The week in review

This weekend saw the first Vanguard Festival here in Copenhagen. A bold step up from long-time hip hop booker Peter “Soul Kitchen” and his team, it spread over two days divided between indie rock (Friday) and hip hop (Saturday). Surely a risk, it seems to have paid off — at least judging by attendance on Saturday. The lineup was stellar, if somewhat retrograde — what one might call ‘your dad’s favorite hip hop’: Pharoahe Monche, DOOM, De La Soul, and the Wu-Tang Clan (on their 20th anniversary tour), as well as some quality Nordic acts, with Loop Troop Rockers and Malk de Koijn being the most notable.

While among the best in hip hop of the past twenty plus years, the list carried some risk: DOOM is infamously languorous on stage, De La have long been past their (astonishing) prime, the the Wu-Tang are notorious wild cards as a live act. And while DOOM was just as boring as always, and De La gave a lacklustre performance loaded up with time-filler and frustrating wheel-ups, the festival overall was a fantastic live experience. Loop Troop ripped it with their reliably energetic show; Malk is always solid: Pharoahe, backed up by Mela Machinko and DJ Boogie Blind, was reliably amazing, his vocal stylings and content crisp on the mic; and Wu-Tang brought the blast.

When I last heard them perform live, in 2008 — in the wake of their partly public row over royalties and creative decisions — morale was clearly fraying and their show was erratic. Five years later, and twenty years after Enter the Wu-Tang, the Clan was evidently more closely knit, even if Ghostface still seems reluctant to participate — I don’t think he spat more than four or five verses total — and any Wu-Tang show without a prominent Ghost is a less than optimal one. Good that Meth remains the fabulous entertainer he is, that U-God and GZA (the usual weak links live) performed above average, that Dek remains rock solid, and that the RZA retains his enthusiasm. Also crucial was the crowd, psyched to witness the entire clan on stage for the first time in Denmark, sending much love their way. The interaction, spiked when RZA invited two kids on stage to rock out to “4th Chamber”, was nothing less than wonderful and made for a magical finish to a great festival that I hope we will see return many a time in the future.

UPDATE: for Danish readers, peep the Rapspot coverage by Svensker-Martin (Ponyblod, Loop Troop, DOOM, Wu-Tang) and Toobs (Marvelous Mosell, Pharoahe Monche, De La Soul, Malk de Koijn), and here are Kenneth Nguyen’s photos.

OK, here are some links:

Photo: Ghostface Killa by Paw Ager for the Vanguard Festival. More here.

The picks of the week from around the web.

The picks of the week from around the web.

The picks of the week from around the web.

— Slavoj Žižek

The picks of the week from around the web.

— Grant Morrison, on Pico della Mirandola’s Oratory on the Dignity of Man

In the marathon Newsarama interview with Grant Morrison on his and Frank Quitely’s newly-finished All-Star Superman series the writer mentions the Renaissance philosopher Pico della Mirandola’s famous Oratio de hominis dignitate, or Oratory on the Dignity of Man (1486) as central to his take on Krypton’s famous son (go read the interview: parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10). He also mentions Leonardo’s even more famous ‘Vitruvian Man’ (c. 1487, detail above) as important to his interpretation of the Superman myth, and as the direct inspiration for this interpretation by Quitely of the character, keeping us all alive by labouring in the heart of the Sun:

This is of course apt. Leonardo’s depiction of the proportions of man, situates the individual at the centre of the universe, between sacred and profane — a being with free will and the powers of a demiurge to shape himself and the world of which he is part for better or worse. Pico’s text is indeed an almost manifesto-like statement on man’s self-understanding in the modern era, and it remains so today. The following excerpt, on the creation of Man, cuts to the heart of the matter:

