The Times Quotidian

The Aztec Pantheon and the Art of Empire, Getty Villa
by Guy Zimmerman

When, in a crowded casino, the endangered hero of a lousy movie grabs his girl and jumps into a car that’s on display to zoom out through shattering windows into the neon-lit boulevards of Las Vegas, it’s all about generating a moment of surprise. When Teardrop, in the film Winter’s Bone by Debra Granik, grabs his niece Ree by the hair and tells her “I told you to shut up once with my mouth” we are caught off guard, and in that shocked opening we engage anew with the world. When Shakespeare writes “And pity, like a naked new-born babe…” he varies the um-pah, iambic rhythm in the last three syllables to surprise us, and then focuses our opened minds on that vivid closing image. And surprise – subtle, awakening shocks – are what Velazquez is after when he drops the sharp diagonal of the table edge between the curving shapes that compose the Water Seller of Seville. With art (even in its degraded forms), it’s all about the surprise that frees us from conceptual filters and opens us to the seamless emergence of the present in all its vivid complexity. These thoughts came to me at the Getty Villa looking up into the vacant eyes of the Tzitzimitl, which is an artifact designed to do precisely the opposite.

A monument to the depravity of human beings in authoritarian mode, the Tzitzimitl leans forward in the main gallery, hands reaching out, grinning with a lecherous avidity. Small holes perforate the top of the Tzitzimitl’s head. Here, the priests would pour bowls of human blood, and the blood would seep down through the open ribs to drip off the pod-like liver that hangs below the rib cage like the clapper of a bell. A demonic figure dredged up from Aztec Mexico, this life-sized terracotta statue must have been terrifying in the shadowy dark of the temple pyramids, shrouded in smoke while those dying under the sacrificial knife wailed and groaned. The Tzitzimitl is an instrument design to deliver psychic collapse.

We mill around the Tzitzimitl’s legs, me and the other visitors to the Getty Villa, as if the dark and repellent energies that surround this grim artifact have entirely dissipated. But something in me is alarmed, as if I am crossing a line that should not be crossed. A feeling of dread rises up as I watch the tourists scan the explanatory plaque, and then shuffle off under those vacant but watchful eyes. No surprise here: you are defined totally by the reductive narrative of the social hierarchy, the Tzitzimitl whispers, and you must submit and obey its imperatives, even unto your untimely death.

Through the use of this kind of terror, the Aztec priesthood maintained a regime of conquest and domination for the two centuries preceding the arrival of Hernan Cortes in 1519. The curators of the show, “The Aztec Pantheon and the Art of Empire,” take pains to connect the power structure and practices of the Aztecs with those of Imperial Rome, and I would not argue the point. The human urge toward conquest and domination observes no historical, regional or ethnic boundaries. In fact, I’d be willing to extend that analogy to the kind of overt, directly coercive American empire advocated by Dick Cheney and others on the virulent right wing of American politics. The comparison might seem outlandish…except if you are don’t happen to be an American. While thwarted, at least temporarily, in their overt political aims, the right’s communications infrastructure – the infamous, Fox-centered Right Wing Noise Machine – continues to seep polluted thought into the cultural mind stream like a malignant tumor. Rather than work cooperatively to confront the very real and quite alarming environmental and social challenges unfettered Capitalism has created, we are forced to battle disinformation at every turn.

I went to the Getty Villa thinking about the issue that’s come up in recent posts about how the brain is shaped by experience, and how concerted efforts must be made to to alter such “hard wiring.” I’m curious about the collective correlates of this individual effort, which connect for me with the very pressing issue of sustainability – our ability as a species to outrun our own destructive capacities. No doubt there were Aztecs, perhaps a great many of them, who recognized the inherent absurdity (not to mention the barbarity) of human sacrifice, but were powerless to alter a deeply rooted pattern of ritual that was also linked to the tangible benefits of a militaristic empire. In contemporary America we are not in the habit of cutting beating hearts from living victims…but we consume way too much of everything and it’s arguably a more destructive habit in the long run. Authoritarian elements in American cultural life are being energized by how desperate huge segments of the population are to avoid even modest changes.

Recent research into the fine-grain neuronal structure of the brain underscores the roles of “invariant memories” and pattern recognition play in human intelligence. To form predictions about what will happen next, the brain reaches back through the vast, neuronal archive and builds on what has happened before. When predictive statements about how the world operates reach a certain level of complexity we call them stories. Stories are comforting, but when we forget that they are also artificial, stories quickly lead us astray. Reality is inherently non-conceptual. If the stories we tell ourselves are not continually readjusted the invariant memories that drive them inevitably deliver imbalance.

