O inevitabile fatum

from “Stille Nacht I”

In addi­tion to their obses­sion with writ­ing and hand­writ­ten arti­facts (which was the sub­ject of ear­lier post and gallery), the Quays use a vari­ety of print mate­ri­als – adver­tise­ments, engraved illus­tra­tions, hand­bills, maps, labels of var­i­ous types, name plates, posters, signs, etc. – as ele­ments of the décor in their films. These ele­ments are often used deno­ta­tively, i.e. as actual adver­tise­ments, posters, signs, etc., but they are also fre­quently used for their graphic qual­i­ties alone.

One of the more sur­pris­ing print arti­facts to be fea­tured in their films is the hum­ble yet ubiq­ui­tous bar code. It appears briefly in Street of Croc­o­diles, on the rear wall of a shop win­dow, in Stille Nacht I (Dramo­let), as the the table top on which the pup­pet will take his meal, and, most impres­sively, in Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies, where it cov­ers the walls of the white, Escher-like space in which much of the film’s action takes place.

In this lat­ter film, the bar code serves as a visual leit­mo­tif run­ning through the entire film: it first appears on the title screen, the open­ing shots and inter­ti­tle, then later lit­er­ally comes to life when its black ver­ti­cal lines grow to cover the white walls of the décor. It’s alter­nat­ing black and white bars are echoed visu­ally in the striped wall­pa­per and fab­ric found in the black room where two sickly pup­pets lan­guish. The bar code is also sug­gested in a num­ber of other ways, not only in this but in other Quay films as well: by dark tree trunks in a for­est (This Unname­able Lit­tle Broom), the dark and light threads stick­ing up out of the ground (Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies), the engraved ver­ti­cal lines on var­i­ous objects (Anamor­pho­sis), etc.

In each case the bar code serves no func­tional nar­ra­tive pur­pose, were it only to cre­ate an Barthe­sian “effet de réel.” Rather, it seems to be used for purely graphic rea­sons, i.e. for its sim­ple alter­na­tion of black and white lines, much like the cal­ligraphed words and phrases that often cover the walls, tables, and other sur­faces of their filmic inte­ri­ors and which are also often illeg­i­ble. That said, it’s dif­fi­cult to con­sider the bar code as a neu­tral mark and ignore its role as a sym­bol of com­mod­i­fi­ca­tion. In sub­vert­ing its intended use, the Quays could be com­ment­ing on its mer­can­tile asso­ci­a­tions, or on the unavoid­able com­mod­i­fi­ca­tion of cul­ture more broadly speak­ing (“O inevitabile fatum”), as a remark they made about the “Stille Nacht” series sug­gests: they described these short black and white films, all but one being com­mis­sions, as “sub­tly engaged in sell­ing some use­less object as a form of sym­bolic salesmanship.”

You can see a related selec­tion of the stills in the Broth­ers Quay gallery of bar codes.

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09.01.2010 – 12:20 am
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Brothers Quay gallery – bar codes

from <strong>Stille Nacht I (Dramolet)</strong>
from <strong>Stille Nacht I (Dramolet)</strong>
from <strong>Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies</strong>
from <strong>Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies</strong>
from <strong>Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies</strong>
from <strong>Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies</strong>
from <strong>Street of Crocodiles</strong>
from <strong>This Unnameable Little Broom</strong>
from <strong>Anamorphosis</strong>

This gallery con­tains stills from select films by the Broth­ers Quay. Click on a thumb­nail to enlarge it. (And note the recy­cled scenery from Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies in the last still, taken from Anamor­pho­sis.)

Return to “O inevitabile fatum”

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09.01.2010 – 12:15 am
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From my sktchbook, 4

sktch.058

sktch­book is an on-going project of images cre­ated on the iPhone using a vari­ety of image-making and manip­u­lat­ing appli­ca­tions, pri­mar­ily sktch, a gen­er­a­tive draw­ing app by CreativeApplications.Net, from which the project takes its name.

You can view all of the sktches that have been fea­tured on In an inde­ter­mi­nate place here, or the com­plete col­lec­tion on Flickr.

