On Fucking the Audience

Sometimes antagonism is the best medicine. -Arch-priest Reginald Somnambatista

Sometimes antagonism is your only real option.

We've talked in other places about the idea of yarn, a form of materially focused art production that works to avoid post-modern self-critical distance by refocusing its attentions to desire and its form to that which visually represents itself in all its loose and jangliness. That, however, is a trap.

There is no real escape from concerns over authenticity. All art, all production, all life, all everything can be put under question as to its intentionality. This is a pure and unavoidable state.

The problem, however, is constructed almost entirely on the notion of reception. The problem of authenticity is always about a second party (even, as we'll discuss later, when that other party is yourself).

This is why, fuck the audience. Which is not to say make esoteric art that will leave even the elite in a stupor. It means, quite simply, fuck them. And fuck you.

Your job as an artist is solely to engage in the process of production. This isn't a state of being that requires reflection and repetition (it can, of course, or sometimes should).

Fuck the audience takes seriously the notion of creative impulse, not necessarily creative intentionality. Intentionality is already pitched toward reception. It is always angled toward a form of comprehensiblity that undermines the impulse. Now certainly, there is also no pure impulse. That would be almost essentially inhuman to assume anything pure.

Furthermore, antagonism is not forgetting. It is not ignorance or isolation. It is simply the reminder that they aren't the point. Which, as we pointed toward in aside above, is not to say that you are the point either. You are most certainly fucking not. The you of the future is not you and cannot be trusted anymore than anyone else. You are acting for you essentially only in the action itself, not the minute by minute reflection that coinhabits the artistic space. While it would be senseless to ban reflection from that space, it is crucial to retain antagonism toward that reflective corrective. Fuck it. First and foremost get it down. Spit it out. Fuck it up.

The true reception—the receiver, you or anyone else—is just as artistic a process, is just as open to making as in the first instant. When I arrive at your artwork, I may do whatever I wish to it. Hate it, love it, steal it and incorporate it into my own art world. In essence you can't stop me. And similarly, you can't stop yourself. The future you will fuck up your art. You will steal it and massacre it. And that is precisely your right. Which means fuck the artist as much as fuck the audience. You are a free being and it is your job—if we're talking about being an individual either as an artist or just a person—to do precisely what you will with a piece of art.

None of this should be seen as a rejection of the potential for communal interaction around art or anything else. We are speaking solely about a first instance, a snapshot in time to which one could never truly return or inhabit. Art can not be for anything. That is its essence. Art is not even for Art (capital A), which would be to say that art was responsible to some ideal that could exist outside of itself, which—trailing off now—would imply that it wasn't for itself. Art is strictly undefinable outside of negative definitions. Its requirement is to be permanently mutable such that every single instant of creative production can possibly open up to being art.

Which is almost to say that the word itself disappears, loses all meaning. At what point is the conversation no longer about art, but say life, or energy, or matter? No answer. Stupid question. Pointless. Fucking pointless.

Art is not pornography, you don't know it when you see it. That would be loving the audience well beyond the bounds of any safety.

Art is that which you can't really see at all. Art is only that which you can make. So yes. You might as well just say living or making. But isn't that something amazing as such? Perhaps the suggestion here is that all living is unrecognized art (leaving alone for a second the fact that we just claimed that art was in essence unrecognizable). And well, sure it is. Making is the stuff of gods. It you produce a pure moment that must be art no matter the context. As above, this means we are in the realm of the meaningless.

So the question becomes, what is the "art" that we recognize? The answer, which we deduce from its having been made, is those inspired moments that manage to persist in spite of everything that tends to delude there effects. The artist is person that learns to regard the essence of the making. If something was made poorly at first—making poorly might be impossible under this definition, but please, allow us our loopholes—it's remaking can renew or restore its essence. This takes great acuity.

This does not give you license to hack at something lamely and call it art for want of editing because you feel it is pure. Editing can also be art. Art that can piggyback on the first moment and further push that inspiration.

The audience must be fucked. But only as long as they remain an audience. Audiences produce damaging response precisely in their role as viewer. They are essentially at cross purposes with the core of the piece of art. When the audience interacts with the art so as to remake it, they leave the role of audience and become artist. Artists who allow this swapping of positions—or better put a crossing of lines that puts the audience on the same side as the artist—allows the art to change and grow. There can be no damage to the art. Art is never in danger. (Tho admittedly, collective creation is infinitely more difficult than sole creation and is in fact the heart of the sublime, incomprehensible.)

Only audiences destroy. They destroy by being audiences. They destroy in their passivity.

The only good audience is no longer an audience. But of course they never have to be.

