piece: ‘This series, from Now Zad, documents a Marine assault on a Taliban compound. “We blew a hole in the wall of the compound and went inside,” Mr. Guttenfelder said. “As we entered this alleyway, one of the marines saw three Talibans pop out from around the corner and open fire. This was certainly closer combat than I’d ever seen in Afghanistan. They were 15 to 20 feet away from one another.” The second picture [below] shows a marine throwing a hand grenade in the alley.’

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Soldiers from the U.S. Army First Battalion, 26th Infantry take an ambush position during an operation against the Taliban in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan’s Kunar Province on Wednesday May 13, 2009. AP Photo/David Guttenfelder

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U.S Marines from the 2nd MEB, 2nd Battalion, 3rd Marines walk through a mud walled compound as they search for Taliban fighters near Now Zad in Afghanistan’s Helmand province Saturday June 20, 2009. AP Photo/David Guttenfelder (Searching for Taliban fighters half-blinded by dust – how frightening would that be?)

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U.S. Marines from the 2nd MEB, 2nd Battalion, 3rd Marines stand guard along a wall in the village of Khwaja Jamal near their base near Now Zad in Afghanistan’s Helmand province on Monday, June 22, 2009. Three years after its residents fled, the once bustling town of Now Zad is the scene of a stalemate between U.S. Marines and Taliban insurgents and an example of the challenges facing the U.S. administration even as it sends 21,000 extra Marines and soldiers to the south to try and turn around a bogged down, 8-year-long war. AP Photo/David Guttenfelder  (Blank and barren, except for the constant possibilty of an enemy soldier, or a hail of bullets.)

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U.S. Marines from the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, one with the names of fallen colleagues tattooed on his back, bathe at a forward operating base in southern Afghanistan Saturday, April 26, 2008. AP Photo/David Guttenfelder (This picture says a lot to me about how soldiers feel about their job and the people they fight with and on whom their lives can depend.)

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U.S. Marines from the 2nd MEB, 1st Battalion 5th Marines sleep in their fighting holes inside a compound where they stayed for the night, in the Nawa district of Afghanistan’s Helmand province, Wednesday July 8, 2009. AP Photo/David Guttenfelder

Guttenfelder’s in the NYT article on this photo: ‘These aren’t graves. They’re beds. “This is typical of the photos I like to shoot that just show the daily life of soldiers and marines,” Mr. Guttenfelder said. “After a long, hard, exhausting day, you’d pull out your little shovel and dig the hole in the ground where you’d sleep. We all did it, to protect ourselves from incoming mortars.” The photographer made a point of waking up early enough to catch the men still asleep, remembering that a picture like this can convey a lot of information to viewers looking on comfortably in the United States.’

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*PS: On post-traumatic stress disorder – this amazing anecdote reported in the Boston Review (and picked up here via the Daily Dish) in an article titled ‘God, the Army and PTSD’:

[Paul] Sullivan was working as an analyst at the Veterans Benefits Administration in Washington in early 2005 when he was called to a meeting with a top political appointee at the VA [Department of Veterans Affairs], Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy Michael McLendon. McLendon, an intensely focused man in a neatly pressed suit, kept a Bible on his desk at the office. Sullivan explained to McLendon and the other attendees that the rise in benefits claims the VA was noticing was caused partly by Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who were suffering from PTSD. “That’s too many,” McLendon said, then hit his hand on the table. “They are too young” to be filing claims, and they are doing it “too soon.” He hit the table again. The claims, he said, are “costing us too much money,” and if the veterans “believed in God and country . . . they would not come home with PTSD.”

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Apparently, it’s all in the eyebrows. In an MIT study subjects were asked to identify celebrities by altered photos: without eyebrows, and without eyes. With eyebrows, but sans eyes, celebrities were recognised 60% of the time. With eyes but sans eyebrows, only 46% of the time. So, stop plucking them or we’ll not be recall … who are you again?

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And again:

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Not so hard, then. Duh, but anyway, answers –
l-r; top first: R Nixon, W Ryder, T Rein, M Turnbull, Rusty, Delta.

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An online interactive chicklit novel by instalments

Great fun: Saving Face by Dahlia Lithwick, at Slate. Lithwick is otherwise a senior editor at Slate and their extraordinarily erudite legal correspondent. The interactive bit is that readers write in with suggestions, or answer the author’s calls for ideas and assistance.

It’s up to Chapter 7. Here is the first bit of Chapter 1:

You know that small secret shiver of delight you get whenever you hear about somebody you know splitting up?

I’m not getting it.

