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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• Zeitgeist Film’s Brothers Quay page
• Picturing Writing (internal link)
• Brothers Quay gallery – writing (internal link)
• Hands are complicated thoughts (internal link)
• Brothers Quay gallery – hands (internal link)

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Return to “O inevitabile fatum”

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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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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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• André Habib, “Through a Glass Darkly: Interview with the Quay Brothers”
• Николай Гоголь, “Майская ночь, или утопленница”
• Nikolai Gogol, “A May Night or The Drowned Maiden”

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• Zeitgeist Film’s Brothers Quay page

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Pimmon, “while (not &fission) &”

Junior Varsity KM, “(export) 02”

Andreas Berthling, “with(in.III)”

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:

• Pita, break
• Scanner, case
• Cray, comment
• Taylor Deupree, continue
• Rsundin, default
• Kim Cascone, delete
• Later Days, do
• Folder, else
• Junior Varsity KM, export
• Steve Roden, for
• Warmdesk, function
• V/Vm, if
• eM, import
• Stephan Mathieu, in
• *0, label
• Electric Company, new
• Eloy Anzola, return
• Goem, switch
• Ekkehard Ehlers, this
• Richard Chartier, typeof
• Massimo, var
• Akira Rabelais, void
• Pimmon, while
• Andreas Berthling, with

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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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• John-Cage-Orgelprojekt Halberstadt
• As Slow As Possible – Wikipedia

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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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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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• The Official Website of Tom Phillips
• Tom Phillips Info

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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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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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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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• “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote”
• “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” (trans. James E. Irby)

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