As an institution, the Republican party seems to understand all this. Representing the interests of the top one per cent of the population they have become adept at manipulating the story elements buried in the national consciousness, and then frame every issue in narrative terms that resist the influence of reality. As we approach the 2010 midterms they seem determined to wring short term advantage from every situation regardless of how increasing imbalance leads at some point to a crash. Course corrections can be traumatic, involving opening to direct experience unmediated by protective conceptual frames.

For anyone familiar with tragic drama, “direct experience unmediated by protective conceptual frames” begins to sound like a description of catharsis, the shattering moment in which the tragic hero suddenly sees how radically off target his (or her) conceptual picture of things has been. The hero of tragic drama is forced down into the experience of the present moment. There he confronts the somatic voltage of unprocessed traumas directly such that they no longer distort his vision. The shock of this moment is conveyed to the audience watching the tragedy of Oedipus or Lear unfold on stage. The experience is cognitive but also deeply emotive, rooted in the collective body as well as the mind. It’s no accident that tragic drama flourished most powerfully in Athens and Elizabethan England, which are arguably the two most transformative and dynamic societies in the history of man.

As individuals, one action we can take to escape confining narrative and conceptual frames, is to go to the body. How we do this in a collective way is a big subject, clearly. But it’s hardly an abstract issue today. After my encounter with the Tzitzimitl, I found the opulence of the Getty Villa oppressive. Weighty panels of multicolored marble buttress the impression that in the hierarchy of social values you are near the very pinnacle. The last thirty years have seen a remarkable transfer of wealth up the socio-economic ladder and today income inequality is greater than it was in the 1920s. Many of my friends in the arts community are suffering today, their livelihoods in question. Our ability to inquire about root causes of our situation begins to ramp down as we are forced to focus on issues closer to home. In this way economic trauma confers a short term advantage to authoritarian forces, but only on the way towards the chaos of collapse.

Stepping back to look at the longer term I’m compelled to quote from the opening of Knowledge and Politics, by the remarkable Brazilian social theorist Roberto Unger:

“In its ideas about itself and about society, as in all its other endeavors, the mind goes from mastery to enslavement. By an irresistible movement, which imitates the attraction death exercises over life, thought again and again uses the instruments of its own freedom to bind itself in chains. But whenever the mind breaks its chains, the liberty it wins is greater than the one it had lost, and the splendor of its triumph surpasses the wretchedness of its earlier subjection. Even its defeats strengthen it. Thus, everything in the history of thought happens as if it were meant to remind us that, though death lasts forever, it is always the same, whereas life, which is fleeting, is always something higher than it was before.”

Unger, who until recently served as a minister in the Lula government in Brazil, certainly deserves several posts of his own. For now let us hope his former student, Barak Obama, learned enough to break some of the more destructive patterns clouding the American mind.

Vittorio Gelmetti, Composer, Electronic Soundtrack for Il Deserto Rosso (Antonioni, 1964)
By Aram Yardumian

The use of electronic music composed by Vittorio Gelmetti for the soundtrack of Antonioni’s first color film Il Deserto Rosso, contributed greatly to the film’s aesthetic complexity as well as the displaced psychological underpinnings of it’s characters. Rarely heard before in cinema, this example of early musique concrète would serve as a harbinger of the now, widespread use of electronica in film and television. -NC

Vittorio Gelmetti belongs among the earliest and most significant pioneers of electronic music, not only because his earliest compositions date to the mid-1950s, but also because he was self-taught and drew his inspiration not from other electronic music composers, but from Schoenberg, Webern and latter-day Stravinsky. And yet he is very little known or listened to today, even by connoisseurs of early tape music. His LP releases are hard to come by, and only one rather parsimonious CD retrospective has been released to date.

Gelmetti’s music, especially his work from the 1960s, represents something new, if not radical, inasmuch as it accumulates elements of musique concrète (the electronic transformation of pre-recorded sounds), as popularized by Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry; the elektronische Musik (purely electronically generated sounds) of Herbert Eimert and Werner Meyer-Eppler, as well as the later Musik kosmische of Stockhausen; and the aleatory universe of John Cage. There is also a spatial, sometimes theatrical element to some of his works, especially those composed specifically for film or television. What resulted was something very few at the time, especially outside of Paris and Cologne, could appreciate.

Gelmetti rejected the frigidity and ambivalence of other electronic and concrète musicians, preferring a warmer touch in his composition, one that would trick latent memories, and perhaps also create an oblique amusement, for the specter of Dada is never far behind him. If we were to divide Gelmetti’s available works into two, the majority would constitute continuous layered sound sheets and what might called entonnoir drones, not unlike the Xenakis works of that era, but otherwise quite unusual for tape-based musicians of this vintage. His remaining works, those not written for television or film (including Red Desert), are early examples of sound collage.

