(above) The Limelight Mini Mall (formerly The Limelight Dance Club)

I have been groaning over the dumbing down of dance music for the past few years. A part of me believes that it is natural for every outgoing generation to grieve the incoming generation’s music. That’s what rock and roll and youthful rebellion has always been about. My parents have yelled “YOU CALL THAT MUSIC?!!!” (I was listening to John Coltrane’s Ascension and Kryzstof Penderecki’s De Natura Sonoris II) throughout my teenage years. At one point, it even escalated to “TURN THAT  $%#%^ OFF!!!” (This time it was a religious recitation).

When I saw this cartoon (above) It suddenly struck me that both rap and dance music may develop in tandem to each other in terms of their respective evolution. Something happened towards the end of the previous millenium, perhaps people had the notion that an era – a thousand years- was coming to an end. Numerically-based as those sentiments may be, it created dense, complex music along parallel forms of dance club music, rap, rock and electronica. Listen to fast-rapping groups like Das EFX, Fu Schnickens and Zhigge (below):

Drums and Bass and Jungle, rooted in the ska and reggae upbeat pulse was equally frantic. If you listen to the three-turntable mixes of Carl Cox and Jeff Mills in the late 90s, you’ll be treated to a whole new plateau of the word “multi-tasking.”

Then it turned 2000. And the world didn’t end, but September 11, 2001 did. Graydon Carter called it “the end of the age of irony.” Music seemed to have the wind taken out of its sails. In many genres, ennui and languor diffused the urgency of the moment into the inertia of “what’s the point of it all? It can wait.” Slo-jams created congestion in dance music, the rise of Chill Lounge started the descent of club music into simplicity and the dumbing down of the beat. It should come as no mystery, because I have been told by my younger colleagues that there’s no longer much dancing going on in the clubs. Everyone wants to be a DJ, and anyone who puts a pair of headphones on their neck thinks they are one. The only thing going on in dance floor these days are “scene kids” posing their duck faces for an old man behind a camera who they hope is Terry Richardson…or someone who posts regularly to scene websites. Peter Gatien’s Limelight, a cathedral turned ecstasy techno party house or gay cavern (depending on which entrance you picked) in New York City, is now a shopping mall touting brand name boutiques for the label-conscious trendies. Need I say more?

And so we are here today. How else do you explain a piece like this?

Look at the waves of enthusiastic comments over an essentially looped beat (we call it “the sound of a record skipping” in my generation). In any other book, it would be called “mission accomplished,” because my age has to be showing when I loop myself into my parents’ cantankerous voice and grumpily holler out: “Turn that $^#&@^# off!!!!”

Most of the time, it’s some situation as in a vacation, an outing, some crisis, an action sequence, or a scene of high drama. It’s never the cliché hooded ghost from the past floating to me, repeating in a heavily reverberated echo voice “Luke! Luke! I am your father….now take out the trash!”

I just had a visit this morning. This tableaux involved my father wondering whether he should continue night school at the local community college. He had been commuting to classes at a college many miles away, but due to his advancing cancer, he had switched to one nearer.  (It was conveniently located across the street from the local liquor store he frequented. The one he called “The Church.” I secretly had my suspicions, it was true.) I don’t know why he was worried about education in light of a terminal illness, but it’s so typical of the person who once said “I wish I had another year to live, just to explore the internet.”

He announced that he was in so much pain, he is thinking of ending his course. He was almost in tears. I knew this was a dream because complaining about pain and being in tears were two things I have never seen my father do in real life. Still, it felt real when I was in the dream. He thought out loud the possibility of participating in a newfangled religion that enabled people to access god online. Sure there were colleges online, but now, as if in the ongoing feud between faith vs science that is the pretzel logic behind intelligent design, there is God online. Here was the funniest part: The new technology that enabled people to reach god through an internet connection was called Web Redemption. (A feature on tv show Tosh-0 that enabled real life people to redo their youtubed flubs from the past).