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Published:
08.22.2010 – 12:15 am
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By Nipperkin
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Anatomy of a soundtrack: the Brothers’ Quay “Stille Nacht III”

Here is the sound­track from the Broth­ers’ Quay Stille Nacht III (Tales from Vienna Woods):

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Lis­ten­ing to it, the first thing we notice is that it’s not a sound­track by Leszek Jankowski, who has com­posed the music for many of the Quays’ best-known films (Street of Croc­o­diles [1986], Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies) [1987], The Comb [1990], among oth­ers). Rather, it is a sound col­lage appar­ently cre­ated by the Quays them­selves, as the cred­its at the end of the film are fic­ti­tious. They read:

Music: Voz de Dro­hobycz
Per­formed by the Blata Gym­nazjum Children’s Orches­tra
Con­ducted by Izy­dor Hoff­man
Assist: Nicolas

Aside from “Nico­las,” about whom more later, these are the same peo­ple and orga­ni­za­tions cred­ited with the music in Stille Nacht I (Dramo­let) (where it is La Voz… and Blata Gim­nazjum [with an “i“ and not a “y”], how­ever), none of whom actu­ally exist. A clue as to the true nature of the sound­track is given in the fol­low­ing excerpt from an inter­view with the Quays con­ducted by André Habib in 2001:

QUAYS: […] We have all these cas­settes of Radio Moscow that we taped off the radio, and we play them occa­sion­ally. They cre­ate their own spell, with all that sta­tic and inter­fer­ence com­ing over. We put them in Stille Nacht, and in Croc­o­diles also, there’s a pas­sage. We found out much later, through a Russ­ian friends of ours, that it was a Russ­ian actress speak­ing. It was a Russ­ian radio drama and the music was done by a Russ­ian com­poser who lives in Uzbek­istan, who wrote these exotic, kitsch pieces. The voice and the sta­tic opened up this world. We always thought it was the voice of Dro­hobycz, Bruno Schulz’s city. It’s actu­ally Muzak. […]

AH: On Stille Nacht the grain of the record is also very powerful.

QUAYS: It’s actu­ally the sta­tic from the radio.

Thus the muf­fled, barely audi­ble female voice (are there more than one?) that we hear through­out Stille Nacht III is the Russ­ian actress and the “exotic, kitsch” music would be by the Russ­ian com­poser liv­ing in Uzbek­istan. But what about the male voice we hear in the mid­dle of the film (from 1:38 to 3:05)? Well, that’s where “Nico­las” comes in. Actu­ally, it’s not Nico­las but Niko­lai, as in Niko­lai Gogol: in fact, the male voice we hear is an actor read­ing from the latter’s “Майская ночь, или утопленница” [“A May Night or The Drowned Maiden”]. The pas­sage in ques­tion is the open­ing of the first para­graph of sec­ond sec­tion, “Golova” [“The Mayor”], which reads:

Знаете ли вы украинскую ночь? О, вы не знаете украинской ночи! Всмотритесь в нее. С середины неба глядит месяц. Необъятный небесный свод раздался, раздвинулся еще необъятнее. Горит и дышит он. Земля вся в серебряном свете; и чудный воздух и прохладно-душен, и полон неги, и движет океан благоуханий. Божественная ночь! Очаровательная ночь! Недвижно, вдохновенно стали леса, полные мрака, и кинули огромную тень от себя. […] Знаете ли вы украинскую ночь? О, вы не знаете украинской ночи!

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[Do you know the Ukrain­ian night? Aie, you do not know the Ukrain­ian night! Look at it: the moon looks out from the cen­ter of the sky; the immense dome of heaven stretches fur­ther, more incon­ceiv­ably immense than ever; it glows and breathes; the earth is all bathed in a sil­very light; and the exquis­ite air is refresh­ing and warm and full of lan­guor, and an ocean of fra­grance is stir­ring. Heav­enly night! Enchant­ing night! The woods stand motion­less, mys­te­ri­ous, full of gloom, and cast huge shad­ows. […] Do you know the Ukrain­ian night? Aie, you do not know the Ukrain­ian night! (Trans­la­tion: Con­stance Gar­nett)]

Note that only the first half of the para­graph has been used, and the open­ing ques­tion and response have been repeated at the end, after a pause.

