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Seeing that I can find no subject specially useful or pleasing – since the men who have come before me have taken for their own every useful or necessary theme – I must do like one who, being poor, comes last to the fair, and can find no other way of providing for himself than by taking all the things already seen by other buyers and not taken but refused by reason of their lesser value. I, then, will load my humble pack with this despised and rejected merchandise, the refuse of so many buyers; and will go about to distribute it, not indeed in great cities, but in the poorer towns, taking such a price as the wares I offer may be worth.

I know that many will call this useless work, and they will be those of whom Demetrius declared that he took no more account of the wind that came out their mouth in words, than that which they expelled from their lower parts: men who desire nothing but material riches and are absolutely devoid of that of wisdom, which is the food and the only true riches of the mind. For so much more worthy as the soul is than the body, so much more noble are the possessions of the soul than those of the body. And often, when I see one of these men take this work in his hand, I wonder that he does not put it to his nose, like a monkey, or ask me if it is something good to eat.

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Via UBUWeb

More information, including a free coach trip from London to the preview and Jordan Baseman in conversation with Peter Bonnell on the Artsway website.

21st February – 5th April 2009
Tuesday – Sunday, 11am – 5pm 
Preview and Reception for the Artist: Saturday 21st February 2009 at 2pm

A: Artsway, Station Road, Sway, Hampshire, SO41 6BA
T: +44 (0) 1590 682260
W: www.artsway.org.uk
E:  mail@artsway.org.uk

[See the full post to listen to this audio file]

Lucier records himself narrating a text, and then plays the recording back into the room, re-recording it. The new recording is then played back and re-recorded, and this process is repeated. Since all rooms have a characteristic resonance (e.g., between a large hall and a small room), the effect is that certain frequencies are gradually emphasised as they resonate in the room, until eventually the words become unintelligible, replaced by the pure resonant harmonies and tones of the room itself. The recited text describes this process in action – it begins “I am sitting in a room, different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice…”, and concludes with, “I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have,” referring to his own stuttering.

Audio from UBUWeb’s Alvin Lucier page
Quote from the good Wikipedia article about Lucier
Alvin Lucier’s official website

Published in 1987, his landmark Memory for Forgetfulness expresses the plight of the refugee under siege.  This book is an eyewitness account of the peak of shelling in Lebanon during the civil war, called Hiroshima Day. Comparable to Slaughterhouse 5 or Murakami’s The White Sky of Hiroshima, Memories for Forgetfulness is a coherent exploration of a life that is already forfeit, a life of isolation, injustice and alienation.

When he died in 2008, discussions were held with Israel to bury him in his home town.  He was buried in exile from that home village so that he could be where all Palestinians can visit.  His remains rest in Ramallah at the heart of the disputed West Bank.

What follows is a short excerpt where Darwish recalls going out into the city streets under bombardment.

I was touched somehow with enthusiasm.  The occupation extended over space, the sea, Snobar mountain, the first storms of anxiety, the way of Adam exiled from paradise.  Many are the ways of unending exile.  My country never came back to me.  My body never came back.  The air raids rain down hymns spreading out and conferences of the living dead in blood like light burning the cold question:  what am I looking for?  I fill myself with gunpowder because of repressed and compressed anger.

Missiles enter my body through my pores, leaving in all safety.  What strength!  I don’t feel the hell spreading through the air wile I’m breathing hell and sweating hells.  Yes, I sing the burning day.  I want to sing.  I want to find a language that will change language into steel for the soul, an anti-air defence language… shiny silver insects… I want to sing.

I want a language to support me while I support it.  I want a language to bear witness to me bearing witness to this language that we have the power to overcome this cosmic isolation.  I walk on.

I walk to see myself walking, taking firm steps, free even of myself.   In the middle of the road, the exact middle, with the barking of a phantom airplane overhead.  She spits her fire, and I don’t notice.  What am I looking for?  Nothing.  Maybe the determined hard headedness that hides the fear of being alone.  Or maybe the fear of being alone.  Or maybe the fear of being crushed under rubble is what drives my footfall, striking the sleeping streets.  

I never saw Beirut sleep so late.  For the first time I could see the sidewalks cleared of people.  For the first time I could see the trees.  Clear trees with roots and branches and leaves that never brown.  Is Beirut beautiful in and of herself?  There had been movement and speach and congestion and ll the mercantile traffic hiding away something from view, changing Beirut from a city to a given fact, a signification, a phrase, a sign.  She used to publish books, disseminate media and host conferences and colloquiums on cures for the world’s maladies, and she didn’t pay any attention to herself.  She was busy flexing a sarcastic tongue over the dust and oppression all around.  She was a free workshop, and her walls encompassed the entire modern canon.  