I put up my hand and said “no.” And immediately – as in a dream cliché – the townspeople gathered around me and murmured in Ibsenian unrest. Voices that demanded an explanation began to build to a cacophony: “Why not!”

Amidst the protest, I tried to be heard. I finally shouted, “PEOPLE! If this ‘web redemption’ is so effective, can I ask you this: Think of the greatest minds who have lived and those who are alive today. Why didn’t any one of them sign on for web redemption?”

(pause)

(murmurs growing)

A woman from the mob screeched” “Everyone quiet, I think someone came up with a name of a great mind who did sign up for web redemption.”

(people grew quiet. more silence. no name.)

I turned and looked at my dad. You could now hear a pin drop. It was a Bergman moment of stillness.

I woke up, and chuckled a little over the twist of the phrase web redemption.

If there is an afterlife, the end of my life will be a much anticipated reunion with my dad, whom I was very close to. Soberly however, I think it’s more likely going to be the other outcome.

My dad believed that death was merely decomposition into dirt. Raised as a Catholic, who converted to Presbyterian later on, he explained death to me in the following way “once you’re dead, you’re done. If you look at the evolution of the universe, the age of the planets, the billions of years it took the earth to come to being, then wiped out, then return; now you compare it to the evolution of mankind and the millions of years it took us to get to this point is just child’s play by comparison. Now you think about 90 years – a human lifespan *at best* is nothing more than a gasp. Who are we to be arrogant and be so full of self-importance. People die every minute and it has no meaning in the the context of the cosmos. Our entire life is nothing more than a gasp in the timeline of *THE* big picture.”

True to form, his instructions to the local funeral home was to cremate and toss the remains “wherever convenient, in the trash if necessary.”

He passed away from cancer at 64.

His profession: School Teacher.

The scene I am referring to is a clip from Kinski’s spoken word performance in 1971 Jesus Christ Saviour (Jesus Christus Erlöser ). It showed a megalomaniac who saw himself as the savior, and when pacific members of the audience attempted to have their say, they got a mouthful from the performer, even violently shoved. Eruptions ended with Kinski storming off the stage.

Luckily I read somewhere that the clip, in some way was taken out of context. In that description, it said that after most people left, Kinski returned to complete the performance, and those who stayed behind were treated to the rendition they were suppose to see. I recently revisited a favorite film from my childhood: Roman Polanski’s Tess. I found it so rewarding, I attempted to dig up Jesus Chrisus Erloser, and have a closer look at the man who fathered Natassja Kinski.

And what I found, was that the clip grossly misrepresented Kinski. If you watch the entire performance (below in 9 parts), you will note that Kinski was brutally heckled from the first sentence onward. Members of the audience did not let up even after two walk-offs. The piece itself, a monologue of the New Testament spanning some 30 written pages is a gorgeous creation that delves into the depth of the human condition, a vehicle that enabled the unblinking Kinski to display a talent that some have said made Brando’s work look like child’s play.

In a way, the audience heckling was transforming. Even if Kinski began the night to deliver a portrait of Jesus, by the end of the night – through repeated crucifixions and taunting from the faceless black hall- he was transfigured into his subject. Some have speculated that the hecklers were part of the program, but what I saw was the true anxiety of an artist who was devoted to his craft, and had to make it through 30 pages on memory alone. Heckling a person during such a tightrope act would be akin to bringing an electric keyboard to a concert hall and playing during a Rachmaninov piano recital. I don’t know who these people were, but I found the sight of them casually strolling on stage to add their two bits appalling.

It should be noted that German audiences are known for being hostile. I heard somewhere that jazz musicians who returned to festivals with the same material the second year could expect airborne legumes, fruits, and assorted nightshades. Or perhaps they just weren’t that familiar with the spoken format in a large hall. Long before the likes of Karen Finley and Eric Bogosian, Kinski blazed a trail, turning a simple reading into a metatextual entity, most probably not of his choice.