“But why?” I ask Marina, again, juggling phone, water bottle, and steering wheel. “Is he cheating?”

“No,” she says.

“Are you cheating?” Like I wouldn’t know. Marina hasn’t participated in an unreported sexual act since 1989.

“No!”

“Is he stealing office supplies? Seducing his students? Plagiarizing arcane law review articles?” I strain to imagine poor Bob committing these or any other such wrongs. Aside from his invisible floor-length cape of boringness and a tendency to begin every sentence with the law professor’s “So,” Marina’s husband is pedestrian in every way. He was, as far as I can tell, born 43 years old and has spent the rest of his life making middle age his primary place of residence. He’s 36.

“He hasn’t done anything,” sighs Marina. “I haven’t done anything. We just aren’t happy. We haven’t been happy in years. There he was, walking out the door just now, and I couldn’t think of even a single reason he shouldn’t.”

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Recent posts: Barack the barbarian … Friday Mulch: Tarantino defended; and a 40-yr-old drumbeat … Gloriana: the fever of human voices … Nick Cave, censored … Julia Gillard: the fish rots from the head

Thank goodness one other American measure of public feeling is going his way.

I’m guessing that’s a certain Ann Coulter above, with her Barbarian slaying sword, and that’s right, it’s Sarah the Red, left.

And if those don’t do it for you, how about a nice action figure, a samurai with tie:

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Recent posts:

Friday Mulch: Tarantino defended; and a 40-yr-old drumbeat

Gloriana: the fever of human voices

Nick Cave, censored

Julia Gillard: the fish rots from the head

David Foster Wallace

The Amen break

To talk fascinatingly about 40-year-old drum break you don’t know that you know. Brilliantly oblique! This is the apparent subject of a fantastic youtube recording of what amounts to an art project, but which is also a dissertation or argument for open copyright as an essential ingredient in the health of culture. Nate Harrison made this in 2004, but the fortieth anniversary of  the Amen break is a fine reason to have a listen.

The following are excerpts just to give an idea of the arc of Harrison’s script. Butplay the youtube above for yourself. (Harrison is very dry, very deadpan.)

0:00 This is Nate Harrison recording in the summer of 2004. I’d like to talk about drums, about a particular drumbeat. I’m sure you’ve heard it dozens of time before … it’s been used so much I’d argue it’s entered the collective audio unconscious … this particular drumbeat, or break beat as it’s more accurately called, or even more simply, just ‘break’, well, this particular break is called ‘the Amen’, the Amen break. Here is what it sounds like: … Here, I’ll  play it again: …

8:40 Dozens of DJs, a number of clubs and events, in effect an entire subculture is based on this one drum loop, I mean – based on six seconds from 1969. What is it about the ‘Amen break’, what’s the fascination? Is it the punch of the snaredrum, or the overall groove of the loop? …

17:25 [Quoting 9th circuit court of appeals judge Alex Kozinski on copyright]: ‘Overprotecting intellectual property is as harmful as protecting it. Culture is impossible without a rich public domain. Nothing today, like nothing since we tamed fire, is genuinely new. Culture, like science nd technology grows by accretion, each new creator building on the works of those who came before. Over protection stifles the very creative forces it’s supposed to nurture.’

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Defending Inglourious Basterds

The Smart Set is an online culture magazine published out of Philadelphia. (One might say a “little magazine” in the tradition of cultural publications, but questions of scale have undergone a web transvaluation.) It’s a swell publication with eclectic and interesting material. But it really exists in order to house and publish the ingenious and glittering Morgan Meis.

Meis often writes opinions about subjects that bring me to a grinding halt and compel reconsideration, and maybe a change of mind. He’s good, damned good. His piece about Francis Bacon doesn’t reconstruct my view of Bacon – ie Bacon is the transitional painter dealing, and ultimately failing, with the implausibilities of figurative (or any kind of) painting in a technological world – but then Meis doesn’t have to. What he does instead is insert a shining blade through the morass and bring to light a previously unnoticed and possibly crucial element. With Bacon, Meis wasn’t looking at the paint, he was looking at ‘the purity of the scream’; it was an excellent point.