There was a poster factory.  Beirut was the first city to modify poster production into daily newspapers.  Her ability to express patched together variety, death, chaos, freedom, exile, exodus and peoples.  She was filled with and commissioned for (fawada) every known form of expression and found in posters a way to comprehend the burden (fawada) to express the quotidian.  ”Poster” even became a common phrase in tales and epics designating a specialty.

Faces on walls.  Fresh martyrs released from life and published.  The dead repeating the results of death.  One martyr covering the face of another martyr on the wall.  He takes his place until another martyr buries him and then rain.   Slogans inflame slogans which are exchanged and ranked according to sentimental priorities and global daily needs.  

Whatever happens in the world happens here, buy involuted and ideal currents.  An argument between two intellectuals in a Parisian cafe becomes armed conflict her.  

This is because Lebanon has to belong to and keep up with everything new, and every revived old thing, and every new movement and every new theory.  Film revolutions in quick succession.  Video for immediate implementation.  The new leader and new star are candidates of new leader and new star in their respective fields..  They jump over walls with pictures and words  They salivate over bitterness behind a consciousness trading itself in.  To stars their ages, riegns are shortlived.

No, the public here is sensitive.  In fact, there is no public here, for the race is run in the American style even if their goals are hostile to America.  There are always representatives here from every new realization and every new melody and every new enthusiasm: from the coquetish yearnings in the chest of a young woman in tight jeans indicating leftist excesses, to the one in a viel covering face and hands indicating fundamentalism, to the grasping of every fading sign of Karl Marx in his Orientalist catalogue indicating gusts of eastern wind.

Here is a central ontological transformer for everyone who is out of the race.  It was popularized as an employment service for a people busy securing foodstuffs and water, busy burying their dead.

I am walking through streets that no one walks through.  I remember before walking through streets that no one walks through.  And I remember someone who was not with me saying:

Him:  Stop this oratory and come with me.

I:  Where to?

Him:  To see this man.

I:  What does this man do?

Him:  He is going to his house.

I:  But he keeps retracing his steps.

Him:  That’s just how he walks.

I:  He’s not walking.  It’s much better that that:  he’s dancing!

Him:  Watch him carefully.  Count his steps.  1,2,4,7,9 steps forward.  1,2,3,7,8 steps back.

I:  What’s that prove?

Him:  That he is walking, and this is the only way he knows how to get home.  10 steps forward, 9 steps back.  He still advances one step.

I:  What if his mind wanders and he miscounts?

Him:  Then he will never get home.

I:  Are you trying to tell me something?

Him:  Not at all.

Translation:  Lelyn R. Masters

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The Private Life of Gannets, available to download in high quality from the Internet Archive.

The Private Life of Gannets can be located on the Internet Archive – such a veritable storehouse of bird footage that I chose the gannet completely at random. The film was directed by Julian Huxley and shot by John Grierson, the uncompromising Scottish filmmaker and theorist who introduced the word ‘documentary’ to the English language. In the spring of 1937 they began shooting off the Welsh coast on the island of Grassholm (Welsh; Ynys Gwales). Its name, Viking in origin, means ‘green island’ although the rock, pungent with guano and the plumage of the birds, is white in appearance. A camera captures the hatching of a chick; its physical development unfolds in time-lapse photography. New born birds are completely black, and gradually their feathered down shows increasing amounts of white. The use of slow motion reveals the operations of flight. These fowl have far forward eyes with binocular vision allowing them to judge distances with acute accuracy and they are shown diving down into the sea to skewer fish. The term “greedy gannet” arises from their voracious appetite and the species’ arrah arrah cry has made one more recent visitor to the island describe it as an avian discotheque. Today this colony of gannets still rule supreme on a terrain wholly unoccupied by humans. If they could only know this – the gannets might indeed be grateful.

In Aristophanes’ satire – The Birds – the leaders of the bird kingdom are disastrously misled by two humans into defying Zeus by building a city, “Cloudcuckooland” which interrupts the flow of communication between mankind and the gods. The aerial blockade prevents the steam of sacrificial offering rising skywards to the gods.

For the literary ornithologist this play is a delight – amongst its extensive cast are a Hoopoe, Partridge, Mallard, Kingfisher, Sparrow, Owl, Jay, Turtledove, Crested Lark, Reed Warbler, Pigeon, Woodpecker and Vulture – to name but a few.

They describe their creation thus:

It was Chaos and Night at the first, and the blackness of darkness, and hell’s broad border;

Earth was not, nor air, neither heaven; when in depths of the womb of the dark without order

First thing first born of the black-plumed Night was a wind-egg hatched in her bosom,

Whence timely, with season revolving again, sweet Love burst out as a blossom,

Gold wings glittering forth of his back, like whirlwinds gustily turning

He, after his wedlock with Chaos, whose wings are of darkness in hell broad-burning,

For his nestings begat him a race of birds first and upraised us to light new-lighted.