I would argue that Gelmetti’s most significant and underappreciated innovation is to be found in these works, for they are collages not in the sense of Ives’ text-melody juxtapositions, nor of Schaeffer’s “Étude aux chemins de fer”, or even Burroughs-Gysin cut-ups. They are a real, inspired, and playful use of samples—of plagiarism—, thus serving as precursor to the Plunderphonics exercises of John Oswald and friends, Negativland hi-jinxes, and nothing less than hip-hop, house, and second-wave industrial music. Gelmetti sources radio broadcasts, bits of unidentifiable jazz and pop music, and notable classical composers such as Wagner, Bach, and Beethoven, while abstaining from recorded environmental sounds. He took few of these collage sensibilities forward into his career as a composer of film and television scores, however, so it is these, in combination with his drone-sequence works, which stand at the pinnacle of the oeuvre of this little-known Italian innovator.

Nevertheless, it is his film and television scores for which he is best remembered. Indeed, several Italian newspapers carried the headline “Morto Vittorio Gelmetti, musico Deserto Rosso” when Gelmetti died in February of 1992. His works for television are often scenic, making use of lighter tones and broader, more adaptable forms, for the sake of both changing scenes and for human motion within the scenes. Cues from classic poetry are abundant, as are parts for chorus and traditional musical instruments, as well as references to his earlier dronescapes—especially in his score for Antonioni’s Red Desert. His final, unfinished piece was an electro-acoustic choral piece for male voices entitled “New Year’s Eve Toast”.

Gelmetti rarely consorted or collaborated with his peers in the world of electronic music, nor did he consider himself part of the avant-garde, instead, he occupied a rather isolated and unfashionable position in the world of broadcast composition and cinema; never a long-term in-house composer, never with a studio workshop of his own, and never a public personality. He did, however, endure as a considerable creative authority, perhaps unconvinced of his own force and influence.

Nous Irons À Tahiti (1965), Vittorrio Gelmetti
From the compilation Musiche Elettroniche, Nepless 1997

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The Red Desert and The Question Concerning Technology
By Rita  Valencia

Even though we don’t realize it, our lives are dominated by industry. And by “industry”, I don’t just mean the factories themselves, but also their products*

The new release by Criterion of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert comes at a moment when the ecological crisis that was in its infancy in 1964 has matured into a full blown demon with multiple emanations. All cries to end the blind and ludicrous march toward oblivion that “progress” has become are drowned out by the roar of exploding oil gushers. Optimists may claim that the disasters we are seeing are the result of greed and incompetence. Technology and the science which supports it, they would argue, can also be used to solve our ecological problems and create comfort and edification.

They are all over our houses, made of plastic or materials that, up to a few years ago, were totally unknown. They are brightly colored and they chase after us everywhere. They haunt us from advertisements, which appeal ever more subtly to our psychology, to our subconscious.*

Today I read a fascinating piece in the New York Times about the beneficent use of artificial intelligence in making little critters to keep the company of patients with dementia, A Soft Spot for Circuitry. The discussion of brain science often has the feel of an excited girl telling her friend about a first date. “He showed me how a meditating brain has a different color on a CT scan or pattern of brain waves that looks different from that of a “normal” person!” This brightly colored new technology may some day–well, maybe not prove, but posit–that mind exists as an extra-organic noumenon which is at once nonexistent but detectable and measurable and, most importantly, manipulable. The kind of shallow investigation of the measurable raved about on TED, should never excuse us from questioning the phenomenological issues associated with new science in its marriage with technology. Required viewing certainly includes Antonioni’s Red Desert.

Heidegger, in his essay The Question Concerning Technology (1954), examines the troubling ontology of the industrial and post-industrial age. The essence of technology, as Heidegger explains, is exploitive and utilitarian. Instead of the field being a place where the farmer brings forth the fruit of his labors through tools and toil, the field becomes a natural resource that must be regulated and secured for the production of crops. Heidegger calls this transformed entity “standing reserve”, which assumes a position in a process of ordering and managing, cause and effect, in service of a particular set of human demands. The human becomes a subordinate to the process, and though she never entirely succumbs she also is bound into a play of illusory mastery of, or domination by the system. It is a role Heidegger defines as “enframing”. Heidegger sees dangers in this system of enframing. “The unconcealment in accordance with which nature presents itself as a calculable complex of the effects of forces can indeed permit correct determinations; but precisely through these successes the danger may remain that in the midst of all that is correct the true will withdraw.”