Recently I wrote a very moderate tirade against Tarantino and Basterds. I made the uneasy comparison between the kind of violence deployed in his film about WWII to the actual, recent violence perpetrated in the name of Americans and documented in the Inspector General’s Torture Report. Meis, as is his wont, takes a radically different line of defence, an attack in other words. Here are the two key paragraphs:

What people are really protesting in Inglourious Basterds is the idea that movies can be about anything, that they set their own terms from within. This probably bothers us about all art, but it seems to strike us more viscerally with movies. In the case of Tarantino, he rubs our faces in this freedom, so much so that it begins to feel like an affront. Tarantino is simply and deeply pleased with the fact that movies are movies, that they do what they do and nothing else. He has a special talent for using a vast array of cinematic techniques to impressive effect while simultaneously telling us a story about those cinematic techniques. This opens him to the charge of empty irony, nihilism.
…

That’s because movies do matter, and they don’t. Movie critics should know that more than anyone. They love the experience of the movies, whether it be in works of the highest realism or well-crafted drama or sustained acts of goofing around. Movies do matter. And yet there is no argument for why. It is neither good nor bad that movies matter to us. It is simply a fact. Movies, to a greater or lesser degree, become parts of the lives of the people who watch them. We want to justify that love, to puff up the objective importance of movies in order to validate the subjective importance. There is a gap, though, between our love for the movies and our attempts at justification. Unlike most directors and almost all critics, Tarantino is perfectly comfortable in that gap. He exploits everything troubling and uncomfortable about the fact that a love of movies has no inherent virtue.

So, while defending Tarantino – whose current success requires no defence really, anymore than one can argue usefully against the success of Dan Brown – is a stalking horse for the mercurial Meis (pictured left). The deep subversion Meis is practising here is to remind us – and we can use it in these days of 24/7 media – that meaning can be discovered in the enjoyment of art for art’s sake, art without merit.

We find joy and delight whether our rational minds, or superegos, concur or approve. It amounts to a practical definition of the act of encountering art. Or, as Nietzche put it elsewhere, art is the desire to be different, to be elsewhere.

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Recent posts:

Gloriana: the fever of human voices

Nick Cave, censored

Julia Gillard: the fish rots from the head

David Foster Wallace

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Last weekend I went to see my friend Andrew Raiskums conduct his terrific choral outfit Gloriana in one of their quarterly performances. It’s an amateur group – the thirty or so choir members (one of whom rejoices in the name Kate Gondwana) do it out of love and desire; you can tell. The drawings here are from that performance.

Their local paper (the Age) described the choir like this: ‘Gloriana shows us the broiling, turbulent passion of humanity as it strives to the Godhead through artistic endeavour.’

I have no idea if Andrew is religious – I suspect not, despite his Latvian heritage – but Andrew’s interest in early music would necessarily bring the choices within the boundaries of religious music. Power resides there, and Gloriana’s mission is to make us all feel it – help us locate and rest inside the religious feeling.

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Their recent program highlighted the deep, ancient-sounding Choir Concerto by the Russian Alfred Schnittke (see part of a Moscow version on youtube here or and American version here). The choir was stupendous; it was certainly too much for my poor ears and head to grasp then and there – I ‘d need to sit through it again. Or, a few times.

But before the interval they performed the Australian premier of Veljo Tormis’ Incantation for a Stormy Sea. (One of the gifts from the Gloriana program for musical ignorami is being introduced to all kinds of splendid things.) It was a short piece, about 7+ minutes. I discovered later that Tormis, an Estonian, is regarded as one of the greatest living choral composers, as Wikipedia grandly asserts.

Incantation is not a religious piece, but comes out of Tormis’ faith in folk music. Andrew writes in his program notes that the text is

‘in the form of a prayer – to calm the storm as men are out to sea. The piece is openly programmatic: you can hear the waves in the vocal line, the storm surge with the whistling, the prayer to command the storm and the dissipation with the whispering at the end.’

Amidst the swelling voices, when the whistling came on, I thought for a brief moment there was a passing ambulance or somesuch outside. The clicking, the whispering, the unconventional effects – it was mesmerising, and spectacular. You can buy this track* from iTunes – I recommend it.

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Unfortunately Incantation is not on youtube; however you can check out Tormis’ most famous piece, Raua needmine (Curse upon iron) which has his distinctive feeling and musical effect in spades – the text, vocalising and curling language sounds are deeply exotic to these ears, and makes me think of mining dwarves chanting as they dig, call me crazy.

Here (top) it is performed by a Japanese choir who get fabulously animated about three-quarters into the piece. For my money (or time) though, try the (bottom) visual-less version from something called klass muusika seminar. Extraordinary.

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*Incantation for a Stormy Sea, Svanholm Singers & Sofia Söderberg Eberhard – from Tormis: Works for Men’s Voices

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Recent posts:
Nick Cave, censored
Julia Gillard: the fish rots from the head
David Foster Wallace
90% of contemporary art is crap

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To a book with a cosmically different level of sales expectations – a friend was shopping on ebay last week and sent this screengrab: It’s the sale picture of the new Nick Cave novel, The Death of Bunny Munro (reviewed in the Guardian). The white patch is where the cover was redacted. Whether the seller did this, or was requested to do so by ebay, my friend wasn’t sure.