Why this writer, story, and sec­tion? Well, it’s entirely pos­si­ble that this record­ing was one of the things the Quays had recorded from Radio Moscow, and that they felt that it fit the film they were mak­ing – the actor’s tone of voice is calm and dreamy, and he speaks in an East Euro­pean (actu­ally Slavic) lan­guage, both of which, given the film­mak­ers’ aes­thetic and predilec­tions, add a more than appro­pri­ate note to the film. Also, the tex­tual con­tent of the pas­sage in ques­tion, like the story itself, does sug­gest the mag­i­cal, men­ac­ing, fairy-tale world in which the action the film is explor­ing – a stag being shot in the tes­ti­cle, thus caus­ing its antlers to grow asym­met­ri­cally – could take place: an enchant­ing, moon­lit night, a sky that “glows and breathes,” every­thing is bathed in “sil­very light,” the lan­guorous, scented air which seems to be alive, and of course the mys­te­ri­ous, shad­owy, gloom-filled woods.…

It’s inter­est­ing also to con­sider the soundtrack’s cir­cu­lar struc­ture: the open­ing chord sequence is repeated at the end, just like open­ing lines of text are repeated again at the end of the pas­sage spo­ken. Only the music picks up again: the main melody comes back in as if the whole thing were start­ing over, the impli­ca­tion being that the action will repeat itself, osten­si­bly ad infini­tum. In fact, this was the film­mak­ers’ intent – they imag­ined that the anamor­phic deer table, a dis­play in the “Archiv Got­tinga,” would nightly dream of the acci­dent that resulted in its antlers’ asym­me­try and thus of its inclu­sion there, in an eter­nal, loop­ing nightmare.

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Published:
08.15.2010 – 12:15 am
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By Nipperkin
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invalidObjects

As I scan around for inter­est­ing things to lis­ten to on-line, I often find myself return­ing to Fällt Publishing’s invali­dOb­ject Series (2000), a thought­ful col­lec­tion of recent elec­tronic music. The series com­prises 24 releases by 24 microsound com­posers, each one con­tain­ing 15 one-minute com­po­si­tions that range in style from glitch to ambi­ent to degree-zero sound. The entire invali­dOb­ject Series, orig­i­nally released on 3″ CDs but long out of print, is hap­pily avail­able for free down­load on Fällt’s web­site. Here are three sam­ples to get you going:

Pim­mon, “while (not &fis­sion) &”

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Junior Var­sity KM, “(export) 02”

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Andreas Berth­ling, “with(in.III)”

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A full descrip­tion of the invali­dOb­ject Series can be found here, with fur­ther details about the indi­vid­ual artists and releases, as well as music files for lis­ten­ing or down­load, at the links below:

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08.08.2010 – 12:15 am
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As slow as possible

Sep­tem­ber 5, 2001 saw the begin­ning of what will be, on its com­ple­tion, the longest con­cert ever given. On that day, the birth­day of John Cage, a per­for­mance of the latter’s Organ2/ASLSP (1987) was begun in the church of St. Bur­chardi in Hal­ber­stadt, Ger­many. The con­cert will last 639 years. Why Hal­ber­stadt and why 639 years? On the project’s web­site the fol­low­ing expla­na­tion is given:

Michael Prae­to­rius, a com­poser of the late 16th and early 17th cen­turies, wrote that an organ with the first mod­ern key­board arrange­ment had been built in Halberstadt’s cathe­dral in 1361. This organ was the first one with a clavia­ture of 12 notes and this clavia­ture is used on our key­board instru­ments today. So one can say that the cra­dle of mod­ern music was in Hal­ber­stadt. Sub­tract 1361 from the mil­len­nial year 2000, and the result is 639.