After the credits roll (Part 9/9), and almost everyone has left, Kinski returns to perform for a small group of faithful listeners, who recognized Jesus Christ Saviour ( Jesus Christus Erlöser ) as a creation worthy of attention. Kinski walks among the group, talking in a hushed calm voice. Much to filmmaker Peter Geyer’s credit, beautiful shots of audience members listening are immersed in the performer’s words. Not to be missed!

At the photo studio, I’ve been watching and photographing some of whom would be considered  “beautiful” girls, who came in to have their portraits taken. The magic of photography is its ability to trap time and stun that unstoppable force in the essence of living. However, this very ability also tricks our perception into an anthropomorphic state, allowing us the luxury of liberally reading our prejudices, preferences, and a collective consciousness culled from years of myth-making into an open source face.

Like that physics problem where a ball gets thrown inside a dark room and a flash is fired, we see the ball in that split illuminated second, but nobody knows which direction it came from or where it is going.

If you looked at these beautiful girls in the moment the studio strobes flashed – in that silent instant made immortal – you would think you were looking at the very image of beatific vision: light skin, blonde angelic locks framing a youthful face of purity with blue translucent azure eyes shining in a dreamy pause between a poet’s longing stanzas adulating the grace of love, compassion, and profound humanity.

But that’s just the moment the flash went off.

Now if you were there to take in the moments leading up to that photographic frame, and the time afterward, you would hear and see a selfish, vicious, self-absorbed, inconsiderate and mean monster, yelling at her mother to go away so she could channel her inner Steven Meisel and get in her Vogue zone. The smile was turned on and off for the camera, as mechanically and with as much grace as a pneumatic jackhammer destroying a concrete sidewalk. Let us be very clear here: the only reason she tolerated the studio attendants, dressers, lighting technicians, and posers was because their only concern was to make her look good. This was “me time” for her, and we were all there to present her in the best light by making our time her time.

Storytelling in Western civilization may have devoted a little too much equity to the eyes. “Eyes are the window to one’s soul,” “I get lost in your eyes,” portrait photographers seem heavily invested on the eyes as well. One wonders if singers should be writing more songs about the throat.

You can tell something from one’s eyes, but certainly nowhere near the extent of being able to look into his or her soul. I recently had a conversation with a photographer about Steve McCurry’s Afghan Girl, regarded by many as perhaps THE greatest portrait photograph ever taken. McCurry is tremendously talented with a stunning portfolio, and this is a beautifully shot photograph, but every time I look at the picture, one part of me thinks about the initial maniacal response to this photo around the world. The moment people saw those eyes, they dug deep into their pockets to donate (she didn’t see a cent…and is still living in poverty). Another part of me wonders how much of the text “read” into the subject is really just what we chose to believe. Phrases like “the unbreakable will of the human spirit,”"the defiance of the life force against a harsh environment,”"the profound ethereal depth of the soul” abound. Sentiments easily dispatched from those living comfortably within the safety of a developed civilization with all mod cons.

So the photographer and I decided to do an experiment and alter the eyes in McCurry’s portrait. What do you get without the distraction of those marvelous eyes? What do you see when you take in the entire picture? It was what I thought all along: a portrait of a frightened overwhelmed girl. It’s a photojournalistic document taken with great detachment in the National Geographic style.

Photo portraiture is a curious category for me. In the tradition of 17th century painter Diego Velazquez – who inserted himself into family “society” group paintings – a portrait is as much about the photographer as it is about the subject. You could say that about the “greatest” portrait ever made – the Mona Lisa – since it has been speculated that Mona Lisa is, in fact, Leonardo Da Vinci painting himself as a hidden self-portrait (he did the same thing – allegedly – with the Shroud of Turin).