The cover, which I designed, has already had a bit of a workout, or public workshopping. Even before the book was published, Crikey bagged it: ‘…Obviously Text are using the image to be controversial and, to put it simply, because they can…’

As did Melbourne University’s Meanjin quarterly, on its blog. The editor, Sophie Cunningham, had this to say:

The image takes the old adage that sex sells though that, in itself, isn’t the problem to my mind. What I’m not keen on is that it’s an incredibly passive and vulnerable image that invites imagined violation and is a bit of a ‘fuck you’ to women who want to buy the book. I’d also note that it gets tiresome that in the old ’sex sells’ line, it’s usually women’s body’s who do the selling, and disembodied bits of them at that. Certainly if it were a Windsor Smith ad and were on a billboard the Advertising Standards Bureau would be looking at it – not that their standards are necessarily one I’d commend as a guide to book design.

Her post attracted some 33 comments (less the author’s replies), many finding the cover offensive. Eg:

Virginia: ‘I’m bothered by it. I was never a cultural studies student but I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to say that it invites mental penetration; it feels violent to me.’

or,

Sue: ‘I haven’t read the novel yet, but in a way I think it’s irrelevant to the politics of the cover. It might not be irrelevant to the cover itself, which, going on what some others say, fits the story very well and is appropriate. But the cover, to me, is yet another in a long line of reductive images of women. Just because it’s on a book cover doesn’t make it less retrogressive. Does a book have to have a cover like that to sell? Of course not. Some imagination could have gone into the design instead.’

Among the defenders was Mark Mordue, who has written a piece on Nick Cave for the current edition of Meanjin and in the ALR. Mordue’s first remark brought up an interesting question:

‘… I tend to agree with Sophie’s concerns … I’d love to know who designed the cover here and who the publishing individual or deciding group were? I ask because I would not be surprised if they were all women, which makes for a strange split in what the hell they believe/think. In some ways it reminds me of the fashion magazines, run by women, propogating paedophilic images of anorexic young girls. How do they reconcile themselves to that work when it is operating at its basest level?’

A few comments later, Mordue changed his mind:

‘Well, well, what an interesting debate … The further I get into reading The Death of Bunny Munro the more I feel like qualifying my earlier comments. I now think the Australian edition has the best of the covers in any country, and that it is certainly the truest representation of the contents within Nick Cave’s novel. For that reason alone, you can’t say it’s just a cheap stunt. In a way it’s as honest a cover as you will get.’

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You be the judge. Here are three versions of the cover: Australian, UK and US (bottom right):

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And here is a work by the photographer of the Oz cover, Polly Borland, (whose subjects includes the Queen) on the Republic Tower last year in her hometown of Melbourne. She is an old mate of Nick Cave and lives in London. This one is titled, Untitled III.

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Recent posts:
Julia Gillard: the fish rots from the head
David Foster Wallace
90% of contemporary art is crap

The language we speak

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Ah, that Julia Gillard. She’s hotter than swordfish on a bbq. In case you missed it last weekend, she said this of John Howard:

‘In politics, the fish doesn’t so much rot from the head as from the heart.’

(Think I’m kidding? Check out the context.)

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A few days before, you’ll have noticed that our favourite senator from the Family Fist party, Steve Fielding, had a somewhat less successful encounter with language. Commenting about Labor stimulus spending the generally challenged Sen. Fielding said:

‘We need to get the physical and monetary policy working.’

Physical spending? Maybe not. Asked if he meant fiscal spending he gratefully agreed:

‘I will make it quite clear…F..I..S..K..A..L.’

Thank God the people are represented accurately.

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Gillard’s piquant usage prompts fond recall of Paul Keating at his coalblack peak. He has grown gentler; his critique of contemporary Labor was no more than this:

‘… among the new class of professional politicians – power and the pathways to getting it; polls, news management and election campaigns etc, is what turns them on.’

Mungo MacCallum, in his book addressed to a nephew aspiring to be a pollie, How to be a Megalomaniac: Advice to a Young Politican, made a list of Keatings’ keener phrases used in Parliament house (my remarks):

harlots, (of course) … sleazebags, (would anyone dare, today?) … mugs, (old standard) … clowns, (nostalgic) …

friends of tax cheats, (rather Jesus-like) … brain-damaged, (old but good) … stupid foul-mouthed grub, (a mouthful) … bunyip aristocracy, (very period) … clot, fop, (molto ditto)

gigolo, (who on earth did he mean?) … perfumed gigolos, (ditto) … hillbilly, (ditto)

rustbucket, (rust bucket?) … Liberal muck, (bit literal) … ghouls of the National Party, (ditto)

gutless spiv, (hey!) … half-baked crim, (was that half-complimentary?) … piece of parliamentary filth, mmm

Good times.

