Crisis? What Crisis?
Last week, I wrote a long essay about the creative crisis I have been dealing with for a while, only to delete the whole thing once it was done. I was worried that itt would have been too self-indulgent to send it out.
So let’s just get to the other material I had prepared.
For a while, I was very much into Velvet Underground. The music is exhilarating, and the stories seemed so intriguing. At the same time, I had the nagging feeling that I possibly did not in fact want to know too much about the band. Lou Reed did not strike me as the most wholesome character (to say the least). And what insight was to be gained from reading about dysfunction etc.?
A little while ago, I decided to finally read Ten Thousand Apologies, a book about the British band Fat White Family. About the time when their first two albums came out I was a big fan. If you have never heard of them, here’s a clip from their appearance on the David Letterman show. I’m loving Letterman’s “You don’t see that every night” afterwards.
Ten Thousand Apologies was co-written by Adelle Stripe and Lias Saoudi. Initially, it’s a little strange to read, given there are these two very different voices. But you get used to it.
Saoudi was and still is the front man of the band. The band has been described as a “drug band with a rock’n’roll problem”. While that’s kind of funny, it’s also true, and the reality of it, described in the book, makes for a fascinating read, a read that is equally funny and completely repellent.
The book succeeds because unlike so many other books about rock musicians it portrays all of its protagonists as human beings, however flawed they might be. There’s none of the genius talk you’re probably familiar with when famous musicians are being discussed. And there are so many aspects that are almost too hard to believe.
I don’t think that I need to read another book about rock musicians, mostly because any other book can only fall short of this one.
“Over the past 75 years of bloodshed,” writes Sophia Goodfriend who has spent time in Israeli military archives, “photography has long served to trivialize the atrocities of war. The genre is hardly unique to Israel. But today the abundance of smartphones on the battlefield, ease of social media, and unapologetic militancy of Israel’s majority have made such war photography more visible than ever.”
It’s a grim read with a grim conclusion: “Nowhere in these images is a viable political future to be seen for anyone in the region.”
David de Jong wrote a long article about Germany’s richest person, and you’ll never guess where all that money was coming from. Just kidding. Of course, you know.
I suppose what makes this case so particularly galling is the arrogance and complete lack of shame on part of Klaus-Michael Kuehne. That ties in directly what you can observe in Germany right now, where millions of people turn out to vote for a far-right, neo-Nazi party (the party in question just received around 30% of the votes in a state election today).
“The [party] effectively used a visually striking mix of incendiary words and images in their magazine to constantly sow the seeds of doubt among readers. It was hard to know which photographs were real and which were fakes – and, thus, who was telling [people] the truth and who was not. This practice eroded confidence in the news, fueled further conspiracy theories and made it hard to know which political party to trust.”
In the quote above, I changed out a couple of words for a reason: all of that sounds only too familiar, doesn’t it? It’s all around us.
But no, in its original form the quote is from an article about a Nazi magazine from the 1920s.
I don’t know. As much as I’ve become critical of Instagram, this article about it just seems to be too convenient. “Social media is no longer meant for connecting with friends,” Kyle Chayka writes, “it is designed almost entirely to facilitate the following of brands and the monetizing of personalities.” You don’t say! I mean seriously, we’ve know that for years.
To me writing the following comes across as the kind of cheap shot that doesn’t provide any insight and instead merely reaffirms membership in some (New York based) in-group of people who think of themselves as too smart for this world: “The captions might have been the most frustrating element. Each one seemed to outdo the last in its ostentatious meaninglessness; they were the textual equivalent of a coy shrug, as if to say, “I don’t even know why I’m doing this, let alone why you’re looking at it.” The phrase “life lately” was a popular choice, as were “the last few days :)” and “~[insert month] vibes~”. The lowercase, perhaps paired with an emoji, emphasized that you were posting off the cuff. (Common additions were 🌞 and ✨, providing an air of seasonal effervescence.)”
Punching down — lazily criticizing Instagram users for what they do — doesn’t strike me as a good way to go about this.
This link will take you to a Google Translate version of an originally Japanese language article about a group of female curators and photographers (including Rinko Kawauchi) who speak about their work. Despite the occasional shakiness of the translation (machine translation has real problems with Japanese), it’s worth your time.
“What happens when the image of marital perfection doesn’t pan out? Dumping the photos is out of the question in cities with strict waste sorting rules, and privacy is also a concern. Burning photos of people who are still alive is considered bad luck in Chinese superstition — even for estranged spouses.” This article is incredible. It’s all about someone who has made destroying discarded wedding photographs his business.
“For photos, Liu and his co-workers spray-paint faces and distinguishing features like tattoos, piercings and physical disabilities with dark paint — partly to protect client privacy and sometimes to make sure they doubly obliterate the memories. Some customers request a particular color and some ask for patterns like a Taoist talisman to “exorcise toxicity.”” And: “Liu sends his client a video of the whole process — sometimes to an upbeat soundtrack — before the debris is sent to a waste-to-energy facility where it becomes biofuel.”
So when people tell you about how the digital revolution has made objects redundant: don’t believe them.
Lastly, the one photobook Peter Hujar made during his lifetime has been reissued. I’m going to review it over the course of the next few weeks. Meanwhile, read how Stephen Koch remembers the photographer.
Well, that was a little grim, wasn’t it? So here’s one of my favourite cat photographs, taken 10 days ago. Looking for a picture outside (more on that maybe later, but probably not because: see the very beginning), I came across my landlord’s cat who had just woken up and did a stretch for me and my camera.
As always thank you for reading!
— Jörg