“At last the best of artisans ordained that that creature to whom He had been able to give nothing proper to himself should have joint possession of whatever had been peculiar to each of the different kinds of being. He therefore took man as a creature of indeterminate nature and, assigning him a place in the middle of the world, addressed him thus: “Neither fixed abode nor a form that is thine alone nor any function peculiar to thyself have we given thee, Adam, to the end that according to thy longing and according to thy judgment thou mayest have and possess what abode, what form, and what functions thou thyself shalt desire. The nature of all other beings is limited and constrained within the bounds of laws prescribed by Us. Thou, constrained by no limits, in accordance with thine own free will, in whose hand We have placed thee, shalt ordain for thyself the limits of thy nature. We have set thee at the world’s center that thou mayest from thence more easily observe whatever is in the world. We have made thee neither of heaven or earth, neither mortal nor immortal, so that with freedom of choice and with honor, as though the maker and molder of thyself, thou mayest fashion thyself in whatever shape thou shalt prefer. Thou shalt have the power to degenerate into the lower forms of life, which are brutish. Thou shalt have the power, out of thy soul’s judgment, to be reborn into the higher forms, which are divine.”

Leonardo’s interpretation of this same ontology downplays its transcendental aspects and emphasises Man’s immersion in the World. We have free will to fashion ourselves how we wish, but it is only by virtue of our placement at the centre of things that we can exercise it. Through understanding the Order of which we are part. This is the basis for his sfumato technique, where contours are eliminated to convey the fact that there is no separation between individual and cosmos. We are one, and it is in contemplating this oneness that we rise and walk upright.

Superman embodies this choice, and Morrison has delivered one of the definitive takes on the character by realising it. Nevertheless, I think he and Quitely fall somewhat short of the mark in their interpretation, in that Superman becomes an ideal to the extent where the subjectivity with which we experience the world is almost lost. By dismissing the all-seeing Albertian perspective, in favour of a subjective one, Leonardo acknowledged that our experience was filtered by our senses — ie. our brain — a fact that forever makes it less than perfect. Morrison and Quitely instead transform of the Vitruvian Man into a Man of Steel with overtones of revolution-era agitprop.

Let me share with you one of the most moving — if stark — depictions of the facts of life lived in the centre of the World, forever oscillating between the sacred and the profane:

This is Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas, painted late in his life, probably in the 1570s. An interpretation of how Apollo flayed the faun Marsyas alive after the latter had had the temerity to challenge the god to musical duel and lost. Titian’s take is extraordinarily grim, reflecting the horrors of war, of human existence. My supervisor here at Cambridge, Paul Joannides, is usually moved to quote Shakespeare’s Lear:

“As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods, —
They kill us for their sport.”

While this captures the central tragedy of the picture, of how life can appear meaninglessly cruel, Pico’s interpretation of Man in the World seems to me profoundly reflected in not only this painting, but in Titian’s work in general. The dissolution of the flesh brought about by his bold, open brushwork in his late pictures is a sensual dissolution of the separation between individual and cosmos to match Leonardo’s more analytical, exalted one. But it is simultaneously more concerned with transcendence. Apollo’s act, while basely cruel takes on an almost devotional aspect. The reverence held by the dissectionist towards the body he opens up, by the artist towards the canvas on which he conjures up form, and by Man in contemplation of his own divine nature.

The fact that the blood of Marsyas, freed from his body, flowed to create a mighty river, nourishing the land (seen in the background in Titian’s picture), makes his death a moment of transcendence. The Vitruvian Man — or Christ — turned upside down, Marsyas is in a sense forever caught in the suffering of earthly existence, but at the same time he embodies Our greatest potential.

Read the Oratoriohere, read more by Pico here. Read more about Titian, Marsyas and the sacred and profane here. For the comics-iliterati: Shazam! Kimota!

The picks of the week from around the web.

Anyway, Slavoj Žižek was lecturing at Birkbeck College in London, as is his wont. The theme was “The Uses and Misuses of Violence”. Basically he was tackling the question of why normal people inflict atrocious violence on others when they, by all accounts, are caring and considerate of their comrades and family. He started with former Maoists turned Zionists and ended with Stalin (one of his favourite subjects), and made many entertaining and often enlightening digressions along the way. The basic idea was that idealists are invariably aware of the imperfection or even downright infamy of the people they idealize, in this case Mao, but revere them even more because of that fact, because it lends their aspirations a kind of empyrean air. Had Mao been a benign ruler, he would not have inspired such zealous idolization, but languished in history book obscurity instead, he argued.