Aristophanes’ 2500 year old comedy, combines natural history, mythology and augury, to explore governance and corruption in the birds quest for primacy over gods and humans. Cloudcuckooland transforms from an egalitarian state into dictatorship. This theatrical entertainment, outwardly light, colourful, absurd and played for laughs has much darker undertones.

In 1920 the German composer Walter Braunfels used the play to devise an Opera, Die Vogel. On August 29th 1920 another bird was born in Kansas City – Charles Parker Jnr. Die Vogel with other works by Braunfels was banned in the 1930s by the Nazis as part of their campaign against Entartete Musik (Degenerate Music). Other than a general hostility to modernist styles this included music made by composers with differing political views and those of Jewish Lineage. It also included a strong censorship of Jazz because of its Afro – Americans proponents. However later in a perverse form of propaganda a Nazi Jazz band was devised and named Charlie and his Jazz Orchestra, recording versions of popular songs with the lyrics altered and radio broadcast to Britain and America. On both sides, music, film, art even birds were appropriated as tools of warfare.

The British were convinced the Nazis were preparing a pigeon invasion from occupied France and Belgium to deliver messages to their spies in Britain. The British trained battalions of falcons in preparation for a Battle of Britain with feathers. It never happened. The files reveal the Nazi pigeon invasion was the product of overheated imaginations.

Christopher Andrew

Looney Toons indeed, Daffy The Commando and Donald Duck in full Nazi regalia in Der Fuerher’s Face! Hawks, doves and eagles remain the cherished symbols of fighting talk.

The War is on!

War unutterable!

War with the gods!

Scan, scan the cloud-filled sky…

Aristophanes

Created before these rumblings, The Private Life of Gannets became one of many films that were to shape the course of scientific research itself, by encouraging an interest in visual communication within the animal world. Species were selected for their photogenic qualities and there was an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the image’s power to educate and inform.

Science and entertainment required that only the most spectacular and private aspects of animal life were recorded.

Gregg Mittman

Grierson was seriously committed to the fabrication of authenticity in the natural history film and more so in documenting the workings of human society, particularly that of the working class. He was a radical filmmaker. However to the contemporary viewer this observing eye can look and sound a little quaint. The soundtrack is crowded with voice-over and the sound of an anodyne orchestra playing sickly parlour music. A very English voice intones with gravity upon “the anchors and chains of wrecked ships” and the commentary, in describing the pale island, makes repeated poetic reference to the whiteness of snow. We never get to hear the sound of the birds or the rush of the sea or an occasional unearthly silence. Try visiting a different island in Antonioni’s L’Aventurra and you will hear the sound of the wind and waves crashing against the jagged perimeter of rock. You will encounter another form of seeking and looking in which the psychology and sense of place has the exactitude of an almost scientific eye. Yet the two very different films both articulate a terrible sense of remoteness and awe.

It is too easy to overlook Private Lives. The cinematography reveals a passion for expanding the language and content of the medium, within the often limiting conventions of public information films of this time. The aim? To show life and nature as it is. It is a film that wants to fly and what better subject than birds that can, not flightless things like ostriches, penguins, kiwis and chickens.

During the First Punic War, Publius Claudius, a headstrong man, consulted the sacred chickens which were not eating, which was a bad omen, he replied, “Let them drink!” and ordered them to be thrown into the sea. Shortly after that he lost his fleet of the Aegeate islands. This was a great disaster for our Republic and indeed for Claudius himself

Neptonius

In adulthood Charlie Parker Jnr became Bird. While out on the Road with the McShann Band, in the wilds of Nebraska, the car hit a chicken that had run onto the highway from a nearby farmyard. Parker suggested going back to pick up the “Yardbird” and thus his nickname came into being. Was this an augury of sorts?

Bird ate that chicken but why did it cross that road?

Plato: For the greater good.

Aristotle: To fulfill its nature on the other side.

Karl Marx: It was an historical inevitability.

Thoreau: To live deliberately … and suck all the marrow out of life.

Mark Twain: The news of its crossing has been greatly exaggerated.

Emily Dickinson: Because it could not stop for death.

Bird would not stop for anything. He wanted to play a music that “they can’t steal from us“, “they” being the white musicians who copied earlier forms of jazz and received most of its financial rewards.

His playing had such dexterity, such fluidity. In his playing, if you take his nickname Bird and you picture a bird flying through the air – in flight – he’s totally free. Even though the music is structured, his style of playing is so totally free, that he can just fly – go in any direction he so desires.

Milt Jackson

On April 30th 1941 Alto saxophonist Parker made his first commercial recording “Swingmatism” with Jay McShann’s band in Dallas. Also in 1941 an elephant flew, albeit a cartoon elephant. Dumbo’s aerial feat was immortalised in the song – When I See An Elephant Fly. The song was sung by a crew of jive-talking Crows – (voiced as blacks performers). This was not unusual at the time, amongst other crude stereotypes in the world of animation, such as monkeys or cannibals, Afro- Americans were often depicted as black birds, Disney’s unwitting racial divination.

cra, cré, cro, crou, crouou.

grass, gress, gross, grouss, grououss.

craé, créé, croa, croua, grouass.

crao, créé, croé, croue, grouess.

craou, créo, croo, crouo, grouoss.

