It’s hard to know what to say about Charles Koch after reading Jane Mayer’s astonishing expose in the August 30th issue of The New Yorker. American politics have been running hot for decades; finally we can name the source of the fever. Together with his brother David, Charles Koch owns Koch Industries, the second largest private company in the US; only Warren Buffet and Bill Gates are thought to be wealthier. In a remarkably narcissistic and anti-democratic act, the Koch boys long ago anointed themselves the heroic duo who would “rip government out by the roots.” In the grip of this wayward intention, they have, for the past four decades, pumped billions of dollars worth of high-grade hatred into the bloodstream of American politics. From the PR campaigns against Jimmy Carter in the 1970s to the anti-Clinton crusades of the 90s, to the faux populism of today’s Tea Party, the Kochs have pushed the envelope on right wing propaganda while their corporation rakes in mega bucks on the progressive policies they have thwarted.

Until the New Yorker article the Kochs accomplished all this from the shadows via front groups with deceptive names like the “Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment (FREE)” and “Americans for Prosperity.” Now that they have been revealed, hissing, serpent-like, behind the drapes, it’s worth pondering what it is, finally, that has gotten them so pissed off. Forget about David, who plays the submissive role in the relationship; it’s Charles who emerges as a poster child for the neurosis of the Protestant male in its aggressive, active mode, a cartoon version of daddy Warbucks villainy, a caricature of the malignant oligarch in full bloom.

Feeling compassion for a man like Charles is challenging when you consider what his actions have done to working Americans…or why the nation is slipping from the first world to the second…or why our roads are pitted, our health care a global joke and our prisons over-crowded. Given the grandiosity and malice that have animated Charles’ mindless assault on our collective well-being, it’s hard to draw close enough to see clearly what exactly is being acted out. But only by drawing close will we see a way to ease the pointless suffering in the situation, Charles’ as well as everyone else’s.

When the wealthy embrace the principle of weak government there’s the obvious motive of greed, government being that which, via taxation and regulation, impinges on the pure sovereignty of wealth. Rich libertarians are simply feathering their already well-feathered nests when they espouse such “ideals.” In the case of the Kochs, Jane Mayer does a good job showing how their libertarian advocacy dovetails neatly with their financial interests. As one of the top ten US polluters, for instance, Koch Industries benefits directly from the fake controversy Charles Koch has rustled up concerning global warming. Mayer cites other flagrant examples, such as one Koch lobbyist making the ridiculous claim that air pollution reduces the risk of skin cancer by obscuring sunlight. She also cites how the Koch brothers, shortly after contributing twenty-five million to the American Cancer Society, began lobbying hard to prevent formaldehyde being named a carcinogen. She points out that Koch Industries had just become the nation’s largest formaldehyde producer, and stood to gain much more than twenty-five million if regulation could be derailed.

But to point out the transparent fallacy of libertarianism as a political “philosophy” is actually to fall into a tar baby trap. Libertarianism is not a coherent political theory at all – it is a tantrum masquerading as a political theory. Like all tantrums, its true intention is simply to generate opposition. Why the great need for opposition? Once again, David Loy provides an answer:

“… since the sense-of-self is a psychosocial construct, it is ungrounded and ungroundable—hence always insecure. The self is inherently anxious because it is not a “thing” that could ever be secure. We identify with things that (we think) might provide the grounding or reality we crave: money, material possessions, reputation, power, physical attractiveness, etc. This means that if, for example, a preoccupation with making money is my way to become more real, then no matter how much money I may accumulate, it will never be enough.” –Self Transformation, Social Tranformation, Tikkun Magazine

Afflicted by the groundlessness Loy describes, the libertarian strikes out aggressively at the dominant value system, generating a response that seems to provide, albeit in a negative way, a firm foundation for his existence.

Reading Mayer we learn that the Koch’s father, who was among founders of the John Birch Society in the 1950s, made his fortune building oil refineries for Joseph Stalin. The Koch patriarch was harsh with his boys, traumatizing them in the classic authoritarian manner. One way to view the Koch trajectory is that Charles has devoted his adult life to exporting the pain of this emotional abuse on the rest of us rather than experiencing it himself. The anger at the father is split off and projected outward onto “government” that can be campaigned against. And victory is not really the point of the campaign because with victory would come the realization that this Other was just a stand-in for a battle long since lost: the pain waits in the wake of every triumph and the conflict begins anew with ever-higher stakes.

But mixed in with the self-exonerating contempt wealthy men like Koch seem to feel for those less fortunate, one detects an odd element of resentment. In extreme cases this resentment manifests, bizarrely, as a form of envy. To understand what might be at work here, let’s zoom in on a specific imagined event. Let’s imagine Charles Koch being driven through downtown Wichita toward whatever moated sanctuary provides his head with a pillow for the night…and let’s imagine at a stoplight Charles glances out through the tinted glass…and catches the eye of a homeless veteran begging with his cardboard sign. It’s easy to understand why that glance that might trigger in Charles’ heart feelings of disgust, annoyance, contempt, even guilt…but envy?