Using the example of Proust talking on the telephone for the first time, with his grandmother whom he describes as the disembodied voice of an unknown, old woman, Žižek reconfigured the biblical concept of the “neighbour” as a alienating conception of a person, with whom we do not have to engage emotionally. This naturally leads to transgression, and is the reason close family of Stalin, for example, described him as a loving family man.

This led Žižek to what he himself described as an ‘apologia/ non-apologia’ for Stalinism. He compared with the revolutionaries who went before, and quoted a rather chilling passage from Trotsky, describing man as something imperfect that should be improved upon. As if he were a machine. He went on to describe the constructivists as profoundly anti-human, and in many ways much worse than the social realists that came to the fore with Stalin. Eisenstein and company, he argued, never had any support from the broad public; they were elitist and obscure. Social realism was what everyone wanted, and when Stalin purged the cultural field of anything not fitting into his ideological program : it was welcomed by the people, Žižek maintained.

By what appeared to me a short-circuit of argument, Žižek followed this by maintaining that, had the constructivists and their ilk maintained power, things would likely have turned out even worse than they did, Gulag and all. While typically controversial and definitely unexpected food for thought, this appeared to me something of a specious argument. First of all, this alternative was completely hypothetical since most of these people did – as he himself pointed out – not have broad support, neither with the people nor with the establishment that Stalin represented. They were the freak thinkers of an unusual moment, not nation-builders. Secondly, it is just plain hard to believe that anything could be worse than Stalin’s reign of terror. The constructivists would have to work quite hard at creating their utopian world of man-machines for that to happen.

Žižek then proceeded to dissect democracy as an ideological guarantor of civilization, another of his perennials. A pessimist, he does not believe globalized capitalism to be a potentially benign force to be harnessed by the multitude, the way that for example an Antonio Negri does. He rather sees it as an ultimately oppressive reality, and a great challenge to the contemporary Left to counter. Deeply sceptical of our current configurations of democracy, he admitted that he had no hard and fast answers and was himself profoundly conflicted as to what should be done.

In what seemed to me a further logical disconnect, he suddenly suggested public disobedience on a massive scale, in an effort to discredit the “democratically elected” politicians totally. Using the last years of Tito’s Yugoslavia as an example, he argued that a “democracy” that has been thoroughly discredited by the people will no longer have to pander and keep up its charade, but be forced to do its best to improve things. Using José Saramago’s recent novel Seeing as a poetic example, he suggested a massive manifestation of blank votes as described in that book constitute a kind of violence beyond the banalities of infamy, the kind of “Divine Violence” originally alluded to by Walter Benjamin.

This all seemed incredibly speculative, and not a little utopian, to me, despite Žižek’s persistent insistence that he was a pessimist in these matters. In the Q&A when the question of the Middle East inevitably arose, he did, however, offer up a kind of earthbound qualifier. He pointed out that what he called “miracles” actually did happen from time to time, and offered the 1971 peace between Israel and Egypt under Sadat as an example. This resolution of the conflict between the two countries had till then been regarded as an impossibility, but suddenly garnered support across the political spectrum. Žižek emphasized that he did not believe in “age-old” hatreds, such as the alleged one between the Israelis and the Palestinians, that are impossible to transcend. They are political inventions of the moment, he argued.

All in all, it was an enlightening session, despite the fact that counter-intuitive logic can only be taken so far before turning to absurdity, and despite the distinct utopianism of the concluding remarks. Contrary to what I had expected, it was not so much the idiosyncrasy of Žižek’s arguments that impressed me – most of what he said was only original in presentation, and much less so in substance. No, what did it was the passionate, inquisitive, lucid and totally unarrogant way in which he presented his views. He never claimed to have any answers. Rather, his counter-intuitive argumentation seemed almost Socratic in its method, if not objective: Žižek’s great contribution, it seems to me, is to question received truths, for example our current configuration of Democracy, while keeping his utopianism at a sufficiently abstract level to remain hopefully utopian, rather than descend into dangerous idealism.

Žižek lectures regularly at Birkbeck College, London, and has a week-long master class coming up in March – keep watching their website for info. Also, he has a four-week master class on Lacan running through May-June. Also, check this text by José Saramago on democracy, it is interesting reading. The painting is Karp Demyanovich Trokhimeko’s “Stalin as an Organizer of the October Revolution”, I assume from sometime in the 1930s.