Johnny Clegg and Savuka: Asimbonanga, 1987

This video was made before Mandela was released from prison.  From 1964 to 1990, the only image in circulation was from before the Rivonia trials — this is the one used in the Clegg video.  When he was released and appeared on the tv walking through the crowds, I couldn't even recognise the young face in the 72 year old man.  The suppression of his appearance had been utter and complete.

And then, later, in 1999 in France:

Asimbonanga
Asimbonang' uMandela thina
Laph'ekhona Laph'ehlikhona
Asimbonanga
Asimbonang' uMandela thina
Laph'ekhona Laph'ehlikhona
Oh the sea is cold and the sky is grey
Look across the Island into the Bay
We are all islands till comes the day
We cross the burning water
Asimbonanga
Asimbonang' uMandela thina
Laph'ekhona Laph'ehlikhona
Asimbonanga
Asimbonang' uMandela thina
Laph'ekhona Laph'ehlikhona
A seagull wings across the sea
Broken silence is what I dream
Who has the words to close the distance
Between you and me
Asimbonanga
Asimbonang' uMandela thina
Laph'ekhona Laph'ehlikhona
Asimbonanga
Asimbonang' uMandela thina
Laph'ekhona Laph'ehlikhona
Asimbonanga
Asimbonang' uMandela thina
Laph'ekhona Laph'ehlikhona

Youssou N'Dour: Xale

from Set, Virgin Records, 1990

Xale : Freedom

William Klein, irrepressible

This came out in 2012 as a BBC program.  It is long, perfect for watching, as I did, while a snowstorm rages, drifts, beats at the windows.  Like, alright already. Yes it is winter. 

Never quite realised how influential Klein was until this film. His images were everywhere at one time, in magazines mostly: they taught us all how to compose a photograph, and probably a lot more, just about life.

not safe, not suburban

Suzanne Moore wrote a good piece in the Guardian about how postmodernism put paid to the avant-garde which can perhaps only exist within modernist certainties.  She writes:   Reed's death has hit my generation because his presence anchored us into a time and a place when the avant garde was still meaningful. .. His death made us remember the music that made us want to leave our small towns and our small lives, a time when transgression was not simply a marketing technique.

Take a Walk on the Wild Side was all over ordinary radio in 1973, when I remember listening to it, in Nanaimo, during my year out from the AA.  It didn't shock, it seemed right, I got it, as did we all.  

It was reportage.

sorry, I didn't ad the ads, they just all of a sudden have started to appear.  damn. 

Marketing, the bane of contemporary life. 

Queen of the Rushes

Michael and Paddy Rafferty in Galway, September 1982. 

This is lilting, puirt a beul in Scottish Gaelic, portaireacht bhéil in Irish Gaelic: rhythm and tone, mouth music, coded messages perhaps, perhaps vocables.  Can't understand it, but I do like the ties, the shirts, the concentration, the relative immobility of the two brothers, the relentless beat.  This is a lovely thing.

the Willows: the Maid of Culmore

Something tells me these people don't spend a lot of time rushing around, meeting eleventh hour deadlines, tap tap tapping on their iPhones.  There is another world, where stories are remembered and told, and sung. 

Jeremy Deller. English Magic, 2013

Still from Jeremy Deller. English Magic, Venice Biennale British Pavilion until November 24, 2013

Jeremy Deller, passionate chronicler of the tangents of war.  The reviews have called his installation at the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale aggressive. Angry, yes; resigned perhaps; this video captures something else. Deller's 2008 piece at the Imperial War Museum, It Is What It Is, was made from a bombed Baghdad car: there is something about the gratuitous destruction of cars in this film that with that earlier car in mind seems obscene. As does the aftermath of the inflatable Stonehenge: heritage as entertainment, the critique levelled at Danny Boyle's orchestration of the positive side of Britain for the opening of the 2010 Olympics.  There is a place and time for critique and the London Olympics was not one of them.  Deller has no such restrictions.

He isolates contradictions in Britain – the gap between pride and insignificance, between a blithe skipping along and a still, red in tooth and claw, countryside; between an imperial history and its modern incarnation as entertainment and celebrity.  Perhaps not contradictions, rather they are complex, near-inexplicable realities which artists and critical theorists keep trying to explain, reframe, re-present.  Adrian Searle calls Deller's Biennale installation a war on wealth — maybe, obviously I haven't seen it, I'm not British and I receive such works through a different lens, however, it seems that at the heart of Deller's work is a critique of war that uses a panoply of images used to disguise the project of war as a series of successes, heroisms and parades.