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You lie!

Pollies rarely have that turn of phrase, or range, anymore. See, or hear, rather, Congressman Joe Wilson’s interjection during Obama’s health speech – ‘You lie!’

To the point and brutish. Better british, I think – as Andrew Sullivan reminds us, Churchill had a more refined locution: “terminological inexactitude“.

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Recent posts:
David Foster Wallace
90% of contemporary art is crap
Damien Hirsts’s £500,000 pencils stolen
The Hollywood strangle

Postmodern Writer Is Found Dead at Home
Headline, New York Times, Sept 14, 2008

Interviewer: ‘What does postmodern mean in literature?’
Foster Wallace, smiling: ‘After modernism.’
‘… I think that postmodernism has to a large extent run its course.’ This, in 1997.

He doesn’t loom large in the Australian landscape as he does in the US. No matter, his effect is probably unavoidable, in the way T S Eliot and Joyce, or, say, Orwell, affected those after – you’ve read Foster Wallace if you’ve read Dave Eggers, Zadie Smith or  Jeffrey Eugenides (in the way one might say that if you’ve read Don Delillo, you’ve read Foster Wallace).

I’ll admit to an unresolved and partial crush on David Foster Wallace. The late, qualifiedly but undeniably great writer ended his life a year ago – pursued by the “howling fantods” of his personal demons, his 20-years-or-more long depression. The howling, or the silence, finally cornered him, backed him into a far corner of his mind. Despite the world’s regard – “the most influential and innovative writer of his generation” LA Times, NYT, et al – and finally, a stable, happy relationship, he would find himself at 46 and a half years old on that Californian evening entering his garage workspace, tidying the manuscript stack of his unfinished novel, writing a farewell note to his companion of six years, Karen Green, and then going back “through the house to the patio, where he climbed onto a chair and … hanged himself” – a terrible choice among no good choices, leaving an indelible image for the one to find him: his wife, and – in a world-shifting, unfathomable moment – widow.

Foster Wallace wrote the precisely self-reflexive ‘The View From Mrs. Thompson’s’, a report on watching the 9/11 event at the house of a nearby elder, and the realisation of his difference of national understanding from that of this neighbours. One wonders a little if this most incorrigible of noticers, either out of piety or humility, and/or unconsciously and perversely, as a last act of self-preservation, waited for September 12 to top himself.

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The scent of an author: “a kind of perfume of sensibility”

David Foster Wallace on Dostoevsky:

“That distinctive singular stamp of himself is one of the main reasons readers come to love an author. The way you can just tell, often within a couple of paragraphs, that something is by Dickens, or Chekhov, or Woolf, or Salinger, or Coetzee, or Ozick. The quality’s almost impossible to describe or account for straight out — it mostly presents as a vibe, a kind of perfume of sensibility — and critics’ attempts to reduce it to questions of “style” are almost universally lame.”

And so it was that in 1998 I picked up his distinctively-titled collection of essays, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, and fell acrush onto the body of his work. The now legendary centrepiece about being on a cruise ship established his voice in my head, among so many other heads. (”I have seen sucrose beaches and water a very bright blue. I have seen an all-red leisure suit with flared lapels.”)

But my affections didn’t go all the way. I bought his first novel second hand, The Broom of the System – and barely got past the cover. I bought a new, hardback edition of his short stories, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and was unable to maintain my gaze on the creamy, acid-free page, wishing the interviews were rather with vampires. Backtracking I found a second hand copy of the 1.4kg Infinite Jest, his supposed magnum opus. It may well be shorter than the Harry Potter books, at 1079 pages v 4175 pages (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix makes 896 all by itself) but inside of forty pages it had thrown me to the ground with my smacking the mat in furious surrender. I’d like to own up to the reason Raymond Carver cited for his engagement with short stories and poetry rather than long forms like novels: a “short attention span.” Only, that span didn’t work even with Foster Wallace’s short fiction.