So cease. Cease to exist those who don't make. We must be antagonistic to the audience. We must fuck the audience.

Fuck you.

The Return of Radio

I've written a few time now about my love of KALX. This station has single handedly returned an interesting variety to my music listening and has opened me up to a form of music listening that is more trial-sized. Sometimes I cope through some of the music. And sometimes I fall in love. But all the time I'm happy for the spinning, chaotic ball of variety (except when it is disco, which despite my best attempts and efforts still grates on me nearly instantly).

But here is a little thesis about our changing relation to music as a commodity. With the advent of the mp3 and the mass storage device (and a little friend I like to call digital media pirating) we have access to boatloads of tunes (I'm a hep cat, I know). At a certain moment in this evolution, for me let's say around 2004-2005 when I began to carry with me a continual 40+ gb of music at any time, the problem stopped being access and become choice. Now we might characterize the problem even a little differently and say that instant access vis the internet is even more important than size of storage (which none the less continues to grow, more of the access point in a moment). But so, choice becomes the problematic issue. You have a metric fuck ton of music, but you don't know how to move through it readily enough to maintain your own interest (a sad day for humankind, when our laziness is returned to us). And so we try using randomizing functions—shuttle. But it turns out with so much music—not to mention audiobooks—shuttle pushes you mostly crap (or if its algorithm makes use of your play counts, only things you already listen to too often). And thus we get Pandora and the Genius Playlist. Functions that require only a minimal input to produce for you a serious of choice, which in the former at least, you can always tweak.

So choice is solved right? Sort of yes, but now we've already (with Pandora) moved from an ownership model. And then Pandora pushes commercials. The rest of the music is still our there for your listening pleasure without commercials easily enough, but you would have to find it. Boo-urns to that. And here is where I at least get off the merry-go-round. The internet has taught me to forego ownership for access, to let go of my death grip on media. And in negative, it has taught me to despise commercials. It has, essentially, returned me to the loving arms of radio. I suppose I mean public radio or commercial-free radio. And specifically, I only really mean KALX, because they produce the only radio without obnoxious DJs and terrible cut music.

Now I'm not saying that innovation will or should cease in any respect to the form of music delivery. But I think that 1) the access vs. ownership war has been won by access—tho I know not yet, I'm just predicting that that war is ideologically already won and just going to take its time to peter out. (And not of course to say that there won't be media-ophiles of all sorts still with rampant need to collect and keep.) And 2) radio, done right, has yet to be outmoded and is in fact newly returned to relevancy. Once people eschew the need for ownership, radio returns to viability provided that it can present an informed eclecticism (which is understandably completely subjective and just as likely to fail for you as it is to succeed for me).

Suffice it all to say, the world of media and ownership is changing and it turns out radio was a pretty smart idea after all.

Yarn: A Sort of Prayer

Why today is there the familiar rallying cry of 'return to the earth'? Why, when such movements have come up again and again and been defeated by sound logic, ungirded of their false assumptions, made to bathe in their contradictions? Why too the return to folk of all sorts?

There is an easy answer that won't desituate itself even after we've made it less easy—tho make it less easy we must. The big resounding fact is that we live in an age of digital technologies, which continually blur the line between 'real' and virtual words. To the point that the previous sentence cannot go any longer without quotation marks, without internal reference to an open exchange between the 'real' and the virtual. As 'real' as this fact may be—technology has made our experience of the world less stable than our own bodies left alone would tend to do—it is not as interesting as its symptoms. Or, put another way, it is not as interesting as our attending to its symptoms will allow us to see it in its full complexity. And really, the symptoms are what we are interested in here, so let us turn to them now.

The return to folk, a particular sub-culture in the oughts, is marked by its desire to 'do it yourself.' DIY culture has run amok in a particular collusion with technology—but this interesting facet we'll turn to much later. Contemporary folk and DIY represent a radical materiality, an insistent return to the most 'real' and tangible material they can find. Knitting, yarn. But also, metalwork, glassblowing, cobbling.

Yarn. A sort of pun. As material, yarn makes sense. Yarn is ragged with visible tendrils of the 'real.' Yarn exhibits the same chaos as our lives. Yarn, despite the multitude of fly-aways, achieves unity, direction and continuity. Yarn is a strained and straining desire. Endless yearning. Agony of trying. (And now, in a parallel world, we digress to discuss trying and essays—essayer, esssaying...)

Yarn. The pun. The tale that is already the first metaphor. The image of the tale-taler, an old salt, weaving (pun/metaphor) a wry legend with all the ragged bits and straying edges that give onto new worlds at every end. Yet through the digressions, a tale emerges, whole and true—even as we put 'whole' under question (under quotations that question). The same unity, direction and continuity that survives amidst the digressions. That, truth told, is only ever just enough digressive material that it begins to appear as a unity, directed and continuous.