Though the choice of the cal­cu­la­tion used to deter­mine the unusual length of the per­for­mance may seem some­what arbi­trary (not to men­tion equat­ing the loca­tion of the first organ with a “mod­ern” key­board with the birth­place of “mod­ern music”), it is cer­tainly not inap­pro­pri­ate given Cage’s predilec­tion for the ran­dom. The com­po­si­tion itself is of inde­ter­mi­nate dura­tion and Cage did note that it should be played “as slow as pos­si­ble,” and this effec­tively leaves the door open for extended per­for­mances, so why not 639 years?

Such an idea cer­tainly has its prece­dents, one of them being Erik Satie’s Vex­a­tions (1893), though its mon­u­men­tal length of 18+ hours seems down­right puny when com­pared to the 600+ years of Organ2/ASLSP. (It’s worth recall­ing that Cage orga­nized the first com­plete pub­lic per­for­mance of Vex­a­tions in 1963.) Another antecedent is La Monte Young’s Com­po­si­tion 1960 #7, which con­sists of just two pitches – the B below mid­dle C and the F# above it – “to be held for a long time,” accord­ing to the composer’s instruc­tions. Organ2/ASLSP is actu­ally closer to the for­mer than the lat­ter, though, since Young’s piece is of indef­i­nite dura­tion and could go on, the­o­ret­i­cally at least, forever.

What is unprece­dented here is that, since the per­for­mance will last sev­eral life­times, if indeed it can actu­ally be com­pleted, no one will ever hear it in its entirety, at least not in real time. Thus, it may well be the first pub­lic pre­sen­ta­tion of a work of art that can only be expe­ri­enced in part, the inten­tional impos­si­bil­ity of per­ceiv­ing a work in its total­ity being a rel­a­tively rare phe­nom­e­non. And it cer­tainly gives new mean­ing to the cliché “ars longa, vita brevis.”

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08.01.2010 – 12:15 am
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Reading “A Humument” – the characters

A Humu­ment, p. 11

As I’ve writ­ten (here and here), the open­ing pages of A Humu­ment serve pri­mar­ily to estab­lish its sta­tus as a con­cep­tual work of art/literature. Over the course of those pages the nature of the com­ing nar­ra­tive is also hinted at: we are given a brief glimpse of the story-line (a love story with strong erotic over­tones) and are intro­duced to the fol­low­ing char­ac­ters, who are listed on page 11 (TE, TPE, FRE, SRE): “the his­tory viola,” “eve,” “edo­ple,” “stan quent,” “sid,” “the human nature gen­eral,” and “oper­a­tion toge.”

One of the inter­est­ing things about this list is its sketch­i­ness: a cou­ple of the char­ac­ters named here (eve and edo­ple) appear only in pass­ing on the com­ing pages while oth­ers (the his­tory viola, stan quent, sid, and the human nature gen­eral) do not appear at all. The pro­tag­o­nist of A Humu­ment comes at the end of the list: “oper­a­tion toge,” though to my knowl­edge this is the only time he is so named. His “real” name is “bill toge,” though he is often sim­ply called by his sur­name “toge.” As Phillips has noted in his intro­duc­tion to A Humunent, that par­tic­u­lar com­bi­na­tion of let­ters only appears in Eng­lish in the words “together” and “alto­gether,” hence he can only be named on pages on which those words appear. Oth­er­wise, dif­fer­ent monikers are used to indi­cate him (such as “mys­ter t,” or sim­ply “T,” as he is called on p. 6 [AE]), when he is not sim­ply referred to by the pro­nouns “he” and “him.”

Also inter­est­ing is the fact that the other two main char­ac­ters – Irma and Grenville – do not appear on the list, though Irma may be the woman referred to on p. 2 (AE) as she who is per­haps “over her ankles in the storm and fire and desire of art; and the art of art, and would have given us a humu­ment or two.” (And if we con­sider her role in both the present book and in Phillips’ opera Irma [on which more later], she has given us a humu­ment or two.) The lat­ter two char­ac­ters were in fact the main char­ac­ters of Mallock’s A Human Doc­u­ment, the source of A Humu­ment, but they have with­drawn slightly to leave the cen­ter stage to toge, whose story will unfold over the pages of Phillips’ book.