I discovered that, for me, the “vibe” or “perfume” – his writerly pheromone, to bring in something of an eew factor – resided only in his non-fiction, in the lavish facticity delivered as an incremental self-portrait of a hyper-curious and -intelligent man inordinately given to noticing and describing the world around him – describing, deconstructing and theorising in rococo efflorescence, with footnote upon footnote. The voice of this obsessive-compulsive, arcane erudition was the freshest of demotic American. His stylistic showiness was restrained in the non-fiction by the world, in the way that the fiction was not disciplined in his mind. (He said that he wore a bandana because if he didn’t he was afraid his head might explode.) It was a one-book crush – until I picked up his last collection of non-fiction this year – in the same way that my great delight in Annie Proulx rests almost entirely with The Shipping News.

His 50-page essay, ‘Authority and American Usage’ – an extraordinary dissertation on American class as refracted through language, after Orwell’s essay, ‘Politics and the English Language’, via a book review of A Dictionary of Modern American Usage – not only has pages of footnotes, but sub-footnotes to boot. ‘Consider the Lobster’ (also) from the collection of that name, really is about lobsters – the author goes to a lobster festival and brings back seemingly all of it, slathered with three A4 pages (out of a total of ten) of footnote sauce, highly perfumed with essence of DFW.

The very first paragraph of ‘Consider the Lobster’ has the first of 20 footnotes. An unmistakable taste of Foster Wallace:

The enormous, pungent, and extremely well marketed Maine Lobster Festival is held every late July in the state’s midcoast region, meaning the western side of Penobscot Bay, the nerve stem of Maine’s lobster industry. What’s called the midcoast runs from Owl’s Head and Thomaston in the south to Belfast in the north. (Actually, it might extend all the way up to Bucksport, but we were never able to get farther north than Belfast on Route 1, whose summer traffic is, as you can imagine, unimaginable.) The region’s two main communities are Camden, with its very old money and yachty harbor and five-star restaurants and phenomenal B&Bs, and Rockland, a serious old fishing town that hosts the Festival every summer in historic Harbor Park, right along the water. 1

Footnote 1: There’s a comprehensive native apothegm: “Camden by the sea, Rockland by the smell.”

Footnote 20 is: ‘Meaning a lot less important, apparently, since the moral comparison here is not the value of one human’s life vs. the value of one animal’s life, but rather the value of one animal’s life vs. the value of one human’s taste for a particular kind of protein. Even the most diehard carniphile will acknowledge that it’s possible to live and eat well without consuming animals.’

And why all the footnotes? In an interview with Charlie Rose, Foster Wallace says: ‘There is a way that reality is fractured right now, at least the reality I live in … the difficulty about writing about that reality is that text is very linear, is very unified and, I, anyway, am constantly on the lookout for ways to fracture the text that doesn’t totally disorient it…’

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David Foster Wallace’s last words, twelve years ago

And so, I’ve bypassed David Foster Wallace’s fiction for his non-fiction – it’s the same thing with Susan Sontag’s work. I will never read Everything and More, Foster Wallace’s book-length essay about infinity, involving maths and set theory (his college interests were “mathematical logic and semantics” – he was a true geek). Or his book on rap, or John McCain. But I look forward, one day, to the little book, a booklet really, This Is Water, a commencement address he gave in 2005 – subtitled, characteristically, and a little preciously but appealingly, Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life.

Right at the end of the 1997 interview between Charlie Rose and a younger (! a sadly small difference) David Foster Wallace  – sporting his trademark bandana, with a tie but no jacket – are these poignant shards:

Rose: ‘But … there were drugs, you were suicidal, it was the whole nine yards, yes?’

Foster Wallace: ‘Here’s why I’m embarrassed talking about it, not because I’m personally ashamed about it, but because everyone talks about it – it sounds like some kind of Hollywood thing to do – oh, he’s out of rehab …

‘The problem was I started out, I think, wanting to be a writer and wanting to get some attention, and I got it really quick and realized it didn’t make me happy at all, in which case, ‘hmm, why am I writing?’ You know, ‘what’s the purpose of this?’ And I don’t think it’s substantively different from the sort of thing: you know, somebody who wants to be a really successful cost accountant and be a partner of his accounting firm and achieves that at 50 and goes into something like a depression. “The brass ring I’ve been chasing does not make everything okay.” So that’s why I’m embarrassed to talk about it. It’s just not particularly interesting. It’s, what it is, is very, very average …

‘The people who most interest me now are the people who are old, and who have sort of been through a mid-life crisis. They tend to get weird, because the normal incentives for getting out of bed don’t tend to apply anymore. I have not found any satisfactory nuance but I’m also not getting ready to, you know, jump off the building, or anything.’

Rose: ‘Well, that’s good news.’

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David Foster Wallace online: uncomfortable lengths for web-reading but here they are:

Consider the Lobster, from Gourmet, 2004.

