Precious, out for about a month now, was a tremendously complicated movie to attend. Audience members were divided on how to respond, vocally. How should people react to difficult art? Loudly or quietly? And if loudly, how? This problem took on an ethical dimension, and the sound of the theater became one of the key ways that viewers experienced the movie as a document of race and racial difference.
Posts archived in Artworks
For many people, Mazen Kerbaj is just Mazen Kerbaj, an accomplished graphic artist and trumpet improviser who’s toured and recorded in France, the US, Lebanon, etc. He’s gotten plenty of well-deserved, enthusiastic press for his playing.
Plaza Garibaldi, Zona Rosa, is a mariachi band supermarket. Peaking in numbers on Friday and Saturday nights, bands gather to perform for potential clients. (Anyone.) As no band is more than a few feet from several others, the air is thick with mariachi music. Sometimes in sync, often not. An occasional harpist or guitarist performs alone.
The musicians do not play full songs. Instead, disconnected snippets – a brass section, unaccompanied, showing off how good it is – just imagine if you hired them to play with a full band for your quinceañera (Mexican sweet fifteen party)!
(P.S. Check out Billtron’s recording of the exact same event.)
What are the consequences of believing in the synchrony of representation and space? Usually not confusion. More often hucksterism.
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October 21, 2009
Artwork #7: Buzz-a-Rama “500″ (or where to find some excited children on the weekend)
The double-wide storefront across the street had been shuttered for two months. Once I saw some guys getting arrested in front of it on my way to work in the morning, but that was the most action to be observed there, and it seemed unrelated to whatever business was hiding inside. Then, just last weekend, the metal gates finally flung open, like God parting the waters at Yam Suph. But what was revealed was far more miraculous than anything in the bible.
The building is home to Buzz-a-Rama “500,” the last remaining slot-car establishment in the city of New York. The owner, Frank Perri, 74, claims that there used to be 30 or 40 such venues throughout the boroughs, back in the late 60s and 70s when he first opened. Children worked on their personal cars over the weekend, and then brought them in to race on lovely and elaborate courses. This article suggests that the name Buzz-a-Rama “captured the energy of the hundreds of teenagers and kids who used to crowd into the room on race days, and also the sound of the cars themselves, a high-pitched, insectlike whine — the sound of constant speed.”
A short documentary has Mr. Perri yelling at a child who claims his fingers are numb, among other amazing old slot-car guy moments.
This is a montage of crushing sadness and fleeting joy (the essence and the promise, respectively, of fandom.) Mostly joy, though, last night, because the Phillies won. I cheered silently for the concept of Manny Ramirez, and for Chan Ho Park’s fabulous new beard.
In the 1950s, music enthusiasts in the Soviet Union made copies of banned Western records using sheets of x-ray film purchased from clinics and hospitals. Photographic film, like wax, acetate, or vinyl, is thick and firm enough to be used with commercially available music engraving machines. X-rays weren’t the ideal medium, being prone to warping, but they worked well enough, and were cheap to boot.
Movie theater culture varies dramatically, but in most places audiences respond out loud in ways that are normative and even, in a sense, ethical. These modes of response are a very important part of how people are expected to relate to artwork. For instance, Film Forum has sustained, respectful silence with dashes of old-man snore, followed by a hearty concluding round of applause to recognize auteurship. The UA on Court Street has text-pages and outdoor voices. You might be interested to know that Jaipur, India has crying, whistling, and viewers generally wearing their hearts on their sleeves.
Although none of us knew a word of Hindi, the plot of “Rab Ne Bana De Jodi” (“God Made This Couple”) was pretty transparent. We were riveted for more than three hours (plus an intermission) by a twisting love story in which two of India’s most glamorous models played an ordinary working couple struggling through an arranged marriage. In a device I found Shakespearian, especially for its implausibility, the male lead did double-duty as a working schmo and a hubristic fop, changing only his shirt, glasses, and mustache in the transformation.
You get the idea from the trailer:
Anyway, the crowd in the gigantic one-screen theater with the ice cream paint job treated the movie like an event from the opening shot. Particularly in the first and the last half-hour, every scene was accompanied by shouts of delight and expressions of concern. By the end, the crowd was worked up, and the babies were at their crankiest. As the protagonists (fop now revealed as schmo) were named the winners of the climactic dance contest, and the central motif began playing for the last time (1:45), there was a grand finale of appreciative clapping and whistling.
This is a montage of people reacting to the smell of the bagful of fresh basil I carried around all day yesterday.
Over the weekend, I was in Maine for S and O’s wedding reception. On Sunday, we went to S’s parent’s house, which has a large garden. Perhaps because I have a prominent tattoo of a basil leaf, or perhaps because I ate all of her pesto, S’s mother sent me home with a quantity of basil that easily exceeded the rest of my luggage. Being fresh-picked and uncovered, it had a powerful odor, particularly when jostled in the bag. Because airports usually smell like carpet and noxious cinnamon buns, the herb scent was not only strong but also out-of-place. Airports regulate sights, smells, and sounds very carefully for reasons of efficiency and security, so it’s unusual to experience anything aesthetically surprising while in them. Consequently, almost everyone nearby noticed the basil, from the security line to the gate to the plane to the taxi, in many cases enough to start up a conversation with an unshaven and hungover stranger.
This piece, although I didn’t deliberately set it up, is the most sculptural of the sonic artworks so far presented because it was such a specific provocation. It was also a productive exercise to excite one sense-mode as a means of eliciting recordable action in another.
An upcoming post will deal with food, a subject central to the politics of sensuality in the contemporary moment. This piece will hopefully make a useful lead-in.
After the AM rush hour, New York falls into the peaceful lull of the local. Traffic dies down, kids play handball, parents stroll infants, grill cooks sit on stoops and take it easy before lunch. Pairs of old men in high pants laze in lawn chairs on the sidewalk and wait expectantly for anything even marginally remarkable, although Bensonhurst, Brooklyn at 10:15 in the morning won’t usually surprise you. It’s actually brutally routine. No one really visits except delivery vehicles and people picking up U-Hauls from the lot on New Utrecht and 68th. It’s an excellent, low-stress time to hear the texture of dirty truck engines mingling with conversations about parenting.
This recording was made walking in a semi-circle around a handball court, away from the street and toward two mothers.
THIS IS WEIRD VIBRATIONS // the politics of sound
Sound in Bangkok
