Adam Curtis – The World of the Self/Our World
Sat 8 December, & Sun 9 December
Whitechapel Art Gallery
Angel Alley Entrance
80 – 82 Whitechapel High Street
London, E1 7QX
+44 (0)20 7522 7888
Info@whitechapel.org

“Adam Curtis is one of the best-known documentary filmmakers in Britain. His films have won numerous awards including 6 Baftas and have been shown at festivals around the world. They fuse together hard critical journalism with techniques borrowed from a wide-range of experimental film and video techniques.

“Out of this he has created a body of work that examines how power functions in modern society – not just in politics but also in many of the institutions and activities that permeate our lives today – from science to consumerism, modern psychology and the way our society fights terrorism.

“Over this unique weekend programmed by Adam Curtis a cross-section of episodes from various series that span his career propose a stunning argument. Considered together these works tell a bigger story than that of their specific subjects. It is the story of our time. How we have moved into a world that is dominated and driven by the ideas, the dreams and the emotional needs and cravings of the individual self.

“Nothing is more important today than the individual self and its freedom to do, to feel and to get what it wants. This is the belief that guides our politicians, all those who run marketing and advertising, and all of our media.

“And it is what we all believe.

“Over two days Adam Curtis will show how episodes from four of his series can be re-conceptualized equally as the story of the rise of this ideology and a critical examination of how it has come to limit and trap both us and our leaders into a narrow and static universe.

“Programme
“The screenings range from one episode of the early series Pandora’s Box to The Century of the Self, which describes how Freud’s ideas of the inner irrational drive inside human beings came to shape the rise of modern public relations, consumerism and the way we feel about ourselves – and how this view eventually took over politics itself.

“In The Power of Nightmares two groups who could not be more different in their aims – the Neo-Conservatives in America and the Islamists – are united in a belief that the unbridled self is corrupting society. The series examines how both of them set out to stop this, but how in the process they in fact helped create today’s world of paranoia and fear.

“Finally in The Trap the subject becomes the death of the self – how, behind the dream of individual freedom, is actually a very narrow and peculiar idea of freedom and human nature that has come to enslave both us and our leaders. Such a freedom is actually a simplistic model of human beings as self-seeking, almost robotic creatures who constantly watch and monitor each other suspiciously. The Trap shows how in this idea of freedom lay the seeds of new forms of social control – not imposed from outside of us, but constructed by the ways in which we monitor ourselves.”

Saturday 8 December, 2007
4pm – Pandora’s Box: To The Brink of Eternity, 1992, 60’
5.30pm – The Century of the Self, Part One: Happiness Machines, 2002, 60’
7pm – The Century of the Self, Part Three: There is a Policeman Inside All Our Heads He Must Be Destroyed, 2002, 60’

Following the screening Adam Curtis is in conversation with artist Josephine Pryde and Mike Sperlinger, Assistant Director of LUX, independent writer and editor.

Sunday 9 December, 2007
4pm – The Power of Nightmares, Part One: Baby Its Cold Outside, 2004, 60’
5.30pm – The Trap, Part 2: The Lonely Robot, 2007, 60’
7pm – Adam Curtis on The World of the Self
“Adam Curtis presents an illustrated talk on the ideas behind this unique series and the things that link these episodes together, looking at both the extraordinarily wide range of source material that the films employ and their structure of modern collage as form of contemporary journalism.”

Tickets
£5 per screening
£15/12* day
£25/16* weekend
* concs and Whitechapel Members. Free for Patrons & Associates.

Maria Forde: The Fetching Veggie Etchings

December 1st – December 22nd, 2007
OPENING RECEPTION: Saturday, December 1st, 6-9pm

little tree gallery
3412 22nd St @ Guerrero
San Francisco, CA 94110
415.643.4929
http://www.littletreegallery.com
info@littletreegallery.com

“little tree gallery is pleased to present the work of Maria Forde in her second solo show at the gallery entitled The Fetching Veggie Etchings. Presenting 8 different works utilizing etchings, fabric, collage and frame making, Ms. Forde gives life to a variety of underappreciated vegetables, from kale to squash, green beans to corn. In addition Ms. Forde will be making a limited edition, low-priced calendar about junk food just in time for the New Year.

“A central part of life is the act of eating. While food is our fuel, it also is our passion. TV cooks and haughty restaurants are lauded for what they can do with a bevy of ingredients. The food itself is transformed into foams, custards, and the like. Yet Ms. Forde isn’t interested in all the fanfare surrounding celebrity chefs or gastronomic adventures in dining. She’s interested in the simple and pure workhorse that has nourished and satisfied us for millennia. That’s right, vegetables.