I would go as far as to say that by setting the story for Red Desert in the world of factories, I have got to the source of that crisis that like a river, collects together a thousand tributaries and then bursts out into a delta, overflowing its banks and drowning everything.*

The “character” with which she is set in conflict is not any of the humans, but the extraordinary environment which Antonioni has so carefully painted her into: shades of ash torn by shocking hues of red, green and yellow, massive pipes and towers, smokestacks spewing. In a tale reminiscent of one of my favorite scenes from Alice in Wonderland, Antonioni describes a night of painting a hapless stand of pines. or rather ordering a team of workers to do so. He had decided they must be white for just the right effect in the dank fog. It was a bitter cold night, with a stiff wind, and the workers were high up in the trees, clouds of white paint billowing around them, all working to exhaustion, some of the men quitting outright. But Antonioni was indefatigable, and scrupulous in describing a world which is not real, but hyper real. Alas, after the rigors of all night painting, (and his best effort at transforming the stand of pines into “standing reserve” in service of Art), his shot was ultimately ruined. The next morning the sun came out, so that the white-painted trees became black silhouettes against the sky.

The dramatic heart of the film is a strange extended scene where Giuliana and a group of her husband Ugo’s associates and friends, including Corrado, gather in a river-side hut for dinner and a swinger party. Starting with an inane conversation about the aphrodisiac effect of quail eggs, Giuliana takes over, in a forced and awkward display of uncool, a cringe-worthy Italian film version of dancing with a lampshade on her head–sexy but underlaced with anxiety. Just in time to forestall even deeper embarrassment, one of the workers walks in on them, accompanied by a sensual low-caste woman. The two are welcomed with an exchange of bawdy, coarse language, but clearly the mood is ruined.

In the party’s denouement, it comes out that the owner of the hut has sold it to the intruding worker, a fact passed over very lightly. A woman complains of the cold. There is no fuel for the woodburning stove. Someone has the idea of pulling slats from an interior wall and breaking down some furniture. Madness ensues: the cruel gaiety of a mob taking delight in the destruction–of property the bourgeois has already sold to the worker–which therefore, is now worthless. Giuliana has taken part…one of the first and only times we see her happy, or at least, savagely gleeful. This orgy takes the place of the sex that never got off the ground–all of the sexual tension is released as destructive and sadistic violence.

In a pause, the party sees a great ship come to a halt right in front of the hut. It hoists a flag to signal the fact that there is an infectious disease on board. On seeing this, Giuliana becomes hysterical and forces the group to leave. Giuliana exists in a toxic world, but the toxic is far preferable to the septic. Although the others are indifferent to any danger, they follow her out–it is cold and the party a failure anyway–Giuliana drops her purse as she leaves but doesn’t realize it before the group has gotten back to the cars. Her emotional state further devolves as Corrado steps up before her husband to fetch it back, and her emotional outburst in pleading with him not to go becomes an unbearable humiliation. Shown POV of Giuliana: the party guests stand in a fog suspension, their bodies fading and blurring before her. They are at once a mob on the verge of stoning the village outcast or a coven of indifferent gaping strangers, but the unsettling shimmer between these two inflections of their gaze is a moment of pure hell and as perfect a filmed poem of alienation as you’ll ever see. Spiralling down, Giulianna gets in her car, drives off into the fog and stops just short of plunging it into the port. Giuliana has taken the scene as far as she could. She has led the action, from eating the libidinous quail’s eggs to rousting the group from its apathy over the boat’s septic threat, and now an attempted suicide shaking them from emotional torpor.

I think that in the next few years we will see some major violent transformations, both in the physical world and in man’s psyche. The current crises derive from this spiritual confusion, which is also moral, religious and political.*

1964 was the year R.D. Laing published Sanity, Madness, and the Family. In eleven case studies, Laing demonstrates the way in which families will take their most non-adaptive member and create a sort of emotional scapegoat of them, depositing in the “neurotic” (or “psychotic”) all the emotional dysfunction of the family, identifying the member as the sole one with the problems, and thus absolve themselves of any responsibility or need to examine their own behavior. This is a microcosm of the larger process of scapegoatism which Girard examines in Violence and the Sacred. Giulianna the “non-adaptive”, will continue to be in a metaphysical sense the dousing rod for the ecological-industrial travesty around her, resisting the process of enframing by failing to comply with a new normalcy, and yet, remaining capable of carrying the load of poisons that lace her environment, inasmuch as she is incapable of figuring out how to put it down.