Perhaps the answer to this riddle lies in the different ways these two men relate to the experience of our common mortality. After all, there will come a time, in the dead of a night not so far from now perhaps, when death steals in through Charles’ bedroom window and makes a bee-line for that delicate, beating heart. There will be no bargaining then. Money will have no currency. And though that night has not yet arrived, Charles’ sleep is troubled already by the dark mystery of his inevitable death much as the vet’s sleep is troubled by the idea of dying. It’s not hard to imagine Charles lying sleepless disturbed by the realization that there will be no difference, finally, between the death of Charles Koch and the death of his newfound acquaintance crouching in his plywood shelter.

The insidious aspect of wealth is how it supplies an ability to arrange things in a way that encourages the delusions of the self. To a narcissistic personality this ability to arrange things seems to imply a control that he does not have, and can never have. When such a man encounters the “less fortunate” he discovers, in the moment, that the story of wealth is just that: a story. Having money does not, in the end, address the feeling of lack that we all hope it might address. As Loy points out, the homeless man on his street feels himself to be, in the moment, as “real,” as Charles does looking out his window. The vet is, if anything, more likely to be reconciled already to his own vulnerability such that he experience his life with some amount of presence. And this is why it’s not hard to imagine Charles looking out and feeling something like envy toward the vet…and being bewildered, scandalized even, by this feeling of envy.

If visualizing a homeless man introduces distracting issues for you, feel free to substitute any working American into the above scenario. The point is that the problem with wealth, adorned as it is with false promises, is how it can seduce us away from our true humanity…sometimes so far away there is no path back. Then we must confront our death alienated from our fellow man and feeling as though we have not been truly alive. This knowledge may be buried deep at the level of dreams, but it consumes our hearts with bitterness and regret. Spiritual leaders have understood this quite clearly. Remember, for example, Jesus’ famous dictum that it’s easier to “pass a camel through the eye of the needle” than to bring a rich man into heaven. Such statements point to how corrupting wealth can be when it is allowed to fuel the delusions of the self.

On one level, the levers of power must be removed from the hands of Charles Koch, and men like him, as quickly as possible. The power wealth gives these deluded souls will only add to the sum of human suffering, theirs included. But accomplishing this task will be easier when the curtains around Charles’ little Oz machine have been pulled aside. Then we will recognize how his affliction is just an amped up version of our own struggles with delusion, malice and longing…and we can move on and devote our common energies to the very real problems that confront us.

September is here and even though I have thoroughly combed through the collections, I still race to see how the venerable magazine fashion editors piece it all back together. So far I have found the the massive amount of pulp to be fairly prosaic (yes I capitulate there are a few economic restraints to reflect upon), and really, what could possibly compete with Fall 2009’s Grace Coddington Little Red Riding Hood spread? This year however, before I could even crack the magazine covers, my fashionista cohorts were directing me towards another venerable artiste who seems to be in vogue once more. Kenneth Anger, the octogenarian auteur, has become incredibly fashionable as of late. At Valentino, a massive montage of Anger films was utilized as a backdrop for the catwalk Fall 2010. Interviewed at the show Anger gleefully asserts “I’ve always been friends of fashion!” July previewed a more ambitious project by Missoni who recruited Anger to film their Fall 2010 campaign. I was a bit confused by commission as the Missoni’s strike me as a particularly happy clan as portayed by the Jurgen Teller Spring/Summer campaign, whereas Kenneth Anger is better known for his relationship with the dark side (see Aleister Crowley, Anton LaVey and Bobby Beausolei). In an interview with Italian Vogue, Angela Missoni, the brand’s principle designer, explains,“The images of Juergen Teller for the S/S 2010 campaign reflected and portrayed our everyday family life, Kenneth Anger’s experimental approach and his narrative style, on the other hand, transformed the new campaign into a sublimation of our world.”

Distinctly Kenneth Anger, Missoni includes all the filmmaker’s signature moves. Psychedelia, layered surreal dream sequences, mirrored camera work, the compulsory orb, hand crafted titles and a well appointed soundtrack provided by the French symphonic composer Koudlam. In keeping with the celebrated Missoni family tradition all generations are represented; Margherita, Jennifer, Angela, Rosita, Ottavio, and Ottavio Jr all play their parts. Filmed in the Sumirago countryside and utilizing part of Rosita and Ottavio’s own garden, Anger also made use of other local resources for indoor sequences, building a set in the Council Room of the Sumirago Town Hall.

Whereas I am not thoroughly convinced of the efficacy of the esoteric Missoni as an ad campaign, there is no denying that Kenneth Anger not only has an affinity for fashion, but his own familial ties lean in the sartorial direction. In Puce Moment (1949) he uses gowns handed down to him by his grandmother, a costume mistress of the 1920’s silent era. Titillated as Anger is with the tabloid of celebrity his is quick to add these glamorous gowns were worn by the likes of the suicide prone Clara Bow and the drug addicted Barbara Lamarr. In his later films, Lucifer Rising (1972),  Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969) and Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), Anger did much of the costume design himself (he had a great fondness for crafting occult robes).