For me, a truly spectacular portrait is an expertly executed visual and emotional record of both the photographer and the sitter. When asked about my favorite photo portrait, there is none other than Edouard Boubat’s Lella of Bretagne. Boubat was also a photojournalist. This photograph was taken in 1947. It was a portrait of a woman Boubat admired (she was a war time nurse), was deeply in love with, and attracted to (they married after the war) You see all the components presented here: awe, sexual attraction, veneration elevated to neoclassical heroism,and starry-eyed dreaminess. (curiously, her eyes are not very prominent, though Boubat also has photos of her with downcast, even shut eyes.)

I think we are too easily misled by what we think eyes say about a person. I believe we are defined by our actions, and though there are many things a photograph can do, it can’t present a sequence in time. We are left with our own narrative to construct the moments that lead up to that photograph, and the time afterward. A person photographed brandishing a knife near someone could be attacking that person…..or removing it for safety purposes. Not waving, but drowning.

I give a pass to photographers though. We, of all people, are willing co-conspirators to the lies constructed through omission by the camera. If photographers ever get swindled by someone who happened to be born with “deep, profound, soulful” eyes and end up living miserably with a heartless, compassionless witch, the cliché is inevitable: Live by the sword, die by the sword.

Then we solicited a number of plumbers to come work on our house plumbing. Many promised to give an estimate and show up for paid work. Not one came through. This was before Hurricane Irene.

One’s  word is often no longer good. It disturbed me even to hear it. I have always believed that a developed civilization rested on a handshake and a verbal agreement, but that is an incredibly incongruous and misled conclusion. These days, our “developed civilization” is plagued by attorneys and frivolous class-action lawsuits that is all about the money, not the principle…while claiming otherwise. In the meantime, indigenous tribes within the canopies of jungles can still nod on an agreement, and more often than not, do right by their word.

It’s something that makes me toss and turn in my sleep. I have always had a deep feeling that each of us exists in our generation to improve upon the generation that came before us. There is no reason to continue status quo. I saw a program about how the painter Jacques-Louis David believed in the idea of greatness, something that appears to be anachronistic in these days of irony and skepticism. I think we have forgotten that we can be great, or strive to be great. We can still be heroes. That song has barely faded and remains the same.

I recently did volunteer work for kids at my mom’s church, a vacation bible school. It was two weeks of set painting, preparing food, decorating, playing with kids, photography, photoshop, powerpoint presentations, sweeping, mopping, cleaning, etc. I just got a call from a church member a few days before.  I’ve never met her before, and I only attend church on Christmas Eve. I said “I’ll be there.” That’s it. After a month, the happy reports from her Reverend and fellow congregation are still coming in about what I did. (Overinflated, in my opinion) But my mom was astonished. I was astonished that she was astonished. She always assumed I was the biggest slacker in town. Though not religious, I understood the tough times small churches are going through. I wanted to do my best for kids who may not have the luxury of going on a vacation. I adored each and every one of them, and I enjoyed giving the local church – who helps our community through tough times – a hand. It definitely wasn’t greatness by any measure, but it was an attempt. And even if you fail at being great, I think you still manage to come off fairly good.

There is a fear in me that countries who have been reared on the practical aspects of  communists-aching-for-recent-capitalist-flash Darwinists’ “survival of the fittest” will overly influence nations that once believed in a simple handshake and a verbal agreement. I worry that pretty soon, everyone will be thinking “what is in it for me?” That’s not civilization to me. That’s just raw survival.

Eventually we may have to tear ourselves away from all the electronics, whirring appliances, flashing devices, and modern conveniences and trod deep into the jungle where people in loin clothes squat over an open fire….to learn the lesson of civilization.

When Kanye West’s Auto-Tune malfunctions in the studio, he resorts to the next best thing: wearing Cher’s Uninhibited.

I was at that rat’s maze some of you know as Ikea. Normally I go there to play “gay couples vs. mail order brides,” tallying up which group has a higher head count before my visit is up. I actually like Ikea’s stuff. Snobs may poo-poo it as disposable furniture, but that is precisely the charm of it. Who wants to live with the same furniture forever unless is it’s an authentic Shaker dresser? Ikea gives you the living space of the season, and it’s affordable enough to toss if you wake up one morning on the wrong side of bed and hit your head on that armoire.