Thursday, May 30, 2013

Will Gompertz on BBC World last night reported on Jeremy Deller's Venice project: the language a classic put-down.  'Aggressive' figures as the first word in every review, every report. If someone is angry, and as Deller said, these things had been in his mind for a long time, they can be dismissed as being aggressive, much as how angry women are written off as strident.  

And then, and this is unforgivable, Gompertz called Deller's angry, close to the bone murals that show just how socially conflicted England is today, 'the heir' to Danny Boyle's Olympic extravaganza.  This trivialises Deller by giving him a critical biography not from art but from the world of entertainment.  Controversy safely contained.

Chris Hadfield: ISS

So relieved the landing went well.  One always worries. 

Tim Buckley: Dolphins, 1974

This song was written by Fred Neil in 1966.  Neil spent much of his life in dolphin preservation, but there is another layer in the lyrics about war, which would have been Vietnam. 

The early 1970s were an agonized time, a war had gone on too long for unsupportable reasons, the environmental movement realised just how quickly species were being lost and saw climate change rushing towards us like a dust storm. And poets picked up guitars.

Adrian Mitchell: tell me lies

The earliest filmed version of Adrian Mitchell performing his poem, To Whom It May Concern (tell me lies about Vietnam) at the Albert Hall, June 11, 1965:

And a film by Pamela Robertson-Pearce of Mitchell reciting Tell Me Lies just before his death in 2008.  He constantly adapted the last verse to pull the poem into the continual present, for about war some things never change. 

Mark Knopfler: Brothers in Arms, 1988

Although this was written in 1985 about the Falklands War, it has come to stand for many different kinds of solidarity, most recently British Forces in Afghanistan.  YouTube views of any version are in the multii-millions; this one, live and while Mandela was still in prison, might still be the most moving. 

It is this fellow feeling that infuses the military, more so when things go wrong.  Having one's ship torpedoed, being rescued, enduring a POW camp, sitting in an FOB, or in a convoy waiting for the next IED: the rest of us get it intellectually, but not viscerally.  Is it the sharing of intense fear – the most heightened emotion – that chooses an anthem?  Something about Brothers in Arms has made it anthemic.

Isabelle Hayeur: Castaway

CASTAWAY from Isabelle Hayeur on Vimeo.

29th Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival
11.13.12 - 11.18.12 | Kassel

Une vidéo expérimentale filmée dans les eaux incertaines du plus grand cimetière de bateaux de la côté Est de l'Amérique. Situés près de la Chemical Coast du New Jersey et de l'ancien dépotoir Fresh Kills, ces rivages désormais toxiques ont été le théâtre de nombreux désastres écologiques

An experimental video filmed in the murky waters of Witte's Marine Salvage at Staten Island (New York). Located near New Jersey's Chemical Coast and the former Fresh Kills landfill, these now toxic shores have seen their share of ecological disasters.

Great Lake Swimmers: Your Rocky Spine :: land as love

We should make this the theme song for On Site 29: geology.

Great Lake Swimmers. Original album was Ongiara, 2007; here a performance from the neighbor's dog.

Call for articles for 29:geology here.

Värttinä: Kylä Vuotti Uutta Kuuta

Because, it is snowing today.

Kevin Harman: Skip 7

Kevin Harman. Skip 7. 2007 Mixed Medium Friday, take all contents out of skip, break down and place all debris back in skip for opening on Sunday night, leave.

Kevin Harman, Scottish sculptor, has a series of reorganised skips full mostly of construction debris. This is Skip 7, before and finished.

At once performance, community project, statement about density, found materials, deconstruction of the already deconstructed, reconstruction leading to a complete absence of inner space.  Rachel Whitread filled a small house full of plaster, then removed the mould – the structure of the house itself, leaving solid blocks of 'space'.  Kevin Harman takes the materials of a house and squeezes all the space out, leaving a small block of airless density.

The process is public and good natured. Here is an 11 minute 2009 film from Harman's website:  www.kevinharman.co.uk/skip11video.html

Below, Skip 11, a strangely romantic reorganisation.

Kevin Harman. Skip 11, 2011 Mixed Medium Friday, take all contents out of skip, break down and place all debris back in skip for opening on Sunday night, leave.

Ebarme dich

Putting together this issue of On Site, on sound, has really made me listen to things.  And because music is the soundtrack, more so than traffic, or radio discussions, or mechanical systems, I find I'm listening to recordings and tracks with a different set of filters.