Puce Moment, quite simply is all about getting dressed. The six minute film stars Yvonne Marquis, as the young woman ecstatic in her selection process, features the cinematography of Curtis Harrington, who later goes onto direct Night Tide, and the soundtrack is the contribution of Jonathan Hapler whose two distinct songs, “Leaving My Old Life Behind” and “I Am A Hermit”, reflect a stirring fusion of traditional folk sensibilities and airy, psychedelic musical experimentation. The films opulent interior shots are filmed at home of Sampson DeBreer, who later figures prominently in Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome. To evoke the camera work of the silent era Anger uses different camera speeds and Borzois, a breed favored by the fashionable in the 1920s, make an appearance almost overpowering the young woman as they lead the way to destinations unknown.

There is an playfulness in Puce Moment’s opening sequence as the shimmering gowns happily dance off the rack and are swiftly snapped up out of sight. And at last as our protagonist settles on the color puce, there is a deep sense of portent pleasures to come.

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Islands are geographically unique in the ways they generate life and culture. On them we find species and traditions which have been forged in the crucible of isolation, from pollens and ideas that blow in with the trade winds, take root and grow without the pressures they would face on the continent. Remote islands such as Soqotra and the Andaman archipelago are renowned for their unique flora and fauna and outlying cultural tropes, while others like Zanzibar and Bali, closer as they are to the continental mass, respond more regularly to transmissions from culture-at-large. The Regione Autonoma Siciliana is, like all islands, the interface for multiple cultural inheritances: Greek, Roman, Norman, Spanish, Arab, Moor, and modern Italian. Sicilians have collected aesthetic forms from all these diverse colonizers and now boast a musical tradition both unified and diverse–something that has attracted the attentions of many, Alan Lomax not the least of which.

Sicily’s location between continents–two so very different continents–must be the beginning of any historical analysis of its music. On the island we find a great variety of religious and secular music played on instruments found only there. For example, the cupa cupa, a fricative percussion instrument, and the donax reed pipe. And unusual harmonic structures are found in both folk and choral music, some of which is due no doubt to the influence of the Arab tonal system. That we also find a sophisticated school of electronic music in Sicily should come as little surprise, especially to those who follow concomitant schools in mainland Italy. Sicily’s electronic music is remarkable inasmuch as we can best hear the ancient and the modern, the historic and the avant-garde, the intellectual and the emotional, the East and the West in one tradition.

For a rather short time the island even boasted the Electronic Music School of the Istituto Musicale Vincenzo Bellini of Catania, under the guidance of Alessandro Cipriani (who himself studied with the venerable Barry Truax). And though it is now defunct, its approximate ten years of life has given us a small treasure box of Musique concrèt and pure electronic sound, the best of which is available on the Electronic Music Foundation’s 2003 CDr release, Electroacoustic Music From Sicily. The eleven featured compositions were recorded between 1995 and 2003 and include a few familiar names as well as several names unfamiliar even to someone who pays far too much attention to this sort of thing. Massimo Carlentini’s piece Mutamenti was featured on the Fondazione Russolo-Pratella label’s XXII° Concorso Internazionale Luigi Russolo Di Musica Elettroacustica, 2000, and Vincento Cavalli has produced or recorded the odd CD. The rest are quiet geniuses, hopefully preparing new electronic masses in monastic isolation.

Speaking in terms of the Sicilian music tradition, the compositions on Electroacoustic Music From Sicily actively cross the threshold of the traditional before our ears. Recognizable forms slowly grow unrecognizable, while always some vestige of the old folk narrative survives, for each piece (with the possible exception of Rapisarda’s  Almaquae) tells a linear story or at least describes something literal. Mario Valenti’s Inside describes “the conflict engendered by the refusal to accept solitude, squalor, death” and was recorded in the village Agira. The piece, for all its heavy topic, is the most settling of the eleven with its light rain and church bells–not to mention its sense of humor: a snoring old man is looped beneath the campanile. Vincenzo Cavalli’s Idea, the entire sonic field and narrative of which is drawn from baritone and soprano saxophone sources, is a progressing figurative piece “coordinated with a work of spatialization in the stereo sound field” in order to generate specific sonic bands. And yet the piece stands not so far apart from jazz sounds of the Italian sixties.

Inside (1999) per nastro, Mario Valenti

Idea (2000) per nastro, Vincenzo Cavalli

While none of the old folk melodies or modes, per se, are employed in the compositions, the donax reed pipe is sampled by Massimo Carlentini, who also uses didgeridoo in his composition entitled Recycling recycled. Overall this piece builds an ambiance not unlike Jorge Reyes’s early albums and some of the work of Kenneth Newby and Stephen Kent. This piece has shares less with European electroacoustic music than the others and as such stands apart. The title refers to Carlentini’s approach, which he characterizes as “[sonic] material, duly processed, coming from different cultures, [each with] a message to deliver”. Anna Maria Gervasio’s Calvario Metafisico likewise is weighted with the sense of urgency in its message, for it is not a single but a double allegory of the fourteen stages of Christ’s journey to Calvary, and in turn a message of hope for those who suffer. One can hardly imagine watching Enrique Irazoqui marching up to Golgotha to the tune of this; in fact, the piece draws on no part of the Christian sacred music tradition. Something melancholic is there beside the tragic hope, and something mysterious but never divine, something perhaps redolent of Pasolini’s words, “I am an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for a belief.”

