Wall Street, in recent times

Wall Street, in recent times, has become, as a learned phrase has it, very "public relations conscious." Since a speculative collapse can only follow a speculative boom, one might expect that Wall Street would lay a heavy hand on any resurgence of speculation. The Federal Reserve would be asked by bankers and brokers to lift margins to the limit; it would be warned to enforce the requirement sternly against those who might try to borrow on their own stocks and bonds in order to buy more of them. The public would be warned sharply and often of the risks inherent in buying stocks for the rise. Those who persisted, nonetheless, would have no one to blame but themselves. The position of the Stock Exchange, its members, the banks, and the financial community in general would be perfectly clear and as well protected in the event of a further collapse as sound public relations allow.

As noted, all this might logically be expected. However, it did not happen in the go-go years of the late sixties and immediately after -- the years of the performance funds and the conglomerate explosion -- nor will it come to pass. This is not because the instinct for self-preservation in Wall Street is poorly developed. On the contrary, it is probably normal and may be above. But now, as throughout history, financial capacity and political perspicacity are inversely correlated. Long-run salvation by men of business has never been highly regarded if it means disturbance of orderly life and convenience in the present. So inaction will be advocated in the present even though it means deep trouble in the future. Here, at least equally with communism, lies the threat to capitalism. It is what causes men who know that things are going quite wrong to say that things are fundamentally sound.

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash, (book 1954, new intro 1997)

All too often education

All too often education actually acts as a form of aversion therapy, that what we're really teaching our children is to associate learning with work and to associate work with drudgery so that the remainder of their lives they will possibly never go near a book because they associate books with learning, learning with work and work with drudgery. Whereas after a hard day's toil, instead of relaxing with a book they'll be much more likely to sit down in front of an undemanding soap opera because this is obviously teaching them nothing, so it is not learning, so it is not work, it is not drudgery, so it must be pleasure. And I think that that is the kind of circuitry that we tend to have imprinted on us because of the education process.

Alan Moore, interview in Salon, 2009

It's been a long time, we shouldn't have left you / without a dope beat to step to

Big shout-out to pjjH for helping me sort out the DNS forwarding to get this blog running again...question is...is the audient still out there for it? Well, no matter, i will resume posting stuff here from time to time even as the days of reading physical books recede. 

When Diane Arbus died she had no will

When Diane Arbus died she had no will and, because she was divorced, my younger sister Amy and I, as her children, were deemed to be, according to law, her only heirs. Amy, then seventeen, was still legally a minor, so on October 12, 1971, I was appointed administrator of the estate.

This left me officially in charge and subsequent organizational changes notwithstanding, I essentially remain so. Aside from the intrinsic power of the photographs themselves, much of what has happened to the work of Diane Arbus in the thirty-two years since her death - including this book and the accompanying exhibition - has been contingent on decisions I have made. While I have had a lot of help, advice, prodding, both from individuals and from circumstances beyond my control, the primary responsibility fell to me and, without precisely envisioning what it might entail, I accepted it. The result has been a long, challenging, quarrelsome, passionate, complicated, exhilirating, comical obsessive, one-sided relationship with an absentee.

In the early stages, before the 1972 posthumous retrospective a The Museum of Modern Art, the task seemed straightforward enough: to do what was necessary to make the work as widely available as possible. After that, things changed. She was turning into a phenomenon and that phenomenon, while posing no threat to her, began endangering the pictures. She had achieved a form of immunity but the photographs had not. The photographs needed me. Well, they needed someone. Someone to keep track of them, to safeguard them - however unsuccessfully - from the onslaught of theory and interpretation, as if translating images into words were the only way to make them visible. More to the point, there were often people in the pictures, people who had certainly volunteered to be in them but who, in doing so, had not bargained on getting diagnosed by strangers as mere symptoms of someone else's hypothetical state of mind. I felt a responsability, not exactly to the people themselves, whom I do not pretend to know, but to the aspects of them that continue to exist in the pictures.