It is tempt­ing, given the nature of A Humu­ment, to read the tex­tual ele­ments of the work as so many unre­lated orac­u­lar or apho­ris­tic state­ments. To do so, how­ever, is to deny the nar­ra­tive qual­i­ties of the work and ignore the fact that a story is being told. On the sur­face, it is the story of toge, Irma, and Grenville. Beneath the sur­face, it is the story – in the form of a demon­stra­tion or in places an anatomy – of lit­er­ary and artis­tic cre­ation. The dual nar­ra­tive reflects the dual nature of the book, a work of both the visual and lan­guage arts.

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Note

As A Humu­ment varies from edi­tion to edi­tion, it is nec­es­sary to indi­cate the edi­tion to which I’m refer­ring at any given point. To do so I have adopted the fol­low­ing key:

TPE = Tetrad Press Edi­tion
TE = Trade Edi­tion
FRE = First Revised Edi­tion
SRE/TE = Sec­ond Revised Edi­tion / Third Edi­tion
FE = Fourth Edi­tion
AE = All editions

As I hope these pages will demon­strate, A Humu­ment could and should be read both syn­chron­i­cally and diachronically.

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07.22.2010 – 12:15 am
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From my sktchbook, 3

sktch.077

sktch­book is an on-going project of images cre­ated on the iPhone using a vari­ety of image-making and manip­u­lat­ing appli­ca­tions, pri­mar­ily sktch, a gen­er­a­tive draw­ing app by CreativeApplications.Net, from which the project takes its name.

You can view all of the sktches that have been fea­tured on In an inde­ter­mi­nate place here, or the com­plete col­lec­tion on Flickr.

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07.15.2010 – 12:15 am
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The Conet Project

The Conet ProjectIn the event that inter­ested read­ers and short­wave radio fans might have missed it, I thought I’d point out that The Conet Project is avail­able for either lis­ten­ing or down­load on-line.

Never heard of The Conet Project? Well, it is a rather fas­ci­nat­ing 4-CD com­pi­la­tion of 150 record­ings of “num­bers sta­tions” put out by Irdial-Discs in 1997 and which is unfor­tu­nately long out of print. The pack­age includes an 80-page book­let con­tain­ing a his­tory of “num­bers sta­tions” and detailed notes on the record­ings, from which I’ve drawn the fol­low­ing description:

For more than 30 years the short­wave radio spec­trum has been used by the world’s intel­li­gence agen­cies to trans­mit secret mes­sages. These mes­sages are trans­mit­ted by hun­dreds of “Num­bers Stations.”

Short­wave Num­bers Sta­tions are a per­fect method of anony­mous, one way com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Spies located any­where in the world can be com­mu­ni­cated to by their mas­ters via small, locally avail­able, and unmod­i­fied short­wave receivers.…

These sta­tions use very rigid sched­ules, and trans­mit in many dif­fer­ent lan­guages, employ­ing male and female voices repeat­ing strings of num­bers or pho­netic let­ters day and night, all year round.

One might think that these espi­onage activ­i­ties should have wound down con­sid­er­ably since the offi­cial “end of the cold war,” but noth­ing could be fur­ther from the truth. Num­bers Sta­tions (and by infer­ence, spies) are as busy as ever, with many new and bizarre sta­tions appear­ing since the fall of the Berlin wall.

The sam­pler below gives a glimpse of the uncanny and atmos­pheric beauty of the col­lec­tion, and will hope­fully inspire you to visit the site for a more thor­ough listen.

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The Swedish Rhapsody

“This sta­tion oper­ates on a rigid and com­pli­cated sched­ule, in both voice (AM and SSB) and Morse modes (M5). It does not oper­ate on Fri­days. The oper­at­ing agency is unknown. R 06/09/93”

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Pho­netic Alpha­bet – NATO

“The E10 setup has been on the air from the mid-1970s, and can be heard 24 hours a day on a large num­ber of fre­quen­cies. The Israeli Mossad have been named as the orga­ni­za­tion respon­si­ble for this huge net­work, by mag­a­zine writ­ers and authors. R 1994”

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Eng­lish Man

“Russ­ian Intel­li­gence. R 12/03/92 ”