Calvario Metafisico (2001) per flauto, piano e nastro, Anna Maria Gervasio

Speaking outside the purview of Sicilian music, some of the compositions also share a reverence for Stockhausen’s vari-scale microtonal structure (even if the Arab tonal system may be the ultimate source in some cases), and obsessive attention to granular texture. There is also a distinct awareness among these artists of the implications of the sound sources they are using. Massimo Fragalà, in his piece entitled Contaminazione, utilizes sounds originating in (unspecified) nations of the former Soviet Union, juxtaposed with the sounds of his voice and some taken from “contemporary reality” as a sonic allusion to “the cancellazione of the cultures and traditions of these people,” on the one hand, and on the other, “their resurfacing in all of their strength”. (I believe we can translate cancellazione here to mean diminution, not literally “cancellation”).

Contaminazione (2003) per nastro, Massimo Fragalà

Given what we know about the mechanics of cultural transmission it seems unwieldy to make statements about what traits and innovations belong to what set of people or to what authority. Taxonomy, as Asif Agha said “is taxidermy”. What may be worth asking is how the dynamic relationship between ideas and physical culture relates more specifically to geography, that is, to landscape and available materials (beyond the Diamond Hypothesis); and how historical memory mitigates these processes. On islands such as Sicily, where the sea both mitigates and obstructs social interactions, these processes must be continually re-imagined.

Currently on exhibition at the Académie de France à Rome – Villa Medici is an extraordinary pairing of artists, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Ellsworth Kelly. While the most immediate choice of comparisons would be of a formalist concern, this exhibition which includes new works by Kelly and the Portrait de Desdéban (ca 1810, Musée of Besançon), painted in the Villa Medici, by its former director, Ingres, the Académie is stressing a more viseral approach “…the visitors’ eye and spirit will successively be confronted to one artist and then to the other, in such a way that the memory of one inhabits the look upon the other and vice-versa.” Currated by Ellsworth Kelly and Éric de Chassey, the current director of the French Academy in Rome, the exhibition is organized around three aspects shared by both Kelly and Ingres, a connection of outline and form, serialism and the search for the “good form” and the duality between fragmentation and unity. Ah, to be summering in Italia!

Seeing notice of the above show prompted me to revisit another Kelly pairing, Antoni Gaudi: Trecadis, A Project for Artforum, by Ellsworth Kelly. Trencadis is a Catalan word used to describe a type of mosaic composed of broken shards of discarded tile reconfigured and repurposed to decorate buildings (a comparible process to the French, pique assiette). I have been hanging on to these remarkable mosaic reproductions that Kelly had produced in honor of the great Spanish architect Antoni Gaudi (1852-1926) first because I loved the domestic reference. Perhaps I could try my own hand at such a task? But, secondly, because there seemed such disparity between these trencadis arrangements and the minimalist abstractions I’ve long associated with Kelly’s art. So un-Kelly like. And as the Viila Medici exhibition digs into the past for fresh interpretations, so a revived historical forage (on my part) has made the connection now quite clear to me. I would venture to say the first impulse came from Kelly’s military experience when in 1943 he was inducted in the US Army where, at his request, he was assigned to the camouflage unit. Much the same as Richard Avedon honed his initial photographic eye taking identity pictures during his service in the Merchant Marines (1942), Kelly had ample time to spend in contemplation of the rearrangement of form and perceptual ambiguities. More to the point, his miltary experience afforded him the ability to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. In Paris, Kelly would now come into close contact with the work of Pablo Picasso who became a profound initial influence. In his book Barcelona, the critic Robert Hughes quotes Ellsworth Kelly’s observation that Gaudi’s trencadis – the fragmented mosaics he used to create shimmering surfaces on solid architectural mass – had a profound effect on Picasso’s fragmented forms. The provenance of inspiration and continuity of vision that permeates these splendid Kelly trencadis is explicit…and so very Kelly-like after all.

Please click to enlarge.

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Dispatch Oman, Part Three, Gulf-kitch, Excavation of the 3rd Millennium
by Aram Yardumian

These days, Omani houses are built in the Gulf-kitch style: expensive and magnificent from afar, but inside cramped and awkward, and each complete with a sweeping faux-marble staircase that leads to a dead end—there is no second floor. And at close range you’ll notice how pocked and grainy the cement is. Some German stonemasons I met there showed fatal cracks already in the foundation of their house and in their main staircase. They gave the whole thing twenty years and then a pile of rubble.

Our house is a survivor from much more practical and traditional times. Flirting with pure utility as it does; square, solid and drafty as it is, it supported a team of eleven archaeologists, plus guests, and no one had to step on each others’ abdomens to get to the can at night. We are six Americans, one Pole, One Portuguese, two Indians and one Japanese. Two additional members of our team didn’t actually participate in this year’s work: one got held up by jury duty in Gujarat; the other stayed in Muscat ostensibly to make a comprehensive study of pottery, but so far the only sketch he’s made is of ministerial bureaucracy.

We have for ten team members, three vehicles, thousands of sealable plastic bags, hundreds of buckets and ten tin foil wheelbarrows, some tree saws for belligerent acacias, eight Omani workmen, sunglasses, stakes, a mallet and a bit of know-how between us. The work week is Saturday through Wednesday with a half-day Thursday. Fridays we usually spend traveling to another relevant archaeological site, or drinking black market rum.