And the metaphors will extend on. So, yarn. To name a movement that understands the fragility of its purpose. That is defined by its ardent desire to tell in full realization of the difficulties attendant on that desire. Of the world's occlusion in the mysteries of markets and technologies. That wants to weave. Never wants to stop or cease. Refuses to deny the ability to render digression and strands into something more solid. Even if unstable, baseless, essentially and always only ever 'virtual'.

And there we hit a conceptual epiphany that we must cease the rhetorical flourishes to attend to. 'Virtual' now relegated to the questioning quotations. Yarn, recognizing that 'real' must be suspended and held aloft in perpetual observation and questioning, takes that questioning to be a proof. Unsure of 'real,' we must be unsure of all. No stable anything. Even the antagonistic 'virtual' must exist under questioning only. No longer can it be the new dominant Truth. The digital and virtual, seeming to erase the boundaries of the 'real,' actually erase the boundaries of themselves. And just enough credence return to the 'real,' now given a more solid name, the material.  Just enough credence need not mean Truth. But just enough credence to be open to choice. To choose the material as as 'real' as the 'virtual.' But here we spin perhaps a bit too far into our metaphors—or perhaps too far from the ground materiality of our metaphoric yarn.

Yarn can neither do without its continuity nor its digression. The metaphoric slippage between a yarn and some yarn is instructive. Their relationship is so essential that the language of weaving applies equally to both objects. Which is not to say that this is natural in some gods given way, only that their constructions are essentially linked and co-constitutive. Perhaps the sailor's yarn seems secondary, an easily adaptable metaphor for the realm of metaphoricity. And perhaps in a strictly historical sense this is true. But the use of "yarn" to describe a narrative, gives yarn back to us in its specific materiality. Yarn the material functions on the same dynamics as narrative yarns and makes visible, in part, the relationship between continuity and digression. But this visibility disappears, in part, in its use, utility and functionality. Woven yarn enters into projects that appear as whole and complete. Ragged edges are more concealed in finished sweaters and scarves. Yarn's metaphorical link to narrative, especially of the rambling variety, establishes its difference in thought. That is, yarn maintains its distinction as a ragged thing instead of collapsing into synonymousness with "thread." The distinction should be apparent at the emergence of this term. Thread is that which links as its essential property. Its metaphoric associations are all about continuity and attachment. There is no escaping thread. Thread is that which may be lingering, which may always be picked up. And thus, yarn requires its metaphoric attachment to avoid lapsing into the simple rigors of its function without regard to its real material qualities.

We are dealing here with a real 'back to the earth' phenomenon. Yarn is a tool. And if our only experience of it is as a consumer of pre-produced good made from it, we do not have the experience of it in itself. Those who knit and purl come closer, they experience the material feel of the tool. Yet they still do not produce the tool. And failing to produce the tool they are at a remove from its essence. We are rightfully critical of 'back to the earth' movements. Any game of pure individual production, even as a thought experiment, necessarily butts up against unpassable boundaries. Even if one could strip away all goods and run naked into the woods, the immaterial knowledge of our consumption/production world would tread in after. We are subject to this world in an inextricable way.

And so why yarn? Why the conscious steps backward if we know the way back is built on unstable ground, and untenable tenets? Because we are engaged in a war for consciousness. We are constructing a web of awareness that will not allow us to fall silently back into the drone of pure consumption. (We could, as cynics, divert now into a limitless concern that 'awareness' here becomes an empty move that simply returns us all the more safely and satisfied into the arms of the status quo, relieving the pent up concerns just enough to continue to let the system operate, but as I say, that is a perpetual concern and one that tends to close down discussion rather than allow it to attend its full measure as I would like to do here—regardless in this moment whether the matter we're discussing is effective or not.)

Yarn, and DIY, is a culture of critical awareness. It is a culture whose aesthetic marks itself hyper-visibly with its making. That announces itself as produced, as consumable only under the condition that the consumer admit the production, make visible the constituent elements. This is the 'folk', that has been heretofore synonymous with 'poorly crafted.' The return to the 'folk' as a citation is necessarily elitist and troubled. One cannot escape that. The intention is to escape from the factory-made and it is a desperate escape which clings to another free from that association. 'Folk' then becomes valorized as that which as resisted the systemization of the factory. 'Folk' is an unwitting hero tho, that never intended or desired to stand forth against the machines. All this troubles the movement and rightfully so. As a conscious movement, however, these troubles are not uncritical and can be worked at, transformed.

