Cremastery or Cremasturbation?

This past week I attended a private press screening at the Roxie Theater of two of the five Cremaster films by Matthew Barney, in addition to a 2004 collaboration with Arto Lindsay entitled De Lama Lâmina. Barney’s work is certainly not the most conventional way to start the day–the three-hour screening began at 10:00 am–but such an oeuvre on the big screen is a difficult invitation to turn down. The films were being shown in advance of the Roxie’s July 30th two-week engagement where the film cycle will be shown in all its 7.5 hour glory. The screening’s press release says that you haven’t been able to do this since 2003, and the thing will never be available on DVD.

For better or worse, I’ve always regarded Barney’s practice with a bit of skepticism, partly because of the hyperbolic praise heaped on him by critics like the Times’ Michael Kimmelman, but also because of what I found to be the profound waste of his Drawing Restraint show in 2006 at SFMoMA. Lots of hardened white goo and whaling detritus. Almost souvenir shop-like. Big on matériel, small on ideas. Nevertheless, I’d only seen parts of the Cremaster Cycle, and I’d always wanted to see more. Many people I’d spoken to insisted that, all his work aside, the Cremaster stuff needed to be seen.

Barney’s work, even for the most devoted acolytes, has always remained a bit elusive, and it’s usually easier to peg the referent–Bernini to Beuys–than it is to figure out just what the hell is going on. That said, it might help to know that the cremaster is the muscle which controls the movement of the testicles within the scrotum. There, I said it. Now the scene in Cremaster 5 where seven Hungarian bathhouse naifs lasso the Giant’s alien scrotum to a flock of Jacobin pigeons makes a tad more sense. But only somewhat.

The Cremaster movies can be likened to a sort of meditation on reproduction, sexual morphology, and–this being art–death. Barney clearly prizes the fully realized form in these works, and it’s his obsession with material detail, athletic precision, and classical and mythic images of beauty that make the Cremaster films such eye candy. The rest of the fun, of course, is figuring out what you’ve just watched.

I only watched two of the films, and I can only imagine what the cumulative effect of watching all five might be. Revelation? Revulsion? Fatigue? How about profound confusion?

De Lama Lâmina, a sort of addendum to the Roxie’s festivities is a 2004 collaboration with the guitarist Arto Lindsay, which he and Barney filmed during Carnaval celebrations in Salvador de Bahia, Brazil. Part musical documentary, part myth-entranced and materially elaborate feature work, the film struck me as a bit lopsided. To get the full effect of Barney’s m.o., you have to fully bow in to his world, which surely helps to explain the project of viewing his 7.5 hour film cycle. For De Lama Lâmina, I much more thoroughly enjoyed seeing Lindsay atop a giant Carnaval float singing in Portuguese and jamming over guitar squalls, than I did trying to decipher what a New York Times reviewer described as Barney’s repeated “cuts to the undercarriage of the vehicle, where a Caliban-like man-beast, covered in dirt and vegetation, hangs by his arms and legs in a wheel housing, masturbating against the drive shaft and pausing to dote on a stuffed toy monkey that he cradles like an infant.”

Catch the wunder of Barney’s work beginning July 30th at the Roxie Theater.

The Greatest Recession

Coexistent with the global rise of financial insolvency has been the equal, and yet less heralded loss of cultural capital. Urban dwellers will be familiar with the term “networking.” Prior to the Great Recession, finding a “good job” required on some level to “know someone.” Older friends, peers, and family members all could in theory use their existing employment status as a vector by which someone lacking known experience or credentials could enter their industry or specific company. (Concurrently, the necessity of networking almost certainly prefigured the rise of the intern, for those whose working contacts were either ineffectual or unrelated to a chosen field.)

The collapse of global markets and the attendant hemorrhaging of jobs from across business changed all of this. On one level, the financial ruin of certain companies and industries represented the loss of the Network itself, for if there is no Network for which to aspire to, any attempt to do so is a null and fruitless undertaking. In a different sense, such collapses prefigured the dissolution of networking because as industries shed workers, less and less were in a position for which they could approach, or be approached, about a foothold in the Network.

Under normal employment termination, one should, without much undue stress, be able to turn around and refocus on his or her network of contacts, then re-enter the workforce. In the best of scenarios, such a person’s acquired experience might even obviate the very need for networking. This is no longer the case however. As more and more lost (and continue to lose) their jobs, there were more unemployed workers networking in order to find their next employment opportunity. Unique, however, was that as each new unemployed worker was shed from the Network, their relationship to it was further diminished by every other worker thus shed–for each new unemployed worker is one less person with whom contact can increase a chance at returning to meaningful employment. It is the law of diminishing returns. One works harder for for less and less probability of a successful outcome–in this case, a job.

The unemployed person, thus stripped of financial capital which resulted from his or her loss of wage-earning employment, is now also devoid of a distinct level of cultural capital. Their existence matters less. Under normal conditions, all individuals maintain a basic cache of social worth which is invariably tied up in their concept of self-worth. Stripped of the ability to network or be networked entails a significant demotion in both measures–one inexorably entwined with the other.

The notion need not be abstracted: Individuals unknown to each other will at social events almost invariably ask three questions of one another prior to engaging in lengthier conversation. 1.) What is your name? 2.) Why are you here? (Often, How do you know so-and-so?) and 3.) What do you do? The latter is obviously the question to which we are concerned. It is one of the most uncomfortable and terrifying questions.