Our operations in 2008 include the excavation of two late-third millennium ‘towers’ (known as 1146 and 1147 in the scholarly literature) which we call towers only for lack of a better term. Really they are just rings of foundation stones now that once supported a structure of unknown form and function. Tombs? Agricultural devices? Ritual structures? Who knows. What we do know is that there are many of them all across Oman and into the Emirates and that each measures between 20 and 23 m in diameter. Also, there are proper cairn tombs in the area, though we are not ourselves excavating them. Most of these sit astride mountain ridges, visible from great distances. There are thousands of these, also late third millennium, all over Oman, which suggests a great uniformity of culture across a wide expanse. More tombs are constantly being re-discovered and recorded.

We have a one-room laboratory in the German team’s house, where pottery is washed, drawn, and sorted; and where I go mad in effort to manage my GIS software. But day-to-day life isn’t terribly different from what people do everywhere: we get up early (I myself wake up at 5:30 with the muzzein), work, come home, eat, continue working, eat some more, and go to sleep. Our problems are everyone’s problems: lost keys, hangovers, electricity failures, lung infections and camels in our rubbish. This is true. Camels get into our garbage barrel and they spread it everywhere. And once the camel puts its head inside the barrel you can do nothing about it. Yell, throw stones, do what you want, it’s just going to stand there and lick cardboard until its enzymes shut off. And don’t touch the beast, for your teeth-eyeballs-lips-neck-spine’s sake, you’ll never know what kicked you. Sometimes two camels stick their heads in at once and you get something like a Narmer’s Palate that the artisans rejected.

The dust here is as absolute as His Majesty’s power. You can’t fight it, it’s going to win. It piles up against the walls, collects on your papers, in your shoes, ears, hermetically sealed black boxes. It blows right back where you just swept it from, it blots out the sun. Sometimes in the late afternoons so much rises into the air that the landscape as you see it goes black-and-white, and the only thing one sees move is the sun, an orange ball one may safely stare into. In the dust live scorpions and camel-spiders that our workmen like to capture on shovels to taunt the ladies.

How many coffee table books have given us how many cliches to capture the desert? Impoverished in this but rich in that; vast and alluring; ancient and foreboding. You’ve heard it all. But I will confirm, and what’s more: humans do strange things in the desert. Just ask T.E. Lawrence. Or Charles Doughty, whose brain was so affected he went about overwriting English like Jarry went about his alcoholism: as a discipline. Ask Wilfred Thessiger, who crossed the Empty Quarter twice—recreationally. Or ask Dr. Jeffrey Rose, expert in Paleolithic rock art, who claims he has discovered the semiotic origin of world religions out there somewhere. Or ask me. Apparently I sing arias of Wagner in my sleep here, and I don’t even know German.

The first shot of Life During Wartime has Joy (Shirley Henderson) quietly weeping, as she sits across from her boyfriend Allen (Michael Kenneth Williams) in a restaurant booth done in upholstery inspired by strychnine hallucinations. Framed in a peculiarly awkward way by crooked bangs and virgin eyebrows that appear never to have been tweezed,  her lovely face will not remain still, but continues blubbering. The upholstery and her tears taken together is alienating–passively aggressive and demanding–and yet whatever your emotional response, the scene has an unsettling quality, as though you have been manually probed and your fraudulence has been exposed. What do you care more about–why she cries, or her bad hair? How Michael Kenneth Williams got that awesome scar across his face? What was the very bad thing he did?  Why do you want to know exactly–so that you can then spit in his face too?

There is no point in denying what you stand accused of, for the faster you set your tongue clucking at the lameness of these characters, the faster you realize how stuck you are, essentially, in the same misery. The impossibility of forgiveness and the continuing cycle of transgression is philosophically rich. It is one thing to critique the shallow mores of post-post-Woody Allen America, with cleverness and outrageously on-target satire. But the project of this film is more ambitious, less comical, and darker. The sentient viewer is more deeply implicated, and the stakes are higher…the word “War” has not entered the film’s title frivolously: it plays its own role of haunting the proceedings by reminding us of the ultimate consequences of clinging to the joyless satisfactions of retribution.

Life During Wartime is a challenging experience, in the way previous Solondz films have been: refusing comfortable illusions of a pleasing entertainment. It is a web of inversions and repetitions, of scathing admissions and crushing deceits. Much of the time you are either forced to retreat emotionally or relent, but inhabiting this cinema is never easy, where perhaps the only crime worse than serial pedophilia is sentimentality. Naturally, this film has provoked one of the most churlish  reviews I’ve ever seen, by Marshall Fine in the Huffington Post (who sanctimonously claims to have tolerated, even enjoyed, Solondz’ other films); as well as a comparison to Rainer Werner Fassbinder by J. Hoberman in the Village Voice.  I’m with J. —this film brought to mind for me Fassbinder’s heartbreaking I Only Want You To Love Me (1976), which explores wrenchingly cold family life in post-postwar Germany.