Modern high fashion, another concept that changes with every season, by contrast, is pure smoke and mirrors. That’s why I roll eyeballs and muffle a laugh when I hear some girls go ga-ga over brand labels and furiously name-drop designers as if being “associated” with those names is a validation ticket to the coveted lifestyle among the arrivistes. It’s no different than Asian women purchasing luxury items as simulacrum for a Western identity.

In 1999, Tommy Hilfiger was rumored to have “publicly admitted to Oprah that he wished African-Americans, Hispanics, Jewish people and Asians would not buy his clothes because ‘they are made for upper class white people.’” What breathtaking brilliance on a marketing level! He probably disseminated that rumor himself. I betcha minorities the next day were secretly ordering every Hilfiger item online, while publicly denouncing the designer as a racist. I have said this before: The most effective way to invoke the greatest passion in people to cross a threshold is to put a gate up. They could have walked by that unprotected opening every day for the thousandth time without thinking to enter, but the moment a gate goes up, entering becomes a sign of prestige.

I tried valiantly to remember a tv documentary I saw almost twenty years ago. It was an incisive and critical look at the fashion industry. This was just at the nascent stages of supermodel worship, so most of the program concentrated on the nuts-and-bolts of fashion marketing. My memory failing me, I dragged out my trusty old Sony Betamax, plugged it in, and who would have known! That very videocassette is still in the player. It is Gina and Jeremy Newson’s The Look (1992) produced by Janet Street-Porter for BBC-2. It’s a fantastic, eye-opening program. I was surprised you can’t even find it mentioned online. When I typed in “fashion industry”+”documentary”+critical, all that turned up were more supermodel infatuation films. I guess the fashion powers-that-be have done everything they could to erase this documentary from the face of the earth….or at the very least, among the Macy’s set.

Among some of the gems discussed in the program is the notion of seating at a fashion show. Celebrities and magazine editors jockey for the most prestigious front row seats, but they are also the worst seats in the house. All the photographers stand in front of you and you see nothing. But it’s important to be seen in those seats. What’s more, if you’re a magazine fashion writer and you say one bad word about a collection, you won’t be invited back the next show. So in order to give us fashion advice, these editors who crave the most prominent seats have to brown-nose the designers just so they’ll be invited back another season. But in order to get that invite, they can’t say a critical word about the collection.

And we’re taking fashion advice from these tastemakers? Isn’t that a conflict of interest?

The concept of diffusion is the most fascinating item for me. A collection showcases a dress for $30,000 on a runway. 6 people (mostly nouveau riche ladies of middle eastern oil tycoons alongside wives of junk bond dealers) can afford it. The label gets brought down a notch to a $3000-$5000 dress and now hundreds of people who want to purchase the simulacra of taste and breeding hand their credit cards over. The designer adds a consumer line to their collection (Emporio Armani, Armani Exchange, DKNY, Lauren, Brooks Brothers 346) and the washed masses rush in to drop $200 -$400 for a simple sweater. Most of the time, the designer themselves don’t even have ANYTHING to do with making the clothes at this level. They merely sell the licensing rights to their name, and some no name clothier from Thailand slaps the purchased logo onto their handiwork and mark it up by 500%. (This aren’t the knockoffs, it’s the *cough* real thing that then gets shipped to U.S. Stores as the genuine brand item.) You wait and you wait for that sale at Macy’s (which comes around approximately every 12 hours). And finally for those who simply need to feel rich and look like Linda Evangelista (oh alright, Gisele Bundchen for you Ugg Boots wearing embryonic fashionistas), they drop what’s left of their week’s pay on a bottle of Eau de Parfum. (Chanel No.5: Total cost of ingredients $3, packaging: $6, Administration $8. Advertising $8. Final price: $62..00 in 1992)

Where do I fit in in this absurdist pyramid? I’d have to say I’ll be at the Goodwill / Oxfam with my trusty measuring tape. And oh can I pick them! My togs are so fetch, when I sashay pass old biddies in Philly, they rise from their wheelchairs in pilled-cardigans grumbling “oh no she didn’t!”