The three previous books of her work, although hardly wordless, were informed by the stubborn conviction that the photographs were eloquent enough to require no explanations, no set of instructions on how to read them, no bits of biography to prop them up. The relevant things about her were in them anyway. Besides, in her absence, the person she was seemed best left to the vagaries of our private mis-recollections, and of little use to anyone in encountering the pictures. Diane Arbus, Diane Arbus: Magazine Works and Untitled were each addressed to something left unfinished by what came before. This book is no exception.

Each successive project, each new attempt at organization, functioned inadvertently as a kind of archeology, unearthing that which had yet remained unnoticed. Unearthing a little whetted the appetite for unearthing more. As it turns out, we kept an awful lot of stuff, partly out of diligence, or superstition, partly out of reverence for the kind of history that survives more or less intact in objects, but primarily to avoid the decisions entailed in doing otherwise. The accumulation of all this evidence, the revelations lurking there, seemed to demand a forum, a safe place for anyone who cares to wander around at will and play detective, to peer into dark corners, to touch things, or circle back, to invent a path without the interference of the tour guide, making independent discoveries, because making discoveries in that way lies at the core of what it's really all about.

This book and exhibition, by integrating her photographs and her words with a chronology that amounts to a kind of autobiography, do not signal a change of heart, but one of strategy, and a willingness to embrace the paradox: that this surfeit of information and opinion would finally render the scrim of words invisible so that anyone encountering the photographs could meet them in the eloquence of their silence.

Afterword from "Diane Arbus Revelations", Doon Arbus, 2003

Sometimes I look at this woman

Sometimes I look at this woman, perhaps the fifteenth or twentieth most recognisable woman in the world, and wonder what would have happened to her and her strange, melancholy, uncomprehending-looking face if she'd been born a couple of years earlier or later. As it is, we know what happened to the face. It was spotted, when she was 14, at JFK airport by Sarah Doukas, head of the Storm model agency in London. This was 1988. Later, when asked exactly what it was she'd spotted, Doukas just said, "Bones. Great bones."

We know what happened to these great bones over the next few years. For a while, nothing much. And then - whoosh! This was not exactly classical beauty. But it was something. Kate Moss, a slim girl who looked surly and not-quite-healthy, summed up people's feelings. First, it was the people at The Face magazine, in 1990 and 1991. By 1993, it was millions. Moss was on magazine covers and billboards all over the world. She was the first new woman to be called a "supermodel" since the term had been coined. She was blamed for introducing a a generation of teenage girls to the world of eating disorders. Like Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton before her, she was far from perfect, but exactly right.

Look at this woman for a moment. She evokes emotions, certainly. She's from Croydon. She's 22 3/4, more or less. She is not beautiful, but she definitely "has something". A truck driver probably wouldn't fancy her. She looks a bit blank and slightly worried in a lot of pictures, like she might be about to go home and cry. She is roughly speaking, a cross between Uma Thurman and Ian Beale from EastEnders.

The rise of Kate Moss tells us some interesting things, not about her, but about ourselves. In the Eighties we wanted women to be tall, slim, glossy: we wanted them to look as if they knew what they were doing. Linda Evangelista, Helena Christiansen, Karen Mulder: in photographs they looked as if they might be the sort of people who ran their own businesses. They looked smart. Kate Moss does not look smart. There is no glossy Eighties-looking facade about her. She looks lost, stymied; she looks as if things haven't quite worked out for her. This is the face of the Nineties, the face which reminds you that the optimism you had was misplaced.

So Moss, the phenomenon, happened because people needed someone just like her. In 1992, she arrived at Harper's Bazaar in New York. "The second she walked in to our office," said Liz Tilberis, the magazine's editor, "model editor Sara Foley and fashion director Paul Cavaco knew they were looking at a true beauty; someone whose face and attitude were the personification of the time." On being discovered, Moss simply says: "I don't know why any of this happened. The chain of events that followed has led me to where I am now and I wouldn't attempt to question any of it, or ask why. It's none of my business."