Antonioni is not consistent in his remarks about Guiliana: sometimes he says the environment is only a trigger to her emotional breakdown–a suicide attempt that has preceded the timeframe of the film–asserting that the ground had to be fertile for her problems to mushroom as they have. In other statements he claims her neurosis is a product of her failure to adapt to her environment; a failure which he sometimes sees as social dysfunction, other times as ecological malaise, and as well in psychological terms. But the poetic truth of this first-ever film in which ecology and psychology are juxtaposed in a meaningful way is undeniably mysterious and anxious. Yes, Guiliana is non-adaptive, but it seems that if she were to “adapt”, the result would necessarily be cynicism and despair…or self-deluded complacency. In his interviews, Antonioni tries to maintain that he is not against progress, and this film is not by any stretch a moralistic diatribe against industrialization. But one needs to imagine a Giuliana who could accept the brutal beauties that meet her gaze: the fruit (painted) gray on the stand outside the empty shop she hopes in vain to open some day, the dinghy smokestacks spewing poison smoke, the brackish polluted water, the heaps of steaming refuse in vacant lots that resemble a sort of charnel ground. Only a yogi–or an artist–would see such a world as “alive and serviceable”–Antonioni’s adjectives. The question also arises, are the objects of the camera’s gaze a symbolic projection of Giuliana’s psychic malaise? Significantly, not. Antonioni is not interested in symbols, but he is keenly observing a remarkable phase of human endeavor, where the forest is just something that gets in the way of industry, and has no business being there–any more than the difficult and maladaptive Guiliana. This problem of functioning/adapting within a context of the Heideggerian “enframing” becomes even more metaphysical than psychological.

The scene of the giant oil tanker sliding anomalously, monstrously, behind the pathetic stand of pines demonstrates the visceral and unnerving process that enframing engenders; the sea transforming from living waterway (see the new dvd’s extraordinary doc fragment, Gente del Po) to standing reserve–a channel for commercial shipping that is open for exploitation. It follows thematically that Corrado, the reluctant entrepreneur with a surfeit of capital to float, finds a new business potential in the tankers for hauling his freight at low low rates–an inspiration he draws from the anchored ship of contagion outside the orgy hut.

The men who comprise the inner circle of Giuliana’s life are her husband Ugo, her 7-year old son Valerio, and Corrado, her lover. She is as it were, their “standing reserve”; for husband, a duty-bound desirable wife; for son, a serviceable mother even in her madness; and for Corrado, a mysterious challenge and conquest. In woman’s traditional role as caregiver and object of desire, happiness has never been a requirement, any more than a donkey is required to enjoy pulling its cart. It is impossible in the red desert world for love to exist, it can only or cohabit with indifference, demand or exploit. In the interpersonal, there is only the decency of exchange, and human decency is thin when it is unsupported by real compassion or ethics. The story which Giuliana tells her son, or rather which her son wrests from her, is a lyrical respite from the desaturated and raw hues of the red desert world, into a world of pink sands, fleshy rocks, and a sea of clear aquamarine…a wistful, narcissistic idyll, gathered into the bosom of a nurturing Nature. This is a world as limpid and light as the voice singing that emanates from “everything”.

I have to say that the the neurosis I sought to describe is above all a matter of adjusting.*

Corrado, after a decent amount of time stalking Giuliana in his polite and patient way, ultimately rapes her. Yes, she shows up at his hotel room, but Giuliana is incapable of wholeheartedly giving herself over to anything as simple as going to bed with a man–and indeed going to bed with a man is anything but simple given the state of things, the hidden dangers, the unspoken cries, the surrender of ego to strange and possibly alien forces. She says she wishes for a circle of people who love her to form a protective wall around her…and then…her limbs twist and fold away from Corrado at odd angles…she jumps out of the bed and must be brought back, again and again. He is never really cruel, but relentless and insentient, as he goes about stripping her and folding her into compliance. Would he be any less so if she were more complicit in his goal?

“The essential unfolding of technology threatens…that all revealing with be consumed in ordering, and that everything will present itself only in the unconcealment of standing reserve.” —Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology” Heidegger is speaking of technology not as the “machines” that ease, and increasingly define, our lives but the Machine that is in manifold ways pressing us into its service as it refuses to show its aims, its ends or its face–a fact Heidegger sees as the “machines” with a lower case m but the Machine that is in manifold ways pressing us into its service as it refuses to be show its aims, its ends or its face—which Heidegger sees as a great danger and one which is only to be defused by art and the questions it poses. The Red Desert is truly an answer to this call, with its sad forest of skinny pines, beings of a ghostly realm; where sailing ships linger and the yellow clouds no longer kill the little birds who now know to avoid them.