“The Fetching Veggie Etchings are as engaging as the title suggests. Ms. Forde has made 8 pieces that leave no detail left undone. Ms. Forde even apprenticed as a master framer in order to hand-make each frame to her specifications. Each piece has two prints; the larger of the two displays a vegetable while the smaller etching makes a reference to the larger image. In addition to the etchings and frame, Ms. Forde has sewn a patchwork of fabric surrounding the prints. The patches are a variety of colors and patterns, adding a simple abstraction to the work. The patches also give the work a country twang; a deft nod to the vegetables point of origin.

“In one work the regal onion is centered with its shadow darkening a corner of the print. Opposite the onion is a smaller etching of a person, crying, as tears form a puddle below. The connection to the vegetable is immediate and intimate. Ms. Forde’s work is powerful because of how she is able to transport the viewer to a place s/he can recognize and instantly relate. The act of cutting onions; it can be therapeutic, monotonous and can even burn you eyes. But there is more. Ms. Forde highlights an everyday transcendental experience channeled through onions. So, if it isn’t obvious already, a show about vegetables is no small potato.

“Ms. Forde’s work has appeared in 826 Valencia and The San Francisco Chronicle, among others. She has shown extensively throughout the Bay Area and beyond. Her work is in the permanent collections of The San Francisco Arts Commission as well as The Capital Group. She lives in San Francisco.

“For inquiries and questions regarding the show, please contact J. Brent Large by phone at (415) 643-4929 or by email at info@littletreegallery.com.”

Hands down the funnest march I ever marched happened 8 years ago today. It was a polyamorous procession of the entire “Seattle Coalliton” (busty steel men, enviros, indigenous folks, dreamers and korean unionists) down some broad shoppers avenue on Capital Hill. Some where along the way the whole sh’bang (at least a thousand of us) fueled by the weight of our innevitablity, wandered off the street, onto the sidewalk and straight through the doors of one of those urban malls into a navy blue Gap. Through the atrium we brought our rummble of chants and slogans and drums, transformed it to an echo chamber- the mannequins in the store bopping to the drone of something louder than the big Taiko drums of the Koreans.

Later that evening my brother, this playful dude from Katuah Earth First! and I cruised Seattle in my ’89 Civic, playing rewinding and then playing again Garry Glitter’s stadium anthem Rock and Roll: Parts One & Two, all the while trying to top it with our own broadcasts of “General Strike Tommorow, Don’t Go To Work”, screamed out the window to any one we drove by. Next day was the blockade that closed down the city for the rest of the week.

Times have changed in the past but we won’t forget
Though the age has passed they’ll be rockin’ yet

Rock and ro-o-oll, rock and roll
Rock and ro-o-oll, rock and roll
Rock and ro-o-oll, rock and roll
Rock and ro-o-oll, rock and roll
Rock and ro-o-oll, rock and roll
Rock and ro-o-oll, rock and roll
Rock and ro-o-oll, rock and roll

(flyer and arm band scavenged from the Denny St. convergence center 11/99)

click here to see details of above image

hipped by David Patton!

“We do not deserve these people”
by Anatol Lieven

Published in the London Review of Books, 20 October 2005

reviewed: The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War by Andrew Bacevich

A key justification of the Bush administration’s purported strategy of ‘democratising’ the Middle East is the argument that democracies are pacific, and that Muslim democracies will therefore eventually settle down peacefully under the benign hegemony of the US. Yet, as Andrew Bacevich points out in one of the most acute analyses of America to have appeared in recent years, the United States itself is in many ways a militaristic country, and becoming more so:

“At the end of the Cold War, Americans said yes to military power. The scepticism about arms and armies that informed the original Wilsonian vision, indeed, that pervaded the American experiment from its founding, vanished. Political leaders, liberals and conservatives alike, became enamoured with military might.

“The ensuing affair had, and continues to have, a heedless, Gatsby-like aspect, a passion pursued in utter disregard of any consequences that might ensue.”

The president’s title of ‘commander-in-chief’ is used by administration propagandists to suggest, in a way reminiscent of German militarists before 1914 attempting to defend their half-witted kaiser, that any criticism of his record in external affairs comes close to a betrayal of the military and the country. Compared to German and other past militarisms, however, the contemporary American variant is extremely complex, and the forces that have generated it have very diverse origins and widely differing motives:

“The new American militarism is the handiwork of several disparate groups that shared little in common apart from being intent on undoing the purportedly nefarious effects of the 1960s. Military officers intent on rehabilitating their profession; intellectuals fearing that the loss of confidence at home was paving the way for the triumph of totalitarianism abroad; religious leaders dismayed by the collapse of traditional moral standards; strategists wrestling with the implications of a humiliating defeat that had undermined their credibility; politicians on the make; purveyors of pop culture looking to make a buck: as early as 1980, each saw military power as the apparent answer to any number of problems.”