Yarn, again, is a culture of attempt, of trial. This is its essence and that which, even amidst troubles, it does not (have to) apologize for.

[music]

Photography presents an interesting case here. Early photography—daguerreotypes, pin-hole cameras, tintypes—when technology could still be felt and processed by one's own hands. Understood, more importantly. But interesting still because it is technology, it is the beginning of the mystery. First the chemicals, already terribly mixed up in the trajectories of global trade, already too mysterious to get one's hands on. But palpable none the less, an exposure to the dangers of 'real' science. This approach to the 'real' and dangerous projects a psychological limit. 'Real' enough to feel free of the larger mysterious networks. Like planting seeds in one's own yard and tending them with no idea how the seeds were developed and produced over centuries for your own easy planting. Or worse still, the farmer's market that has faith that 'real,' natural work is happening just adjacent, that you can see and touch and talk to the people who do it. And they too slaves to markets and processes, grown green only as subsidiary markets easing the distaste of the rich and petulant few.

But cameras, film. A return to magic in technology, just enough to not get lost. Steampunk as a genre is all about the return to ownership of technology. A desire to recapture the age of the individual inventor. To escape the multinational and return to the fantasy of individual production. A safe imaginary letting onto a dangerous ignorance of the world itself. Tho related, yarn is a distinct movement and one we will rightly return to now.

Woah: Keanu Reeves & the Limits of Acting

The easy mockery that surrounds Keanu Reeves presents itself essentially as a critique of bad acting. It is a self-assured, nearly definitive stance, sullied only occasionally by reference to positive reviews from his Shakespearean stagework and rumors of his having been trained classically. Both give way easily to the same laughing critique that struts forth in mockery the early 90s Much Ado About Nothing.

Despite tacit, imbedded critique, he continues to be a box office draw, broadly in the realm of the science fiction / action Summer Blockbuster. This genre is particularly appropriate for Keanu—interesting that his moniker tends to utilize his first rather than last name—for reason I will soon discuss. The glib respondent would likely point to the fact that Summer Blockbusters are the type of film that people see simply to be entertained, films for which they can 'shut off their brains' and just passively consume. In fact, I agree. But this is only half of the equation.

After years of searching, Mr. Reeves—for the sake of formality here and as we'll see to mark a distinction that becomes increasingly important and interesting—has finally found his home within the world of acting. And in that world, he has ceased to act. I contend that all along Keanu has, at particular crucial moments, ceased to act, but that only relatively recently has he learned to manifest and capitalize on this skill more completely. Perhaps, tho, capitalize is to brusque a word. I will also contend that this skill reveals a deep inner peace and its appearance within film transmits something of this peace to the audience, accounting for the odd appeal of Keanu. This returns us then to the question: Why Summer Blockbuster sci-fi? These films curiously combine the sparking of intrigue and thoughtfulness with the passivity of modern thoughtless film consumption. Precisely this admixture opens the space for spiritual revelation. But we'll come to that.

Firstly, the appearance of this technique in the early films as a means of grasping the technique itself. Keanu has often—with great success—played dumb. Throughout his career he has been cast as a character in need of being educated, a pupil. (The converse of this can be seen in Much Ado About Nothing and to some extent in the latter half of My Own Private Idaho. Both reveal the difficulty with which people accept him as one that produces his own knowledge or toys with that of others.) In both Bill & Ted films, as well as Point Break and almost most importantly The Matrix—from which the titular "Woah"—Keanu is the star of a new form of bildungsroman. Keanu is the empty vessel into which information is poured. In Bill & Ted, this information is simple and didactic and his ability to remain near totally blank provides the necessary comedy to push the bitter pill of learning. (One shouldn't discount the brilliant performance of Alex Winter either, but for our purposes and clearly for Hollywood's Keanu performance provides us with something more important and enduring.) While The Matrix may be the crucial turning point in Keanu's career—serendipitously as a box office star and within the bound of my own humble thesis—in its presentation of Keanu as pupil, it remains somewhat simple and inelegant. Keanu's learning and his reason for "woah" provide the film with occasion for in-depth explanation of its world and rules—what science fiction authors call "worlding." This is the standard, if rather cheap, way of going about worlding. Invite a new, uninitiated fellow to the party and give him the tour while the audience hovers over his shoulder like a voyeuristic ghost. As cheap as the scene in every teen film that tours the schoolyard hashing out the cool kids from every other variety—and no less fun.