Because it is necessary for any “genuine” artist to begin with irony–if only to go beyond it–and eschew the grandiose in this anti-culture we inhabit, the comparison to the Promethean Fassbinder may seem unclear, yet Solondz is the only American filmmaker today seriously critiquing the uniquely American form of moral corruption embedded in its insistently bland conventionalism, and exposing the banal righteousness of the culture of punishment, the punitive impulse that drives Americans to view victims as “the good people” (Solondz’ words) and perpetrators as always and forever bad and deserving of social deletion.

Hypocrisy is only beginning of this corruption: the project of Life During Wartime is to explore the territory of forgiveness and investigate the harboring of spite. Both spite and forgiveness depend upon a relationship to the past, and a constant repetition of the offense that generated the suffering. The formal genius of “Wartime” is how the sequence of scenes,  and the cast of characters are haunted both literally and figuratively, by their former incarnations (Happiness, 1995). The surprise of Timmy cumming in Happiness is transposed into the surprise of his committing the first sin…which is an inverted form of the sin (pedophilia) of his father. The pedophile father, Bill, is now incarnated by Ciaran Hinds, whose broken rock of a face is spellbinding and grave.  The scandal-haunted Paul Reubens plays Andy, the ghost of Joy’s boyfriend. Along with Shirley Henderson, these actors bring a new sense of gravitas to their redux roles. This film could be appreciated entirely through its performances, for it gives the actors what it gives the audience, a brilliantly crafted wordplay that realizes a tragic dimension.

Coming of age in such a world as this, a world that demands war,  enmity and anger, means a right of passage that inverts the prayerful bar mitzvah ritual. Set in the midst of emotional devastation created by selfishness, cruelty, and banality,  the boy Timmy (Dylan Riley Snyder), on the cusp of puberty, does what any normal boychild would do when his mother shows signs of interest in a man: derails the relationship by any means necessary, in this case,  he falsely accuses the innocent and tender-hearted Harvey (Michael Lerner) of pedophilia. Timmy is naturally close to the concept of a pedophile; his father was incarcerated for serial boy rape, and so his mother Trish (Allison Janney) has warned him, in language inappropriately vague, that he should respond to any man’s touching him with a loud, rousing scream. Trish, hopelessly philistine and obtuse, freaks out, and Lerner is X’d from her affections. His heart is broken. As for Timmy, an innocent boy’s first experience of sin is a surprise. Nothing has really prepared him for the freakish pain of realizing his responsibility in creating another’s suffering. It sets him running backward in a romantic escape scene from his bar mitzvah party: he is a man today, but last week–when IT happened–he was only a boy! It is a failed excuse. Today he is a man, and there is no turning back.

Our insistence on spiteful reactivity has created continual war, out of the quandary of the Middle East and the infection of 9/11. One of the most striking images from the film is a shot of Helen (Ally Sheedy) spewing a cruel rant at her sister Joy, poised in front of a giant photographic blow up of an Israeli tank bearing down on an unarmed lone Palestinian. Solondz inserts his knife in the neck with lines like, “We [the Floridian Jews] only voted for Bush because of Israel, but we really thought he was an idiot.” The political analysis is tense but oblique.  This intentionally remote “war” exists offstage, in the realm of the moral and ethical, where it acts as a carapace of suffering that holds its set of characters exercising demons in the Florida sunshine within an unseen but everpresent darkness.

Photography by Catherine Opie. Please click image to enlarge for detail information.

When we share with a work of art an experience of presence, we come close to understanding art’s intrinsic value. Deploying skill and emotional force, the artist imbues the material with a living, emergent quality that engages the viewer fully, inducing an open stance toward the immediate moment. There is a small awakening to the radical freedom inherent in the embrace of the ever-shifting present.

In theater, this mark is being hit when you hear yourself say, “okay, now something new needs to happen,” and then immediately find that what you had in mind (three women enter, for example) is actually happening. This kind of small elation, for me, took place again and again while watching the Poor Dog Group’s production of Brewsie and Willie, by Gertrude Stein (1874-1946). Hats off to the director, Travis Preston, and to the ensemble for making me smile almost continuously throughout the performance.

“No thinking, no whores, nothing but jobs,” says Willie, a GI stationed in Europe after World War Two, as he contemplates the life that awaits him back home. Stein has a light touch and she appears to improve with age. There’s no pressure in her text here; it allows itself to be in a way that Hemmingway’s writing also does, when he’s on. The American lightness of spirit is there in her simple, direct sentences that aren’t concerned with anything that has a vertical dimension. Her lines are like sedans speeding West on a new interstate, eyes on the road that unfurls ahead, and no need to explain what they are doing because it’s so self-evident. The relationships in the play are very specific without being clear, but you don’t need them to be clear, it turns out, to find them compelling. A sexy physicality has been channeled into language by a seventy year old woman who lived through various cataclysms and somehow retained her sweetness of vision.