To that I say, “if you think I look antiquated now, wait till you see what I have in store for next season! Grandmama, Please!”

“I wanted the audience in a position they could trust their eyes. I want to take cinema audiences back to the earliest days, like when the Lumiere brothers screened their film of a train pulling into a station. Reports say that the audience fled in panic because they believed the train would run them over…. This is the issue of truthfulness in today’s cinema. It is not about realism or naturalism….Nowadays, even six-year-olds know when something is a special effect.”

Herzog on Herzog, p 177

I think about that quote often.

In this day and age of CGI (Computer-Generated Imagery) and Photoshop disasters, the line between reality and imagination is one clone stamp away. When a fake can be as real as the authentic item, what does authenticity now mean? It certainly doesn’t help that a counterfeit nation is quickly overtaking the West, dictating the rules of conduct by shattering any considerations towards intellectual property.

The trend is that we, the audience, have become increasingly skeptical. I know when I see a spectacular YouTube clip online, the first thing I do is to scan the comments for the keyword “FAKE.” If that produces nothing, the next stop is Snopes.com. It’s not that I don’t want to be swept off my feet and dazzled, I just don’t want to get prematurely enthusiastic, soar to the heights of inspiration, only to have the wind die in mid-flight. I proceed with caution, like most people in the digital age.

For me, the MegaWoosh Video was the turning point where I went from doubtful to permanent skepticism. It turned out to be a viral marketing campaign for Microsoft Germany.

By the time Girl Dies Exhibit B-5 rolled around, I was pretty jaded. A few Facebook click reveals the “dead” girl to be actor Cindy Vela.

So it should come as no surprise, that when the photo of dead Osama Bin Laden / Usama Bin Laden was circulated on the internet, most of us who were well-versed in the viral culture of digital hoaxes shrugged with a “Meh, whatever.” It’s debatable at this point whether there is any true value in releasing the actual picture, especially when the “digitally-jaded” amongst us have been conditioned to question everything we see. I do think the fear of inciting violence, as an excuse for withholding the publishing of the photograph, is proof that terrorism is effective. I’d rather we’ve said “because we are a civilized nation, and we don’t do that sort of thing.” As much as I want to believe it, I know it’s not true. There’s already pictures of the three dead men shot in Bin Laden’s compound making its rounds around the mainstream media outlets.

How to retouch a photo of a dead terrorist: Bin Laden fake dead photo. General Public: 0 Photoshop CS5: 1 (click on picture for Guardian story)

It’s funny that Herzog said he wanted to restore our trust in our eyes, because later on in Fitzcarraldo, there is a scene where speculations abound as to whether the “ship” was a model or the real thing. (Look at the size of the water droplets). Herzog was there, he was on the real boat. There is no doubt about that, but this was also 1978-1982: the pre-digital age. Given Herzog’s insistence on photographing at “the golden hour,” (near sunset) combined with the reckless rapids and the director’s shoot-from-the-hip filmmaking style, it’s not improbable that the camera was set at the wrong exposure during the frantic moment a 360 ton ship was barreling down the white waters of the Amazon. The actual boat did come down the river, as documented in Burden of Dreams. I just believe the footage wasn’t useable, and a replica had to be made for the three second shot.

It’s different today. We are constantly Googling and Factchecking what we see and hear. Oftentimes, regarding items that were manipulated, retouched, computer generated, auto-tuned, cut-and-paste, and digitally spliced. We expend an inordinate amount of time to double-check our reality. And that says only one thing: the machines are winning.