Two other factors have also been critical: the dependence on imported oil is seen as requiring American hegemony over the Middle East; and the Israel lobby has worked assiduously and with extraordinary success to make sure that Israel’s enemies are seen by Americans as also being those of the US. And let’s not forget the role played by the entrenched interests of the military itself and what Dwight Eisenhower once denounced as the ‘military-industrial-academic complex’.

The security elites are obviously interested in the maintenance and expansion of US global military power, if only because their own jobs and profits depend on it. Jobs and patronage also ensure the support of much of the Congress, which often authorises defence spending on weapons systems the Pentagon doesn’t want and hasn’t asked for, in order to help some group of senators and congressmen in whose home states these systems are manufactured. To achieve wider support in the media and among the public, it is also necessary to keep up the illusion that certain foreign nations constitute a threat to the US, and to maintain a permanent level of international tension.

Continue reading →

November 26, 2007 8:00 pm
($9, $7, $4)
REDCAT
box office at 213-237-2800.

Film/Video, Jack H. Skirball Series

ALCHEMICAL DREAMS: THE SHORT FILMS OF HARRY SMITH

“The hand-painted films with which [Smith] began his career are the most remarkable ever achieved in that technique; and his subsequent stature as one of the central filmmakers of the avant-garde tradition.” films, both animated and photographed from actuality, sustain his.” P. Adams Sitney

“You shouldn’t be looking at this as a continuity. Film frames are hieroglyphs, even when they look like actuality. You should think of the individual frame, always, as a glyph, and then you’ll understand what cinema is about.” – Harry Smith

Harry Smith (1923–91) was a unique visionary whose art and interests moved freely between music (most notably, with the seminal Anthology of American Folk Music), film, painting and the occult. Smith’s ground-breaking experimental films are rarely shown, and this screening includes several of his hand-painted Early Abstractions (1941–57, assembled ca. 1964, 23 mins., b/w and color, 16mm)), featuring live musical accompaniment; Film No. 17: Mirror Animations (Extended Version) (1979, 11 min., 16mm), collage-animation laden with Smith’s symbology and mythic imagination; Film No. 14: Late Superimpositions (1964, 28 min., 16mm), a quasi-autobiographical account of Anadarko, Oklahoma; Film No. 15 (1965–66, 10 min., silent, 16mm), Smith’s animation of Seminole patchwork; and Film No. 16: Oz, The Tin Woodman’s Dream (1967, 15 min., silent, 35mm CinemaScope).

Curated by Rani Singh, director of the Harry Smith Archives and senior research associate at the Getty Research Institute.

Early Abstractions (1941–57, assembled ca. 1964, 23 min., b/w and color, 16mm) is a set of seven films between two and six minutes in length produced between 1946 and 1957. Each film is numbered (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, and 10) in the order they were made (a system animation pioneer Oskar Fischinger and Austrian experimental filmmaker Kurt Kren also employed). This numbering imposed an order and axis on these works from the beginning and suggests a commitment to a sustained “arc” that Smith undertook and achieved in his film-work. – Senses of Cinema
Featuring live musical accompaniment

Film No. 17: Mirror Animations (Extended Version) (1979, 11 min., 16mm). “If, (as many suppose), the unseen world is the real world and the world of our senses but the transient symbols of the eternal unseen… we could logically propose that any one projection of a film is variant from any other. This is particularly true of Mirror Animations. Although studies for this film were made in the early 1960s, the non-existence of suitable printing equipment until recently, my inability to locate the original camera footage until 1979, and particularly, the lack of an audience ready to evaluate L. Wittgenstein’s ‘Ethics and Aesthetics Are One and the Same,’ in the light of H.C. Agrippa’s earlier, ‘there is no form of madness more dangerous than that arrived at by rational means’ – have all contributed to delaying until now the availability of a print in the full mirror-reverse form originally envisioned.” – Harry Smith

Film No. 14: Late Superimpositions (1964, 28 min., 16mm) “Superimposed photographs of Mr. Fleischman’s butcher shop in New York, and the Kiowa around Anadarko, Oklahoma–with Cognate Material. The strip is dark at the beginning and end, light in the middle, and is structured 122333221. I honor it the most of my films, otherwise a not very popular one before 1972. If the exciter lamp blows, play Bert Brecht’s Mahogany.”– Harry Smith

