The Critic at Work

Hiding in Plain Sight is one year old!

Butcher's Crossing

Is this the great American novel? Quite possibly.

Certainly it has all the elements. The mythic journey west, then farther west. Contempt for the natural world. Spoliation of the natural world. Degradation of women. The imperatives of commerce. The slaughter of beasts. Dangerous mysticism. The supremacy of the marketplace. The treachery of the marketplace. The impossibility of ever going home again. Insanity. Brutality. Despair.

What could be more American than that?

John Williams was born in the West in 1922 and died there in 1994. In between, he wrote three novels: Butcher's Crossing, Stoner, and Augustus. Augustus won the National Book Award in 1973. Butcher's Crossing and Stoner vanished from print until rescued this year by the New York Review of Books.

One critic called Butcher's Crossing "the finest western ever written." It's actually better than that.

$9.11

From the Easy to See Without Looking Too Far That Not Much Is Really Sacred department, word just in that a Giuliani supporter is holding a fundraiser tomorrow in Palo Alto at which the guests will be asked to donate "$9.11 for Rudy." Not that anyone in his right mind would have thought there was anything sacred in the first place, certainly not in an American presidential campaign. Still, it's always interesting to see really blatant hypocrisy in action.

Gray City

Pacific Street, 2007

Tom Sandberg

Tom Sandberg, Untitled, date unknown

I came across Tom Sandberg's pictures in Aperture the other day and really liked them. Sandberg, a Norwegian, had his first New York show at P.S.1 a few months ago. I was sorry I missed it.


Tom Sandberg, Untitled, date unknown

Then, on Google, I came across a link to an earlier post about Sandberg by Alec Soth, some comments to which raised questions about this picture:


Tom Sandberg, Untitled, date unknown

Specifically, a reader objected that planes don't fly that close to the ground unless their landing gear is down. Good point. And, as it turns out, absolutely right. Sandberg digitally removed the plane's wheels.

Why? Who knows. Does it matter? I think maybe it does. The photograph is degraded by it. (Imagine the airplane with its wheels intact.) Worse, the manipulation opens a gap between the apparent naturalism of Sandberg's work and what the viewer now knows about it.

All in all, a strange choice. I wonder what he was thinking.

Shit Floats

Interesting how at least some stuff we sneered at then sounds pretty good now. (On the other hand, if you catch me humming "Desperado," just shoot me.)

LCD Soundsystem

These guys get better and better. Although I haven't quite gotten over "Losing My Edge," Sound of Silver, their new album, is tighter and less goofy than their eponymous first. People say this is dance music, but what it really is is music to drive to. Try it; you'll find yourself walking around the house muttering damn, what did I do with that album. (It's in your car.)

Sims

I re-read Jean Baudrillard's Precession of Simulacra the other day. An elegant little book, particularly interesting, right now, for Baudrillard's analysis of the Vietnam war.

Why did that war end so anticlimactically? And why, given the widespread belief that the United States was defeated in Vietnam, were there no repercussions of any significance in this country?

Because, Baudrillard says, America's objective in Vietnam was not the defeat of North Vietnam. Rather, it was to bring China among the powerful:

"Ultimately, this war . . . marked the advent of China to peaceful coexistence. The long sought-after securing and concretising of China's non-intervention, China's apprenticeship in a global modus vivendi, the passing from a strategy of world revolution to one of a sharing of forces and empires, the transition from a radical alternative to a now almost settled system . . . all this was the stake of the Vietnam war . . ."

That, and to ensure that the Viet Cong - the terror-bent insurgents of their day - were absorbed into a predictable and trustworthy system of power:

"The war lasted as long as there remained unliquidated elements irreducible to a healthy politics and a discipline of power, even a communist one. When finally the war passed from the resistance to the hands of regular Northern troops, it could stop: it had obtained its objective."

This would be intriguing, in the context of Iraq, even without the recent invocation of Vietnam by both Bush and bin Laden. What, after all, is the purpose of the Iraq war? No one seems to know. Perhaps it is simply Vietnam in a different theater. Perhaps our objective in Iraq is to demonstrate to ourselves, and the rest of the world, that Russia will not intervene even that close to home, that Russia is as complicit in the needs and designs of capital as any Western state.

Or perhaps what we really want is to make that same demonstration as to Iran. And, like Vietnam, perhaps this war will end only when the unpredictable and dangerous Iraqi insurgents - the Viet Cong of today - are brought within the relatively stable and disciplined orbits of Iran and Saudi Arabia.

On the other hand, maybe that's not it either. Maybe it's all just exactly as it appears, and we really have no fucking idea what we're doing.

Gray City

Columbus Avenue, 2007

What Was I Thinking?

Cartier-Bresson

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Heyeres, 1922

In contrast to the warmth of Lartigue, the coldness of Cartier-Bresson.

As Robert Frank said of him: "You never felt that he was moved by something that was happening, other than the beauty of it, or just the composition."

That seems right. Beyond that momentary if decisive apotheosis of form, there's often less to Cartier-Bresson than meets the eye.


Henri Cartier-Bresson, Simiane-la-Rotonde, 1970

Yet what an eye he had.