Any one person can “do” a number of things, but the question is obviously geared towards ascertaining what someone does professionally, invariably for wages. For the unemployed, there is no answer to this question, and therefore, there is typically no further discussion of it in our hypothetical scenario. Nothing is to be had from the unemployed person. There is no Network from which to entreat or even gossip about. In employment’s place is a void. If both of the parties are unemployed, the effect is no different, only the depth of the insolvency. Instead of one lost soul, there are two. Their worth to the wider social structure diminishes in correlation with their increasing disconnection to the Network. Concurrently, they rapidly lose worth to themselves.

Analyzing the effect of inflation on the individual, the great Bulgarian-born novelist and social theorist Elias Canetti understood the matter thus:

The individual feels depreciated because the unit on which he relied, and with which he had equated himself, starts sliding; and the crowd feels depreciated because the million is…. Together people are worth as little as each is worth alone. As the millions mount up, a whole people, numbered in millions, becomes nothing. [emphasis in the original]

In May, the US Department of Labor estimated the number of unemployed to be 15 million people. When numbers reach such fantastical heights, the resulting social stigma of being without work ceases to be and transmogrifies into an incontrovertible diminution of social value.

The long and winding road

For my faithful, few readers, I apologize for neglecting you. But I have news! Or rather, I’ve been writing news. A review too. Where did we last leave off? 

Ages ago, it seems, I was tracking the imminent demise of San Francisco’s Mission District cultural life, with another aside on (tangentially) related developments in SOMA.

I’ve also attempted to catalog the trials of those privy to the death of California public education, an experience, I’d add, that has been especially troubling since I grew up in South Carolina, at one time (no longer!) the laughing stock of American public education.

For a brief moment, I like to think I single-handedly influenced the Police Commission’s decision to deny the SFPD the use of tasers. Oh, zap!

In addition, my sleuthing on the increasingly labyrinthine scandal involving the SF public utility’s attempt to greenwash compost made of human poo and industrial pollutants has been well documented.

But lest one think I’ve abandoned all pursuits not related to the the doings of Downtown or sourced from smoking guns in underground parking lots, I found time to pen a review of the fun little firecracker of an art show at CCA’s Wattis Institute for the Arts.  

And all month, beneath my nom de plume “BW,” I can be read hyping the certifiably hypable events going down at NYC’s Thirty Days Gallery. I know not from where these people’s money and connections come from, but they have managed to corral Kim Gordon, Thurston Moore, Gary Panter, Art Speigelman, Will Oldham, and an arc-load of other cultural and artistic icons under one roof for the entire month of April, and then some.

Extra, Extra!

This is not a picture of me, but rather one of the most generic images to be found on the Interweb. However, it is a visual representation of what I will be up to for the next four months. That’s right. I’m a journalist! Temporarily, at this point, but hopefully that doesn’t detract from my ace reporting, a recent example of which, came out today. Read here!

Keep yrself tuned to the San Francisco Bay Guardian (and politics blog) for more, and soon.

Roll Over Beethoven

I’ve been thinking about how to move YrDoingAGreatJob away from the whole blog as just re-posted smorgasbord of cool stuff you think your (invariably tiny) group of readers will dig; but dadgummit, along comes this monumentally astute knowledge bomb from Matt Bai over at the New York Times Magazine.

In light of yesterday’s “shocking” defeat of Democrat Martha Coakey by Republican Scott Brown for Teddy Kennedy’s Senate seat, Bai discusses the increasingly antiquated notion of partisan political alignment. Now, if that term sounds unfamiliar, you’re probably young and it might as well remain unfamiliar. But basically, it’s the idea that because one year ago voters ushered in the Liberal Jesus Barack Obama and technical Democratic majorities in both chambers of Congress, the nation’s voters would stop watching crappy cable news and listening to even crappier talk radio and go back to work and forget about guns and butter and trust the Democratic Party they just elected and keep voting them back into power each time because, well, Washington and politics and especially, reform, move at about the pace of a garden slug.

Of course, all that is about as relevant now as a rotary phone. Here’s Matt (worth quoting at length):

On a deeper level, the fading dream of realignment reflects our attitudes about permanence in a society that judges its digital TVs by their “refresh rates” — that is, the number of times per second that the pixels on the screen rearrange themselves to create a more eye-popping picture than the one that just existed. In an accelerated culture, our loyalties toward just about everything — laundry detergents, celebrities, even churches and spouses — transfer more readily than our grandparents could have imagined. Now we dispose of phone carriers and cash-back credit cards from one month to the next, forever in search of some better deal. Forget the staying power of an institution like Johnny Carson; when Jay Leno starts to feels a little stale, he is shifted to prime time, then shifted back to late night…

It isn’t only majority parties that will have to recalibrate their ideas of longevity in this new environment. It’s the individual politicians, too. Only in Washington, where changing social attitudes from the rest of the country generally arrive with all the speed of a Pilgrim vessel, is protracted incumbency still considered some kind of ace-in-the-hole selling point. Americans who rotate through a series of jobs or even careers every decade are far less likely to want to pull the lever for the same graying senator — or the same graying party — for the duration of their natural lives, which means the politician-as-local-institution is probably headed for the history books. It doesn’t seem likely that Scott Brown, the newest Massachusetts senator, or any of the energetic and unwrinkled senators who have recently arrived in Washington will ever be memorialized the way Ted Kennedy was, or have the chance to treat the Senate as a kind of surrogate nursing home, in the manner of a Strom Thurmond or a Robert Byrd.