Brewsie and Willie and their company, both men and women, are stranded in the ruins of Western Europe. The destructive energies of war have opened a space where eros has free play. The Poor Dogs convey this right away, moving with grounded ease around a stage space defined by stacks of sand bags and a billowing white parachute overhead. Sometimes they undress. At other times they freeze in unison and quiver briefly, gripped by some unknowable collective trauma. Every once in a while they break into a dance – Dionysus, the god of “love and ecstasy”, is in the room. In the East they call this god Shiva, the creative ground of being from which all phenomenon arise. Preston understands how this works on stage. Nothing needs to be reached for – the deity is present already in the voltage between actors whenever they are fully grounded in their bodies. With well-trained actors, all that needs to happen is a relaxed opening alert to the moment. Dionysus arrives. He leaves again. The fact that no one tries to make him stay – no one tries to build on that ground – means he’ll come back real soon.

Brewsie and Willie speaks to an unshakable quality associated with being an American. It’s poignant, how in their thoughts about their plight these characters don’t lay claim to any privileged status outside the play of history. All the characters will be equally implicated; the “job-minded” world that awaits them back home will have its way with the human spirit. Brewsie’s earnest pessimism speaks to us across the decades, as does Willie’s ecstatic nihilism. And the humility of their voices makes the production an avant garde transmission that vaults the ditch of the 1960s. The energies at work in the writing – and now in the performances – have little to do with the long agon of that most bombastic of generations. The complacent self-regard that undermined the progressive impulses of ’68, and then delivered the energies of the generation to a right wing defined by Newt Gingrich and Roger Ailes, does not show up here. And so, while Gertrude Stein’s politics were so bad you can almost hear Mel Brooks laughing in the wings, the politics in this adaptation by Preston, Eric Ehn and Marissa Chibas, are subtle and authentic. The production speaks powerfully to the Poor Dog generation, confronted as it is by radical dislocations and economic hardships.

It’s always interesting to look back at avant garde work and see what remains “avant” with the passage of time. For me, Lautréamont and Raymond Roussel hold up pretty well, as does William Burroughs. Like Stein, these writers continue to create the future even as the imagery they deploy to do so slips into the past. With Brewsie and Willie the continuous presenting that is the defining quality of Stein’s prose seems a perfect match for Preston’s Growtoskian approach to performance. In Grotowski’s view (and, yes, he is indeed an icon of the 60’s), theater has one foot firmly planted in the spiritual, which is inherently non-conceptual terrain. The conceptual mind with its representations of reality, the spinner of stories and myths, comes later. There’s a correlate here in writing, a ferocious integrity in the act of listening, and Stein shows what this looks like. Put them together on stage and something opens. Watching Brewsie and Willie in their erotic playground of post-war Paris, we come to inhabit the freedom that follows the great victory of our last out breath.

The 20th Century evidenced an era of supersized ruins. Two epic wars, scores of civil conflicts, revolutions and fundamentalist jihads produced ruination on a scale never before experienced. The photographs, artwork, newsfilms and few extant ruins remain the crucial means of reminding successive generations of the irrationality that foments such destruction, but also of the constant examination necessary as antidote to devastation.

Most experiences of ruination in the 18th and 19th centuries were of the Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias, variety– so distant that any threat or reminder of human pride could be neutralized in the assuring Kantian mode. What does it mean to view the ruins of one’s own civilization, to have no comforting millennia between oneself and the various agents of destruction? Should we serve the grand narrative of progress, removing, smoothing over, redesigning and reconstructing showpieces of Modernist utopianism as quickly as possible as the Germans did post World War II (that is now prompting a great deal of hindsight debate) and as Amreicans did after 9/11? Contemporary massive ruination like the Katrina wasted acres of New Orleans and the unemployment ravaged urban landscape of Detroit simply cannot be harmonized in the Romantic tradition. Nor, as the Germans are now learning, is a rapid polished makeover necessarily going to repair the damage to the collective psyche and make us forget. To designate an area of ruins with documentation preserving the damage done by the BP oil spill might do more to sustain full consciousness of the myths and facts that drive such catastrophe.

Photographers like Richard Misrach and Edward Burtynsky have been significantly documenting some of the most egregious recent environmental ruination in dramatic photographs of nuclear test sites and Third World industrial areas respectively. The superb artistry of their pictures, the terrible beauty, confronts the viewer with the unsolvable dilemma of aesthetics coexisting with suffering, pollution, and profiteering. It is perhaps the struggle therein that makes us act by rooting for beauty. That anxious truce between the depiction of environmental catastrophe and aesthetic pleasure was jump started in the early 1970’s by The New Topographers, Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal and Robert Adams who photographed the defilement of the American Western pristine landscape by rampant land speculation and urban development. The New West was the tabula rasa of wide open land, ideal for promoting the post war American Dream. Exposing the re-enactment of the fictions of Wagons Ho!, these photographers represented the mushrooming housing tracts, the open desert spaces crisscrossed with vehicle tracks, and the young families starting their lives in the new post-war America hellbent on erasing the effects of wartime shortages and grimy industrial cities.