Authority and American Usage (Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage), from Harper’s, 2001.

And the invaluable interview with Charlie Rose (32 mins), 1997. You can watch the rather shy (frequently averted gaze), very self-concious and highly alert David Foster Wallace as a feted young writer.

Also, for those who have read it, or will never read it, a very illuminating and enjoyably sceptical but sympathetic discussion by the Slate book club (audio podcast or live streaming) about Infinite Jest, and the success and failure of Foster Wallace’s writing.

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Recent posts:
90% of contemporary art is crap
Damien Hirsts’s £500,000 pencils stolen
The Hollywood strangle
Literature is only a genre

“Ninety percent of everything is crud.” Sturgeon’s Law

On a roll – we follow on from yesterday’s post about the theft of Damien Hirst’s £500,000 pencils.

You may recall: the reputedly richest artist in the world (pictured left, poss. net worth £200 million) is in dispute with an 17-yr-old graffitist, Cartrain, which will end up in court later today, London time. Cartrain has been arrested for stealing a packet of pencils from the room-sized installation called Pharmacy at Tate Britain. Charges being laid are £500,000 worth of theft and £10 million worth of damages.

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Damien Hirst congratulates the 9/11 terrorists

Let’s also remind ourselves, Damien Hirst is famous for many things apart from wealth: sharks in formaldehyde, diamond encrusted skulls, and also this (Guardian 11 Sept 2002):

The artist Damien Hirst said last night he believed the terrorists responsible for the September 11 attacks “need congratulating” because they achieved “something which nobody would ever have thought possible” on an artistic level.

Hirst told BBC News Online: “The thing about 9/11 is that it’s kind of an artwork in its own right. It was wicked, but it was devised in this way for this kind of impact. It was devised visually.”

Describing the image of the hijacked planes crashing into the twin towers as “visually stunning”, he added: “You’ve got to hand it to them on some level because they’ve achieved something which nobody would have ever have thought possible, especially to a country as big as America.

“So on one level they kind of need congratulating, which a lot of people shy away from, which is a very dangerous thing.”

The clarity of thought! The insight! The moral compass! The delicacy of his aesthetic perception! O what a piece of work is Damien, how noble in reason, in apprehension how like a god! (Oops, sorry, that last bit was a lift from Hamlet.)

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The banality of evil contemporary art: “I sincerely believe that this art is amongst the best work that has been made in the last 15 years or so.”

Also yesterday, I linked to this article from the Guardian (June 09): “Recently acquired works by Damien Hirst and the Chapman Brothers go on show at Tate Britain.” Let’s have a look at some excerpts:

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Naeem, a checkout operator at a north-London branch of Morrison’s, may not have realised it at the time, but when he was putting through groceries for a demanding customer on a Tuesday evening earlier this month, he was creating art. Yesterday, it went on display for the first time at Tate Britain.

It is, basically, a till receipt stuck to the wall – although more is revealed on closer examination – and it is among works by artists including Damien Hirst and the Chapman Brothers that the Tate believes is some of the best art from the last two decades.

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Marvelous! How was this effortlessly ineffable piece of art (pictured left) conjured? Let’s see:

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Monochrome Till Receipt (White) by the artist Ceal Floyer is in the first room of the show. The original 1999 receipt is in the Tate archives, acquired this year for a sum that will be disclosed in the next annual report. For this version, Tate curators went to a supermarket and followed Floyer’s instructions on what to buy. The shopping cost £70.32. [bold type added]

The show’s curator Andrew Wilson, who went on a dummy run, told the checkout operator “that we were constructing a work of art”, and to put the goods through in a certain order. One of the themes that emerges is the colour of all the goods bought – Alka Seltzer, rock salt, pickled eggs, swing bin bags – all of which are white, and can be seen as a monochromatic still life.

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A white, monochromatic still-life. Genius! Alas, it is not even the actual, real, certified artwork receipt. It is only a reconstruction. But the original receipt – artwork? what do we call this? – was estimated at £30,000 three years ago.

But back to the Tate curators:

The exhibition,’ Classified’, showcases recent additions to the Tate collection. [Curator] Wilson said: “I sincerely believe that this art is amongst the best work that has been made in the last 15 years or so.”

To quote poet A D Hope: ‘Divine Cecilia, there is no more to say!’*

Our leading artists have failed us, have failed the imagination. Our (their) public servants have failed us, have failed the bullshit judgment test. Somewhere, we have mislaid soul, mistaken something else for the heart.