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Tyrolean Music Station

“Vin­tage Num­bers Sta­tion, recorded 1971. […] Two exam­ples of some of the songs trans­mit­ted, the first bar of ‘The Inter­na­tionale,’ voice sam­ple, mes­sage with farewell, and final song. Total weird­ness in full effect. See enigma list, and the forth­com­ing Enigma book. ”

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07.08.2010 – 12:15 am
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Windmills of the mind

In the mid­dle of “Pierre Menard, autor del Qui­jote” [“Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote”], a (fic­tional) schol­arly homage to a (equally fic­tional) early-20th cen­tury French neo-Symbolist poet whose crown­ing lit­er­ary achieve­ment was to write, some 300 years after the fact and for no appar­ent rea­son, Don Quixote, Borges’ nar­ra­tor com­ments: “No hay ejer­ci­cio int­elec­tual que no sea final­mente inútil.” [“There is no intel­lec­tual exer­cise that is not ulti­mately useless.”]

This para­dox­i­cal state­ment has always puz­zled me, espe­cially com­ing from Borges, though per­haps it shouldn’t have. If ever there was a writer whose work could be con­sid­ered an “intel­lec­tual exer­cise” it would be him. And of his writ­ings, “Pierre Menard” per­haps more than any other deserves that label – how bet­ter to describe a story that, in the midst of an oth­er­wise straight­for­ward par­ody on lit­er­ary cul­ture, poses prob­ing ques­tions about the nature of lan­guage and mean­ing, about the respec­tive roles of writ­ers and read­ers and the ways in which socio-cultural con­texts inflect their activ­i­ties, and finally, about the sta­tus of author­ship and the neces­sity, in fact, the very pos­si­bil­ity of being “orig­i­nal”? In this heady con­text, what are we to make of this state­ment that, on the sur­face at least, seems to deride the util­ity of intel­lec­tual enquiry?

Well, one way to take the state­ment is lit­er­ally, i.e. as a claim that intel­lec­tual activ­ity is point­less, though admit­tedly such an inter­pre­ta­tion seems to fly in the face of the story, writ­ten in praise of a par­tic­u­larly cere­bral exer­cise: the cre­ation of a work of con­cep­tual lit­er­a­ture. Another way to take the state­ment is, well, also lit­er­ally, i.e. that intel­lec­tual activ­ity is not nec­es­sar­ily use­ful. This would cer­tainly be the case of Menard’s under­tak­ing (that of Borges’ as well): lit­er­ary writ­ing serves no prac­ti­cal pur­pose. As Auden said of poetry, it makes noth­ing happen.

It’s inter­est­ing to con­sider this lat­ter idea through the prism of a state­ment made by Dar­wish. “J’ai longtemps cru que la poésie était une arme,” he wrote. “Et puis j’ai com­pris qu’un poème ne changeait rien. Rien que la poésie.” [“For a long time I believed that poetry was a weapon. And then I under­stood that a poem didn’t change any­thing. Any­thing other than poetry.”] A lit­er­ary text may “change noth­ing” in prac­ti­cal terms, though it can inspire and inform change in aes­thetic, artis­tic, and/or con­cep­tual domains that could ulti­mately have “real-world” con­se­quences. Such, I believe, is the case of Borges’ “Pierre Menard” (and “The Gar­den of Fork­ing Paths” and…): it antic­i­pates some of the fun­da­men­tal ques­tions that under­lie post­mod­ern and post-structuralist the­o­ries about lit­er­a­ture and art, and lit­er­ary and artis­tic cre­ation, and offers a re-imagining of the respec­tive roles of authors and read­ers, that is, of mak­ers and con­sumers, that is cur­rently being played out in a vari­ety of socio-cultural con­texts, not least of all on the “Web 2.0” Inter­net with its wikis, blogs, mashups, et al.

Borges’ nar­ra­tor could be right – there may be no intel­lec­tual exer­cise that is not ulti­mately use­less. On the other hand, the con­scious explo­ration of that use­less­ness may well lead to some­thing useful.

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Published:
07.01.2010 – 12:05 am
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By Nipperkin
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