Several contributors to issue 28: sound talked about the purposeful manipulation of reverb time in churches and cathedrals.  This video of Michael Chance, with the Brandenburg Consort, singing 'Erbarme dich, mein Gott', from Bach's Matthäus Passion, Parte second:39, is clearly in a church – well, we can see that, but it is also in the sound of his voice, which is almost otherworldly.

When I looked about for other recordings of this same conveniently short and lovely piece, I came across Delphine Galou with Les Siècles, clearly not in a church.  More glamorous recording, a totally different but oddly more conventional sound, and it isn't just the difference between a counter tenor and a contralto, rather it is in that other active member of the ensemble, the space.  

Evelyn Waugh: 1960

A most interesting look at Evelyn Waugh in a 1960 BBC interview.  Curiously, Joan Bakewell's later introduction and John Freeman's comments seem to indicate that this interview is some sort of failure as Waugh was so bored, nervous, unforthcoming.  Curious, because it seems to me that Waugh answered some very strange questions very straightforwardly.  No, he doesn't get all chummy with the interviewer who soldiers on with what could be seen as dreadfully provocative questions, often a thinly-veiled prurient interest in a supposedly idle, well-upholstered, squirarchic life.  Clearly Waugh was on his way to being deeply unfashionable in the early 1960s, and actually still is.  

I quite respect Waugh in this interview and his resistance to the psychologising impulse that so dominates contemporary interviewing.  And yet, he does reveal so much.  For example, his self-indulgent sloth at Oxford where he was on an open scholarship and where he said he grew up, or public schools after WWI, bleak, terrible food, cold, shell-shocked and/or sadistic teachers: the basis of a terrific body of literature.  He wants to be seen as a wordsmith, a trade at which he labours.  The interviewer flounders, Waugh is implacable, he simply won't deliver what the interviewer wants.

Having recently been interviewed myself (a brief five minutes) and finding myself led completely off-track into fields I strenuously try to avoid, I wish I had the intelligence and sang-froid of Waugh, plus his patience.

the violent sound of remembering violence

link sent to us by Chloé Roubert

Extremism and zealotry beget generations of extremism and zealotry.  It isn't over yet.

paralympic beauty

Supposedly the big bang, but so often whatever was going on looked like drawings, in this case a smudged Boullée. London 2012 Paralympic Games Opening. AP PhotographThe opening for the 2012 Paralympics, staged by Jenny Sealy, the artistic director of Graeae, was astounding.  Unlike the paean to seemingly eternal but tired British pop culture that dominated the regular Olympics' opening and closing, the Paralympic opening was narrated, alternatively, by Stephen Hawking and Ian McKellan as Prospero: books flew, people flew, apples fell: one realised that paralympians live in the world of science and technology in a way that non-paralympians do not.  Meanwhile, atoms collided, dark matter surged, Handel was sung, and it was beautiful.  

Not least, perhaps most, beautiful was David Toole, who dances like water down a river to his very fingertips.

a change is gonna come

Sam Cooke - A change is gonna come by hopto

One of the proposals for On Site 28: sound is about recording studios and their particular qualities of surface and such.  Sam Cooke was mentioned.

We were in English in grade 9 and Judy Butler who sat behind me told me Sam Cooke had died.  This 1963 song, A Change is Gonna Come, sat, and still sits, at the heart of the Civil Rights movement.   

1963 was an important year: Martin Luther King wrote 'Letter from Birmingham Jail', the 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed in Birmingham and four little girls were killed, King's 'I Have a Dream' speech was made in Washington, Medgar Evers was murdered.  Not until the formation of the Black Panthers in 1967 did black power begin to overtake black faith that a change was going to come.

And, still thinking of things Olympic, it was at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City that the 200m gold and bronze medalists, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, shared a pair of black gloves and made their stand for human rights.  Last night on the Radio Australia's Asia Pacific Report, there was a piece about the silver medalist, Australian Peter Norman, who also wore a human rights badge in solidarity and was subsequently reprimanded by the AOC and not sent to any further Olympic games. His 1968 200m record of 20.06 seconds still stands in Australia.  Evidently there is a debate in the Australian Parliament about apologising to him, although he died in 2006. 

Why do people wait until someone dies, before their time in this case - he was only 64, before admitting they treated them badly? 

Peter Norman, Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the podium as the US anthem was playing, at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City. They all wore the badge of the Olympic Committee for Human Rights, OCHR.