Kate Moss smokes a lot. She says she eats a lot. She's naturally slim. She's got a calorie-burning metabolism. For a while, in the early Nineties, as she flew around the world in order to look a little surly and taciturn in endless countries, she didn't know what had hit her. She went out with Johnny Depp for a while. She almost never looks seductive, in the sense of looking like she wants someone to make a pass at her. When she is photographed wearing underwear, she does not usually pose like other models do; she looks as if she's been caught unawares, spied upon. She lets her feet stick out at odd angles: she is slightly bandy-legged. Famously, she has a "lazy eye", which makes her look more like an urchin, or, in the more famous phrase, a "waif". You can look at a picture of Kate Moss and think of words like: toenails, moles, cigarette butts.

There is one photograph which sums things up. It was taken by Glen Luchford, in April 1994, for Harper's Bazaar. The location is New York. Here Moss appears in a shiny synthetic-looking dress which hangs loose on her because she is thin. She is standing in front of a strip of tacky clothes and video shops - I think it's 42nd Street in Manhattan. She is in a defensive boxing pose, legs apart, leading with her left. She has a fake tattoo on her left upper arm. Her hair is scraped back. And she looks...ratty. She's dropping her chin, revealing the flattish plane between her eyes, the expanse of flat forehead, the low bridge of her nose. She looks really slaggy; also coiled with aggression. It's a brilliant photograph. You can just, just, see that this is a picture of a not-quite beautiful woman. But almost not.

Now, imagine showing this photograph to someone 60 or 70. Imagine showing it to Margaret Thatcher. What would the response be? It would be "Ugh!" It would be "This is exactly what's wrong with the world, summed up in one picture." Here is an image in which all optimistic, old-fashioned ideas have taken a beating. You see gender confusion, fear, stains on the the sidewalk; a world of cheapness and discomfort. It's a picture that makes you realise you have got a lot to think about. And here's another of the qualities of Moss - just as her extraordinary not-quite-beauty can be seen in all this rattiness, the reverse is also true. Even at her most glamorous, something of the other side always shows through.

Arena magazine, William Leith, 1996

The Death of La Nan M.

When she could no longer
prepare mash for the chickens
or peel potatoes
for the soup
she lost her appetite
even for bread
and scarcely ate

He was painting himself
black on the branches
to watch the crows
who no longer flew high
but kept to the earth

Smaller than the stove
she sat by the window
where outside the leeks grow

By the wood stack
- the hillsides of brushwood
she had carried on her back -
he crouched and became
the chopping block

Her daughter-in-law
fed the chickens
put wood in the stove

At night he reclined on each side
of the burning black fire
burning her bed
What she asked him was his opposite?
Milk he answered with appetite

Lining the kitchen
family and neighbours followed
her fight for breath

High up on the mountain
he pissed on snow and ice
to melt the stream

She found it easier if
she laid her head
on the arm of the chair

His urine was the shape
of an icicle
and as colourless

In her hand
she held a handkerchief
to dab her mouth
when it needed wiping

On his black mirror
there was never breath

The guests as they left
kissed the crown of her head
and she knew them
by their voices

He trundled out a barrow
overturned it
on the frozen dungheap
its two legs still warm

The seventy-third anniversary
of her marriage night
she spent
huddled in the kitchen
from time to time calling her son
she called him by his surname
who rocked on his slippered feet
like a bear

One mistake you made
Death did not joke like a drunk
You should not have grown old

I was not a thief she replied

Dead she looked as tall
laid out on her bed
in dress and boots
as when a bride
but her right shoulder
was lower than the left
on account of all
she had carried

At her funeral
the village saw the soft snow
bury her
before the gravedigger

from "Pig Earth", John Berger 1979

If you go to Asia

If you go to Asia and visit a wat (Thailand) or gompa (Tibet), you will enter something that looks very much like an abbey, a church, or cathedral, being run by people who look like monks or priests, displaying objects that look like icons, which are enshrined in alcoves that look like chapels and revered by people who look like worshippers.

If you talk to one of the people who look like monks, you will learn that he has a view of the world that seems very much like a belief system, revealed a long time ago by someone else who is revered like a god, after whose death saintly individuals have interpreted the revelations in ways like theology. There have been schisms and reforms, and these have given rise to institutions that are just like churches.

Buddhism, it would seem, is a religion.

But is it?