But before getting carried too away with the poetry of it all, follow this link…

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturenews/7862914/Shakespeare-plays-help-boost-cows-milk-production.html

*Michaelangelo Antonioni’s quotes from the interview with Jean-Luc Godard published in Cahiers du Cinema 160, Nov 1964

Menswear Spring / Summer 2011
By Nancy Cantwell

I have to say that I had a much harder time than I expected trying to narrow the field for Menswear Spring 2011, but my first impulse is to run with what really works. This is how I would have sent David de Rothchild packing for his latest eco-crusade expedition aboard Plaskti, in search of Eastern Garbage Patch, an island of trash twice the size of Texas located in the Pacific Ocean. From creative director Alessandro Sartori of Z Zenga, the fashion forward branch of the 100 year Ermenegildo Zegna family empire, this ultra light, multo functional outwear is just the thing for our fearless adventure ecologist. I think Mr. de Rothchild would also feel comfortable wearing material produced by a company such as Zenga, whose commitment to social responsibility can be explored here at Oasi Zenga Project. You can follow David de Rothchild’s voyage at adventureecology.com

Outerwear seems to be favored over the traditional jacket for most shows. Trenches are everywhere, but let’s start at Lavin where Alber Elbaz, along with Lucas Ossendrijver, cooked up some amazing classics. The twist of turning a bomber jacket into a duster is absolute genius. Hooded or not, in suede or something more practical, these coats are an essential piece for spring. While more popular figures of fantasy use their coattails to traverse the realms of the undead, again my mind lights on the nautical, seeing Melville’s Ahab as the character of choice to wear the all noir enselmble on the left. I can imagine him updated, replete with whale bone jewelry, austere and fierce as he skippers the Pequod onward in his monomaniacal search for the “thick-lipped Leviathan” that was the elusive Moby Dick.

Rick Owens men look like they are survivors of some teutonic Wagnerian theme park ride. The short sleeves work particularly well with the long under tee…but, as always, Owens has just killer boots— industrial strength, half dock loader, half God stompers.

Keeping with the full length profile, but striking a far more relaxed pose are hybrid coat/robes at Dior Homme. House designer Kris Van Assche serves up one the finest white trenches of the season. He then moves on to more esoteric shapes. I do like the way the middle coat morphs from lapel jacket tailoring on one side into fabulous Morrocan robe on the other. And I have clear vision of a most refined Japanese gentleman on a hot summer evening, sleeveless, seated on tatami, practicing his kanji calligraphy.

For color this year you just had to go for the cacophony of brights by Raf Simons for Jill Sander. The show’s evening setting at the spectacular gardens of Renaissance-era Tuscan Villa Gamberaia provided the perfect backdrop for these rare birds to take flight. And in contrast to previously discussed silhouettes these slim honed trousers and suits are incisive and exciting.

And finally John Galliano’s men are part Buster Keaton, part Harold Lloyd, but all Proust. The look is light and ready for action whether it be a summer picnic, boat ride or generally just hanging off a clock. These are the finest of duds, most beautifully collared, tied and cuffed, complete in concept like no other than Galliano can do.

Persepolis (1971), Iannis Xenakis
“Nous Portons La Lumiere de la terre”
“We Bear the Light of the Earth”
by Aram Yardumian

The Iranian Revolution of 1979 was fomented by the unusual pairing of ultra-conservative Islamists, reacting against the so-called “cultural contamination” of Iran by the West, and by various leftist elements, long outraged by the nation’s history of injustice, brutality and extravagance under the rule of the Shah. Left and right together filled the streets for months of protest. They marched on and sometimes burned cinemas, casinos, banks, hotels and other ostensibly un-Islamic institutions and luxuries, paving the way for the return of the Ayatollah Khomeini.

Symbolic of the extravagance perpetrated by the regime of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi that outraged both conservative and leftist was the Jashnhaa-ye 2500 Saaleh, or 2500th anniversary celebration of Iran’s founding by Cyrus the Great, held in 1971. This four-day event, held in an elaborate, glittering air conditioned tent city at the ancient Persian capital of Persepolis, and in conjunction with the Third Annual Shiraz Arts Festival, is possibly the grandest celebration ever staged. According to no less of an authority than The Guiness Book of World Records, it was also the most “well attended” international event in history, inasmuch as it attracted some sixty-five heads of state, legates and their entourages—including Sultan Qaboos of Oman, Imelda Marcos, Pres. Joseph Mobutu of Zaire, Emperor Haile Selassie I, Vice Pres. Spiro Agnew (representing Richard Nixon), and Tito—and their spouses—a total of six hundred dignitaries, in addition to some 150 chefs, bakers and waiters, hundreds of security personnel, teams of desert vermin exterminators, Parisian hairdressers and make-up artists, Italian drapers, florists, musicians, and chauffeurs for the 250 custom-ordered red Mercedes-Benzes. As well, some 4000 (or 6000, estimates vary) period-costumed soldiers paraded a spectacularly choreographed review of two and a half millennia of Persian imperial glory—the Achaemenid, Parthian, Sassanian, Safavid, Afsharid, Qajar, and Pahlavi dynasties—in order to impress upon the guests what Iran had been in the past, was in 1971, and would be in the future.

