In the “unreal dream
world” of plants, animals and Man the adventurer, things co-exist side-by-side
with a tacit acceptance and no real order. The body is strength that conquers
through sweat, dirt and dance. Conquers in a type of coincidental harmony of half-abandoned
streets, fields, homesteads and hamlets.
As it says in Americana
“a ragtaggle showcase of
corporate logos, a veritable shambles with a vaguely rustic appearance. You can
just imagine Dogpatch round the bend of the sloway”.
So, OK, one
can’t live in the 30s all the time and competitive industry can co-exist
side-by-side with commune (as at Motown). It’s not that I’m a Luddite but
nowadays when industry spreads, it is spreading by-and-large through “the
mirror of nothingness”.
Vis Trump’s
Opportunity Zones; here’s a typical photo; Galen Robotics, Baltimore. The image of physical boredom, reptile eyes gleaming. A life of straight lines and death to primitive urges of the psyche (of flesh, blood and living bone).
These are
industries that are attracted by having tax breaks and investment to abandoned
districts. All you are seeing is screens, since that’s what most new industry is.
Opportunity Zone in effect means the spread of Silicon Valley. What’s my exact
gripe?
That abandonment
can have a naïve harmonic that is part of its charm. Once they become “joined
up” by development that is essentially of one type, in comes order and out goes
coincidental harmony.
Opportunity is
always going to follow “the mirror of nothingness” because that is the dragon
that attaches to the ego of sorcerers of straight lines. The American Dream is
an interior dream built of urges and visions that produce the indefatigable
images found in pulps and comics. It is a magic land where ambiance reigns and
order does not. It is the land of poetry from Walt Whitman to Little Nemo in
Slumberland, an eccentric mix of Dionysian urges and Apollonian visions.
Such images
speak of life and can conquer death; the death-wish of lack of awareness that
comes with the dragonfeed of news that kills the interior life; dreamlike
images, desires and urges of the psyche; images that are part of the American meta-culture
of bison and eagles and 20s art-deco skyscrapers.
A meta-culture
is not completely real; Americana mentions Planetary with its
weird pulp pre-history of 20th century events. As I tend to say,
datafeeds – dragonfeeds – are convincing to the ego because they are born of physical
boredom. The reality we live in is a product of boredom.
In other words,
boredom seems real, and the American meta-culture of iconic dream images seems
unreal. The sense that the mythic or unreal have a tenacious hold on the psyche
is a prominent theme of Jean-Luc Godard’s 60s films, and I recently watched Masculin,
Feminin, probably his most UIS-satirical piece: “The children of Marx and
Coca-Cola”.
Through his 60s
films, Godard seems to be struggling with the reality of the psyche verus the
visible, material reality of brash capitalist mores. There is always a death;
in Le Mepris Camille and Prokosch are killed by a truck; in Weekend
Roland is killed by the cannibals and eaten by Corrine; in Masculin, Feminin
Godard himself is shot be a jealous woman.
Partly, it’s
playing to the tropes of gangster films, to show that the films are also about
filming. Again, there is that unreality; yet Masculin, Feminin is probably
his most ambient filmj and steeped in the Parisian noises, glare, majestic arcades,
light and sound in constant motion.
Filmed in 66 –
50 years gone – my overriding impression was that the reality on display is
actually the ambiance that does not show the hand of government or revolution,
that just is (somewhat akin to Breathless).
It’s also the
reality of line, movement, dance – of which there some – and pop as Chantal
Goya was a ye-ye girl. What there is never a sign of is hygiene (in one scene,
Paul is about to go to the lavatory, and brushes a flea off his crotch).
There is a
certain lewdness, with a hustler and an irate German, breast jokes. All of this
hints at a magic that 50 years later has all but gone. Vis, the idea that dirt
and ambiance conquer through strength the dragon (of ego-lust and datafeed)
that weakness invites. Into a hygienic reality of newsfeeds that convinces the
ego of illusions of fact born of physical boredom and shorn of psychic urges. The
dream dies; the fact lives.
This illusory
world is now hosted by the ubiquitous screens (electro-impulses). As a
side-issue: why is it that iphone photos don’t make the grade? Because they can
only photograph what is there, which is lack of ambiance and lack of dirt!
Godard’s 60s
films are dirty, cool and ambient chic in ways that indicate what has truly
been lost in the intervening years to an order of straight lines that cages the
interior world of urges, dreams, visions.