----------

When asked what he was doing the Buddha replied that he taught "anguish and the ending of anguish." When asked about metaphysics (the origin and end of the universe, the identity or difference of body and mind, his existence or non-existence after death), he remained silent. He said the dharma was permeated by a single taste: freedom. He made no claims to uniqueness or divinity and did not have recourse to a term we would translate as "God."

Gautama encouraged a life that steered a middle course between indulgence and mortification. He described himself as an openhanded teacher without an esoteric doctrine reserved for an elite. Before he died he refused to appoint a successor, remarking that people should be responsible for their own freedom. Dharma practice would suffice as their guide.

This existential, therapeutic, and liberating agnosticism was articulated in the language of Gautama's place and time: the dynamic cultures of the Gangetic basin in the sixth century B.C.E. A radical critic of many deeply held views of his times, he was nonetheless a creature of those times. The axioms that he foresaw as lasting long after his death were refracted through the symbols, metaphors and imagery of his world.

Religious elements, such as worship of the Buddha's person and uncritical acceptance of his teachings, were doubtless present even in the first communities that formed around Gautama. Even if for five hundred years after his death his followers resisted the temptation to represent him as a quasi-divine figure, they eventually did so. Asa the dharma was challenged by other systems of thought in its homeland and spread abroad into foreign cultures such as China, ideas that had been part of the worldview of sixth-century-B.C.E. India became hardened into dogmas. It was not long before a self-respecting Buddhist would be expected to hold (and defend) opinions about he origin and end of the universe, whether the body and mind were identical or different, and the fate of the Buddha after death.

"Buddhism Without Beliefs", Stephen Bachelor, 1997

When they first worked together

When they first worked together, Fetyukov had tried throwing his weight around and shouting at the captain. But the captain had smacked him in the teeth, and they called it quits.

Some of the men were sidling up to the stove with the sand on it, hoping for warmth, but the foreman warned them off.

"I'll warm one or two of you with my fist in a minute! Get the place fixed up first!"

One look at the whip is enough for a beaten dog! The cold was fierce, but the foreman was fiercer. The men went back to their jobs.

Shukov heard the foreman speak quietly to Pavlo: "You hang on here and keep a tight hold on things. I've got to go and see about the percentages."

More depends on the percentages than the work itself. A foreman with any brains concentrates more on the percentages than on the work. It's the percentage that feeds us. Make it look as if the work's done, whether it is or not. If the rate for the job is low, wangle things so that it turns out higher. That's what a foreman needs a big brain for. And an understanding with the norm setters. The norm setters have their hands out, too.

Just think, though - who benefits from all this overfulfillment of norms? The camp does. The camp rakes in thousands extra from a building job and awards prizes to its lieutenants. To Volkovoy, say, for that whip of his. All you'll get is an extra two hundred grams of bread in the evening. But your life can depend on those two hundred grams. Two-hundred-gram portions built the Belomor Canal.

Two buckets of water had been brought in, but they'd iced over on the way. Pavlo decided that there was no point in fetching any more. Quicker to melt snow on the spot. They stood the buckets on the stove.

Gopchik, who had pinched some new aluminum wire, the sort electricians use, had something to say: "Hey, Ivan Denisovich! Here's some good wire for spoons. Will you show me how to mold one?"

Ivan Denisovich was fond of Gopchik, the rascal (his own son had died when he was little, and he had two grownup daughters at home). Gopchik had been jailed for taking milk to Ukrainian guerrillas hiding in the forest. They'd given him a grownup's sentence. He fussed around the prisoners like a sloppy little calf. But he was crafty enough: kept his parcels to himself. You sometimes heard him munching in the middle of the night.

Well, there wouldn't have been enough to go around.