Keanu's role as pupil requires this initial emptiness, but the typical bildungsroman would ask him to end the movie filled with new knowledges and capable of wielding them to his advantage. Keanu's career fulfills this request in one sense, but denies it just as emphatically at the same time—resulting as I claim in a new form of bildungsroman. The twist in Keanu is that emptiness remains essential. Bill & Ted presents this in its simple form. The comedic frame of the movie requires that the two remain ignorant in some very specific ways. They are able to mouth and even embody heroic truths by the end of their quest, but they must not lose their lovable absent mindedness. Of course, even these films aren't so simple. Already, the lovable absent mindedness is paired with access to some essential truth that will one day define the future of that narrative world: "Be excellent to one another." The Christian cum New Age  cum radical 80s skater dude manta demonstrates the doubt movement always at work within the film. The essence of my claim is already active in this film, but played for laughs and not embodied as a performance (which is also not a performance under standard definitions) it doesn't have the same impact. That is also to say that in the Bill & Ted movies we only ever see glimpses of the two self-consciously aware of and enacting their mastery of this essential knowledge. They are capable of living within it, but not every quite conscious of it.

The Matrix follows up on the double movement of pure emptiness and pure knowledge, but asks of Keanu the full display of mastery by the film's end. While we sit just behind Keanu's shoulder as the world of the Matrix is explained—and join him in the eponymous 'Woah'—he is promoted as an adept capable of advancing through knowledge well beyond that of any other character. Only after his character's death within the Matrix, however, does his true mastery emerge, visualized as anthropomorphic code. This death and subsequent resurrection are more Buddha than Christ—no 'why hast thou forsaken me' shouts, but a calm confusion at the trifles of the "material" world, bullets no less. The point in all this is that mastery takes the form of emptying out, releasing worldly concerns in leu of higher truths. While at one level the narrative arc is from deception to truth, the more subtle arc made visible by Keanu's acting technique is from wooden blankness to wooden emptiness. This may sound like the same critique of Keanu that has floated limply throughout his career, but it is my point to make a virtue of it.

Their is undeniably a transition that takes place in Keanu's character throughout the course of the Matrix that we see, not by paying attention to the early ham-fisted scenes of his panic, but by attending to the various moments of his pure composure. There is a sort of deadness to his character at our entry into the narrative, a deadness that is intended to correspond to his deception and displacement into an unreal world—kindly displayed by the all too familiar, in the late 90s, Dilbert-esque cubicles. It seems more to the point, however, that this apparent deadness is in fact a deep internal calm, perhaps a foreknowledge of his chosen-ness. Keanu—by the end of the film—is revealed to be at home within the Matrix, not—as the other characters are—deceived or displaced with in it. The narrative arc then turns out to be not a story of unveiling deception, but a much more straight forward account of coming to appropriate consciousness of the home you've always belonged in.

But we've strayed again some what far away from the point, which is that Keanu's portrayal of emptiness is allows for this understanding within the film. If this is not perhaps the most conscious recognition in audiences, it is nonetheless effective and is at the heart of the success of the films, the ease with which audiences can accept Keanu as a messianic figure.  It is my contention here that Reeves himself only becomes fully conscious of this effect around the time of The Matrix. One would like to think that the process of filming the movie itself, of taking the character through the arc of development revealed this truth, but perhaps that is too pretty to literally believe. Whatever the case, Reeves choices of roles following The Matrix belie an understanding of his ability to play characters at a Buddhistic remove from the material world to great success.

The most overt rendering of this occurs recently in the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still. Keanu appears as a detached outsider with extensive foreknowledge and control, but emptied into total of any desire in relation to the world. Eventually the detachment is produced as non-total and a limited engagement saves the day, and the narrative. But Keanu's ability to serve as a blank slate is proven. Against this empty backdrop even the faintest glimmer of emotion—here "acting"—appears radically visible, indeed garish. And this in sum is the heart of critique: Keanu is portrayed as automaton whose forays into representing emotion are only mawkish and inarticulate. A more appropriate rendition would claim that Keanu represents the strangeness of all emotion seen through an appropriated detached view of the world. The momentary perturbance of calm by the overwrought strugglings of a world at war within itself invokes a bit awkward if not unreasonable response. Keanu sets things right. And then he returns again to the empty shell of peace. This revelation of absurdity in the "real" world—here primarily Hollywood's sense of basic morals and ethics—enables viewers to step outside of the film itself, step outside of acting and of representation, revealing in turn the emptiness at their core. And emptiness yes, that should be shouted from the roof tops and embraced by the teeming masses if only that wouldn't entangle us again in the distracted and distraught trappings of the everyday world. It is only in representation—staged—that the revelation of its emptiness is even possible. But Keanu's task and ability is to stand as an open and empty space in the midst of these normal chaoses. To hold open within the window of the film the unmarked territory of calm and perhaps, indirectly, to point the way in.