Film No. 15 (1965–66, 10 min., silent, 16mm)

Film No. 16: Oz, The Tin Woodman’s Dream (1967, 15 min., silent, 35mm CinemaScope). One of the three surviving fragments of Smith’s aborted major project of reworking Wizard of Oz (the others being Oz/No. 13, ca. 1962 and Fragments of a Faith Forgotten/No. 20, ca. 1981). “Smith’s Wizard of Oz film (co-animated with Joanne Ziprin) would have chronologically followed his Heaven and Earth Magic. The project was begun in the early 1960s and received major financial backing from a consortium (which included Elizabeth Taylor). This was to be a widescreen film, using a number of colored glass plates in front of the lens at varying distances in order to create strange effects. Smith drew on a number of sources in order to produce a cabalistic environment within which the Oz story would unfold: these included the drawings of Hieronymous Bosch, Tibetan mandalas and sketchings of microscopic life by biologist Ernst Haeckel. Unfortunately, the major backer of the film, Arthur Young, died and the project was abandoned.” – Senses of Cinema

About Harry Smith

Although best known as a filmmaker and musicologist, Harry Smith (1923-1991) frequently described himself as a painter, and his varied projects called on his skills as an anthropologist, linguist, and translator. Born May 29, 1923, in Portland, Oregon, he spent his early childhood in the Pacific Northwest. His parents were Theosophists, and exposed him to a variety of pantheistic ideas, which persisted in his fascination with unorthodox spirituality and comparative religion and philosophy. By the age of 15, Smith had spent time recording many songs and rituals of the Lummi and Samish peoples and was compiling a dictionary of several Puget Sound dialects. He later became proficient in Kiowa sign-language and Kwakiutl.

Smith studied anthropology at the University of Washington between 1943 and 1944. After a weekend visit to Berkeley, during which he attended a Woody Guthrie concert, met members of San Francisco’s bohemian community of artists and intellectuals, and experimented with marijuana, he decided that the type of intellectual stimulation he was seeking was unavailable in his student life. In San Francisco he began to build a reputation as one of the leading American experimental filmmakers. He became close with other avant-garde filmmakers in the Bay Area, such as Jordan Belson and Hy Hirsh, and traveled frequently to Los Angeles to see the films of Oskar Fischinger, Kenneth Anger, and other Southern Californians experimentalists. He developed his own methods of animation, using both stop motion collage techniques and hand-painting directly on film. Often a single film required years of painstakingly precise labor.

Smith’s films have been interpreted as investigations of conscious and unconscious mental processes, while his fusion of color and sound are acknowledged as precursors of 1960s psychedelia. He also spoke of his films in terms of synaethesia, the search for correspondences between color and sound and sound and movement. Smith’s paintings and films were influenced by Kandinsky, Marc, and others who formed the foundation of the collection of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (later the Guggenheim Museum). He developed a relationship with Hilla Rebay, the museum’s director, and she arranged for him to receive a Solomon Guggenheim grant. He moved to New York permanently in the early 1950s.

In 1952 Folkways issued Smith’s multi-volume Anthology of American Folk Music. It was comprised entirely of recordings issued between 1927 and 1932. Released in three volumes of two discs each, the 84 tracks of the anthology are recognized as having been a seminal inspiration for the folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960.

From the late 1940s, Smith was also a passionate jazz enthusiast, and created paintings that are note-by-note transcriptions of particular tunes. He spent much of the 1950s in the company of jazz pioneers like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk. His involvement with recording continued into the 1960s and 1970s as he produced and recorded the first album by the Fugs in 1965. His long term friendships with many of the Beat writers led to the release of Allen Ginsberg’s First Blues in 1976 as well as unreleased recordings of Gregory Corso’s poetry and Peter Orlovsky’s songs. Smith spent part of this era living with groups of Native Americans, and this resulted in his recording the peyote songs of the Kiowa Indians.

Smith donated the largest known paper airplane collection in the world to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum. He was a collector of Seminole textiles and Ukrainian Easter Eggs. He also considered himself the world’s leading authority on string figures, having mastered hundreds of forms from around the world. Smith spent his last years 1988-1991) as “shaman in residence” at Naropa Institute, where he offered a series of lectures, worked on sound projects, and continued collecting and researching. In 1991 he received a Chairman’s Merit Award at the Grammy Awards ceremony for his contribution to American Folk Music.

For more information on Harry Smith please visit the Harry Smith Archives website: www.harrysmitharchives.com