Parisian Master Hotelier Max Blouet, came out of retirement to oversee the wait staff for the welcome banquet, an event catered by Maxim’s de Paris, which shut its Paris location for almost a fortnight in order to focus on the event. The menu, which was a carefully guarded secret, included roast peacocks with foie gras-stuffed tails, quails’ eggs stuffed with golden Caspian caviar, mousse of crayfish tails with Nantua sauce, and the finest ports and champagnes, including a 1945 Chateau Lafitte-Rothschild—hardly, many were quick to note, traditional Persian cuisine.

Following the banquet was son et lumière show and fireworks. The voice of Darius the Great spoke in the dark—in French—recounting the glories of Xerxes. This was followed by Greek composer Iannis Xenakis’s monumental fifty-six minute, eight-track electro-acoustic work Persepolis, which was commissioned by the Shah to simultaneously exalt ancient Persia’s aristocratic pre-Islamic religious culture, and define a new, specifically secular moment in the nation’s history. Persepolis, subtitled ‘We Bear the Light of the Earth’, was a massive multimedia spectacle (which Xenakis referred to as a ‘polytope’) employing lasers, spotlights, and hillside bonfires to evoke the Zoroastrian belief that light is eternal life. For the event, the eight independent tracks were broadcast by 48 (or 59, or 100, accounts vary) high-end speakers spread around the ruins of the ancient Palace of Darius. The audience circulated freely between six listening zones, listening as they watched laser lights scan the night sky and the ruins of the city, and the mountains. During the event, 150 Shiraz schoolboys ran with torches from the ravine, through the audience, into the columns of the ruins.

Beginning minutes of Persepolis, Composer Iannis Xennakis
Pour bande magnétique 8 pistes. Band réalisée au Studio Acousti, Paris. Creation: 20.08.1971, Persépolis, Festival de Shiraz (Iran)

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The work itself is the ebb, flow and overlap of eleven basic waves of texture, ranging from what sound like wind instrument polyphonics, rubbed glass, treated air, and the scraping together of large steel sheets. Listened to in stereo, one or another of these entities appears to dominate the encroaching and juxtaposing layers, but it is important to remember that in experiencing the work as a polytope, it would have no linear motion, only elliptical shifts in texture and “mass”—a concept Xenakis strove to introduce to the world of musical composition. The textures are often at odds, acoustically, yet they do not fight; they, in their opposition somehow strike a balance—exactly as the Zoroastrian contest between Light and Darkness. The sounds themselves burrow up like the elements in times of geologic turmoil, from unimaginable depths, oxidizing and crystallizing on the surface into forms that in turn decay and return to the earth, like civilizations. Even in stereo, Persepolis has no harmonic structure, no breaks or movements, and, like history, no beginning or end.

Xenakis spoke of Persepolis as “… [N]either a theatrical spectacle, nor a ballet, nor a happening. It is visual symbolism, parallel to and dominated by sound”. Though decidedly untheatrical, the event was certainly dramatic, even sublime as a feat of architecture rather than a history lesson, or perhaps the poverty of history consumed by the glissandi of the spheres. It was, Xenakis wrote in his notes, a “symbol of history’s noises; unassailable rocks facing the assault of the waves of civilization. Childhood’s awakening must be maintained because it represents active knowledge, perpetual questioning which forges the becoming of man. To invent light trajectories, to create signs, destinies on stone: on mountain and ruins, through sound, through fire, through light …. This music corresponds to a rock tablet on which hieroglyph or cuneiform messages are engraved in a compact, hermetic way, delivering their secrets only to those who want and know how to read them. The history of Iran, fragment of the world’s history, is thus elliptically and abstractly represented by underground currents of sound. The listener must pay for his penetration into the knowledge of the signs with great effort pain and the suffering of his own birth.”

Xenakis, born in unified Romania in 1922 to Greek parents, is remembered not only for his innovations in computer music, but specifically for the application of mathematics (specifically Peano axioms, set theory and stochastic processes) to musical composition. Unlike some of his drier and more abstruse 20th century contemporaries, his compositions are both emotional and metaphoric, immediate and cumulative in their search for a language to express the most basic and elusive philosophical forms: knowledge, life, power, and tragedy.