A transcription of crow-calls made in 1806 by Dupont de Nemours

In 1945 after an unsuccessful engagement ended with Dizzie Gillespie, all the musicians returned to New York except for Bird, who cashed in his airplane ticket and stayed in California. Stranded there with a serious heroin addiction, his need for cash led him to Dial Records where he recorded “Moose The Mooch,” “Yardbird Suite,” “Night In Tunisia” and “Ornithology.”

“Ornithology” is a ‘contrafact’ – a newly written melody over the chord progression of another song –”How High The Moon” Again notions of flight, of becoming airborne, are never far from reach. Contrafact gives birth to improvisation.

arrah arrah

bebop bebop

be-babbe-debop

boo bam boo

hoopoe hoopoe

baba-baba-BA!

The regal instrument sounds out timelessly.

King Solomon then called in the animals, birds and creeping things, one by one, to parade before the king and his onlookers, without any man leading them, and without any of them being bound by fetters or restraints. While this was taking place, King Solomon noticed that the Hoopoe bird was absent among the birds, and commanded his servants to bring unto him the bird, even if it meant chaining him. When he was eventually brought before the king, the king enquired where he had been.

The Hoopoe bird tells King Solomon of a land he has discovered in the east whose capital is called Qitor and whose ruler is the Queen of Sheba.

Lo! I found a woman ruling over them and she has been given abundance of everything; she has been given the knowledge of all things in her country, and has a mighty throne adorned with gems, pearls, gold and silver.

The bird is sent by Solomon to request the queen’s immediate attendance at Solomon’s court. The Hoopoe is a spy, messenger, envoy and diplomat but being a mercenary he too likes to fly in any direction he so desires. He hovers through Time with a pearl in his beak, flying across centuries towards the 1950s streets of New York, to 1678 Broadway, to Birdland. He swoops right inside the club and nests that pearl in the interior of an alto sax.

Down them stairs, lose them cares – where?

Down in Birdland.

Total swing, bop was king – there

Down in Birdland.

Bird would cook, Max would look – where?

Down in Birdland.

Miles came through, Trane came too – there

Down in Birdland.

Basie blew, Blakey too – where?

Down in Birdland.

Cannonball played that hall – there

Down in Birdland

Saturday morning, an empty sky.

His death, too and his deification after death were known in advance by unmistakable signs. As he was bringing the lustrum to an end, before a great throng of people, an eagle flew several times about him then across to the temple hard by, perched above the first letter of Agrippa’s name

Suetonius

On March 12th 1955 Bird took flight from a room in the Stanhope Hotel. An ornithic host gathered in the branches of a Sawtooth Oak in Central Park and sang sweet and plaintive laments. Only the Hoopoe remained aloof from the congregation – perched alone in the recesses of a Black Willow, completely mute. He was preparing to change places, tempos, time zones; ready to fly back to King Solomon, or perhaps further forward to who knows where.

Walls in Greenwich Village were covered in the graffito: BIRD LIVES.

Never again

Through my domain

Shall a god presume to stray;

The birds are on guard,

The gates are barred,

Not one shall pass this way!

Never again

Through my domain

Shall the smoke from altars rise;

In vain they’ll sniff:

For the faintest whiff:

We’ve cut off their supplies

Aristophanes

Back at the end of the day, the film crew at Grassholm are packing up their kit and waiting nervously on the rocks for the boat to the mainland, oblivious to the Gannets continuing to dive into the ocean for fish. The film must go to the lab in Soho as soon as possible. They rub their sides and stamp their feet against the chill air – never for a moment considering the possibility of taking the auspices.

In 357 AD the emperor Constantius outlawed all methods of divination including Augury.

The art may have gone the way of the dodo, yet when watching Huxley & Grierson’s film or foraging through the links below, you may discover your own propensity towards divination. If you don’t believe me – you are almost certainly in Cloudcuckooland.

The Private Life of Gannets

Directed by: Julian Huxley

Produced by: Alexander Korda

Written by: Ronald Lockley

Starring: A. L. Alexander

Cinematography: John Grierson, Osmond Borradaile

Release date: July, 1937

Running time: 10 minutes

View the full film or download a high-quality version on the Internet Archive

To visit the island of Grassholm call:

A Thousand Expeditions +44 (0)1437 721 721

In a recent issue of NY Arts Magazine, Éva Pelczer interviewed Margarita Gluzberg about her show The Money Plot at Paradise Row Gallery in London.

Read the full interview »