Combining a photo documentary approach with an artistry rooted in the representations of the Romantic sublime landscape and the Minimalist/formalist aesthetics of the Seventies, the New Topographers seemed to ironically signal the dismantlement of the idealized western landscapes of Edward Weston and Ansel Adams. While Adams and Weston maintained the fantasy of untouched Western wilderness, the New Topographers in turning their cameras on the collision of unrestrained industrial and residential growth and natural areas, began to pry open a dialogue concerning environmental degradation and to deconstruct the dominant Sierra Club, Ansel Adams influenced nature photograph. Any direct condemnation of the destruction of wilderness by such development was veiled in the New Topographers by their accent on the reductive abstract beauty of these sites: one has to look deliberately beyond the mesmerizing beauty of Robert Adams’s lovely abstract traceries made by dune buggies in formerly pristine sand dunes to realize an ecosystem is being ruined beyond repair. Rather shortsightedly criticized at the time as lacking the transparency we associate with photography that would allow for a head-on critique of such environmentally destructive exploitation, the New Topographers, unlike straight photojournalists, engaged a wide range of rich art historical references and multiple competing narratives, radical for the time. If somewhat conflicted or ambiguous, as the era was itself, The New Topographers’ depictions of suburban sprawl nevertheless offered many portentious signs that all was not right in paradise.

In his recent exhibition at Gallery Luisotti entitled Now It Is Dark, Los Angeles photographer Mark Ruwedel clearly establishes his affinity with The New Topographers’ scrutiny of the Western landscape, both in his studies of land development and in his use of exquisite hand made gold toned gelatin silver prints and silver chloride prints. Ruwedel’s earlier photographic works of abandoned railway paths throughout the West (a study spanning 20 years) recall the nineteenth century photography of William Henry Jackson and Timothy H. O’Sullivan. Ruwedel revealed the end of that historical, necessary phase of capitalism and its narrative in expanding the West, a sentiment that is updated in the newer series here. In these three distinct series, his camera focuses on abandoned homes in the Southern California exurban high desert locations of the Antelope and Imperial Valleys. The era that appeared boundlessly optimistic and plentiful in the previous New Topographers’ work of the 60’s and 70’s, here seems spent and utterly bankrupt.

All shot at twilight, evocative of Ansel Adams transcendent qualities of natural light but also metaphorical of waning and extinction, we see various singly portrayed uninhabited structures, many mid century homes, uncompleted or in various stages of decay. With the silhouettes of rugged, high mountains in the distant –that classic Western divide between “civilization” and the rugged outsider– the decaying structures are framed dead center, iconic portraits of generic American housing styles that pass as expressions of our individuality. Surrounding the variously wrecked or empty structures are dead and twisted leafless trees and shrubs, windblown detritus, tumbleweeds, decapitated palms, discarded mattresses, water heaters, junked cars, and torqued metal. Along with the peeling paint, missing shingles, bullet riddled cinderblock walls, boarded up windows and doors, and battered stucco, these eerie pictorial elements comprise a sort of foreboding “ghost town aesthetic” characteristic of Western mythology and its pervasive cinematic representations. The sense of mystery is heightened as well in small poignant portraits of single articles of clothing: strapless bras, boots, corsets, partially covered or filled with dust, slowly decomposing and being reclaimed by the earth. They remain only props or clues in resolving the whereabouts of the late residents.

One of the central questions here is whether Ruwedel is simply a neo-Romantic in his implications of the sublimity in human powerlessness over mortality and the destructive but inevitable forces of nature (and human nature), or whether he succeeds in raising more contemporary critical questions through his ruin gazing. The kind of humor and subtle wit felt in Antelope Valley #293 with its fading weathered plywood and corregated metal sheets neatly organized into strict geometries, but clearly hardscrabble and do-it-yourself, allows for both a parody of high modernist architecture–its purported “unity”– and Frank Gehry’s postmodern low materials and tipsy forms. It wards off an overdose of nostalgia and melancholia. At the core of these near post-apocalyptic photographs, however, is a serious consideration of the demise–a “darkening” –of the American Dream, here seen exposed, ripped apart, collapsing into chaos and disarray, e.g. a family’s belongings spill out of a stripped van like an animal’s entrails. Recognizing the Home Depot building materials, the bedding from the Mattress Store, and the late model van, we have little distance from the present. We imagine foreclosure, water shortages, nuclear and chemical pollution, or unemployment, as the reasons these homes lie in ruin, none of which are far from the current realities. The fragile desert land is blighted and trashed. A lack of specifics, though, moves us to the symbolic.

At a time of unprecedented environmental crisis, these unforgiving images force a reckoning with the notions of infinite plenitude, the pursuit of unfettered individual gratification and consumption, and its resulting waste as well as its human toll. Ruwedel, in situating our gaze on the unsettling present through this archive of failure, critically disrupts and undermines any lingering utopian myths or narratives of progress. We could dismiss these idle homes as just another soon-to-vanish part of “boom, bust, decay” cycles so crucial to the ethos of expanding global capitalism. Or we see them as a useful mnemonic for transgressing such narratives as the West as an endless supply of resources. By not obliterating, but preserving as Ruwedel has, the traces of the carnage, perhaps we can begin to contemplate what it might take to avoid being another century of supersized ruins.

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Constance Mallinson is a Los Angeles artist and critic who has exhibited nationally and internationally. She is a regular contributor of reviews to Art in America, Art,Ltd. and Xtra. Her last solo painting show at Pomona College Art Museum, Nature Morte, was reviewed in the Times Quotidian.

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.

The use of electronic music composed by Vitorrio 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), Vitorrio Gelmetti
From the compilation Musiche Elettroniche, Nepless 1997