That the Shah would select Xenakis, a Greek living in France, for the task of firing the warning shot for an Iran both old and new reflects, I would argue, the Shah’s mystical view of history. The pendulum of history had swung once from Iran to the West and, Inshallah, it would soon swing back. Commissioning a piece so utterly European to represent Iran’s past and future suggests Perepolis and the celebration at large were a metaphor for the Shah’s ambitions for his country: a profound break from history, a reinvigoration of the distant past—a secular phoenix rising from the flames, and the rebirth of the great pre-Islamic Persian civilization as, said the Shah, the world’s “fifth most powerful nation”.

Instead, Iran’s 2500th anniversary celebration was, I would argue, the major polarizing event during the proto-Revolutionary days. Thereafter, the public was either pro- or anti-Shah, and violently so. In the months leading up to the celebration, the liberal press grew very critical, and very lazy, in their diatribes, resorting to crypto-Socialist cant about the celebration being at the expense of the “starving Iranian people”. (Exactly, or even approximately, how much it all cost remains an inflamed partisan issue with critics claiming upwards of $200 million and supporters as low as $17 million. Abdolreza Ansari, one of the organizers, in an interview, put the figure at $22 million). University students, many of whom would soon join the street protests, were caught denouncing the Persepolis celebration on the walls of bathrooms and courtyards. Of course, the most ominous, and portentous, words came from the Ayatollah Khomeini himself, then in exile in Iraq, who condemned the “evil celebrations”.

“I say these things because an even darker future, God forbid, lies ahead of you,” he warned the Shah.

The Iranian public’s reaction was marbled. There were those who saw the celebration as a diplomatic success, a rite of passage for Iran from developing to civilized nation, and a project that had employed hundreds of poor Iranians, as well as securing a major tourist infrastructure in Persepolis. Moreover, Iran’s oil revenue jumped from $2.5 billion to $18 billion in the years between the event and the Revolution. And there were those, mostly leftist, who dubbed the celebration a “ridiculous farce” and pointed to the absence of the Iranian public at the actual ceremonies as the acme of imperial arrogance. Conservative Islamists came to it as proof that the Shah was too secular, anti-Islamic, and a puppet of the west, and was westernizing Iran in an attempt to attract attention. Never mind that the mausoleum of Ayatollah Khomeini cost an estimated two billion dollars.

On the final day of the Jashnhaa-ye 2500 Saaleh, the Shah inaugurated the Shahyad Tower (now known as the Azadi Tower), in which was displayed the Cyrus Cylinder (borrowed from the British Museum for the event). The Shah declared it to be “the first human rights charter in history” and rededicated the freedom that it had promised two and a half millennia before, to the Iranian people. Nine years later he and his family would be stateless wanderers, wanted by nobody, and Iranian history would take a hard right turn. Would that Xenakis’s Persepolis, perhaps the paragon of his repertoire, serve not to represent the pinnacle of Iranian monarchical history, but instead be its swan song.

Notes_______________________________________________________________

The audio portion of Persepolis is available in three formats:

1) the original LP version released in 1972 on the prestigious (and highly collectable) Prospective 21e Siècle label. This version features the original analog eight-channel stereo INA-GRM mix. http://www.discogs.com/Iannis-Xenakis-Persepolis/release/655556

2) the CD version released in 2000 on Fractal Records. This version is remastered for continuous play by João Rafael from the original INA-GRM master tapes.
*http://www.discogs.com/Iannis-Xenakis-Persepolis/release/131823

3) a second CD version released in 2002 on Asphodel. This edition contains a second disc of shorter remixes of Persepolis by Zbigniew Karkowski, Merzbow, Otomo Yoshihide, and other electronic music artists. The version of Persepolis is, to my ears, indistinguishable from the remastered Fractal edition.*http://www.discogs.com/Iannis-Xenakis-Persepolis-Remixes-Edition-1/release/197685

* Audiophile note: since the master tapes were mixed for eight channels, but the publically available versions are mastered for stereo, Eric Falardeau of Montreal recommends a 7.1 setup with a receiver supporting Neural THX 7.1 as the surround algorithm. Unlike Dolby PLII and PLIIx, or Neo:6, Neural THX 7.1 shifts channels to the rear speakers, evidently due to a natural compatibility with the tools used to create the mix. The effect is as close to the eight-channel experience as possible.

– “Flames of Persia”, a documentary film of the event, narrated by Orson Welles, is available on DVD. It does not, however, contain any significant mention of Xenakis’s Persepolis).