The poet Paul Simon put it cheerfully in his song:

… every generation throws a hero up the pop charts,
Medicine is magical and magical is art
think of the boy in the bubble
and the baby with the baboon heart

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A small sad, beautiful moral

* From A D Hope’s Moschus Moschiferus, a poem (c.1960s) he wrote to the patron saint of musicians, St Cecilia. In twelve lilting stanzas Hope tells the tale of how, in the high jungles near Tibet, the Kastura deer were hunted for their musk glands. Hunters set traps and in the silence pipers played to lure the deer to their doom:

Through those vast, listening woods a tremulous skein
Of melody wavers, delicate and shrill:
Now dancing and now pensive, now a rain
Of pure, bright drops of sound and now the still

Sad wailing of lament; …

Two stanzas later:

… The little musk-deer slips into the glade
Led by an ecstacy that conquers fear

A wild enchantment lures him, step by step
Into its net of crystalline sound, until
The leaves stir overhead, the bowstrings snap
And poisoned shafts bite sharp into the kill.

Then as the victim shudders, leaps and falls,
The music soars to a delicious peak,
And on and on its silvery piping calls
Fresh spoil for the rewards the hunters seek.

A hundred thousand or so are killed each year;
Cause and effect are very simply linked:
Rich scents demand the musk, and so the deer,
Its source, must soon, they say, become extinct.

Divine Cecilia, there is no more to say!
Of all who praised the power of music, few
Knew of these things. In honour of your day
Accept this song I too have made for you.

***
And so it is that a divine art can be practiced to lure its captivated audience to their doom. There is no more to say …

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Recent posts:
The Hollywood strangle
Literature is only a genre
Reading without merit
Kay Ryan – concise, memorable

Long story short: teenager steals a pack of pencils (above) from multi-millionaire artist, is arrested and up to be fined £500,000.

Slightly longer story: 18-year-old graffitist Carwreck, sorry – Cartrain – arrested by the Art and Antiques squad from New Scotland Yard for the theft of a packet of pencils from Tate Britain gallery. Currently out on bail, he returns to court tomorrow (Fri 11 Sept ’09).

Charges being laid are:

• £10 million worth of damages.
• £500,000 worth of theft.

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The story, illustrated:

The exhibit from which the pencils – a “rare” pack of Faber Castell Mongol 482 pencils – were stolen is a Damien Hirst installation called Pharmacy, purchased by the Tate in 1996 and now commodity-valued at £10 million.

Cartrain has had previous run-ins with Hirst for using his famous diamond skull image (For the Love of God) in posters – these were confiscated, and of the £200 Cartrain made from them, Hirst is demanding £195. After which Cartrain played a bodalicious prank – he created a poster which he snuck into the National Portrait Gallery and hung and labeled as a “portrait” of Hirst – the diamond skull plastered with a censored label.

So it was that on July 4, Cartrain, visiting the Pharmacy installation, simply picked up the pencils and walked out, and issued this ransom:

“For the safe return of Damien Hirst’s pencilers [sic] I would like my artworks back that DACS [Design and Artists Copyright Society] and Hirst took off me in November. It’s not a large demand… Hirst has until the end of this month to resolve this or on 31 of July the pencils will be sharpened. He has been warned.”

For which he created a fake police poster. Thence, his arrest, along with his father (on suspicion of “harbouring the pencils”, but later released).

If convicted they will both be sentenced to hard labour for the term of their natural lives, and fed only stale bread and water.

And thus, Leddies and Genmen, do we protect the artists of the land (or, at least the wealthy ones from the poor) – those guardians of our spirit, pathfinders of morality – to the full, awful extent of the Law. Long live Justice, long live art! For the love of God.

We will keep you posted.

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The original offending posters:

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The National Portrait Gallery poster (copy of):

Photo: unusualimage/Flickr

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The Pharmacy installation:

The pencils were lifted from the desk in the foreground. Photo © Damien Hirst.

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The fake police poster by Cartrain:

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Ah, contemporary art! Damien Hirst! For the love of God!

My immediate response has been very well pre-empted by a comment made by another graffitist, which I posted last month (which btw I see as gender-neutral in spirit). Here it is again:

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More Hirsty triumphs:

• “Recently acquired works by Damien Hirst and the Chapman Brothers, believed to be the best of British art in the last 20 years, go on show at Tate Britain.”
• How Damien Hirst made a bundle on his second version of ‘Pharmacy’, the Notting Hill restaurant, for which he designed all interior fittings and details in 1997, and which he leased to the owners, and which he then auctioned off 5 years later.

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Recent posts:
The Hollywood strangle
Literature is only a genre
Reading without merit
Kay Ryan – concise, memorable