"One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich", Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, 1978, translation H.T. Willetts

I fell into a sickly sleep

I fell into a sickly sleep. All night long, nightmares and disagreeable dreams followed one another; they left me completely exhausted. I woke up sicker than ever. I recalled what I had just dreamed: on entering a large room, I found myself in front of a four-poster canopy bed - a kind of wheelless hearse. This bed, or hearse, was surrounded by a certain number of men and women; the same, apparently, as my companions of the previous evening. The vast room was no doubt a theater, and these men and women were actors or perhaps directors of a production so extraordinary that I was filled with anxiety as I waited...I myself was to one side, in the shelter of a kind of bare, dilapidated corridor: its relation to the room with the bed in it was like that of orchestra seats to the floor of a stage. The forthcoming entertainment was evidently upsetting and full of outrageous humor: we were expecting a real corpse to appear. At that point I noticed a coffin resting in the middle of the four-poster. The plank covering it disappeared, gliding back as noiselessly as a theatre curtain or the lid of a chess set; but what was revealed was not horrible. The corpse was an object of indefinable shape - pink wax of dazzling freshness. The wax recalled the blonde girl's doll whose feet had been cut off. What could be more delectable? It suited the sardonic, quietly delighted attitude of those present. A cruel and agreeable joke had just been played on some victim as yet unknown. Soon afterward, the pink object, which was both disturbing and appealing, grew considerably larger; it took on the appearance of a gigantic corpse carved in marble, with veins of pink or of yellow ocher. The head of the corpse was a huge mare's skull; its body was either a fishbone or an enormous jawbone that had lost half its teeth and been bent straight. The legs prolonged this spine the way a man's do. They had no feet - they were the long, gnarled stumps of a horse's legs. The sum of these parts was hilarious and monstrous and had the likeness of a Greek marble statue. The skull was topped by a soldier's helmet, which was set on its peak like a straw bonnet on a horse's head. Personally, I could no longer tell whether I was supposed to feel anxious or start laughing. It became clear that if I did start laughing, this corpse of sorts would be nothing but a sarcastic jest; whereas if I started trembling, it would rush at me and tear me to pieces. I lost track of everything. The recumbent corpse turned into a Minerva in gown and armor, erect and aggressive beneath her helmet. This Minerva was also made of marble, but she was running around like a crazy woman. In her violent way she was perpetuating the jest that had delighted me and nevertheless left me aghast. There was tremendous hilarity in the back of the room, except that no one was laughing. The Minerva started whirling a marble scimitar in the air. Everything about her was corpselike. The Moorish shape of her weapon referred to the place where things were happening: a "scimitary" of white marble, of livid marble. She was gigantic. There was no way of knowing if I was supposed to take her seriously. She became even more equivocal. For the time being, there was no question of her coming down from the room in which she was running around to the alley where I had fearfully taken refuge. I had now grown small. When she saw me, she realized that I was afraid. My fear attracted her. Her gestures became ludicrously wild. Suddenly she came down and started rushing at me, twirling her lugubrious weapon with ever wilder energy. Things were coming to a head. I was paralysed with horror.

I quickly grasped that, in this dream, Dirty (now both insane and dead) had assumed the garb and likeness of the Commendatore. In this unrecognizable guise, she was rushing at me in order to annihilate me.

"Blue of Noon", Georges Bataille, 1957, translation Harry Mathews

Are you ashamed because you are alive

Changing moral codes is always costly: all heretics, apostates, and dissidents know this. We cannot judge our behavior or that of others, driven at that time by the code of that time, on the basis of today's code; but the anger that pervades us when one of the "others" feels entitled to consider us "apostates," or, more precisely, reconverted seems right to me.

Are you ashamed because you are alive in place of another? And in particular, of a man more generous, more sensitive, more useful, wiser, worthier of living than you? You cannot block out such feelings: you examine yourself, you review your memories, hoping to find them all, and that none of them are masked or disguised. No, you find no obvious transgressions, you did not usurp anyone's place, you did not beat anyone (but would you have had the strength to do so?), you did not accept positions (but none were offered to you...), you did not steal anyone's bread; nevertheless you cannot exclude it. It is no more than a supposition, indeed the shadow of a suspicion: that each man is his brother's Cain, that each one of us (but at this time I say "us" in a much vaster, indeed, universal sense) has usurped his neighbour's place and lived in his stead. It is a supposition, but it gnaws at us; it has nestled deeply like a woodworm; although unseen from the outside, it gnaws and rasps.

"The Drowned and the Saved", Primo Levi, 1986, translation Raymond Rosenthal